Night Journey (11 page)

“But I am here at his special request. You telephoned me.”

Hesitation on the man's face. “Are you one of the scientists? We couldn't get hold of them.”

“I represent Captain Bonini. I was to have attended tomorrow's conference on behalf of the Admiralty.”

“Oh, well.” A piece of anti-aircraft shell hit the railings near us with a clang. “You'd better come in.”

I followed him down a long hall to the foot of the stairs. “ I will inquire,” he said.

Why had they wanted so urgently to get in touch with the scientists to-night? Instead of waiting I followed the man up the stairs.

At the top he was talking with a man who had a stained bandage round his head. They both stared at me. Before they could object I again said who I was. “I was given instructions to take all responsibility for Captain Bonini, just as if he were here. When someone telephoned me——”

“I telephoned,” said the wounded man.

“When you telephoned and suggested I should come——”

“I? I suggested no such thing. You——”

“But you
did
. Did you not say——”

“Oh, there is some mistake.” The man turned away wearily. “Anyway, since you had the courage to come, see Professor Brayda If it pleases you. It can do him no harm.”

“In here,” said the man who had admitted me, opening a door.

Large bedroom, pleasantly furnished in a style fashionable before the First World War. Six people. On the edge of an easy chair a stout elderly woman sat weeping, her hair hanging in grey wisps. Sitting beside the bed was a man whose tonsure showed that when properly dressed he would have worn a csssock; his eyes, nearly closed, showed a thin slit of pale iris; he was intoning in Latin. The sound went on without a break all the time I was in the room.

“Yes, gentlemen,” said a voice. ‘But there are graver potentialities in this than you'd think … If someone can demonstrate … after-effects are quite clear …”

It was the man on the bed who spoke, in a weak slurred voice. Handsome, about sixty, with an imperial and a short moustache. His eyes were open, but there was no comprehension in them. Professor Brayda, the man for whom I had come the length of Europe.…

No one paid attention to me and I approached the bed.

“Concentration of one to a million, with something like a thirty minutes' exposure. You will see from this …”

I glanced at the weeping woman. This was the lowest common denominator of war. Weeping women all over the earth. This was the final insanity. Nationality did not count for much when it came down to individuals. We all had the same measuring stick of sorrow.

“
Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea, quare me repulisti? Et quare tristis incedo dum affligit me inimicus?
?”

One of the three men near the bed suddenly said to me: “ What is it that you want?”

“I represent the Admiralty. Professor Brayda is …?”

“Nothing at all can be done. The wall fell on him.” The speaker turned again to the dying man, taking his wrist between thumb and forefinger. “I am needed urgently elsewhere,” he said, relinquishing the wrist. “ Signora Brayda, you understand? As there is nothing, nothing to be done here I cannot afford to stay. In other circumstances, of course …”

The woman nodded without speaking.

“And I must go too,” said one of the other men. “Listen to that! They are bombing again. They shall pay for this! Have no fear, Signora Brayda, they shall pay for this! You shall be revenged. Their cities shall be burned to the ground!” He followed the physician to the door, “ You are staying, Dr von Riehl?”

I glanced sharply at the third man, who now nodded. “A little while longer,” he said in awkward Italian. “ Outside there is nothing I can do.”

“Very well. I will return, Signora Brayda. God give you strength.”

They went out. The German folded some sheets of paper on which he had been writing and put them in his pocket.

“
Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum
,” came the priest's low voice. “
Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea
.”

I stared sidelong at Dr Amadeus von Riehl, that highly-placed representative of the Third Reich, who was to have attended to-morrow. A man of middle age, tall and big boned, with a flushed colour, hair so close cut as to merge into baldness, spectacles half moon shape. In his button-hole was an
Ehrenzeichen
, a Nazi long-service badge of honour.

The priest stopped his mutterings. “He wishes to speak.”

At once Signora Brayda was beside the bed, wetting the sheet with her tears. Von Riehl was on the the side; I stood at the foot.

But Professor Brayda was now too far gone to recognise us. He was talking, but they were disconnected sentences, quite rational in themselves but out of context. Sometimes it seemed he was beginning a lecture, part of the address he would have given to-morrow. Sometimes he was instructing an assistant. Presently he was silent, and I thought he was gone. Dr Von Riehl, put away his pencil.

But then Brayda began again. He was back with to-morrow's lecture. It seemed that he expected a certain amount of criticism on ethical grounds. He apologised that his conclusions were incomplete, but with Italy at war he felt it necessary and patriotic that his researches so far should be given this airing. The scientist was the uncommitted explorer; what he discovered might be truly put to the service of the state; but in its first stage it was no more and no less than the detached activity of the humanist brain directed towards no specific end-product. One worked, one found, one published or stated the findings: it was for the nation or the state then to decide if or how those findings should be used.

“Our distinguished visitor, Dr von Riehl,” said the injured man, and waited, as if expecting applause. “Representing our comrades in arms, the great German nation … with whom … shoulder to shoulder …”

“This is a great tragedy.” I said in an undertone to the German. “How did it happen?”

He looked at me as if I were an impertinent servant. “As you would expect. Incendiaries on the laboratory fell. Professor Brayda and his chief assistant went to put them out. A high explosive bomb dropped, killing the assistant outright, and Brayda was crushed by a falling wall.”

“Hush,” said the priest. “He is going now.”

The professor's wife leaned forward. His lips were working feebly, but not with any loving message of farewell. I caught the words: “Vesicant … less arsenic content … cannot be used … intended to occupy … impregnation … uncalculated after-effects.” Then he said: “.…
et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris
…”

His lips fluttered and he gave a deep sigh and was still.

The priest crossed himself, and we all followed suit.

“
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
…”

Strange the silence that had fallen. It is the inexplicable silence of death. I turned away. There was nothing more here that concerned the war or the whims of dictators or the vagaries of patriotism.

I quietly left the room.

As I got to the head of the stairs there were voices at the bottom, and I saw Professor Brayda's secretary talking to a self-important but pleasant faced little man in—of all things—a morning suit.

“I ventured out as soon as ever the worst was over. Though even yet it is not safe, and,
Santa Marie
, to drive for six miles with bombs raining down on the roads! … Let me go up, I may be able to help him.”

“I think it is too late,” said the secretary.

“Well, where are the others? You did not tell me over the phone that Emilio Brayda was dying!”

“Three of the others are not yet in Milan and four have not come. Captain Bonini's secretary came; and Dr von Riehl, who was staying near, was hare almost at once …”

“The German? Where is he, then? I will meet him.”

They saw me. The secretary explained who I was. “Professor Brayda is dead,” I said.

Nobody spoke. The newcomer shook his head. “ Oh, the loss! Oh, the loss for Italy!”

The man who had let me in was near by and said: “So far we have gained nothing out of this war. Not even Bizerta! Only bombs.”

“Hush, it is not your place to criticise! The rewards of endurance will come later. I greatly regret my distinguished colleague's death. If Dr von Riehl was present …”

A footstep behind me.

The secretary drew himself up. “Dr von Riehl. Dr Pietro of the University of Turin.”

I moved a little away but not so far as to be unable to hear their conversation.

“A tragic evening, Dr von Riehl. Much, much our worst raid so far.”

“It was nothing to what we have given them. And shall give them in the future. But you have the loss of Herr Professor Brayda unfortunately suffered.”

“This is a very grievous blow to science. His was an original mind, a lonely mind, seldom sharing his ideas. A practical eccentric, one might say. It was fortunate you were staying near. I was delayed; the police advised me it was not safe to leave the hotel.”

“Quite so,” rather contemptuously. “ I understand. But to myself I do not think any good fortune for being at the scene of the bombing.”

“I mean, in the matter of Professor Brayda's researches into the new gases.”

“I am not following.”

“Well, as I have said, his was always a lonely mind. If his chief assistant was killed and his laboratory wrecked, there might have been some risk at least of his latest ideas dying with him.”

Von Riehl took off his half moon glasses and breathed on them and polished them with a cream silk handkerchief.

“Yes, naturally. That too was in Professor Brayda's mind.” To the secretary: “ He spoke to me at some length.”

“Yes, sir, I heard him. You have the notes, sir.”

“I took notes,” said von Riehl. “For It seemed necessary a dying man's every word to take down. It seems from what he said that this idea of his is of an irritant gas of some potential.” He put his spectacles on again, hooking them carefully behind each ear. “So far so good. But in detail he spoke nothing I could understand. His brain, you see, was then wandering. A dying man's delirium.”

“But, sir,” the secretary said, “at first he seemed—completely himself. He spoke, I thought, very clearly, very deliberately, sir. I am not, of course, a scientist, but I have worked for Professor Brayda for three years, and—and …”

Dr von Riehl looked over the top of his glasses at the wounded man. “You will see the notes? Ton would wish to see the notes I took?” He brought some sheets of paper from his pocket and thrust them at the secretary, who flushed and hesitantly accepted them and then without looking at them passed them to Dr Pietro.

The Italian held them near the light and frowned.

“These are—I can make very little of this.” He turned the first sheet over. “Now this is to do with hydro-electric power … and has some reference to deliveries of wolfram …”

Outside a hooter sounded; presumably the all-clear.

Dr Pietro shook his head. “ Incomprehensible. These might be supply problems. But even then much of it—you use a shorthand system, Dr von Riehl?”

“No. But it was jotted down, you understand, in haste. Often his words no sense made. Like a child, delirious.”

The Italian shrugged. “This is too bad. Well … first I must pay my sad respects to his widow. Then the laboratory. What can be salvaged——”

“Have you seen it?” the secretary asked.

“As bad as that? But surely he kept notes of his work? Full notes.”

“Yes, full notes in his office, I know. But that received the direct hit.”

“Anyway we shall try. Perhaps we shall be allowed a small light now. Then in the morning a thorough search. Where did he keep his personal papers?”

“In the house next door, sir. His house. But they were chiefly personal. I did not deal with his scientific findings.”

Dr von Riehl picked up his hat. “He was to me most anxious the information to impart. Unfortunate to fail.”

“Unfortunate indeed,” said Pietro. “I met him at a small scientific party two months ago in Turin and he gave me then the impression that his work was exciting him—even alarming him.”

“Too bad. Too bad.”

I did not want to leave with von Riehl so I slipped out of the house ahead of him. I had been very lucky all through, and one did not want to try one's luck too far.

In only one thing had I been very unfortunate, and that was in out being on the scene half an hour earlier. Then I could have been sure to what extent von Riehl was lying.

I was certain he was lying for two reasons. He had taken the notes from a different pocket from that in which I had seen him put them. And although Brayda's mind may have been confused by the approach of death when I was present, he had spoken sensibly enough to give me the gist of what he had probably told Dr Amadeus von Riehl. And there was nothing nonsensical in that.

There were a number of simple choices I could have made at this time, and of all of them I no doubt chose the unwisest. But I had left my papers and my passport at the hotel, and it seemed to me that the only course was to go back for them and then ring Andrews, so that if he gave me different instructions I could act on them without, if need be, any later return. Of course I knew that my headlong drive to the Faroni works had almost certainly rid me of any followers, and by going back I might run into them again; but in any event I was still officially Edmondo Catania attached to Captain Bonini, and perhaps should have to continue to behave like him.

When I got back to the hotel I paid off the driver and went in. There was no one about, and my bedroom was again untouched, the bed still with the impression of my body on it. Telephone Andrews from here? That seemed unwise. Wait until morning? But Andrews and Dwight were leaving by the early train.