Stamboul Train (10 page)

Mr Savory jumped. ‘What have you got?' he asked. ‘Toothache?'

‘No, no,' said Miss Warren. She felt grateful to him for the illumination which now flooded her mind with light, leaving no dark corners left in which Dr Czinner might hide from her. ‘Such an excellent interview, I meant. I see the way to present you.'

‘Do I see a proof?'

‘Ah, we are not a weekly paper. Our public can't wait. Hungry, you know, for its lion's steak. No time for proofs. People in London will be reading the interview while they eat their breakfast tomorrow.' She left him with this assurance of the public interest, when she would far rather have sown in his overworked mind, grappling already with the problem of another half million popular words, the suggestion of how people forget, how they buy one day what they laugh at the next. But she could not afford the time; bigger game called, for she believed that she had guessed the secret of the Baedeker. It had been the consideration of her own prophecies which had given her the clue. The map was loose, the paper in a Baedeker she remembered was thin and insufficiently opaque; if one fitted the map against the pen drawings on the earlier page, the lines would show through.

My God, she thought, it's not everyone who would think of that. It deserves a drink. I'll find an empty compartment and call the steward. She did not even want Janet Pardoe to share this triumph; she would rather be alone with a glass of Courvoisier where she could think undisturbed and plan her next move. But when she had found the empty compartment she still acted with circumspection; she did not pull the Baedeker from under her shirt until the steward had fetched her the brandy. And not at once even then. She held the glass to her nostrils, allowing the fumes to reach that point at the back of her nose where brain and nose seemed one. The spirit she had drunk the night before was not all dissipated. It stirred like ground vapour on a wet hot day. Swimmy, she thought, I feel quite swimmy. Through the glass and the brandy she saw the outer world, so flat and regular that it never seemed to alter, neat fields and trees and small farms. Her eyes, short-sighted and flushed already with the mere fume of the brandy, could not catch the changing details, but she noticed the sky, grey and cloudless, and the pale sun. I shouldn't be surprised at snow, she thought, and looked to see whether the heating wheel was fully turned. Then she took the Baedeker from under her shirt. It would not be long before the train reached Nuremberg, and she wanted everything settled before fresh passengers came on board.

She had guessed right, that at least was certain. When she held the map and the marked page to the light the lines ran along the course of streets, the circles enclosed public buildings: the post office, the railway station, the courts of justice, the prison. But what did it all mean? She had assumed that Dr Czinner was returning to make some kind of personal demonstration, perhaps to stand his trial for perjury. The map in that context had no meaning. She examined it again. The streets were not marked haphazardly, there was a pattern, a nest of squares balanced on another square and the balancing square was the slum quarter. The next square was made on one side by the railway station, on another by the post office, on a third by the courts of justice. Inside this the squares became rapidly smaller, until they enclosed only the prison.

A bank mounted steeply on either side of the train and the sunlight was shut off; sparks, red in the overcast sky, struck the windows like hail, and the darkness swept the carriages as the long train roared into a tunnel. Revolution, she thought, it means nothing less, with the map still raised to catch the first light returning.

The roar diminished and light came suddenly back. Dr Czinner was standing in the doorway, a newspaper under his arm. He was wearing his mackintosh again, and she regarded with contempt the glasses, the grey hair and shabby moustache, the small tight tie. She laid down the map and grinned at him. ‘Well?'

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 police 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.