The Unsettled Dust Read online

  “Bout time the whole village was redeveloped,’ said Rort, ‘judging by some of the places we’ve seen.’ It was not a tactful remark, but Rort was far from consciousness of offence. He always assumed that his standards were shared by the vast majority, had they the honesty to admit it.

  Before picking up the whisky Dyson had bought him, the old man did something most unexpected: one might say that he crossed himself, but he did it in a queer, backwards way that I had never seen before. He then downed the whisky in one gulp.

  Not being myself a Catholic, or an authority on ritual, I might have thought that I was deceived about the old man’s gesture, but Gamble, who was always the most observant among us of what was said or done, asked the old man a question: ‘Does that exorcise the ghost in your mind’s eye?’

  ‘Ghosts,’ said the old man quietly but amiably. ‘Ghosts in the plural. But I have no wish to exorcise them, even if exorcism were possible or relevant. Whereas it is neither.’

  ‘Tell us about exorcism,’ said Dyson.

  ‘Exorcism may only be attempted upon licence from an archbishop, and in any case is applicable only when a person is believed to be possessed by a devil. That is not my case. There was nothing diabolical about my escape, I assure you.’

  ‘But there was something supernatural?’ responded Gamble; often a little too much the cross-examining barrister when all the circumstances were considered.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old man in his quiet and simple way. ‘At least I think so. It was connected with this.’ He put his fingers in his bottom left waistcoat pocket and produced a coin or medal. It was dull rather than bright as it lay on his palm in the dim light of the bar; and a fraction smaller, I should say, than a penny.

  The barman got in first. ‘Can I hold it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the old man, passing it over. ‘But it has no intrinsic value.’

  ‘Just a lucky charm?’ asked the barman.

  ‘More a token. The visible symbol of an invisible grace.’

  ‘My mother has one. Given her when she married my father, by my gran, who got it from the gypsies. I suppose these marks are the Romany?’

  ‘No,’ said the old man. ‘That’s Russian.’

  ‘Have another drink,’ said Gamble, ‘and tell us about Russia.’

  ‘Tell us the whole story,’ said Dyson.

  We were really all there to learn about fisheries: agricultural and icthyological students, prospective economists and sociologists, one or two sportsmen and aspirants to tweedy journalism, all male and all young; plus the one old man, retired, and representative of a type often to be found on such courses, often, I fear, regarded by the rest of us as more or less a nuisance. We were all boarded out on the villagers. After our substantial teas, we assembled together every evening at this battered little pub because the competitive establishment was flashy and perceptibly dearer. It was now our third night. Hitherto, the old man had spoken hardly at all. His years had cast a certain constraint upon us, but he had arrived late and left soon, and, in any case, most of us were so brimming with fish-talk and career-talk that his presence inhibited us little. I myself had supposed that he seemed genuinely pleased just to listen to us. The men who ran the course did not fraternise with us in the evenings. In any case, most of them were housed with the flashy competitor.

  One reason for the old man’s near-accident had been the failing light. As he went on talking, darkness fell and the night wind off the sea began to creep under the door and across the stone flags. Infrequently, a solitary villager appeared, quietly ordered his drink, and settled to listening with us. One suspected that the presence of our group in the bar every evening was tending to keep out the regulars.

  ‘Not Russia,’ said the old man. ‘I’ve never been there, though I’ve known Russians – in a way. It was in Finland that I knew them.’ He was looking at his recovered token.

  ‘Surely Russians are rather unpopular in Finland?’ asked Gamble.

  Rort was about to speak, probably in dialectical contradiction, but the old man began his story, ignoring Gamble.

  ‘Until I retired I was an estate agent and surveyor. At the time I am talking about, I was little more than a clerk, working for a firm called Purvis and Co. I was supposed to be learning the business, and Mr. Purvis was very keen that I should, because he knew my father and because he had no sons of his own. He did everything he could for me; then and for a long time afterwards. I owe Mr. Purvis a great deal. When he died prematurely in 1933, I inherited most of his business. Of course, I was a qualified surveyor by then, and quite competent to handle everything that arose. Ten years earlier, I knew nothing.

  ‘In 1923, Purvis and Co. had a client with an interest in a Finnish timber plantation. He was in the trade in a big way, with large offices down in the east end of London, but he wanted his son to have experience of all sides of the business, and for this reason proposed to lease a house in Finland for six months and actually move over there with his wife and the boy. I should mention that the wife was Finnish herself. The man’s name was Danziger, so his own forebears may all have come from the Baltic also. I never set eyes on the elder Danzigers because Mr. Purvis used to go to see them instead of them coming to see him, but I met the son several times. Later it struck me that he had all the wildness and toughness I saw in the Finns, but none of the steadiness and application. He might have done better as a militiaman in the Winter War than as a merchant. But of course the Winter War came much later than the time I am talking about, and as a matter of fact young Danziger was already dead before it happened.

  ‘The nearest town to the particular timber plantation was a place called Unilinna. Mr. Purvis had been asked to go there himself, have a look round for a suitable house, and, if he found one, try to get hold of it. He asked me if I would like to come with him, but said that the firm could not afford to pay my fare, especially as I was such a junior. I was so pleased that I talked my father into paying for me, and, as a matter of fact, I think that this was just the main reason why Mr. Purvis had chosen me. He knew that my father could manage it, where the fathers of some of the other juniors probably couldn’t. Mr. Purvis knew better than most that shrewd economies like that often make all the difference to the success of a business. He needed someone amenable in Finland to take notes and hold the tape. Later, it might have been different. I grew very much into Mr. Purvis’s confidence, and I am sure that he would have picked me anyway.

  ‘I had never before been abroad at all. This may seem strange to you, when nowadays students spend so much of their time travelling on grants, but you may recall that the First World War was not long over, and that travelling had become enormously more difficult than it had been before the war started, when you didn’t need so much as a passport. The change put off people like my father from even making the attempt. Besides, I think they were afraid of the alterations they might see.

  ‘Mr. Purvis and I took the two-funnelled Swedish-Lloyd steamer from Tilbury to Gothenburg, with him all alone in a first-class cabin, and me in with a young Swedish missioner, as he called himself, who prayed out loud for most of the two nights, wore dark grey vests and pants, and tried to convert me by catching hold of both my shoulders and speaking to me very slowly and gravely about hell and repentance. He also left a tract in English under my pillow or in my shoes every time I went outside.

  ‘In Gothenburg, Mr. Purvis took me to the beautiful amusement park called Liseberg, where I saw a different aspect of Swedish life. Oddly enough, Mr. Purvis liked places like that, and would sit for hours staring at the lovely Swedish girls, and commenting to me on their points, as if they had been horseflesh. We did exactly the same in Stockholm. We went to the Gröna Lunds, where conditions were distinctly less elegant and refined than at Liseberg, but Mr. Purvis didn’t mind in the least. I daresay he enjoyed it all the more. I was amused to see that he was quite the Englishman abroad. I should have preferred to go off on my own a bit, but Mr. Purvis seemed to like my company s
o much that it would obviously have been a mistake.

  ‘After a night in Gothenburg and a night in Stockholm, we took the Finnish steamer across the Baltic from Nortälje, to Turku. We sailed through the Äland Islands, hundreds of them, mostly uninhabited, which had been captured from the Bolsheviks by the Finns marching scores of miles across the winter ice in 1918. From the harbour at Turku we went on by the boat train to Helsinki, where we spent our fifth night. We arrived very late and had to leave early the next morning, so I didn’t see much of Helsinki, but it is astonishing what you can do with even an hour or two if you really want to, and I shall never forget the shape of the Great Church against the starry sky, or the view from the Kauppatori across the straits to the fortified island on the other side. There was a kind of mystery about them I have never met anywhere else. It was July or August, and in Finland never quite dark; which added to the beauty of it, even though I had no particular wish for the full midnight sun. I fancy that daylight all the time would be worse than darkness all the time. Staring out across the sea from the Kauppatori at midnight wasn’t so much Mr. Purvis’s kind of thing, but he was very good about it all the same, recognising that I was travelling abroad for the first time, and bought us both a Finnish liqueur called Mesimarja.

  ‘The next morning we set off for Unilinna, where we arrived about lunch-time. We passed four nights there in all. It is not a very large town and as we spent most of our time moving about it to look at various houses, I got to know it quite well. It was a beautiful place. It lay, like so many Finnish towns, on the narrows between two lakes, but it also spread over several lake islands all connected by bridges, so that it was often difficult to recollect whether you were on the mainland, so to speak, or on an island. In Finland the difference between mainland and island is often indistinct. There are supposed to be tens of thousands of lakes, many of them linked together, as at Unilinna, and there are rivers also, even canals. The sea-coast is broken up into islands in just the same way. The main impression I had of Finland was of life being mingled with the water in every direction. In between the lakes are ridges of rocky hills, mostly a hundred feet or two hundred feet high, and all covered with conifers. They look right there, of course, even if they look wrong and ugly round here. I gathered that most of the conifers I saw round Unilina belonged to the firm in which Mr. Danziger had an interest. Every autumn they were floated down to the sea in rafts for export.

  ‘Unilinna was very much a watering place for holidaymakers. It had a gay front with flags, as if it had been the seaside. The steamers lined up along it, going to different spots on the lake, some of them taking all day to reach. The steamers burnt only wood and gave off a wonderful smell, which sometimes you noticed all over the town. At one end of the front was an enormous ruined castle. It was the single proper tourist attraction I had time to see. The outside was magnificent, but I discovered that the outside was about all there was to it, as far as I was concerned. The inside was given up to open-air plays, and they weren’t much use when you couldn’t speak more than a few words of Finnish. Yes, I did manage to pick up just a little, but long plays in verse were something different. Nor, of course, were they right for Mr. Purvis either. He liked to sit outside a café passing the girls in review. They were every bit as gorgeous as the Swedish girls, but not so elegantly dressed. Looking at them was as near as ever I got to them.

  ‘There were gypsies too; real, opera gypsies with dark faces, flashing eyes, and brightly coloured clothes. They were to be met with all over the town, but especially in the market, which, as far as I could see, spread all the way along the waterfront every morning, but seemed to disappear almost completely after about midday. The gypsies would half come up to you and half speak, but draw quickly away, almost vanish into the air, when they realised you couldn’t speak their language, any of their languages. For I was given to understand that many of them were Russian gypsies, fled since 1917 from the Bolsheviks. If this was true, they were in fact the first Russians I ever knowingly met. If, of course, gypsies can properly be described as Russians. Perhaps not. In any case, it is always a problem about Russians: when you go into it, they are so often something else; Ukrainians, Georgians, Asiatics, and, since 1939, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, in so far as any have survived. You can look out from Helsinki over the sea to Estonia, but since 1939, you haven’t been able to go there, not just for the trip.’

  ‘Of course you can go there,’ muttered Rort.

  Again the old man ignored him.

  ‘All the time we were in Unilinna the sun shone by day and it was very hot, but in the evening a quite thick mist would rise, so that the temperature changed completely. The visitors would say it came off the lakes and look suspicious, but of course that wasn’t the point. The mist would have been there even if there had been no lakes. It meant that next day the sun was likely to shine again. It was elementary meteorology.

  ‘Mr. Purvis had some kind of an introduction to a man in Unilinna who was the equivalent of an estate agent. We went to see him as soon as we had moved into an hotel and had lunch. His name was Mr. Kirkontorni. He was quite a young man and he spoke English remarkably well. I remember wondering both how he had learnt so much and why. I couldn’t believe that he met more than two or three Englishmen a year, and the Americans had not then discovered Finland at all. He knew the Danziger family quite well and he had a list of properties for us to visit, with particulars all written out in his own English, including many comments that an English estate agent would have hesitated to put in writing. Not derogatory comments, just plain-spoken and unconventional.

  ‘We spent that afternoon looking at various places, and a large part of the following days, but all that won’t interest you. Mr. Kirkontorni apologised for being unable to come with us himself. He offered us a junior to go round with us, someone rather like me, but Mr. Purvis refused. The lad couldn’t really speak English, and Mr. Purvis always disliked the company of strangers on a job like this. We found our way about on a plan of the town which Mr. Kirkontorni lent to us. Mr. Purvis was vain about maps and insisted on keeping this one entirely to himself, though, having other things on his mind, he would have done better to have left the pathfinding to me.

  ‘Where the lad might have helped would have been with the people who occupied the various properties. Fortunately, Mr. Kirkontorni had been able to warn most of them that an English agent (as he put it) was coming, but there were still some who had heard nothing, or had not grasped the message, and we had several comic experiences. But the usual trouble was that the lady of the house had cleaned the whole place up especially for us, and even laid out a large meal on the table, with a clean, white tablecloth. There was a limit to what the two of us could eat and drink, especially as the lady often just stood or sat and watched us do it, and still more of a limit to the time we had, but of course we couldn’t be rude, and we fell more and more behind schedule, especially as not many of our hostesses had much English, though they all seemed to have a few phrases, like ‘Sit down’ and ‘Help yourself and ‘Very good’, which they said pointing to cakes and bottles. Another difficulty was that Mr. Kirkontorni had spoken of only one visitor, so that everywhere I came as a surprise. The main effect of that was to waste still more time. But we managed to get round most of the places on our list, even though we didn’t examine all of them as well as we might have done. At the end of the first afternoon, Mr. Purvis said that at least we should not have to spend much on dinner; and that couldn’t be denied.’

  The old man chuckled a little, and Dyson took the opportunity to buy him another drink.

  ‘Did you discover anything suitable?’ asked Jay, who had not said much earlier.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the old man, ‘and the Danzigers moved in and everything went so well that old Danziger wrote a special letter to Mr. Purvis at the end of it, and said how pleased he was. Mr. Purvis even managed to get a sort of bonus out of him on top of the usual commission and expenses. A trinkgeld he called it
. But, do you know, I’ve quite forgotten which place it was we settled on. There were so many we saw, and so many people, all perfectly charming, in so far as we could understand them. But there was one place I know it wasn’t. It was a place that only I saw, and that Mr. Purvis didn’t.’

  The old man paused; probably choosing his words, rejecting the spontaneous ones, having reached a point in his tale where persuasiveness might be required, and, therefore, artifice.

  ‘What was Mr. Purvis doing at the time?’ asked Gamble, encouragingly and because someone had to say something, but still perceptibly the examining barrister.

  ‘Mr Purvis was asleep,’ said the old man, in a new tone of voice, ‘or at least lying down in his room.

  ‘It was the day after we arrived. We’d spent hours and hours walking round the town in the sun, and, as I say, we’d had a lot of mixed stuff to eat and drink. Mr. Purvis said he wanted to put his feet up. I wouldn’t have minded doing the same myself, but it was the first chance I’d had on the whole trip to get away on my own for a little, and I couldn’t let it go. We agreed a time for me to come back and see how Mr. Purvis was doing, and I wondered off to the north side of the town, where till then I had hardly been, the southern end of the northern-most of the two lakes, if you follow me. The reason why we hadn’t been there much was that Mr. Kirkontorni had said it was out of the sun and rather a run-down area. Of course a southern aspect does matter considerably in Finland, especially to a rich man with local connections, like Mr. Danziger.

  ‘The evening mist that I have spoken of was rising quite thickly, but in patches. In places it was really dense, but other places were still open, with the mist all round at a little distance, like clearings in a forest. Also, a breeze was getting up, so that the mist was beginning to swirl a bit. It was quite a queer effect altogether; with the sun still shining through at the same time. I felt hot and cold all at once.