Tales of Adventurers Read online

  He said that while they were waiting for the sub-director of railways he would see about his cook.

  “Don’t bother, Uncle John,” Ion assured him. “That’s all arranged.”

  He hoped that it was; but the more he considered the character of his godson, the more sure he was that in the excitement of organizing his influential colleagues there could have been no time for a visit to Traian or the Restaurant Gradina.

  Ten minutes later the subdirector of railways arrived, with no baggage but a bottle and what looked like an official cashbox. He announced that in another hour they would be on their way to Constantsa.

  “And my cook?” Devenor asked again.

  “Look here, Uncle John, we’ll write for him,” said Godson Ion.

  Devenor crawled out of the manhole, and from the safety of the outer air addressed the undersecretaries. He told them that he was going to get his cook, that if they wanted to stop him they would have to catch him among the trees in pitch darkness, and that if they left without him he would go straight to the political police.

  “They’re still accustomed to foreign exploitation,” he would explain. “There was nothing, really nothing, that they could do with a determined Englishman in a temper. No doubt they would be equally helpless with a Russian.”

  Ion quickly related the fanatical resolution which had brought his godfather to Bucharest. His two friends were delightfully sympathetic, enthusiastic indeed. This penetration of the Iron Curtain merely to obtain a cook appealed both to Roumanian pride and Roumanian love of a jest. A plan swiftly emerged from committee. It was for Ion and his godfather to call on Traian – who was still alive, and whose son might be the very man for Devenor – and then to catch the column in the marshaling yards or anywhere along the line to Constantsa.

  Fortunately the trust of the three functionaries in one another was not so great that they had entirely burned their boats. Each of them had kept a car and driver waiting on a dirt road, beyond the belt of trees, all ready for swift return to Bucharest in case of accident or treachery. Mines and Railways now dismissed their cars, and returned to the column in high spirits. As soon as the road was clear, Devenor and his godson drove off in the third car.

  Traian had been the headwaiter at the Gradina for twenty years, and had retired shortly before the war. If Devenor had known his address, he would, he said, have gone to see him at once, and left his damned godson to the inevitable end of his career as a commissar. Traian was a man you could trust. In all the years of his highly civilized trade he had never lost his peasant integrity.

  He lived exactly where he ought to live: in the old eastern suburbs of Bucharest, where the streets of white, single-storied houses preserved something of the character of an untidy and once prosperous village. At the back of a yard, where the dusty earth just kept alive a tree, a few flowers and a couple of hungry hens, they found Traian sitting under the eaves of his house in the melancholy idleness of the old. He looked ill fed and disintegrating; otherwise he was the same Traian who had hovered for twenty years at Devenor’s shoulder, whose middle-aged wedding Devenor had attended (and attended for a full riotous fourteen hours), whose retirement had been put beyond the reach of poverty by the subscriptions of Devenor and his friends.

  Traian and Devenor embraced with tears in their eyes.

  “And why not?” Devenor insisted. “Why not? Hadn’t we known each other at our best and proudest? We embraced the splendor of our past manhood.”

  The old man – aged by undeserved and unexpected hardship rather than years – had no fear of godson Ion. To him gilded youth, whether it was communist or whether its checks were frequently returned to drawer, was gilded youth. He talked freely. His wife was dead. His son, Nicu, trained in the kitchens of the Gradina and destined – for the Gradina thought in generations – to be the next chief cook but one, was working in a sausage factory. Traian himself was destitute. He could no longer be sure that he even owned his modest house.

  “The tragedy of communism,” said Devenor, “is that the State won’t help those who can’t help themselves. Even so, Traian wanted me to take his son. Yes, at an hour’s notice. Nicu was asleep inside, before going on the early morning shift. Yes, he begged me to take his son.”

  Devenor, of course, turned the offer down flat. There couldn’t be any question of taking Nicu’s support away from his father. Like a couple of old peasants, they talked the problem out unhurriedly, with many mutual courtesies, while the precious minutes of the night slipped away. Godson Ion fumed with impatience. He told Devenor not to be a sentimental fool. He told Traian not to spoil the boy’s chances. He was remarkably eloquent in pointing out that there was no future at all for Nicu in Roumania, or for any man of taste and ability who hadn’t, like himself, had the sense to join the party.

  Meanwhile Traian’s voice was growing firmer, and the ends of his white mustache began to twitch into life. Devenor remembered that Traian was only sixty-eight; he decided to take the responsibility of abducting father as well as son. He felt, he said, damnably ashamed of himself for shifting such fragile cargo, but, after all, that well-fitted steel cylinder was little less comfortable than a Roumanian third-class coach. He ordered Traian into the column regretfully and decisively, as if he had been sending back a Chateaubriand for another five minutes on the grill.

  “And look at him now,” Devenor invited, “when he brings in the brandy! I have to let him do something, you know. Oh, and he’ll take a glass with us, too – but I can’t make the old fool sit down to it when there are guests.”

  Traian’s son was collected straight from bed, and packed into the car. He had no objection to any change, however immediate and revolutionary, so long as it took him out of the sausage factory and included his father. He was on his way to the marshaling yards before he had really got clear of a nightmare that he was making his palate into sausages; his palate, he said, had appeared to him as a large, white lump of lard.

  The column had left for Constantsa. So insistent were the instructions of Railways, Mines and Marine that the yardmaster had presented it with a powerful, fine locomotive of its own. That fractionating column was going to be on board by dawn, all ready to be returned with ignominy to the corrupt capitalists who had sold it. The yardmaster expected a pat on the back from the ministry. No doubt, when he got it, it was a hard one.

  Ion’s driver did what he was told without question; he knew what happened to undersecretaries’ chauffeurs who talked out of turn. They crossed the plain like a pair of headlights on the wind, but always the column kept a little ahead – for at intervals they had to bump over rutted country roads to the railway, or show Ion’s credentials to saluting police.

  They caught up with their flatcar at last, halted in the sidings before the bridge over the Danube and now with a train at its tail. A more awkward place couldn’t have been found for a return to the safe recesses of the column, but they had no choice. It was their last chance, the absolute last chance. One side of the cylinder was flooded by the arc lights of the yard, as if some monstrous camera were about to take a farewell picture of it; on the other side was much coming and going of officials, and of the sentries who would ride every truck across the Cernavoda bridge.

  Godson Ion told his driver to return to Bucharest if he did not come back in half an hour. He did not seem unduly alarmed.

  “Of course he wasn’t! Of course he wasn’t!” Devenor crowed indignantly. “That dam’ pup had a perfect right to go wherever he wanted. As for the rest of us, we were just a problem to be shelved.”

  In ten minutes Godson returned for Nicu, who went with him unwillingly. But there was no object in protesting against Ion’s plans; he controlled their fate. Devenor didn’t know what he intended, and couldn’t make head or tail of his explanations; he was only rendered thoroughly suspicious by a lot of high-flown nonsense about the young clearing the way for the old.

  Traian and Devenor occupied a patch of darkness whence they could watch both t
he car and the column. They saw the two shadows of Ion and Nicu dive under the train. Shortly afterwards they saw the sentries posted. They waited for five more anxious minutes. Then the train started, and they watched its red taillight swaying down the track towards the bridge and the impassable Danube.

  After a journey of two hundred yards the train stopped. Devenor was so angry that he marched Traian straight up the line after it. He intended, he said, to get hold of the sentry and consign the whole heartless bunch of undersecretaries to Siberia, even if he had to endure their company on the way.

  The sentry was on the platform of the flatcar, just outside the manhole. He was hidden from his fellows by the bulk of the column and the tender of the locomotive. Within the column there was the silence of steel; there couldn’t be anything else from the moment the sentry was posted. That excused Nicu’s behavior. He dared not make sound or protest for fear of getting his deserted father into incalculable trouble with the police.

  It was sheer anger which gave Devenor his inspiration. He informed the sentry that a man was hiding in the fractionating column, and told him to winkle the fellow out with his bayonet while he kept him covered.

  “I knew my Roumanian soldiery well enough to risk it,” Devenor said. “An air of authority. A little mystery. And they’ll do what you tell ’em. There was the button, too, in my lapel – that seemed to impress him. I can’t tell you what it was. I meant to ask Ion. But thereafter I was rather painfully occupied.”

  As soon as the sentry was inside, Devenor put his head and shoulders after, and gave his orders. They were obeyed on the instant, and with only one quick rumble of sound. That unfortunate sentry – no, no, now living peaceably in America – was buried under desperate politicians leaping from the corners of the bubble trays. Then Devenor told his graceless godson to put on the sentry’s uniform and take his place on the platform.

  “Dam’ play actor! He stayed on guard till the cranes hoisted us off the Constantsa water front, without anyone suspecting him of worse than obstinacy, and then managed to slip inside. That was that. They discharged us onto a deserted wharf at Istanbul, and all seven of us just walked out through the gates. Or, rather, six of us walked. I was carried by Nicu and the sentry.”

  At this point it always pleased Devenor to expand and beam and wait for questions.

  “No,” he would answer, “nothing dramatic – no police, no bullets! Just sheer clumsiness. After the sentry had been nobbled, Nicu came out onto the platform of the flatcar, and I got down in order to pass Traian up to him. It was a bit of a strain on us two old gentlemen, and I couldn’t pull my toes clear of the wheel when the train started. Nicu grabbed, and pushed the rest of me inside the column; but all the medical supplies we had were oil and wine, like the good Samaritan. Well, at my age a foot is far from a prime necessity. But Nicu! Don’t you agree that for me, without him, now, life would be inconceivable?”

  The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy

  MY DEAR JOE:

  It’s good to hear that at least one government has had the sense to put a round peg in a round hole, and that some small part of the security of the United States is in your hands. And thanks for kind words. My memory is that we learned from you, not you from us. But that we should both have this impression is probably what Eisenhower wanted.

  So Marton Hevessy has given me as a reference. I have no reason to believe that he was ever a communist. I must confess, however, that his father always said he would end in jail. He used to say it lovingly, if you see what I mean, for he was very proud of Marton; but he was afraid, like any other father, lest his son’s nonconformity should draw upon him the resentment of the herd.

  First, here is a solid fact to reassure you. In old days any Budapest bank would have given Marton Hevessy a tiptop reference. From a banker’s point of view – I’ll come to mine later – he was an honorable, enterprising commercial man who had built up his own business from nothing. Industrial design, it was. If you invented an ingenious electric shoe cleaner, for example, you called on Hevessy to give it the form which would most appeal to the public – though once in a while he would turn out a design so preposterously imperial that it would have won a gold medal at the Exhibition of 1851. That was the aristocrat in him; he considered it his duty to set standards, not to accept them. The Hevessys are a very ancient family, and Marton cannot help looking like one of his ancestors. I don’t suppose that so much tall, audacious elegance has ever been to him anything but a handicap.

  What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Jo, it’s like a question set in an examination paper. State shortly what you know of Don Quixote.

  I can guess what sort of answer you want: some little definite sentence which will enable you to stand up as a supporter of the traditional liberalism of the last hundred years. I wish I could slap it down on your desk; but I am not in the confidence of the Almighty. I cannot imagine Marton – so rounded, so passionate a European – as a contented American unless one of his unpredictable loyalties were engaged. I think it has been, but that is for you to judge. None of his friends could ever foretell how he would react to any new landscape of humanity, though we had absolute faith that the personal expression of his emotions – when, as it were, complete, varnished and framed – would be just as satisfying as his notorious gesture in defense of Sarita’s religion.

  You’ve met Sarita Hevessy, of course. I am certain that it was she, not he (for the one time he never appealed to his friends was when he was in trouble), who told you to refer to me. I can imagine her facing you across the files on the table, all fragrant with common sense and her very great love of her husband. You refused to be impressed by all that beauty, didn’t you? You kept a professional poker face, and reserved judgment. But your first impression was right. She’s gold from the heart outwards.

  Sarita! So un-Hungarian a name may have made you uneasy. Her family were Sephardic Jews, who chose to remain behind at Budapest when the Turks retreated. Reverence for their religion sat pretty lightly on her and her family. They were refreshing and agreeable citizens of the capital. And Budapest was an Eden, you remember, where nobody bothered, until Nazi and Zionist had coiled themselves around the Tree of Knowledge, how host or guest elected to walk with God. If Marton had married Sarita five years earlier than he did, she would merely have mentioned – between casual drinks, perhaps – that she supposed she was a Jewess if she was anything, and left it at that.

  In 1938, however, there was a tough crowd round the Tree of Knowledge. They ate the apples and threw at each other those they couldn’t digest. Marton despised the lot of them, and took action. He wasn’t a man to address a public meeting or write a letter to the press; his revolt was personal. He told Sarita that before he could allow her to honor him with her hand in marriage he would become a Jew.

  Sarita protested. She was a most capable and tolerant child, and she tried to laugh Marton out of this misplaced loyalty. Still, she was Magyar all through – for her family had loved and lived and drunk their wine and ridden their horses on Danube banks for five hundred years – and as a Magyar she couldn’t help being impressed by irresistible extravagance of gesture on the part of her lover. Marton had put himself in the class of those Hungarian magnates who ordered from Nice a special train of flowers merely to pave the courtyard for the entrance of a bride, or built a Cinderella’s glass coach that she might be carried to a single birthday picnic in the forest.

  She wasn’t conceited. She didn’t think that she was worth such fantasies. She never suspected that any good citizen of Budapest would have been ashamed of his ignorance if he couldn’t tell to a visiting provincial the name of that golden arrow flighting down the Corso, with the chestnut hair and the velvety warm skin of Magyar horse and woman. No, it wasn’t any sense of her own value that made her give way to Marton’s insistence. It was just the glowing unnecessariness of any such sacrifice at all.

  The Hevessy marriage was near perfect – as soon as Sarita had managed to stop her husband�
�s sober visits to the synagogue, which were embarrassing to everyone but himself. She didn’t prohibit, of course. She just knew how long Marton needed to tire of any of his exciting perversities. Moral for a policeman, Jo!

  On which side did he fight? But what a question! Hasn’t Sarita told you that he is the most loyal man she ever met, that the key to his whole character is loyalty? He’s a Hevessy and a patriot, and of course he fought for Hungary against the hereditary enemy. Marton went off to war with Russia as a dashing captain of cavalry. A little elderly for the part, perhaps, but for youth he substituted enthusiasm – or as much of it as his hatred of Hitler allowed.

  Ah, but what happened to Sarita, you’ll ask. Isn’t it easy to account for Marton’s communist sympathies? Didn’t the coming of the Russians save her from an extermination camp? No, it didn’t. Even the most rabid Hungarian Nazis would have thought it ridiculous to pester Hevessys, however they might describe their religion on a government form.

  What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Well, I can answer for him in the post-war years. Siege, slaughter and Russian occupation looted from him everything movable, including, we thought, his romanticism. Just to feed his wife and children and remake his business were tasks of knight-errantry valiant enough even for him. He succeeded, and he was content. He wasn’t a worker to be bullied, or a capitalist to be ruined. He was a specialist; and whether he designed for private clients or for the State, his living was secure. Sarita was a little sad. She found herself married to a sober, tranquil professional of industry. He even used to spend free evenings with his lawyers.