In Paris it was raining. Yellow mackintoshes, white mackintoshes, black mackintoshes emerged from suburban trains and disappeared like a flitting of butterflies. Long dead, and grown quite respectable and undebatable, the French Impressionists continue to paint Paris. The canvases of the Gare du Nord replaced the canvases of the Gare de Lyon. Presently the hand bell would be rung down the corridor. Though he was rumpled and unshaven, he would have breakfast before he faced the odious young man, the disapproving attendant.
The noise of the hand bell approached, its associations so compelling that the smell of coffee seemed to be approaching with it. On the heels of the ringer came a man carrying a breakfast tray. The clatter of crockery ceased, a door was opened, there was an acclaim of voices. The little girls led it, but everyone was talking, and they all sounded happy and unconstrained—as they would be, of course, now that his formalizing presence was removed. So Henry went and ate his solitary breakfast, and prolonged the solitude as long as his self-respect would allow him to. When he came to walk past the compartment that was Sardinia, he allowed himself to glance in. The mother was replaiting the younger daughter’s hair, the father was rolling a cigarette. No one saw him. There seemed to be a great deal more hand baggage than during the night, but that was because much of it had been taken down from the rack and opened to get things out. When an adventure is over, it is over. Only the adventure’s grudging begetter remained—the young man but for whose inability to recognize a peasant family when he met it Henry would not have entered the Sardinian compartment. No doubt he also had been unpacking and expanding. If he starts being grateful to me, thought Henry; if he has the effrontery to utter a word of thanks … However, this did not seem very likely.
The wagon-lit attendant was in his cell, bundling sheets into a laundry sack. ‘Your sleeper’s ready for you,’ he said. ‘I expect you’ll be glad to be back in it, and to have it to yourself.’ Having watched the first arrow quiver in the outer ring, he aimed the second at the bull’s-eye. ‘Your friend has left the train, you know. He collected his passport and his ticket to London, and got out at the Gare de Lyon.’ Barely glancing at the effect of his words, he showed Henry into his tidied, passionless sleeper and left him to think it over. Postponing emotion, Henry shaved.
Shaving was a thing that Henry did very well, but shave as he might, he was not able to dispel his bristling uneasiness. The event was so exactly what he would have wished that he could not feel satisfied with it. There must be a catch in it somewhere. The young man would reappear, having got out to buy a paper, or hoping to change his Turkish notes. But if so, why did he take his suitcase with him? Suppose he had killed himself in a lavatory?—with a revolver taken from the suitcase? This disposed of the suitcase but not of the young man. His body would be found, the attendant would testify that Henry had put him in the sleeper, a guilty association would be manifest to all, and by the time Henry had extricated himself from the processes of French law, dozens of starving relations would have sprung up in Liverpool. There would be a widowed mother—he was the kind of young man who has ‘Widowed Mother’ stamped on his brow. Henry had noticed it, along with the pimples, beneath Prière d’exiger when the lights came on again in the dining car. ‘Priere d’exiger’ … ominous words. It was going to be one of those transactions you don’t get out of till the uttermost farthing has been accounted for. All ill-considered kind actions end calamitously—at any rate, most of Henry’s did. One should learn to leave kind actions to the young, who are not endangered by them since they rarely perform them.
Calmed by these general reflections, Henry began to think on broader lines. He thought he would go to sleep. He settled himself, and closed his eyes. They hadn’t closed comfortably. He opened them again and saw that the sleeper wasn’t quite what it had been. Something was missing. What was missing was the slow wag of his overcoat on its hanger. So that was it! The odious young man had left the train because it was a safe and simple way of stealing a good overcoat. Warm in a good overcoat, he would wait till the next train, and then continue his journey. Henry heaved a sigh of relief. His mind was at rest. He need never give another thought to that odious young man, and when he got to London he would buy a new overcoat.
There was a knock; the door opened. The attendant came in, and he held the overcoat. He had observed, he said with specious tact, that Monsieur’s friend had dropped cigarette ash on it. To avert any further mishap, he had taken it away.
The coat was put on the hanger, and resumed its faintly mesmerizing wag. It was a good coat, and Henry was attached to it; under different circumstances he would have been glad to see it again. But now it came as a monitor, and told him he was not done with that young man after all. He would not reappear, he would not be found dead in a lavatory—these silly fancies had gathered up their improbably trailing skirts and fled like ghosts at sunrise. What remained was the real young man, who had left the train with his shabby suitcase, and no good solid overcoat, and no apparent reason. There he stood on the platform, hunching his narrow shoulders against the wet, wolfish cold. No overcoat, no breakfast, no reason. No real reason. No possible reason at all that Henry could see, except a reason which irresistibly imposed itself on his mind, forcing him to admit its validity, its tit-for-tat symmetrically. For if the odious young man had felt a reciprocal dislike, and had nursed it all night, tossing in luxury on a bed he had been forced into, and in the morning had realized that he would be expected to put up some show of thanks to the odious old fellow who at any moment would reappear with his chilblained civility, he might very well have had the courage of his animosity and got out in Paris—as Henry had failed to do at Sion.
About the Author
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) published seven novels, four volumes of poetry and eight volumes of short stories. She also wrote the biography of T. H. White, and spent ten years of her life as one of the four editors of the ten-volume compilation Tudor Church Music. She lived most of her adult life with her close companion Valentine Ackland.
Faber Finds are reissuing four volumes of her short stories: Winter in the Air, A Spirit Rises, A Stranger with a Bag and Scenes of Childhood.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© The Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1961
The right of Sylvia Townsend Warner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28011–7
A Stranger with a Bag Page 19
