England Made Me by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page B

were closed; there were few people about. It was too cold to walk, and Krogh looked round for a taxi. He saw a car up the narrow street on the right and paused at the corner. The trams shrieked across Tegelbacken, the windy whistle of a train came over the roofs. A car travelling too fast to be a taxi nearly took the pavement where Krogh stood, and was gone again among the trams and rails and lights in Tegelbacken, leaving behind an impression of recklessness, the sound of an explosion, a smell. In a side street a taxi-driver started his car and ambled down to the corner where Krogh stood. The explosion of the exhaust brought back Lake Vätten and the wild duck humming upwards from the reeds on heavy wings. He raised his oars and sat still while his father fired; he was hungry and his dinner depended on the shot. The rough bitter smell settled over the boat, and the bird staggered in the air as if cuffed by a great hand.
    â€˜Taxi, Herr Krogh.’
    It might have been a shot, Krogh thought, if this were America, and he turned fiercely on the taxi-driver: ‘How do you know my name?’
    The man watched him with an air wooden and weather-worn. ‘Who wouldn’t know you, Herr Krogh? You aren’t any different from your pictures.’
    The bird sank with beating wings as if the air had grown too thin to support it. It settled and lay along the water. When they reached it, it was dead, its beak below the water, one wing submerged like an aeroplane broken and abandoned.
    â€˜Drive me to the British Legation,’ Krogh said.
    He lay back in the car and watched the faces swim up to the window through the mist, recede again. They flowed by in their safe and happy anonymity on the way to the switchbacks in Tivoli, the cheap seats in cinemas, to love in quiet rooms. He drew down the blinds and in his dark reverberating cage tried to think of numerals, reports, contracts.
    A man in my position ought to have protection, he told himself, but police protection had to be paid for in questions. They would learn of the American monopoly which even his directors believed to be still in the stage of negotiation; they would learn too much of a great many things, and what the police knew one day the Press too often knew the next. It came home to him that he could not afford to be protected. Paying the driver off, he felt his isolation for the first time as a weakness.
    He could hear the siren of a steamer on the lake and the heavy pounding of the engines. Voices came through the mist muffled, the human heat damped down, like the engines of a liner flooded and foundering.

2
    Krogh was not a man who analysed his feelings; he could only tell himself: ‘On such and such an occasion I was happy; now I am miserable.’ Through the glass door he could see the English man-servant treading sedately down marble stairs.
    He was happy in Chicago that year.
    â€˜Is the Minister in?’
    â€˜Certainly, Herr Krogh.’
    Up the stairs at the servant’s heels: he was happy in Spain. His memories were quite unconcerned with women. He thought: I was happy that year, and remembered the small machine no larger than his suitcase that began to grind upon the table of his lodgings, how he watched it all the evening, eating nothing, drinking nothing, and how all night he lay on his back unable to sleep, only able to repeat over and over again to himself: ‘I was right. There’s no serious friction.’
    â€˜Herr Erik Krogh.’
    The room was full of women, and he experienced no pleasure at the way they watched the door with curiosity and furtive avidity (the richest man in Europe), their faces old and unlined and pencilled in brilliant colours, like the illumination of an ancient missal carefully preserved under glass with the same page always turned to visitors. The Minister attracted elderly women. He was absorbed now by the little silver spirit-lamp under the kettle (he always poured out the tea himself), and a