Fellow Passenger

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘But they will torture you,’ he said.

  ‘I am brave.’

  He made an appropriate gesture of heroic admiration.

  ‘But you know too much.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I told him. ‘Remind them that I don’t know where I stayed after my escape. I don’t know when I was taken on board or by whom. I can be landed as a stowaway and disowned. Don’t you see the propaganda value? The glorious People’s Democracies have nothing to do with espionage. We work for peace by cleaner methods than the fascist hyenas. Got it?’

  ‘What about your own organization?’ he asked.

  ‘Purely personal. I think they’ll see that by now.’

  In the last forty-eight hours every scrap of information must have been collected—to the exclusion of all other business in the radio rooms—from any and every department which could conceivably have employed me, and it must have become obvious that I had never been employed at all. Whatever my insane motives, there was nothing of importance I could give away if brought to trial.

  ‘But me? Advise them what to do with you?’ Karlis protested.

  ‘You are not advising them, comrade. I am advising them,’ I replied superbly.

  We knocked my proposal into his own officialese, ready to be sent off to Riga whence it would ascend, without a doubt, straight to the heights. Karlis’ attitude of reverence, even in his use of both hands to hold the final draft, was indescribable. He might have been some simple Ecuadorian Indian whom I had persuaded that he was able, via the local police post, to send a telegram to God.

  The interval between my helpful suggestion and the reply was short—a mere twelve hours. At two a.m. on Friday I was woken up by the ship’s engines, and shortly afterwards Karlis hurled himself through the wardrobe into my cabin.

  ‘Your sacrifice,’ he panted, ‘your sacrifice has been accepted. We are returning to London.’

  I was relieved but not surprised. That message from the ship, zealously relayed, must have fallen like manna upon the blotting-paper of those harassed men at the centre of their spider web. It was delightful to think of them—for who does not enjoy the role of benefactor?—wiping the sweat from chewed moustaches, complimenting themselves on their clarity of vision and wandering off arm in arm to punish the vodka and the sandwiches.

  O eloquent, unjust and mighty Muddle! As I look back to that moment from my ignominious but distinguished present, I cannot resist a digression in praise of Muddle, for digressions, however unpardonable in a literary man, are historically proper to a Prisoner in the Tower.

  Muddle, most powerful resort of the individual against the State, and yet how prostituted! With what ingenuity do we avoid taxes, when with the same weapon we might destroy the complacency of politicians! This world of technicians and economists is more vulnerable than any which preceded it, for there is more to muddle. Inject into it, with all the appearance of legality and innocence, the logic of Alice in Wonderland, and you shall find the planners groping in a world of your creation.

  Yet remember always that the answer to Muddle is Violence! When my maternal ancestors were at last compelled to produce the accounts of their provinces or the nominal rolls of the quarter-strength regiments for which they drew full pay, they created Muddle but were careful to preserve their distance and some few rounds of ammunition that would fire. I, too, was assisted by geography to maintain my imaginary but unassailable status. In western countries the risk that the exasperated will resort to violence is slight. And yet, even if the chosen victim of your nuisance be but a municipal sanitary inspector, do not commit it, however great your necessity, before his face!

  My fate now depended upon whether or not the captain had been instructed to wireless to London his true reasons for putting back. I thought it probable that the matter would be taken out of his hands. First secrecy, then drama with the utmost publicity—that would be the usual line. Karlis confirmed that I was right. The scandalous presence of Howard-Wolferstan on board was only to be divulged at the last moment.

  For two days I gave Karlis no trouble at all. I was a model prisoner, helpful, resigned and silent. It was an easy part, for I needed rest. It was also sound psychology. Karlis had to have plenty of time to think about himself, not me.

  He became more and more melancholy, sunk in a monosyllabic Slav depression. He would not let me into his cabin again, but used to sit with me and say nothing when he collected my empty tray. As soon as I thought his nerves were about ripe, I began to work on them.

  ‘A costly business,’ I remarked regretfully. ‘Fuel. Delay of cargo. And then the poor passengers.’

  ‘They are being given free air passages,’ he told me.

  ‘More money and trouble. How unjust life is, comrade! All this expense because I had to take advantage of your afternoon sleep.’

  ‘But why? Why? That is what I do not understand,’ he cried.

  ‘You do not need to understand,’ I answered gently. ‘There have to be some of us who are only expected to obey. But it isn’t bad, being a miner. You mustn’t believe all you hear. The State is humane. You get enough calories to enable you to work and a little money over. Think of me—tortured, beaten, rotting in a capitalist prison and then thrown out upon the streets to beg.’

  He pounded his fist on the wall in indignation. When it was not his duty to be stern, he was easily moved by emotion.

  ‘And escape from the ship before I am landed is impossible,’ I said.

  So it was, unless I could persuade him to go with me. Together we might have a chance.

  ‘Yes. There is no way out. It is my order to hand you over to the British as a stowaway,’ Karlis answered.

  I left my bunk and sat side by side with him on the settee. I meant him to feel that we were partners. I said bitterly that I could never be any more use to the party and that at last I was entitled to look after my own interests. He put on his blank, Slav face. He saw what I was driving at, all right; but was afraid to commit himself to what might be a trap. It was hard to believe that a communist hero would countenance desertion to the West.

  ‘Comrade, think for a minute!’ I begged him. ‘I am sacrificed, finished. My only hope is to live out my life as a peasant in South America.’

  It was a good moment to bury my face in my hands and weep. I can do that quite convincingly. I have only to imagine that I am making a manly speech to a Latin audience, and to repeat to myself the nobler sentences of my peroration.

  ‘After causing all this trouble,’ I went on, raising my streaming eyes to his, ‘after thinking I knew better than the party, after all this deviationist activity, what will be my fate? For the sake of old comradeship I may be allowed to live, but I shall never be trusted. No report of mine will be believed. When we talk now, we can talk as freely as one corpse to another.’

  ‘I am a servant of the people,’ he answered firmly.

  ‘Yes, Karlis. But you have no political convictions.’

  ‘You could guess that?’

  I begged him not to be alarmed. Old political hands like myself were accustomed, I said, to dealing with men who were not fit for the party, but whose loyalty was undoubted so long as the cash was there on pay-day.

  ‘The first day I met you,’ I added, ‘I knew that you preferred Riga before the war to Riga now.’

  ‘Is life in England as good as Riga before the war?’

  I assured him that it was, though personally I doubted it. You can’t honestly advertise as enjoyable to a foreigner a country in which—to use the jargon of economists—it costs a man-hour to buy a drink, and that without reckoning insurance and income tax.

  ‘I would be followed and killed,’ he said.

  ‘Not important enough, my dear Karlis,’ I replied, dropping that damned ‘comrade’ for good. ‘In England it costs a disproportionate amount of money and planning to have a man killed. You must
n’t believe all you read.’

  ‘Chicago—’ he began.

  I reminded him that Chicago was not England, and that, anyway, his impression of it was thirty years behind the times.

  ‘You’ve been in the police all your life,’ I told him, ‘and you know as well as I do that if a man’s society isn’t that of potential murderers, he can rule out the chance of being murdered. Like everything else in the world, as we communists know, it’s just a question of economics. You can be done in cheap if you move in the proper circles. And if you don’t, the cost is prohibitive.’

  ‘But would the police ever let me go free?’

  ‘Yes. Ask for sanctuary as a political refugee. Don’t try any nonsense about wanting to free Latvia. They’d see through you at once. Just put it on the grounds of self-interest. Say you would be shot if you went back. That’s the sort of thing which impresses policemen. No damned nonsense about being converted from this to that!’

  He asked how he would live, and I assured him it was easy. Lieutenants of security police were rare birds as refugees, and he could sell the secrets of the MVD to the Sunday papers.

  ‘I don’t know any,’ he said.

  He was really being difficult. But fortunately I had not got to explain the capitalist world from the beginning. After all, he had lived most of his life in it. At last I convinced him that an MVD lieutenant had only to sign whatever the newspapermen put in front of him, and correct the grosser errors. So long as he did not bite the public, it would never let him starve.

  That finished our Sunday night conversation, and I went to sleep at last, feeling sure that I had persuaded him.

  But on Monday morning he was back in dejection again. He moaned that he could not be a traitor, that an honourable worker like himself should take his punishment rather than run away. I didn’t believe a word of this. Nor did he, at bottom. His scruples, however, were quite genuine enough to make him hesitate until it was too late for action. Time was running short. We should be off the Nore before dawn on Tuesday.

  When he had left me alone, I tried hard to make some sort of mental plan of his character—a far harder task than planning action. Character does not lend itself to attack by pencil and paper. One can only close one’s eyes, and let the personality of the opponent spread itself all through one’s imagination.

  The trouble was, I felt, that I had been too flippant, had displayed too freely—in order to gain his confidence—the sardonic bitterness of a man with little hope. It had worked up to a point. I had persuaded Karlis that my own motives were straightforward and purely selfish; but for him self-interest was not good enough. There was sufficient Russian in him to make him unhappy unless he could persuade himself that he was serving an ideal rather than avoiding punishment.

  The only bromide I could prescribe was weak. It may be that I lack the common idealisms myself, and therefore do not readily sympathize with those who need them. After lunch, however, I did my best. I told him that he represented the Plain Citizen, not anti- and not pro- but patriotic. How valuable he could be, how helpful to peace and goodwill, if he could convince the enemies of his country that nine-tenths of the Soviet Union thought as he did! How pleasant if they could see with their own eyes that a lieutenant of the MVD was not essentially different from a friendly security officer anywhere else!

  He seized my hand.

  ‘I will do it,’ he said. ‘You and I together!’

  It was too emotional a reaction to be trustworthy, but I had no time to waste. I took him straightaway into a committee of ways and means, and began to explain to him what his story must be: that Howard-Wolferstan had escaped from the ship in spite of him, and that he knew he would be severely punished.

  He objected to that. The official story was that I was a stowaway. How then could he say that he had been on board looking after me?

  ‘You were on board for normal security duties,’ I told him. ‘After the stowaway was discovered, you were naturally put in charge of him.’

  He would have none of that either. It wouldn’t stand up for a moment under interrogation, he said. Where had I hidden? How had I come on board? He could never answer those questions satisfactorily in front of a skilled interrogator; and he could not say he had been unable to find out the answers.

  ‘All right, then. Tell the truth,’ I suggested.

  No, he would not. The disloyalty was too rank. To escape to the West was legitimate; but to say that I had been deliberately smuggled on board was treachery.

  ‘Comrade, it is all too big for us,’ he sighed. ‘We can only suffer.’

  He picked up my tray and turned to go. He was not even dramatic. There was finality in his drooping shoulders. The practical difficulties, from his policeman’s point of view, had overwhelmed him.

  Only then did I have a flash of real inspiration. It should have occurred to me long before; but I had been so content with the immediate effects of my intelligent suggestions to the Kremlin that I had not bothered to follow them through to their logical conclusion.

  ‘Have you realized, Karlis, that the captain has orders to put you under arrest and hand me over to the British police himself?’

  ‘How can you know?’ he protested angrily.

  ‘Experience, just experience. Only you can show the police where I was hidden. Only you know that the government story is a lie. Only you know what really happened and the messages which went back and forth. And only you have anything to gain by giving it all away. You will not be allowed any opportunity to talk to the British police. In fact, I don’t think you will be allowed to talk to anyone again.’

  He turned pale as the certain truth of this hit him. He stared at me as if I had been a fortune-teller of sinister accuracy who had prophesied his death within a week.

  ‘You know as much as I do,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I am a spy, disowned and returned for trial. That act of good faith covers any amount of sins. What I say may or may not be believed, but it can’t be proved. And when the ship enters an English port again, there will be no trace of this cabin. The danger, Karlis, is you, not me.’

  He put down that damned tray he was balancing.

  ‘And I did my best for them!’ he exclaimed. ‘Didn’t I? Do you not think so?’

  Indefinite punishment was one thing; certain death, another. The Slav dropped off him and he stood up, as it were, a naked and very indignant Scandinavian. I told him to go and collect all possible information on our movements and time of arrival. He seemed to be angry because the task was so easy. I had the impression that he would rather have gone straight out of the cabin and scuttled the ship.

  During the afternoon hours when he usually slept, we shut ourselves up in my cabin. He told me that I was to be put ashore at Tilbury, to save the long and unnecessary voyage up river. We should pick up a Thames pilot soon after midnight and anchor off Tilbury at dawn. We were not going alongside. Those of the passengers who had accepted the offer of a free air passage would go ashore by the customs launch, if it would take them, or by tender.

  There was nothing for it but to slip overboard at night. Karlis, a strong swimmer, was unafraid of this, for it did not matter if he were all dripping from the sea when he hurled himself into the arms of the nearest startled policeman; but for me it was essential to arrive dry and respectable, ready for any opportunity which would enable me to disappear among my fellow countrymen. We had to have a raft or a boat and something to paddle it with.

  I read him a lecture on the tides of the Thames Estuary. He knew even less about them than I did, so it was easy to convince him that a swimmer was more likely to fetch up on the Maplins than on dry land. I also suggested that it might be as well to let the ship sail before he gave himself up, and that he, too, had every interest in reaching the shore secretly and dry.

  He agreed with me, and at once lost heart. He insisted t
hat he had no chance of laying his hands on anything larger than a lifebelt—no rubber dinghy, no float, nothing. And on second thoughts he doubted if we could even get clear by swimming. The watch, in territorial waters, was alert. Members of the crew had been known to jump overboard, but had always been picked up.

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  ‘With the launch, of course.’

  I pointed out that at least the launch would then be in the water and not on its davits. He seemed to think that I proposed to take it by force—a one-man cutting-out expedition straight out of the sea stories. Even if I had a gun, he said, Russian sailors would die rather than surrender the launch. He grew quite heated on the subject until I convinced him that there was nothing I disliked more than physical violence. The simpler classes of humanity can be disconcerted so much more quickly by thought than hands.

  ‘Suppose,’ I suggested, ‘that there was a man in the water, but not us.’

  ‘And when he says I pushed him in?’ Karlis asked.

  A valid objection. But he was becoming far too full of objections. I told him to pipe down for a minute while I worked out the first movement.

  ‘Any of the launch crew speak English?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who would command it?’

  He calculated the watches.

  ‘After midnight, the third officer.’

  ‘Does he speak English?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’ll push a passenger overboard. He can’t explain what happened to him till he gets back on deck.’

  Karlis almost shouted that I was irresponsible, that it was no good at all thinking along those lines. He pictured for me the return of the launch, and the English-speaking captain, who would at once have been called, leaning over the flying bridge and asking questions. The mere existence of the captain seemed to appal him. It was understandable. The dual control got on his nerves. The captain was the only person who could put him under arrest, and the only person whom Karlis could neither bluff nor frighten.