Stamboul Train (16 page)

‘Young lady, indeed. She's a tart.'

Coral had pulled her bag from beneath the seat, but now she set it down again firmly on Mr Peters' toes. She put her hands on her hips and faced the woman, feeling very old and confident and settled, because the nature of the quarrel brought to mind her mother, arms akimbo, exchanging a few words with a neighbour, who had suggested that she was ‘carrying on' with the lodger. For that moment she was her mother; she had sloughed her own experiences as easily as a dress, the feigned gentility of the theatre, the careful speech. ‘Who do you think you are?' She knew the answer: shopkeepers on a spree, going out to Budapest on a Cook's tour, because it was a little farther than Ostend, because they could boast at home of being travellers, and show the bright labels of a cheap hotel on their suitcases. Once she would have been impressed herself, but she had learnt to take things casually, never to admit ignorance, to be knowing. ‘Who do you think you are talking to? I'm not one of your shopgirls. Not that you have any in your back street.'

‘Now, now,' said Mr Peters, touched on the raw by her discovery, ‘there's no call to get angry.'

‘Oh, isn't there. Did you hear what she called me? I suppose she saw you trying to get off with me.'

‘We know he wasn't good enough for you. Easy money's what you want. Don't think we want you in this carriage. I know where you belong.'

‘Take that stuff out of your mouth when you talk to me.'

‘Arbuckle Avenue. Catch 'em straight off the train at Paddington.'

Coral laughed. It was her mother's histrionic laugh to call the neighbours to come and see the fight. Her fingers tingled upon her hips with excitement; she had been good so long, never dropped an aitch, or talked of a boy friend, or said ‘pleased to meet you.' For years she had been hovering indecisively between the classes and belonged nowhere except the theatre, with her native commonness lost and natural refinement impossible. Now with pleasure she reverted to type. ‘I wouldn't be a scarecrow like you, not if you paid me. No wonder you've got a belly-ache with a face like that. No wonder your old man wanted a change.'

‘Now, now, ladies,' said Mr Peters.

‘He wouldn't soil his hands with you. A dirty little Jew, that's all you're good for.'

Coral suddenly began to cry, although her hands still flaunted battle, and she had voice enough to reply, ‘Keep off him,' but Mrs Peters' words remained smudged, like the dissolving smoke of an aerial advertisement, across the fair prospect.

‘Oh, we know he's your boy.'

‘My dear,' said a voice behind her, ‘don't let them worry you.'

‘Here's another of your friends.'

‘So?' Dr Czinner put his hand under Coral's elbow and insinuated her out of the compartment.

‘Jews and foreigners. You ought to be ashamed.'

Dr Czinner picked up the suitcase and laid it in the corridor. When he turned back to Mrs Peters, he showed her not the harassed miserable face of the foreign master, but the recklessness and the sarcasm which the journalists had noted when he took the witness-box against Kamnetz. ‘So?' Mrs Peters took the peppermint out of her mouth; Dr Czinner, thrusting both hands into the pockets of his mackintosh, swayed backwards and forwards upon his toes. He appeared the master of the situation, but he was uncertain how to speak, for his mind was still full of grandiloquent phrases, of socialist rhetoric. He was made harsh by the signs of oppression, but he lacked for the moment words with which to contest it. They existed, he was aware, somewhere in the obscurity of his mind, glowing phrases, sentences as bitter as smoke. ‘So?'

Mrs Peters began to find her courage. ‘What are you barging your head in about? It's a bit too much. First one Nosey Parker, then another. Herbert, you do something.'

Dr Czinner began to speak. In his thick accent the words assumed a certain ponderous force that silenced, though they did not convince, Mrs Peters. ‘I am a doctor.' He told them how useless it was to expect from them the sense of shame. The girl last night had fainted; he had ordered her for her health to have a sleeper. Suspicion only dishonoured the suspicious. Then he joined Coral Musker in the corridor. They were out of sight of the compartment, but Mrs Peters' voice was clearly audible, ‘Yes, but who pays? That's what I'd like to know.' Dr Czinner pressed the back of his head against the glass and whispered with hatred, ‘Bourgeois.'

‘Thank you,' Coral said, and added, when she saw his expression of disappointment, ‘Can I do anything? Are
you
ill?'

‘No, no,' he said. ‘But I was useless. I have not the gift of making speeches.' He leant back against the window and smiled at her. ‘You were better. You talked very well.'

‘Why were they such beasts?' she asked.

‘They are always the same, the bourgeois,' he said. ‘The proletariat have their virtues, and the gentleman is often good, just, and brave. He is paid for something useful, for governing or teaching or healing, or his money is his father's. He does not deserve it perhaps, but he has done no one harm to get it. But the bourgeois—he buys cheap and sells dear. He buys from the worker and sells back to the worker. He is useless.'

Her question had not required an answer. She stared at him, bewildered by the flood of his explanation and the strength of his conviction, without understanding a word he said. ‘I didn't do them any harm.'

‘Ah, but you've done them great harm. So have I. We have come from the same class. But we earn our living honestly, doing no harm but some good. We are an example against them, and they do not like that.'

Out of this explanation she picked the only phrase she understood. ‘Aren't you a gentleman?'

‘No, and I am not a bourgeois.'

She could not understand the faint boastfulness of his reply, for ever since she left her home it had been her ambition to be mistaken for a lady. She had studied to that end with as much care as an ambitious subaltern studies for the staff college: every month her course included a new number of
Woman and Beauty,
every week a
Home Notes;
she examined in their pages the photographs of youngsters and of the daughters of the obscurer peers, learning what accessories were being worn and what were the powders in favour.

He began to advise her gently, ‘If you cannot take a holiday, try to keep as quiet as possible. Do not get angry for no reason—'

‘They called me a tart.' She could see that the word meant nothing to him. It did not for a moment ruffle the surface of his mind. He continued to talk gently about her health, not meeting her eyes. He's thinking of something else, she thought, and stooped impatiently for her bag, intending to leave him. He forestalled her by a spate of directions about sedatives and fruit juices and warm clothes. Obscurely she realized a change in his attitude. Yesterday he had wanted solitude, now he would seize any excuse to keep her company a minute longer. ‘What did you mean,' she asked, ‘when you said “My proper work”?'

‘When did I say that?' he asked sharply.

‘Yesterday when I was faint.'

‘I was dreaming. I have only one work.' He said no more, and after a moment she picked up her bag and went.

Nothing in her experience would have enabled her to realize the extent of the loneliness to which she had abandoned him. ‘I have only one work.' It was a confession which frightened him, for it had not always been true. He had not lived beside and grown accustomed to the idea of a unique employment. His life had once been lit by the multitude of his duties. If he had been born with a spirit like a vast bare room, covered with the signs of a house gone down in the world, scratches and peeling paper and dust, his duties, like the separate illuminations of a great candelabra too massive to pawn, had adequately lit it. There had been his duty to his parents who had gone hungry that he might be educated. He remembered the day when he took his degree, and how they had visited him in his bed-sitting-room and sat quiet in a corner watching him with respect, even with awe, and without love, for they could not love him now that he was an educated man; once he heard his father address him as ‘Sir'. Those candles had blown out early, and he had hardly noticed the loss of two lights among so many, for he had his duty to his patients, his duty to the poor of Belgrade, and the slowly growing idea of his duty to his own class in every country. His parents had starved themselves that he might be a doctor, he himself had gone hungry and endangered his health that he might be a doctor, and it was only when he had practised for several years that he realized the uselessness of his skill. He could do nothing for his own people; he could not recommend rest to the worn-out or prescribe insulin to the diabetic, because they had not the money to pay for either.

He began to walk the corridor, muttering a little to himself. Small flakes of snow were falling; they were blown against the windows like steam.

There had been his duty to God. He corrected himself: to a god. A god who had swayed down crowded aisles under a bright moth-worn canopy, a god the size of a crown-piece enclosed in a gold framework. It was a two-faced god, a deity who comforted the poor in their distress as they raised their eyes to his coming between the pillars, and a deity who had persuaded them, for the sake of a doubtful future, to endure their pain, as they bowed their heads, while the surge of the choristers and the priests and the singing passed by. He had blown that candle out with his own breath, telling himself that God was a fiction invented by the rich to keep the poor content; he had blown it out with a gesture, with a curious old-fashioned sense of daring, and he sometimes felt an unreasoning resentment against those who nowadays were born without religious sense and were able to laugh at the seriousness of the nineteenth-century iconoclast.

And now there was only one dim candle to light the vast room. I am not a son, he thought, nor a doctor, nor a believer, I am a Socialist; the word mouthed by politicians on innumerable platforms, printed in bad type on bad paper in endless newspapers, rang cracked. I have failed even there. He was alone, and his single light was guttering, and he would have welcomed the company of anyone.

When he reached his compartment and found a stranger there he was glad. The man's back was turned, but he spun quickly round on short stout legs. The first thing which Dr Czinner noticed was a silver cross on his watch-chain, the next that his suitcase was not in the same spot where he had left it. He asked sadly, ‘Are you, too, a reporter?'

‘
Ich spreche kein Englisch,
' the man replied. Dr Czinner said in German, while he barred the way into the corridor, ‘A police spy? You are too late.' His eyes were still on the silver cross, which swung backwards and forwards with the man's movement; it might have been lurching to the human stride, and for a moment Dr Czinner flattened himself against the wall of a steep street to let the armoured men, the spears and the horses pass, and the tired tortured man. He had not died to make the poor contented, to bind the chains tighter, his words had been twisted.

‘I am not a police spy.'

Dr Czinner paid the stranger small attention as he faced the possibility that, if the words had been twisted, some of the words might have been true. He argued with himself that the doubt came only from the approach of death, because when the burden of failure was almost too heavy to bear, a man inevitably turned to the most baseless promise. ‘I will give you rest.' Death did not give rest, for rest could not exist without the consciousness of rest.

‘You misunderstand me, Herr—'

‘Czinner.' He relinquished his name to the stranger without hesitation; the time was past for disguises, and in the new veracious air he had to doff not only the masks of identity. There were words which he had not inquired into closely, common slogans which he had accepted because they helped his cause: ‘Religion is the rich man's friend.' He said to the stranger: ‘If you are not a police spy, who are you? What have you been doing here?'

‘My name,' and the fat man bobbed a little from the waist, while a finger twisted the bottom button of his waistcoat ‘is—' The name was tossed into the bright snow-lit darkness, drowned by the roar of the train, the clatter of steel pipes, an echoing bridge; the Danube, like a silver eel, slipped from one side to the other of the line. The man had to repeat his name, ‘Josef Grünlich.' He hesitated and then continued, ‘I was looking for money, Herr Czinner.'

‘You've stolen—'

‘You came back too soon.' He began slowly to explain. ‘I have escaped from the police. Nothing disgraceful, Herr Czinner, I can assure you.' He twisted and twisted his waistcoat button, an unconvincing alien talker in the newly lit air of Dr Czinner's brain, populated only by incontestable truths, by a starving face, a bright rag, a child in pain, a man staggering up the road to Golgotha. ‘It was a political offence, Herr Czinner. An affair of a newspaper. A great injustice has been done me, and so I had to fly. It was for the sake of the cause that I opened your suitcase.' He blew out the word ‘cause' with a warm intense breath, cheapening it into a shibboleth, an easy emotion. ‘You will call the guard?' He fixed his knees, and his finger tightened on the button.

‘What do you mean by your cause?'

‘I am a Socialist.' The realization came sharply to Dr Czinner that a movement could not be judged by its officers; socialism was not condemned by the adherence of Grünlich, but he was anxious, none the less, to forget Grünlich. ‘I will let you have some money.' He took out his pocket-book and handed the man five English pounds. ‘Good night.'

It was easy to dismiss Grünlich and it had cost him little, for money would be of no value to him in Belgrade. He did not need a lawyer to defend him: his defence was his own tongue. But it was less easy to evade the thought which Grünlich had left behind, that a movement was not condemned by dishonesty of its officers. He himself was not without dishonesty, and the truth of his belief was not altered because he was guilty of vanity, of several meannesses; once he had got a girl with child. Even his motives in travelling first class were not unmixed; it was easier to evade the frontier police, but it was also more comfortable, more fitted to his vanity as a leader. He found himself praying: ‘God forgive me.' But he was shut off from any assurance of forgiveness, if there existed any power which forgave.