“We’ll go and have some caviare,” said Gregory Vassilieff, finding himself not far from his favourite café at midday. “Then you come back and lunch with us.”
“Hadn’t we better make it another day?”
“No, no! Tina will be delighted. She always plans for a guest. A point of honour with her.”
Vassilieff dived through a string of alleys where the booths of coffee merchants and carpet sellers kept alive the memory of Turkish bazaars, and came out into a small cobbled square, one side of which was occupied by the plate glass windows of a café. It was a large, dingy hall, smelling of stale beer and pickled cucumbers and furnished with cheap wooden tables and chairs that ran in regular rows between the iron pillars that supported the roof. Sordid though it was, the place was full of animated customers. Toby placed them as mechanics and students rather than clerks. They looked hungry, but vividly alive. They did not have the melancholy and nihilistic air of being on their way from the venereal specialist to their mistress which he was beginning to associate with the Bucharest Rumanian.
“They have good vodka here,” Vassilieff explained.
He chose a table near the centre of the café, nodded to a few acquaintances and ordered a carafe of vodka and some caviare.
“Who are all these people?” Toby asked.
“Teachers from the university. Intellectuals. A sprinkling of communists. They usually meet here.”
“You aren’t a communist, are you?”
“I? No! I have no politics. I am sick of new Rrrussia. I am sick of Holy Rrrussia.”
“One does get a bit tired of it,” said Toby.
“You understand, eh?” growled Vassilieff. “It is always in their mouth. Holy Rrrussia. And what have they given, our refugees? The French Huguenots, the German Jews, even the Armenians—all enriched the countries they went to. But we? Manservants. Taxi drivers. Pimps. I am a businessman. I meet your civilisation on its own terms. I hate it. But I have proved—adjustable! That is what Europe expects of me. Very well, I will give it. Then civilisation will pay me twenty-five per cent. I am a good boy, ha!”
Vassilieff fired a glass of vodka into his stomach and laughed.
“That needed courage,” said Toby. “But I don’t blame the émigrés. They do seem to take always the easiest route. I’ve known a good many of them, and I can’t blame them. I’ve experienced myself how hard it is to get a business job in a foreign country.”
“You have? Well—if you’ll permit me—it’s done you no harm.”
Out of the alleyways leading into the square came knots of men and single men walking hurriedly and looking back over their shoulders like game driven out of a covert by the beaters. The clatter and hum of the café had hidden the unmistakeable mutter of a crowd approaching.
“What’s the noise?” asked Toby. “The Bourse coming out of school?”
The café buzzed with nervous excitement, some of the customers sitting still with self-conscious expressions of unconcern, others jumping up, calling to friends, running out of the door, hastening back again.
“Damn them!” Vassilieff spat. “I am tired of them. Tired, do you hear me?”
He glared at his companion as if Toby had been responsible for whatever was upsetting the peaceful hour of the aperitif.
“What’s up?” Toby asked.
“The Iron Guard! Idiots! Dolts!”
The square was filled with men, as smoothly and suddenly as if by water. It was a yapping crowd. Yelps of laughter and shouted slogans blended into a clamour that was wholly cruel but had neither dignity nor deep emotion.
Gregory Vassilieff was very angry. He had known crowds in his time; crowds who flowed forwards with a triumphant, savage roar; crowds who trickled on over the snow quite silently except for coughs and cries, the limited little scale of notes that a solitary machine gun, playing upon that vast human instrument, could knock out of it. The petty riots of the Iron Guard infuriated him. They blocked his way home past the university. They upset his customers. They were a continual annoyance in an easy-going country with twice as much territory as it had any right to, and no political grievances whatever.
“It looks as if we’re for it,” said Toby. “Who are they anyway?”
“Anti-Semites. Anti-communists. Anti-foreign capital. Anti-everything except stupidity. They’ve wrecked a few Jewish shops. Now they want these—talkers!”
Vassilieff flung out his large, pale hand in a scornful gesture towards the clients of the café ; there was pity in it, but it implied his contempt for them as well as for their persecutors.
There were about a hundred and fifty men demonstrating in front of the café. Most of them were young and noticeably fairer than the average citizen of Bucharest. Sons of peasant farmers, they had less gipsy and Syrian blood. Their leader, easily recognisable by the fact that when he shouted the rest were silent, had the dark and puffy face of a Levantine. They baited their opponents with deliberate cruelty. It was obvious that they meant to wreck the café, but, that accomplished, there would be nothing to do but go home to lunch. They did not hurry.
A thin unhappy-looking devil who had been frantically biting his nails at the next table to Toby and Vassilieff suddenly sprang up and ran for the back door knocking over everything in his path. It was startling. One could almost hear the man’s nerves give way. A score of patrons followed his example and jammed sobbing like women in the narrow exit between the lavatory and the telephone. A bag that had been resting at the thin man’s feet was kicked hard and straight against Toby’s chair. It burst open, showering upon the sawdust-covered floor a stethoscope, rubber gloves, a hypodermic syringe and some obstetrical forceps, tortuous shapes of shining steel that suggested unmentionable fantasies of agony.
Vassilieff glowered at the scattered instruments; then gave a start and pushed Toby down towards them.
“Quick! Pick ’em up!” he snapped.
Toby swept the doctor’s possessions back into his bag, and shot a glance at his companion. Vassilieff had peeled off his coat and was rolling up his sleeves. His eyes were cold and his mouth had set into a dangerous little smile that neither flickered nor changed. It was simply there.
“Hold that!”—he passed the coat to Toby—“Back me! For God’s sake, don’t hit anyone!”
“But what are you doing?”
“Look as if you knew! A cold Englishman! That’s right!”
Vassilieff bent down and filled the syringe from a pool of beer on the floor, He spilt some iodine on his bare arms, drew on the rubber gloves and stuck a couple of instruments in his belt.
“Speak German!” he ordered. “They believe anything of a German. Most of them understand it. Language of science! Terrifying!”
He strode through the avenue of tables to the door, followed by Toby carrying his coat and the doctor’s black bag, and held up his hand for silence. He got it.
“Guten Tag, meine Herren! ” he began with icy and ferocious courtesy. “I regret that I must disturb you. But I and my friends wish to drink in peace. You see this?”—he held up the hypodermic syringe, and the eyes of the crowd followed the movement of his stained arm—“This is alive. It is the spit of a little dog that I killed yesterday. I killed him with rabies. Rabies!” he repeated the word in Rumanian.
“A swab, please, Herr Doktor,” he said to Toby, his eyes never leaving the upturned faces in the square.
Toby opened the bag and handed him a swab of cotton wool, with which he coolly wiped the point of the syringe. The late autumn sunlight struck on the slender thread of steel and showed the pale yellow liquid in the glass. The odour of iodine drifted over the square.
“And now, gentlemen, permit me to tell you that I hate you! You are a nuisance!”
It was a harsh cry of hatred, genuinely unbalanced, for Gregory Vassilieff had been longing for months to tell them what he thought of them.
“And anyone I can reach will receive the injection. Like this he died!”
Vassilieff let off a blood-curdling imitation of a dog’s howl.
He took three steps out of the café doorway, slightly crouching, the syringe held with both hands a foot away from his stomach. Toby followed, keeping level eyes on the eyes in front of him. He could hear the beating of his own heart, and knew that he was either extremely pale or extremely red. But at least his features were immobile. A cold Englishman—well, thank God, one could play that part naturally!
The loose front ranks backed and formed a semicircle as Vassilieff advanced. Up to the present they had been as much hypnotised by the man as the syringe. His ruthless anger was obvious to any living thing with eyes; his height and bearing made it quite certain that he could carry any promise into action.
The leader stepped forward to meet him, paunch and powdered jowl thrust confidently out of the crowd. He had the swagger of a politician; sure of his oratory, his bribes to the police to keep away, and the revolver in somebody else’s pocket. He was smiling incredulously.
Vassilieff launched himself from the doorway like a grey wolf, forceps jangling, syringe stabbing the air, the smell of iodine surrounding him with horrid associations. The fat lieutenant of the Iron Guard hesitated for a fraction of a second, jumped back, tripped over himself and fell heavily against the nearest of his followers, hands outstretched to ward off the attack. It was the signal for panic. The crowd raced for the alleys, shrieking, crawling, falling over each other, while Vassilieff darted from side to side of the square rounding up his victims, capering like a witch doctor among African natives and arousing the same emotions.
He caught the leader tearing madly at the backs of his guard in an effort to get through them, and gave him a good cubic centimetre of beer in the fleshy part of the thigh. The man screamed horribly:
“He has pricked me! The lunatic! The devil! He has pricked me!”
His ghastly terror exploded like a bomb down the alleys, clearing them of crushed humanity. Vassilieff and Toby found themselves in an empty square.
Gregory grinned at his companion and jerked the syringe towards his ribs as a man might jerk a humorous thumb. Toby involuntarily jumped a yard.
“I wish you’d put that thing away!” he said nervously.
Vassilieff stared at him.
“There’s nothing in it,” he answered.
“I know. I know. But I want my lunch.”
The Russian strode back into the café, the onlookers parting hastily to let him through. He put all his medical paraphernalia back into the bag and handed it over to the proprietor, who held it gingerly at arm’s length and deposited it under the bar. They vanished out of the back door and took a taxi to Vassilieff’s house.
Toby’s first impression of Tina Vassilieff was a very white woman with very golden hair, placidly exposing the deep V between her heavy breasts as she told her own fortune on the divan.
She looked into Toby’s eyes with contented recognition as if he had been a childhood friend lost to sight for twenty years.
“It is you!” she exclaimed.
“I could never forget you,” answered Toby politely. “It was in Vienna, wasn’t it?”
“No, no! We have never met! It is you that the cards foretold. A tall, dark man who will bring good luck—to-day!”
“I hope so,” Toby laughed.
“He is rich, Gregory?”
“I don’t think so, dear.”
“Very well! It will pass. He is lucky?”
“Very!”
“Then it is he!” answered Tina triumphantly. “And you have a fair woman in your life,” she announced positively to Toby.
“I have—now,” he replied.
“He is sympathetic, Gregory! Introduce me!”
Gregory Vassilieff solemnly introduced his wife to his friend.
“She tells our fortunes twice a day,” he explained to Toby. “She is always wrong, but it amuses her.”
“How can you say so, Gregory? Don’t you remember when I told you that a woman would make trouble between us? I made him scenes for a month,” she added. “I was very jealous and he swore there was no woman. And at last I saw that it was I who was making the trouble. The cards are never wrong.”
Gregory Vassilieff was continually and tenderly amused at his wife. She told fortunes as another woman might play patience. He loved her and had no complaint of the nuptial couch, so long as she refrained from calling up the office when he claimed to be staying there late. She was an admirable cook and an adorable, if unconventional hostess. He was proud of his wife and it delighted him to see Manning falling instantly under her spell. Even Captain Eliot used to come to her with his troubles. Gregory was well aware that Captain Eliot had reached the point of telling himself firmly that it was wrong to make love to his employer’s wife. He wished he would get on with it. Then Tina could tell him that he must be content to be only her soul mate in a great world that would never understand them, and his visits to the house would be less strained.
“You haven’t offered us a drink, Tina,” he said.
She seized both Toby’s hands, and opened her large brown eyes as if to show him her sincerity.
“Forgive me! But you were so interesting. A minute, Gregory!”
She hurried out, moving with the easy swing of a lazy and delicious woman.
“Don’t tell her anything,” said Vassilieff. “She might be worried. I’ll tell her when it’s blown over. How are you feeling?”
“I could do with that drink.”
“So could I! You must think me crazy.”
“No. Only exasperated. And, by God, I don’t blame you!” Toby declared. “A man like you selling toys and tennis balls!”
“That wasn’t what I meant. But you’re right. It all counts. And eventually one boils over.”
“What will happen?”
“Nothing! The chief of police is a friend of mine. And the Rumanians have a sense of humour. It’s a corrupt, shameless country, but it has charm. That’s why I hate the Iron Guard. Fascists have no business here.”
“I suppose the communists are as bad.”
“They’d be just as bad if they got the chance. But they haven’t the chance. Harmless! Talkers! They can’t offer the peasants anything the peasants haven’t got.”
Tina Vassilieff came in with a tray of drinks, followed by two buxom maids in Rumanian peasant costumes carrying silver platters laden with little plates of zakuska, the orange brown of a great smoked eel set off by the red and black of salmon and caviare, the green and yellow of olives and mayonnaise.
“But how quickly you did it!” Toby exclaimed.
“I expected you, you see.”
“I tell you, she always expects the guest,” Gregory laughed.
He closed his hand over his wife’s as she offered him his glass.
“Tina should have lived a hundred years ago. She was born to be the lady of the manor. Extravagant girl!”
“I am not extravagant, Gregory,” she answered with half-assumed indignation. “We eat most of it. And they are so glad of the rest.”
“Who are they?” Toby asked.
“God knows!” Vassilieff answered. “The cook’s brother. Two professional beggars. A newspaper man out of a job. An old whore up the street. I don’t know who else at the moment. They change. Sometimes she invites them and sometimes she sends it to them. She thinks I’m the Duke of Bucharest.”
“You know you love it,” said Tina.
“I don’t dislike it,” Vassilieff admitted. “And it’s your luxury. We have to have some even if we can’t afford them.”
“We can now,” insisted Tina. “Mr Manning is going to make us rich.”
“I’m afraid not,” laughed Toby. “I don’t bring him anything except a very
minor agency for toys. A few pounds a month commission without much extra work.”
“But will he enjoy it?” asked Tina anxiously.
Toby smiled the question at Vassilieff and shrugged his shoulders.
“I think so. It’s honest trade.”
“He is so difficult,” Tina sighed.
“I don’t suffer fools,” said Vassilieff shortly.
“You won’t have to.”
Toby told them something of Albert Whitehead.
“—You’ll only know him as a signature unless business takes you to England, but all the same you’ll like him. You’ll see nobility in him. I don’t mean that he’s a younger son who has taken to business. He’s a plain clerk from the outer suburbs of London. He likes to be unnoticed, and he is. He’d never revolt against the mob. That’s where he differs from you. But put him down in a factory or an office and the fragrance of man would pervade the whole place.”
“Has he a wife?” asked Tina.
“Yes. A farmer’s daughter, I believe. She drives him a bit—but she would use money well if she had it.”
“It’s easy for women to use money well,” said Vassilieff. “They are not distorted by the making of it.”
“That is bitter, my little Gregory,” said Tina gently. “He is tired,” she explained to Toby. “Let us go into lunch.”
She led the way into the dining room, and set herself to draw out the guest so that her husband might rest from whatever strain he had suffered. That he had suffered she knew from his close-cropped hair and eyebrows; they stood out from the skin a little more stiffly than usual—a microscopic sign noticeable only to a wife’s eye.
Toby was in good form, stimulated by vodka and excitement. He told her of the four months he had been on the road, passing along the frontiers of Russia through the Baltic States, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as an itinerant pedlar might skirt the walls of some vast private park. He repeated a few scraps of Russian news, the trifles of information that seemed to him to reveal an aspect of truth.
The Third Hour Page 15
