Stamboul Train Read online

  He dipped his spoon into the tasteless Julienne; he preferred his food rich, highly seasoned, but full of a harsh nourishment. Out in the dark nothing was visible, except for the occasional flash of lights from a small station, the rush of flame in a tunnel, and always the transparent likeness of his own face, his hand floating like a fish through which water and weeds shine. He was a little irritated by its ubiquity and was about to pull down the blind when he noticed behind his own reflection, the image of the shabby man in the mackintosh who had looked into his compartment. His clothes, robbed of colour and texture and opacity, the ghosts of ancient tailoring, had still a forced gentility; the mackintosh thrown open showed the high stiff collar, the over-buttoned jacket. The man waited patiently for his dinner—so Myatt at first thought, allowing his mind to rest a little from the subtleties of Stein and Mr Eckman—but before the waiter could reach him, the stranger was asleep. His face for a moment disappeared from view as the lights of a station turned the walls of the coach from mirrors to windows, through which became visible a throng of country passengers waiting with children and packages and string bags for some slow cross-country train. With the darkness the face returned, nodding into sleep.

  Myatt forgot him, choosing a medium Burgundy, a Chambertin of 1923, to drink with the veal, though he knew it a waste of money to buy a good wine, for no bouquet could survive the continuous tremor. All down the coach the whimper and whine of shaken glass was audible as the express drove on at full steam towards Cologne. During the first glass Myatt thought again of Stein, waiting in Constantinople for his arrival with cunning or despair. He would sell out, Myatt felt sure, for a price, but another buyer was said to be in the field. That was where Mr Eckman was suspected of playing a double part, of trying to put up the price against his own firm with a fifteen-per-cent commission from Stein as the probable motive. Mr Eckman had written that Moult’s were offering Stein a fancy price for his stock and goodwill; Myatt did not believe him. He had lunched one day with young Moult and casually introduced into their talk the name of Stein. Moult was not a Jew; he had no subtlety, no science of evasion; if he wished to lie, he would lie, but the lie would be confined to the words; he had no knowledge how the untrained hand gives the lie to the mouth. In dealing with an Englishman Myatt found one trick enough; as he introduced the important theme or asked the leading question, he would offer a cigar; if the man was lying, however prompt the answer, the hand would hesitate for the quarter of a second. Myatt knew what the Gentiles said of him: ‘I don’t like that Jew. He never looks you in the face.’ You fools, he would triumph secretly, I know a trick worth two of that. He knew now for example that young Moult had not lied. It was Stein who was lying, or else Mr Eckman.

  He poured himself out another glass. Curious, he thought, that it was he, travelling at the rate of sixty miles an hour, who was at rest, not Mr Eckman, locking up his desk, picking his hat from the rack, going downstairs, chewing, as it were, the firm’s telegram between his sharp prominent teeth. ‘Mr Carleton Myatt will arrive Istanbul 14th. Arrange meeting with Stein.’ In the train, however fast it travelled, the passengers were compulsorily at rest; useless between the walls of glass to feel emotion, useless to try to follow any activity except of the mind; and that activity could be followed without fear of interruption. The world was beating now on Eckman and Stein, telegrams were arriving, men were interrupting the threads of their thought with speech, women were holding dinner-parties. But in the rushing reverberating express, noise was so regular that it was the equivalent of silence, movement was so continuous that after a while the mind accepted it as stillness. Only outside the train was violence of action possible, and the train would contain him safely with his plans for three days; by the end of that time he would know quite clearly how to deal with Stein and Mr Eckman.

  The ice and the dessert over, the bill paid, he paused beside his table to light a cigar and thus faced the stranger and saw how again he had fallen into sleep between the courses; between the departure of the veal, au Talleyrand, and the arrival of the iced pudding he had fallen victim to what must have been a complete exhaustion.

  Under Myatt’s gaze he woke suddenly. ‘Well?’ he asked. Myatt apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’ The man watched him with suspicion, and something in the sudden change from sleep to a more accustomed anxiety, something in the well-meaning clothes betrayed by the shabby mackintosh, touched Myatt to pity. He presumed on their earlier encounter. ‘You’ve found a compartment all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Myatt said impulsively: ‘I thought perhaps you were finding it hard to rest. I have some aspirin in my bag. Can I lend you a few tablets?’ The man snapped at him, ‘I have everything I want. I am a doctor.’ From habit Myatt watched his hands, thin with the bones showing. He apologized again with a little of the excessive humility of the bowed head in the desert. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you. You looked ill. If there is anything I can do for you—’

  ‘No. Nothing. Nothing.’ But as Myatt went, the other turned and called after him, ‘The time. What is the right time?’ Myatt said, ‘Eight-forty. No, forty-two,’ and saw the man’s fingers adjust his watch with care for the exact minute.

  As he reached his compartment the train was slowing down. The great blast furnaces of Liège rose along the line like ancient castles burning in a border raid. The train lurched and the points clanged. Steel girders rose on either side, and very far below an empty street ran diagonally into the dark, and a lamp shone on the café door. The rails opened out, and unattached engines converged on the express, hooting and belching steam. The signals flashed green across the sleepers, and the arch of the station roof rose above the carriage. Newsboys shouted, and a line of stiff sedate men in black broadcloth and women in black veils waited along the platform; without interest, like a crowd of decorous strangers at a funeral, they watched the line of first-class coaches pass them, Ostend—Cologne—Vienne—Belgrade—Istanbul—the slip-coach for Athens. Then with their string bags and their children they climbed into the rear coaches, bound perhaps for Pepinster or Verviers, fifteen miles down the line.

  Myatt was tired. He had sat up till one o’clock the night before discussing with his father, Jacob Myatt, the affairs of Stein, and he had become aware as never before, watching the jerk of the white beard, of how affairs were slipping away from the old ringed fingers clasped round the glass of warm milk. ‘They never pick off the skin,’ Jacob Myatt complained, allowing his son to take the spoon and skim the surface clear. There were many things he now allowed his son to do, and Page counted for nothing; his directorship was a mere decoration awarded for twenty years’ faithful service as head clerk. I am Myatt, Myatt and Page, he thought without a tremor at the idea of responsibility; he was the first born and it was the law of nature that the father should resign to the son.

  They had disagreed last night over Eckman. Jacob Myatt believed that Stein had deceived the agent, and his son that the agent was in league with Stein. ‘You’ll see,’ he promised, confident in his own cunning, but Jacob Myatt only said, ‘Eckman’s clever. We need a clever man there.’

  It was no use, Myatt knew, settling down to sleep before the frontier at Herbesthal. He took out the figures that Eckman proposed as a basis for negotiation with Stein, the value of the stock in hand, the value of the goodwill, the amount which he believed Stein had been offered by another purchaser. It was true that Eckman had not named Moult in so many words; he had only hinted at the name and he could deny the hint. Moult’s had never previously shown interest in currants; the nearest they had come to it was a brief flirtation with the date market. Myatt thought: I can’t believe these figures. Stein’s business is worth that to us, even if we dumped his stock into the Bosphorus, because we should gain a monopoly; but for any other firm it would be the purchase of a rocky business beaten by our competition.

  The figures began to swim before his eyes in a mist of sleep. Ones, sevens, nines became Mr Eckman’s small sharp tee
th; sixes, fives, threes re-formed themselves as a trick film into Mr Eckman’s dark polished eyes. Commissions in the form of coloured balloons floated across the carriage, growing in size, and he sought a pin to prick them one by one. He was brought back to full wakefulness by the sound of footsteps passing and re-passing along the corridor. Poor devil, he thought, seeing a brown mackintosh disappear past the window and two hands clasped.

  But he felt no pity for Mr Eckman, following him back in fancy from his office to his very modern flat, into the shining lavatory, the silver-and-gilt bathroom, the bright cushioned drawing-room where his wife sat and sewed and sewed, making vests and pants and bonnets and socks for the Anglican Mission: Mr Eckman was a Christian. All along the line blast furnaces flared.

  The heat did not penetrate the wall of glass. It was bitterly cold, an April night like an old-fashioned Christmas card glittering with frost. Myatt took his fur coat from a peg and went into the corridor. At Cologne there was a wait of nearly forty-five minutes; time enough to get a cup of hot coffee or a glass of brandy. Until then he could walk, up and down, like the man in the mackintosh.

  While there was nothing worth his notice in the outside air he knew who would be walking with him in spirit the length of the corridor, in and out of lavatories, Mr Eckman and Mr Stein. Mr Eckman, he thought, trying to coax some hot water into a gritty basin, kept a chained Bible by his lavatory seat. So at least he had been told. Large and shabby and very ‘family’ amongst the silver-and-gilt taps and plugs, it advertised to every man and woman who dined in his flat Mr Eckman’s Christianity. There was no need of covert allusions to Church-goings, to the Embassy chaplain, merely a ‘Would you like a wash, dear?’ from his wife, his own hearty questions to the men after the coffee and the brandy. But of Stein, Myatt knew nothing.

  ‘What a pity you are not getting out at Buda, as you are so interested in cricket. I’m trying—oh, so hard—to get up two elevens at the embassy.’ A man with a face as bleak and white and impersonal as his clerical collar was speaking to a little rat of a man who crouched opposite him, nodding and becking. The voice, robbed of its characteristic inflexions by closed glass, floated out into the corridor as Myatt passed. It was the ghost of a voice and reminded Myatt again of Stein speaking over two thousand miles of cable, hoping that he would one day soon have the honour of entertaining Mr Carleton Myatt in Constantinople, agreeable, hospitable, and anonymous.

  He was passing the non-sleeping compartments in the second class; men with their waistcoats off sprawled along seats, blue about the chin; women with hair in dusty nets, like the string bags on the racks, tucked their skirts tightly round them and fell in odd shapes over the seats, large breasts and small thighs, small breasts and large thighs hopelessly confused. A tall thin woman woke for a moment to complain: ‘That beer you got me. Shocking it was. I can’t keep my stomach quiet.’ On the seat opposite, the husband sat and smiled; he rubbed one hand over his rough chin, squinting sideways at the girl in the white mackintosh, who lay along the seat, her feet against his other hand. Myatt paused and lit a cigarette. He liked the girl’s thin figure and her face, the lips tinted enough to lend her plainness an appeal. Nor was she altogether plain; the smallness of her features, of her skull, her nose and ears, gave her a spurious refinement, a kind of bright prettiness, like the window of a country shop at Christmas full of small lights and tinsel and coloured common gifts. Myatt remembered how she had gazed at him down the length of the corridor and wondered a little of whom he had reminded her. He was grateful that she had shown no distaste, no knowledge of his uneasiness in the best clothes that money could buy.

  The man who shared her seat put his hand cautiously on her ankle and moved it very slowly up towards her knee. All the time he watched his wife. The girl woke and opened her eyes. ‘How cold it is,’ Myatt heard her say and knew from her elaborate and defensive friendliness that she was aware of the hand withdrawn. Then she looked up and saw him watching her. She was tactful, she was patient, but to Myatt she had little subtlety; he knew that his qualities, the possibilities of annoyance which he offered, were being weighed against her companion’s. She wasn’t looking for trouble: that was the expression she would use; and he found her courage, quickness, and decision admirable. ‘I think I’ll have a cigarette outside,’ she said, fumbling in her bag for a packet; then she was beside him.

  ‘A match?’

  ‘Thanks.’ And moving out of view of her compartment they stared together into the murmuring darkness.

  ‘I don’t like your companion,’ Myatt said.

  ‘One can’t pick and choose. He’s not too bad. His name’s Peters.’

  Myatt for a moment hesitated. ‘Mine’s Myatt.’

  ‘Mine’s Coral—Coral Musker.’

  ‘Dancing?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘American?’

  ‘No. Why did you think so?’

  ‘Something you said. You’ve got a bit of the accent. Ever been there?’

  ‘Ever been there? Of course I have. Six nights a week and two afternoons. The Garden of the Country Club, Long Island; Palm Beach; A Bachelor’s Apartment on Riverside Drive. Why, if you can’t talk American you don’t stand a chance in an English musical comedy.’

  ‘You’re clever,’ said Myatt gravely, releasing Eckman and Stein from his consideration.

  ‘Let’s move,’ the girl said, ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘Not after that crossing. It’s too cold, and that fellow’s fingering my legs the whole time.’

  ‘Why don’t you smack his face?’

  ‘Before we’ve reached Cologne? I’m not making trouble. We’ve got to live together to Budapest.’

  ‘Is that where you are going?’

  ‘Where he is. I’m going all the way.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Myatt, ‘on business.’

  ‘Well, we are neither of us going for pleasure, are we?’ she said with a touch of gloom. ‘I saw you when the train started. I thought you were someone I knew.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘How do I know? I don’t trouble to remember what a boy calls himself. It’s not the name the post office knows him by.’ There seemed to Myatt something patient and courageous in her quiet acceptance of deceit. She flattened against the window a face a little blue with cold; she might have been a boy avidly examining the contents of a shop, the clasp-knives, the practical jokes, plate lifters, bombs that smell, buns that squeak, but all that was offered her was darkness and their own features. ‘Do you think it will get any warmer,’ she asked, ‘as we go south?’ as though she thought herself bound for a tropical climate. ‘We don’t go far enough for it to make much difference,’ he said. ‘I’ve known snow in Constantinople in April. You get the winds down the Bosporus from the Black Sea. The cut round the corners. The city’s all corners.’

  ‘I hope the dressing-rooms are warm,’ she said. ‘You don’t wear enough on the stage to keep the chill out. How I’d like something hot to drink.’ She leant with blue face and bent knees against the window. ‘Are we near Cologne? What’s the German for coffee?’ Her expression alarmed him. He ran down the corridor and closed the only open window. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  She said slowly with half-closed eyes, ‘That’s better. You’ve made it quite stuffy. I’m warm enough now. Feel me.’ She lifted her hand; he put it against his cheek and was startled by the heat. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Go back to your carriage and I’ll try and find some brandy for you. You are ill.’ ‘It’s only that I can’t keep warm,’ she explained. ‘I was hot and now it’s cold again. I don’t want to go back. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘You must have my coat,’ he began reluctantly, but before he had time to limit his unwilling offer with ‘for a while’ or ‘until you are warm,’ she slid to the floor. He took her hands and chafed them, watching her face with helpless anxiety. It seemed to him suddenly of vital necessity that he should aid her. Watching her dance upon the stage, or stand
in a lit street outside a stage-door, he would have regarded her only as game for the senses, but helpless and sick under the dim unsteady lamp of the corridor, her body shaken by the speed of the train, she woke a painful pity. She had not complained of the cold; she had commented on it as a kind of necessary evil, and in a flash of insight he became aware of the innumerable necessary evils of which life for her was made up. He heard the monotonous tread of the man whom he had seen pass and re-pass his compartment and went to meet him. ‘You are a doctor? There’s a girl fainted.’ The man stopped and asked reluctantly, ‘Where is she?’ Then he saw her past Myatt’s shoulder. His hesitation angered the Jew. ‘She looks really ill,’ he urged him. The doctor sighed. ‘All right, I’m coming.’ He might have been nerving himself to an ordeal.

  But the fear seemed to leave him as he knelt by the girl. He was tender towards her with the impersonal experienced tenderness of a doctor. He felt her heart and then lifted her lids. The girl came back to a confusing consciousness; she thought that it was she who was bending over a stranger with a long shabby moustache. She felt pity for the experience which had caused his great anxiety, and her solicitude went out to the friendliness she imagined in his eyes. She put her hands down to his face. He’s ill, she thought, and for a moment shut out the puzzling shadows which fell the wrong way, the globe of light shining from the ground. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, trying to remember how it was that she had come to his help. Never, she thought, had she seen a man who needed help more.