He waited.

Her throaty voice was a bullwhip, and she lashed savagely at him. ‘You’re quaking down to the crotch. You’re the boy without balls, and we both know it. You’re afraid of me, and that’s the beginning and end of it. You’re scared of sex, and you’re scared of a real woman, and it’s a thousand to one you’re afraid of my bed and my body, because you can’t get it up.’

It was then that he did a foolish thing. He had been controlled, but now, like a schoolboy taking a dare, he lost his control. ‘I wish I could save your face and say that’s true, but the truth is I’ve done all right by myself, and right here in Sweden, and with a woman who has the decency to give love for love and for nothing else.’

‘You’re a liar!’ she shouted. ‘I wouldn’t let you touch me now, if you were William Shakespeare and wanted to give me every word you ever wrote. I wouldn’t let myself be touched by a puny, running weakling-who’s got integrity instead of balls. Is that what you give your lady friend, your poor, starved lady friend, a hot injection of integrity? Get out of here, Craig, get out of my sight! Get your clothes and beat it, and stay out of my sight before I tell the whole world about their great masculine Nobel winner-the one man on earth who couldn’t get it up with Märta Norberg!’

She spun away from him, seething so furiously that the contraction of the muscles in her shoulders and back was visible. He remained a moment, looking at her, at the dishevelled hair no longer provocative, the slouched shoulders that would soon be old, the curved spine no longer lithe and slender but skinny and knobby, and the sparse folds of buttocks below the bikini strip no longer inciting but only grotesque and pitiful. The lofty, illusive female love symbol was, finally, only an embittered man-woman of the market-place, and no more. Wordlessly, Craig turned away from her and went to the cabaña.

He changed slowly in the confined room, without anger, with only an inexplicable burden of sorrow, and when he was fully dressed, he emerged.

The lanai was vacant of life. She had gone. He went into the living-room and found the yellow telephone. The number came to him at once. He dialed 22.00.00, and when the girl answered, he requested a taxi and told her where he was. As he hung up, his eyes caught the full-length oil of Märta Norberg on the far wall. As Manon Lescaut. The Trader, he thought-no, better-Trader in the Market-Place.

His hat and coat lay across a bench in the vestibule. No one came to see him out. He opened the heavy door and went into the cold and fog to wait.

After he had lit his pipe, he felt better and wondered why. He had lost something tonight. In the eyes of the world, he had lost very much. Yet he was certain that he had gained infinitely more. For the first time since the Harriet years, he realized that he was not only a writer of integrity, but a human being of worth. The evaluation had a pomposity about it, and he considered rephrasing it, reworking it, and then he left it alone, because it was true, and because the feeling deep inside him, in that recess where the soul crouched and watched, the feeling was good, and it had not been that way for a long, long time.

He smoked his pipe, and enjoyed the fog, and waited for the taxi that would take him back to the living.

AS each new day brought the climactic occasion of the Nobel Ceremony closer, the lobby and restaurants of the Grand Hotel became more and more crowded with new arrivals, largely journalists and dignitaries, from every part of Scandinavia and every corner of the world.

Now, at the noon hour of December eighth, with the Ceremony only two days off, the immense Winter Garden of the Grand was filled nearly to capacity. When Andrew Craig, wearing a knit tie, tweed sport jacket, and slacks, and carrying a folded airmail edition of The New York Times under an arm, entered the noisy indoor Garden, he found it difficult to make himself heard. The maître d’hôtel checked his reservation, then bowed across his folded arm and said, ‘Right this way, Mr. Craig.’

Craig followed the dining-room steward past a table of cultural delegates from Ghana, past another where American and English newspapermen conversed and several of these waved to him, past two tables joined to hold eight members of the Italian Embassy staff, and past yet another white-covered table at which Konrad Evang was in deep discussion with several Swedish business types. The variety of foreigners, like the variegated shifting patterns of colour in a kaleidoscope, diverted Craig briefly from what had been uppermost in his mind, the scene with Leah just left behind and the scene with the Marceaus that lay immediately ahead.

The table that he had booked was on the carpeted higher level of the room, between two massive pillars. The maître d’hôtel removed the ‘Reserved’ sign, pulled out a cane chair, dusted it briefly with a napkin, and offered it to Craig.

When Craig was seated, the maître d’hôtel inquired, ‘Does Monsieur wish to have a drink or to order now?’

‘Neither one,’ said Craig. ‘I’d prefer to wait. I’m expecting guests.’

When the maître d’hôtel left, Craig drew his chair closer to the table and spread open the newspaper before him. He had not read a newspaper carefully in days, but today, because he had slept late and soberly, and his eyes were rested, and because he had recaptured some interest in his contemporaries, he intended to resume following the serial story of his time.

But when he bent over the front page, he told himself that the light was too poor to read by. Through the enormous latticed glass dome above, he could see that even at noon, the day was sunless and sombre. Then he realized that although the globular restaurant lamps on either side of him, and all about the room, were illuminated, the artificial lighting was diffused and yellow. Reading, he decided, would be a strain, and he knew that he was in no mood for it anyway. He closed his newspaper and slipped it under his chair. He tilted backwards, one hand fiddling absently with the table silver, and lost himself in thought.

In bed the night before, he had reviewed the astonishing encounter with Märta Norberg, had tried to remember what he could remember with emotional detachment, had sorted out one or two moments of it that he would have to relate to Lucius Mack once he was back in Miller’s Dam, and then he had recalled something said earlier that evening that he had almost forgotten. What he had recalled was Norberg’s bizarre revelation of Ragnar Hammarlund’s machinations-the secret recordings, the information on Claude Marceau’s affair with some mannequin, the plotting to snare the chemistry laureates into Hammarlund’s industrial web.

In bed, Craig had considered all of this detestable scheming. Generally, he did not concern himself with individual morality. Most often, he preferred to play the onlooker, to live and to let live all the earth’s cabbages and kings. Perhaps that had been his major defect as a human being. Last night, for once, he had determined to correct this defect in himself. He had detested Hammarlund for his cynicism, for his degrading of dignity by invasion of privacy. The Hammarlunds of the world, like the Sue Wileys of the world, he had told himself, must not go unchallenged. Moreover, Craig had identified himself not only with all victims of life, but, in this case, victims with whom he had a bond in common.

Somehow, he had seen that the Marceaus-like the hapless Garrett and distant Farelli and forever displaced Stratman-were, like himself, by chance, by circumstance, human targets. Through the prize, they had all become, with him, not only what Gottling had called democracy’s élite, but also democracy’s vulnerable ones. The six of them were, by birth and environment and interests, strangers before meeting in Stockholm, but with the awards, they had been pressed into eternal kinship. Forever after, they would be as one, the laureates of this year, and Craig had seen that if the Marceaus were harmed, so was he, and so were they all.