Night Journey (2 page)

I felt frozen, unable to think it out.

“May I be allowed to write to my sister this time?”

“Oh, yes, you'll find a big improvement in conditions generally in the camps. Last time it was emergency measures for everyone. And I don't—and if nothing too bad happens, I don't suppose they'll keep you much after the end of September. It's got to come—the invasion, if it comes at all this year—has got to come within the next three weeks.” Inspector Donnington rose.

“And my work?” I said, in exasperation. “It has already been delayed by months, and I assure you it's not useless.”

He shook his head. “I'm afraid it'll have to wait for your release, sir. We can't very well provide you with a laboratory in the camp, can we? But if it's papers you want—if it's anything we can do in the camp—I'll be very happy to pass on instructions to your sister. We'll see that anything she sends will reach yon.”

“I'm obliged.” I stared at the bright shafts of sunlight on the papers on his desk. They even lit up my photograph, the one taken by the Viennese security police, in April 1938. “I question if they will really risk the invasion while you—while we—still have some control of the air.”

“That we don't know. You will have seen that the best predictions date it for the day after to-morrow.”

“In that case,” I said, “I should be more use with a rife—if you have one to spare—than locked away in an internment camp.”

He looked at me narrowly

“I daresay you would. But I'm afraid this is a case where ninety-nine innocent people have to suffer because of the odd black sheep who may be among them.”

So much has happened since then that it is quite hard to remember just what those early days were like. The danger of invasion was acute; later it became chronic and therefore in a sense a commonplace. So memories are overlaid and one tends to forget the apprehension and
qui vive
of a whole nation.

Yet for me as a part-alien, even as a part-pacifist, there had been a curious exhilaration in the thought. One might die. But one might live gloriously. Whatever happened there would be no more shame. So I took my first internment with great bitterness. It seemed like a sudden stab in the back—the uttermost insult.

Of course I should say at once that physical conditions had not been too bad even in May. They were Utopian compared with the treatment we should have received in the countries of our various origins. It was the psychological shock that hurt, the incredible moral insult of being herded with men of pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist sympathies. In the matter of a few hours there were arguments, quarrels, open fights amongst us: factions and cliques, bitter enmities grew overnight. An old Italian journalist who occupied the bunk next to mine said one day:

“Patience, my boy, that is what is needed for us all now. We of our type who have suffered and striven for what I suppose we can, without a sneer, still call democracy … who have become penniless and lonely and outcast … who have come to live in one of the very few lands—the last in Europe, almost—which still stand for the things we hold.… We feel betrayed because the people here seem, in the final crisis, to have turned against us.… But patience, it was bound to happen after all the other betrayals. A little time and we shall be free again.”

I grew very much to admire old Gentile Farino. Unfortunately his freedom came earlier than it should have done, for he was transported to Canada on the
Arandora Star
, and when she was torpedoed he went down with her.

But this time … this time I had no cause at all to complain of being herded with Nazi sympathisers. I had no cause to complain of being herded with anyone, because I was kept only one night in Worcester and then was transferred to a quiet place near Hereford where the buildings were hardly finished and the number housed was so few we could have had a hut each to ourselves. All the same I fretted and fumed at the waste of time, the boredom, the inability of officialdom to see into my brain and discover that it held no ambition more passionately than the defeat of the dictators. I prayed for rain with the ardour of a farmer in a drought, because it was obvious that the danger of invasion had to be considered imminent while the weather held. But each day was as bright as the last. My sister wrote that she had again appealed to the Council of Austrians and was determined to make a public fuss even if they did not. I wrote back to tell her to do nothing of the sort, since the probable reaction of a government already overburdened with work would be to intern her as well.

Six days went, and then I was called out one morning and conducted by a sentry to a fine old Queen Anne house I had glimpsed before, set among beeches and not yet quite surrounded by Nissen huts. The house was empty, but in an ante-room off the panelled hall another interviewer was waiting.

Star and crown of a lieutenant-colonel; a slender, blue-eyed soldier with a limp and hair thinning and greying. Air of authority so tactfully concealed that you imagined he hardly ever had to exercise it. I knew his type, the introspective man of action that the British Army—and the Austrian Army—sometimes throws up. The direct opposite of the Blimp, and rarer, but just as much a product of the same society.

“Good morning. Do sit down, Dr Mencken. Whisky and soda?”

“Thank you.” Somewhat surprised at this. “ But weak please. I seldom drink.”

“That's all to the good, Isn't it,” he said, obscurely. “ Lovely house this; maybe you've seen over it?”

“No.”

“Did you notice that overmantel in the hall? Grinling Gibbons or his school. Must have been brought here, as the honse isn't old enough.”

“I will look as I go out.”

“Good to be able to live in a place like this. Doubt if anyone will be able to afford to after the war.”

“So long as there is an ‘after'.”

“Yes. Yes.” He handed me a glass and now limped over to an armchair opposite me. “I expect you're feeling sore about your re-internment, aren't yon?”

I smiled bleakly. “ Not happy, shall we say.”

“That's diplomatic anyway.… You know, the military have had to stand up to quite a few brick-bats over this internment question, Dr Mencken. Questions in Parliament concerning the limitations of the military mind and what happens when the War Office is in full cry. Oh, there's some truth in it, I won't deny. But I'd like you to know that the wholesale internment which took place in May was only finally decided on in the interests of the aliens themselves.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It's an old story, that the refugee alien is not always a free agent. From 1935 to 1938 hundrerds of men and women were granted permission to leave Germany and enter France and then told privately before they left that their permits were not in order. They were then kept in touch with the Fatherland under constant threat of being exposed and forced to return.” The colonel sipped his whisky. “And any number of refugees of unimpeachable character and long records of oppression in their own country have betrayed the country that accepted them because of fear for their relatives. If you do not obey the commands of the Führer your mother or your brother or your sister or your wife will disappear into Auschwitz. Many cases have come to our notice in the last few months alone.”

“I see that. But I think you must know that I have no near relative in Austria whom I need fear for.”

“Certainly we do—and did. But to intern one alien to protect him so that he cannot obey the Nazis is not usually quite sufficient. Enough people must be interned with him so that no suspicion arises that he has told the truth to the authorities. Otherwise the threatened relative may suffer all the worse.”

“It's obliging of you to explain this. I see the difficulties …”

“But this does not explain your arrest last week?”

“I should like to think it did.”

He laughed. “ You're a younger man than I expected to meet, Dr Mencken.”

“I'm thirty-one. You must know that.”

“I do. I mean in manner. For your academic distinction, thirty-one is in any case very young.”

“It somewhat depends how you start. Most people spend seven years as children on general subjects; a liberal education they call it. I started very early on what interested me. Therefore I knew quite a bit on some subjects—on others virtually nothing at all.”

He leaned back in his big leather chair—so slim that another could have sat beside him. “Would it surprise you to know that of the seventy-three thousand three hundred Germans and Austrians in this country, you are the only one who was re-arrested last week?”

I shifted uneasily. All this friendliness and lack of ceremony.… What action of mine recently could possibly have been misinterpreted? That letter I wrote to Giiligan at the Royal Society? My demands to the electricians for extra power points? My telephone call to Leeds?

He was watching me closely. “ This work you are doing. It's of national importance, I understand.”

“Among other things, I am working on a process for utilising sisal in submarines.”

“Would you say that is of vital national importance?”

“I don't quite understand. All such processes are of exceptional value in wartime. This not more so than many others. Not less so either.”

“Would you consider yourself indispensable to the country's effort—say for a couple of months? I understand there are other men working on the same idea. Professor Martin, for instances of Edinburgh.”

“You know him? Then you must know as much about all this as I do.”

“You think Professor Martin is likely to succeed independently of yon?”

“I have not seen him since May. He's a clever man and has better facilities.”

“More whisky, Dr Mencken?”

“Thank you; I've not finished this yet.”

He looked out of the window, his blue eyes [??? Page No.16] as if temporarily he was thinking of something else. “Would it be true to say you were an expert on the subject of poison gas?”

I thought this out. The alien problem, sisal waste, and now gas. Even for a chat over after-dinner port it seemed a little disconnected. “No. I would not call myself anything like an expert.”

“But you gave a course of three lectures on various gases at London University the first winter you were here.”

“Those,” I said, “were ionised gases.”

He paused. “I didn't know. I thought …”

“I'm sorry.”

There was nothing absent-minded about his eyes now. Someone was going to get into big trouble for that mistake.

“Those lectures,” I said. “In any case they were not very profound. I was invited to give them because I had been a friend and confidant of Kaufmann in Vienna. I was reporting some of the original ideas of a great man. There was little original of my own in them. And anyway—as you will know—that is really a branch of atomic physics.”

He had risen and gone to his desk, picked up a paper and read through it. “ But I understand from this that you did some work on poison gases when you were in Vienna.”

“Ah, yes, a little, when I was younger. But when I was twenty-six I gave all that up.”

“Why?”

“By then many of us in Austria could see the writing on the wall. As an Austrian, Hitler would never be content without possessing Austria. If he did take it I knew I would not want to stay. (Always, of course, I have been half English in sentiment.) But if my work there was such that it could contribute to military knowledge I knew I should not be allowed to leave. So I turned to other things.”

“Very far sighted of you.” He was still staring at the paper.

“You see,” I said, “in spite of having avoided a liberal education I am really rather a jack of all trades. It is not really the way to achieve eminence.”

“Suppose,” he said, “you were to see a gas manufactured in a laboratory, and demonstrated; would you be able to tell in what way it differed from a known gas, and—and recognise and remember the elements going to its composition?”

“Oh, yes. If I had full access to the laboratory.”

He nodded, “Perhaps it's time we stopped beating about the bush, Dr Mencken.”

I said I thought it was.

“You have been very patient. But in a letter to your sister—I'm so sorry but these things are always intercepted—in a letter to your sister written last Satuday you complain rather bitterly of this country's lack of confidence in your patriotism. I think we can prove to you now that we have a very real confidence in your patriotism—if you'll allow us to make use of it.”

“I hope I can.”

“Well … it's no sinecure that we offer.”

Outside, some machine was at work. I think it was a reaper, cutting and gathering the mixed corn that grew on the one-time lawn in front of the house.

“My name is Brown,” he said. “ I belong to the Special Branch of the British Intelligence Department. A little while ago we had a word from the head of our northers Italian organisation, appealing for extra help for a job which had come their way and asking if we could supply it. This we have been considering. The help they need is only one man. But unless that man conforms to certain definite requirements he would be better not sent.”

I sipped my whisky. Now I needed it. “ I conform to these requirements?”

He smiled suddenly. “ That, for the last two weeks, we have been trying to decide. The requirements are that he must be completely trustworthy, and able to keep his mouth shut if things go right—or still more if they go wrong. He must speak Italian like a native and know German too. And he
must
be a first-class chemist. That is the great difficulty.”

“With some knowledge on the subject of poison gases?”

“As you say.”

“Anything else?” I asked with a touch of sarcasm.