“Madame,” he said ruefully, “your husband plays cards very well.”
“He has had a lot of practice.”
“Ah, yes, I am sure.” He played a card. José slapped another one on top of it triumphantly. Mr. Kuvetli’s face fell.
“It is my game,” said José and gathered up some money from the table. “You have lost eighty-four lire. If we had been playing for lire instead of centesimi I should have won eight thousand four hundred lire. That would be interesting. Shall we play another game?”
“I think that I will go to bed now,” said Mr. Kuvetli hurriedly. “Good night, Messieurs-dame.” He went.
José sucked his teeth as if the game had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. “Everyone goes to bed early on this filthy boat,” he said. “It is very boring.” He looked up at Graham. “Do you want to play?”
“I’m sorry to say that I must go to bed, too.”
José shrugged. “Very well. Good-bye.” He glanced at Josette and began to deal two hands. “I will play a game with you.”
She looked at Graham and smiled hopelessly. “If I do not he will be disagreeable. Good night, Monsieur.”
Graham smiled and said good night. He was not unrelieved.
He got to his cabin feeling a good deal more cheerful than he had felt when he had left it earlier in the evening.
How sensible she was! And how stupid he’d been! With men like Banat it was dangerous to be subtle. If a dog saw that you were nervous, he bit you. From now on he would carry the revolver. What was more, he would use it if Banat tried any funny business. You had to meet force with force.
He bent down to pull his suitcase from under the bunk. He was going to get the revolver out then and there.
Suddenly he stopped. For an instant his nostrils had caught the sweet cloying smell of attar of roses.
The smell had been faint, almost imperceptible, and he could not detect it again. For a moment he remained motionless, telling himself that he must have imagined it. Then panic seized him.
With shaking fingers he tore at the latches on the suitcase and flung back the lid.
The revolver was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He undressed slowly, got into his bunk and lay there staring at the cracks in the asbestos round a steam pipe which crossed the ceiling. He could taste Josette’s lipstick in his mouth. The taste was all that was left to remind him of the self-assurance with which he had returned to the cabin; the self-assurance which had been swept away by fear welling up into his mind like blood from a severed artery; fear that clotted, paralysing thought. Only his senses seemed alive.
On the other side of the partition, Mathis finished brushing his teeth and there was a lot of grunting and creaking as he clambered into the upper berth. At last he lay back with a sigh.
“Another day!”
“So much the better. Is the porthole open?”
“Unmistakably. There is a very disagreeable current of air on my back.”
“We do not want to be ill like the Englishman.”
“That was nothing to do with the air. It was seasickness. He would not admit it because it would not be correct for an Englishman to be seasick. The English like to think that they are all great sailors. He is drôle but I like him.”
“That is because he listens to your nonsense. He is polite-too polite. He and that German greet each other now as if they were friends. That is not correct. If this Gallindo …”
“Oh, we have talked enough about him.”
“Signora Beronelli said that he knocked against her on the stairs and went on without apologising.”
“He is a filthy type.”
There was a silence. Then:
“Robert!”
“I am nearly asleep.”
“You remember that I said that the husband of Signora Beronelli was killed in the earthquake?”
“What about it?”
“I talked to her this evening. It is a terrible story. It was not the earthquake that killed him. He was shot.”
“Why?”
“She does not wish everyone to know. You must say nothing of it.”
“Well?”
“It was during the first earthquake. After the great shocks were over they went back to their house from the fields in which they had taken refuge. The house was in ruins. There was part of one wall standing and he made a shelter against it with some boards. They found some food that had been in the house but the tanks had been broken and there was no water. He left her with the boy, their son, and went to look for water. Some friends who had a house near theirs were away in Istanbul. That house, too, had fallen, but he went among the ruins to find the water tanks. He found them and one of them had not been broken. He had nothing to take the water back in so he searched for a jug or a tin. He found a jug. It was of silver and had been partly crushed by the falling stones. After the earthquake, soldiers had been sent to patrol the streets to prevent looting, of which there was a great deal because valuable things were lying everywhere in the ruins. As he was standing there trying to straighten the jug, a soldier arrested him. Signora Beronelli knew nothing of this and when he did not come back she and her son went to look for him. But there was such chaos that she could do nothing. The next day she heard that he had been shot. Is that not a terrible tragedy?”
“Yes, it is a tragedy. Such things happen.”
“If the good God had killed him in the earthquake she could bear it more easily. But for him to be shot …! She is very brave. She does not blame the soldiers. With so much chaos they cannot be blamed. It was the Will of the good God.”
“He is a comedian. I have noticed it before.”
“Do not blaspheme.”
“It is you who blaspheme. You talk of the good God as if He were a waiter with a fly-swatter. He hits at the flies and kills some. But one escapes. Ah, le salaud! The waiter hits again and the fly is paste with the others. The good God is not like that. He does not make earthquakes and tragedies. He is of the mind.”
“You are insupportable. Have you no pity for the poor woman?”
“Yes, I pity her. But will it help her if we hold another burial service? Will it help her if I stay awake arguing instead of going to sleep as I wish? She told you this because she likes to talk of it. Poor soul! It eases her mind to become the heroine of a tragedy. The fact becomes less real. But if there is no audience, there is no tragedy. If she tells me, I, too, will be a good audience. Tears will come into my eyes. But you are not the heroine. Go to sleep.”
“You are a beast without imagination.”
“Beasts must sleep. Good night, chérie!”
“Camel!”
There was no answer. After a moment or two he sighed heavily and turned over in his bunk. Soon he began gently to snore.
For a time Graham lay awake listening to the rush of the sea outside and the steady throb of the engines. A waiter with a fly-swatter! In Berlin there was a man whom he had never seen and whose name he did not know, who had condemned him to death; in Sofia there was a man named Moeller who had been instructed to carry out the sentence; and here, a few yards away in cabin number nine, was the executioner with a nine millimetre calibre self-loading pistol, ready, now that he had disarmed the condemned man, to do his work and collect his money. The whole thing was as impersonal, as dispassionate, as justice itself. To attempt to defeat it seemed as futile as to argue with the hangman on the scaffold.
He tried to think of Stephanie and found that he could not. The things of which she was a part, his house, his friends, had ceased to exist. He was a man alone, transported into a strange land with death for its frontiers: alone but for the one person to whom he could speak of its terrors. She was sanity. She was reality. He needed her. Stephanie he did not need. She was a face and a voice dimly remembered with the other faces and voices of a world he had once known.