Savage Coast (21 page)

But, as the street receded around them, they were again looking at the knocker: the charming hand, falling with its fruit against the door.

“The same one!” Peter exclaimed, looking back. The knockers were identical.

They looked down the street, filled with milky light, translucent and lovely upon the housefronts, the colored walls in the impossible morning.

On all the doors fell hands. Reproduced in a dream of sameness, a row of soft iron hands, holding fruit.

THREE WOMEN WERE
at the street corner, at the end of the doors. Two sat on the wide step before the corner house, and the other leaned against the door. As she spoke to them, Helen recognized her. She was the girl who had searched the train for cameras.

“How is the train?” she was saying. “We heard about the money and letter you gave the town. Nobody knew you people felt like that.”

“You certainly frightened a lot of the tourists,” Peter told her. They all laughed together, the girl first in astonishment and disbelief, and then in a kind of pleasure. She had a soft full face, very strong.

“Did you hear that?” she said, laughing, to the other women. “I frightened”—she said, laughing—“all those dressed-up—” laughing, “tourists.” She looked solemnly at Peter and Helen. “They should have known how I felt,” she said, and ducked her head forward with a little giggle.

“How's the fighting?” asked Helen.

“Oh, it's coming,” the girl answered, “the hills are getting cleaner every hour. But the town! It's got to stop soon, or we'll need help with food, and we can't ask: all the towns will be having that.”

“And you let us buy provisions,” Helen said slowly.

“We're not like you,” the girl said, kindly, “we've got our houses. How is that train to sleep in,
hein
?”

“Oh, it's all right,” Peter put in quickly. They all laughed. The other two women said something gaily to the girl. She bobbed her head in the direction of the train.

“What a smell to sleep with!” she said. “These two were saying the same thing; and the first thing this town will do after the war is have one big laundering. We haven't had anything washed since the fighting started.” She pulled out her handkerchief, and made a face. “Full of egg!” she said. “There was a little business of egg-throwing in the beginning.”

Helen got out her handkerchief and offered it, but it wasn't much better. The girl refused. “We'll have a washing soon,” she said. “This will be over very soon in Catalonia. The people know how soon.”

“Many dead?” Peter asked.

“Very many,” she said. “About twenty from the town yesterday. There has never been anything like this.”

It was full morning now.

“Well, good luck on the train,” they said.

“Good luck in the town.”

“Long live the Catalonian Republic,” they said.

The women moved off together down the street, into the beginning blaze. Peter and Helen stood looking after them, their swinging loose hips, their easy shoulders, the gentle back that had frightened the tourists. They turned down the corner, stopping to stare up the brightened olive-hill that was now perfectly quiet, looking over the garden walls, pointing out cactus, unfamiliar trees, clambering plants, a hutch of fat-skinned white rabbits with sensitive spinster lips and dark reflective eyes.

“Their eyes should be ruby, shouldn't they?” Helen asked.

“Not necessarily. Why?”

“I thought—” she laughed at herself. “Someone once told me, and it hurt me, too, that I acted in the country as if I were in a museum.”

“No,” said Peter. “You are very much at home, here. And the train is so definitely home, now. In the tired moment I imagine flying high over the Atlantic; so high that all of America and Spain could be seen in the same coasting view. Nothing could be more familiar now than the train and the people on it.”

“I have that, too.” She was still very rested, covered with the languid flushed dawn, but set square and alert at the same time, ready. Now it was easy, she dared think; even if she were shot, she let herself think, it was all happy for a moment; she was beginning to have a place here.

They walked down. Little trees hung over the low walls, and from one, clusters of rosettes leaned at the wall's edge. Peter reached across and broke one off. The intricate pink buds were as hard as fruit. He held it by the black stem, thrusting it through the loose weave of Helen's sweater, at the breast. She looked down at the close group of curious roses against the limp wool that had been lived in, and at Peter's hand that set it there, fine and white behind the sumptuous rose color.

Shadow washed on them as they reached the underpass, having swung back to the tracks. Over them, they saw through ties the rods and wheels of the last car, a barred Venetian blind of light.

A triple horn. Blowing.

It started them wide awake; as the full car roared down the street, full of men, equipped, thorny with guns. The car blared up the underpass, slowed, stopped opposite them in the faint shadow. A gun pointed directly at the cluster of roses. Helen could feel the channel of flesh behind it, running through her body, shrinking from the gun-bore. Through the open car she was suddenly conscious of a green-and-purple poster glued against the far wall of the underpass: a lurid advertising portrait—Jimmy Cagney, grinning
in green-and-purple, both hands full, the pistols pointed at the car, pointing at her. And the men's hands on the rifles.

Peter stiffened his neck. The tunnel shut them all in together. “
Extranjeros
,” he described. They nodded abruptly, and started off.

“Let's be getting back to the train,” said Peter. There was only one way to go. Up the little street to the Calle Mayor, and around the station. The church was cleaned out now, everything was cleanly destroyed, the streets looked neater, the meat-shop was already open and preparing for the day.

“At six o'clock!” Helen exclaimed.

“Sure; the same thing, everywhere. Haven't you ever seen the east side butchers opening at five in the morning?”

The man was hanging sausages and waved at them.

“Does it mean the strike is over?”

“Maybe, although food wouldn't prove that. Look, I'll go and wake Olive.” They could see the English, trooping up to the café for breakfast. “She may take a bit of waking, if yesterday's a sign. We'll meet you at breakfast.”

“I'll find Hans,” Helen said. She went past Peter's compartment, looking for the one they had found. The view from the corridor window was the landmark. She swung back the door. It had been the compartment next to Peter and Olive; her hat and coat were on the rack, flies were circulating at the mouths of someone's beer bottles, old newspapers were crushed in a corner of the gray bench. Hans was not there. It was the first time Helen saw the room plainly.

Young Mrs. Drew walked along the platform, looking up at the windows. “Hello there!” she called. “Come on to breakfast. The rest of the car is just waking.”

THEY SAT DOWN
in their usual places at the café, and as the late passengers came in, they took their seats confidently, like guests under a formal régime. All the women were lined on one side of the chain of tables. More subdued than before, they drank their coffee
without speaking. Hans sat at the far end of the men's side; as Helen came in with Mrs. Drew, he swung his shoulders toward her seat. She was beside the lady from South America again, who for the first time was looking tired and afraid. She did not think that the train would leave.

“They say that the train may start this morning, or that a lorry will surely come by noon,” she was telling the table.

“But the Hungarians have gone already,” said Hans.

“Gone!” cried the lady, and the Belgian woman echoed her.

“What's that?” the man in Coffee-and-Tea asked, coming in. One of the young ladies was with him. “What's that?” he repeated officiously. He was looking very well set up, and stared at the platinum hair continually with a patronizing look of ownership.

“Something will follow it,” said Hans, repeating the news for his benefit.

“
That's
what we heard during the night,” said the lady.

“Were you well off in the school?” Helen asked.

“On the benches, with those gunnysacks?” the lady laughed. “The bench tied itself into wooden knots under me all night—it's a wonder I missed the lorry, I can't say I slept though!”

Peapack came in with the professor, and the rest of the chorus. They had left out any attempt at makeup, and looked oddly fresh and English. The morning around them still kept its clear, water-quiet quality, although bright light penetrated every crack, and the heat was rising.

The manager was putting the pale coffee and glasses of milk on the table. Coffee-and-Tea was asking for rolls.

“Do you notice,” he said to the rest of the table, “that they're not bleeding us? I should've thought there'd be a rise in food prices immediately. After all, we're foreigners.”

“And they're afraid of a shortage,” said Helen. She thought of the goats and rabbits she had seen. “Even though it's not immediate.”

Coffee-and-Tea went on. The young lady admired. “I mean,
there's no profiteering,” he explained. “The prices are just where they always were. And they could have asked any price from us. In our predicament! Why, do you know, we're better off here—why, we're living here for
nothing
and in a hotel, I wager they'd—”

Hans cut in. “It's a criminal offense,” he said, in German. “I was speaking to the mayor. No prices are allowed to move a centime during the state of war.”

“What's that?” the lady translated.

Peapack looked up from her roll. “But nobody would know what they did, way out here in the country,” she mumbled, and went back to her food.

“That's what I mean,” said the Belgian woman in a cracked voice. “Anything can happen to us here, and nobody would know!”

The table was silent.

Peter and Olive came in, found places at the far end, ordered, and were already eating before there was anything else said. Then, all together, Hans was explaining to the Belgian woman how wrong she was, Helen and Olive speculated about the truck, the professor was outlining a plan for pooling all the money on the train that evening. The chorus had no cash left, and everyone was begging to borrow from the few who had changed their money at the border.

“Of course, let's pool!” said Peter. “On the same principle that the young ladies should stage a rehearsal, if only on that!”

“Definitely,” said the man with the tall wife. “Although we'll surely move by tonight. There's a story I heard that the General Strike is over, and the Giral is now president of the Cortes.”

“How does it touch the fighting?” Peter asked.

“Oh well, if that's how things stand, I've got to learn Spanish,” Coffee-and-Tea said abruptly, pulling out a little handbook. He opened it, breaking its binding. “Here!” he said to the lady. “You'll help me, won't you? Handy little glossary. Here—you be a shoe-store, and I'll ask you in Spanish for three pairs of shoes: one brown, one black, and one patent-leather—”

Terrible clamor broke into the transaction; harsh, foreign, and beautiful, a bell rang, the telephone bell behind the counter, the first bell they had heard in all that time. It struck down their conversation, turned them all toward it, coffee-glasses lifted, roll halfway to the mouth. Telephone! Then the lines, the communications—?

Helen's look flickered, startled, across to Hans's look.

Peter leaned back in his wire chair. He prepared his remark. “If that's for me, I'm not in,” he cracked, and waited for laughter.

There was none. The man with the tall wife forced an unlucky, stiff expression into his eyes. His glare blazed then explosively over Peter's face. “So the lines are up!” he shouted.

“Certainly,” said Peter to the air. “The secretary telephoned to his committee when we took the train letter to him.”

“Even if they are,” commented the lady from South America, in a ravaged voice, “there will be nothing for us. Nobody will help us.”

Drew burst in. He was at the door, sweater out, hair uncombed.

“Oh, come down to the station!” he said. “A couple of men are in from Barcelona, and they're letting the stationmaster out.”

All their chairs went back. Mrs. Drew ran over to her husband, and started down the street ahead of them all.

“What stationmaster?” asked Helen, in confusion. She was watching the Drews. In this moment of sight, she saw the ridge that Mrs. Drew's heel was going to catch, and in a slowmotion catastrophe, saw her go down. The morning was changing: the hysteria here was evident. Hans was firm; the walk with Peter, even, was away from this. But here everything shook and fell in fear and increasing conflict.

Mrs. Drew was helped to her feet. The square bruise on her knee was out and ugly, beginning to bleed. Drew stared in fear at her, and then, in a moment, was charming again, bandaging it with a handkerchief.

Hans was next to Helen. “They're losing their heads,” he said.

“I'll be in the compartment,” Helen said rapidly to him. She went on to the Drews. “Better wash it,” she said.

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Drew. “With what?”

“I don't trust the water in the schoolhouse.”

“I know,” said Drew. “We'll use the Vichy. It won't sting as much as iodine.”

“I've got some extra handkerchiefs,” Helen offered, and remembered the girl who had searched the train.

“Fine! I'll be down for them in a moment.”

Helen hurried ahead.

The two men from Barcelona were sitting in the center of a little knot on the platform, talking to a train official. The stationmaster! Helen called over, “Is the General Strike over?”