Dr Czinner came in and shut the door. He sat down opposite her without a sign of hostility. He knows I’ve got him fixed, she thought; he’s going to be reasonable! He asked her suddenly, ‘Would your paper approve?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I’d be sacked tomorrow. But when they get my story, that’ll be a different matter.’ She added with calculated insolence, ‘I reckon that you are worth four pounds a week to me.’
Dr Czinner said thoughtfully, without anger, ‘I don’t intend to tell you anything.’ She waved her hand at him. ‘You’ve told me a lot already. There’s this.’ She tapped the Baedeker. ‘You were a foreign master at Great Birchington-on-Sea. We’ll get the story from your headmaster.’ His head drooped. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘there’s this map. And these scrawls. I’ve put two and two together.’ She had expected some protests of fear or indignation, but he was still brooding over her first guess. His attitude puzzled her and for an anguished moment she wondered, Am I missing the best story? Is the best story not here at all, but at a south-coast school among the red-brick buildings and the pitch-pine desks and ink-stands and cracked bells and the smell of boys’ clothes? The doubt made her less certain of herself and she spoke gently, more gently than she had intended, for it was difficult to modulate her husky voice. ‘We’ll get together,’ she growled in a winning way. ‘I’m not here to let you down. I don’t want to interfere with you. Why, if you succeed, my story’s all the more valuable. I’ll promise not to release anything at all until you give the word.’ She said plaintively, as if she were an artist accused of deprecating paint, ‘I wouldn’t spoil your revolution. Why, it’ll be a grand story.’
Age was advancing rapidly on Dr Czinner. It was as if he had warded off with temporary success five years of pitch-pine smells and the whine of chalk on blackboards, only to sit now in a railway carriage and allow the baulked years to come upon him, together and not one by one. For the moment he was an old man nodding into sleep, his face as grey as the snow sky over Nuremberg. ‘Now first,’ said Miss Warren, ‘what are your plans? I can see you depend a good deal on the slums.’
He shook his head. ‘I depend on no one.’
‘You are keeping absolute control?’
‘Least of all myself.’
Miss Warren struck her knee sharply. ‘I want plain answers,’ but she got the same reply, ‘I shall tell you nothing.’ He looks more like seventy than fifty-six, she thought; he’s getting deaf, he doesn’t understand what I’ve been saying. She was very forbearing; she felt certain that this was not success she faced, it resembled failure too closely, and failure she could love; she could be tender and soft-syllabled towards failure, wooing it with little whinnying words, as long as in the end it spoke. A weak man had sometimes gone away with the impression that Miss Warren was his best friend. She knelt forward and tapped on Dr Czinner’s knee, putting all the amiability of which she was capable into her grin. ‘We are in this together, doctor. Don’t you understand that? Why, we can even help you. Public opinion’s just another name for the Clarion. I know you are afraid we’ll be indiscreet, that we’ll publish your story tomorrow and the government will be warned. But I tell you we won’t breathe so much as a paragraph on the book page until you begin your show. Then I want to be able to put right across the middle page, “Dr Czinner’s Own Story. Exclusive to the Clarion.” Now, that’s not unreasonable.’
‘There’s nothing I wish to say.’
Miss Warren withdrew her hand. Did the poor fool, she wondered, think that he would stand between her and another four pounds a week, between her and Janet Pardoe? He became, old and stupid and stubborn on the opposite seat, the image of all the men who threatened her happiness, who were closing round Janet with money and little toys and laughter at a woman’s devotion to a woman. But the image was in her power; she could break the image. It was not a useless act of mischief on Cromwell’s part to shatter statues. Some of the power of the Virgin lay in the Virgin’s statue, and when the head was off and a limb gone and the seven swords broken, fewer candles were lit and the prayers said at her altar were not so many. One man like Dr Czinner ruined by a woman, and fewer stupid girls like Coral Musker would believe all strength and cunning to reside in a man. But she gave him, because of his age and because he reeked to her nose of failure, one more chance. ‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
She laughed at him angrily. ‘You’ve said a mouthful already.’ He was unimpressed and she explained slowly as if to a mental defective, ‘We reach Vienna at eight-forty tonight. By nine I shall be telephoning to the Cologne office. They’ll get my story through to London by ten o’clock. The paper doesn’t go to press for the first London edition till eleven. Even if the message is delayed, it’s possible to alter the bill page for the last edition up to three o’clock in the morning. My story will be read at breakfast tomorrow. Every paper in London will have a reporter round at the Yugoslavian Ministry by nine o’clock in the morning. Before lunch tomorrow the whole story will be known in Belgrade, and the train’s not due there till six in the evening. And there won’t be much left to the imagination either. Think what I shall be able to say. Dr Richard Czinner, the famous Socialist agitator, who disappeared from Belgrade five years ago at the time of the Kamnetz trial, is on his way home. He joined the Orient Express at Ostend on Monday and his train is due at Belgrade this evening. It is believed that his arrival will coincide with a Socialist outbreak based in the slum quarters, where Dr Czinner’s name has never been forgotten, and an attempt will probably be made to seize the station, the post office and the prison.’ Miss Warren paused. ‘That’s the story I shall telegraph. But if you’ll say more I’ll tell them to hold it until you give the word. I’m offering you a straightforward bargain.’
‘I tell you that I am leaving the train at Vienna.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Dr Czinner sucked in his breath, staring through the window at the grey luminous sky, a group of factory chimneys, and a great black metal drum. The compartment filled with the smell of gas. Cabbages were growing in the allotments through the bad air, gross bouquets sprinkled with frost. He said so softly that she had to lean forward to catch the words, ‘I have no reason to fear you.’ He was subdued, he was certain, and his calmness touched her nerves. She protested uneasily and with anger, as if the criminal in the dock, the weeping man beside the potted fern, had been endowed suddenly with a mysterious reserve of strength, ‘I can play hell with you.’
Dr Czinner said slowly, ‘There’s going to be snow.’ The train was creeping into Nuremberg, and the great engines that ranged themselves on either side reflected the wet steel aspect of the sky. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do which will harm me.’ She tapped the Baedeker and he remarked with a flash of humour: ‘Keep it as a souvenir of our meeting.’ She was certain then that her fear was justified; he was escaping her, and she stared at him with rage. If I could do him an injury, she thought watching in the mirror behind him success, in the likeness of Janet Pardoe, wandering away, lovely and undeserving and vacant down long streets and through the lounges of expensive hotels, if I could do him an injury.
It angered her the more to find herself speechless and Dr Czinner in control. He handed her the paper and asked her, ‘Do you read German? Then read this.’ All the while that the train stood in Nuremberg station, a long twenty minutes, she stared at it. The message it contained infuriated her. She had been prepared for news of some extraordinary success, of a king’s abdication, a government’s overthrow, a popular demand for Dr Czinner’s return, which would have raised him into the position of the condescending interviewed. What she read was more extraordinary, a failure which put him completely out of her power. She had been many times bullied by the successful, never before by one who had failed.
‘Communist outbreak in Belgrade,’ she read. ‘An attempt was made late last night by a band of armed Communist agitators to seize the station and the prison at Belgrade. The po
lice were taken by surprise and for nearly three hours the revolutionaries were in undisturbed possession of the general post office and the goods-yard. All telegraphic communication with Belgrade was interrupted until early this morning. At two o’clock, however, our representative at Vienna spoke to Colonel Hartep, the Chief of Police, by telephone and learned that order had been restored. The revolutionaries were few in number and lacked a proper leader; their attack on the prison was repulsed by the warders, and for some hours afterwards they stayed inactive in the post office, apparently in the hope that the inhabitants of the poorer quarters of the capital would come to their help. Meanwhile the government was able to muster police reinforcements, and with the help of a platoon of soldiers and a couple of field-guns, the police recaptured the post office after a siege lasting little more than three-quarters of an hour.’ This summary was printed in large type; underneath in small type was a more detailed account of the outbreak. Miss Warren sat and stared at it; she frowned a little and was conscious of the dryness of her mouth. Her brain felt clear and empty. Dr Czinner explained, ‘They were three days too early.’
Miss Warren snapped at him, ‘What more could you have done?’
‘The people would have followed me.’
‘They’ve forgotten you. Five years is the hell of a time. The young men were children when you ran away.’
Five years, she thought, seeing them fall on her inevitably through future days, like the endless rain of a wet winter, watching in mind Janet Pardoe’s face as it worried over the first wrinkle, the first greyness, or else the smooth tight lifted skin and dark dyed hair every three weeks whitening at the roots.
‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked, and the promptitude and plainness of his answer, ‘I’ve told you. I’m getting out at Vienna,’ filled her with suspicion. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, ‘we’ll be together. We can talk. You’ll have no objection to an interview now. If you are short of money, our Vienna office will advance you some.’ She was aware that he was watching her more closely than ever before. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘perhaps we can talk,’ and she was certain this time that he was lying. He’s going to double, she thought, but it was difficult to see his motive. He had no choice but to get out at Vienna or at Budapest; it would be unsafe to travel farther. Then she remembered him at the Kamnetz trial, fully aware that no jury would convict and yet giving his dangerous useless evidence while Hartep waited with the warrant. He’s fool enough to do anything, she thought, and wondered for a moment whether, behind the quietness, he was already standing in the dock with his companions, uttering his defence with an eye to the packed gallery. If he goes on, she thought, I’ll go, I’ll stick to him, I’ll have his story, but she felt curiously weak and undecided, for she had no threat left. He was beaten, leaning back in his corner old and hopeless, with the newspaper gathering dust on the floor between them, and he was triumphant, watching her leave the carriage, the Baedeker forgotten on the seat, with nothing but silence for her exclamation: ‘I’ll see you again at Vienna.’
When Miss Warren had gone, Dr Czinner stooped for the paper. His sleeve caught an empty glass and it fell and shattered on the floor. His hand rested on the paper and he stared at the glass, unable to concentrate his thought, unable to decide what it was he had to do, pick up the paper or gather the dangerous sharp scraps. Presently he laid the paper carefully folded across his knees and closed his eyes. He was haunted in his personal darkness by the details of the story that Miss Warren had read; he knew every turn in the stairs in the post office, he could see the exact spot where the barricade had been built. The muddling fools, he thought, and tried to feel hate for the men who had destroyed his hopes. They had ruined him with them. They had left him in an empty house which could not find a tenant because old ghosts were sometimes vocal in the rooms, and Dr Czinner himself now was not even the latest ghost.
If a face peered from a window or a voice was heard upstairs or a carpet whispered, it might have been Dr Czinner seeking to return to a sentient life after five years of burial, working his way round the corners of desks, exposing his transparency before the blackboard and the insubordinate children, crouched in chapel at a service in which the living man had never believed, asking God with the breathing discordant multitude to dismiss him with His blessing.
And sometimes it seemed as if a ghost might return to life, for he had learned that as a ghost he could suffer pain. The ghost had memories; it could remember the Dr Czinner who had been so loved that it was worth while for a hired murderer to fire a revolver at his head. That was the proudest memory of all, of how Dr Czinner sat in the beer-house at the poor corner of the park and heard the shot shatter the mirror behind him and knew it for the final proof of how dearly the poor loved him. But the ghost of Czinner, huddled in a shelter while the east wind swept the front and the grey sea tossed the pebbles, had learned to weep at the memory before returning to the red-brick building and tea and to the children who fashioned subtle barbs of pain. But after the final service and the customary hymns and handshakes the ghost of Czinner found itself again touching the body of Czinner; a touch was all the satisfaction it could get. Now there was nothing left but to leave the train at Vienna and return. In ten days the voices would be singing: ‘Lord receive us with Thy blessing, Once again assembled here.’
Dr Czinner turned a page of the paper and read a little. The nearest he could attain to hate of these muddled men was envy; he could not hate when he remembered details no newspaper correspondent thought it worth while to give, that the man who, after firing his last shot, was bayoneted outside the sorting-room had been left-handed and a lover of Delius’s music, the melancholy idealistic music of a man without a faith in anything but death. And that another, who leapt from the third-floor window of the telephone exchange, had a wife scarred and blinded in a factory accident, whom he loved and to whom he was sadly and unwillingly faithless.
But what is left for me to do? Dr Czinner put down the paper and began to walk the compartment, three steps one way to the door, three steps the other way to the window, up and down. A few flakes of snow were falling, but the wind blew the smoke of the engine back across the window, and if the flakes touched the glass at all, they were already grey like scraps of paper. But six hundred feet up, on the hills which came down to the line at Neumarkt, the snow began to lie like beds of white flowers. If they had waited, if they had waited, thought Dr Czinner, and as his mind turned from the dead to the men who lived to be tried, the impossibility of his own easy escape presented itself with such force that he exclaimed in a whisper, ‘I must go to them.’ But what was the use? He sat down again and began to argue with himself that the gesture would have practical value. If I give myself up and stand my trial with them, the world will listen to my defence as it would never listen to me, safe in England. The strengthening of his resolution encouraged him; he grew more hopeful; the people, he thought, will rise to save me, though they did not rise for the others. Again the ghost of Czinner felt close to life, and warmth touched its frozen transparency.
But there were many things to be considered. First he had to avoid the reporter. He must give her the slip at Vienna; it ought not to be difficult, for the train did not arrive till nearly nine, and by that hour of the evening, surely, he thought, she will be drunk. He shivered a little with the cold and the idea of any further contact with that hoarse dangerous woman. Well, he thought, picking up the Baedeker and letting the newspaper drop to the floor, her sting is drawn. She seemed to hate me; I wonder why; some strange pride of profession, I suppose. I may as well go back to my compartment. But when he reached it, he walked on, hands behind back and Baedeker under arm, absorbed by the idea that the ghostly years were over. I am alive again, he thought, because I am conscious of death as a future possibility, almost a certainty, for they will hardly let me escape again, even if I defend myself and others with the tongue of an angel. Faces which were familiar to him looked up as he passed, but they failed to break his
absorption. I am afraid, he told himself with triumph, I am afraid.
II
‘Not the Quin Savory?’ asked Janet Pardoe.
‘Well,’ said Mr Savory, ‘I don’t know of another.’
‘The Great Gay Whirl?’
‘Round,’ Mr Savory corrected her sharply. ‘Great Gay Round.’ He put his hand on her elbow and began to propel her down the corridor. ‘Time for a sherry. Fancy your being related to the woman who’s been interviewing me. Daughter? Niece?’
‘Well, not exactly related,’ said Janet Pardoe. ‘I’m her companion.’
‘Better not.’ Mr Savory’s fingers closed more firmly on her arm. ‘Get another job. You are too young. It’s not ’ealthy.’
‘How right you are,’ said Janet Pardoe, stopping for a moment in the corridor and turning to him eyes luminous with admiration.
Miss Warren was writing a letter, but she saw them go by. She had laid her writing-pad upon her knee, and her fountain-pen spluttered across the paper, splashing ink and biting deep holes.
Dear Cousin Con [she wrote] I’m writing to you because I’ve nothing better to do. This is the Orient Express, but I’m not going on to Constantinople. I’m getting out at Vienna. But that’s another story. Could you get me five yards of ring velvet? Pink. I’m having my flat done up again, while Janet’s away. She’s on the same train, but I’m leaving her at Vienna. A job of work really, chasing a hateful old man half across Europe. ‘The Great Gay Round’ is on board, but of course you don’t read books. And a rather charming little dancer called Coral, whom I think I shall take as my companion. I can’t make up my mind whether to have my flat re-decorated. Janet says she’ll only be away a week. You mustn’t on any account pay more than eight-and-eleven a yard. Blue, I think, would suit me, but of course not navy. This man I was telling you about [wrote Miss Warren, following Janet Pardoe with her eyes, digging the pen into the paper] thinks himself too clever for me, but you know as well as I do, don’t you, Con, that I can play hell with anyone who thinks that. Janet is a bitch. I’m thinking of getting a new companion. There’s a little actress on this train who would suit me. You should see her, the loveliest figure, Con. You’d admire her as much as I do. Not very pretty, but with lovely legs. I really think I must get my flat done up. Which reminds me. You can go up to ten-and-eleven with that ring velvet. I may be going on to Belgrade, so wait till you hear from me again. Janet seems to be getting a pash for this Savory man. But I can play hell with him too if I want to. Good-bye. Look after yourself. Give my love to Elsie. I hope she looks after you better than Janet does me. You’ve always been luckier, but wait till you see Coral. For God’s sake don’t forget that ring velvet. Much love. Mabel.
Stamboul Train Page 8
