Free The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman

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 so 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