Stamboul Train (15 page)

‘But I do.'

‘Wait till breakfast. Ask me at breakfast. Or just don't ask me.'

‘No, not cricket. Not crickett,' said Josef Grünlich, wiping his moustache. ‘In Germany we learn to run,' and the quaintness of his phrase made Mr Opie smile. ‘Have you been a runner yourself?'

‘In my day,' said Josef Grünlich, ‘I was a great runner. Nobody runned as well as I. Nobody could catch me.'

‘Heller.'

‘Don't swear, Jim.'

‘I wasn't swearing. It's the beer. Try some of this. It's not so gassy. What you had before they call Dunkel.'

‘I'm so glad you liked it.'

‘That little char. I can't remember her name, she was lovely.'

‘Come back and talk a little after dinner.'

‘You won't be silly now, Mr Savory?'

‘I shall ask you.'

‘Don't promise. Don't promise anything. Talk about something else. Tell me what you are going to do in Constantinople.'

‘That's only business. It's tricky. The next time you eat spotted dog, think of me. Currants. I am currants,' he added with a humorous pride.

‘Then I'll call you spotted dog. I can't call you Carleton, can I? What a name.'

‘Look, have a currant. I always carry a few with me. Have one of these in this division. Good, isn't it?'

‘Juicy.'

‘That's one of ours, Myatt, Myatt and Page. Now try one of these. What do you think of that?'

‘Look through there in the first class, Amy. Can't you see her? Too good for us, that's what she is.'

‘With that Jew? Well, one knows what to think.'

‘I have the greatest respect, of course, for the Roman Catholic Church,' said Mr Opie. ‘I am not bigoted. As an example of organization . . .'

‘So?'

‘I am silly now.'

‘Juicy.'

‘No, no, that one's not juicy.'

‘Have I said the wrong thing?'

‘That was one of Stein's. A cheap inferior currant. The vineyards are on the wrong side of the hills. It makes them dry. Have another. Can't you see the difference?'

‘Yes, this is dry. It's quite different. But the other was juicy. You don't believe me, but it really was. You must have got them mixed.'

‘No, I chose the sample myself. It's odd. It's very odd.'

All down the restaurant-cars fell the sudden concerted silence which is said to mean that an angel passes overhead. But through the human silence the tumblers tingled on the table, the wheels thudded along the iron track, the windows shook and sparks flickered like match heads through the darkness. Late for the last service Dr Czinner came down the restaurant-car in the middle of the silence, with knees a little bent as a sailor keeps firm foothold in a stormy sea. A waiter preceded him, but he was unaware of being led. Words glowed in his mind and became phrases. You say that I am a traitor to my country, but I do not recognize my country. The dark downward steps, the ordure against the unwindowed wall, the starving faces. These are not Slavs, he thought, who owe a duty to this frock-coated figure or to that: they are the poor of all the world. He faced the military tribunal sitting under the eagles and the crossed swords: It is you who are old-fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country. Unconsciously as he walked the aisle from table to table he touched and straightened the tightly knotted tie and fingered the Victorian pin: I am of the present. But for a moment into his grandiloquent dream obtruded the memory of long rows of malicious adolescent faces, the hidden mockery, the nicknames, the caricatures, the notes passed in grammars, under desks, the ubiquitous whispers impossible to place and punish. He sat down and stared without comprehension at the bill of fare.

Yes, I wouldn't mind being that Jew. Mr Peters thought during the long angelic visitation, he's got a nice skirt all right, all right. Not pretty. I wouldn't say pretty, but a good figure, and that, said Mr Peters to himself, watching his wife's tall angularity, remembering her murmurous stomach, that's the most important thing.

It was odd. He had chosen the samples with particular care. It was natural of course that even Stein's currants should not all be inferior, but when so much was suspected, a further suspicion was easy. Suppose, for example, Mr Eckman had been doing a little trade on his own account, had allowed Stein some of the firm's consignment of currants, in order temporarily to raise the quality, had, on the grounds of that improved quality, indeed, induced Moult's to bid for the business. Mr Eckman must be having uneasy moments now, turning up the time-table, looking at his watch, thinking that half Myatt's journey was over. Tomorrow, he thought, I will send a telegram and put Joyce in charge; Mr Eckman shall have a month's holiday. Joyce will keep an eye on the books, and he pictured the scurryings to and fro, as in an ants' nest agitated by a man's foot, a telephone call from Eckman to Stein or from Stein to Eckman, a taxi ordered here and dismissed there, a lunch for once without wine, and then the steep office steps and at the top of them the faithful rather stupid Joyce keeping his eye upon the books. And all the time, at the modern flat, Mrs Eckman would sit on her steel sofa knitting baby clothes for the Anglican mission, and the great dingy Bible, Mr Eckman's first deception, would gather dust on its unturned leaf.

Q. C. Savory pushed the button of the spring blind and moonlight touched his face and his fish knife and turned the steel rails on the quiet up-line to silver. The snow had stopped falling and lay piled along the banks between the sleepers, lightening the darkness. A few hundred yards away the Danube flickered like mercury. He could see tall trees fly backwards and telegraph-poles, which caught the moonlight on their metal arms as they passed. While silence held the carriage, he put the thoughts of Janet Pardoe away from him; he wondered what terms he could use to describe the night. It is all a question of choice and arrangement; I must show not all that I see but a few selected sharp points of vision. I must not mention the shadows across the snow, for their colour and shape are indefinite, but I may pick out the scarlet signal lamp shining against the white ground, the flame of the waiting-room fire in the country station, the bead of light on a barge beating back against the current.

Josef Grünlich stroked the sore on his leg where the revolver pressed and wondered: How many hours to the frontier? Would the frontier guards have received notice of the murder? But I am safe. My passport is in order. No one saw me take the bag. There's nothing to connect me with Kolber's flat. Ought I to have dropped the gun somewhere? he wondered, but he reassured himself: it might have been traced to me. They can tell miraculous things nowadays from a scratch on the bore. Crime grew more unsafe every year; he had heard rumours of a new finger-print stunt, some way by which they could detect the print even when the hand had been gloved. But they haven't caught me yet with all their science.

One thing the films had taught the eye, Savory thought, the beauty of landscape in motion, how a church tower moved behind and above the trees, how it dipped and soared with the uneven human stride, the loveliness of a chimney rising towards a cloud and sinking behind the further cowls. That sense of movement must be conveyed in prose, and the urgency of the need struck him, so that he longed for paper and pencil while the mood was on him and repented his invitation to Janet Pardoe to come back with him after dinner and talk. He wanted to work; he wanted for an hour or two to be free from any woman's intrusion. I don't want her, he thought, but as he snapped the blind down again, he felt again the prick of desire. She was well-dressed; she ‘talked like a lady'; and she had read his books with admiration; these three facts conquered him, still aware of his birthplace in Balham, the fugitive Cockney intonation of his voice. After six years of accumulative success, success represented by the figures of sale, 2,000, 4,000, 10,000, 25,000, 100,000, he was still astonished to find himself in the company of well-dressed women, and not divided by a thick pane of restaurant glass or the width of a counter. One wrote, day by day, with labour and frequent unhappiness, but with some joy, a hundred thousand words; a clerk wrote as many in an office ledger, and yet the words which he, Q. C. Savory, the former shop assistant, wrote had a result that the hardest work on an office stool could not attain; and as he picked at his fish and watched Janet Pardoe covertly, he thought not of current accounts, royalties, and shares, nor of readers who wept at his pathos or laughed at his Cockney humour, but the long stairs to London drawing-rooms, the opening of double doors, the announcement of his name, faces of women who turned towards him with interest and respect.

Soon in an hour or two he will be my lover; and at the thought and the touch of fear at a strange relationship the dark knowing face lost its familiarity. When she fainted in the corridor he had been kind, with hands that pulled a warm coat round her, a voice that offered her rest and luxury; gratitude pricked at her eyes, and but for the silence all down the car she would have said: ‘I love you.' She kept the words on her lips, so that she might break their private silence with them when the public silence passed.

The Press will be there, Czinner thought, and saw the journalists' box as it had been at the Kamnetz trial full of men scribbling and one man who sketched the general's likeness. It will be my likeness. It will be the justification of the long cold hours on the esplanade, when I walked up and down and wondered whether I had done right to escape. I must have every word perfect, remember clearly the object of my fight, remember that it is not only the poor of Belgrade who matter, but the poor of every country. He had protested many times against the national outlook of the militant section of the Social-Democratic party. Even their great song was national, ‘March, Slavs, march'; it had been adopted against his wishes. It pleased him that the passport in his pocket was English, the plan in his suitcase German. He had bought the passport at a little paper-shop near the British Museum, kept by a Pole. It was handed to him over the tea-table in the back parlour and the thin spotty man, whose name he had already forgotten, had apologized for the price. ‘The expense is very bad,' he complained, and while he helped his customer into his coat had asked mechanically and without interest: ‘How is your business?' It was quite obvious that he thought Czinner a thief. Then he had to go into the shop to sell an
Almanach Gaulois
to a furtive schoolboy. ‘March, Slavs, march.' The man who had written the music had been bayoneted outside the sorting-room.

‘Braised chicken! Roast veal . . .' The waiters called their way along the carriage and broke the minute's silence. Everyone began talking at once.

‘I find the Hungarians take to cricket quite naturally. We had six matches last season.'

‘This beer's not better. I
would
just like a glass of Guinness.'

‘I do believe these currants—' ‘I love you.' ‘Our agent—what did you say?' ‘I said that I loved you.' The angel had gone, and noisily and cheerfully with the thud of wheels, the clatter of plates, voices talking and the tingle of mirrors, the express passed a long line of firtrees and the flickering Danube. In the coach the pressure gauge rose, the driver turned the regulator open, and the speed of the train was increased by five miles an hour.

III

Coral Musker paused on the metal plates between the restaurant-car and the second-class coaches. She was jarred and shaken by the heave of the train, and for the moment she could not go on to fetch her bag from the compartment where Mr Peters sat with his wife Amy. Away from the rattling metal, the beating piston, she stepped in thought, wrapping a fur coat round her, up the stairs to her flat. On the drawing-room table was a basket of hothouse roses and a card ‘with love from Carl,' for she had decided to call him that. One could not say: ‘I love you, Carleton,' but ‘I adore you, Carl' was easy. She laughed aloud and clapped her hands with the sudden sense that love was a simple affair, made up of gratitude and gifts and familiar jokes, a flat, no work, and a maid.

She began to run down the corridor, buffeted from one side to the other, but caring not at all. I'll go into the theatre three days late, and I shall say: ‘Is Mr Sidney Dunn to be found?' But of course the door-keeper will be a Turk and only mutter through his whiskers, so I'll have to find my own way along the passage to the dressing-rooms, over a litter of fire-hoses, and I shall say ‘Good afternoon' or ‘Bong jour' and put my head into the general dressing-room and say, ‘Where's Sid?' He'll be rehearsing in front, so I'll pop out of the wings at him, and he'll say, ‘Who the hell are you?' beating time while Dunn's Babies dance and dance and dance. ‘Coral Musker.' ‘You're three days late. What the hell do you mean by it?' And I'll say, ‘I just looked in to give notice.' She repeated the sentence aloud to hear how it would sound: ‘I just looked in to give notice,' but the roar of the train beat her bravado into a sound more like a tremulous wail.

‘Excuse me,' she said to Mr Peters, who was drowsing in his corner a little greasy after his meal. His legs were stretched across the compartment and barred her entry. ‘Excuse me,' she repeated, and Mr Peters woke up and apologized. ‘Coming back to us? That's right.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I'm fetching my bag.'

Amy Peters folded along a seat with a peppermint dissolving in her mouth said with sudden venom, ‘Don't speak to her, Herbert. Let her get her bag. Thinks she's too good for us.'

‘I only want my bag. What's getting your goat? I never said a word—'

‘Don't get fussed, Amy,' said Mr Peters. ‘It's none of our business what this young lady does. Have another peppermint. It's her stomach,' he said to Coral. ‘She's got indigestion.'