by Ann Bridge
“Oh Bill, yes. 1 feel I could sleep for a thousand years! But you will try and find out what’s happened to Father and Mother, won’t you?”
“Sure I will—I’ll put the Legation on to it. Now you sleep.” And he went away.
16
Bill went straight back to the Consulate and put a personal call through to a friend at the Legation in Sofia. He was now just as determined to find the Kirkland parents, if alive, as he had been the previous day to find Hope. There would be at least three hours’ delay, the clerk reported, so he got into his car again and drove off to the Radolny utca. A solitary policeman was at the door of the Penzio, but Bill had no difficulty in getting in, seeing the landlady, and being taken to the Moranskis’ room. He was as much struck by its poverty as Hope had been on her first visit—more so, for then its occupants had given it life and charm, while now only Mme Moranska’s corpse lay on the poor bed, with the red and white carnations dull and withered on the dingy quilt. The landlady spoke some German, as Bill did—practically all diplomatic officials learned to speak a little German, almost in self-defence, while in Budapest—and she was greatly relieved to learn that he had come to arrange about the funeral; she herself had sent for the parish priest, and a grave could be had in the Friedhof, she said—but who was to pay, and how was it all to be arranged? She was obviously harassed, and kept repeating, almost weeping, that she wanted no more trouble with the police! Bill patted her shoulder and said that he was an American, and had seen the police; then he took down the name of the priest, and hers, and said that he thought the good nuns at the Sacré Coeur would see to it all, and he would pay, and could he telephone? So in the end Bill Hershey himself telephoned from that tottery table with the aspidistra on it and the Polish doodles on the wall above; he got hold of Mother Antony, said who he was, and asked if she could arrange a funeral for a friend of Miss Hope Kirkland? The nun was supremely competent. Where was the body, what was the name, when had death taken place, had the death been registered, had the parish priest been notified, was the Requiem Mass to be said in the parish church or somewhere else? Bill answered all these questions by referring her to the landlady and the parish priest, giving in addition his private address, and saying that he would be responsible for the expenses. “There must be plenty of music, and lots of flowers,” said innocent Bill. “And Mr. Hershey will of course attend?” the nun assumed. Bill was staggered into saying Yes. “Just let me know when, and I’ll be along. The family—well, they’re Poles, you see, and they’ve left the country. I’ll be the only mourner, I imagine.” Mother Antony quite understood—“These poor Poles!—it is the major tragedy of our time. Such a Catholic people.”
Bill was reminded, involuntarily, of Hope’s words about girls getting their faces slapped because they loved their country. These very odd connections and activities of hers were making him conscious of aspects of Europe that he had never really registered before. “And how is our dear Hope?” the nun then asked. “She has the potentialities of a great soul, young as she is. We love her dearly.” Bill stammered out that he quite agreed, and rang off. What he had seen and heard that day had given him a rather high estimate of the potentialities of Hope’s soul, but he really couldn’t discuss them down the telephone with an unknown nun.
Then he told the landlady that everything about the funeral was to be arranged by the nuns, and asked if he could go back to the Moranskis’ room for a moment? Oh, yes, most certainly—and if the Polish family was leaving definitively, what about the effects? Bill explained that he proposed to remove some of the effects. It had already struck him that these were few, and poor; back in the room he looked round and confirmed his impression. Except for the pictures, and a few old clothes on those so very public hooks, there was nothing—really nothing at all. He went over to the canvases propped against the wall, took them up and looked at them. The one of the house was in front of the rest, and he recognized it immediately from Hope’s description—he put it aside and examined the others; there were only four or five. Bill knew little about pictures, but even he saw that these were agreeable, and forcible. He wheeled round on the landlady.
“Do they owe anything for rent?” he asked.
“Oh, no, Sir; they always paid a week in advance, most regularly; they still have three days paid, to go yet.”
“Good. Well in that case I’ll take all the pictures.” He gathered them up under his arm—they were not large—while his eyes roved round the room, to be arrested by the basket of Herend flowers on the mantelpiece, so out of keeping with the dreariness of all the rest. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Oh, I believe that was a gift from the American young lady who visited here often, recently—I heard the old lady speak of it just before the trouble began, and with so much pleasure.”
“Well, have it buried with her—put it in her coffin,” said Bill Hershey brusquely; with his free hand he lifted the pretty thing down and set it on the bed. As he did so he looked at that still waxen face, with the sculptured quality that the faces of the dead do have. Somehow she looked wonderful—and Hope had given her some exquisite and costly porcelain flowers. She should damn well have them in the grave! He said goodbye to the landlady, and took the pictures back to the Consulate.
The call to Sofia was not in yet; first thing of all Bill rang up his house and enquired for Hope. Erich sent Anna to the telephone. The young lady was fast, fast asleep, the maid said; “she sleeps as sweetly and prettily as a child.” Satisfied, Bill turned to the papers and visitors that had accumulated during the afternoon—there was still a considerable press of work. Tibor rang up, impatient to know where Hope had been found, and what had happened; Bill said he couldn’t tell him on the telephone. When—“Could I not speak with her?” the young man asked. “No, you can’t—she’s asleep,” Bill growled. “And I have to work, anyway. Sorry, Tibor—look, I’ll ring you tomorrow; you shall see her all right before she goes.” And he turned back to his papers.
It was quite late when his telephone rang, and the little clerk said—“The Sofia call, Mr. Hershey, Sir,” and put him through.
Bill asked his colleague at once for news of Belgrade. Oh, an utter shambles, the colleague said, but they had heard by some roundabout route that the Minister and his wife and all the staff were safe. Bill was greatly relieved, and said so. “Did you hear anything of the Kirklands?” he asked then.
“John B., of the National Oil Company? No, I haven’t heard anything, but didn’t they travel by car? The girl’s car passed through here early this morning—I happened to see it myself; I spotted the Massachusetts number-plates, and that made me notice it. That new grey Dodge she has. So I suppose they were all in it.”
“No, they damn well weren’t!” Bill almost snapped. At last one American official in South-East Europe now knew who the occupants of that car really were.
“Not? Well then I don’t know a thing,” said the colleague. “But hold on a moment—Sam Harrison’s here in my room and he’d like a word with you.”
“Sam? What’s he doing in Sofia?—I thought he was in Istanbul,” Bill said, in surprise.
The colleague’s voice conveyed amusement, even down the rather crackling line of an inter-capital Balkan telephone, as he replied—“I guess he can tell you that! Hold on—here’s the old guy himself.”
And as the familiar voice, saying “Oh hullo, Bill!” came through—“Sam, what on earth are you doing up in Sofia?” Hershey asked.
The answer to that question lay in what had happened down in Istanbul early that same morning. John Kirkland had telegraphed to Sam Harrison, out of a father’s very proper respect for his only daughter’s fiancé, to inform him that the Kirkland family would be arriving in Istanbul on the morning of April the 6th. The Simplón Orient Express arrives at the European station, beyond the Galata Bridge, at an uncompromising hour; Sam, the devout lover, left his bed and his comfortable room in the Park Hotel far earlier than is common with journalists, who
are normally of nocturnal habits, and was waiting, happy and eager, among the pimps and tourist agents on the platform when the long train drew in. But there were no Kirklands on it—and what was even more surprising, the sleeping-car attendant said that there had been no cancellations: the gentleman and the two ladies just hadn’t turned up at Belgrade the previous day at all. Sam stood staring in bewilderment at the empty sleepers. It was most extraordinary—it wasn’t in the least like John Kirkland, with his business-like habits. Disappointed, and more hurt by his disappointment than he expected—for after all there must just have been some muddle, and the telegram had missed him somehow—he went and had a cup of coffee, and was on the doorstep of the Consulate when it opened, confident of finding a message.
But there was no message. An obliging friend had the register of the previous day’s telegrams gone through in front of him; there had been nothing for “Harrison” except what he had already seen, a cable from his paper, suggesting that if “current troop movements Hungary develop warwise Balkans” he should go up and cover the new Balkan War—the decision, for the moment, was left to him.
Puzzled, unhappy, and disturbed, Sam hung about the Consulate all the morning, reluctant to leave the most probable source of news; now and again he went over to the Associated Press Office, wondering—really rather perspicaciously—if anything funny was going on up in Yugoslavia. Towards lunch-time he went and had a drink in the bar of one of the more Europeanized hotels, and there heard from a fellow journalist a circumstantial rumour about the bombing of Belgrade early that morning. Leaving his drink half-finished he flung a note on the counter, and hurtled back in one of Istanbul’s enormous and death-dealing taxis to the Consulate. His obliging friend was still there, on the telephone to the Embassy up in Ankara, which was busily monitoring wireless reports from the various radio-stations in South-East Europe, especially from Radio Ankara itself; someone was at that moment relaying these by telephone to the Consulate-General in Istanbul. Sam sat down, heavily, and listened to what his friends threw out at intervals, lighting fresh Chesterfields all the time. The friend eventually put down the receiver and said that it sounded pretty bad up in Belgrade, and he wished there was some news of the Legation and all the staff—but anyway what about some lunch?
Sam said No, he had to see about a plane. The friend told him not to be a sucker, didn’t he know all offices in Turkey closed for two hours at lunch-time? So Sam went off and ate grilled Marmara mackerel and a salad composed of lamb’s lettuce, sliced with onions, tomatoes, and delicious oily black olives with his friend, who had been in Turkey a long time; they did this in a rather grubby little restaurant, and for a fraction of what Sam would have paid in his hotel. And then he took another of those dangerous taxis, and went off to get a seat on the Belgrade plane.
Here he was frustrated again—all planes to Yugoslavia had been cancelled. “To Sofia, perhaps?” the Levantine clerk suggested. Sam agreed—Sofia was part-way there, anyhow, and he booked a seat on the first plane he could get, late in the afternoon. Then he returned to the hotel, packed his bags, and sent off a cable to his paper saying “proceeding war area today”.
All the way up to Sofia in the plane, flying rather bumpily over the broken mountainous country, he went on puzzling and worrying about what could have become of the Kirklands and his precious Hope. None of it was in the least like them, none of it made sense. John Kirkland was about the last man God ever created to pay for things like sleepers and not use them! But they ought to have got through Belgrade a clear twenty-four hours before the bombing had started. It was all quite incomprehensible, Sam thought, as he sat sweating slightly, a little air-sick from the bumps of the machine. He was so upset that when the plane touched down outside that rather Neapolitan-ice capital, all pink-and-white buildings and green trees along the new streets, he drove from the small airport not to The Bulgaria, the main hotel—known locally as The Brown House, because it was so full of Nazis—but to his country’s Legation. There he routed out, as it happened, the particular colleague whom Bill was trying to ring up from Budapest, and asked him if he had seen or heard anything of the Kirklands? The colleague said No, he hadn’t seen them exactly, but wasn’t the girl’s car a grey Dodge with Massachusetts number-plates?—because he’d seen just such a car flash through the town early that morning, and surely there could hardly be two grey Dodges with Massachusetts number-plates roaring around through the Balkans. Sam agreed—though he found it even more peculiar, if the Kirkland parents had changed their minds and decided to travel by car, that they should have failed to cancel their reservations, and should neither have let him know, nor have made their number with the American authorities as they passed through Sofia, in view of the disturbed state of affairs. It was precisely at this point in his cogitations that the Budapest call came through, and he heard his friend repeating to Bill Hershey the story of Hope’s grey car having gone through the city that morning, and—obviously—Bill’s repudiation of the idea that the Kirklands were in it. And then his friend handed the receiver to him, and he proceeded to answer Bill’s question about what he was doing in Sofia.
“Well, officially I’ve come up to cover this new war,” Sam said with deliberation—he always spoke rather slowly. “But primarily I’m trying to trace the Kirklands. I gather you don’t know where they are, either?”
“Not the old folks—no. I’m afraid they’ll have been in Belgrade this morning,” Bill said. “But Hope’s here.”
“Here? You mean in Budapest? But how on earth? Why isn’t she with her parents?”
“Well, it’s quite a story,” Bill began.
“Wasn’t she in her car? Garner says he saw it going through here this morning,” Sam interposed.
“No, she wasn’t. It’s all a bit mixed, and I don’t want to say too much. You ought to be able to guess why. But she lent her car—and her passport—to some friends of yours, so they could get out. Seems that some girl looks very like her.”
“Litka!” Sam ejaculated, so loud that the telephone cracked in Bill’s ear. “I never thought of it before, but they are alike.”
“Well, dressed up in Hope’s clothes she was quite like enough to use Hope’s papers,” said Bill.
Sam fairly gasped as it hit him, this thing that Hope had done. “What happened to her?” he asked urgently.
“Oh, she stayed behind, taking the other girl’s place—you’d know where—till she figured everything was O.K. Then the D.B. boys picked her up, thinking she was your girl-friend with the queer name.”
“Oh God! They didn’t! Not Hope?”
“Yes they did. She spent the night in the cells—I bailed her out this morning.”
“Is she all right?” Sam’s voice was strained with anxiety, even to Bill’s ears down the telephone.
“Perfectly all right; only tired, and quite a bit shaken. And all tensed up about what happens to European girls in Hitler’s Europe, having been one for twenty-four hours.”
“She has a right to be! But where is she staying?”
“At my place—sleeping like the dead in the spare room! Want to talk to her?—if so I’ll transfer the call. I daresay she wouldn’t mind waking for you,” said Bill. In spite of his guess about Hope and the unknown Polish young man, this conversation with Sam had given him a rather definite picture of the situation, at least from Sam’s end.
“Not for the wide world!” said Sam. “Let her sleep. What are her plans?”
“None, till she finds out what’s happened to her parents. I hope to God they’re all right—if they aren’t, what plans can she have?”
“She can come right down to Sofia and marry me, as she’s promised to do,” said Sam Harrison, with a sudden extreme decision. “Or I’ll come up to Budapest, and your boss can marry us at the Consulate! But I hope to Heaven old John and Mrs. Kirkland are all right—I’ll hang around the Legation till we get some news. And Bill—” He paused slightly.
“Yes?”
“When she
does wake, give her my love, and tell her I’m around; and that the Dodge dodged through all right, and that she’s wonderful.”
“I’ll do that. She is,” Bill said, grinning sympathetically to himself as Sam rang off. Poor Sam! How would it all work out for them both, he wondered, as he at last drove home.
Hope had woken up, Anna reported when he got back, and they dined together at half-past nine—in Budapest a perfectly normal hour. The girl looked better after her long sleep; the evening having turned warm she had abandoned Litka’s hideous check coat, and was almost her old pretty self. Bill watched her face curiously when he said—after replying negatively to her first enquiry for news of her parents—“I’ve just been talking to Sam.”
To his dismay she turned quite white.
“Sam? Is he here? He can’t be!”
“No, it was on the telephone.” He wished then that he had not been so abrupt. “From Sofia,” he said. “I guess he’s come up to cover this new war. But he said I should give you his love, and tell you that the Dodge had dodged right through.”
Colour and animation flew into her face.
“Through Sofia!”
“Yes. Garner happened to see it, and recognized the number-plates. The poor sucker thought you and your parents must be on board, but I knew better!”