by Nigel Dennis
Panting for breath, old Simon ran into the bedroom. Ignoring the engineer, he whispered in Morgan’s ear: “The mayor has a place for the director. Make him come, sir.”
“Not for me, sir,” said the engineer loudly. “I stand on my own feet. James, you take my place.”
“Jesus, I would die of shame! I chose to stay, I am not ill, I have a passport. By God no! I’ll wait for my train.”
“Then you,” said the engineer, pointing his finger at Simon. “Get along with you! Thank you for your help, Simon: now, get out, or you will be too late.”
“I can never leave …”
“Go on, goddammit; go on, old man. Don’t argue with me. Go home!”
“Home?” said Simon, with shaky bewilderment.
“Home, Tutin, wherever it is!” The engineer was now shouting like a strong man. “You do what I tell you and get out!”
The old man looked at him, puzzled, unhappy, frightened.
“Get out!” shouted the engineer. “You’re no good here.”
At this, the old man gave way and ran from the room.
“Sometimes one must be harsh,” said the engineer, falling into his normal tone. “That old man was trained as a serf: you need a crowbar to free a serf.” He thought over his own words, and then added, “There is one other way, of course.” He looked closely at Morgan and asked curiously: “Will you see our mutual friend again?”
“When he gets home, if he does.”
“Then perhaps you would like to know why he has run out on me … No, don’t get all het up; it’s a simple, useful story. I am alone here because I turned out to be a criminal in the eyes of your friend and my wife. I committed the worst crime in the book: I freed them, freed the slaves.” He sat up eagerly, his eyes full of satisfied malice. “Do you know what I did yesterday? I said I was through; I cried; I asked them to help an old man and remember how much he had helped them. I told them I was ashamed of my life and that I would repent and never be a tyrant again. At first, they soothed me and said ‘There, there, Larry; you just feel a little depressed.’ When they saw I meant it, it was more than they could bear: they began to feel a terrible cold draught. First my wife ‘went out to the drugstore’ as she said; then that poor idiot Divver went into the next room and spent an hour or so heating up his old principles. Do you know what his last words to me were? He put his head in at the door and said: ‘I have decided that it is impossible for me to associate with a man whose views are totally reactionary.’ If he had had a gun, he would have shot me … Well, sir, when I think of those two parasites searching around now for a bigger and better nursemaid, I feel my strength come back. I shall make all the parasites and politicians miserable”—and holding up a set of fingers, he began to tick off: “one—Mr. Minister Tevil: two—his government and his lousy country: three—our mutual friend, with his parrot’s tongue, his indomitable principles and his reversible conscience: four—my dear wife, who will marry again, and live in misery to the end of her days with a man who respects her. I am only sorry that she has no conscience to worry herself with, and no brains to grasp the truth of the situation. Divver, fortunately for me, has just enough of both to live on in endless shame … Well, off you go, young man, and catch your train. And do pass on what I have said, to Divver; otherwise, there is just a chance that he may manage to bury the past, to forget that he never felt so natural and happy as when he escaped from his progressive friends and found me, a dictator.”
“What are you going to do, Mr. Streeter? You look very healthy to me. I should never have listened to you.”
The engineer made no reply, and picked up his book.
Morgan left the room, picked up his suitcases, stumbled down the backstairs, past the empty kitchens and into the courtyard. On rounding the hotel he saw that although the evacuation was over, the square was not empty. The Turin workmen from the mines were coming through it, some running, some on bicycles, and, without pause, heading straight on towards the station. Far away down the railroad track, perhaps two villages distant, Morgan heard the whistle of a train.
His heart jumped, he stood stock-still, his mind asking in a silly way how the train could exist if it was a half-hour ahead of schedule.
Then he, too, started to run for his life.
By the time he reached the edge of the square, he was exhausted. Cyclists and runners passed him at what seemed like a dashing clip, skirting him as though he were a dead obstacle. Abreast of the cathedral, he hurled his suitcases into the gutter and, his limbs light and strong, sprinted down the road. Approaching the station-house, he once more heard the train’s whistle.
The waiting-room was crowded with miners. They had pinned the station-master against a wall: one of them repeated the same demand over and over, and, each time he received no answer, gave the station-master a brutal punch. The station-master’s face was covered with blood, his gold-braided hat was squashed under a miner’s foot. His eyes were closed, he said not a word; with each punch his head snapped against the wall. Behind him, in his office, a telegraph instrument clattered away in code without pause.
The last of the miners, a big foreman who was sweating like a pig, burst off the road into the waiting-room. He took in the situation in a second, bellowed to his friends and rushed out on to the platform. They all ran after him; the station-master, suddenly unpropped, fell on the floor in a heap.
On the sunny platform, half a dozen miners, directed by the chief, dragged one of the wrought-iron benches loose and lowered it over the side. In a moment it was in position, four-square athwart the rails, its high, convoluted back shining dully in the sun. The miners climbed back on to the platform, dusting their hands.
The train came round the bend at full speed. A hundred yards away it began to whistle, in sharp snorts. Fifty yards away, it slowed down abruptly, and out of the cab leaned the driver’s face, red and angry, his black fist shaking beside it: at each of three doorways down the train’s length, a soldier swung out, hanging by one hand, a rifle in the other, ready to jump to the platform.
The train drew in. As each window of the coaches pulled slowly by, Morgan saw behind the misty panes a crush of men’s and women’s faces, staring out. All the faces were blank and unmoved except for a common, profoundly sullen expression—the suppressed indignation of people who, having reached shelter, find it endangered by hysterical interlopers.
The train stopped a yard short of the bench. The soldiers jumped down and advanced on the miners. Their rifles were menacing, but the soldiers themselves were young and unconfident. The big miner ignored them; having scanned the pale-faced windows of the massed cars, he jerked his thumb at his friends and marched off toward the freight car and caboose. At this, one of the soldiers came to meet him; but the miner boldly put out one hand, grasped the barrel of the man’s rifle and slung it down the platform. The door of the freight car was slid open, and the miners climbed in, followed by Morgan. The big miner put his head out and shouted an O.K.; the soldiers shrugged and resumed their places.
But the engineer still bellowed from his cab, pointing to the iron bench, which everyone had forgotten. At this, the miners began to guffaw, and with the air of lazy aristocrats settled themselves comfortably on the floor and the freight. At last, the three soldiers, joined by the furious driver and his mate, descended to the rails and hoisted the bench on to the platform.
The train pulled out. As the open door of the freight car passed the waiting-room, the dishevelled station-master came stumbling over the platform, his torn gold hat hanging over his bleeding face, his hands raised imploringly. Two miners reached out and hauled him in: they patted him forgivingly in a good-humoured way and tried to clean up his face. He lay on the floor, panting and groaning, his shoes still hanging through the doorway, the laces fluttering in the wind as the train ran faster through the countryside. Soon, it was whistling through successive stations, brushing past platforms that struck the eye as a momentary shambles of people, fronted by open mouths and wavin
g arms. Then the train plunged into a smoky waterfront of docks and whirling spurlines and, running from the sun into a covered way, drew up alongside the Tutin customs-house.
In this great vaulted hall—where only yesterday cynical inspectors had raised one end of innocent lingerie and heard at the other the rustle and thud of falling contraband—native refugees from neighbouring villages were already grouped under the big metal signs that told their names from A to Z. Soldiers stood at the exits, and their legs were visible on top of the thick glass roof, pacing smartly up and down. The noise of a big city mixed with the shouts and hurrying of the refugees; relatives hurried in and claimed whole families; and nuns, with composed faces, moved here and there, finding solitary children and leading them away. As he moved, awed and half-stunned by the din, to the nearest exit, Morgan bumped into Mr. Hovich, who said, his eyes searching on either side, “I am looking for my uncle. Mr. Divver is at the hotel outside. Where is the Director?”
“He refused to come.”
“I am not surprised.” The Representative screwed an imaginary neck with two fists, and bellowed pleasantly: “I hope he has a death by torture; but I fear not, au revoir,” and he moved off toward the sign of H. “If you see Mr. Divver …” Morgan shouted after him. But the Representative was lost in the crowd.
The station-hotel was the customary grimy and cumbersome structure. He pushed into a soiled lobby that was a madhouse of reckless, shouting people weaving around heaps of personal baggage. He found a vacant foot of window-ledge and sat there to catch his breath, his head spinning with the noise, his brain picking up odd and ends like a magpie:—he thought of the clamorous horror of it all, of his lost suitcases, of Mr. Hovich’s uncle, of the nuns and children, and of such airy things as the inscrutability of the Incomprehensible and the puffs of white steam that had preceded the whistles of the train. His knees were batted back and forth by the pushing mob, his ears sang, his empty, nervous stomach accompanied his ears with rumbles and trills. At last he pulled himself together and decided to find Divver: I have to tell him I’m safe; that’s my last duty; and then back to a sane world where I can put myself together again. With calm intelligence he wrote Divver’s name and nationality in block letters on a slip of paper, set his jaw and fought his way to the desk, where the clerk, amid his own screams and those of a hundred questioners, at last scrawled Divver’s room number on the slip. That’s much better, Morgan thought, storming his way to the stairs like a veteran boarding-party; I am at last making use of my brain.
The noise of the lobby dropped away, he found Divver’s room in a threadbare corridor, and walked in.
The rest of the world might be entering chaos, but there was only peace and order in this bare room. And, for once, Divver seemed to be in tune with his surroundings: he was reading calmly in a chair, looking as serene as if he and the Forces had at last reached a happy, conclusive agreement. He arose pleasantly and greeted Morgan; they shook hands and sat down. “Wow, what a din outside!” said Morgan. “Have some schnapps and bread?” said Divver, “I don’t have anything else.” “I didn’t bring a damn thing out of Mell with me,” said Morgan, relaxing, “not a thing: yours or mine.” “Who cares?” said Divver, laying out a bottle and a roll of bread; and indeed there was something idyllic about having only the clothes one stood up in, and plenty of money.
“You can guess what happened to me,” Divver said: “it took me half the night to find the doctor, and then, after persuading him to come along, the police stopped us on the main road and made me take him back.”
“Well, that’s all to the good. I saw Larry for a moment this morning and he was in perfect health.”
“Just what I thought. I worried a certain amount about you, but not too much, to tell you the truth; I felt you would manage O.K.”
“Made the train by the skin of my teeth, as a matter of fact. Just give me five minutes to ease up and I’ll move on to the consulate.”
But Divver was obviously in no hurry to get rid of Morgan any more. “Take your time, don’t kill yourself,” he said nonchalantly: “I am enlisting in the Polish Army.”
“Oh yes?” said Morgan; and althought the idea gave him a certain shock, it soon seemed like a perfectly reasonable one; perhaps the only one under the circumstances.
“In fact I have already done so,” said Divver: “I was directed to a plain-clothes recruiting-sergeant, who typed out an application form and told me to sit tight until I was called. It only cost ten dollars—he said that was to cover a foreign volunteer’s special uniform. Of course, there may not actually be a Polish army right here, but some sort of a National Guard would do me just as well.” “Of course it would,” said Morgan, “but I hope you’ll look out for yourself.” “You bet I will,” said Divver, “I never felt freer and safer than after I gave my passport away this morning. I guess there were periods this summer when you thought I had become a raving idiot.” “I was too tied up in my own woes to care very much, Max.” “Well, it’s all over now, and I can’t for the life of me understand how I ever got mixed up with that old phoney. Did his wife come back? No? I guessed she wouldn’t. Did he weep on your shoulder?” “No, I can’t say he did. He seemed to have picked up his old toughness.” “What did he have to say?” “Oh, you know—angry ravings about everyone.” “About me?” “Some, yes.” “Well; what?” “Oh, that he’d make you sorry for walking out on him, and so on.” “And how did he plan to do that, may I ask?” “Well, I took for granted that he meant to revenge himself by staying in Mell to work for the Nazis.”
Divver’s mouth fell open: he caught Morgan by the shoulders, shook him, and yelled: “Is that a joke? Are you crazy?”
“No: don’t you think that’s what he meant?”
“Do I think so! What in hell gave you that idea?”
“But Max, you know his type.”
“Type hell: did he say he was going to stay and work?”
“No, but he swore to make the Poles pay, as well as you and the ministry.”
“And what did you say?”
“Why, I don’t think I said anything: I was too surprised: I mean I wasn’t too surprised. I always took for granted that he was that kind of man.”
“What kind of man? You don’t imagine that I would ever have had dealings with a Nazi, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then prove what you are saying.”
“Why, I always took for granted that a man who behaves like him is a dictator. And he’s done very well for himself in Europe, so I think he would work for anyone rather than go back. If you must know, I once heard her say that he would.”
“Her?”
“His wife.”
“When did she ever say anything like that?”
“What does that matter? I heard her say it one day, that’s all.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“Yes, but I don’t believe he’d do it … Yes, by God, I do believe he’d do it … By God: it’s just what he is doing. Over my dead body!”
He ran to the door and down the stairs, Morgan after him. Next moment, Divver was clawing his way through the mob in the lobby; Morgan caught up with him on the sidewalk unlocking the door of the ministry car. “Where are you going, Max?” he cried. “To Mell, of course,” said Divver. “Should I come?” “I would hope you would insist on coming,” said Divver.
*
The car, freshly ornamented by Mr. Hovich that very morning with impressive governmental insignia, passed out of the city without hindrance. In half an hour they turned off the main road and Morgan, with the distaste of a man stepping back into a wet bathing suit, felt the discarded town’s grey streets closing in on his body. Divver began to drive very slowly, the car’s engine fell into a faint hum. “We don’t want to announce our arrival or he’ll take a powder,” Divver said.
He parked the car in the lee of the cathedral, took off his jacket and threw it over the hood. Then he led the way to t
he hotel, hugging the house-fronts and walking as quietly as possible. “He may try to get tough,” Divver said in a whisper, as they sneaked up the very edge of the marble steps, “so let me go first.”
“What will we do with him when we find him?”
“Oh, I don’t know for sure; break his neck maybe,” said Divver.
As they tiptoed up the stairs, Morgan’s heart began to thump with excitement; but when he saw the old corridors and numbered rooms, he was filled with the grouchy disconsolation of anti-climax: I have had a bellyful of this layout, he thought, his stomach sinking with resentment. “You stand at the drawing-room door,” whispered Divver, as they approached the suite, “and hold the knob tight in case he tries to get out there. I shall enter by the bedroom.”
Morgan gripped the knob. Divver padded on down the passage. Outside the bedroom he stopped, drew breath ferociously, and then suddenly hurled himself througth the door.
At once the suite sounded as if elephants were playing in it: the curtains whipped, doors crashed open and shut, crockery smashed to the floor. Then there was a pause, a hoarse whisper—and Morgan felt the knob turning in his fist.
He resisted with all his might, grappling the shiny brass: he shouted: “Here, Max! Hi! got him!”
The knob turned violently under his fingers; the door opened, and Divver’s face appeared in the slit, saying hoarsely: “Shut up, for Christ’s sake; it’s only me. You’ll scare him out of the damn country.”
Much ashamed, he followed Divver back into the drawing-room. They closed the doors and sat down. “The little bastard has got away,” said Divver: “but what’s all this?”
The suite was in perfect order, but in the centre of the drawing-room was a big cabin trunk bearing a piece of paper with the words: “NEUTRAL PROPERTY AMERICAN CITIZEN.” “Well, I be ——!” said Divver, glaring at the paper: “the nerve of the little skunk!”
