The horror rose to the surface. There was to be no whisky that day and nearly all the next day. No whisky till Malta, thirty hours away, and no guarantee that one could land at Malta. But of course they would be allowed to land. He clung to that. Only thirty hours away. And of course they would be allowed to land.
“Good morning to you.”
It was the cable manager. He had washed and shaved and extracted enough from a well-packed suitcase to give himself the dapper niceness of a holiday-maker.
“Got a touch of fever?”
Avellion tried to concentrate his thoughts.
“Fever? Fever?”
“You’re shaking all over.”
Avellion held out his hand and looked at it stupidly. It did not seem to belong to him. It was dancing. He put the tips of his index and third finger on his knee and let them gambol like the legs of a ballerina. That was an old trick of his at parties – to wrap a handkerchief round his wrist to form the skirt and let his fingers dance. They danced now. His whole hand danced furiously, and there was nothing at all he could do to stop it. He felt a rush of anger at the man who stared.
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he said. “Always like this in the morning. Everybody is. Where the devil do I get a wash?”
He could not shave, but the cool water in which he dipped his face and wrists revived him. He dressed, and strolled round the deck, stepping with care over the prostrate bodies of the army. With many he exchanged smiles. They felt, obviously, that their discomfort was comic, that nothing whatever could be done about the inefficiencies of the War Office as a travel agency, and that one might as well enjoy the enforced idleness. For Avellion there was comfort in the prevailing bonhomie, and again a measure of calm in the exhilarating rush of the ship across a perfectly flat Mediterranean. He could not face breakfast or lunch, but it was not so bad. Not so bad. And he was four and a half hours nearer Malta.
In the afternoon he had trouble with a very primitive Avellion who wanted to scream. He kept him in order, but was driven to cadge – very decently – for drinks. Drink was the subject of his conversation with all casual acquaintances. But the passengers’ baggage was bone dry. Everyone to whom he spoke was also hoping to God that Mr. Avellion – his nose looked so promising – would produce a bottle and himself offer treat. A naval officer murmured uncomfortably that the wardroom too was dry; they couldn’t, he said, very well open the bar for themselves alone when the ship was full of devastatingly thirsty soldiers. He moved uneasily away.
Avellion clung for support to that invaluable local knowledge. He had it all right. His line had always been the native trade, and he knew the dhow skippers from Oman to Suez, their ships, their reputations, and their rackets; little cargo could run the blockade to Abyssinia and no gossip of it be repeated in his office. He looked forward to new, stern friendships, more dutiful than his innumerable bar acquaintanceships, more familiar than the strange attachments occasionally and passionately formed by Arabs for those they could not understand.
No more of just making and losing money. At last, he told himself, he had something to serve, and in good company like that colonel’s. For an important man, an important man in good and gallant company, not to be able to stand two days without a drink was absurd. Self-control! Mustn’t make a fuss.
Two more hours passed, long as the whole voyage. The bugle summoned him to eat, but he could not face the mess flat and the sweating alleyways. The open deck was fresh and cool as sanity.
The cable manager had pity on him and, suspecting that the oily smell below had upset Mr. Avellion, brought him a sandwich. Avellion ate it and swallowed water. Nothing had taste or even feeling.
“Bothered by the sea, old chap?”
Avellion shook his head. The confession broke from him.
“I’ve got to have a drink,” he cried harshly. “You don’t understand. I’ve shifted a lot in the last twenty years. Not real heavy drinking. Only just what one needs in the tropics. It doesn’t do me any harm, but being cut off like this—”
His hand danced in the air describing a vague figure eight, a complicated gesture of emptiness.
“Ask the doctor for some,” suggested the cable manager. “You ought to taper off gently. He’ll know that.”
“Yes. Yes, I will. Of course.”
Avellion got up from his two blankets spread on the deck. He did not look back at them. There had been a queer shadow close to his ear, at the limit of vision. He scuttled off towards the sick bay, and then could not remember why he wanted to go there. He sat down heavily on a stanchion. To go to the doctor – of course that was it: to ask the doctor for a drink.
The cruiser hurled herself through the water, white ensign at the stern stiff with the wind of passage as the tin flag on a toy ship. The mercenaries of the Middle East strolled leisurely past Avellion; they could, he gathered, endure the steady diet of stew and marmalade; they could sleep well enough on blankets and the deck; they were ribald at the overcrowding, so close that one man’s head was between the feet of another; but they still cursed bitterly at the lack of any alcohol to beguile the tedium of the voyage.
It seemed to Avellion that he was not alone in his torment. He was again ashamed. He too was a servant of the state, and invaluable. If they could endure privation, he could. Good God, he had recaptured his youth during those long hours in the train!
The doctor? It might be less than twenty hours to Malta at this speed. Then he could soak in it, and afterwards taper off gradually. That colonel, the one who sat and sweated into his marmalade, wasn’t asking for special privileges. What? Go squealing to the doctor with all his comrades as thirsty as he? Comrades – comrades – he kept rolling the young word through his mind as he walked back to his blankets.
The night was peopled with strange images. It seemed busier and less long than the last. Once he screamed.
“Sorry, chaps. Must have had a nightmare.”
It cost him a physical effort to say so. He wanted to go on screaming and tell them why. He screamed twice more – simply couldn’t help it – but managed to make them sound like violent coughs.
In the morning he felt better. The shadow in the corner of his eyes had gone. He decided that he hadn’t felt so well for a long time. That was what came from self-control, from really knocking off the drink. He had a pet, too. As soon as the others had gone to breakfast he played with it. It seemed quite tame, but stayed always out of reach of his hand.
When the cable manager came back, Avellion showed it to him.
“Look at him!” he said. “Animals know whom to trust.”
“Look at what?”
“Here, man, here! See him?”
“See what?”
“Little black rat. His Majesty’s rat! Look at him.”
The cable manager did not always appreciate jokes. He was therefore unduly willing to accept them when they were not there.
“Very good! Very good!” he said with an embarrassed laugh, and trotted away to take his exercise.
Several people watched, disturbed, the flitting of Mr. Avellion’s hands and listened to the endearing terms in which he spoke to the invisible; but he looked sane, though unshaven, and they gave him the benefit of the doubt – an eccentric passing the hours of idleness in his own way, with, undoubtedly, the help of a secret bottle.
In a dream Avellion waited for Malta. There was nothing clear in his brain out a longing and a prohibition. “It will be all right when you get to Malta,” he said to himself. “Do nothing till you get to Malta.” Desire was no longer so simple that it could be defined as wanting a drink. At Malta there would be an end to unknown agony.
The colonel sat down by Mr. Avellion. He did not know what was wrong, or indeed if there was anything seriously wrong at all. He talked very casually with the eccentric businessman, and at last, as a good regimental officer, he understood and he admired the rat. He also said that Malta was in sight. Mr. Avellion began to weep. He then screamed luxuriously, and kept on scre
aming while the colonel led him to the sick bay.
Mr. Avellion got his whisky, but it was of little interest to him. He even reached Malta, or at least the launch which came out to carry him to the hospital. The ship reported him as a case of delirium tremens caused by a habitual drinker’s sudden want of alcohol. There were plenty of such cases in the books, due to poverty or isolation in desert or at sea. The ship was doubtful whether d.t. could be caused by sheer courage, but could give no other explanation of Mr. Avellion’s abstinence and death.
Culture
PRIVATE KIRIAKOS VACLIS was in his middle thirties, and not so handy an infantryman as he had been when he completed long ago his military training. His heart and mustache were exceedingly fierce, but his belly was still round – though conforming, after a month of Greek rations and mountain warfare, more nearly to the platoon average. He was in civil life headwaiter in an Athens café. When the military smiled at this former profession, he explained to them, with passionate eloquence, that the culmination of the soldier’s art was nothing but great efficiency at great speed – and who should know more of that than he?
They were at the bottom of an uncomfortable valley. The clouds wreathed down it towards Greece, carrying either freezing mist or sleet. Five hundred feet higher, on the two ridges that commanded the plain, the clouds brought snow. Up there were the Italians. To Vaclis the damp seemed colder than any imaginable snow. His section was huddled under the lee of a ruined wall with two stout blankets, supported by stones and sticks, for shelter. They had no fire, since any flicker of light at once became the target for Italian mortars. The enemy never hit the offending unit, but scored freely among innocent comrades who had obeyed orders and remained shivering in the dark.
The beastliness of their bivouac did not damp their spirits. They were victorious, and in the first flush of romantic patriotism. Their morale was terrific. Any one of those unlettered peasants was ready to declare his war aims in oratory that would have dispatched a northern soldier to the cookhouse or the psychiatrist. They were full of classical allusions to Salamis and Thermopylae, for ancient history was their own. They invoked the conquest of Greece by the Romans as if it had happened yesterday, and called on the apostles for revenge.
Kiriakos Vaclis shared the fanaticism of his fellows, and, as an educated man, added a vigorous editorial rotundity to the expression of their common feelings. He was proud to be an Athenian, and prouder still – since it reflected glory on his city – of knowing the ways of foreigners and of speaking French. The language was not as orientally courteous as his own, but the possession of it gave him a sense of polite internationalism which he was at pains to cultivate.
Vaclis shivered as spurts of wind trickled round the protecting wall, and stabbed into the wet wool of his uniform. He was in physical misery, warmed only by good Greek thoughts of defiance. At first light they were to attack the western ridge. He had misgivings lest he, the townsman, should not keep pace with sure-footed peasants, but he was sure of his skill at arms. A civilized Athenian was, he told himself, at an advantage in handling modern weapons.
He damned the Italians who compelled urbanity to leave the luxurious warmth of a café, the comfortable sweat of kitchens, to sit on an Albanian mountain in the middle of winter. He swore aloud to bathe in their warm blood. The phrase was heroic, and had pleasing associations of steaming gravy. He rolled it out again. His mates applauded, though they knew very well that blood, up there among the Italians, was neither liquid nor warm. One couldn’t bathe in it. One could, if so minded, pick up a lump and throw it.
The night had paled enough to distinguish a snowflake from a stab of rain. Formless bundles stirred on the ground, and rose; rocks detached themselves from rocks, bushes from bushes. The gray bodies in the gray mist took on shape and purpose as the company, huddled in sheepskin coats, moved to the forming-up area like animals driven by the wind to gather in herd. The sleet hissed down the valley, hiding them under an icy web of showers from each other and from the enemy.
Kiriakos Vaclis plodded up the goat track which zigzagged along the foot of the ridge. His platoon objective was the highest of all: an Italian post well out to the right flank of their main position. He knew that there was a fierce climb ahead of him, and certainly a fierce reception waiting at the top. His Mediterranean blood was up, and he cared for neither. To get his hands on the invader of his sacred land – that was what he wanted.
The platoon halted in dead ground, and deployed. Then his section was away, hands hauling on the tough scrub, feet searching for crannies in the rock. He squirmed upwards, flat against so steep a slope that even the belly which remained to him was an encumbrance. Soon they were clambering upon slush and gravel, sharp frozen by the night; then at last upon an easier gradient where deep snow slowed and silenced movement.
The wind howled over the slopes of the plateau. Vaclis realized that the enemy position was even crueler than their own. He wondered how humanity could endure to remain on the defense, inactive in such cold, and then remembered that the Italians, so it was said, would certainly run away if they were not frequently shot by their own officers.
His heart pounded with the effort of the climb. Only his fingers were frozen, and they did not matter. There would be little trigger pulling; the Greeks went in with the bayonet. They had no grenades.
When he topped the ridge, the snow was immediately flecked with little holes. He yelled defiance, but was practical soldier enough to drop into cover as he did so. The snow did not spurt like dust or earth; it just received the machine-gun bullets and forgot about them. His section was pinned down. That was to be expected; but he could see the platoon Bren gun – mysterious and effective gift of the British, if only one had enough ammo – working into position on the flank. A few bursts, and his section would rush the last hundred feet. In the excitement of his patriotism he had no fear of death, and certainly none of the Italians.
The enemy fire became ragged. The section was up from the snow and plunging forward.
“Aera! Aerar!”
The effort of finding still more breath for the battle cry was too much for Vaclis. He forgot his feet, and tripped over a loose strand of wire. Cursing and damning, he picked himself up and stumbled after his comrades who had overrun the Italian post and were storming on towards their next objective.
“Aera!” he yelled, and charged over the beaten track, with bayonet ready for any enemy who might be left.
Ten yards ahead a little figure in thin Italian uniform rose from the snow, shivering and weaponless. He made no gesture of surrender, but his whole body was evidence that he had had enough of cold. Even death – if anyone could be bothered to kill in such weather – was a mere incident compared to the endless misery of cold. He regarded the terrible Greek, and smiled nervously.
“Monsieur,” he stammered in excellent French, “il fait bien froid.”
As a greeting it was adequate; and as comment on the only fact that mattered, it called for a civilized response.
Vaclis stopped and stared. The enemy was conversational. It spoke French.
In his astonishment he answered automatically and with equal politeness.
“Oui, monsieur, il fait bien froid.”
Woman in Love
IT WAS the nearest he had ever come to sending an agent to his death. Her death, rather. He admitted that he shouldn’t have taken the risk, that a man with his experience of women should have known better; but there he was with the enemy order of battle – or ally’s peaceful deployment, according to how you look at it – all along the southern fringe of the Iron Curtain from Bratislava to the Black Sea. The list was complete, and accurate up to the previous Saturday; and there wasn’t a chance of getting it out to the west. No handy secret wireless. No landing grounds. Not a trustworthy agent who had the remotest hope of being given a passport in time to be of use. Theotaki had found his job much easier when operating under the noses of the Gestapo.
He was a Roumanian of Gre
ek origin, with all a Greek’s hungry passion for the ideal freedom which had never in practical politics existed, and never could. He had also the Greek’s love of adventurous intrigue for its own sake. One gets used to the trade, he would say. Steeple jacks, for example. They couldn’t be thinking all the time about risk. They took, he supposed, meticulous care with all their preparations – blocks and tackle, scaffolding, belts – and then got on with the job. It was only when a man had scamped the preliminaries that he need worry about risks.
Normally there was no need to scamp them, no disastrous demand for hurry. Cold war wasn’t like hot war, and there weren’t any impatient generals howling for immediate results. So caution, caution, caution, all the time. It was a bit dull, he said, but the main objective had to be to keep his organization alive.
He admitted, however, that this had been an occasion for desperate measures. The only chance he could see of getting that enemy order of battle into hands that would appreciate it was D 17. D 17 was going the very next day to Stockholm to be married. She would never have been allowed to leave for less neutral territory; but it was hard, even for communist bureaucrats, to think up a really valid excuse for preventing a citizen – an entirely useless citizen whose parents were living on the proceeds of their jewelry and furniture – from taking herself off to Sweden and matrimony, when a firm request for her had been passed through diplomatic channels.
Alexia – D 17 – was a very minor agent: somewhat too enthusiastic, said Theotaki, for her sister had been mishandled by the Russian advance guards when they entered Bucharest and had died the following week. The unfortunate incident had had some effect on Theotaki’s ideals of freedom, too. But he never confessed to emotion. To judge by his jowled, dead, decadent face, you wouldn’t have thought him capable of feeling any.
Since he had moved before the war in the social circle of the parents and their two daughters, he knew Alexia very well. She had, of course, no idea that he was in any way responsible for the occasional orders received by D 17. She couldn’t have given away more than the three names of the other members of her cell – at least she couldn’t up to the time when Theotaki was forced into gambling against his better judgment.
Tales of Adventurers Page 11