Bernardo was stuck. Since he had to leave the train at the first opportunity he could not say he was going to Bucarest nor could he say he wasn’t because he did not know the name of any other station on the line. He thanked Niculescu for his invitation and added vaguely that he was going straight through to the sea.
‘Ah, to Galatz! You are a seaman? You brought the horse by sea?’
‘A naval officer,’ Bernardo said, thinking that he might as well have a social position worthy of the Kalmody clothes.
‘Now I understand! No doubt you delivered it to Prince Ghika?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Who else in Moldavia could have a horse sent by a British warship?’
Bernardo reproached himself for entering into the spirit of things too impulsively. On the other hand he had established an identity for himself which seemed to be convincing to this eager Mr. Niculescu.
‘Prince Ghika is a customer of yours?’ he asked.
‘Alas, no more! I cannot compete with Paris and London. But one never knows. He has formed himself into a Company and may again become as rich as he was. If only I could put a dummy in my window with such clothes as yours. Tone—it would add tone!’
Lord only knew whether the idea had entered Mr. Niculescu’s head, but it was worth trying.
‘Well, if you think it might bring in Prince Ghika & Co., I shall not want this outfit till my ship is back in Portsmouth.’
‘You would sell it?’
‘At a price—and if you have anything else I can wear as far as Galatz. We are much the same size.’
‘But I have no other suit in my bag. I have only been away from home one night.’
‘We might exchange now before anyone else gets in. I can’t very well stand in the corridor outside the lavatory and hand my breeches through the door.’
Haggling was fierce but went as fast as a hand of poker since the next station was not far away and one was as keen to buy as the other to sell. They arrived at a price of six thousand lei which Bernardo discovered was about seven and a half pounds and at last had an accurate valuation of the unknown currency. He regarded Mr. Niculescu with admiration. By a tug at the lapels and half a dozen pins from his bag the tailor had succeeded in looking like a very shady racehorse trainer compensating for his morals by his clothes. As for himself, he was a middle-class Romanian in a dark suit of cheap Czech cloth, with coat too tight and trousers too short. The shoes were much too small, considering that feet were going to be important. But presumably he could buy another pair somewhere.
The train stopped at Pascani. It was the junction for Lasi the chief town in Moldavia, and Mr. Niculescu could not resist showing himself off to a public of some standing. He climbed down to the platform on the pretence of buying a paper and strolled up and down clicking imaginary spurs. It was a good chance to disappear. Mr. Niculescu would assume he had gone to the restaurant car.
Bernardo hurried down the corridor, got off at the rear of the train and crossed to the opposite platform. No trouble there. Just enough people idling or watching trains to prevent his being conspicuous. The ticket collector, if any, was occupied elsewhere. He strolled out of the station and took cover behind an ox cart as the Bucarest train pulled out and revealed Mr. Niculescu being led away between two brown uniforms with a superior blue one following behind.
By God, that had been a close thing! Provided he left the town at once speaking to no one he had a chance of vanishing into—well, wherever in Romania one could vanish to. He hoped that he could count on a good hour before the unfortunate Civil and Military Tailor managed to prove his identity and the hunt for the real boots-and-breeches was on. It might start in the wrong direction. Mr. Niculescu had jumped at the port of Galatz as soon as the sea was mentioned. A railway map in the corridor had shown that it was a natural assumption; one changed for Galatz further down the line. The police might well accept that bit of Niculescu’s story while rejecting the naval officer. That the wanted man could be a seaman on the run without baggage or papers was possible.
Bernardo had no plan at all except to put so much distance between himself and the town of Pascani that he could safely buy food and drink. He started out more or less south-west with the intention of returning to the forests and valleys of the Carpathians and then taking a train to Bucarest. Once in the mountains he hoped to pass as a casual hiker whose baggage and passport were at his inn; and the language difficulty, insuperable on the Moldavian plain, must surely be easier where tourists were less rare. So far as Bernardo remembered, it would mean a tramp of about eighty miles. Perico had retained the map since at the time his need appeared the greater.
He made a rule of speaking to no one. It was hard to follow and of doubtful value. He was aware that he was leaving behind him a trail of curiosity about this self-centred man, dressed as if he ought to have money for travel, who shuffled through the dust of country roads responding to greetings with only a mumbled good-day. He was also limping. After a few miles he slit open the uppers of Niculescu’s shoes and moved more easily.
Marching at night for as long as he could see what he was doing and lying up by day seemed the best way to avoid the stares of the curious. It didn’t work. Since there were no walls or hedges it was easy enough to circle round the villages but difficult to regain the right road or any road in the dark. When he came across a wattle shack roofed with rushes and floored with hard mud he decided to give up this random wandering and sleep there till dawn.
He woke up on fire with itching and dashed out into the open. Even the half light was enough to show that he was crawling with fleas, hungrier and more active than the occasional Spanish flea. Those had been a mere annoyance; this swarm was a humiliation, driving home the fact that he was a helpless outcast in the chill of dawn at the wrong end of Europe. He shook out his clothes as best he could and hobbled off. The slits in his shoes had freed his toes but badly blistered them.
No one in the dreary fields was near enough to bother him. Evidently there was little to do once the maize had been harvested. He followed an earth track across country to a hazy line of willows in the distance and came at mid morning to the banks of a considerable river where the water was low, swirling gently between sand banks. He took off his clothes and waded across with a sense of freedom as if the river were an obstacle cutting off the immediate past as well as telephone lines between police stations. A mile upstream was the bridge he would have crossed if he had stuck to the road; downstream was a pool in which was a small herd of water buffaloes—wicked-looking creatures with back-swept black horns, but plainly as tame as cows in a meadow.
After a swim he lay and sunned himself on the hot sands with his feet in the water, trying to forget hunger in the meticulous job of catching and drowning fleas. He did not dare dip Niculescu’s suit in the river in case it shrank to something unwearable. The desolate feeling that he belonged nowhere fell away as he remembered the kindly estuaries of the Basque coast. There too his feet had often ached and been cooled.
But there the countryside flowed with food and wine. In this poverty-stricken province of Romania it certainly did not. After recovering the road he stopped hopefully at a lonely cottage with a bottle of tsuica in the window, an iron table outside in the dust and no other customer. Nothing to eat, however much he pointed to his mouth! He gathered there was not even enough for the peasant proprietor. He took a stiff glass of very bad tsuica to disinfect the river water he had been drinking and tramped on.
The next place on the road was more than a mere village. A church and a public building showed above the low, white houses and guaranteed that there would be police. Hungry though he was, he stuck to his rule of avoiding the public. It was not so much from fear of being asked questions—whether kindly or suspicious—as that he had had enough of continual stares at his clerk-out-of-work, Chaplinesque figure with the broken shoes. He might, he thought, have done better in boots and breeches after all; at least they would allow him to wave a lo
rdly hand as if the groom and the horses were just around the corner.
The only handy cover was a sparse hedge of shrubs surrounding the garden of a house which seemed to have its entrance on one of the first side-streets of the town. He waited till the road was clear, half circled the garden and took refuge in a dry ditch under arching branches. It was a good spot in which to sleep and wait for darkness. His way on was clear enough and convenient; one of the usual earth tracks, more a boundary between fields than a road, passed outside the houses and ran westwards.
He was woken up by music. The garden was full of coloured lights which twinkled through the hedge. He saw a long table at which a dinner party was just sitting down, and other diners in a few dim corners under trees. A birthday or a christening was being celebrated at the town restaurant and—if it was anything like Spain—all the notables would be there. They might ask him to join the party, and half of them were sure to speak some French. What would happen if he limped in and ordered a meal? Hell, but he was too tired and dirty to account for himself! He lay in his ditch, listening to the wail of the leading violin and the speed of the cimbalon. Lawless music and of infinite pity. Hungarian music had been on the whole happy, suggesting wine and dancing, wild in triumph of what is to-day; but these Romanian gipsy melodies were an aching for what never was. They tore the physical body out by the roots leaving a spirit, lonely as his own, with no comfort but bird-song.
Bernardo cautiously followed the hedge round to the lane at the front of the establishment, prowling in hope of food which could be bought and eaten without committing himself to a table. Over the gate was a string of lights. A path led to the front door which opened into an empty passage with a lot of shadowy activity at the end of it. He saw no chance of getting anything to eat unless he appeared in the full light of the kitchen.
Just inside the gate was a horse, saddled, bridled and hitched to a tree by the reins. Temptation was overwhelming. The respectable shipping clerk contemplated his first crime. Old Mr. Brown insisted that his fall from grace was due to the mood of self-pity induced by gipsy music even more than to the pain of his blistered feet.
In any case he was learning quickly, as Toledano said he would. Since he had no existence, it would be nearly impossible to trace the thief once the horse was abandoned. He patted its neck and unhitched the reins, keeping one eye on the house. Everybody seemed to be busy with the party on the other side of it. The lane was empty and his partner in crime was a docile gelding, not caring who rode him or whether he was ridden or not. Bernardo led him quietly away, ready to jump into the saddle at the first sound of any excitement. As soon as he was on the track to the west and the beat of hooves over dust was unlikely to be heard he mounted and cantered off, hoping that with luck and the help of a half moon he would have covered a good twenty miles by dawn and that the first foot-hills would be in sight. Mountains obsessed him. There he would never be far from woods and water and free of the suspicion that he was being watched.
He kept riding westwards till well after the sun was up—an amateur criminal on edge with the risk he was taking. It was now time to get rid of the horse, but there was never a convenient patch of cover where it could be left while he himself continued on foot and unremarked. At last he saw ahead of him a tumble of mounds and ridges uncultivated and dotted with bushes. There seemed no obvious geological reason for its existence: no connection with other high ground, no rocks, no water. As he rode closer he was sure that such a barren, untidy mess could never have been made by nature. It must once have been a town of this melancholy Moldavian plain swept clean by one invasion after another.
Over the first rise was a long, shallow depression. Its sides gave the impression of a rubbish heap with old tarpaulins and tattered carpets spread out to dry in the sun. At the bottom were a few canvas shelters over hoops, showing that the place was after all a ragged human settlement though lacking even the comparative cleanliness and order of aboriginal huts.
As he appeared on the skyline there was a clamour of dogs; the rags suddenly pullulated with men, women and children as if a fork had disturbed the riper depths around Nepamuk’s feet. Some of the men, much darker than Romanians, ran up the slope to meet him, at first whining and respectful, then for no apparent reason aggressive. One seized the bridle and led him down to the dry bottom.
It was a gipsy encampment. Bernardo recognised the familiar race of Spain, but this branch of the family were still demoralised scavengers from Asia, rejects of civilisation rather than decorative strangers within it. However, gipsies in his experience always had something nourishing to eat and some of the men were fat. Bernardo smiled, chattered hopefully in a fair imitation of Spanish gipsy dialect and pointed to his mouth. There was no response whatever.
His first impression was right. This had once been a town. There was a well of good masonry and it was in use. Here and there fox holes had been burrowed between scraps of stone walls, as likely as not leading to dry, paved dens. A couple of appalling old hags shoved their heads under the flapping entrance to one of these holes and screamed.
A most unexpected personage crawled out. He was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers with a red sash at the waist. His round, yellowish face was completely devoid of expression. He lounged up to Bernardo, took a close look at the horse and said something. Bernardo was at once dragged to the ground and held there when he tried to get up. He protested. Gipsies, as he knew them, were consummate petty thieves but never went in for open robbery. Nobody paid the least attention to his remarks. Meanwhile the leader in the red sash picketed the horse and returned at leisure.
Finding that his captive spoke no Romanian, he broke into passable French. It was more astonishing than ever to hear the language of decent society in such a setting.
‘You stole this horse last night,’ he said.
‘It’s yours?’ Bernardo asked, for it was no use denying.
‘It is the mayor’s. We spent the night looking for it.’
‘Then how did you get here before me?’
‘You think we cannot afford a taxi?’
‘Monsieur, I am a foreigner in Romania for the first time,’ Bernardo said politely. ‘I would not know how or where to sell a horse. I only borrowed it to go on a little faster. I was going to leave it here among the mounds and walk.’
‘Leave it here? So that we would be accused of stealing it?’
‘But I did not know you were here. How could I? One cannot see your camp.’
The blank, dark brown eyes considered this while never leaving Bernardo’s face.
‘True,’ the gipsy said. ‘But I must hand you over to the police.’
‘Couldn’t you let me go and say that you just found the horse?’
‘No.’
The man in the red sash had a point; it would certainly be better for the clan’s reputation if they handed over the thief as well as the horse. Bernardo shrugged his shoulders and accepted the position. The men and women were gathered round, listening to the foreign language. Wild hair, wild clothes, eyes without meaning. He felt that the sooner he was in the hands of police, the better, and that meanwhile polite conversation should be kept moving along.
‘Where did monsieur learn French?’ he asked.
‘In Bucarest. From foreigners and soldiers.’
‘So you don’t live here?’
‘When I wish.’
‘And the rest of the time?’
‘I have my band.’
It all became clear—all, that is, except for the fact that a musician who had played in international society often enough to speak some French should ever desire to return to this revolting squalor.
‘Was it your violin I heard last night in the restaurant where I permitted myself to borrow a horse?’
‘That could be.’
‘Maître!’ Bernardo exclaimed, his sincerity inspiring a stroke of genius. ‘Never in my life have I heard anything so moving. And to think it was you who spoke to me with your violin
when I was lying in the ditch! In the salons of Bucarest they are too occupied to listen with the heart as I did.’
‘Have you no money?’
‘A little, but not much.’
‘Take it off him and send him on his road!’
Bernardo understood. Drumul—the road—was already a familiar word. And gipsies—well, one couldn’t expect them to leave a man his cash when there was no chance of being accused of taking it.
They stripped him of every cent. Bernardo turned to the violinist of two lives.
‘Will you give me at least a pair of peasant shoes?’ he asked.
Yes, willingly. For some reason the request aroused crazy laughter—perhaps because middle-class clothes and rubber sandals with their thongs crossed outside the trousers were so incongruous or because the foreign horse-thief was so innocent that he had set out to tramp the road in shoes too small for him. Two of the men led him out of the camp and indicated that he should take a cart-track to the north and hurry. Why the north? Why anything? He obeyed.
It served him right. Stealing the mayor’s horse was nothing, but he accused himself of never even thinking that somebody else might be charged with the crime. He trudged on, his feet not so eased as he expected. Why he had been directed north was understandable. There was a dark line of forest on the horizon. Those homeless nomads were all right in the open plain themselves but recognised that for a solitary outcast the shelter of trees was the answer.
So it might have been, temporarily, for an individual able to return to the herd whenever he wished. But Bernardo had no herd. He was stripped of morale as he had been of money. He lost his courage, his assurance, his sense of past and future. For two days he lived on blackberries, preferring the privacy of the woods to the shame of being a pariah who could not communicate intelligibly with his fellows. He despaired of reaching Bucarest or of finding an end to his troubles if he did, certain that no consul could help him, that a Romanian gaol would be followed by a Spanish gaol and that it would not make two hoots of difference to Kalmody if the father of his grandson—and God damn eternally that lovely obsession of a girl for whom he would be perfectly willing to die!—were garotted by the public executioner for the murder of Bobo who, if there were any justice, should have had his skull blown in by the Bolsheviks.
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown Page 9