“You could always go by train, of course. It takes a little time but it would probably be quicker in the end. I presume you have all the necessary visas?”
“No. How long would they take to get?”
“Perhaps three weeks, perhaps longer. It’s the Inter-Allied Zone Authority which holds things up.”
“But I can’t afford to go on living here indefinitely. I was only allowed to bring seventy-five pounds and the prices are terrible.”
“Yes, we had a case like that the other day. A man called Whitemaid. He’d run out of money and wanted to cash a cheque, but of course that is specifically contrary to the currency regulations. The consul took charge of him.”
“Did he get home?”
“I doubt it. They used to ship them by sea, you know, as Distressed British Subjects and hand them over to the police on arrival, but all that has been discontinued since the war. He was connected with your Bellorius celebration I think. It has caused a good deal of work to us one way and another. But it’s worse for the Swiss. They’ve had a professor murdered and that always involves a special report on counsellor-level. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you. I only deal with air priorities. You are the business of the consulate really. You had better let them know in a week or two how things turn out.”
The heat was scarcely endurable. In the ten days Scott-King had been in the country, the summer seemed to change temper and set its face angrily against him. The grass had turned brown in the square. Men still hosed the streets but the burning stone was dry again in an instant. The season was over; half the shops were shut and the little brown noblemen had left their chairs in the Ritz.
It was no great distance from the Embassy to the hotel, but Scott-King was stumbling with exhaustion before he reached the revolving doors. He went on foot for he was obsessed now by parsimony; he could no longer eat with pleasure, counting the price of each mouthful, calculating the charge for service, the stamp duty, the luxury taxes; groaning in that scorching summer under the weight of the Winter Relief Fund. He should leave the Ritz without delay, he resolved, and yet he hesitated; once ensconced in some modest pension, in some remote side street where no telephone ever rang and no one in passage from the outer world ever set foot, might he not be lost irretrievably, submerged, unrecognizable in his dimness, unremembered? Would he perhaps, years hence, exhibit a little discoloured card advertising lessons in English conversation, grow shabbier and greyer and plumper with the limp accretions of despair and destitution and die there at last nameless? He was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet, but he could not face that future without terror. So he clung to the Ritz, empty as it was, contemptuously as he felt himself regarded there, as the one place in Neutralia where salvation might still be found. If he left, he knew it would be forever. He lacked the assurance of the native nobility who could sit there day by day, as though by right. Scott-King’s only right lay in his travellers’ cheques. He worked out his bill from hour to hour. At the moment he had nearly forty pounds in hand. When he was down to twenty, he decided, he would move. Meanwhile he looked anxiously round the dining room before starting the daily calculation of how cheaply he could lunch.
And that day he was rewarded. His number turned up. Sitting not two tables away, alone, was Miss Bombaum. He rose to greet her. All the hard epithets with which they had parted were forgotten.
“May I sit here?”
She looked up, first without recognition, then with pleasure. Perhaps there was something in his forlorn appearance, in the diffidence of his appeal, which cleared him in Miss Bombaum’s mind. This was no fascist beast that stood before her, no reactionary cannibal.
“Surely,” she said. “The guy who invited me hasn’t shown up.”
A ghastly fear, cold in that torrid room, struck Scott-King, that he would have to pay for Miss Bombaum’s luncheon. She was eating a lobster, he noted, and drinking hock.
“When you’ve finished,” he said. “Afterwards, with coffee perhaps in the lounge.”
“I’ve a date in twenty minutes,” she said. “Sit down.”
He sat and at once, in answer to her casual enquiry, poured out the details of his predicament. He laid particular stress on his financial problems and, as pointedly as he could, ordered the humblest dish on the menu. “It’s a fallacy not to eat in hot weather,” said Miss Bombaum. “You need to keep your resistance up.”
When he had finished the recital she said, “Well, I reckon it shouldn’t be hard to fix you up. Go by the Underground.”
Blacker despair in Scott-King’s haunted face told Miss Bombaum that she had not made herself clear.
“You’ve surely heard of the Underground? It’s”—she quoted from one of her recent articles on the subject—“it’s an alternative map of Europe, like a tracing overlying all the established frontiers and routes of communication. It’s the new world taking shape below the surface of the old. It’s the new ultra-national citizenship.”
“Well I’m blessed.”
“Look, I can’t stop now. Be here this evening and I’ll take you to see the key man.”
That afternoon, his last, as it turned out, in Bellacita, Scott-King received his first caller. He had gone to his room to sleep through the heat of the day, when his telephone rang and a voice announced Dr. Antonic. He asked for him to be sent up.
The Croat entered and sat by his bed.
“So you have acquired the Neutralian custom of the siesta. I am too old. I cannot adapt myself to new customs. Everything in this country is as strange to me as when I first came here.
“I was at the Foreign Office this morning enquiring about my papers of naturalization and I heard by chance you were still here. So I came at once. I do not intrude? I thought you would have left by now. You have heard of our misfortunes? Poor Dr. Fe is disgraced. All his offices taken from him. More than this there is trouble with his accounts. He spent more, it appears, on the Bellorius celebrations than the Treasury authorized. Since he is out of office he has no access to the books and cannot adjust them. They say he will be prosecuted, perhaps sent to the islands.”
“And you, Dr. Antonic?”
“I am never fortunate. I relied on Dr. Fe for my naturalization. Whom shall I turn to now? My wife thought that perhaps you could do something for us in England to make us British subjects.”
“There is nothing I can do.”
“No, I suppose not. Nor in America?”
“Still less there.”
“So I told my wife. But she is a Czech and so more hopeful. We Croats do not hope. It would be a great honour if you would come and explain these things to her. She will not believe me when I say there is no hope. I promised I would bring you.”
So Scott-King dressed and was led through the heat to a new quarter on the edge of the town, to a block of flats.
“We came here because of the elevator. My wife was so weary of Neutralian stairs. But alas the elevator no longer works.”
They trudged to the top floor, to a single sitting room full of children, heavy with the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke.
“I am ashamed to receive you in a house without an elevator,” said Mme. Antonic in French; then turning to the children, she addressed them in another tongue. They bowed, curtsied, and left the room. Mme. Antonic prepared coffee and brought a plate of biscuits from the cupboard.
“I was sure you would come,” she said. “My husband is too timid. You will take us with you to America.”
“Dear madam, I have never been there.”
“To England then. We must leave this country. We are not at our ease here.”
“I am finding the utmost difficulty in getting to England myself.”
“We are respectable people. My husband is a diplomat. My father had his own factory at Budweis. Do you know Mr. Mackenzie?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He was a very respectable Englishman. He would explain that we come of good people. He visited often to
my father’s factory. If you will find Mr. Mackenzie he will help us.”
So the conversation wore on. “If we could only find Mr. Mackenzie,” Mme. Antonic repeated, “all our troubles would be at an end.” Presently the children returned.
“I will take them to the kitchen,” said Mme. Antonic, “and give them some jam. Then they will not be a nuisance.”
“You see,” said Dr. Antonic, as the door closed, “she is always hopeful. Now I do not hope. Do you think,” he asked, “that in Neutralia Western Culture might be born again? That this country has been preserved by Destiny from the horrors of war so that it can become a beacon of hope for the world?”
“No,” said Scott-King.
“Do you not?” asked Dr. Antonic anxiously. “Do you not? Neither do I.”
That evening Miss Bombaum and Scott-King took a cab to the suburbs and left it at a café where they met a man who had sat with Miss Bombaum in the Ritz on her first evening. No names were exchanged.
“Who’s this guy, Martha?”
“An English friend of mine I want you to help.”
“Going far?”
“England. Can he see the chief?”
“I’ll go ask. He’s on the level?”
“Surely.”
“Well, stick around while I ask.”
He went to telephone and returned saying, “The chief ’ll see him.
We can drop him off there, then have our talk.”
They took another cab and drove further from the city into a district of tanneries and slaughterhouses, recognizable by their smell in the hot darkness. Presently they stopped at a lightless villa.
“In there. Don’t ring. Just push the door.”
“Hope you have a good trip,” said Miss Bombaum.
Scott-King was not a reader of popular novels and so was unfamiliar with the phrase “It all happened so quickly that it was not until afterwards . . .” That, however, expressed his situation. The cab drove off as he was still stumbling up the garden path. He pushed the door, entered an empty and lightless hall, heard a voice from another room call “Come in,” went in, and found himself in a shabby office confronting a Neutralian in the uniform of a major of police.
The man addressed him in English. “You are Miss Bombaum’s friend? Sit down. Do not be alarmed by my uniform. Some of our clients are very much alarmed. A silly boy tried to shoot me last week when he saw me like this. He suspected a trap. You want to go to England, I think. That is very difficult. Now if you had said Mexico or Brazil or Switzerland it would be easier. You have reasons which make England preferable?”
“I have reasons.”
“Curious. I spent many years there and found it a place of few attractions. The women had no modesty, the food upset my stomach. I have a little party on their way to Sicily. That would not do instead?”
“I am afraid not.”
“Well, we must see what can be done. You have a passport? This is lucky. English passports come very dear just now. I hope Miss Bombaum explained to you that mine is not a charitable organization. We exist to make profits and our expenses are high. I am constantly bothered by people who come to me supposing I work for the love of it. I do love my work, but love is not enough. The young man I spoke of just now, who tried to shoot me—he is buried just outside under the wall—he thought this was a political organization. We help people irrespective of class, race, party, creed or colour—for cash in advance. It is true, when I first took over, there were certain amateur associations that had sprung up during the World War—escaping prisoners, communist agents, Zionists, spies and so on. I soon put them out of business. That is where my position in the police is a help. Now I can say I have a virtual monopoly. Our work increases every day. It is extraordinary how many people without the requisite facilities seem anxious to cross frontiers today. I also have a valued connection with the Neutralian government. Troublesome fellows whom they want to dispose of pass through my hands in large numbers. How much have you got?”
“About forty pounds.”
“Show me.”
Scott-King handed him his book of travellers’ cheques.
“But there are seventy pounds here.”
“Yes, but my hotel bill . . .”
“There will be no time for that.”
“I am sorry,” said Scott-King firmly. “I could not possibly leave an hotel with my bill unpaid, especially in a foreign country. It may seem absurdly scrupulous to you but it is one of the things a Granchesterian simply cannot do.”
The Major was not a man to argue from first principles. He took men as they came and in his humane calling he dealt with many types.
“Well, I shan’t pay it,” he said. “Do you know anyone else in Bellacita?”
“No one.”
“Think.”
“There was a man called Smudge at our Embassy.”
“Smudge shall have your bill. These cheques want signing.”
Despite his high training Scott-King signed and the cheques were put away in the bureau drawer.
“My luggage?”
“We do not handle luggage. You will start this evening. I have a small party leaving for the coast. We have our main clearinghouse at Santa Maria. From there you will travel by steamer, perhaps not in the grand luxury, but what will you? No doubt as an Englishman you are a good sailor.”
He rang a bell on his desk and spoke to the answering secretary in rapid Neutralian.
“My man here will take charge of you and fit you out. You speak Neutralian? No? Perhaps it is as well. We do not encourage talk in my business, and I must warn you, the strictest discipline has to be observed. From now on you are under orders. Those who disobey never reach their destinations. Good-bye and a good journey.”
Some few hours later a large and antiquated saloon car was bumping towards the sea. In it sat in extreme discomfort seven men habited as Ursuline nuns. Scott-King was among them.
The little Mediterranean seaport of Santa Maria lay very near the heart of Europe. An Athenian colony had thrived there in the days of Pericles and built a shrine to Poseidon; Carthaginian slaves had built the breakwater and deepened the basin; Romans had brought fresh water from the mountain springs; Dominican friars had raised the great church which gave the place its present name; the Hapsburgs had laid out the elaborate little piazza; one of Napoleon’s marshals had made it his base and left a classical garden there. The footprints of all these gentler conquerors were still plain to see but Scott-King saw nothing as, at dawn, he bowled over the cobbles to the waterfront.
The Underground dispersal centre was a warehouse; three wide floors, unpartitioned, with boarded windows, joined by an iron staircase. There was one door near which the guardian had set her large brass bedstead. At most hours of the day she reclined there under a coverlet littered with various kinds of food, weapons, tobacco and a little bolster on which she sometimes made lace of an ecclesiastical pattern. She had the face of a tricoteuse of the Terror. “Welcome to Modern Europe,” she said as the seven Ursulines entered.
The place was crowded. In the six days which he spent there Scott-King identified most of the groups who messed together by languages. There was a detachment of Slovene royalists, a few Algerian nationals, the remnants of a Syrian anarchist association, ten patient Turkish prostitutes, four French Pétainist millionaires, a few Bulgarian terrorists, a half-dozen former Gestapo men, an Italian air-marshal and his suite, a Hungarian ballet, some Portuguese Trotskyites. The English-speaking group consisted chiefly of armed deserters from the American and British Armies of Liberation. They had huge sums of money distributed about the linings of their clothes, the reward of many months’ traffic round the docks of the central sea.
Such activity as there was took place in the hour before dawn. Then the officer in charge, husband, it seemed, of the guardian hag, would appear with lists and a handful of passports; a roll would be called and a party despatched. During the day the soldiers played poker—a fifty-dollar ante and a hundred
-dollar raise. Sometimes in the hours of darkness there were newcomers. The total number at the clearing station remained fairly constant.
At last on the sixth day there was a commotion. It began at midday with a call from the chief of police. He came with sword and epaulettes and he talked intently and crossly in Neutralian with the custodian.
One of the Americans, who had picked up more languages during his time in the Old World than most diplomats, explained: “The guy with the fancy fixings says we got to get the hell out of here. Seems there’s a new officer going to raid this joint.”
When the officer had gone, the custodian and his wife debated the question. “The old girl says why don’t he hand us over and get rewarded. The guy says Hell, the most likely reward they’d get would be hanging. Seems there’s some stiffs planted round about.”
Presently a sea-captain appeared and talked Greek. All the Underground travellers sat stock-still listening, picking up a word here and there. “This guy’s got a ship can take us off.”
“Where?”
“Aw, some place. Seems they’re kinda more interested in finance than geography.”
A bargain was struck. The captain departed, and the Underground conductor explained to each language group in turn that there had been a slight dislocation of plan. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just go quiet. Everything’s all right. We’ll look after you. You’ll all get where you want to in time. Just at the moment you got to move quick and quiet, that’s all.”
So, unprotesting, at nightfall, the strangely assorted party was hustled on board a schooner. Noah’s animals cannot have embarked with less sense of the object of their journey. The little ship was not built for such cargo. Down they went into a dark hold; hatches were battened down; the unmistakeable sound of moorings being cast off came to them in their timbered prison; an auxiliary Diesel engine started up; sails were hoisted; soon they were on the high seas in very nasty weather.
This is the story of a summer holiday; a light tale. It treats, at the worst, with solid discomfort and intellectual doubt. It would be inappropriate to speak here of those depths of the human spirit, the agony and despair, of the next few days of Scott-King’s life. To even the Comic Muse, the gadabout, the adventurous one of those heavenly sisters, to whom so little that is human comes amiss, who can mix in almost any company and find a welcome at almost every door—even to her there are forbidden places. Let us leave Scott-King then on the high seas and meet him again as, sadly changed, he comes at length into harbour. The hatches are off, the August sun seems cool and breathless, Mediterranean air fresh and spring-like as at length he climbs on deck. There are soldiers; there is barbed wire; there is a waiting lorry; there is a drive through a sandy landscape, more soldiers, more wire. All the time Scott-King is in a daze. He is first fully conscious in a tent, sitting stark naked while a man in khaki drill taps his knee with a ruler.