The Europe That Was (5 page)

‘The épée is not used because people
will
get hurt with it. Only the fleurette is allowed. That's just a foil with the button off. But don't choose it, Rob,' I begged him, ‘if you can't fence. You'll make it so hard for him just to prick you.'

‘I'll make it hard for him all right. What about sabres, Stephen?'

I explained that sabres were not for society affairs. They were only used by brutally angry military men—who could keep accidents fairly quiet and be punished by court martial rather than the criminal law.

‘Do you want to spend some years in gaol?' I asked him. ‘Duelling is forbidden, Rob, just like drinking after midnight in England. If it isn't done decently, the police have to take action.'

‘I don't give a damn,' he said. ‘They started it, and they're going to get it. Sabres it is.'

‘But how good are you?'

‘Better than anything else. I used to do a lot of singlestick as a boy. You teach me the proper salute, and then I'll wade in.'

Wade in. Those were his words. I can hear them now. I was appalled at such bluntness in an affair which had to be handled with the utmost discretion.

‘Look here,' said Rob, ‘if you won't let me pick my own weapon I'll walk up to that captain and slap the face powder off his blue chin! Then he can choose machine-guns if he likes, and God help him!'

That silenced me. I had to agree to deliver his challenge. And, after all, if Rob could really use a sabre—singlestick meant nothing to me—it might for once be safer than the fleurette. The only concession I could get from him was that he would fence with me at my flat next day just to put my mind at rest.

I drove round to call on the captain and performed the formalities. His company was on guard duty at the Royal Palace, and the honour had gone to his head. So had the brandy which he and his chosen friend had been drinking, tapering off from the night before. Both those uniformed owls were sure that Rob had chosen sabres as a shrewd way of avoiding any fight at all. They called the bluff. Sabres would do.

Rob turned up at my flat the next morning. He was half angry, half pleased with himself. The hotel porter had seen him to the door with a deeper bow than he had ever given. His driver had attached a red, white and blue ribbon to his whip. The speed at which rumour travelled was amazing.

I gave him the time and place—on a river sandbank about six miles out of town at 12.30 the following day. The more usual hour was before breakfast, but the captain and his second wanted to avoid it on the grounds that the police would then be watching their movements.

‘I suppose the captain is quite happy about sabres?' Rob asked. He sounded as if he felt he might be taking an unfair advantage, bless him! I put his mind at rest on that score. The captain was no master, but he had got through two rounds of the army championship.

We set to. Five minutes were enough to show me that nobody could possibly be less experienced than Rob. Somehow he had got German student duelling into his head and thought that sabre fighting was all cut and slash. His bucolic singlestick gave him the guards for that stuff. But I tell you he didn't even realize that the point of a sabre was meant for business.

‘Your opponent can touch you wherever he likes,' I said, ‘and I take it that will be painful but not vital. What terrifies me is that if one of those swipes of yours ever did by accident connect, you'd cut him clean in two.'

‘Look here, I don't want to go to gaol,' Rob began, taking off his mask in despair.

It was going to be that or hospital, but I didn't say so.

‘One of our foundry foremen was champion of Yorkshire at singlestick,' he went on. ‘He told me that if you jump back and whack the ground you can get in again while the other fellow is wondering what you are up to.'

‘He'd certainly wonder—especially meeting a lunatic for the first time.'

The trick was better than nothing. There was just a chance that,
with his reach and a twist of the wrist, he might get the point under the captain's sword arm. I refused to let him try it on me—I didn't want to spoil his confidence—but I made him practise the footwork and learn to lunge. Out! Whack the ground! And in like lightning! The slightest scratch was enough for the seconds to call it a day.

But the longer he practised it, the more I saw it could be suicide. I promised that if he would drop his damned British obstinacy I would tell Magda the whole truth, and that she would be thankful he had shown some common sense. That was as near as I had ever come to admitting she was all ready for orange blossom and London. He blushed slightly and asked me what I
had
told her.

Well, I had let her believe it was to be the usual pistols; and she was still chuckling at the thought of her Rob trying to keep a solemn face while he went through the absurd ceremony of loosing off a shot into the sky.

Rob at last left, still determined to educate the foreigner. I suppose he was conditioned by his long war service to taking useless risks with a sort of sulky anger. As for me, I was as near hysteria as a young man brought up to decent self-control can get. There was no power on earth which could now stop this folly but the police. And to let the police know the time and place of the meeting was the act of a coward, a man without honour, a really unscrupulous, unsporting scoundrel. It was far worse than cheating at cards or bribing a jockey to pull a horse.

I considered all possible friends who could help with advice; every one of them would assume that it was too late. At last I thought of Marguliesh. As he had said to Rob, he was not—officially—a gentleman. He was safely seated in the stalls of this detestable comedy and could see what the actors did not.

I drove round to the bank, and he had me shown into his office at once. He was very fond of Magda and Rob, and, I think, disapprovingly fond of me. He was horrified when he heard of sabres and took all the blame on himself. Given Rob's character, he ought to have foreseen, he said, what might happen.

I felt the disgrace so strongly that I had not even formulated to myself what I wanted him to do: to tell the police. I couldn't allow Rob to be killed or sentenced. Magda was deeply in love with him, and he was the only man of first-class character likely to come her way who wouldn't care whether she had money or not.

Marguliesh understood all that without my having to stammer more than two words of it. ‘Just tell me the time and place,' he murmured, ‘and forget you ever did.'

I pointed out agitatedly that the police were inclined to malicious gossip. If they let it slip that their information came from Marguliesh, everyone would guess that I …

‘Don't worry about that,' he replied. ‘It is often of great importance that information should not be traced to me.'

Of course. Brokers, the market, issues of stock—he could handle all that. But what about the police?

‘A man such as I in a country like this,' Marguliesh said slowly in his melancholy way, ‘is unfortunately compelled to have his agents everywhere.'

I told him the time and place of the meeting, horrified at what I was doing. He smoked half a cigarette and asked me a question or two. Then he said: ‘There is a pleasant little tavern some two kilometres up river from your sandbank. I think you know it?'

I didn't dare ask him why he thought so. It was a rendezvous which I had found useful for a very private and sentimental affair.

‘Be there with Mr Tymson a good hour before the meeting. Any conversation you have will be overheard and reported to police headquarters.'

‘But Rob and I will be speaking English,' I protested.

‘The person who composes the report,' said Mr Marguliesh, ‘will not think it worth while to bother with too many details.'

I called for Rob next morning at eleven. He was fiercely determined to appear normal. The only sign of nerves was in his language as he fumbled about the hotel bedroom looking for his matches. I told him that he wouldn't need any matches—which was hardly the best way of putting it—and then had to explain that I had brought some. I knew he would keep on lighting his pipe until his right hand was otherwise occupied.

It offended him to be looked after as if his thoughts were out of joint.

‘Got the sabres?' he asked sharply.

‘Yes—and a picnic basket with drinks for the party when it's all over.'

‘Don't the other fellows do anything?'

I said they didn't. As a matter of fact they were bringing the surgeon.

‘What do we want to start so early for?'

‘Just to get clear of the town in case the police suspect anything.'

‘Blast the police!' he exclaimed. ‘Slip twopence to the right man and he'll fix the police for you.'

These business men seemed to think alike. But in an affair of this kind it was not so easy. Police procedure was to give a polite and formal warning to principals and seconds. If that failed—and it was supposed to fail—the police tried to turn up when the duellists were already on the ground. That ended the quarrel, for the principals had already shown their courage, and nothing more was to be gained by firing in the air or very cautiously poking at each other with the fleurette. If, however, police were successfully
avoided, a duel fought and damage done, the criminal law was enforced—not so heavily as on a pair of gangsters but enough for a sharp lesson.

I drove Rob to the tavern, where we sat under the willows along a backwater of the river and shared a bottle of white wine. There was a poor and respectable clerk entertaining his family in the garden and obviously above all suspicion—obviously, that is, unless one had a guilty conscience and began to wonder why he should choose such an hour on a working day for a family treat. He went into the back passage of the tavern where there was a telephone. I felt suddenly hopeful and, simultaneously, defiled.

We left soon after twelve. The track which ran along the river was full of pot-holes and cut by pebble drifts from the fast spring torrents. I doubted if the car would take it and allowed plenty of time in case we had to walk part of the way.

But the track gave us no trouble at all. We climbed the flood-bank. Below us were the hard sand, the blue swirl of the river and another car. The military men, coming direct from Bucharest, had evidently doubted the state of their track just as I did, and arrived early at the rendezvous.

‘For heaven's sake tell me what I do!' Rob appealed. ‘Do I say good-morning, or what?'

‘You say a cheerful good-morning to his second, and bow very distantly to him.'

‘And suppose he apologises?'

‘Accept it quick! But he won't.'

The two officers in their best uniforms were strolling up and down the yellow sand, talking to an unhygienic-looking gentleman with a black beard and a black bag. Rob measured out his bows. He certainly appeared a most cool and formidable opponent. I suppose he was pretending to himself that there was a platoon behind him which had to be impressed.

It was only seventeen minutes past twelve. I went into a huddle with the other second, comparing weapons, complaining of the ground—anything to waste time, for I could see what he was going to propose. But the moment came when I could think of no more excuses. And the police would time their arrival for a minute or two before twelve-thirty.

‘Delay is so embarrassing for our principals, M. le Comte,' he said. ‘So shall we…?'

Rob and his opponent took off their coats and rolled up their sleeves. The surgeon wiped down the sabres with a swab. The seconds passed them on. When Rob faced his man I could see he was trying not to give him a nervous grin. The captain's face was set and pale. For all he knew, he might be up against a master. I expect he hoped he
was. At least it would be a guarantee that he wouldn't be run through the liver by accident.

Rob performed his salute very well. The captain attacked instantly in a violent
flèche
which Rob by wild luck parried. He must have felt the experienced control of his opponent's wrist as the points slithered in tiny semi-circles against each other, and realized there wasn't a moment to be lost. He jumped back half a step, tapped the ground smartly with his sabre and lunged.

I closed my eyes, I think—a split second in which to imagine the captain dead, Rob racing for the frontier and myself in the dock for aiding and abetting. The mess in reality was bad enough, before the law and from a housemaid's point of view. Rob's hilt was within two feet of the captain, and the steel through him between shoulder and elbow. He was so appalled—the sensation of his sabre jarring on bone—that he hadn't yet noticed that his opponent's curved point had ripped up six good inches of his forearm. He apologized instantly, just as for some unavoidable foul in the course of a jolly game.

‘But it is I who should apologize,' replied the captain with a startled smile, and held out his hand.

We seconds, overcome by alarm and relief and the unconventional behaviour of our two gladiators, fluttered incompetently round them. The surgeon lost his head and kept exclaiming that it was unprecedented and that the seconds must decide which of the two gentlemen should be attended first.

‘Shove on a couple of field dressings, Stephen,' Rob said, twisting a handkerchief round his arm above the elbow, ‘while he fixes the captain.'

The captain grinned at Rob and gave a deep sigh which made the surgeon bustle to his professional duty. But to us the sigh was plainly one of relief. Almost anything might have happened. As it was, the pair had only to keep their arms in slings and their mouths shut. I was the only person who knew we were not yet out of trouble. When Mr Marguliesh said that something would be done, done it was.

Naturally I heard before any of them the noise of a car roaring in second gear along the track. I held up my hand. The captain's second dashed on to the flood-bank and put his head over the top. He signalled back frantically that it was the police. Rob didn't understand the danger. I was aghast at the result of my crime and couldn't use my head at all. It was the captain who was inspired.