Fellow Passenger (30 page)

We went on elsewhere to dance. It was ritual, like the preliminary bowing of birds. The question of where I was staying fitted harmoniously into caress and response. She made no comment upon my choice of the Westminster Palace beyond a liquefaction of white lace.

I had just enough sense left to see that it would be wiser, in case of accidents, not to enter the hotel together; so I dropped her outside the door and myself turned up ten minutes later. Her room was two floors above my own. I put on my dressing-gown and negotiated the stairs and passages with caution, having an instinctive feeling that a hotel with so mixed a complement of guests might be ultra-careful of respectability. I was quite right. The shoes which the occupants of her floor had put out for cleaning were all female. I doubt if any of their owners was ever so sure of her own perfection and her sense of timing as to allow herself to be surprised dressed only in a diamond necklace.

All innocently I asked the dark head on my shoulder:

‘When do I see you again?’

Not that it was time to go - only the intermediate moment when it is again possible to remember that a future exists.

‘My darling, be sensible!’ she answered. ‘It’s you we have to think of - how you are to escape and where you will be.’

I told her that I thanked God for my father, my arrest and my danger because all of them had led me to her. On such occasions it is hard for any man to know how far he is sincere or not. Her response was touching. She was a woman who was overwhelmed by the effect of her own beauty on a lover; it fascinated her as much as surrender itself.

‘Do you really love me, Claudio?’

I answered her incoherently. My beard, which had clumsily learned its part upon the haystack, could now communicate to me her delight like the whiskers of a cat. Again my departure was postponed.

‘Claudio, tell me the truth!’ she asked with a delicious ripple of laughter. ‘Shouldn’t we be fools to marry even if we could?’

The way she put it was perfection. Her voice formed an alliance between us two against a prosaic world which could never know such abandon. I suspect that she was near to a feminine counterpart of myself. It does not disturb me. I like to think that her tempestuous emotions were just as sincere as her self-interest, though she was much more able to disentangle them than I am.

‘Possibly,’ I answered.

‘And would you be miserable if I married Horace?’

Horace! I had never given him a thought. All I knew of him was that he was tactless, stolid and that her door in Moreton Manor had been left open for him to continue some talk or other.

‘You can’t!’ I protested.

‘He’ll make a very good husband for me.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘That’s very ungallant, Claudio,’ she murmured and melted herself against me. ‘No, I am not sure.’

‘Then why marry him?’

‘Because he is a brilliant scientist and very lonely and he needs me.’

‘I shall go mad with jealousy,’ I cried, for some dramatic gesture was essential.

‘Darling,’ she answered, lifting the diamonds to my lips as if she wished me to leave a permanent kiss upon them, ‘I shall be with you every time I touch your present to me.’

It was impossible to tell her what I thought of her. And did I in fact think anything of the sort? Was it conceivable that she had not known I was offering a mere civility when I told her to wear the diamonds always? I am sure of nothing except that her intelligence was as exceptional as her beauty and that my whole character was transparent to her. Indeed I cannot avoid a feeling that I myself had created a pattern which compelled her to hand out poetic justice. Yet I do not think I can accuse myself of ever having exploited the opposite sex - with the possible exception of Pearl and Topaz.

I will not pretend I felt all this at the time. I was shocked and shattered, for after all I had built a whole imaginative future on those diamonds. But Cornelia had created for me a world which had paid me six hundred pounds, which could no longer go so far as hanging me if I were caught, which had granted to me, a helpless fugitive at the onset of winter, herself.

That, however, was of no importance one way or the other. For a descendant of Jim Tutty and of Spain there could be but one answer:

‘That’s all I ask of it,’ I said.

I suppose the tone of my reply was more or less what she wanted, and yet she vanished under her hair and showed unaccountable emotion. I held her close. I could not tell what was going on in myself, let alone in her. I asked her, without much hope of any reply, why she was crying.

‘Because I wish that you did love me,’ she said.

I think that was the most profoundly feminine remark that I have ever heard.

When at last I left her, it was just after six o’clock. A stupid hour. It was too late to slip unseen back to my room, and too early to mingle confidently in the comings and goings of a fully awake hotel. However, I managed to get clear of her floor without being spotted. That was essential. In the stuffy, threatening corridors of the hotel I realized more fully the risk she had taken for the sake of - well, whatever it was for the sake of. A dowry for Horace? Our helpless mutual attraction? But it is unprofitable now to speculate.

On the floor below there was more activity. A number of guests must have been catching an early train. Clean shoes were being replaced outside doors. Tea-trays were being delivered. My dislike of early morning tea was reinforced. I have never been able to understand why the English insist that a teapot, depressing symbol of the dullness of the day ahead, should be the first object to meet their waking eyes.

I passed the open door of a pantry and wished the two waiters, who had observed me, a cheerful and unconcerned good morning. Another man in the pantry, not himself a waiter and swilling the tea made for his betters, looked at me sharply and came out.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘Are you looking for your room?’

I answered that it was No. 117, and showed him the key. He accompanied me, making remarks about the weather. Evidently he was a sort of house detective. I explained that I had gone up a floor because I could not find the lavatory on my own. Weak, of course - but the excuse would have been accepted in a hotel less accustomed to questionable guests.

Outside my door, he asked:

‘You are Mr—?’

‘Winthrop.’

He drew a list from his pocket and checked the name.

‘If I might see your business card?’ he suggested.

‘I don’t think I have one with me.’

‘A letter will do. Anything just to establish that you are Mr Winthrop, sir,’he said, following me into my room.

The sleek, smooth little Westminster Palace floor-walker! Damn him, I had not a chance of getting away with any bluff at all. If I had polished their hygienic flooring with his detestable nose, he would still have been polite and persistent.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘This was a most unexpected visit, and I don’t believe I have anything whatever.’

‘Any name on your suitcase?’ he asked. ’Clothes? Pyjamas?’

‘I am afraid I am not accustomed to have them marked.’

He could not resist his triumph. He had some reason. Where all the police of Great Britain had failed, he, the slimy little crook who had probably been eased out of Scotland Yard as unreliable, had succeeded.

‘Make a habit of dressing-gown and pyjamas, don’t you?’ he said.

He stepped smartly outside my room and locked it.

The game was up. He was so sure of my identity that he was ready to risk being sacked by the hotel. I had known all along that as soon as anyone admitted to himself the possibility that I might be Howard-Wolferstan, I was finished; but up to the present the world had been hypnotized by my stage properties. Here in the hotel I hadn’t any. Worse still, ever since the newspaper reports of my arrest in Moreton Manor, Howard-Wolferstan had been associated with dress-ing-gown and pyjamas. And to any Englishman who, with superior and uplifted eyebrow, coarsely ascribes my downfall to running after women I suggest that a man who cannot worship beauty at the expense of his own liberty is unworthy to enjoy either.

I looked out of the window. There was a sheer drop to the street. With no escape possible I had only one way to save something from the wreck; and that was to shave off my beard at once before a photograph of me could be taken. You can describe a man with a beard as long as you like, but provided you use only words no one can be quite certain how he really appeared. I had to prevent all the waiters and public who had seen me with Cornelia from rushing down to police stations with yarns that Howard-Wolferstan had been entertaining a beautiful spy. Nor did I want that excellent jeweller from whom I had obtained six hundred pounds to be compelled to suspect who Peter Bowshot St John Godolphin really was; he would certainly be proof against the temptation to report to the police if he could convince himself that there was a reasonable doubt. Which was my true motive - love of Cornelia or six hundred pounds? I do not know. Two floors above she may - unless I am completely misjudging her - have been exercised by a somewhat similar problem.

I jammed the bed against the door; and the dressing-table, lengthwise, between bed and far wall. Satisfied that the police who called for me would not be able to open the door more than a couple of inches, I set about the removal of my beard. It was a longish job, for I had only nail scissors. When most of the beard - dying in the full flower of its experience - was in the basin and I had begun to lather my face, the police were at the door and quietly requesting Mr Winthrop to open it.

They had no wish to make a noise in a respectable hotel - especially as they must already have investigated so many innocent Latins in dressing-gowns and pyjamas which they were reluctant to explain - and they talked to me reassuringly while I packed and dressed. My evening clothes, which might lead enquiries to Cornelia, and my new suit I rolled up in a tight ball and tied with string. I tried to land the bundle in the back of a passing truck and missed. Then a bus ran over it and a passing taxi-driver picked it up. I never heard any more of it.

The police outside my door carried on with soothing conversation addressed to Mr Winthrop, in which I began to detect a note of impatience. If their disgusting little colleague were right in his identification, the notorious spy might be destroying his papers or committing suicide; and there was nothing they could do about either.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said at last, ‘if you will now stop pushing for a moment, I will remove the furniture.’

They came tumbling into the room, hotel manager, house detective, plain-clothes detective and two decent London constables trying to look stern. They found me in the old tweed coat and shabby trousers which had served Faiz Ullah so well.

‘Claudio Howard-Wolferstan,’ I said, ’and at your service.’

~ * ~

Epilogue

by Sir Alexander Romilly,

C.H., D.SC., D.LITT., F.R.S.

WHEN FIRST I WAS shown Mr Howard-Wolferstan’s manuscript and approached with the suggestion that I should write an introduction to it, I rejected the proposal as one which illuminated the enterprise of a youthful publisher rather than his sense of propriety. But, where a preface might suggest to interested parties that I approve a work of which the execrable taste, enlivened though it be by ribaldry, can arouse and indeed deserves nothing but disgust, an epilogue which confines itself to the mere confirmation of the truth of Mr Howard-Wolferstan’s narrative may reasonably be considered a duty to the Establishment over which I and my colleagues have the honour to preside.

The interests of a certain former member of my staff appear to have been somewhat wider than I had any reason to suspect, and I will refrain from comment upon her reasons for resignation and her present choice of the Pacific coast of South America as a domicile. Since, however, the integrity and competence of my Establishment have been impugned by the fantastic allegations of the more irresponsible sections of the Press to the effect that Mr Howard-Wolferstan and this former member of my staff are secretly engaged on the construction of a Primary Reactor for the Andean Republics, I think it only proper to point out:

The unexpected release of Mr Howard-Wolferstan, after he had been held for three months in the Tower of London upon a charge of High Treason, gave rise to comment in which the readiness of a healthy democracy to argue from unjustifiable hypotheses was only equalled by the vehemence, no doubt legitimate, with which they were expressed.

Had this document at that time seen the light, a clearer but not necessarily more favourable view of Mr Howard-Wolferstan’s motives and morals would have been available to such leaders of public opinion as are able to read with ease and accuracy. As it was, Mr Howard-Wolferstan being a prisoner on remand, the document was privileged. It could be, and in fact was, handed by him to his solicitor, but might not be divulged to the prosecution and still less to the public. The essential facts, however, were freely admitted in the prisoner’s statements to the police and in his markedly cordial replies to War Office interrogators. Both authorities could only advise the Crown that on a charge of High Treason no jury would convict.