Stamboul Train (17 page)

The guard came and looked at his ticket. ‘Snowing again,' he said. ‘It is worse up the line. It will be lucky if we get through without delay.' He showed an inclination to stay and talk. Three winters ago, he said, they had had a bad time. They had been snowed up for forty-eight hours on one of the worst patches of the line, one of the bare Balkan patches, no food to be got, and the fuel had to be saved.

‘Shall we reach Belgrade to time?'

‘One can't tell. My experience is—snow this side of Buda, twice as much snow before Belgrade. It's a different case before we reach the Danube. It can be snowing in Munich and like summer at Buda. Good night, Herr Doktor. You'll be having patients in this cold.' The guard went down the corridor beating his hands together.

Dr Czinner did not stay long in his compartment; the man who shared it had left the train at Vienna. Soon it would be impossible to see even passing lights through the window; the snow was caked in every crevice and ice was forming on the glass. When a signal box or a station lamp went by its image was cut into wedges by the streaks of opaque ice, so that for a moment the window of the train became a kaleidoscope in which the jumbled pieces of coloured glass were shaken. Dr Czinner wrapped his hands for warmth in the loose folds of his mackintosh and began again to walk the corridor. He passed through the guard's van and came out into the third-class carriages which had been attached to the train at Vienna. Most of the compartments were in darkness except for a dim globe burning in the roof. On the wooden seats the passengers were settling themselves for the night with rolled coats under their heads; some of the compartments were so full that the men and women slept bolt upright in two rows, their faces green and impassive in the faint light. There was a smell of cheap red wine from the empty bottles under the seats, and a few scraps of sour bread lay on the floor. When he came near the lavatory he turned back, the smell was too much for him. Behind him the door blew open and shut with the shaking of the express.

I belong there, he thought with conviction; I should be travelling third class. I do not wish to be like a constitutional Labour member taking his first-class ticket to cast his vote in a packed parliament. But he comforted himself with the thought of how he would have been delayed by frequent changes and how he might have been held up at the frontier. He remained aware nevertheless of the mixture of his motives; they had only begun to worry him since his knowledge of failure; all his vanities, meannesses and small sins would have swept to darkness in the thrill and unselfishness of victory. But he wished, now that all depended on his tongue, that he could make his speech from the dock with a conscience perfectly clear. Small things in his past, which his enemies would never know, might rise in his own mind to clog his tongue. I failed utterly with those two shopkeepers; shall I succeed any better in Belgrade?

Because his future had an almost certain limit, he began to dwell, as he was not accustomed to do, on the past. There had been a time when a clear conscience could be bought at the price of a moment's shame: ‘since my last confession, I have done this or that.' If, he thought with longing and a little bitterness, I could get back my purity of motive so easily, I should be a fool not to take the chance. My regret for what I have done is not less now than then, but I have no conviction of forgiveness; I have no conviction that there is anyone to forgive. He came near to sneering at his last belief: Shall I go and confess my sins to the treasurer of the Social-Democratic party, to the third-class passengers? The priest's face turned away, the raised fingers, the whisper of a dead tongue, seemed to him suddenly as beautiful, as infinitely desirable and as hopelessly lost as youth and first love in the corner of the viaduct wall.

It was then that Dr Czinner caught sight of Mr Opie alone in a second-class compartment, writing in a notebook.

He watched him with a kind of ashamed greed, for he was about to surrender to a belief which it had been his pride to subdue. But if it gives me peace, he protested, and at the still darkling associations of the word pulled the door back and entered the compartment. The long pale face and pale eyes, the impression of inherited culture, embarrassed him; by his request he would admit the priest's superiority; and he was again for a moment the boy with grubby hands blushing in the dark of the confessional at his commonplace sins. He said in his stiff betraying English, ‘Will you excuse me? Perhaps I am disturbing you. You want to sleep?'

‘Not at all. I get out at Buda. I don't suppose I shall sleep,' he laughed deprecatingly, ‘until I am safe ashore.'

‘My name is Czinner.'

‘And mine is Opie.' To Mr Opie his name had conveyed nothing; perhaps it was kept in mind only by journalists. Dr Czinner drew the door to and sat down in the opposite seat. ‘You are a priest?' He tried to add ‘father,' but the word stuck on his tongue; it meant too much, it meant a grey starved face, affection hardening into respect, sacrifice into suspicion of a son grown like an enemy. ‘Not of the Roman persuasion,' said Mr Opie. Dr Czinner was silent for several minutes, uncertain how to word his request. His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room. Mr Opie seemed aware of his embarrassment and remarked cheerfully, ‘I am making a little anthology.' Dr Czinner repeated mechanically, ‘Anthology?'

‘Yes,' said Mr Opie, ‘a spiritual anthology for the lay mind, something to take the place in the English church of the Roman books of contemplation.' His thin white hand stroked the black wash-leather cover of his notebook. ‘But I intend to strike deeper. The Roman books are, what shall I say? too exclusively religious. I want mine to meet all the circumstances of everyday life. Are you a cricketer?'

The question took Dr Czinner by surprise; he had again in memory been kneeling in darkness, making his act of contrition. ‘No,' he said, ‘no.'

‘Never mind. You will understand what I mean. Suppose that you are the last man in; you have put on your pads; eight wickets have fallen; fifty runs must be made; you wonder whether the responsibility will fall upon you. You will get no strength for that crisis from any of the usual books of contemplation; you may indeed be a little suspicious of religion. I aim at supplying that man's need.'

Mr Opie had spoken rapidly and with enthusiasm, and Dr Czinner found his knowledge of English failing him. He did not understand the words ‘pad,' ‘wickets,' ‘runs'; he knew that they were connected with the English game of cricket; he had become familiar with the words during the last five years and they were associated in his mind with salty windswept turf, the supervision of insubordinate children engaged on a game which he could not master; but the religious significance of the words escaped him. He supposed that the priest was using them metaphorically: ‘responsibility,' ‘crisis,' ‘man's need,' these phrases he understood, and they gave him the opportunity he required to make his request.

‘I wished to speak to you,' he said, ‘of confession.' At the sound of the words he was momentarily young again.

‘It's a difficult subject,' said Mr Opie. He examined his hands for a moment and then began to speak rapidly. ‘I am not dogmatic on the point. I think there is a great deal to be said for the attitude of the Roman Church. Modern psychology is working on parallel lines. There is a similarity in the relationship between the confessor and the penitent and that between the psychoanalyst and the patient. There is, of course, this difference that one claims to forgive the sins. But the difference,' Mr Opie continued hurriedly, as Dr Czinner tried to speak, ‘is not after all very great. In the one case the sins are said to be forgiven and the penitent leaves the confessional with a clear mind and the intention of making a fresh start; in the other the mere expression of the patient's vices and the bringing to light of his unconscious motives in practising them are said to remove the force of the desire. The patient leaves the psychoanalyst with the power, as well as the intention, of making a fresh start.' The door into one corridor opened, and a man entered. ‘From that point of view,' said Mr Opie, ‘confession to the psychoanalyst seems to be more efficacious than confession to the priest.'

‘You are discussing confession?' the newcomer asked. ‘May I draw a red 'erring across your argument? There's a literary aspect to be considered.'

‘Let me introduce you to each other,' said Mr Opie. ‘Dr Czinner—Mr Q. C. Savory. We really have here the elements of a most interesting discussion; the doctor, the clergyman, and the writer.'

Dr Czinner said slowly: ‘Have you not left out the penitent?'

‘I was going to introduce him,' Mr Savory said. ‘In a way surely
I
am the penitent. In so far as the novel is founded on the author's experience, the novelist is making a confession to the public. This puts the public in the position of the priest and the analyst.'

Mr Opie countered him with a smile. ‘But your novel is a confession only in so far as a dream is a confession. The Freudian censor intervenes. The Freudian censor,' he had to repeat in a louder voice as the train passed under a bridge. ‘What does the medical man say?' Their polite bright attentive gaze confused Dr Czinner. He sat with head a little bent, unable to bring the bitter phrases from his mind to his lips; speech was failing him for a second time that evening; how could he depend on it when he reached Belgrade?

‘And then,' said Mr Savory, ‘there's Shakespeare.'

‘Where is there not?' said Mr Opie. ‘He strides this narrow world like a colossus. You mean—'

‘What was his attitude to confession? He was born, of course, a Roman Catholic.'

‘In
Hamlet,
' began Mr Opie, but Dr Czinner waited no longer. He rose and made two short bows. ‘Good night,' he said. He wanted to express his anger and disappointment, but all he found to say was: ‘So interesting.' The corridor, lit only by a chain of dim blue globes, sloped grey and vibrating towards the dark vans. Somebody turned in his sleep, and said in German, ‘Impossible. Impossible.'

When Coral left the doctor she began to run, as fast as was possible with a suitcase in a lurching train, so that she was out of breath and almost pretty when Myatt saw her pulling at the handle of his door. He had put away the correspondence from Mr Eckman and the list of market prices ten minutes ago, because he found that always, before the phrases or the figures could convey anything to his mind, he heard the girl's voice: ‘I love you.'

What a joke, he thought, what a joke.

He looked at his watch. No stop now for seven hours and he had tipped the guard. He wondered whether they got used to this kind of affair on long-distance trains. When he was younger he used to read stories of king's messengers seduced by beautiful countesses travelling alone and wonder whether such good fortune would ever happen to him. He looked at himself in the glass and pressed back his oiled black hair. I am not bad-looking if my skin were not so sallow; but when he took off his fur coat, he could not help remembering that he was growing fat and that he was travelling in currants and not with a portfolio of seated papers. Nor is she a beautiful Russian countess, but she likes me and she has a pretty figure.

He sat down, and then looked at his watch and got up again. He was excited. You fool, he thought, she's nothing new; pretty and kind and common, you can find her any night on the Spaniards road, and yet in spite of these persuasions he could not but feel that the adventure had in it a touch of freshness, of unfamiliarity. Perhaps it was only the situation: travelling at sixty miles an hour in a berth little more than two feet across. Perhaps it was her exclamation at dinner; the girls he had known were shy of using that phrase; they would say ‘I love you' if they were asked, but their spontaneous tribute was more likely to be ‘You're a nice boy.' He began to think of her as he had never thought before of any woman who was attainable: she is dear and sweet, I should like to do things for her. It did not occur to him for several moments that she had already reason for gratitude.

‘Come in,' he said, ‘come in.' He took the suitcase from her and pushed it under the seat and then took her hands.

‘Well,' she said with a smile, ‘I'm here, aren't I?' In spite of her smile he thought her frightened and wondered why. He loosed her hands in order to pull down the blinds of the corridor windows, so that they seemed suddenly to become alone in a small trembling box. He kissed her and found her mouth cool, soft, uncertainly responsive. She sat down on the seat which had become converted into a berth and asked him, ‘Did you wonder whether I'd come?'

‘You promised,' he reminded her.

‘I might have changed my mind.'

‘But why?' Myatt was becoming impatient. He did not want to sit about and talk; her legs, swinging freely without touching the floor, excited him. ‘We'll have a nice time.' He took off her shoes and ran his hands up her stockings. ‘You know a lot, don't you?' she said. He flushed. ‘Do you mind that?'

‘Oh, I'm glad,' she said, ‘so glad. I couldn't bear it if you hadn't known a lot.' Her eyes large and scared, her face pale under the dim blue globe, first amused him, then attracted him. He wanted to shake her out of aloofness into passion. He kissed her again and tried to slip her frock over her shoulder. Her body trembled and moved under her dress like a cat tied in a bag; suddenly she put her lips up to him and kissed his chin. ‘I do love you,' she said, ‘I do.'

The sense of unfamiliarity deepened round him. It was as if he had started out from home on a familiar walk, past the gas works, across the brick bridge over the Wimble, across two fields, and found himself not in the lane which ran uphill to the new road and the bungalows, but on the threshold of a strange wood, faced by a shaded path he had never taken, running God knows where. He took his hands from her shoulders and said without touching her: ‘How sweet you are,' and then with astonishment: ‘How dear.' He had never before felt the lust rising in him checked and increasing because of the check; he had always spilt himself into new adventures with an easy excitement.