The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Don’t bother, Uncle John,’ Ion assured him. ‘That’s all arranged.’

  He hoped that it was; but the more he considered the character of his godson, the more sure he was that in the excitement of organizing his influential colleagues there could have been no time for a visit to Traian or the Restaurant Gradina.

  Ten minutes later the subdirector of railways arrived, with no baggage but a bottle and what looked like an official cashbox. He announced that in another hour they would be on their way to Constantsa.

  ‘And my cook?’ Devenor asked again.

  ‘Look here, Uncle John, we’ll write for him,’ said godson Ion.

  Devenor crawled out of the manhole, and from the safety of the outer air addressed the undersecretaries. He told them that he was going to get his cook, that if they wanted to stop him they would have to catch him among the trees in pitch darkness, and that if they left without him he would go straight to the political police.

  ‘They’re still accustomed to foreign exploitation,’ he would explain. ‘There was nothing, really nothing, that they could do with a determined Englishman, in a temper. No doubt they would be equally helpless with a Russian.’

  Ion quickly related the fanatical resolution which had brought his godfather to Bucharest. His two friends were delightfully sympathetic, enthusiastic indeed. This penetration of the Iron Curtain merely to obtain a cook appealed both to Romanian pride and Romanian love of a jest. A plan swiftly emerged from the committee. It was for Ion and his godfather to call on Traian—who was still alive, and whose son might be the very man for Devenor—and then to catch the column in the marshalling yards or anywhere along the line to Constantsa.

  Fortunately, the trust of the three functionaries in one another was not so great that they had entirely burned their boats. Each of them had kept a car and driver waiting on a dirt road, beyond the belt of trees, all ready for swift return to Bucharest in case of accident or treachery. Mines and Railways now dismissed their cars, and returned to the column in high spirits. As soon as the road was clear, Devenor and his godson drove off in the third car.

  Traian had been the headwaiter at the Gradina for twenty years, and had retired shortly before the war. If Devenor had known his address, he would, he said, have gone to see him at once, and left his damned godson to the inevitable end of his career as a commissar. Traian was a man you could trust. In all the years of his highly civilized trade he had never lost his peasant integrity.

  He lived exactly where he ought to live: in the old eastern suburbs of Bucharest, where the streets of white, single-storeyed houses preserved something of the character of an untidy and once prosperous village. At the back of a yard, where the dusty earth just kept alive a tree, a few flowers and a couple of hungry hens, they found Traian sitting under the eaves of his house in the melancholy idleness of the old. He looked ill-fed and disintegrating: otherwise he was the same Traian who had hovered for twenty years at Devenor’s shoulder, whose middle-aged wedding Devenor had attended (and attended for a full riotous fourteen hours), whose retirement had been put beyond the reach of poverty by the subscriptions of Devenor and his friends.

  Traian and Devenor embraced with tears in their eyes. ‘And why not?’ Devenor insisted. ‘Why not? Hadn’t we known each other at our best and proudest? We embraced the splendour of our past manhood.’

  The old man—aged by undeserved and unexpected hardship rather than years—had no fear of godson Ion. To him gilded youth, whether it was communist or whether its cheques were frequently returned to drawer, was gilded youth. He talked freely. His wife was dead. His son, Nicu, trained in the kitchens of the Gradina and destined—for the Gradina thought in generations—to be the next chief cook but one, was working in a sausage factory. Traian himself was destitute. He could no longer be sure that he even owned his modest house.

  ‘The tragedy of communism,’ said Devenor, ‘is that the state won’t help those who can’t help themselves. Even so, Traian wanted me to take his son. Yes, at an hour’s notice. Nicu was asleep inside, before going on the early morning shift. Yes, he begged me to take his son.’

  Devenor, of course, turned the offer down flat. There couldn’t be any question of taking Nicu’s support away from his father. Like a couple of old peasants, they talked the problem out unhurriedly, with many mutual courtesies, while the precious minutes of the night slipped away. Godson Ion fumed with impatience. He told Devenor not to be a sentimental fool. He told Traian not to spoil the boy’s chances. He was remarkably eloquent in pointing out that there was no future at all for Nicu in Romania, or for any man of taste and ability who hadn’t, like himself, had the sense to join the party.

  Meanwhile Traian’s voice was growing firmer, and the ends of his white moustache began to twitch into life. Devenor remembered that Traian was only sixty-eight; he decided to take the responsibility of abducting father as well as son. He felt, he said, damnably ashamed of himself for shifting such fragile cargo, but, after all, that well-fitted steel cylinder was little less comfortable than a Romanian third-class coach. He ordered Traian into the column regretfully and decisively, as if he had been sending back a Chateaubriand for another five minutes on the grill.

  ‘And look at him now,’ Devenor invited, ‘when he brings in the brandy! I have to let him do something, you know. Oh, and he’ll take a glass with us, too—but I can’t make the old fool sit down to it when there are guests.’

  Traian’s son was collected straight from bed, and packed into the car. He had no objection to any change, however immediate and revolutionary, so long as it took him out of the sausage factory and included his father. He was on his way to the marshalling yards before he had really got clear of a nightmare that he was making his palate into sausages; his palate, he said, had appeared to him as a large, white lump of lard.

  The column had left for Constantsa. So insistent were the instructions of Railways, Mines and Marine that the yardmaster had presented it with a powerful, fine locomotive of its own. That fractionating column was going to be on board by dawn, all ready to be returned with ignominy to the corrupt capitalists who had sold it. The yardmaster expected a pat on the back from the ministry. No doubt, when he got it, it was a hard one.

  Ion’s driver did what he was told without question; he knew what happened to undersecretaries’ chauffeurs who talked out of turn. They crossed the plain like a pair of headlights on the wind, but always the column kept a little ahead—for at intervals they had to bump over rutted country roads to the railway, or show Ion’s credentials to saluting police.

  They caught up with their flatcar at last, halted in the sidings before the bridge over the Danube and now with a train at its tail. A more awkward place couldn’t have been found for a return to the safe recesses of the column, but they had no choice. It was their last chance, the absolute last chance. One side of the cylinder was flooded by the arc lights of the yard, as if some monstrous camera were about to take a farewell picture of it; on the other side was much coming and going of officials, and of the sentries who would ride every truck across the Cernavoda bridge.

  Godson Ion told his driver to return to Bucharest if he did not come back in half an hour. He did not seem unduly alarmed.

  ‘Of course he wasn’t! Of course he wasn’t!’ Devenor crowed indignantly. ‘That dam’ pup had a perfect right to go wherever he wanted. As for the rest of us, we were just a problem to be shelved.’

  In ten minutes godson returned for Nicu, who went with him unwillingly. But there was no object in protesting against Ion’s plans; he controlled their fate. Devenor didn’t know what he intended, and couldn’t make head or tail of his explanations; he was only rendered thoroughly suspicious by a lot of high-flown nonsense about the young clearing the way for the old.

  Traian and Devenor occupied a patch of darkness whence they could watch both the car and the column. They saw the two shadows of Ion and Nicu dive under the train. Shortly afterwards they saw the sentries posted. They waite
d for five more anxious minutes. Then the train started, and they watched its red tail-light swaying down the track towards the bridge and the impassable Danube.

  After a journey of two hundred yards the train stopped. Devenor was so angry that he marched Traian straight up the line after it. He intended, he said, to get hold of the sentry and consign the whole heartless bunch of undersecretaries to Siberia, even if he had to endure their company on the way.

  The sentry was on the platform of the flatcar, just outside the manhole. He was hidden from his fellows by the bulk of the column and the tender of the locomotive. Within the column there was the silence of steel; there couldn’t be anything else from the moment the sentry was posted. That excused Nicu’s behaviour. He dared not make sound or protest for fear of getting his deserted father into incalculable trouble with the police.

  It was sheer anger which gave Devenor his inspiration. He informed the sentry that a man was hiding in the fractionating column, and told him to winkle the fellow out with his bayonet while he kept him covered.

  ‘I knew my Romanian soldiery well enough to risk it,’ Devenor said. ‘An air of authority. A little mystery. And they’ll do what you tell ’em. There was the button, too, in my lapel—that seemed to impress him. I can’t tell you what it was. I meant to ask Ion. But thereafter I was rather painfully occupied.’

  As soon as the sentry was inside, Devenor put his head and shoulders after, and gave his orders. They were obeyed on the instant, and with only one quick rumble of sound. That unfortunate sentry—no, no, now living peaceably in America—was buried under desperate politicians leaping from the corners of the bubble trays. Then Devenor told his graceless godson to put on the sentry’s uniform and take his place on the platform.

  ‘Dam’ play actor! He stayed on guard till the cranes hoisted us off the Constantsa water front, without anyone suspecting him of worse than obstinacy, and then managed to slip inside. That was that. They discharged us on to a deserted wharf at Istanbul, and all seven of us just walked out through the gates. Or rather, six of us walked. I was carried by Nicu and the sentry.’ At this point it always pleased Devenor to expand and beam and wait for questions.

  ‘No,’ he would answer, ‘nothing dramatic—no police, no bullets! Just sheer clumsiness. After the sentry had been nobbled, Nicu came out onto the platform of the flatcar, and I got down in order to pass Traian up to him. It was a bit of a strain on us two old gentlemen, and I couldn’t pull my toes clear of the wheel when the train started. Nicu grabbed, and pushed the rest of me inside the column; but all the medical supplies we had were oil and wine, like the good Samaritan. Well, at my age, a foot is far from a prime necessity. But Nicu! Don’t you agree that for me, without him, now, life would be inconceivable?’

  HUNGARY

  TELL THESE MEN

  TO GO AWAY

  Miss Titterton was so ashamed of being put inside—as she believed it was now called—and so uneasily certain that she must have committed an offence that it was very difficult to persuade her she was not a criminal. Even the Family could never quite restore her faith in herself.

  In the nineteenth century the Family—Miss Titterton always pronounced the word with a coronet over the capital F—owned some five hundred square miles of Hungarian soil; by the twentieth this inheritance had been reduced to fifty. Neither chaperones nor husbands could control the females, and no racecourse, marriage, cabaret or casino was safe from the males. The only hope for the future of the Family and its estates was, their lawyers said—and the Emperor graciously supported the recommendation—an English governess who could inculcate a sense of discipline into the infant generation during the formative years.

  The choice fell upon Ellen Titterton. Not for a moment did she feel unworthy, but she could not explain it. She had no connections with Nobility or Higher Clergy, and was far too truthful to claim anything but humble birth and a sound education. Though she was never allowed to suspect it, her appointment was simply due to the fact that she had been the fourth candidate to be interviewed. Her prospective employer, the Countess, had languidly remarked that, whether or not English governesses had the inhuman virtues ascribed to them, they were a dying fashion, and nobody could possibly be expected to endure conversing with more than three of them in quick succession.

  Miss Titterton settled into the nursery wing, and was immediately adored by her charges. She had never, my dears, felt the necessity for any harsh discipline. At any rate she trained the characters of two generations of the Family with such success that they could without effort appear imperturbably British: a quality which in later life impressed their bank managers and allowed a presumption of innocence in such divorces as were sadly unavoidable.

  When Ellen Titterton was sixty-five, the Family, who all loved a generous gesture, pensioned her off and presented to her a gay, distinguished, little doll’s house just off the main street of their market town. She had as well enough savings of her own—she never seemed to spend any money except on felicitous presents to the children—to impress local society with her independence, and she earned a trifle of income by giving delicately efficient English lessons.

  She was slim, straight, respected and as reasonable as ever. She had no special enthusiasms. She did not occupy herself unduly with priests or pets or worthy causes, content to contribute the graces of etiquette to her little circle of maiden aunts and major’s widows. She read and recommended; she played the piano well; she left the proper cards upon her friends on all the correct occasions. The society which Miss Titterton ornamented was exactly that for which Providence and a Victorian girlhood had prepared her. She was also grateful to Providence for a basic training in languages which allowed her to speak Hungarian with a hardly noticeable accent.

  In 1938 the Family saw what was coming and removed themselves to London. They could not persuade the beloved nursery governess to accompany them. At her age, she insisted, she did not chose to be uprooted. As she had always told the children, when one has made one’s bed one must lie on it.

  Her confidence was justified. Nobody thought of interning her when Hungary entered the war on the German side—or, if anybody did, the proposal was rejected as a waste of time and money. She continued to live her miniature social life and comforted herself by the thought that there was no quarrel between her two countries. It was a mere accident of diplomacy that Hungary had become an enemy nation. The Germans are so self-willed, my dear, though very musical of course.

  When German base units were stationed in the little town, the social decencies were eased for her by her friends. Should some veteran German officer be invited to coffee, it was understood that Ellen Titterton must be warned. If, in spite of this, she came face to face with the enemy her dignified bow was a satisfaction to all concerned. It apologized so exquisitely for the fact that international differences prevented any personal relations.

  The Germans found great difficulty, Miss Titterton said, in distinguishing between allied and conquered territory; she would have thought it could have been explained to them. So she was puzzled—but still charitable—when a German army truck, half loaded with furniture, called at her house. Out of it stepped an officer and six SS men.

  The officer saluted and asked if he might be permitted to inspect the house. Miss Titterton realized that the visit was official, not social, and that her distant bow would be out of place. She followed the high, black boots from room to room and back to the front door. There, on her own doorstep, she was bluntly informed that, since the only occupants of the house were herself and her little dainty-aproned servant, she did not need more than two bedrooms. No doubt she would be glad to make a free gift of the furniture of the other to some suffering family in the Ruhr which had been bombed out.

  Miss Titterton did not approve of this method of collection. Giving to the Hungarian troops she understood—and to hospitals, bazaars, all the scores of war charities. Very willingly she played her tiny part, for after all the Hungarians were not in act
ion against British troops. Even if they had been, it would have made no difference to her pity.

  She replied to the demand that she was very sorry, but she could not give up her furniture. That third bedroom, unused and spotless, was specially dear. It was the dream of her retirement that some day one of the Family would come to stay with her.

  The officer showed his army authority—German Army—to remove furniture—Hungarian furniture—and regretted that he had no alternative. He ordered two men up the stairs. They seemed to Miss Titterton rather brutal and large, but she reminded herself that removal men had so much heavy lifting to do. All the same, she was outraged. She took the rational but extraordinary step of telephoning to the town police for protection.

  The Family could never find out what had happened at the other end of the line. The police, who knew all about the Herrenvolk’s requisitioning, could only recommend prompt obedience. Why they took any action at all was beyond conjecture. It may have been that they wondered if the SS was being impersonated by some band of ordinary, less efficient criminals; it may have been that they were just weary of being ignored. Whatever the reason, Sergeant Bacso, sword, pistol, moustache and all, paced round the corner of the main street and halted in front of Miss Titterton’s house.

  The dressing-table had got as far as the front door. It could go no farther, since Ellen Titterton, drawn up to her full height, was standing in the doorway. She neither protested nor fluttered. To get the furniture out she herself would first have had to be removed to the army truck, stiff and dignified as a piece of Victorian teak.

  Sergeant Bacso was also of an older generation. He and Miss Titterton knew of each other’s existence and reputation, but had had no dealings together. For Miss Titterton police were like plumbers—necessary and useful but required only in unpleasant emergencies. For the sergeant she was part of a closed world to which emergencies must not be allowed to happen. That at first was the only common ground.