Stamboul Train (23 page)

‘But I haven't a sou.' She turned and waved her hand. ‘Mr Savory, come and share a car. You'll pay my share, won't you?' Mr Savory elbowed his way out of the group of people round the driver. ‘I can't make out what the fellow's saying. Something about a boiler,' he said. ‘Share a car?' he went on more slowly. ‘That'll be rather expensive, won't it?' He eyed the woman carefully and waited, as if he expected her to answer his question; he is wondering, of course, Myatt thought, what he will get out of it. Mr Savory's hesitation, the woman's waiting silence, aroused his competitive instincts. He wanted to unfurl the glory of wealth like a peacock's tail before her and dazzle her with the beauty of his possessions. ‘Sixty dinas,' he said, ‘for the two of you.'

‘I'll just go along,' said Mr Savory, ‘and see the
chef de train.
He may know how long . . .' The first snow began to fall. ‘If you would be my guest,' said Myatt, ‘Miss—'

‘My name's Janet Pardoe,' she said, and drew her fur coat up above her ears. Her cheeks glowed where the snow touched them, and Myatt could follow through the fur the curve of her concealed body and compare it with Coral's thin nakedness. I shall have to take Coral too, he thought. ‘Have you seen,' he said, ‘a girl in a mackintosh, thin, shorter than you?'

‘Oh, yes,' Janet Pardoe said, ‘She got out of the train at Subotica. I know whom you mean. You had supper with her last night.' She smiled at him. ‘She's your mistress, isn't she?'

‘Do you mean she got out with her bag?'

‘Oh no. She had nothing with her. I saw her going across to the station with a customs man. She's a funny little thing, isn't she? A chorus girl?' she asked with polite interest, but her tone conveyed to Myatt a criticism not of the girl but of himself for spending his money to so little advantage. It angered him as much as if she had criticized the quality of his currants; it was a reflection on his discernment and his discretion. After all, he thought, I have spent on her no more than I should spend on you by taking you into Belgrade, and would you pay me back so readily in kind? But the unlikelihood woke desire and bitterness, for this girl was silver polished goods, while Coral was at the best a piece of pretty coloured glass, valued for sentimental reasons; the other had intrinsic worth. She is the kind, he thought, who needs more than money: a handsome body to meet her own lust, and wit and education. I am a Jew, and I have learned nothing except how to make money. But none the less her criticism angered him and made it easier to relinquish the unattainable.

‘She must have missed the train. I'll have to go back for her.' He did not apologize for his broken promise, but went quickly while it was still easy to go.

The merchant was haggling with the driver. He had brought the price down to a hundred dinas, and his own offer had risen to ninety. Myatt was ashamed of his interruption, and of the contempt both men must feel for his hasty unbusinesslike manner. ‘I'll give you a hundred and twenty dinas to take me to Subotica and back.' When he saw the driver was ready to begin another argument he raised his offer. ‘A hundred and fifty dinas if you take me there and back before this train leaves.'

The car was old, battered, and very powerful. They drove into the face of the storm at sixty miles an hour along a road which had not been mended in a lifetime. The springs were broken and Myatt was flung from side to side, as the car fell into holes and climbed and heeled. It groaned and panted like a human being, driven to the edge of endurance by a merciless master. The snow fell faster; the telegraph-poles along the line seemed glimpses of dark space in the gaps of a white wall. Myatt leant over to the driver and shouted in German above the roar of the ancient engine, ‘Can you see?' The car twisted and swerved across the road and the man yelled back at him that there was nothing to fear, they would meet nothing on the road; he did not say that he could see.

Presently the wind rose. The road which had before been hidden from them by a straight wall of snow now rose and fell back on them, like a wave of which the snow was the white stinging spume. Myatt shouted to the driver to go slower; if a tyre bursts now, he thought, we are dead. He saw the driver look at his watch and put his foot upon the accelerator and the ancient engine responded with a few more miles an hour, like one of those strong obstinate old men of whom others say, ‘They are the last. We don't breed that kind now.' Myatt shouted again, ‘Slower,' but the driver pointed to his watch and drove his car to its creaking, unsafe, and gigantic limit of strength. He was a man to whom thirty dinas, the difference between catching and losing the train, meant months of comfort; he would have risked his life and the life of his passenger for far less money. Suddenly, as the wind took the snow and blew it aside, a cart appeared in the gap ten yards away and right in front of them. Myatt had just time to see the bemused eyes of the oxen, to calculate where their horns would smash the glass of the windscreen; an elderly man screamed and dropped his goad and jumped. The driver wrenched his wheel round, the car leapt a bank, rode crazily on two wheels, while the others hummed and revolved between the wind and earth, leant farther and farther over till Myatt could see the ground rise like boiling milk, left the bank, touched two wheels to the ground, touched four, and roared down the road at sixty-five miles an hour, while the snow closed behind them, and hid the oxen and cart and the astonished terrified old man.

‘Drive slower,' Myatt gasped, but the driver turned and grinned at him and waved an untrembling hand.

The officers sitting in a row at the table, the guards at the door, the doctor answering question after question after question receded. Coral Musker fell asleep. The night had tired her; she could not understand a word that was said; she did not know why she was there; she was frightened and beginning to despair. She dreamed first that she was a child and everything was very simple and very certain and everything had an explanation and a moral. And then she dreamed that she was very old and was looking back over her life and she knew everything and she knew what was right and what was wrong, and why this and that happened and everything was very simple and had a moral. But this second dream was not like the first one, for she was nearly awake and she ruled the dream to suit herself, and always in the background the talking went on. In this dream she began to remember from the safety of age the events of the night and the day and how everything had turned out for the best and how Myatt had come back for her from Belgrade.

Dr Czinner too had been given a chair. He could tell from the fat officer's expression that the lie was nearly done with, for he had ceased to pay any attention to the questions, nodding and hiccuping and nodding again. Colonel Hartep kept up the appearance of justice from a genuine kindliness. He had no scruples, but he did not wish to give unnecessary pain. If it had been possible he would have left Dr Czinner until the end some scraps of hope. Major Petkovitch continually raised objections; he knew as well as anyone what the outcome of the trial would be, but he was determined that it should have a superficial legality, that everything should be done in the proper order according to the regulations in the 1929 handbook.

With his hands folded quietly in front of him, and his shabby soft hat on the floor at his feet, Dr Czinner fought them without hope. The only satisfaction he could expect to gain would be the admission of the hollowness of his trial; he was going to be quietly tucked away in earth at the frontier station after dark, without publicity. ‘On the ground of perjury,' he said, ‘I have not been tried. It's outside the jurisdiction of a court martial.'

‘You were tried in your absence,' Colonel Hartep said, ‘and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.'

‘I think you will find that I must still be brought up before a civil judge for sentence.'

‘He's quite right,' said Major Petkovitch. ‘We have no jurisdiction there. If you look up Section 15—'

‘I believe you, Major. We'll waive then the sentence for perjury. There remains the false passport.'

Dr Czinner said quickly, ‘You must prove that I have not become a naturalized British subject. Where are your witnesses? Will you telegraph to the British Ambassador?'

Colonel Hartep smiled. ‘It would take so long. We'll waive the false passport. You agree, Major?'

‘No,' said Major Petkovitch, ‘I think it would be more correct to postpone trial on the smaller charge until sentence—that is to say, a verdict—has been declared on the greater.'

‘It is all the same to me,' said Colonel Hartep. ‘And you, Captain?' The captain nodded and grinned and closed his eyes.

‘And now,' Colonel Hartep said, ‘the charge of conspiring.' Major Petkovitch interrupted, ‘I have been thinking it over. I think “treason” should have been the word used in the indictment.'

‘Treason, then.'

‘No, no, Colonel. It is impossible to alter the indictment now. “Conspiracy” will have to stand.'

‘The maximum penalty—?'

‘Is the same.'

‘Well, then, Dr Czinner, do you wish to plead guilty or not guilty?'

Dr Czinner sat for a moment considering. Then he said, ‘It makes little difference?' Colonel Hartep looked at his watch, and then touched a letter which lay on the table. ‘In the opinion of the court this is sufficient to convict.' He had the air of a man who wishes politely but firmly to put an end to an interview.

‘I have the right, I suppose, to demand that it should be read, to cross-examine the soldier who took it?'

‘Without doubt,' said Major Petkovitch eagerly.

Dr Czinner smiled. ‘I won't trouble you. I plead guilty.' But if this had been a court in Belgrade, he told himself, with the pressmen scribbling in their box, I would have fought every step. Now that he had nobody to address, his mind was flooded with eloquence, words which could stab and words which would have brought tears. He was no longer the angry tongue-tied man who had failed to impress Mrs Peters. ‘The court adjourns,' Colonel Hartep said. In the short silence the wind could be heard wandering like an angry watch-dog round the station buildings. It was a very brief interval, just long enough for Colonel Hartep to write a few sentences on a sheet of paper and push it across the table to his companions to sign. The two guards a little eased their position.

‘The court finds all the prisoners guilty,' Colonel Hartep read. ‘The prisoner Josef Grünlich, is sentenced to a month's imprisonment, after which he will be repatriated. The prisoner, Coral Musker, is sentenced to twenty-four hours' imprisonment and will then be repatriated. The prisoner . . .'

Dr Czinner interrupted: ‘Can I speak to the court before sentence is passed?'

Colonel Hartep glanced quickly at the window: it was shut; at the guards: their disciplined faces were uncomprehending and empty. ‘Yes,' he said.

Major Petkovitch's face flushed. ‘Impossible,' he said. ‘Quite impossible. Regulation 27a. The prisoner should have spoken before the court adjourned.' The Chief of Police looked past the major's sharp profile to where Dr Czinner sat, bunched up on the chair, his hands folded together in grey woollen gloves. An engine hooted outside and ground slowly down the line. The snow whispered at the window. He was aware of the long ribbons on his coat and of the hole in Dr Czinner's glove. ‘It would be most irregular,' Major Petkovitch railed on, while with one hand he absent-mindedly felt for his dog under the table and pulled the beast's ears. ‘I note your protest,' Colonel Hartep said, and then he spoke to Dr Czinner. ‘You know as well as I do,' he said kindly, ‘that nothing you can say will alter the verdict. But if it pleases you, if it will make you any happier to speak, you may.'

Dr Czinner had expected opposition or contempt and his words would have flown to meet them. Kindness and consideration for a moment made him dumb. He envied again the qualities which only confidence and power could give the possessor. Before Colonel Hartep's kindly waiting silence he was tongued-tied. Captain Alexitch opened his eyes and closed them again. The doctor said slowly, ‘Those medals you won in the service of your country during the war. I have no medals, because I love my country too much. I won't kill men because they also love their country. What I am fighting for is not new territory but a new world.' His words halted; there was no audience to bear him up; and he became conscious of the artificiality of his words which did not bear witness to the great love and the great hate driving him on. Sad and beautiful faces, thin from bad food, old before their time, resigned to despair, passed through his mind; they were people he had known, whom he had attended and failed to save. The world was in chaos to leave so much nobility unused, while the great financiers and the soldiers prospered. He said, ‘You are employed to bolster up an old world which is full of injustice and muddle. For people like Vuskovitch, who steal the small savings of the poor, and live for ten years fast, full, stupid lives, then shoot themselves. And yet you are paid to defend the only system which would protect men like him. You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.'

Major Petkovitch said, ‘What the prisoner is saying has no bearing on the case. It is a political speech.'

‘Let him go on.' Colonel Hartep shaded his face with his hand and closed his eyes. Dr Czinner thought that he was feigning sleep to mask his indifference, but he opened them again when Dr Czinner called out to him angrily, ‘How old-fashioned you are with your frontiers and your patriotism. The aeroplane doesn't know a frontier; even your financiers don't recognize frontiers.' Then Dr Czinner saw that something saddened him and the thought that perhaps Colonel Hartep had no desire for his death made him again at a loss for words. He moved his eyes restlessly from point to point, from the map on the wall to the little shelf below the clock full of books on strategy and military history in worn jackets. At last his eyes reached the two guards; one stared past him, paying him no attention, careful to keep his eyes on one spot and his rifle at the correct angle. The other watched him with wide stupid unhappy eyes. That face joined the sad procession through his brain, and he was aware for a moment that he had a better audience than pressmen, that here was a poor man to be converted from the wrong service to the right, and words came to him, the vague and sentimental words which had once appealed to him and would appeal to the other. But he was cunning now with the guile of his class, staring away from the man at the floor and only letting his gaze flicker back once like a lizard's tail. He addressed him in the plural as ‘Brothers.' He urged that there was no shame in poverty that they should seek to be rich, and that there was no crime in poverty that they should be oppressed. When all were poor, no one would be poor. The wealth of the world belonged to everyone. If it was divided, there would be no rich men, but every man would have enough to eat, and would have no reason to feel ashamed beside his neighbour.