Stamboul Train (26 page)

She felt in Dr Czinner's pockets and found a box of matches. When she struck one the roof shot above her like a bean-stalk. Something blocked the shed at one end, stacked half-way to the roof. Another match showed her fat sacks piled more than twice the height of a man. In Dr Czinner's right-hand pocket was a folded newspaper. She tore off a page and made a spill, so that she might have enough light to drag him across the shed, for she was afraid that at any moment the guard would open the door. But his weight was too much for her. She held the spill close to his eyes to see whether he was conscious, and the stinging smoke woke him. He opened his eyes and watched her with perplexity. She whispered to him, ‘I want to hide you in the sacks.' He did not seem to understand and she repeated the sentence very slowly and distinctly.

He said, ‘
Ich spreche kein Englisch.
'

Oh, she thought, I wish I'd left him; I wish I was in the car now. He must be dying; he can't understand a word I say, and she was terrified at the idea of being left all alone in the shed with a dead man. Then the flame went out, choked in its own ash. She searched for the newspaper again on hands and knees and tore a page and folded it and made another spill. Then she found that she had mislaid the matches, and on hands and knees she felt the floor all round her. Dr Czinner began to cough, and something moved on the floor close to her hands. She nearly screamed for fear of rats, but when at last she had found the matches and lit a spill, she saw it was the doctor who had moved. He was crawling crookedly towards the end of the shed. She tried to guide him, but he seemed unaware of her. All the slow way across she wondered why no one came to look in the shed.

Dr Czinner was completely exhausted when he reached the sacks and he lay down with his face buried against them; he had been bleeding from the mouth. Again all the responsibility was hers. She wondered whether he was dying and she put her mouth close to his ear. ‘Shall I get help?' She was afraid that he would answer her in German, but this time he said quite clearly, ‘No, no.' After all, she thought, he's a doctor; he must know. She asked him, ‘What can I do for you?' He shook his head and closed his eyes; he was no longer bleeding and she thought him better. She pulled sacks down from the pile and made a kind of cave large enough to shelter them, piling the sacks at the entrance, so that no one could see them from the door. The sacks were heavy with grain, and the work was unfinished when she heard voices. She crouched low in the hole with her fingers crossed for luck, and the door opened, a torch flashed over the sacks above her head. Then the door was shut and quiet returned. It was a long time before she had the courage to finish her work.

‘We'll miss the train,' Myatt said as he watched the driver turn and turn the starting handle; the self-starter was useless.

‘I will take you back quicker,' the man said. At last the engine began to wake, grumble, fall asleep and wake again. ‘Now we're off,' he said. He climbed into his seat and turned on the front lamps, but while he was coaxing the engine into a steady roar, there was an explosion in the dusk behind. ‘What's that?' Myatt asked, thinking the car had back-fired. Then it happened again, and a little afterwards there was another sound like the popping of a cork. ‘They are firing in the station,' the driver said, pushing at the self-starter. Myatt knocked his hand away. ‘We'll wait.'

The man repeated, ‘Wait?' He explained hurriedly, ‘It's the soldiers. We had better be off.' He could not know how closely Myatt echoed his advice. Myatt was frightened; he had seen in the soldier's attitude the spirit which made pogroms possible; but he remained obstinate; he was not quite satisfied that he had done everything he could to find the girl in Subotica.

‘They are coming,' the man said. Along the road from the station someone was running. At first he eluded them in the falling snow. Then they could make out a man dodging a little this way and a little that. He was upon them with surprising speed, short and fat, clawing at the door to climb in. “What's up?' Myatt asked him. He spluttered a little at the mouth. ‘Drive off quick.' The door stuck and he bundled himself over the top and collapsed out of breath in the back seat.

‘Is there anybody else?' Myatt asked. ‘Are you alone?'

‘Yes, yes, alone,' the man assured him. ‘Drive away quick.'

Myatt leant back and tried to see his face. ‘No girl.'

‘No. No girl.'

There was a flash of light somewhere by the station buildings and a bullet scraped the mudguard. The driver, without waiting for an order, thrust down his foot and sent the car ricocheting from hole to hole along the road. Myatt again studied the stranger's face. ‘Weren't you on the Orient Express?' The man nodded. ‘And you haven't seen a girl at the station?' The man became voluble. ‘I will tell you all about it.' His speech was indistinct; many phrases were taken from his mouth by the plunging car; he said he had been detained for not declaring a little piece of lace, and had been badly treated by the soldiers and fired on when he escaped. ‘And you saw no girl?'

‘No. No girl.' He met Myatt's gaze with a complete honesty. It would have needed a long inquisition to spy at the back of the blank eyes the spark of malice, the little glint of cunning.

Although the wooden walls trembled with the wind, it was warm among the sacks, in the dark, in the unwindowed shed. Dr Czinner turned to escape the pain in his chest and turned again, but it pursued him; only in the moment of turning did he gain a few strides; when he was still, the pain was on him. So all through the night he turned and turned. There were times when he became conscious of the wind outside and mistook the rustle of the snow for the movement of the pebbles at the sea's edge. During those moments a memory of his years of exile took shape in the barn, so he began to recite German declensions and French irregular verbs. But his resistance was weakened, and instead of showing an obstinate sarcastic front to his tormentors, he wept.

Coral Musker laid his head in an easier position, but he moved it again, turning it and turning it, muttering rhythmically, tears falling down his cheeks and on to his moustache. She gave up the attempt to help him and tried to escape into the past from her own fear, so that if their thoughts had been given a form visible to each other, a strange medley would have filled the barn. Under coloured lights which spelt out ‘It's a Baby' a clergyman rumpled his gown across his arm and dived at a black-board with a piece of chalk; several children pursued another with taunts in and out of stage doors, up and down agents' stairs. In a glass shelter on a grey sea-front a woman gave a neighbour a piece of her mind, while a bell tolled for tea or chapel.

‘
Wasser,
' Dr Czinner whispered. ‘What do you want?' She bent down to him and tried to see his face. ‘
Wasser.
'

‘Shall I fetch someone?' He did not hear her.

‘Do you want something to drink?' He paid her no attention, repeating ‘
Wasser
' again and again. She knew that he was not conscious, but her nerves were worn and she was irritated by his failure to answer her. ‘All right then, lie there. I've done all I can, I'm sure.' She scrambled as far away from him as she could and tried to sleep, but the trembling of the walls kept her awake, the moaning of the wind made her aware of desolation, and she crept back to Dr Czinner's side for company and comfort. ‘
Wasser,
' he whispered again. Her hand touched his face and she was astonished at the heat and dryness of the skin. Perhaps he wants water, she thought, and was at a loss for a minute where to find it until she realized that it was falling all around her and piling itself against the walls of the shed. She was warned by a faint doubt: should somebody in a fever be given water? But remembering the dryness of his skin, she gave way to pity.

Although water was all round her, it was not easily or quickly reached. She had to light two spills and climb from the hole among the sacks without extinguishing them. She opened the door of the shed boldly, for she would half have welcomed discovery now, but the night was dark and there was no one to be seen. She gathered a handful of snow and went back into the shed and closed the door; the draught of the closing door blew out her light.

She called to Dr Czinner, but he made no reply, and she was frightened at the thought that he might be dead. With one hand held in front of her face she walked forward and was brought up short by the wall. She waited a moment before trying again and was glad to hear a movement. She went to it and was again stopped by the wall. She thought with rising fear: it must have been a rat that moved. The snow in her hand was beginning to melt. She called out again, and this time a whisper answered. She jumped, it was so close to her, and feeling sideways her hand immediately touched the barricade of sacks. She began to laugh, but rebuked herself: Now don't be hysterical. Everything depends on you; and she tried to comfort herself with the assurance that this was her first star part. But it was difficult to play with confidence in the dark without applause.

When she had found the hole among the sacks most of the snow was melted or spilt, but she pressed what was left against the doctor's mouth. It seemed to ease him. He lay still, while the snow upon his lips melted and trickled between his teeth. He was so quiet that she lit a spill to see his face and was astonished at his shrewd conscious gaze. She spoke to him, but he was too full of thought to answer.

He was taking in his position, the force of his second failure. He knew that he was dying; he had been brought to consciousness by the touch of cold upon the tongue; and after a moment of bewilderment, remembered everything. He could tell where he had been shot from the pain; he was aware of his own fever and of the secret fatal bleeding within. For a moment he thought it his duty to brush the snow from his lips, but then he realized that he had no more duties to anyone but himself.

When the girl lit the spill he was thinking: Grünlich has escaped. It amused him to consider how hard it would be for a Christian to reconcile that escape with his own death. He smiled a little, maliciously. But then his Christian training took an ironical revenge, for he too began to reconcile the events of the last few days and to wonder in what he had erred and how it was that others had succeeded. He saw the express in which they had travelled breaking the dark sky like a rocket. They clung to it with every stratagem in their power, leaning this way and leaning that, altering the balance now in this direction, now in that. One had to be very alive, very flexible, very opportunist. The snow on the lips had all melted and its effect was passing. Before the spill had flickered to its end, his sight had dimmed, and the great shed with its cargo of sacks floated away from him into the darkness. He had no sense that he was within it; he thought that he was left behind, watching it disappear. His mind became confused, and soon he was falling through endless space, breathless, with a windy vacancy in head and chest, because he had been unable to retain his foothold on what was sometimes a ship and at other times a comet, the world itself, or only a fast train from Ostend to Istanbul. His mother and father bobbed at him their seamed thin faces, followed him through the ether, past the rush of stars, telling him that they were glad and grateful, that he had done what he could, that he had been faithful. He was breathless and could not answer them, tugged downward in great pain by gravity. He wanted to say to them that he had been damned by his faithfulness, that one must lean this way and that, but he had to listen all the way to their false comfort, falling and falling in great pain.

It was impossible to tell in the barn the progress of the dark; when Coral struck a match to see her watch, she was disappointed to find how slowly time went by. After a while the store of matches became low and she did not dare to strike another. She wondered whether to leave the shed and surrender herself, for she began to despair now of seeing Myatt again. He had done more than could have been expected of him by returning; it was unlikely that he would come back again. But she was frightened of the world outside, not of the soldiers, but of the agents, the long stairs, the landladies, the old life. As long as she lay by Dr Czinner's side, she retained something of Myatt, a memory they both possessed.

Of course, she told herself, I can write to him, but months might pass before he was again in London, and she couldn't expect either his affection or desire to last when she was away. She knew, too, that she could make him see her when he returned. He would feel that it was his duty at least to give her lunch, but ‘I'm not after his money,' she whispered aloud in the dark barn beside the dying man. Her sense of desolation, the knowledge that for some reason, God alone knew why, she loved him, made her for a moment protestant. Why not? Why shouldn't I write to him? He might like it; he might want me still, and if he doesn't, why shouldn't I put up a fight? I'm tired of being decent, of doing the right thing. Her thoughts were very close to Dr Czinner's when she exclaimed to herself that it didn't pay.

But she knew too well that it was her nature, she was born so and she must make the best of it. She would be a fumbler at the other game; relentless when she ought to be weak, forgiving when she ought to be hard. Even now she could not dwell long with envy and admiration at the thought of Grünlich driving away into the dark beside Myatt; her thoughts returned with stupid fidelity to Myatt himself, to her last sight of him in the restaurant-car with his fingers caressing his gold cigarette case. But she was aware all the time that there was no quality in Myatt to justify her fidelity; it was just that she was like that and he had been kind. She wondered for a moment whether Dr Czinner's case was not the same; he had been too faithful to people who could have been served better by cunning. She heard his difficult breathing through the dark and thought again without bitterness or criticism, it just doesn't pay.