The Refuge (14 page)

She lit a cigarette, after I had refused one, and her hands from which she had drawn off the long black gloves were shaking slightly as she held the cigarette and a small gold automatic lighter. This in itself was not unusual, for people who visit newspaper offices for some purpose of their own are usually in the grip of one excitement or another—anger, indignation more often, a natural nervousness of their surroundings, but seldom fear. An interview deliberately sought with a particular member of the staff is quite another matter, especially when, as in this instance, the man sought out is in close daily contact with the police force of a city as cosmopolitan and as large as Sydney was even in those days. In such an instance, the visitor is often nervous of the reporter as an individual.

But Irma was not nervous of me. She seemed indeed hardly aware of me for a time, while she inhaled her cigarette smoke sharply, exhaling it each time with a sort of finality as though about to speak, yet saying nothing, merely looking vaguely at me as though there were someone standing behind me.

There was no need to hurry her; she was a delight to look at, afraid or not, and to be alone with. I filled my pipe and lit it at leisure. We had been in that small, cramped room scarcely two minutes, though I would have supposed it to have been longer; and, in accordance with a habit which I have found to save time even while it seems to waste it, I was not going to break the silence. Let the visitor speak first. Meanwhile, setting aside my feeling of disturbed impatience, I was able to observe her at my ease.

‘Some dame’, the scamp of a boy had said. If he meant he found her beautiful, why, so did I. The taut, blank mask of her face—the same look, now I thought of it, with which she had faced me on board the
Empire Queen
a year ago, as she uttered the word ‘Police?’—in no way hid the fine underlying modelling of the bone; the slant of cheekbone and eyelid and eyebrow was alive with youth and intelligence, Slavic and glowing like the glowing ivory of her throat above the formal neck of the white bodice. Again I was forced—it is not too strong a word to say—forced to notice her disturbing power of imperturbable stillness. Only her bare hand, carrying the cigarette to and from her parted lips with a gesture of ineffable leisure, broke the immobility of her seated pose; and this physical appearance of being undisturbed was all the more remarkable to me because, with the passing of every few seconds, I knew as surely as if she had told me that she was afraid—not as afraid, perhaps, as she may recently have been, but still afraid, and unhappy in it.

Fear is like a smell to men trained to detect it; and in my particular job we so accustom ourselves to its aspects, in so many citizens, that if it is not there when it should be we wonder why. I had quickly known that Irma was afraid, or at least in the ebb of fear. I waited for her to speak, and for another full minute we both smoked in silence, and I listened to yet hardly heard the familiar quiet voices of the women of the library staff, the intermittent patter of typewriter keys on index cards, and the opening and closing of the drawers of cabinets where the incessant work of filing reference went forward in peace. Those peaceful sounds through the open door emphasized the dead hush of that little room whose only window, very dirty on the outside with the rough grime of the city, gave on to a central light well from which no light penetrated.

‘You told me, come to you if I wanted help?’ she said abruptly, and her questioning tone was as it were underlined by her hand holding the cigarette arrested in mid-air in front of her face, so that now only the upward rippling ribbon of bluish smoke moved where she was sitting.

‘Yes, I believe I did.’

‘You did . . . Now I think I shall need help.’

My first thought, of course, was that she must need money, yet when I looked at the obvious quality and newness of her handbag, her gloves and shoes—the usual points at which a woman’s impoverishment first shows itself—at the perfect condition of fingernails and hair and unobtrusive
maquillage
, and above all at the lack of speculation or embarrassment in the regard of her opaque blue eyes beneath the slanted brows, a request for financial assistance by her seemed wildly improbable. Nevertheless, stranger things had happened to me before this.

‘In what way do you think I can help you?’ I said; but she did not answer the question. After looking in vain for an ash-tray, she dropped the end of her cigarette on the linoleum covering the floor, and extinguished it with a quick movement of one foot. It was very neatly done, a curiously masculine trick which, in her, quite surprised me. I was still looking at the arched firmness of her black suede shoe, which had a very high heel and sported a silver button as big as a shilling, when she spoke in a low, confident voice, leaning forward suddenly without haste.

‘I have remembered you since that day when I arrive. You said we are to be friends—you, my first Australian friend, eh? I have thought of you often, again and again, and wished sometimes to see you. But, you understand, there was no occasion, was there?’

‘No,’ I said; and I was curiously moved by the calm, low-voiced confession of one of whom I myself had thought so seldom, and then with almost distrust, almost distaste, and no pity.

‘No.’ She sat back in the chair, her hands lying still in her lap. The fear was leaving her while she spoke.

‘I always thought, “Anyhow, that Mr. Fitzherbert is there,” and I look at your card, often—then,’ she smiled apologetically, ‘not so often.’ Her eyes were steady on my face. ‘One makes other friends. One learns to live in the new country. I have done it before. But I did not forget you. I can speak?’

Her rapid words somehow confused me. I could not follow as one usually can follow in advance the direction of this interview. Without my having suspected it, it had become a personal matter between the two of us—the last thing I desired or ordinarily allowed to happen in that office.

I could only nod my head and murmur rather coldly, ‘We are quite alone . . .’

‘I must
trust
you,’ she said with sudden enormous emphasis. ‘I am in danger, and you can maybe help me. Maybe not. If not, what I say you must forget. It is understood?’

Yes, it was personal now, beyond all doubt. Again I nodded, this time saying nothing. She seemed not fully reassured. I witnessed one of the impulsive gestures I was later to come to know so well, to delight in yet almost to shrink from. Leaning forward again, she took my right hand in both hers. Quite automatically—the man’s instinctive gesture of calm self-possession—with my other hand I put the mouthpiece of my pipe between my teeth and held it there.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I must be sure. If we waste time, I go. If not, I tell you. It is all true, but you may say it is—what?—
fishy
. If you think that, you may also think it does not matter that you tell. My friend,’ with great weight, pressing my hand hard, ‘you must not talk. If you talk, it may harm you too.’

Freeing my hand, I pretended to be feeling for matches as I said, ‘Look here, you had better tell me. You have my word that whatever you say will be strictly between ourselves.’

She looked down at her two hands clasped together empty of mine. I could still feel the earnest, excited touch of her fingers, the only indication she had given of how profound her feelings were at that moment.

‘So,’ she said, with a sigh, whether of relief at the assurance of secrecy or of disappointment that I could not return stress for stress, I do not know. Leaning back in the leather armchair she let her hands lie again still and empty in her smooth lap, and looked at me intently, sidelong across her cheekbones with eyes half-closed—the look of so many foreigners I have known who wished to be impressive. Cautiously, I waited.

‘Those three men on the ship,’ she said. ‘You remember what I tell you?’

‘The three Communists. The police have not lost track of them, I can assure you of that.’

‘They are dangerous,’ she said with bland simplicity. ‘But I must tell you everything—everything. You know Russia?’

She spoke of Russia as of a mutual acquaintance. The remark was rhetorical, and again I needed only to incline my head as she went on with suddenly tense and joyless excitement.

‘Those three men say there is going to be a treaty with Germany. Soon, very soon. A treaty of non-aggression. For you it is perhaps already a rumour. Now I tell you it is fact. They know.’

I was so immediately astounded, my mind so jolted and incredulous, that it was like being in a street accident, in that moment before feeling and reason again take charge of action.

‘Impossible,’ I said quite automatically—exactly as one says the word in one’s mind at the instant of mechanical impact in the street; but a moment later I was crying inwardly, as the accident victim so often cries aloud, in the small self-deafening voice of horrified belief, ‘
No . . . no . . . no . . .
’

‘But no,’ she said. ‘You do not know Russia. He copies what he admires. What Hitler did at Munich, he too can do—that Stalin, that Molotov, and the others. I know. You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, I have been a member of the Party, in many European countries. I did many missions, I did many things for the Party, learned many things. Not any more—do not suppose.’ She made a gesture of cancellation without raising her arm from her black-clad thigh. ‘That is why I am in danger. Those three men, they did not come here because of me, but they know me. You see . . .’

She paused and looked at the window, which was closed as it had probably been since the building’s construction half a century earlier; and at the open door. With a movement of her head towards this, she said authoritatively, ‘Please close it.’

I do not mind confessing what I would not for anything have let her know—namely, that I was for the moment in a state of much mental confusion and distress. She did not seem to feel it. Perhaps she had known too long what even a child would have realized in those nightmare days, that a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany was in fact a clear signal from Moscow to Berlin, to move, and that this time there could be no Munich. With a sensation of physical weakness, I rose and took the two steps necessary to bring me to the innocently open door. The whole brief series of movements between leaving and returning to my chair seemed to take a long time. I was thinking so fast that every act of mine appeared to me to be performed with dragging slowness. When I sat down she was looking at me with a sort of satisfaction.

‘You see,’ she said at once, as though there had been no interruption, ‘I know too much. And I have left the Party. This is not allowed, if you know many things. Now me—I will never tell of what I know—never. But this, of course, they do not believe. Why should they?’ She shrugged slightly. ‘I am a woman . . . If you do not help me, there will be an accident. An accident—you know. Today or next week. They hate me, because they are uncertain. I have friends here, I call them friends, who are Party members. These do not know how much I know. They think I was just a file-and-rank member, you see. Of my active work they know nothing. They hear these three men talk, and they wonder why they hate me, and so, because they are such friends, they tell me how these men hate me and what they say they would like to do. It is all a joke, my friends say. And Mr. Fitzherbert . . .’

For the first time, with the breaking of her quiet voice on my name, she openly showed emotion. She had talked fear back into herself. I waited while she took out and lighted another of her cigarettes; then, once more unemotionally, she went on.

‘Mr. Fitzherbert, what they say they would like to do, they will do that. Have no mistake—they will do it. That is why I am so relieved to know there is this treaty.’

It seemed to me the extreme of irrelevance.

‘I do not see what the possible treaty has to do with your safety,’ I said rather coolly, for, irrelevance apart, her words had rather shocked me. How could one possibly feel the gladness of relief at the spectacle imagination was pitilessly unfolding?

‘Possible, possible,’ she said impatiently. ‘It is sure. This is from Moscow, do you understand? And as for me, you cannot know your own government. They too are frightened—yes, yes, like me, as you so kindly do not remind me. Your Mr. Menzies will do the only logical thing when war comes. You know what I mean?’

As always, she began to speak with a gentle patience when she talked of matters political. I had noticed it, in retrospect, that morning on the
Empire Queen
; I noticed it again now, and was not offended even though, watching her while she spoke, I could not help remembering that she was much younger than, from her dress and self-command and the secret, as it were impatient, authority of her manner now and again, one might have supposed. She was no more than nineteen, I told myself, and was surprised that I should give her such attention and such credence; for at thirty-one I still supposed that years, rather than experience, demanded one’s chiefest respect.

‘I don’t know that I follow you,’ I said, ‘but if we were at war with Germany’ (I ignored her slight gesture and went on steadily) ‘and the pact you speak of had been signed and still existed, then the governments of the British empire would inevitably make the Communist Party illegal. It is the only logical action.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, pressing her hands one upon the other over her heart; and for a moment her widened eyes seemed to burn not blue but violet. ‘And those three men, they go—out of your country. I know the police watch them.
Then
, they are for deportation, yes? Yes. And I am safe again. Even if they try to denounce me to your police, I am safe from—from accident.’

She sighed, and let her hands fall to her lap, and lay back in the deep chair, staring blindly at the white wall opposite her. This attitude of repose, though it appeared exhausted, was merely a resuming of her beautiful mask of indifference. When she spoke again she spoke slowly and clearly, without looking in my direction.

‘That treaty. Do not be alarmed. I laughed when I heard. Your own secret agents will be laughing. It is just like Moscow. Hitler, he will now take Poland. There will be war with England this time, and France. Soon, my friend, there will be war with Russia too.’