Across the table, Joan and I stared at each other, and wished that it were so. But we knew him too well. We were each harrowed because of him and for him.
Because of him — since we were living in a time of crisis, and it was bitter to find an opponent in someone we loved. Both Joan and I believed that it hung upon the toss of a coin whether or not the world would be tolerable to live in. And Roy was now wishing that we should lose. It was a wound of life. We had taken our stand, we each knew we should not change: but this positive news of Roy weakened our will. For we should be the last people to dispose of him as frivolous. Our doctrinaire friends would no doubt feel convinced that he was nothing but a rich man out to preserve his money: to us, that was a crassness that broke the heart. No one alive knew his vagaries as deeply as we did. We could not pretend to disregard anything he truly believed. We thought his judgment was dead wrong; but anything he felt, came from the depth of his sense of life: anything he said, we should have to listen to.
We were harrowed for him. We could only guess what he was going through, and where this would lead him. But he was without fear, he was without elementary caution. He had none of the cushions of self-preservation which guard most men; he did not want success, he cared nothing for others’ opinion, he had no respect for any society, he was alone. There was nothing to keep him safe, if the mood came on him.
“Ought I to go and see him?” said Joan.
I hesitated. She was distracted for him, with a devotion that was unselfish and compassionate — and also she wanted any excuse to meet him again, in case the miracle might happen. Her love was tenacious, it was stronger than pride, she could not let him go.
“He might still listen to me,” Joan insisted. “It will be difficult, but I feel I’ve got to try.”
Nothing would put her off. That was the advice she had come to get. Whether she got it or not, she was determined to go in search of him.
I heard another, and a very different, account of Roy a few days later. It came from Colonel Foulkes, whom I ran into by chance when I was lunching as a guest at the Athenaeum. Oulstone Lyall had died suddenly at the end of 1938 (I was interested to see in one of the obituaries a hint of the Erzberger scandaclass="underline" it seemed now that the truth would never be known) and Foulkes had become the senior figure in Asian studies.
“Splendid accounts of Calvert,” he said without any preliminaries, as we washed our hands side by side. The Oriental faculty at Berlin University had decided, Foulkes went on, that Roy was the finest foreign scholar who had worked there since the 1914–18 war. “They’re thinking of doing something for him,” Foulkes rapped out. “Only right. Only right. Subject’s cluttered up with old has-beens. Such as me. Get rid of us. Get rid of us. That’s what they ought to do.”
He had also heard that Roy was sympathetic to the régime, but it did not cause him the slightest concern. “Great deal to be said for it, I expect,” said Foulkes, briskly towelling his hands. “Great deal to be said for most things. People ought to be receptive to new ideas. Only way to keep young. Glad to see Calvert is.”
He had himself, it then appeared, just become absorbed in theosophy. It had its advantages, I thought, being able to overtrump any eccentricity. He remained curiously simple, positive and unimaginative, and he took it for granted that Roy was the same.
I had a letter from Roy himself early in March. He invited me to spend a week or two of the vacation with him in Berlin. He seemed acutely desirous that I should go, but the letter was not an intimate one. It was stylised, almost awkward, almost remote — usually he wrote with liquid ease, but this invitation was stiff. I suspected a purpose that he wished to hold back. There was nothing for it but to go.
I arrived at the Zoo station in Berlin on a snowy afternoon in March. I looked for Roy up and down the platform, but did not see him. I was cold, a little apprehensive; I spoke very little German, and I stood there with my bags, in a fit of indecision.
Then a young woman spoke to me: “You are Mr Eliot, please?”
She was spectacularly thin. Beneath her fur coat, her legs were like stalks. But she had bright clever grey eyes, and as I said yes she suddenly and disconcertingly burst into laughter.
“What is the joke?” I asked.
“Please. I did not quite understand you.” She spoke English slowly, but her ear was accurate and her intonation good.
“Why do you laugh?”
“I am sorry.” She could not straighten her face. “Mr Calvert has said that you will look more like a professor than he. But he said you are really less like.”
She added: “He has also said that you will have something wrong with your clothes. Such as shoelace undone. Or other things.” She was shaken with laughter as she pointed to the collar of my overcoat, which I had put up against the cold and which had somehow got twisted. She thought it was an extraordinarily good joke. “It is so. It is so.”
It was one way of being recognised, I thought. I asked why Roy was not there.
“He is ill,” she said. “Not much. He works too hard and does not think of himself. He must stay in bed today.”
As we got into a taxi, she told me that her name was Mecke, Ursula Mecke. I had already identified her as the “little dancer”: and she told me: “I am tänzerin.” I liked her at sight. She was ill, hysterical and highly-strung; but she was also warm-hearted, good-natured, and had much insight. She was quick and businesslike with the taxi driver, but when she talked about her earnings on the stage, I felt sure she was hopelessly impractical in running her life. I did not think she had been a love of Roy’s. She spoke of him with a mixture of comradeship and touching veneration. “He is so good,” she said. “It is not only money, Mr Eliot. That is easy. But Mr Calvert thinks for us. That is not easy.” She told me how that winter her mother had fallen ill in Aachen. The little dancer could not afford to go; she was always in debt, and her salary, after she had paid taxes and the party contributions, came to about thirty shillings a week. But within a few hours she found in her room a return ticket, a hamper of food for the journey, an advance on her salary, and a bottle of Lanvin scent. “He denies it, naturally,” said Ursula Mecke. “He says that he has not given me these things. He says that I have an admirer. Who else has given me them, Mr Eliot?” Her grammar then got confused in her excitement: but she meant who else, in those circumstances, would have remembered that she would enjoy some scent.
The Knesebeckstrasse lay in the heart of the west end, between the Kurfürstendamm and the Kantstrasse. No. 32 was near the Kantstrasse end of the street; like all the other houses, it was six storied, grey-faced, and had once been fashionable. Now it was sub-let like a complex honeycomb. Roy had the whole suite of five rooms on the ground floor, but the stories above were divided into flats of three rooms or two or one: the tänzerin had a single attic right at the top.
All Roy’s rooms were high, dark, and panelled in pine which had been painted a deep chocolate brown; they were much more sparsely furnished and stark than anywhere else he had lived, although he had added to them sofas, armchairs, and his inevitable assortment of desks. The family of von Haltsdorff must have lived there in dark, dignified, austere poverty; now that Roy had leased the flat from them they had gone to live in austere poverty on their estate on the Baltic. They had permitted themselves one decoration in the dining-room; on the barn-like expanse of wall, there stood out a large painted chart on which their eyes could rest. It was the family genealogy. It began well before the Great Elector. It came down through a succession of von Haltsdorffs, all of whom had been officers in the Prussian Army. They had intermarried with other Prussian families. None had apparently had much success. The chart ended with the present head, who was a retired colonel.