The Europe That Was (4 page)

The day passed in intolerable nervousness. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena the Greek were not accustomed to be idle, to be without some vague and nearly objectless occupation. They rose usually at midday, fiddled with their breakfasts and complexions for a couple of hours. practised a few dance steps, showed themselves in whatever public place was temporarily in fashion, then passed the evening with some admirer until it was time to go to work. Now, however, with Gino's island ruined and the season nearly over, there was nothing to be gained by visiting the town, nor had they the heart for it. They remained in their rooms or on the balcony, quarrelling, screaming, in tears, demoralized.

At sunset Gino shut the wooden doors on the gangway to his island and put up a notice of
CLOSED
. Then he took his boat and lamp and fish spear and disappeared into the darkness of the bay. He said nothing whatever to the girls, accepting their forced occupation of his island without resentment, without pity, without helpfulness.

The soft splash of Gino's oars recalled them to sanity. They stared after him into the calm blackness of the sea. They could hear him; they could see the twin phosphorescent puddles of the oars receding into the distance, but the boat itself was invisible. Their fear of this isolation was extreme. All quarrels forgotten, they drew together on the balcony. The lights of the little town glittered half a mile away. The villas were nearer, but their lit windows were so scattered over the coastal plain that they only increased the sense of loneliness. In the girls' minds, and indeed in fact, they were castaways; it mattered nothing that their island was joined to all Asia by only a dozen planks.

They crept downstairs and turned up the lights in the kitchen. All day they had not had the energy to eat. There were bread and vegetables and a few eggs. Fish there was none, for Gino never kept it overnight. Miriam again turned cook. They ate in silence, exhausted and hopeless.

The effort of cooking and feeding did them good. Their washing-up extended itself spontaneously from the plates to Gino's revolting kitchen. They were six women who had seldom had goods of their own to
scrub and polish. Not one of them would have done a stroke of work for Gino, but this was for themselves. The silence, the closed door, the sea around and under impressed on them that it was for themselves.

By morning the unconscious, communal spirit of discipline was dead. No one made breakfast. They drifted down to the café and drifted back into the bedrooms to continue the interminable discussions. At least they were all calmer. One of the commisionaires had a touch of sunburn; it made her pudgy face look firm and elastic.

At ten Tatiana took command and persuaded Miriam to the kitchen. It was clean as they had left it. On the table were two flat baskets, a yard in diameter, piled with fish, among them a dozen fat, expensive soles. Tatiana, pacified by this industry, observed that Gino had eaten nothing. Outside on the jetty his indifferent back was towards them, hunched over the rod. Patronizingly she offered him a cup of coffee and the last of the bread. He accepted without pleasure or surprise and thanked her. His words were formal Levantine courtesies meaning nothing: phrases by which two human beings could converse for minutes without the need of any thought at all. She asked him what to do with the fish. Gino shrugged his shoulders. If people came to eat, they ate it; if they didn't, nobody ate it. He landed a red mullet and paid no further attention to Tatiana.

For all their working lives Tatiana and Miriam had depended on manager or proprietor. His was the responsibility, theirs the obedience. Even Tatiana's Russian liveliness was purely professional. Her plan for living was to make the clients spend in return for her wages and commission. Her future was a succession of engagements at third-class cabarets; her firm faith, founded on nothing, was that they would become first-class cabarets before she was too old.

The boss of the moment might be inefficient or exacting, lecherous or contemptuous, broke or miserly or generous; but the boss he was. He did not merely live as they between four walls from nine in the evening to three in the morning. He was in the mysterious outer world of contracts, arrangements, recommendations. Looking at Gino's back, it was evident to Tatiana and Miriam that they were for the first time without a boss and that Gino was in their own world of helpless resignation. He might as well have been the ghost of a fisherman sitting outside his own back door.

Even this understanding of Gino did not move them to any constructive plan. Indeed their angry chatter reached new depths of futility. All former schemes, however wild, had depended on Gino being forced to do something. They had at last realized that nothing would force him to do anything.

It was the fish that made the plan. There it lay, in quantity, luxurious. Alongside the baskets was the empty bread bin. Without need of imagination, the economic problem solved itself. Two of the
commissionaires put on aprons of sacking and Gino's shoes—for their own had the high heels of their vocation—and shuffled off to the town with the fish baskets upon their heads. They returned at midday, weary, humiliated, miserable, but with bread and groceries and money over. Fresh sole was fifty piastres a kilo on the market. The girls were all ignorant of local commerce, and amazed.

Day after day passed while they ate and slept well, and fussed frantically to get themselves away. Gino wandered through and among them on his own plane, occasionally cooking, always unseeing and, after a while, unnoticed. Those who could write with ease wrote letters to the Alexandria agency, to cabaret proprietors in Athens and Istanbul, to old admirers, to anyone they had ever known with money to lend or employment to offer. The only result of all that fevered, impractical planning, that see-saw of hope, those hysterical visits to the post office to insist that letters had been lost, was that Elena the Greek was lent a pound by her sister. They tried to plan how it should be spent, but the island imposed its own solution. The pound immediately went on soap and a washtub.

The town returned to its winter peace. Gino and his girls had provided a week of scandal, conjecture and conversation, and a week was all they were worth. Nobody bothered them. They bothered nobody. On the island they were brown, healthy and rested, but neither knew nor felt the improvement. They were dull with fear of poverty, illness and starvation. When they thought, they had no hope; but they had little time to think. The island was their taskmaster.

Organisation grew though they intended none. Tatiana, by reason of her education, was general manager. Miriam was assistant cook. Elena the Greek, who had a passion for neatness perhaps inherited from that unknown Chinese ancestor, expended it upon the crusted dirt of Gino's hidden corners. Two of the commissionaires were becoming known in a more friendly fish market. The third was washerwoman. To all the girls their life seemed inactive and frustrated, for they were unaware of their achievement. Their only comfort was the superb fish supper that Gino often made for them. He seemed to enjoy their appreciation. He said nothing, but his body undulated graciously as he set the dish upon the table.

At the end of October the first storm roared down the Mediterranean and over the town. With Gino's island it merely played, for wind and sea were diverted by the sheltering promontory to the north. The wind was neither cold nor convincing; it whistled merrily round the ill-fitting eaves and slammed the bedroom doors. The sea, excitedly sucking and splashing, managed to wet three steps of Gino's jetty that had been dry all the summer. Gino lit the iron stove in the café, packing it with cut driftwood. Where the plates were thin with age and the blacking worn away the stove glowed red and comforting.

Wind, sea and fire emphasized the passing of time. Tatiana revolted. She shouted that they could not stay, that winter was coming, that this could not go on. She crashed a plate upon the floor and earned a reproachful look from Elena. They all listened while she cried and cursed; they had no answer to her repeated question of what they were to do. They looked at her, disconcerted by her vehemence as if she were destroying some feminine, delicately poised, illusive truth. In the silence the washerwoman spoke. ‘Here we eat,' she said.

The comment was unanswerable. It referred to the present, that present in which the commissionaires had learned through timeless suffering to exist; yet in its profundity was hidden an illimitable future. If they wished, on Gino's island they might eat for ever. The warmth of the stove blended serenely with the warmth of the food within them. The storm was for others, not for them. Their dreams changed in that moment: those vague intentions which supported the lonely, personal life of each battered individual. They were back in the field of women—of eagerness and the possibility of love, of industry and of abounding health. They even had a willing servant who asked only to remain, unresisting upon his island. Impulsively Tatiana began the new world by a single act of creation. She rose from the table to give Gino orders for the morrow.

ROMANIA

SABRES ON THE SAND

The rules of the game of honour were really, you know, common sense. Like all conventions, they were ridiculous but prevented anarchy. I accepted them with a casual amusement which should have enabled me to handle them easily. Yet I am still bothered by the memory of an act which would have been condemned as unforgivably dishonourable by all my contemporaries. That it was for the sake of my sister made no difference—made it worse, if anything.

I must take you back to musical comedy of the year 1923. But it was not on any stage; it was the life of every week. Or, not exaggerating at all, the life of once a month. My sister and I were then Romanians. Before 1918 we had been Hungarians. As a Count of the Empire, I never really felt that I was either. So Magda and I took to our new nationality with decent resignation. We were flat broke, but one could have a lot of formal fun in Bucharest on next to nothing a year.

We had been asked to the royal ball at the Military Club. It was a scented night of late spring, but nerves were too edgy for enchantment. Chandeliers, which had only just been adapted from gas to electricity, gave too hard a light. The officers were made aware that cheap cloth of pale blue and gold was no more effective in a ball-room than it had been in battle. The women, wearing the short and unceremonious frocks of 1923 for the first formal occasion, felt disarmed—as if, Magda said, they were waltzing in their slips.

Only the few foreigners, dressed in the black-and-white of secure convention, were enjoying themselves without a care. They were mostly diplomats, but there were a few socially acceptable representatives of industry and finance—among, them, Rob Tymson. He was five years older than I, but I felt responsible for him. When I saw that he was contentedly knocking back champagne at the bar and exchanging pleasant reminiscences of sudden death in the St Quentin sector of the western front with a French banker called Delorme, I went off and danced.

My first premonition of something wrong was half an hour later. Magda and Rob were fox-trotting together, and everybody was trying hard not to stare at them. I thought that perhaps he had proposed at last and then committed the crime of kissing her in public. But it was not that. When I had managed to draw them unobtrusively out of the
crowd and on to a quiet balcony, Magda said: ‘Rob is going to fight a duel.'

Well, it was just possible. If in the mood, Rob could play his part in our local comedy as flamboyantly as the British colonel in attendance upon Prince Florizel. But he was a typical Englishman, tall, fair, full of responsibility and common sense. He had come out to Bucharest for three weeks to sign a government contract on behalf of his family steel business. As soon as he realized that three weeks meant at least six months, he determined to stay on and enjoy himself.

‘I am
not
going to fight a duel,' said Rob, very red in the face. ‘It is barbarous to risk murdering a man just because he lost his temper.'

‘You can choose pistols,' Magda advised him quite correctly. ‘You were in the war. You must know enough about it to be able to miss him.'

‘Will you try to understand, Magda, that Englishmen do not fight duels?'

‘Oh, but you must, Rob! You can't help it,' she insisted. ‘Ask Stephen to explain. He'll tell you how silly it all is.'

He stared at us as if we were two slim, eager, fallen angels from the pit. There we were, Count Stephen and Countess Magda, with no parents, no land, no money, nothing to hold on to but our conventions of honour, male and female, and intelligent enough to find them comic. The Romanian duel was normally a farce without any danger at all. My sister knew it as well as I did. That was why she was perfectly willing for Rob to do the proper thing although she was in love with him.

I sent Magda off to dance. She doesn't come into my story at all, the darling. She was a motive, nothing else. A most lovely motive for dishonourable conduct.

With some difficulty I got out of Rob what had happened. Delorme and he had been talking French and discussing the Romanian Army. Rob couldn't accept those gorgeous cockatoos upon the dance floor as real soldiers. A soldier to him was a bit of shapeless, suffering humanity, inexplicably cheerful and plastered with mud. What with champagne and disapproval, his voice was too loud.

‘The cloak-room is stacked with their silly swords,' he said to Delorme. ‘And they couldn't draw them if they wanted to, because the hilt is cast in one piece with the scabbard.'

His shoulder was roughly hauled round. He met the enraged eyes of a Romanian captain, who smartly slapped him across the cheek with the open hand. Rob was a competent welterweight and his reaction was nearly immediate. Nearly. Sheer surprise used up a fraction of time. So did reluctance—for he was not the type to start a rough-house in a ball-room.

Before his right hook could get fairly started he was gripped from
behind. Other bystanders were holding—but more conventionally—his opponent. Between the two groups a minor diplomat and a Romanian general were advising patience. I'm experienced in such scenes myself. One acts with the quiet decision of the knowledgeable man who throws the dog out just before it is sick.

‘Damn it!' Rob exclaimed indignantly. ‘I seemed to be caught up in a sort of ceremony without anybody asking me.'

Well, of course, he had been. Blue and gold officers closed in casually to hide the unfortunate affair from the dance floor. Between Rob's friends and the defiant captain's friends the general and the minor diplomat observed the frontier. Anybody who had not seen the slap would have suspected nothing. Delorme received the captain's card. He told Rob to go away and dance, and to look calmly composed.

When Rob at last got Magda to himself—partners were still booked on programmes with little white pencils—he found to his horror that she knew all about the incident. Everybody agreed, she told him, that it had been beautifully managed. They were bursting with curiosity to know what he would do, and trying hard not to show it.

‘I shouldn't have been talking so damned loud,' Rob said to me. ‘Stephen, I feel the right move is to apologize.'

‘But you can't apologize.'

‘Why can't I?'

‘Because you're the insulted party. Only he can apologize.'

‘Then what
can
I do?'

‘Nothing—except send him a challenge.'

I might as well have asked him to play ring-a-ring-a-roses in the courtyard of the Bank of England. He became offensively British. He pointed out that he was a civilized Westerner visiting Romania to assist in the reconstruction of the country, that he had had enough fighting to last him the rest of his life and that he wasn't going to begin again on Romanian officers. So I shut up. I really was not sure what public opinion would be. One can't count on certainties in a time of social transition.

Rob stalked back to the ball-room and did his best to appear composed; but all he could manage was a fixed grin. He went home early in the open carriage which he had romantically retained for his private use during his stay in Bucharest. No doubt he was more patient with our absurdities when he observed himself jingling magnificently through the Romanian night behind a pair of black and lively horses like a baron in a whisky advertisement.

The next morning he felt like a plain business man with a headache, living in a cosmopolitan hotel full of other business men with other headaches. He did not want to see uniforms, horses, swords and the idle poor for the rest of his life. I don't suppose he even wanted to see Magda. He must have been sourly glad that he had an appointment
with Mr Marguliesh. The world of Marguliesh was sane, and he, Rob, belonged to it.

Mr Marguliesh was his financial adviser and the correspondent of his London bankers. We all liked him. In the rush of little rats between money-lenders and the Stock Exchange, trying to profit by inflation without going to gaol, he represented a vanished world. His white waistcoat, his taste in cigars and his obvious integrity would have graced the City of London.

Marguliesh told me afterwards that he was shocked by Rob's appearance. He immediately rang for his senior bank servant—about eighty years old and liveried in chocolate and silver—who came with his keys of office and unlocked a cupboard in the walnut panelling. There was something in it to suit every mood. Brandy and ginger-ale was Marguliesh's prescription for Mr Tymson.

When Rob was half-way through his long, golden glass and they had discussed some sound and sober question of shipment against treasury bills, Marguliesh delicately referred to private problems.

‘It's half past eleven,' Rob protested, ‘and nobody who was at the ball is up yet. How on earth do you know?'

It was never any good putting that question to Marguliesh. He knew everything. It always seemed natural that he should. As likely as not he had the barman on his pay roll.

Rob cursed all primitive societies and finally asked him—assuming that he would have the same point of view as a respectable English banker—whether he would fight a duel himself.

‘Fortunately,' said Mr Marguliesh dryly, ‘I am not officially a gentleman.'

‘Well, damn it, I'm not officially a gentleman, either!'

‘Oh, my dear sir, the aristocracy of industry! We accept it at last. And then you were a lieutenant-colonel in the war. Of course there is always a doubt who is and who is not a gentleman in England. It appears to depend on education. Here the last thing one expects of a gentleman is education. But if you send this fellow a challenge you prove what you are.'

Rob asked if he had to be a bloody fool in order to be rubber-stamped as a gentleman. ‘Yes,' said Marguliesh. ‘And if you ever wanted to marry into the aristocracy, how much more smoothly things would go for her!'

He was our banker too—though that was a pretty hopeless task—and I know he was just as anxious about Magda's future as I was. But Rob had the Englishman's dislike of anyone suspecting his emotions. In spite of the civilizing influence of brandy and ginger-ale he denied furiously that he had any intention of marrying into the aristocracy.

‘A challenge would also do no harm to business,' Marguliesh suggested.

‘I think, if I may say so, that is rather a sordid way of looking at it,' said Rob—and he cashed a cheque and scowled his way out.

He lunched at his hotel in a furious temper, and after a long afternoon's sleep went down to the bar for some companionship. There he found Delorme and greeted him as his only friend. Delorme had been a comrade-in-arms. He was civilized, reasonable and only too willing to explain English customs to Romanians and Romanian customs to English when he didn't know much about either.

‘The captain is expecting you to send a friend to call on him,' Delorme said.

‘I wouldn't send my worst enemy to call on him.'

Delorme made it clear what he meant. Rob patted him on the shoulder and repeated that duels were a hundred years out of date. ‘They have gone out even in France,' he said.

‘I beg you will not repeat your
even
in France, monsieur,' Delorme replied.

Rob protested desperately that he meant that in the most gallant of countries only politicians and critics fought duels any more, and who the hell cared if they killed each other. But Delorme had gone.

Though I did not know all the details of that unfortunate day till afterwards, I guessed that Rob would be readier to listen. To my mind the solution was obvious. He should give full play to his taste for operetta, and go through the ridiculous, bloodless farce of a Romanian duel. Still, I only decided to intervene after I had run into Delorme dining alone and looking extremely Napoleonic and disdainful. He gave me the news, but was not prepared, he said, to discuss further my good friend, M. Tymson. He added that this was the twentieth century, but that British manners were sometimes enough to make one forget it.

After that I went up to Rob's room. He had taken refuge in his business correspondence and was not at all pleased when I pretended to think that he was clearing up his affairs. He said that a man of my intelligence ought to understand his point of view without having it explained all over again.

‘I do, Rob,' I assured him. ‘You object to bloodshed, but you will be delighted to put on the gloves with him, cut his eyes open and knock out his front teeth.'

‘At least I shouldn't risk killing him.'

‘Who's asking you to kill him? You surely don't think there is any risk in a modern duel? It's against the law, and nobody wants to be run in.'

‘I don't understand,' said Rob. ‘Then why bother with it?'

‘Why bother with a carriage and pair when you could use a car? I do wish you'd believe that Magda and I are only trying to help.'

He remarked that he considered my influence very bad for
Magda—in a proprietary tone which was thoroughly promising—and then he said:

‘But I don't know the drill. Would you yourself second me or whatever it's called?'

‘Of course. An honour.'

‘And what do I fight him with?'

‘In principle you can choose.'

‘Well, I did a course of bayonet fighting once. Can I have a go at him with rifle and bayonet?'

That should have warned me. I should have spotted that slow rising of fury to the brain which the English call logic. But I thought he was just being perverse.

‘No, you can't! It has to be pistols, so that you can fire in the air if you wish.'

‘What's the good of a duel then?'

‘The point is, Rob, that he will fire in the air and so will you. But you can't count on it.'

‘If I can't count on it, I'm damned if I do it. I should look a silly clot blazing off at the sky while he's aiming at six o'clock on the bull. If I'm going to fight him at all, I'll fight him square. How about swords?'

I insisted that swords were out of the question, but he knew that was not strictly true and kept on bullying me until I had to tell him what the convention really was.