Stamboul Train (9 page)

‘I hardly know him.'

‘I think you are wise, my dear. Jews are not to be trusted.'

Coral Musker said slowly, ‘Do you think he thought that? That I didn't like him because he was a Jew?'

‘They are used to it, dear.'

‘Then I shall go and tell him that I like him, that I've always liked Jews.' Mabel Warren began to swear with a bitter obscene venom beneath her breath.

‘What did you say?'

‘You won't leave me like this until you've found the doctor? Look. My compartment's at the end of the corridor with my niece. I'll go there if you'll fetch him.' She watched Coral Musker out of sight and slipped into the lavatory. The train came to a sharp halt and then began to move backwards. Miss Warren recognized through the window the spires of Würzburg, the bridge over the Main; the train was shedding its third-class coaches, shunting backwards and forwards between the signal boxes and the sidings. Miss Warren left the door a little open, so that she could see the corridor. When Coral Musker and Dr Czinner appeared she closed the door and waited for the sound of their footsteps to pass. They had quite a long walk to the end of the corridor; now, if she hurried, she would have time enough. She slipped out. Before she could close the door the train started with a lurch and the door slammed, but neither Coral Musker nor Dr Czinner looked back.

She ran awkwardly, flung from one side to the other of the corridor by the motion of the train, bruising a wrist and a knee. Passengers returning from breakfast flattened themselves against the windows to let her by, and some of them complained of her in German, knowing her to be English, and imagining that she could not understand them. She grinned at them maliciously, uncovering her great front teeth, and ran on. The right compartment was easy to find, for she recognized the mackintosh hanging in a corner, the soft stained hat. On the seat lay a morning paper that Czinner must have bought a minute or two before in Würzburg station. In the brief pursuit of Coral Musker along the corridor she had thought out every move; the stranger who shared the compartment was at breakfast, Dr Czinner, seeking her at the other end of the train, would be away for at least three minutes. In that time she must learn enough to make him speak.

First there was the mackintosh. There was nothing in the pockets but a box of matches and a packet of Gold Flake. She picked up the hat and felt along the band and inside the lining; she had sometimes found quite valuable information concealed in hats, but the doctor's was empty. Now she reached the dangerous moments of her search, for the examination of a hat, even of the mackintosh pockets, could be disguised, but to drag the suitcase from the rack, to lever the lock open with her pocket-knife and lift the lid, laid her too obviously open to the charge of theft. And one blade of her knife broke while she still laboured at the lock. Her purpose was patent to anyone who passed the compartment, and she sweated a little on the forehead, growing frenzied in her haste. If I am found it means the sack, she thought: the cheapest rag in England could not stand for this; and if I'm sacked, I lose Janet, I lose the chance of Coral. But if I succeed, she thought, prying, pushing, scraping, there's nothing they won't do for me in return for such a story; another four pounds a week wouldn't be too much to demand. I'll be able to take a larger flat; when Janet knows of it, she'll return, she'll never leave me. It is happiness, security, she thought, I'll be getting in return for this, and the lock gave and the lid lifted and her fingers were on the secrets of Dr Czinner. A woollen stomach-belt was the first of them.

She lifted it with care and found his passport. It gave his name as Richard John and his profession as teaching. His age was fifty-six. That proves nothing, she thought, these shady foreign politicians know where to buy a passport. She put it back where she had found it and began to slip her fingers between his suits, half-way down in the centre of the suitcase, the spot the customs officers always miss when they turn up the contents of a bag at the bottom and at the sides. She hoped to find a pamphlet or a letter, but there was only an old Baedeker published in 1914:
Konstantinopel und Kleinasien, Balkanstaaten, Archipel, Cypern,
slipped inside a pair of trousers. But Mabel Warren was thorough: she calculated that she had about one minute of safety left, and as there was nothing else to examine she opened the Baedeker, for it was curious to find it so carefully packed away. She looked at the fly-leaf and read with disappointment the name of Richard John written in a small fussy hand with a scratching nib, but under it was an address, The School House, Great Birchington-on-Sea, which was worth remembering; the
Clarion
could send a man down to interview the headmaster. A good story might be hidden there.

The guide-book seemed to have been bought second-hand, the cover was very worn and there was the label of a bookseller in Charing Cross Road on the fly-leaf. She turned to Belgrade. There was a one-page map, which had worked loose, but it was unmarked; she examined every page dealing with Belgrade and then every page dealing with Serbia, every page on any of the states which were now part of Yugoslavia. There was not so much as a smudge of ink. She would have given up the search if it were not for the position in which she had found the book. Obstinately and against the evidence of her eyes she believed that it had been hidden there and that therefore there must be something to hide. She skimmed the pages against her thumb, they ran unevenly because of the many folded maps, but on one of the early pages she found some lines and circles and triangles drawn in ink over the text. But the text dealt only with an obscure town in Asia Minor and the drawings might have been a child's scribble with ruler and compasses. Certainly, if the lines belonged to a code only an expert could decipher them. He's defeated me, she thought, with hatred, smoothing the surface of the suitcase, there's nothing here; but she felt unwilling to put back the Baedeker. He had hidden it, there must be something to find. She had risked so much already that it was easy to risk a little more. She closed the suitcase and put it back on the rack, but the Baedeker she slipped down her shirt and so under her armpit, where she could hold it with one arm pressed to her side.

But it was no use going back to her own seat, for she would meet Dr Czinner returning. It was then that she remembered Mr Quin Savory, whom she had come to the station to interview. His face was well known to her from photographs in the
Tatler,
cartoons in the
New Yorker,
pencil drawings in the
Mercury.
She looked cautiously down the corridor, her eyes blinking a little in a short-sighted manner, and then walked rapidly away. Mr Quin Savory was not to be found in the first-class carriages, but she ran him to earth in a second-class sleeper. With his chin buried in his overcoat, one hand round the bowl of a pipe, he watched with small glittering eyes the people who passed in the corridor. A clergyman dozed in the opposite corner.

Miss Warren opened the door and stepped inside. Her manner was masterful; she sat down without waiting for an invitation. She felt that she was offering this man something he wanted, publicity, and she was gaining nothing commensurate in return. There was no need to speak softly to him, to lure him into disclosures, as she had tried to lure Dr Czinner, she could insult him with impunity, for the Press had power to sell his books. ‘You Mr Quin Savory?' she asked, and saw out of the corner of her eye how the clergyman's attitude changed to one of respectful attention; poor mutt, she thought, to be impressed by a 100,000 sale, we sell two million, twenty times as many people will have heard of Dr Czinner tomorrow. ‘I represent the
Clarion.
Want an interview.'

‘I'm a bit taken aback,' said Mr Savory, raising his chin, pulling at his overcoat.

‘No need to be nervous,' said Miss Warren mechanically. She fetched her notebook from her bag and flipped it open. ‘Just a few words for the English public. Travelling incognito?'

‘Oh, no, no,' Mr Savory protested. ‘I'm not royalty.'

Miss Warren began to write. ‘Where are you going?'

‘Why, first of all,' said Mr Savory brightly, as if pleased by Miss Warren's interest, which had already returned to the Baedeker and the scrawl of geometrical figures, ‘to Constantinople. Then I may go to Ankara, the Far East. Baghdad. China.'

‘Writing a travel book?'

‘Oh, no, no, no. My public wants a novel. It'll be called
Going Abroad.
An adventure of the Cockney spirit. These countries, civilizations,' he made a circle in the air with his hand, ‘Germany, Turkey, Arabia, they'll all take second pew to the chief character, a London tobacconist. D'you see?'

‘Quite,' said Miss Warren, writing rapidly. ‘“Dr Richard Czinner, one of the greatest revolutionary figures of the immediate post-war period, is on his way home to Belgrade. For five years the world has thought him dead, but during that time he has been living as a schoolmaster in England, biding his time.”' But for what? Miss Warren wondered. ‘Your opinion of modern literature?' she asked. ‘Joyce, Lawrence, all that?'

‘It will pass,' Mr Savory said promptly with the effect of an epigram.

‘You believe in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Charles Reade, that sort of thing?'

‘They will live,' Mr Savory declared with a touch of solemnity.

‘Bohemianism? You don't believe in that? Fitzroy Tavern?' (‘A warrant for his arrest has been issued,' she wrote, ‘but it could not be served till the trial was over. When the trial was over Dr Czinner had disappeared. Every station had been watched by the police, every car stopped. It was little wonder that the rumour of his murder by government agents spread rapidly.') ‘You don't believe it's necessary to dress oddly, big black hat, velvet jacket, and what not?'

‘I think it's fatal,' Mr Savory said. He was now quite at his ease and watched the clergyman covertly while he talked. ‘I'm not a poet. A poet's an individualist. He can dress as he likes; he depends only on himself. A novelist depends on other men; he's an average man with the power of expression. 'E's a spy,' Mr Savory added with confusing drama, dropping aitches right and left. “'E 'as to see everything and pass unnoticed. If people recognized 'im they wouldn't talk, they'd pose before 'im; 'e wouldn't find things out.' Miss Warren's pencil raced. Now that she had got him started, she could think quickly: no need to press him on with questions. Her pencil made meaningless symbols, which looked sufficiently like shorthand to convince Mr Savory that his remarks were being taken down in full, but behind the deceiving screen of squiggles and lines, circles and squares, Miss Warren thought. She thought of every possible aspect of the Baedeker. It had been published in 1914, but was in excellent condition; it had never been much used, except for the section dealing with Belgrade; the map of the city had been so often handled that it was loose.

‘You do follow these views?' Mr Savory asked anxiously. ‘They're important. They seem to me the touchstone of lit'ry integrity. One can 'ave that, you know, and yet sell one hundred thousand copies.' Miss Warren, annoyed at the interruption, only just prevented herself retorting, ‘Do you think we should sell two million copies if we told the truth?' ‘Very interesting,' she said. ‘The public will be interested. Now what do you consider your contribution to English literature?' She grinned at him encouragingly and poised her pencil.

‘Surely that's for somebody else to state,' said Mr Savory. ‘But one 'opes, one 'opes, that it's something of this sort, to bring back cheerfulness and 'ealth to modern fiction. There's been too much of this introspection, too much gloom. After all, the world is a fine adventurous place.' The bony hand which held the pipe beat helplessly against his knee. ‘To bring back the spirit of Chaucer,' he said. A woman passed along the corridor, and for a moment all Mr Savory's attention was visibly caught up to sail in her wake, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing, like his hand. ‘Chaucer,' he said, ‘Chaucer,' and suddenly, before Miss Warren's eyes he gave up the struggle, his pipe fell to the floor, and stooping to find it, he exclaimed irritably, ‘Damn it all. Damn.' He was a man overworked, harassed by a personality which was not his own, by curiosities and lusts, a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Miss Warren gloated over him. It was not that she hated him, but that she hated any overpowering success, whether it meant the sale of a hundred thousand copies or the attainment of three hundred miles an hour, which made her an interviewer and a man the condescending interviewed. Failure of the same overwhelming kind was another matter, for then she was the avenging world, penetrating into prison cells, into hotel lounges, into mean back parlours. Then with a man at her mercy between the potted palms and the piano, when he was backed against the wedding photograph and the marble clock, she could almost love her victim, asking him little intimate questions, hardly listening to the answers. Well, not so great a gulf lay, she thought with satisfaction, between Mr Quin Savory, author of
The Great Gay Round,
and such a failure.

She harped on his phrase. ‘Health,' she said. ‘That's your mission? None of this “adults only” stuff they give you as school prizes.'

Her irony had been a little too obvious. ‘I'm proud of it,' he said. ‘The younger generation's being brought up on 'ealthy traditions.' She noticed his dry lips, the squint towards the corridor. I'll put that in about healthy traditions, she thought, the public will like it, James Douglas will like it, and they will like it still better when he's a Hyde Park case, for that's what he'll be in a few years. I'll be alive to remind them. She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled. Take an expression in the present, a line of ill-health, a tone of voice, a gesture, no more illuminating to the average unobservant person than the lines and circles in the Baedeker, and fit them to what one knew of the man's surroundings, his friends and furniture, the house he lived in, and one saw the future, his shabby waiting fate. ‘My God!' said Miss Warren, ‘I've got it.'