by Ann Bridge
13
When Hope, that same morning, had been reckoning with her parents’ probable anxiety on finding that she was not on the train, she had counted on her Mother’s coming to her sleeper to make sure that she was getting up well before their arrival at Belgrade. In fact on this particular occasion that for once didn’t happen; Mrs. Kirkland, very much overtired with packing and farewells, took a sleeping-pill and was only aroused, with a start, when the train stopped at the Yugoslav frontier some distance short of Belgrade, and the Customs came knocking on her door. She did then think of Hope, but didn’t really worry; the child had her own passport and ticket. When the man had gone she concentrated on getting herself dressed and packed in an unwonted hurry, sighing as she did so for Margit’s expert aid. At Belgrade the passengers for Istanbul had to change trains and pick up the Simplon Orient Express, coming down from Trieste and Zagreb; and like her daughter the night before, Mrs. Kirkland looked with dismay at the wilting flowers which filled the compartment, impeding her hasty packing.
Five minutes before the train got in, her husband tapped and poked his head round the door.
“Morning, dear. Hopey here with you?” He put his head further round and said—“Why no, she isn’t. I wonder where she’s got to?”—in tones of surprise.
“Isn’t she in her compartment? I hope she’s ready,” said Mrs. Kirkland.
“She’s ready all right—all her stuff is there, packed,” said Mr. Kirkland. “But she’s not there; I thought she’d be with you.”
“She must be down the corridor some place,” said Mrs. Kirkland abstractedly, trying to wedge her slippers, which she had forgotten, into her rather overfull dressing-case.
“I’ll ask that attendant man,” said Mr. Kirkland, retreating through the door again; “he’s just coming along.”
The suave little attendant could throw no light on Hope’s movements; he had not seen Mademoiselle since last night, when she rang for a bottle of Vichy water, just outside Kelenföld. She was then preparing to retire. (His language was as genteel as that of an old-fashioned English servant.)
“Well, hustle round and find her—we’ll be in in a minute,” said Mr. Kirkland impatiently.
In a minute, indeed, they were in—but as the train emptied itself on to the platform, under that low smoky glass roof, it became finally and indisputably evident that Hope was not among the passengers. Out they came, and Mr. Kirkland stood checking them as best he could—for the station seemed to be thronged with people and troops, and the platform itself was cluttered up with baggage—as they streamed down towards the exit: out came all the Kirklands’ heavy luggage from the van, and the small pieces from their sleepers, including Hope’s dressing-case, hat-box and lesser suitcases—but of Hope herself there was no sign. “Well, that’s peculiar; where can she be?” said her Father, and tackled the Wagons-Lits man again. This individual hastened to point out that the loss of a passenger was only what one might expect if people were allowed to keep their own tickets and passports, instead of handing them over to him, their proper custodian on night journeys. If he had had Mademoiselle’s passport, it would have been observed at the frontier that she was not on the train.
“But she must be on the train! Where could she leave it?” Mr. Kirkland demanded.
Oh, there were several places—Kecskemét, and at least two other stops.
“But she wouldn’t want to leave the train—why should she?” Mrs. Kirkland put in.
However, leave it she clearly had, since she was not on it. A friend on the American Legation staff had come down to see the Kirklands as they passed through, and was in a position to force the station officials, in spite of the confusion and excitement which seemed to prevail, to have every coach searched from end to end. But there was no trace of Hope; she had vanished as completely as if she had evaporated.
Mrs. Kirkland began to cry a little, very quietly. “We have to find her,” she kept saying, over and over again.
Did the young lady walk in her sleep? one of the harassed officials wanted to know.
“No,” Mr. Kirkland snapped. “Why?”
“Because in that case, she might have fallen out on to the line.”
“Oh mercy!” said poor Mrs. Kirkland, wringing her hands.
“Well, people do that and don’t get killed,” her husband comforted her. “But we’ll have to ring back up the line and check. Can these people do that?” he asked his friend. “Or had we better come up to the Legation?”
The friend thought it might be better to go up to the Legation—“the lines are pretty well jammed up with military calls. You see there’s a mobilization going on.”
“Mobilization? Why?” Mrs. Kirkland asked; her thoughts were all on her child.
“Well, we’re more or less starting a war down here. There are several German divisions only just beyond the frontier, and I believe the Hungarians are moving into the Banat, too,” the friend replied. “It’s a bit of a mix-up, today. We’d have a better chance telephoning from the Legation, of course, but”—he looked at his watch—“there won’t be a lot of time, if you’re going to catch the Orient Express; hardly time to get calls through.”
“To Hell with the Orient Express!” said Mr. Kirkland. “D’you think we’re going on without Hopey?”
“Oh yes, 1 see. Do you want to cancel your reservations, then?”
“No, I want to get on the telephone!—let the reservations slide.” He glanced at their pile of luggage. “Can we leave this some place, while we go up and telephone?”
The Legation friend thought that could be arranged, and spoke to one of the station officials who still, unwillingly, hung about these tiresome but evidently important foreigners who had mislaid a young lady—he only wanted to get on with his immediate and urgent job of entraining troops, and Jewish refugees fleeing from the possible advent of the Germans.
But while the bigger luggage was being stowed in a cloakroom Mrs. Kirkland had an idea.
“John dear, mightn’t it be a good plan if we let Mr. Bridges do the telephoning, and we took a train back meantime, and made enquiries at the stations ourselves? They’d know, surely, if anyone had been found along the line?” She tried to speak steadily, but her lips were trembling.
Mr. Bridges put this suggestion up to the station officials, and then turned to Mrs. Kirkland with their reply.
“There are no trains back, Mrs. Kirkland—nothing is running North at all. It’d be running right into the Germans, you see; all trains, except troop-trains, are being routed South.”
“All the same, Alice has something there,” said Mr. Kirkland. “I guess we’d better go up and put through some enquiries by telephone first, but then maybe we could take one of the Legation cars and drive back—we’d get through all right—and start asking ourselves at the local stations.”
Mr. Bridges looked embarrassed. “I think you’d better come up and see the Minister,” he said. “We’re rather short on cars, just today; you see we’ve been evacuating all non-essential personnel, and most of the cars are out. I had my own to come down here to meet you, but”—he coughed—“I wouldn’t like to hand it over indefinitely, without the Minister’s sanction.”
There was obviously nothing for it but to go up to the Legation. They were driven by Mr. Bridges through a city where tension and the prospect of war were fairly evident. Little parties of troops, marching raggedly, but looking tough and resolute; knots of students and school-children, singing martial songs; here and there rather more gloomy groups of people, all obviously Jews, piling dilapidated-looking cars with objects of every conceivable description—Mr. Kirkland saw a ‘cello being corded on to the roof of one such vehicle, and had to laugh, anxious as he was. More aware of the threat to Yugoslavia than his wife, he was struck by the resilient, almost casual attitude of most of the population of Belgrade. “They’re pretty tough, these people,” he observed.
“Oh, they’re tough all right, the Yugoslavs,” Mr. Bridges responded.
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To Mrs. Kirkland that day was one long misery—of ghastly anxiety, combined with complete frustration and considerable embarrassment. She and John knew the Minister and his wife fairly well, Hope had even stayed with them when she went down to say goodbye to Sam; but though they were all kindness and sympathy, and anxious to help, it could not fail to be crystal clear that the advent of unexpected visitors, who wished to use the Legation telephone for long spells on end, was hardly welcome on that particular day. Ministers who find themselves faced at any moment with a possible invasion of the capital where they are functioning have in fact quite a lot of uses for their telephones and cars themselves; and the Kirklands realized even before breakfast was over that their idea of borrowing a car and driving back into Hungary was out—finally and utterly out. Mr. Kirkland of course suggested hiring a car, but that, it seemed, was out too. “The Jews are paying 500,000 dinars for a car,” one of the secretaries explained. (Half a million dinars, at the rate then current, was nearly £2,000, and Mr. Kirkland rather blenched at such a sum.) “Anyway you’d never get one now,” the young man added, with finality.
There remained the telephone. Since even Legation telephoning from Belgrade that day proved to be subject to interminable delays Mr. Kirkland decided to let Budapest do what it could, and put through a personal call to Bill Hershey at the Consulate—while he waited for it Mrs. Kirkland went off in a taxi and booked a room at the Majestic, one of Belgrade’s principal hotels. This hostelry diligently, but rather unsuccessfully, aped the West; it had all the drearier features, in the chromium-plate line, of would-be smart hotels in more up-to-date countries, but little of their efficiency: the water in the bathroom which Mrs. Kirkland secured was not very hot, and nothing—as she noted in one distasteful glance—was what she called clean. However, please God, it was only for one night! Then she went on to the station—the Legation had thoughtfully provided her with a taxi-man who spoke German—and got out her own, Hope’s and John’s overnight cases, and the picnic-basket, and took them back to the hotel.
During this second visit to the station she registered far more clearly than she had done on their arrival the sense of emergency which prevailed. Troops, supplies, agitated passengers filled the whole place; sharp words of command rang out, echoing under the glass roof; soldiers marched here and there, and then tramped back again. All this discouraged the poor lady greatly—imagine little Hope, alone, perhaps caught up in such a mêlée! She didn’t waste a moment at the Majestic—she handed over the luggage to the hall porter and hastened back to the Legation.
Here she found that her husband had got through to Bill Hershey. Bill, the comfortable and reliable, had been “like a mad bull”, according to John Kirkland when he heard that Hope was missing, and had promised to do anything and everything to trace her. “He said—’If she‘s above ground and in Europe, I’ll find her!’” Mr. Kirkland reported. “And he’ll call us back.”
“Where?” Mrs. Kirkland asked.
“Here. We’ll keep in touch. They’ll take a message for us—or maybe I can come back and sit, after lunch.”
So the Kirklands went off to the hotel for a wretched meal, surrounded by people who seemed to be drowning their anxieties in slivovitz, after which Mrs. Kirkland went to lie down, and Mr. Kirkland returned to sit about in the Legation and wait for news.
News he got, rather late in the afternoon, and very surprising it was. During the morning the Legation, as an extra precaution, had badgered an already frenzied Ministry of the Interior to have a sharp look-out kept at the frontier for a young lady answering to Hope’s description, who might be coming on by train, and about 5 p.m. an excited attaché rushed into the room where Mr. Kirkland sat waiting, trying to read Time Magazine, but mostly smoking endless cigarettes, and fairly shouted—“Mr. Kirkland, she’s through! She crossed the frontier. The Ministry has just called up. They say the frontier police report that she crossed about 3.50 in an American car, with two young men.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” John Kirkland raised his considerable length out of his chair at unusual speed; Time fell unheeded to the floor. “Crossed by car, did she? Why the Hell should she have gone back for the car? It doesn’t make sense. Well, maybe it does—she kind of likes that car. But just the same!—what a darned thing to do! When’ll she be here?”
“Oh, any time now, I’d say, Mr. Kirkland. It’s not a long run from the frontier—though with all these troop movements she may be held up a bit.”
John Kirkland sat down again—his mind began to work at the thing.
“Two young men with her, eh? What young men?”
“The Ministry didn’t say, Mr. Kirkland—they just said she had two young men along.”
“Refugees she’d picked up, it could be,” the father said, still thoughtfully. “Hopey’s kind of kind.” Suddenly he rounded on the young man. “They’re sure it is Hope?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Kirkland. There’s no doubt about that. The police saw her passport with the name, and the description, and it all added up. She was wearing a long grey coat of some sort of sheepskin, they said, with a little cap to match. That right?”
“Yes, that’s Hopey,” said Hope’s Father with conviction. “That’s what she had on. Thanks a million, Norris!” He rose and picked up his hat.
“And—oh, er—Mr. Kirkland—when Miss Kirkland comes I suppose you’ll be going on, won’t you? There are trains going South all right.”
“Why yes—we’ll go on as soon as we can get fresh reservations, I expect,” said Kirkland, walking towards the door.
“Wouldn’t it be best to go right on tonight, Mr. Kirkland? We could get you on to the train. The Minister seemed to think—”
“Oh, don’t worry; thanks all the same, Norris,” the older man interrupted him. Why should young Norris be pressing him to leave like that? “I must get back to the hotel and tell her Mother the good news,” he said, as he walked down the passage. “‘Bye, Norris, and thanks again”—and he strode off, leaving the young attaché thinking that it was all very well for the Minister to tell one to give people a hint, but what could one do if they wouldn’t take it? Then he was called to the telephone, and had to think about something else.
Poor Kirklands! They could not know that the girl with the grey sheepskin coat who had crossed the frontier at ten to four was Litka, blinding South for all she was worth—towards Nish, and the Bulgarian frontier, towards freedom and safety. Those wretched devoted people sat waiting through the interminable minutes, for long hours of an endless evening for a car which never came, and for a girl who was sobbing her heart out, helplessly, in a Hungarian police cell. At midnight John Kirkland fairly drove his wife to bed, and forced her to take three Seconals—but when she was at last asleep, her pillow wet with unwonted tears, he crept downstairs again and sat in the bar—which in the Majestic remained open till 5 a.m.—drinking slivovitz, talking to the barman about the Nazis and the future of Yugoslavia—a gloomy subject just then—and listening in vain for the telephone to ring from the Legation. When the bar at last closed he walked heavily upstairs to bed—the lift had packed up some hours before. That night he got exactly one-and-a-half hours’ sleep.
Bill Hershey had for Hope Kirkland the half-amused, half-protective affection, tinged with tenderness but stopping short well this side of love, which so many middle-aged bachelors have for delightful girls twenty years their junior. But his feeling for her was real and quite strong, and when he got that call from a distracted John Kirkland down in Belgrade, reporting that Hope had disappeared off the night train and calling on him for help, he was tremendously upset. When he said—“John, if she’s above ground, and in Europe, I’ll find her,” he meant it. But after he had put down the receiver he sat for a moment or two with his greying head in his hands, wondering just how he was to find her.
Enquiries down the line were obviously the first step, and very soon he lifted the receiver again and asked for the Central Office of the State Railways. Pista Hort
hy, the Regent’s son and the youthful head of the whole organization, happened to be out, but his secretary, who knew both Bill and the Kirklands, instantly undertook to have enquiries made immediately at all places where the train had stopped, in the first place. “After this we can make enquiries also at the smaller stations, in case she fell off.”
“Better do that right away as well,” Bill said. “Do the two things at once, and rush it. Though why she should fall off a train, I can’t see.”
“Certainly, Mr. Hershey. At once we do both things. Surely we find the young lady.”
After which Bill went back to his trays of papers and his interviews with distracted Jews and news-hungry journalists, half his mind constantly wondering what on earth could have happened to Hope.
He had given her description in fair detail to Pista Horthy’s secretary, as he had seen her at the station the night before: the grey lambskin coat and cap, “and kind of high-heeled shoes.” And before lunch-time news came in that such a young lady had left the train at Kecskemét in the small hours of the morning, carrying a bouquet of flowers, and had taken a taxi to the hotel; moreover the ticket to Istanbul, which had made a strong impression, was reported too. “That’s her all right!” Bill exclaimed. “But what the Hell did she want to go to a hotel in Kecskemét for, in the middle of the night?”
That question stuck in his mind like a burr while he was doing the next thing, which was to make the Hungarian Consulate clerk ring up the police at Kecskemét, give a full description of Hope, and ask them to take all steps to trace her. “Tell them to find a taxi,” Bill said. “Can’t be all that many taxis meeting the night train at Kecskemét—it’s an up-state sort of place.” But the question went on pricking at him, why had Hope done such a thing? Why on earth? And the only answer which suggested itself to his tolerant, kindly, experienced mind was that it was something to do with a young man.