‘Belgrade?’ ‘Yes.’
It had been pure chance that she had said Belgrade and not Constantinople, but the sound of her own voice brought her light. She called out to Janet Pardoe: ‘Take two seats. I’m coming with you as far as Vienna.’
‘Your ticket?’
‘I’ve got my reporter’s pass.’ It was she who was now impatient. ‘Hurry. Platform five. It’s twenty-eight past. Only five minutes.’ She still kept the porter to her side with a muscular grip. ‘Listen. I want you to take a message for me. Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse 33.’
‘I can’t leave the station,’ he told her.
‘What time do you come off duty?’
‘Six.’
‘That’s no good. You must slip out. You can do that, can’t you? No one will notice.’
‘I’d get the sack.’
‘Risk it,’ said Miss Warren. ‘Twenty marks.’
The man shook his head. ‘The foreman would notice.’
‘I’ll give you another twenty for him.’
The foreman wouldn’t do it, he said; there was too much to lose; the head foreman might find out. Miss Warren opened her bag and began to count her money. Above her head a clock struck the half-hour. The train left in three minutes, but not for a moment did she allow her desperation to show; any emotion would frighten the man. ‘Eighty marks,’ she said, ‘and give the foreman what you like. You’ll only be away ten minutes.’
‘It’s a big risk,’ the porter said, but he allowed her to press the notes into his hand, ‘Listen carefully. Go to Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse 33. You’ll find the offices of the London Clarion. Somebody’s sure to be there. Tell him that Miss Warren has taken the Orient Express for Vienna. She won’t be letting him have the interview tonight: she’ll telephone it from Vienna tomorrow. Tell him she’s on to a bill page lead. Now repeat that.’ While he stumbled slowly through the message she kept an eye on the clock. One-thirty-one. One thirty-one and a half. ‘Right. Off with it. If you don’t get it to them by one-fifty I’ll report you for taking bribes.’ She grinned at him with malicious playfulness, showing great square teeth, and then ran for the stairs. One-thirty-two. She thought that she heard a whistle blown and took the last three steps in one stride. The train was moving, a ticket-collector tried to block her way but she knocked him to one side and roared ‘Pass’ at him over her shoulder. The last third-class coaches were slipping by with increasing speed. My God, she thought, I’ll give up drink. She got her hand on the bar of the last coach, while a porter shouted and ran at her. For a long ten seconds, with pain shooting up her arm, she thought that she would be dragged off the platform against the wheels of the guard’s van. The high step daunted her. I can’t make it. Another moment and her shoulder would give. Better drop on the platform and risk concussion than break both legs. But what a story to lose, she thought with bitterness, and jumped. She landed on her knees on the step just in time as the edge of the platform fell away. The last lamp vanished, the door under the pressure of her body opened inwards, and she fell on her back into the corridor. She propped herself up against the wall with care for her aching shoulder and thought with a wry triumph, Dizzy Mabel comes on board.
Morning light came through the slit in the blind and touched the opposite seat. When Coral Musker woke it was the seat and a leather suitcase that she first saw. She felt listless and apprehensive, thinking of the train which had to be caught at Victoria, the dry egg and the slices of the day before yesterday’s loaf awaiting her downstairs. I wish I’d never taken the job, she thought, preferring now when the moment of departure was upon her the queue on the stairs of Shaftesbury Avenue, the forced cheerfulness of long waits outside the agent’s door. She lifted the blind and was for a moment astonished by a telegraph-pole flashing past, a green river running by, touched with orange by the early sun, and wooded hills. Then she remembered.
It was still early, for the sun was low, only just emerging above the hills. A village on the opposite bank glittered with little lights; a few thin streams of smoke lay in the windless air above the small wooden houses, where early fires were being lit, breakfasts for labourers prepared. The village was so far from the line that it remained still, to be stared at, while the trees and cottages on the near bank, the tethered boats, fled backwards. She raised the other blind and in the corridor saw Myatt sleeping with his back against the wall. Her first instinct was to wake him; her second to let him sleep and lie back herself in the luxury of another’s sacrifice. She felt tender towards him, as though he had given her new hope of a life which was not a continuous struggle for one’s own hand; perhaps the world, she thought, was not so hard. She remembered how the purser had spoken to her kindly and called to her, ‘Remember me’; it seemed not unlikely now, with the young man sleeping outside the door, ready to suffer some hours’ discomfort for a stranger, that the purser might still remember her. She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people’s minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to. She looked out of the window again, but the village was gone, and the particular green hills she had stared at; only the river was the same. She fell asleep.
Miss Warren staggered down the train. She could not bear to hold the rail with her right hand, for her shoulder pained her still, although she had sat for nearly two hours in the third-class corridor. She felt battered, faint and drunk, and with difficulty arranged her thoughts, but her nose held yet the genuine aroma of the hunt. Never before in ten years of reporting, ten years of women’s rights, rapes, and murders, had she come so close to an exclusive bill page story, not a story which only the penny papers would trouble to print, but a story which The Times correspondent himself would give a year of life to know. It was not everyone, she thought with pride, who would have been capable of seizing the moment as she had done when drunk. As she lurched along the line of first-class compartments triumph sat oddly on her brow like a tip-tilted crown.
Luck favoured her. A man came out of a compartment and made his way towards the lavatory and, as she leant back against a window to let him by, she saw the man in the mackintosh dozing in a corner, for the moment alone. He looked up to see Miss Warren swaying a little forward and back in the doorway. ‘Can I come in?’ she asked. ‘I got on the train at Cologne, and I can’t find a seat.’ Her voice was low, almost tender; she might have been urging a loved dog towards a lethal chamber.
‘The seat’s taken.’
‘Only for a moment,’ said Miss Warren. ‘Just to rest my legs. I am so glad that you speak English. I am always so afraid of travelling on a train with nothing but a lot of foreigners. One might want anything almost in the night, mightn’t one?’ She grinned at him playfully. ‘I believe that you are a doctor.’
‘I was once a doctor,’ the man admitted.
‘And you are travelling out to Belgrade?’ He looked at her sharply with a sense of uneasiness, and he caught her unawares, the square tweeded form leaned a little forward, the flash of the signet ring, the flushed hungry face. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no. Not so far.’
‘I am only going to Vienna,’ said Miss Warren.
He said slowly, ‘What made you think—?’ wondering whether he did right to question her, he was unused to danger in the form of an English spinster a little drunk with gin: he could smell her all across the carriage. The risks he had faced before required only the ducked head, the quick finger, the plain lie. Miss Warren also hesitated, and her hesitation was like a breath of flame to an imprisoned man. She said, ‘I thought I had seen you in Belgrade.’
‘I have never been there.’
She came roughly into the open, tossing subterfuge aside. ‘I was at Belgrade,’ she said, ‘for my paper at the Kamnetz trial.’ But she had given him all the warning he needed and he faced her with a complete lack of interest.
‘The Kamnetz trial?’
‘When General Kamnetz was charged with rape. Czinner was the chief evidence for the prosecution. But of course the general was acquitted. The jury was pac
ked. The Government would never have allowed a conviction. It was sheer stupidity on Czinner’s part to give evidence.’
‘Stupidity?’ His polite interest angered her. ‘Of course you’ve heard of Czinner. They had tried to shoot him a week before while he sat in a café. He was the head of the Social Democrats. He played into their hands by giving evidence against Kamnetz; they had a warrant out for his arrest for perjury twelve hours before the trial ended. They simply sat and waited for the acquittal.’
‘How long ago was all this?’
‘Five years.’ He watched her narrowly, judging what reply would most irritate her. ‘An old story now then. Is Czinner out of prison?’
‘He got away from them. I’d give a lot to know how. It would make a wonderful story. He simply disappeared. Everyone assumed he’d been murdered.’
‘And hadn’t he?’
‘No,’ said Mabel Warren, ‘he got away.’
‘A clever man.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said furiously. ‘A clever man would never have given evidence. What did Kamnetz or the child matter to him? He was a quixotic fool.’ A cold breath of air blew through the open door and set the doctor shivering. ‘It’s been a bitter night,’ he said. She brushed the remark on one side with a square worn hand. ‘To think,’ she said with awe, ‘that he never died. While the jury were away he walked out of the court before the eyes of the police. They sat there unable to do anything till the jury came back. Why, I swear that I saw the warrant sticking out of Hartep’s breast pocket. He disappeared; he might never have existed; everything went on exactly as before. Even Kamnetz.’
He could not disguise a bitter interest. ‘So? Even Kamnetz?’ She seized her advantage, speaking huskily with unexpected imagination. ‘Yes, if he went back now, he would find everything the same; the clock might have been put back. Hartep taking the same bribes; Kamnetz with his eye for a child; the same slums; the same cafés with the same concerts at six and eleven. Carl’s gone from the Moscowa, that’s all, the new waiter’s a Frenchman. There’s a new cinema, too, near the Park. Oh yes, there’s one change. They’ve built over Kruger’s beer garden. Flats for Civil Servants.’ He remained silent, quite unable to meet this new move of his opponent. So Kruger’s was gone with its fairy lights and brightly-coloured umbrellas and the gipsies playing softly from table to table in the dusk. And Carl had gone too. For a moment he would have bartered with the woman all his safety, and the safety of his friends, to know the news of Carl; had he gathered up his tips and retired to a new flat near the Park, folding up the napkins for his own table, drawing the cork for his own glass? He knew that he ought to interrupt the drunken dangerous woman opposite him, but he could not say a word, while she gave him news of Belgrade, the kind of news which his friends in their weekly coded letters never sent him.
There were other things, too, he would have liked to ask her. She had said the slums were the same, and he could feel under his feet the steep steps down into the narrow gorges; he bent under the bright rags stretched across the way, put his handkerchief across his mouth to shut out the smell of dogs, of children, of bad meat and human ordure. He wanted to know whether Dr Czinner was remembered there. He had known every inhabitant with an intimacy which they would have thought dangerous if they had not so implicitly trusted him, if he had not been by birth one of themselves. As it was, he had been robbed, confided in, welcomed, attacked, and loved. Five years was a long time; he might already be forgotten.
Mabel Warren drew in her breath sharply. ‘To come to facts. I want an exclusive interview for my paper. “How I escaped?” or “Why I am returning home?”’
‘An interview?’ His repetitions annoyed her; she had a splitting headache and felt ‘wicked.’ It was the term she used herself; it meant a hatred of men, of all the shifts and evasions they made necessary, of the way they spoiled beauty and stalked abroad in their own ugliness. They boasted of the women they had enjoyed; even the faded middle-aged face before her had in his time seen beauty naked, the hands which clasped his knee had felt and pried and enjoyed. And at Vienna she was losing Janet Pardoe, who was going alone into a world where men ruled. They would flatter her and give her bright cheap objects, as though she were a native to be cheated with Woolworth mirrors and glass beads. But it was not their enjoyment she most feared, it was Janet’s. Not loving her at all, or only for the hour, the day, the year, they could make her weak with pleasure, cry aloud in her enjoyment. While she, Mabel Warren, who had saved her from a governess’s buried life and fed her and clothed her, who could love her with the same passion until death, without satiety, had no means save her lips to express her love, was faced always by the fact that she gave no enjoyment and gained herself no more than an embittered sense of insufficiency. Now with her head aching, the smell of gin in her nostrils, the knowledge of her flushed ugliness, she hated men with a wicked intensity and their bright spurious graces.
‘You are Dr Czinner.’ She noted with an increase of her anger that he did not trouble to deny his identity, proffering her carelessly the name he travelled under, ‘My name is John.’
‘Dr Czinner,’ she growled at him, closing her great teeth on her lower lip in an effort at self-control.
‘Richard John, a schoolmaster, on holiday.’
‘To Belgrade.’
‘No.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘I am stopping at Vienna.’ She did not believe him, but she won back her amiability with an effort. ‘I’m getting out at Vienna, too. Perhaps you’ll let me show you some of the sights.’ A man stood in the doorway and she rose. ‘I’m so sorry. This is your seat.’ She grinned across the compartment, lurched sideways as the train clattered across a point, and failed to hold a belch which filled the compartment for a few seconds with the smell of gin and shaken notes of cheap powder. ‘I’ll see you again before Vienna,’ she said, and moving down the corridor leant her red face against the cold smutty glass in a spasm of pain at her own drunkenness and squalor. ‘I’ll get him yet,’ she thought, blushing at her belch as though she were a young girl at a dinner-party. ‘I’ll get him somehow. God damn his soul.’
A tender light flooded the compartments. It would have been possible for a moment to believe that the sun was the expression of something that loved and suffered for men. Human beings floated like fish in golden water, free from the urge of gravity, flying without wings, transport, in a glass aquarium. Ugly faces and misshapen bodies were transmuted, if not into beauty, at least into grotesque forms fashioned by a mocking affection. On that golden tide they rose and fell, murmured and dreamed. They were not imprisoned, for they were not during the hour of dawn aware of their imprisonment.
Coral Musker woke for the second time. She stood up at once and went to the door; the man dozed wearily, his eyes jerking open to the rhythm of the train. Her mind was still curiously clear; it was as if the golden light had a quality of penetration, so that she could understand motives which were generally hidden, movements which as a rule had for her no importance or significance. Now as she watched him and he became aware of her, she saw his hands go out in a gesture which stayed half-way; she knew that it was a trick of his race which he was consciously repressing. She said softly, ‘I’m a pig. You’ve been out there all night.’ He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly; he might have been a pawnbroker undervaluing a watch or vase. ‘Why not? I didn’t want you to be disturbed. I had to see the guard. Can I come in?’
‘Of course. It’s your compartment.’
He smiled and was unable to resist a spread of the hands, a slight bow from the hips. ‘Pardon me. It’s yours.’ He took a handkerchief from his sleeve, rolled up his cuffs, made passes in the air. ‘Look. See. A first-class ticket.’ A ticket fell from his handkerchief and rolled on the floor between them.
‘Yours.’
‘No, yours.’ He began to laugh with pleasure at her consternation.
‘What do you mean? I couldn’t take it. Why, it must have cost pounds.’
‘Ten,’ he s
aid boastfully. ‘Ten pounds.’ He straightened his tie and said airily, ‘That’s nothing to me.’
But his confidence, his boastful eyes, alienated her. She said with a deep suspicion, ‘What are you getting at? What do you think I am?’ The ticket lay between them; nothing would induce her to pick it up. She stamped her foot as the gold faded and became no more than a yellow stain upon the glass and cushions. ‘I’m going back to my seat.’
He said defiantly, ‘I don’t think about you. I’ve got other things to think about. If you don’t want the ticket you can throw it away.’ She saw him watching her, his shoulders raised again boastfully, carelessly, and she began to cry quietly to herself, turning to the window and the river and a bridge that fled by and a bare beech pricked with early buds. This is my gratitude for a calm long sleepy night; this is the way I take a present; and she thought with shame and disappointment of early dreams of great courtesans accepting gifts from princes. And I snap at him like a tired waitress.
She heard him move behind her and knew that he was stooping for the ticket; she wanted to turn to him and express her gratitude, say; ‘It would be like heaven to sit on these deep cushions all the journey, sleep in the berth, forget that I’m on my way to a job, think myself rich. No one has ever been so good to me as you are,’ but her earlier words, the vulgarity of her suspicion, lay like a barrier of class between them. ‘Lend me your bag,’ he said. She held it out behind her, and she felt his fingers open the clasp. ‘There,’ he said, ‘I’ve put it inside. You needn’t use it. Just sit here when you want to. And sleep here when you are tired.’ I am tired, she thought. I could sleep here for hours. She said in a voice strained to disguise her tears: ‘But how can I?’
Stamboul Train Page 5
