Stamboul Train (8 page)

Yes, she thought, they knew each other; they had both admitted the fact, and it had left them beggared of words. The world shifted and changed and passed them by. Trees and buildings rose and fell against a pale-blue clouded sky, beech changed to elm, and elm to fir, and fir to stone; a world, like lead upon a hot fire, bubbled into varying shapes, now like a flame, now like a leaf of clover. Their thoughts remained the same, and there was nothing to speak about, because there was nothing to discover.

‘You don't really want me to have breakfast with you,' she said, trying to be sensible and break the embarrassment of their silence. But he would have nothing to do with her solution. ‘I do,' he said, but there was a weakness in his voice which showed her that she had only to be masterful, to get up and leave him and go to her carriage, and he would make no resistance. But in her bag there were stale sandwiches and some of yesterday's milk in a wine bottle, while down the corridor came the smell of boiling coffee and fresh white loaves.

Mabel Warren poured out her coffee, black and strong with no sugar. ‘It's the best story I've ever been after,' she said. ‘I saw him five years ago walk out of court, while Hartep watched with the warrant in his pocket. Campbell, of the
News,
was after him at once, but he missed him in the street. He never went home, and no more was heard of him from that day to this. Everyone thought he had been murdered, but I never understood why, if they meant to murder him, they took out a warrant for his arrest.'

‘Suppose,' said Janet Pardoe, without much interest, ‘that he won't speak.'

Miss Warren broke a roll. ‘I've never failed yet.'

‘You'll invent something?'

‘No, that's good enough for Savory, but not for him.' She said viciously, ‘I'll make him speak. Somehow. Between here and Vienna. I've got nearly twelve hours. I'll think of a way.' She added thoughtfully, ‘He says he's a schoolteacher. It may be true. That would be a good story. And where is he going? He says that he's getting out at Vienna. If he does I'll follow him. I'll follow him to Constantinople if necessary. But I don't believe it. He's going home.'

‘To prison?'

‘To trial. He's trusting the people perhaps. He was always popular in the slums. But he's a fool if he thinks they'll remember him. Five years. No one's ever remembered for so long.'

‘Darling, how morbid you are.'

Mabel Warren came back with difficulty to her immediate surroundings, the coffee swaying in her cup, the gently rocking table, and Janet Pardoe. Janet Pardoe had pouted and protested and grieved, but now she was squinting sideways at a Jew who shared a table with a girl, common to Miss Warren's eyes, but with a bright attraction. As for the man, his only merits were youth and money, but they were enough, Mabel Warren thought with bitter knowledge, to catch Janet's eye. ‘You know it's true,' she said with useless anger. She tore at another roll with her square worn hand, while her emotion grew, how grotesquely she was aware. ‘You'll have forgotten me in a week.'

‘But of course I shan't, darling. Why, I owe you everything.' The words did not satisfy Mabel Warren. When I love, she thought, I do not think of what I owe. The world to her was divided into those who thought and those who felt. The first considered the dresses which had been bought them, the bills which had been paid, but presently the dresses went out of fashion and the wind caught the receipt from the desk and blew it away, and in any case the debt had been paid with a kiss or another kindness, and those who thought forgot; but those who felt remembered; they did not owe and they did not lend, they gave hatred or love. I am one of those, thought Miss Warren, her eyes filling with tears and the bread drying in her throat, I am one of those who love and remember always, who keep faith with the past in black dresses or black bands, I don't forget, and her eyes dwelt for a moment on the Jew's girl, as a tired motorist might eye with longing the common inn, the scarlet curtains and the watered ale, before continuing his drive towards the best hotel, with its music and its palms. She thought: ‘I'll speak to her. She has a pretty figure.' For after all one could not live always with a low voice like music, with a tall figure like a palm. Faithfulness was not the same as remembrance; one could forget and be faithful and one could remember and be faithless.

She loved Janet Pardue, she would always love Janet Pardoe, she protested inwardly; Janet had been a revelation to her of what love could mean ever since the first evening of their meeting in a cinema in Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse, and yet, and yet . . . They had come together in a mutual disgust of the chief actor; at least Mabel Warren had said aloud in English to relieve her feelings in the strained hush of the dark theatre, ‘I can't bear these oiled men,' and had heard a low musical agreement. Yet even then Janet Pardoe had wished to stay till the end, till the last embrace, the final veiled lechery. Mabel Warren urged her to come and have a drink, but Janet Pardoe said that she wanted to see the news and they both stayed. That first evening seemed now to have revealed all of Janet's character that there was to reveal, the inevitable agreement which made no difference to what she did. Sharp words or disagreement had never ruffled her expressionless mood until the evening before, when she had thought herself rid of Mabel Warren. Miss Warren said viciously, not troubling to lower her voice at all, ‘I don't like Jews,' and Janet Pardoe, turning her large luminous eyes back to Mabel Warren's, agreed: ‘Nor do I, darling.'

Mabel Warren implored her with sudden desperation, ‘Janet, when I've gone, you'll remember our love for each other? You won't let a man touch you?' She would have welcomed dissent, the opportunity to argue, to give reasons, to fix some kind of seal upon that fluid mind, but again all she got was an absent-minded agreement. ‘But of course not, darling. How could I?' If she had faced a mirror, she would have received more sense of an alien mind from the image there, but not, Miss Warren thought, the satisfaction of something beautiful. It was no good thinking of herself, her coarse hair, red lids, and obstinately masculine and discordant voice; there was no one, even the young Jew, who was not her physical rival. When she was gone, Janet Pardoe would remain for a little while a beautiful vacancy, hardly existing at all, save for the need of sleep, the need of food, the need of admiration. But soon she would be sitting back crumbling toast, saying, ‘But of course I agree. I've always felt that.' The cup shook in Mabel Warren's hand, and the coffee trickled over the brim and drops fell to her skirt, already stained with grease and beer. What does it matter, she asked herself, what Janet does so long as I don't know? What does it matter to me if she lets a man take her to bed as long as she comes back? But the last qualification made her wince with mental pain, for would Janet, she wondered, ever return to an ageing plain infatuated woman? She'll tell him about me, Mabel Warren thought, of the two years she had lived with me, of the times when we have been happy, of the scenes I've made, even of the poems I've written her, and he'll laugh and she'll laugh and they'll go to bed laughing. I had better make up my mind that this is the end, that she will never come back from this holiday. I don't even know whether it's really her uncle she's visiting. There are as many fish in the sea as ever came out of it, Miss Warren thought, crumbling a roll, desperately aware of her uncared-for hands, the girl with the Jew, for instance. She was as poor as Janet was that evening in the cinema; she was not lovely as Janet was, so that it was happiness to sit for an hour and watch every motion of Janet's body, Janet doing her hair, Janet changing her dress, Janet pulling on her stockings, Janet mixing a drink, but she probably had twice the mind, common and shrewd though it might be.

‘Darling,' Janet Pardoe asked with amusement, ‘are you getting a pash for that little thing?' The train rocked and roared into a tunnel and out again, eliminating Mabel Warren's answer, taking it, as an angry hand might take a letter, tearing it across and scattering the pieces, only one phrase falling face upwards and in view: ‘For ever,' so that no one but Mabel Warren could have said what her protest had been, whether she had sworn to remember always or had declared that one could not be faithful for ever to one person. When the train came out again into the sunlight, coffee-pots glimmering and white linen laid between an open pasture, where a few cows grazed, and a deep wood of firs, Miss Warren had forgotten what she had wished to say, for she recognized in a man who entered the restaurant-car Czinner's companion. At the same moment the girl rose. She and the young man had spoken so seldom Miss Warren could not decide whether they were acquainted; she hoped that they were strange to each other, for she was forming a plan which would not only give her speech with the girl but would help her to nail Czinner once and for all to the bill page of the paper, an exclusive crucifixion.

‘Good-bye,' the girl said. Mabel Warren, watching them with the trained observer's eye, noted the Jew's raised shoulders, as of the ashamed habitual thief who leaning forward from the dock protests softly, more from habit than any real sense of injustice, that he has not had a fair trial. The casual observer might have read in their faces the result of a lover's quarrel; Mabel Warren knew better. ‘I'll see you again?' the man asked, and she replied, ‘If you want me, you'll know where to find me.'

Mabel Warren said to Janet, ‘I'll see you later. There are things I must do,' and she followed the girl out of the car over the rocking bridge between the coaches, stumbling and grasping for support, but with the ache in her head quite gone in the warmth and illumination of her idea. For when she said there were things to do, ‘things' meant nothing vague, but a throned triumphant concept for which her brain was the lit hall and a murmuring and approving multitude. Everything fitted, that she felt above all things, and she began to calculate what space they were likely to allow her in London; she had never led the paper before. There was the Disarmament Conference and the arrest of a peer for embezzlement and a baronet had married a Ziegfeld girl. None of these stories was exclusive; she had read them on the News Agency tape before she went to the station. They will put the Disarmament Conference and the Ziegfeld girl on a back page, she thought. There's no doubt, short of a European war or the King's death, that my story will lead the paper, and with her eyes on the girl in front, she considered the image of Dr Czinner, tired and shabby and old-fashioned in the high collar and the little tight tie, sitting in the corner of his compartment with his hands gripped on his knee, while she told him a lot of lies about Belgrade. ‘Dr Czinner Alive,' she thought, working at the headlines, but that would not do at the top, for five years had passed and not many people would remember his name. ‘Mystery Man's Return. How Dr Czinner Escaped Death. Exclusive Story.'

‘My dear,' she gasped, holding to the rail, apparently daunted by the second bridge, the shaking metal and the sound of the linked coaches straining. Her voice did not carry, and she had to repeat her exclamation in a shout, which fitted ill with the part she was assuming—an elderly woman struggling for breath. The girl turned and came back to her, her unschooled face white and miserable, with nothing hidden from any stranger. ‘What's the matter? Are you ill?'

Miss Warren did not move, thinking intensely on the other side of the overlapping plates of steel. ‘Oh, my dear, how glad I am that you are English. I feel so sick. I can't cross. I'm a silly old thing, I know.' Bitterly but of necessity she played upon her age. ‘If you would give me your hand.' She thought: for this game I ought to have long hair, it would be more womanly. I wish my fingers weren't yellow. Thank God I don't still smell of drink. The girl came back. ‘Of course. You needn't be afraid. Take my arm.' Miss Warren gripped it with strong fingers as she might have gripped the neck of a fighting dog.

When they reached the next corridor she spoke again. The noise of the train was softened, and she was able to subdue her voice to a husky whisper. ‘If only there was a doctor on the train, my dear. I feel so ill.'

‘But there is one. His name's Dr John. I came over faint last night and he helped me. Let me find him.'

‘I'm so frightened of doctors, dear,' said Miss Warren with a glint of triumph; it was extraordinarily lucky that the girl knew Czinner. ‘Talk to me a little first till I'm calmer. What's your name, my dear?'

‘Coral Musker.'

‘You must call me Mabel, Mabel Warren. I have a niece just like you. I work on a newspaper at Cologne. You must come and see me one day. The darlingest little flat. Are you on a holiday?'

‘I dance. I'm off to Constantinople. A girl's ill in an English show there.' For a moment with the girl's hand in hers Mabel Warren felt flustered with a longing to be generous in an absurd obvious way. Why not give up the hope of keeping Janet Pardoe and invite the girl to break her contract and take Janet's place as her paid companion? ‘You are so pretty,' she said aloud.

‘Pretty,' said Coral Musker. No smile softened her incredulity. ‘You're pulling my leg.'

‘My dear, you are so kind and good.'

‘You bet I am.' She spoke with a touch of vulgarity that spoiled for a moment Mabel Warren's vision. Coral Musker said with longing, ‘Leave out the goodness. Say that again about my being pretty.' Mabel Warren acquiesced with complete conviction, ‘My dear, you are lovely.' The astonished avidity with which the girl watched her was touching; the word ‘virginity' passed through the urban darkness of Mabel Warren's mind. ‘Has no one said that to you?' Eager and unbelieving Mabel Warren implored her: ‘Not your young friend in the restaurant-car?'