The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [431]
‘Not for some time. I have an idea that she may have gone out for the evening.’
‘Well, in that case it seems,’ said Ehrendorf with a rather strained smile, ‘that I’ve been stood up. Well, never mind, it’s not for the first time. I’ll just finish my drink if you don’t mind and then I’ll be on my way.’
‘No hurry.’
Walter called for his stengah and sank back in his chair, glad enough after all to have Ehrendorf’s company and to delay his visit to the hospital for a little while. Walter did not greatly care for Americans these days: the acrimony aroused over the Rubber Restriction scheme and the subsequent counter-attack by the American consumers had left its mark. But when one day Captain Ehrendorf, posted to the US military attache’s office in Singapore and armed with an introduction to the Blacketts, had presented himself at their house, neither Walter nor the rest of his family had been able to find fault with him. This had been partly because his introduction had come from none other than Matthew Webb and the Blacketts were curious to learn more about Matthew and the way he lived (incidentally, he must soon do something about sending the poor boy a telegram about his father’s illness), but most of all because Ehrendorf himself was unusually charming and good-looking. He might, indeed, have been specially constructed to topple all Walter’s prejudices about Americans.
Americans, thought Walter, are vulgar: but no one had better taste than Ehrendorf. They are loud: no one more soft-spoken. They have no culture: Walter had yet to meet anyone more cultured, better educated, better mannered, more tactful and well-informed. The fellow, amazing though it might seem to Walter’s jaundiced eye, was quite simply a gentleman. Walter had found it hard to think of him as an American at all. Why, he even spoke English like a civilized person.
Ehrendorf had wasted no time in telling the Blacketts what he knew of Matthew, whom he had first met at Oxford. He himself had been a Rhodes scholar at the university (here he paused for a moment but the Blacketts had stared at him blankly) for a couple of years. Then, five or six years later, they had bumped into each other again, this time in Geneva in 1932 where he himself had been posted as a very junior military assistant to Mr Norman Davis in the long, tortuous and exhausting discussions on the Disarmament Conference. Matthew had not been working for the League Secretariat itself but for some other organization whose name escaped him, connected with it in some way. There were so many! Was it the International Peace Bureau, or the Red Cross Committee? Was it the Permanent Secretariat for War Veterans and War Victims? Or the Union for the Assistance of Calamity-Stricken Populations? Of one thing he was pretty sure, he laughed: it was not the International Humanitarian Bureau for Lovers of Animals, whose rather odd programme was ‘to extend to the animal kingdom the sentiments and duties of humane justice’. He had a suspicion that it might well have been the International League for the Protection of Native Peoples; that was certainly the field he was interested in, anyway. But no matter! How glad they had been to meet each other again!
Geneva in winter was the most depressing town on earth, the international community was cliquish and segregated grimly by nationalities, the Genevese burgher himself was the most narrow and xenophobic animal on two legs. He and Matthew, whom he considered ‘the most wonderful person in the world’ and ‘a wonderful human being’ (young Kate tittered when he said this and clasped a hand over her mouth), casting aside the depressing and Jesuitical, even Jansenist, shackles of Disarmament had resumed their own much more interesting discussions on art, sex, Freud, the existence or otherwise of God, chattering away, as young men will, he added with a smile, about the causes of the Thirty Years War and whether the Defenestration of Prague was instrumental in the downfall of the Palatinate and of the Bohemian church, and countless