A Stranger with a Bag

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  A moment later, the suddenness of his action was as surprising as though a rocket had exploded off his lips. He had said, ‘You’ll go to pieces if you don’t get a night’s sleep. I’m going to put you in my sleeper.’

  ‘In your sleeper? Very kind of you, I’m sure. But I’m afraid it’s out of the question. I’d really rather not.’ The refusal, beginning haughtily, ended coyly. It was clear that he had no doubt of Henry’s intentions, and that the coyness was a cautious acceptance of them.

  ‘Where’s your compartment?’ said Henry. ‘Two cars down? Good! Then you can pick up your traps on the way. Come on!’

  Watching from the corridor, he saw the look of alarm on the mother’s face, and the sadness of her gesture as she woke the child who had stretched out into the vacated seat, gathered him to her and settled his feet on a bundle. The young man jerked down a suitcase from the rack, stumbled over the bundle, stumbled against the man who sat in the inner corner nursing a fiddle case and came away, exclaiming, ‘My God, what a pigsty!’

  ‘Come on,’ said Henry once more. His rage was now sabled with gloom. Not only was he about to put this young cad into his sleeper, he would also have to explain the transfer to the wagon-lit attendant. It would probably turn out to be against the regulations. In which case he would … He really did not know what he would do, except that nothing on earth should prevent him from doing a thing he would do with the utmost ill-willingness.

  The attendant was sitting in his small apartment, looking monkish. He was an immensely tall man, with an inured expression. When he stood up, he did it with a functional agility, as though he were an expanding ladder and part of the equipment. Henry, concentrating on the matter-of-course aspect of thus disposing of a sleeper, almost forgot whom he was proposing to put into it till, with the words, ‘This gentleman here’, he glanced back at the young man standing behind him. Dirty, hangdog, apprehensive, the young man looked like a criminal hauled before yet another official person who would presently find him out. Inflamed by that chivalry towards oppressed criminals by which a law-abiding Englishman compounds his law-abidingness, Henry prepared to give battle. The attendant shrugged his shoulders and said he must have the gentleman’s passport and ticket. The young man produced them with the affable air of one who has again diddled the authorities, and was conducted to the sleeper.

  Henry stood in the corridor waiting to tip. The attendant reappeared. ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer Monsieur another sleeper,’ he said. ‘And the train is very full tonight. However, some people may be getting out at Lausanne. You might find a seat then. It is possible.’ His voice had a skin of solicitude over a granite disapprobation. Scratch a Frenchman and you’ll find a schoolmistress, thought Henry, quite unfairly. Deciding that he would go back to the restaurant car for another brandy, he began to walk through the train. In the corridor of a first-class a man had pulled down a window and was leaning out. He was so absorbed that he made no attempt to move out of the way, so Henry paused and looked out, too. The train slowed down; then, with the eccentricity of night expresses, it came massively to a halt. The black mountain silhouette remained fixedly against the sky, the improbable sparkles of light on its flanks settled into a social pattern. He could hear the noise of a waterfall. If he had got out at Sion he would have spared himself all this shame of false kindness and futile rage—besides having a bed to look forward to. The train began to move, a woman’s voice said, ‘For God’s sake, Winthrop,’ the man went into his compartment. Henry walked on. Almost unawares, he recognized the compartment the young man had quitted.

  There they were, the man nursing the fiddle case, the stout man sitting opposite, the family beyond. The two little girls had fallen asleep, clasped together and moving as one body with the sway of the train. Beyond them, the father drowsed. The boy seemed to be asleep, too; at any rate his eyes were shut in his pained, twitching face. Only the mother sat erect and wakeful, supporting the boy’s head on her lap. Her face was hidden by the folds of the dull black kerchief tied under her chin, but Henry knew by her attitude that she had composed herself to wakefulness as others compose themselves to sleep. Just as her sad gesture had moved him before, her attitude moved him now. She was small, thin, meanly built; but she was one of those beings whose movements and postures have the infallible aristocracy of a long lineage of labour, hardship and duty. She could no more go wrong with a gesture, he thought, than she could go wrong paring a potato. The boy stirred. She turned her head to look down at him. Her glance went on to the two little girls, to the packages in the rack, to Henry looking in. She leaned forward, careful not to disturb the boy, and touched her husband’s knee. Instantly, he came out of his drowse. She said something, and glanced again to the door, and extended her hand palm uppermost over the space between the boy and the stout man in the corner. Henry shook his head, but at the same moment the husband spoke to the stout man, who pulled open the door, saying, ‘The Signora says that if you are looking for a seat, there is one here.’

  ‘It is most kind of the Signora,’ said Henry. ‘But I could not think of disturbing her. I shall certainly find a seat farther on.’

  ‘For that matter,’ said the man with the fiddle case, ‘if you don’t mind waiting a little longer, I shall be getting out at Lausanne, and you can have my seat without disturbing anybody.’

  They all did her bidding, as though she were a queen.

  Just before Lausanne, the man with the fiddle case came into the corridor, touched Henry’s shoulder and said, ‘You can go in now.’ He obeyed, and sat down beside the two little girls. The woman looked across at him. Her grave, unsmiling face was momentarily expressive of a grave satisfaction; then she looked away and the black drapery hooded her again.

  No one spoke. From time to time the boy twitched and moaned. The stout man snored quietly. Then the elder of the little girls, who had woken up, said with a look of delight, ‘He’s like the sea!’

  The mother’s finger went up to her lips, but the stout man snored on, and presently the father said to Henry, ‘It is natural. Our home is by the sea. Besides, I am a fisherman.’

  ‘A hard life,’ said Henry.

  ‘Yes, you are right; a hard life, and a poor livelihood. But it has compensations. One can pick up driftwood on the beach. Sometimes we even find coal. But it does not burn well; the sea has got into it.’

  ‘Once I picked up a toothbrush,’ said the little girl.

  She was easier to understand than her father, who turned to her when he was at a loss for the Italian for some dialect word. Clasping her sister and swaying in unison with her, she interpreted, and helped on the conversation with comments of her own. They were Sardinians; none of them except the father had been off the island till now, when they were all going to London in England—except Rocco and the hens. Rocco had been coming too but Uncle Dante said that the English customs officers would put him in a prison called the Quarantina; though he had never bitten anybody and had very few fleas.

  ‘The boy’s dog, you understand,’ said the father. ‘A pet. It is because of my poor boy that we are going to London. There is a hospital in London that can cure such children, so my wife’s brother says. He and his family live in London. He keeps a tavern——’

  ‘A restaurant,’ corrected the little girl.

  ‘—a restaurant, and students from that hospital go there, and he spoke to one of them about our Gianpaolo. And in the end, suddenly, we heard that all was arranged—the doctor, the bed in the hospital, our permits, our journey. Dante is paying for it all. There is even to be a cabin on the boat. A cabin!’ He shook with laughter at the joke of a fisherman going to sea in a cabin.

  ‘Your brother-in-law is a good friend.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Dante is good, very good. And he is rich. He has done very well; he makes a great deal of money.’

  The mother, who till now had been silent, looked full at Henry. ‘You too are good,’ she said in a stern voice. ‘You gave up your place in the train to that young man
. I saw what was happening. I understood.’

  He lowered his eyes. He did not know how to answer. If he was silent, he would appear to concur. He certainly could not enter into the truth; and the usual ‘Not at all, it was nothing’ would not serve, since there had been an implied reception in her words so that to belittle his merit would be to slight her approval. He was deciding, rather romantically, that the only offering he could make to this remarkable woman would be to leave her her illusion when, raising his eyes, he saw that no answer was called for. Having paid him his due, she had dismissed him from her mind and was offering the child a biscuit.

  He wished he could dismiss himself from his own mind. He had felt a glow of pleasure when the stern voice addressed him. The discovery that he had been noticed, pondered on—that he had become a person to her, been received—would have been delightful, if it had not depended on that mistaken word ‘good’. After the malice with which he had listened to the young man, and probably envy, too, since he would not have felt such animated dislike for someone nearer his own age; after that arrogant wealthy man’s offer of the sleeper, made on an impulse that couldn’t have had a spark of kindness in it (since when it was read as an improper advance he was merely glad of another reason for disliking); after the inertia of not getting out at Sion and so retreating with some remnants of self-respect, it was not easy to submit to an imputation of goodness. Yet by degrees it became easier. Her mistake was in no way his doing; it was not even the total condemnation his middle-class conscience felt it to be—a conscience rating goodness at rarity value and shaped from nursery onwards by such estimating phrases as ‘good as gold’. These people had a different, perhaps unworldly, outlook on goodness, and apparently did not find it more surprising than, say, rain. A torrential rain comes to be acknowledged as the flood of such or such a year; a torrential goodness comes to be acknowledged as a saint; but apart from extremes, goodness and rain are something naturally to be expected. So the father had agreed that Dante was good, very good; but it was Dante’s enabling riches he dwelt on, the riches that were conveying the family to London and Gianpaolo to the hospital. Such an outlook, at once practical and discerning, was very probably quite a common one—at any rate among people who seldom hear the term ‘philanthropy’ and do not daily receive printed appeals on behalf of the blind, the starving, the homeless, the underprivileged, the unconverted to this religion or that. Very likely the stout man sitting opposite also enjoyed this outlook—which was why he was able to snore so peacefully. The little girl was quite right: he snored like the sea.

  The train rushed on through the darkness, and in the darkness waves fell on the beach, broke against the cliffs, and the sea closed and relaxed its embrace of the island. A traveller by air would look down and say, ‘I suppose that’s Sardinia.’ Which way (for one was free to decide) should the plane be travelling—east or west? Henry was nosing his way into sleep when the flash and roar of a train running counter to theirs recalled him to where he was, and why. He realized that it might be possible for him to redeem his imputed goodness. His riches enabled him to command porters.

  ‘I hope there will be someone meeting you at Victoria,’ he said to the father.

  ‘Victoria? I don’t know about Victoria. Dante will know. He is meeting us at the port of Calais.’

  The mother nodded, her face glittering with excitement as though it were a rock dashed with a sudden spray. If Dante resembled his sister, thought Henry, their meeting would be a sight worth seeing. Dante, indeed, was the answer to everything. By asking the address of Dante’s restaurant it would be possible to see these people again; perhaps, at last, be of some use to them; at any rate, see them. Meanwhile, he had entered the restaurant, where Dante was walking about with a peacock under his arm, feeding it with grapes. Coming up to Henry’s table he said, ‘Have you brought my sister’s hat? If she is going to be Queen of Scotland, she will need several hats.’ Looking at the peacock, Henry remarked, ‘I suppose that is the Papal Blessing.’ Even in his dream, he felt pleased with this perspicacity: not every Englishman would have known it. So, in a light slumber, he went lightly from one dream to another, conscious in another region of his mind that the dreams were gay and harmless and that he would come to no harm among them. From time to time, he woke more completely and saw the wakeful mother, sitting composedly, her hooded head erect and sleek like a bird’s. Not since his childhood, when the wind blew in the chimney and the black cat lay under the scarlet eiderdown, had he slept so confidently.

  Somewhere in the middle of this strange night without time or locality, he was nudged awake to share in a meal of bread and stony-hard sausage and rough sweet wine. The stout man had been awakened, too. He was a motor salesman. Hearing Henry’s English accent, he told how his cousin, a prisoner in England and working for a farmer, had slashed his leg with a bill-hook, and how the farmer’s wife, leaving all else, had driven him to the doctor for an anti-tetanus injection. If there was so much science and good will even in a rough country place, there was no saying what a London doctor would not be able to do for the little boy—and should this fail, there was Lourdes.

  At the mention of Lourdes, the father’s face hardened. Seeing that he had said the wrong thing, the motor salesman offered peppermints all round and then produced a very clean handkerchief which he knotted into a conjurer’s rabbit. The rabbit frisked about among the children, tickling them with its ears and pulling peppermints and coins out of pockets and hair ribbons. ‘Look out, look out! He’ll be after your biscuit. Oho, what he has found now?’ A coin fell on the floor. The little girls made a dive for it. The boy, escaping from his mother’s hold, leaned down, lost his balance and fell. Screaming with pain and terror he lay writhing among their feet. When his father tried to lift him up he squirmed away, hideously agile, hauling himself along on his elbows with his useless legs trailing after him, striking his head against whoever’s hand came near him.

  ‘Fool!’ said Henry to the motor salesman.

  The motor salesman’s horrified, crimsoned face did not alter; probably he had not heard, because of the noise the child was making. No one else uttered a word of blame. The mother knelt down beside the child; she made no attempt to touch him but kept up a wordless noise of condolence. Half grunt, half creak, it was more like a tree’s voice than a woman’s. The boy turned his head and spat at her. Instantly, she had her arms round him and in the same flow of movement had lifted him back onto the seat. ‘Brute! Brutes!’ he said between sobs.

  ‘Ciao!’ The father spoke under his breath, with a lifetime of accepted endurance in his voice.

  Presently, like reflections in a shaken pond, they settled again, were the same family travelling to London with a sick child, the same pair of well-meaning outsiders. The mother’s kerchief, loosened in the struggle, had fallen back. Tears of fatigue ran down her unshielded face. Sleep was mastering her, harsh as death in its oncoming. Twice she reeled forward, twice she jerked herself awake and erect again. Henry got up, saying to the motor salesman that they should move to the corridor. The father misunderstood, and began to apologize for the disturbance.

  ‘The Signora must lie down. She is worn out. You must take the boy from her,’ said Henry; and to his amazement he found himself lifting the sleeping child and planting him on the father’s lap. As the child’s weight was taken away, she put out a groping hand. The elder little girl took hold of it, patted it, and laid it gently back on her breast. She was dead asleep before they had settled her at full length, with a bundle under her head and her feet decently covered with a shawl. Even then, the father made a last attempt at hospitality, pointing out that the two little girls took up no more room than one person, so that with the boy held on his knee there would still be places for the two gentlemen.

  Constrained together by what they had been through, Henry and the motor salesman stood in the corridor, keeping up a desultory conversation. Dijon had been left behind; the muteness of the first light was like a reproach to human
activities. ‘Why go further?’ it seemed to say. ‘Why all these purposes?’ The motor salesman remarked that it would have been better to try Lourdes before London; whatever a person’s opinions might be, there was no harm in showing a little civility; and there was no reason to think that the child of Communist parents would not stand as good a chance as any other—even a better chance, as it would be a more beautiful miracle. Henry felt the familiar squirming of inquiry always aroused in him by religious remarks but he had learned from experience that only Dissenters like to have their religious remarks followed up. He praised the behaviour of the two little girls. The motor salesman agreed. Presently they parted.

  I shall never see her again, Henry thought, for I can’t go back now and ask the name of Dante’s restaurant. They would not think it odd. But I should. For a quiet man who minded his own business, he had performed a sufficiency of odd acts during the course of this long night. Since entering Switzerland, he had thrust a young man into his sleeper because he loathed him, prepared himself to fight a wagon-lit attendant, compelled a motor salesman out of his corner seat, and fallen in love with a fisherman’s wife—who had addressed exactly one remark to him, and that on a false assumption. He had fallen in love with her, and almost immediately had fallen asleep in her presence—as contentedly, as reposefully, as though the physical act of love had taken place between them. A long night!—unquestioned, violent and inconsequential as a dream. Even now, the sun had not risen, and the mists were sleeping in the woodlands, and the odious young man was sleeping in his sleeper.

  As he watched, the sky opened like a wound and a glaring tinsel streaked the horizon. Before midday, they would be safe in Dante’s keeping. It was too ambitious, it was almost blasphemous, to hope that their breakfast would have escaped Dante’s consideration; for all that, he would ask about it after leaving Paris, where the breakfast car came on. The brief glare of sunrising waned and went out; daylight showed a low ceiling of cloud. In Paris it would be raining.