Stamboul Train (7 page)

‘How long ago was all this?'

‘Five years.' He watched her narrowly, judging what reply would most irritate her. ‘An old story now then. Is Czinner out of prison?'

‘He got away from them. I'd give a lot to know how. It would make a wonderful story. He simply disappeared. Everyone assumed he'd been murdered.'

‘And hadn't he?'

‘No,' said Mabel Warren, ‘he got away.'

‘A clever man.'

‘I don't believe it,' she said furiously. ‘A clever man would never have given evidence. What did Kamnetz or the child matter to him? He was a quixotic fool.' A cold breath of air blew through the open door and set the doctor shivering. ‘It's been a bitter night,' he said. She brushed the remark on one side with a square worn hand. ‘To think,' she said with awe, ‘that he never died. While the jury were away he walked out of the court before the eyes of the police. They sat there unable to do anything till the jury came back. Why, I swear that I saw the warrant sticking out of Hartep's breast pocket. He disappeared; he might never have existed; everything went on exactly as before. Even Kamnetz.'

He could not disguise a bitter interest. ‘So? Even Kamnetz?' She seized her advantage, speaking huskily with unexpected imagination. ‘Yes, if he went back now, he would find everything the same; the clock might have been put back. Hartep taking the same bribes; Kamnetz with his eye for a child; the same slums; the same cafés with the same concerts at six and eleven. Carl's gone from the Moscowa, that's all, the new waiter's a Frenchman. There's a new cinema, too, near the Park. Oh yes, there's one change. They've built over Kruger's beer garden. Flats for Civil Servants.' He remained silent, quite unable to meet this new move of his opponent. So Kruger's was gone with its fairy lights and brightly-coloured umbrellas and the gipsies playing softly from table to table in the dusk. And Carl had gone too. For a moment he would have bartered with the woman all his safety, and the safety of his friends, to know the news of Carl; had he gathered up his tips and retired to a new flat near the Park, folding up the napkins for his own table, drawing the cork for his own glass? He knew that he ought to interrupt the drunken dangerous woman opposite him, but he could not say a word, while she gave him news of Belgrade, the kind of news which his friends in their weekly coded letters never sent him.

There were other things, too, he would have liked to ask her. She had said the slums were the same, and he could feel under his feet the steep steps down into the narrow gorges; he bent under the bright rags stretched across the way, put his handkerchief across his mouth to shut out the smell of dogs, of children, of bad meat and human ordure. He wanted to know whether Dr Czinner was remembered there. He had known every inhabitant with an intimacy which they would have thought dangerous if they had not so implicitly trusted him, if he had not been by birth one of themselves. As it was, he had been robbed, confided in, welcomed, attacked, and loved. Five years was a long time; he might already be forgotten.

Mabel Warren drew in her breath sharply. ‘To come to facts. I want an exclusive interview for my paper. “How I escaped?” or “Why I am returning home?”'

‘An interview?' His repetitions annoyed her; she had a splitting headache and felt ‘wicked.' It was the term she used herself; it meant a hatred of men, of all the shifts and evasions they made necessary, of the way they spoiled beauty and stalked abroad in their own ugliness. They boasted of the women they had enjoyed; even the faded middle-aged face before her had in his time seen beauty naked, the hands which clasped his knee had felt and pried and enjoyed. And at Vienna she was losing Janet Pardoe, who was going alone into a world where men ruled. They would flatter her and give her bright cheap objects, as though she were a native to be cheated with Woolworth mirrors and glass beads. But it was not their enjoyment she most feared, it was Janet's. Not loving her at all, or only for the hour, the day, the year, they could make her weak with pleasure, cry aloud in her enjoyment. While she, Mabel Warren, who had saved her from a governess's buried life and fed her and clothed her, who could love her with the same passion until death, without satiety, had no means save her lips to express her love, was faced always by the fact that she gave no enjoyment and gained herself no more than an embittered sense of insufficiency. Now with her head aching, the smell of gin in her nostrils, the knowledge of her flushed ugliness, she hated men with a wicked intensity and their bright spurious graces.

‘You are Dr Czinner.' She noted with an increase of her anger that he did not trouble to deny his identity, proffering her carelessly the name he travelled under, ‘My name is John.'

‘Dr Czinner,' she growled at him, closing her great teeth on her lower lip in an effort at self-control.

‘Richard John, a schoolmaster, on holiday.'

‘To Belgrade.'

‘No.' He hesitated a moment. ‘I am stopping at Vienna.' She did not believe him, but she won back her amiability with an effort. ‘I'm getting out at Vienna, too. Perhaps you'll let me show you some of the sights.' A man stood in the doorway and she rose. ‘I'm so sorry. This is your seat.' She grinned across the compartment, lurched sideways as the train clattered across a point, and failed to hold a belch which filled the compartment for a few seconds with the smell of gin and shaken notes of cheap powder. ‘I'll see you again before Vienna,' she said, and moving down the corridor leant her red face against the cold smutty glass in a spasm of pain at her own drunkenness and squalor. ‘I'll get him yet,' she thought, blushing at her belch as though she were a young girl at a dinner-party. ‘I'll get him somehow. God damn his soul.'

A tender light flooded the compartments. It would have been possible for a moment to believe that the sun was the expression of something that loved and suffered for men. Human beings floated like fish in golden water, free from the urge of gravity, flying without wings, transport, in a glass aquarium. Ugly faces and misshapen bodies were transmuted, if not into beauty, at least into grotesque forms fashioned by a mocking affection. On that golden tide they rose and fell, murmured and dreamed. They were not imprisoned, for they were not during the hour of dawn aware of their imprisonment.

Coral Musker woke for the second time. She stood up at once and went to the door; the man dozed wearily, his eyes jerking open to the rhythm of the train. Her mind was still curiously clear; it was as if the golden light had a quality of penetration, so that she could understand motives which were generally hidden, movements which as a rule had for her no importance or significance. Now as she watched him and he became aware of her, she saw his hands go out in a gesture which stayed half-way; she knew that it was a trick of his race which he was consciously repressing. She said softly, ‘I'm a pig. You've been out there all night.' He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly; he might have been a pawnbroker undervaluing a watch or vase. ‘Why not? I didn't want you to be disturbed. I had to see the guard. Can I come in?'

‘Of course. It's your compartment.'

He smiled and was unable to resist a spread of the hands, a slight bow from the hips. ‘Pardon
me.
It's yours.' He took a handkerchief from his sleeve, rolled up his cuffs, made passes in the air. ‘Look. See. A first-class ticket.' A ticket fell from his handkerchief and rolled on the floor between them.

‘Yours.'

‘No, yours.' He began to laugh with pleasure at her consternation.

‘What do you mean? I couldn't take it. Why, it must have cost pounds.'

‘Ten,' he said boastfully. ‘Ten pounds.' He straightened his tie and said airily, ‘That's nothing to me.'

But his confidence, his boastful eyes, alienated her. She said with a deep suspicion, ‘What are you getting at? What do you think I am?' The ticket lay between them; nothing would induce her to pick it up. She stamped her foot as the gold faded and became no more than a yellow stain upon the glass and cushions. ‘I'm going back to my seat.'

He said defiantly, ‘I don't think about you. I've got other things to think about. If you don't want the ticket you can throw it away.' She saw him watching her, his shoulders raised again boastfully, carelessly, and she began to cry quietly to herself, turning to the window and the river and a bridge that fled by and a bare beech pricked with early buds. This is my gratitude for a calm long sleepy night; this is the way I take a present; and she thought with shame and disappointment of early dreams of great courtesans accepting gifts from princes. And I snap at him like a tired waitress.

She heard him move behind her and knew that he was stooping for the ticket; she wanted to turn to him and express her gratitude, say; ‘It would be like heaven to sit on these deep cushions all the journey, sleep in the berth, forget that I'm on my way to a job, think myself rich. No one has ever been so good to me as you are,' but her earlier words, the vulgarity of her suspicion, lay like a barrier of class between them. ‘Lend me your bag,' he said. She held it out behind her, and she felt his fingers open the clasp. ‘There,' he said, ‘I've put it inside. You needn't use it. Just sit here when you want to. And sleep here when you are tired.' I am tired, she thought. I could sleep here for hours. She said in a voice strained to disguise her tears: ‘But how can I?'

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I'll find another compartment. I only slept outside last night because I was anxious about you. You might have needed something.' She began to cry again, leaning the top of her head against the window, half shutting her eyes, so that her lashes made a curtain between herself and the hard admonishments of old dry women of experience: ‘There's only one thing a man wants.' ‘Don't take presents from a stranger.' It was the size of the present she had been always told that made the danger. Chocolates and a ride, even in the dark, after a theatre, entailed no more than kisses on the mouth and neck, a little tearing of a dress. A girl was expected to repay, that was the point of all advice; one never got anything for nothing. Novelists like Ruby M. Ayres might say that chastity was worth more than rubies, but the truth was it was priced at a fur coat or thereabouts. One couldn't accept a fur coat without sleeping with a man. If you did, all the older women would tell you the man had a grievance. And the Jew had paid ten pounds.

He put his hand on her arm. ‘What's the matter? Tell me. Do you feel ill?' She remembered the hand that shook the pillow, the whisper of his feet moving away. She said again, ‘How can I?' but this time it was an appeal for him to speak and to deny the accumulated experience of poverty. ‘Look,' he said, ‘sit down and let me show you things. That's the Rhine.' She found herself laughing. ‘I guessed that.' ‘Did you see the rock we passed jutting out into the stream? That's the Lorelei rock. Heine.'

‘What do you mean, Heine?' He said with pleasure, ‘A Jew.' She began to forget the decision she was forced to make and watched him with interest, trying to find a stranger behind the too familiar features, the small eyes, the large nose, the black oiled hair. She had seen this man too often, like a waiter in a dinner-jacket sitting in the front row at provincial theatres, behind a desk at agents' offices, in the wings at rehearsal, outside the stage door at midnight; the world of the theatre vibrated with his soft humble imperative voice; he was mean with a commonplace habitual meanness, generous in fits and starts, never to be trusted. Soft praise at a rehearsal meant nothing, in the office afterwards he would be saying over a glass of whisky, ‘That little girl in the front row, she's not worth her keep.' He was never angered or abusive, never spoke worse of anyone than as ‘that little girl,' and dismissal came in the shape of a typewritten note left in a pigeon-hole. She said gently, partly because none of these qualities prevented her liking Jews for their very quietness, partly because it was a girl's duty to be amiable, ‘Jews are artistic, aren't they? Why, almost the whole orchestra at
Atta Girl
were Jewish boys.'

‘Yes,' he said with a bitterness which she did not understand.

‘Do you like music?'

‘I can play the violin,' he said, ‘not well.' For a moment it was as if behind the familiar eyes a strange life moved.

‘I always wanted to cry at “Sonny Boy,”' she said. She was aware of the space which divided her understanding from her expression; she was sensible of much and could say little, and what she said was too often the wrong thing. Now she saw the strange life die.

‘Look,' he said sharply. ‘No more river. We've left the Rhine. Not long before breakfast.'

She was a little pained by a sense of unfairness, but she was not given to argument. ‘I'll have to fetch my bag,' she said, ‘I've got sandwiches in it.'

He stared at her. ‘Don't tell me you've brought provisions for three days.'

‘Oh, no. Just supper last night and breakfast this morning. It saves about eight shillings.'

‘Are you Scotch? Listen to me. You'll have breakfast with me.'

‘What more do you expect me to have with you?'

He grinned. ‘I'll tell you. Lunch, tea, dinner. And tomorrow . . .' She interrupted him with a sigh. ‘I guess you're a bit rocky. You haven't escaped from anywhere, have you?' His face fell and he asked her with sudden humility, ‘You couldn't put up with me? You'd be bored?'

‘No,' she said, ‘I shouldn't be bored. But why do you do all this for me? I'm not pretty. I guess I'm not clever.' She waited with longing for a denial. ‘You are lovely, brilliant, witty,' the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give. But he denied nothing. His explanation was almost insulting in its simplicity. ‘I can talk so easily to you. I feel I know you.' She knew what that meant. ‘Yes,' she said with the dry trivial grief of disappointment, ‘I seem to know you too,' and what she meant were the long stairs, the agent's door, and the young friendly Jew, explaining gently and without interest that he had nothing to offer her, nothing to offer her at all.