A Place to Stand

by Ann Bridge

  “Why you poor kid, yes, sure. We’ll go up to my place—it’s getting on for lunch-time. When did you eat last?”

  “I had a bit of stale corn bread this morning, if you call that eating! But Bill, tell me quick—d’you know where Father and Mother are? They didn’t stop over in Belgrade yesterday, did they?”

  Bill looked concerned. From the Legation he had heard rumours of the bombing of Belgrade, but owing to the censorship of all messages he had no “hard news”.

  “Well yes, they did,” he said. “Your Father rang me in the morning—he had a job to get …”

  “Oh mercy!” Hope interrupted. “Were they going to stay the night?”

  “Yes, of course; they wouldn’t stir till they knew what had become of you. I was to call them back at the Legation, only I couldn’t get through till after ten, and then I got cut off almost at once.”

  “Oh Heavens, then they’ll have been in the bombing! Oh Bill, are they all right?”

  “We don’t know—we don’t know yet if the Minister or any of our people down there are all right; the telephones have shut down completely. Sofia was going to try and find out—we asked them to—and let us know, but I haven’t heard anything so far.” He turned to her, suddenly curious. “But how do you know about Belgrade being bombed?”

  “Oh, the gaoler told me,” Hope replied. “He was as pleased as Punch about it, the nasty Schwab! He said it was blown utterly to bits—by eight squadrons,” she said wretchedly. “Oh I do hope they’re all right! If they’re killed it will be all my fault.”

  This was incontrovertibly true. However after a few minutes, during which Bill said all the encouraging things he could, the car drew up outside his pleasant villa on the Rózsa-Domb; over the door the Stars and Stripes floated in the breeze above the lilacs in bud in the pretty front garden. When she got out the girl stood for a moment looking up at the flag, breathing the sweet air deeply—then she turned round to Bill.

  “I know something you don’t know,” she said. “What it really means to be safe, and free!”

  Hershey was impressed by her words, and the new gravity with which she spoke. But he was also worried by her looks; she was pale as well as untidy, with dark rings under her eyes and a general air of great exhaustion.

  “Hope, I want to hear all about it, but just now I think you should come in and have that drink”—and he put a fatherly arm round her shoulders and drew her indoors. From Erich his butler he ordered cocktails at once, and lunch for two as soon as possible, even while he was leading her upstairs to the bathroom. Then he rang up the Consulate and told his clerk that Miss Kirkland was found, and at his house, where he would be lunching, in case any more enquiries came through from the South. The little clerk was delighted. “Oh, this is good, that the young lady is found! But Mr. Hershey, Sir, did you hear any more about Belgrade?”

  Bill told him that eight squadrons had bombed it. “Oh, but this is frightful! It must be utterly destroyed,” exclaimed the Hungarian. “We do not like the Yugoslavs much, but nevertheless this is a terrible thing! Will they do so to us?”

  Bill was getting bored. “I hope not,” he said. “All right, Sándor.”

  “Mr. Hershey, just one moment please—you have told the Count?”

  “Told what Count what?”

  “But the Count Zichy, that the young lady is found?”

  Bill had forgotten Tibor. Of course the consulate clerk was quite right—consulate clerks generally are. “Not yet—we’ve only just got in. I’ll call him, Sándor; okay.” He rang off and went back to Hope. Erich had just given her a cocktail, and stood looking on benevolently while she sipped it and munched cheese biscuits; she had had a wash, and done what she could to her face and hair, so that she looked better, but still very exhausted. Bill decided that they couldn’t do with Tibor just then; he wanted to get the business of learning the facts over at once; then afterwards she could eat, and get a rest. As the manservant withdrew he followed him out into the small hall. “Erich, please call Count Tibor Zichy and tell him that Miss Kirkland is found, and all right; that she is here, but fast asleep. I will call him later. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly, Sir,” said Erich, with sauve and happy comprehension. “I give the Count this message.” Bill went back into the sitting-room.

  “How d’you feel now, Hopey? Better?” he asked, pouring himself out a drink.

  “Oh Bill dear, a whole lot better.”

  “Fine. Well now you’d better come clean about all of this, in case we have any more trouble with the Deuxième Bureau. Just exactly what have you been up to? I saw you onto the train, night before last, with your Father and Mother. Why in all earth did you come back?”

  Hope had been getting ready for his questions, and trying to settle in her mind how much she had better tell. She began readily enough.

  “Well, I made friends these last weeks with some Polish refugees, perfectly darling people—”

  “How did you come to meet Polish refugees?” he interrupted.

  “Bill dear, do I have to tell you that? I just did meet them.” He studied her face, and then asked abruptly—“Friends of Sam’s?”

  To his surprise she blushed violently, but all she said was “Yes.”

  “I see. Funny of old Sam”—he paused. “However—go on.”

  “Well, I knew they meant to get out the night before last; they told me they were going to. But at Kelenföld the train stopped for ages, and I saw the Germans pulling people off it, and the sleeping-car man said they were Poles, and that that was the last train there’d be to Belgrade. And I couldn’t—” she checked herself—“well anyway I got out at Kecskemét, and roused up a garage and got a car, and came back.”

  “Yes, I know that part.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of course when your Father called me up to say you were lost I rang down the line, and heard where you’d got off. But what I cant see is why you didn’t leave a note, or something.”

  “I know!—I see that now,” said Hope miserably.

  “Well never mind—where did you go after you’d got the car out? Did you cross the frontier yesterday afternoon in it?”

  To his surprise her face suddenly became radiant.

  “Who says I did?”

  “Our Legation in Belgrade. But—”

  “Oh, how marvellous!” the girl interrupted. “So they did get through! Well, that’s one thing gone all right, anyway.”

  Bill got up and stood over her.

  “Now look here, Hope Kirkland, will you please not drive me crazy? Suppose you tell me exactly what happened, clear through. I have to know, officially, what you’ve been doing. Where did you go after you took the car from the garage?—begin there.”

  “I’m sorry, Bill—I will. I left the car in a side street and went to find out what had happened to these people. There were police round the house, but I got in all right, and found that—that some of them had gone; but the girl, the sister, was left behind, because the old Mother was dying. She died while I was there,” said Hope, trying to control a quiver in her voice.

  “What of? Had the police beaten her up?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but they’d been rough with her and Litka—that’s the daughter—and she had a weak heart anyway, and that just finished her off.”

  “Poor soul!—and poor little Hopey,” said Bill compassionately. “So then what did you do?”

  “Well you see then there was nothing for Litka, the girl, to wait for any more,” said Hope, speaking very fast—”and we’d heard by then that the two boys had got through the cordon and were waiting outside, so I just dressed her up in my coat and cap, and gave her my passport and triptyque and the car key, and all the dollars Father had given me for the trip, and sent her off with the car, to pick them up and get out.”

  Bill gaped at this.

  “But how could this girl use your passport?”

  “Oh, we’re very alike—the queerest thing! Ste
f—everyone noticed it,” said Hope hurriedly. “And with the coat and cap she was quite like me. The police let her out all right, as they’d seen me come in—and she must have swung it at the cordon, and at the frontier too,” said the girl, that radiant look coming into her pale face again. There was something about her expression at that moment which produced in sober Bill Hershey a most unwonted feeling—of something almost like reverence. He shook it off, however, as practical men tend to do with such feelings; for a moment he looked half-vexed, then he began to roar with laughter.

  “Well, I’ll be absolutely damned! Gosh, you are a crazy kid! And then what did you do?”

  “Oh, I was tired, so I went to sleep on the other bed—the poor old lady was dead on one; I slept till the police and that perfectly revolting Captain Revicsky came, and were horrible to me.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Yesterday, just before four. They thought I was Litka, of course”—she paused, grinning a little. “That awful coat is Litka’s—I was cold, so I put it on; and they’d seen her in it, and swore I was her. So they treated me the way Europeans get treated. And then they took me away to that prison place, and I was there till you came. I told that man in the office—he was a great deal more decent than Revicsky—who I was, and asked to see you; and he half-believed me, anyway, and called you. And then you came.”

  Hershey was looking grave.

  “How did they treat you? Any violence?”

  Hope hesitated. She didn’t want even to think of Revicsky’s hand against her cheek.

  “Dear, I must know,” Bill said very gently. “Come on and tell me.”

  “Revicsky slapped my face,” she said, with a sudden flare of anger. “He’s a beast!—I wish you could get him put in gaol!” Then her face and tone all at once changed back to that strange new gravity. “But Bill, don’t you see, it doesn’t so much matter about me—I’m out of it now, because I’m an American; I’m here with you. But men are slapping girls’ faces all over the place in Europe merely because the girls love their country, or love their brothers and sweethearts, and are trying to save their lives. That’s terrible—and we don’t do a thing about it.”

  Bill was thinking, American-wise, of what had been done to Hope, his countrywoman; he was struck by her care for the sufferings of European girls, but what concerned him, both privately and officially, was what had been done to her.

  “Was that all? Anything else.”

  “No, not really. He did it again when we got to the prison.”

  “You’d told him who you were?”

  “Had I, then? I can’t remember. Yes, maybe I had. I expect so. Bill, I really can’t be sure.”

  “Didn’t you say who you were at once?”

  “Well, I said I wasn’t Litka, right at the start. But I was rather playing for time, because when they came to the apartment it wasn’t quite four, and I’d reckoned that they might not get across the frontier till four—Litka and the boys, I mean—and I didn’t want the police ringing down and having them held up. But afterwards I got so mad, and so frightened, that I just raved that I was Hope Kirkland! But they didn’t believe me. Anyway, the others have got out,” the girl said, again with that look of brilliant happiness.

  “Why did you want them to get out so much?” Bill asked—it seemed to him fantastic that she should have done what she did, and risked and indeed endured so much for comparative strangers.

  “Because they’re splendid people—who’ve lost everything! I didn’t see why they should get shut up by the Boches as well,” she replied with energy. “And besides, by yesterday morning the thing they’d been waiting for had come,” she added incautiously—Bill had refilled her glass, more than once, and she was practically starving.

  “What had they been waiting for?”

  Hope saw her mistake too late.

  “Bill darling, I haven’t the smallest idea, really. It was just something they had to take out.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know that either.” She remembered all those unanswered questions in her mind when the Polish priest first handed her that little white package—about what on earth she was to do with it.

  “Did you see it?” Bill asked, his eyes on her give-away face.

  “Yes, I did,” she said defiantly. “I had it in my bag to get it past the police, going into the apartment.”

  “Who gave it to you? And what did it look like?”

  “Another Pole gave it me, in a café—and I shan’t tell you a thing about him! And it was just a little small white parcel, done up with red sealing-wax.”

  “Micro-film,” muttered Bill, who had long been a friend of Sam’s. He was remembering the Chief of Police’s sour remark about someone having connived at the escape of the wanted Poles. Probably this lot were pretty badly wanted, if they were waiting for some micro-film that had to be got out—smuggled out across the frontier, as no doubt it had been smuggled in over the Polish frontier. There had been a lot of that going on for the last year, and it was incredible, the risks these Poles took to do it—they were brave all right. But the idea that Hope should have been mixed up in all this made him quite angry—carrying the thing in her very handbag to get it through the police!

  “Who were these people, anyway?” he asked—quite sharply for Bill, that calm and sober man.

  She looked him straight in the face, with her lovely candid brown eyes.

  “I’m not releasing anything!” she proclaimed gaily. “They’re Sam’s friends—that’s quite enough for you! And they’ve got out, got out, got out!”—she was chanting the words triumphantly, and Hershey was staring at her radiant face in a sort of awe when Erich came in and announced lunch.

  Sitting at Bill’s table, eating veal and green salad and drinking white wine from Kesthely, Hope was jerked back into the old life with a bounce. This was the way one ate and drank, from shining glass and silver and china, on delicate lacy embroideries; and one ate and drank delicious things, not synthetic coffee, and corn bread off a dirty floor—nor even stale bread with eggs boiled in a kettle, washed down with tea with green apple sliced into it. That recollection caused her to pick up her handbag and hunt in it with something like panic—had those miserable police stolen the fruit-knife? No, it was there, and she set the bag down on the floor beside her again.

  “What is it?” Bill asked. He was curious, watching with interest every action of this new Hope, with her unwonted gravity, and her preoccupation with matters that he had never felt concerned him.

  “Nothing—I was afraid those creatures might have stolen something; they haven’t, though.” But the fruit-knife had taken her, with a profound immediacy, back to the room in the Radolny utca where Mme Moranska’s mortal shell still lay—back in her old world, she still had commitments to her new one.

  “Bill dear, would you do something for me?” she asked.

  “Anything I can. What is it?”

  “Just to arrange a funeral—Roman Catholic, with a Requiem Mass.” She giggled a little at the sight of Bill’s face when she said that, and then was grave again. “I mean, if Father and Mother are all right, I’ll want to go right on to them—I suppose we’ll hear sometime today, through Sofia or somehow—and if I leave, you’ll have to see to it.”

  “Who do I have to bury? The old Polish lady who died?” he asked.

  “Oh, darling Bill!—yes, her. She’s in Room 11 at the Ibolya Penzio in the Radolny utca—on the sixth floor. If you call the nuns at the Sacré Cœur they’ll find a priest, and a church and cemetery; you won’t have any trouble, except to find an undertaker—and I daresay the nuns will see to that too, if you ask them. Mother Antony speaks English—ask for her. But it ought really to have been arranged for today. Can you do it rather fast?”

  Hershey had pulled out a notebook and was jotting all this down, methodically; he nodded assent. Hope sprang up and kissed him.

  “Oh Bill, you really are a lamb!”

  Bill was pleased by he
r kiss; more pleased than he cared to show.

  “No trouble in the world,” he said cheerfully. “Funerals of all religions arranged at any time, at shortest notice. Our motto is service.”

  “We oughtn’t to laugh,” said Hope, while she did.

  “P’raps not. Any other commissions, Madame?”

  “Well yes—one other.”

  “Burying anyone else?” Bill asked, as she paused.

  “No. It’s a picture. Bill, I think you’ll have to go to the Penzio anyhow, to arrange the funeral—so it won’t be much extra bother. Shall you go yourself?”

  “Yes, I guess I’ll have to. What must I do about the picture?”

  “The old Father was a painter—I think he was pretty good, myself. Anyway he’d done some pictures of their home in Poland. One especially, of their house. They brought a few of them out; it was about all they did bring.” She spoke jerkily, in short abrupt sentences. “They’re leaning against the wall, in a corner near the press. The one I want you to get and bring away is of the house—long and white, with trees on the right and cornfields behind; you can’t miss it.”

  “And what will I do with it when I have it?” he asked, jotting again.

  “Keep it here, till you can get it to Sam. He’ll be in touch with Ste—with all of them, and I know he’ll see that they get it. They must have it—you see it’s absolutely all they have left of what used to be their whole life—and a marvellous life, at that.”

  “I’ll do that,” Hershey said. “Come on and have coffee; and then you must go and sleep, while I see to the funeral and all the rest of it.”

  Through all this talk at lunch Bill had derived a strong impression of some emotional disturbance, some involvement on Hope’s part; something more serious than just getting unknown Poles out of Hungary to please Sam. As he led her back into the sitting-room he decided in his own mind—correctly, this time—that what had brought her back to Budapest was a young man all right, but a Pole, not Tibor Zichy. And he further decided not to question her about it—or him. Hope’s heart, her young girl’s heart, was her own affair, secret and sacred; and whatever the impulse, it had led her to show a reckless heroism that moved him profoundly—flinging away her car, papers, money, her very nationality itself, to let others go free. And she had not got off cheaply—her tired white face showed that. She had paid up for these Europeans she cared about so much. When she had drunk her coffee he led her upstairs to a pleasant bedroom, where a pretty housemaid waited. “Now you tell Anna what you want, and she’ll fetch it, or buy it.” he said. “And you have a bath, and then get to bed and have some sleep—you need it, I’d say. And I’ll get cracking and bury your old Pole—and see you at supper. That O.K.?”