Ting…ting…ting…
It sounded again and again. Where was the man? Somebody was getting impatient.
Ting…
Whoever it was was keeping their finger solidly on the push.
Suddenly with a rush, his footsteps echoing up the aisle, the man came. He knocked at a door not far from Poirot’s own.
Then came voices—the conductor’s, deferential, apologetic, and a woman’s—insistent and voluble.
Mrs Hubbard.
Poirot smiled to himself.
The altercation—if it was one—went on for some time. Its proportions were ninety per cent of Mrs Hubbard’s to a soothing ten per cent of the conductor’s. Finally the matter seemed to be adjusted. Poirot heard distinctly:
‘Bonne nuit, Madame,[32]’ and a closing door.
He pressed his own finger on the bell.
The conductor arrived promptly. He looked hot and worried.
‘De l'eau minerale, s'il vous plaît.[33]’
‘Bien, Monsieur.' Perhaps a twinkle in Poirot’s eye led him to unburden himself.
‘La Dame américaine[34]—’
‘Yes?’
He wiped his forehead.
‘Imagine to yourself the time I have had with her! She insists—but insists—that there is a man in her compartment! Figure to yourself, Monsieur. In a space of this size.’ He swept a hand round. ‘Where would he conceal himself? I argue with her. I point out that it is impossible. She insists. She woke up and there was a man there. And how, I ask, did he get out and leave the door bolted behind him? But she will not listen to reason. As though, there were not enough to worry us already. This snow—’
‘Snow?’
‘But yes, Monsieur. Monsieur has not noticed? The train has stopped. We have run into a snowdrift. Heaven knows how long we shall be here. I remember once being snowed up for seven days.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Between VincovI and Brod.’
‘ Là là,’ said Poirot vexedly.
The man withdrew and returned with the water.
‘Bon soir[35], Monsieur.’
Poirot drank a glass of water and composed himself to sleep.
He was just dropping off when something again woke him. This time it was as though something heavy had fallen with a thud against the door.
He sprang up, opened it and looked out. Nothing. But to his right some way down the corridor a woman wrapped in a scarlet kimono was retreating from him. At the other end, sitting on his little seat, the conductor was entering up figures on large sheets of paper. Everything was deathly quiet.
‘Decidedly I suffer from the nerves,’ said Poirot and retired to bed again. This time he slept till morning.
When he awoke the train was still at a standstill. He raised a blind and looked out. Heavy banks of snow surrounded the train.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was past nine o’clock.
At a quarter to ten, neat, spruce, and dandified as ever, he made his way to the restaurant-car, where a chorus of woe was going on.
Any barriers there might have been between the passengers had now quite broken down. All were united by a common misfortune. Mrs Hubbard was loudest in her lamentations.
‘My daughter said it would be the easiest way in the world. Just sit in the train until I got to Parrus. And now we may be here for days and days,’ she wailed. ‘And my boat sails the day after tomorrow. How am I going to catch it now? Why, I can’t even wire to cancel my passage. I feel too mad to talk about it.’
The Italian said that he had urgent business himself in Milan. The large American said that that was ‘too bad, Ma’am,’ and soothingly expressed a hope that the train might make up time[36].
‘My sister—her children wait me,’ said the Swedish lady and wept. ‘I get no word to them. What they think? They will say bad things have happen to me.’
‘How long shall we be here?’ demanded Mary Debenham. ‘Doesn’t anybody know?’
Her voice sounded impatient, but Poirot noted that there were no signs of that almost feverish anxiety which she had displayed during the check to the Taurus Express.
Mrs Hubbard was off again[37].
‘There isn’t anybody knows a thing on this train. And nobody’s trying to do anything. Just a pack of useless foreigners. Why, if this were at home, there’d be someone at least trying to do something.’
Arbuthnot turned to Poirot and spoke in careful British French.
‘Vous êtes un directeur de la ligne, je crois, Monsieur. Vous pouvez nous dire[38]—’
Smiling Poirot corrected him.
‘No, no,’ he said in English. ‘It is not I. You confound me with my friend M. Bouc.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all. It is most natural. I am now in the compartment that he had formerly.’
M. Bouc was not present in the restaurant-car. Poirot looked about to notice who else was absent.
Princess Dragomiroff was missing and the Hungarian couple. Also Ratchett, his valet, and the German lady’s-maid.
The Swedish lady wiped her eyes.
‘I am foolish,’ she said. ‘I am baby to cry. All for the best, whatever happen.’
This Christian spirit, however, was far from being shared.
‘That’s all very well,’ said MacQueen restlessly. ‘We may be here for days.’
‘What is this country anyway?’ demanded Mrs Hubbard tearfully.
On being told it was Yugoslavia she said:
‘Oh! one of these Balkan things. What can you expect?’
‘You are the only patient one, Mademoiselle,’ said Poirot to Miss Debenham.
She shrugged her shoulders slightly.
‘What can one do?’
‘You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.’
‘That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.’
She was not even looking at him. Her gaze went past him, out of the window to where the snow lay in heavy masses.
‘You are a strong character, Mademoiselle,’ said Poirot gently. ‘You are, I think, the strongest character amongst us.’
‘Oh, no. No, indeed. I know one far far stronger than I am.’
‘And that is—?’
She seemed suddenly to come to herself, to realize that she was talking to a stranger and a foreigner with whom, until this morning, she had only exchanged half a dozen sentences.
She laughed a polite but estranging laugh.
‘Well—that old lady, for instance. You have probably noticed her. A very ugly old lady, but rather fascinating. She has only to lift a little finger and ask for something in a polite voice—and the whole train runs.’
‘It runs also for my friend M. Bouc,’ said Poirot. ‘But that is because he is a director of the line, not because he has a masterful character.’
Mary Debenham smiled.
The morning wore away. Several people, Poirot amongst them, remained in the dining-car. The communal life was felt, at the moment, to pass the time better. He heard a good deal more about Mrs Hubbard’s daughter and he heard the lifelong habits of Mr Hubbard, deceased, from his rising in the morning and commencing breakfast with a cereal to his final rest at night in the bed-socks that Mrs Hubbard herself had been in the habit of knitting for him.
It was when he was listening to a confused account of the missionary aims of the Swedish lady that one of the Wagon Lit conductors came into the car and stood at his elbow.
‘Pardon, Monsieur.’
36
the train might make up time – (
38