England Made Me by Graham Greene

moment later, after a nod to Krogh, he was picking up slices of lemon in a pair of silver tweezers.
    â€˜This is a great day, Mr Krogh,’ a hawk-like woman said to him. He had often met her at the Legation and believed that she was some relative of the Minister’s, but her name eluded him.
    â€˜A great day?’
    â€˜The new book of poems.’
    â€˜Ah, the new book of poems.’
    She took his arm and led him to a fragile Chippendale table in a corner of the room furthest from where the Minister poured out tea. All the room was Chippendale and silver; quite alien to Stockholm it was yet like a cultured foreigner who could speak the language fairly well and had imbibed many of the indigenous restraints and civilities, but not enough of them to put Krogh at his ease.
    â€˜I don’t understand poetry,’ he said reluctantly. He did not like to admit that there was anything he did not understand; he preferrred to wait until he had overheard an expert’s opinion which he might adopt as his own, but one glance at the room had told him that here he would wait in vain. The elderly women of the English colony twittered like starlings round the tea-table.
    â€˜The Minister will be so disappointed if you don’t look.’
    Krogh looked. A photograph of de Laszlo’s portrait faced the title-page: the sleek silver hair, the rather prudish quizzing eyes netted by wrinkles, the small round appley cheeks. ‘ Viol and Vine .’
    â€˜ Viol and Vine ,’ Krogh said. ‘What does that mean?’
    â€˜Why,’ said the hawk-eyed woman, ‘the viola da gamba, you know, and – and wine.’
    â€˜I always find English poetry very difficult,’ Krogh said.
    â€˜But you must read a little of it.’ She thrust the book into his hands and he obeyed her with the deep respect he reserved for foreign women, standing stiffly at attention with the book held at a little distance almost on the level of his eyes – ‘To the Memory of Dowson’ – and heard behind him the Minister’s voice tinkling among the china.
    I who have shed with sorrowing the same roses,
    Drained desperately the tankard and despaired,
    Find, when I come to where your heart reposes,
    Ghosts of the sad street women we have shared –
    â€˜No,’ Krogh said, ‘no. I don’t understand it.’ He was embarrassed. Correctness was the quality he most valued: the correctness of a machine, the correctness of a report. It was necessary at times, he thought coldly, for men to go with women as it was necessary at times not to disclose certain assets, to conceal the real value of certain shares, but there was a way of doing these things, and he watched with astonishment and suspicion the Minister nibbling the edge of a macaroon. A tiredness touched him at manners he could not understand and words he did not appreciate, and he thought for the second time that afternoon of his bed-sitting-room in Barcelona and the little model that ticked him into fortune: into great wealth, into great influence, into this weariness and this anxiety. He had entered the American market, he had to be prepared for American methods.
    He thought of Chicago. He had been happy in Chicago, a Chicago quite untouched in those days by gang warfare. It was a long time ago, before Barcelona; he could not remember now why he had been happy. He could remember only these things: ice on the lake, a room in an apartment-house with a hammock bed, the bridge on which he worked and how one night when it snowed he had bought a hot dog at a street corner and ate it under an arch out of the wind’s way. He supposed that he had friends, but he could not remember them, girls, but there was no face left him. He was a man then still unconditioned by his career.
    Now he was hopelessly conditioned by it: even here in the light airy white-walled room, catching the Minister’s eye over the spirit kettle. He knew that presently