It suddenly seemed to Lavinia that she was going down a tunnel that grew smaller and smaller; something was after her. She ran, she crawled; she flung herself on her face, she wriggled. . . . .
‘Gondoliere!’ she cried, ‘Torniamo al hotel.’
‘Subito Signorina?’
‘Subito, subito.’
The next morning Lavinia was sitting by her mother’s side in the Orient express. They had been travelling some hours. The train pulled up at a station.
‘Brescia?’ she thought. ‘Why do I remember Brescia? But Elizabeth was wrong. I shall never forget him.’
THE TRAVELLING GRAVE
The Travelling Grave was first published in Great Britain in 1951
A VISITOR FROM DOWN UNDER
‘And who will you send to fetch him away?’
After a promising start, the March day had ended in a wet evening. It was hard to tell whether rain or fog predominated. The loquacious bus conductor said, ‘A foggy evening,’ to those who rode inside, and ‘A wet evening,’ to such as were obliged to ride outside. But in or on the buses, cheerfulness held the field, for their patrons, inured to discomfort, made light of climatic inclemency. All the same, the weather was worth remarking on: the most scrupulous conversationalist could refer to it without feeling self convicted of banality. How much more the conductor who, in common with most of his kind, had a considerable conversational gift.
The bus was making its last journey through the heart of London before turning in for the night. Inside it was only half full. Outside, as the conductor was aware by virtue of his sixth sense, there still remained a passenger too hardy or too lazy to seek shelter. And now, as the bus rattled rapidly down the Strand, the footsteps of this person could be heard shuffling and creaking upon the metal-shod steps.
‘Anyone on top?’ asked the conductor, addressing an errant umbrella-point and the hem of a mackintosh.
‘I didn’t notice anyone,’ the man replied.
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ remarked the conductor pleasantly, giving a hand to his alighting fare, ‘but I think I’ll go up and make sure.’
Moments like these, moments of mistrust in the infallibility of his observation, occasionally visited the conductor. They came at the end of a tiring day, and if he could he withstood them. They were signs of weakness, he thought; and to give way to them matter for self-reproach. ‘Going barmy, that’s what you are,’ he told himself, and he casually took a fare inside to prevent his mind dwelling on the unvisited outside. But his unreasoning disquietude survived this distraction, and murmuring against himself he started to climb the steps.
To his surprise, almost stupefaction, he found that his misgivings were justified. Breasting the ascent, he saw a passenger sitting on the right-hand front seat; and the passenger, in spite of his hat turned down, his collar turned up, and the creased white muffler that showed between the two, must have heard him coming; for though the man was looking straight ahead, in his outstretched left hand, wedged between the first and second fingers, he held a coin.
‘Jolly evening, don’t you think?’ asked the conductor, who wanted to say something. The passenger made no reply, but the penny, for such it was, slipped the fraction of an inch lower in the groove between the pale freckled fingers.
‘I said it was a damn wet night,’ the conductor persisted irritably, annoyed by the man’s reserve.
Still no reply.
‘Where you for?’ asked the conductor, in a tone suggesting that wherever it was, it must be a discreditable destination.
‘Carrick Street.’
‘Where?’ the conductor demanded. He had heard all right, but a slight peculiarity in the passenger’s pronunciation made it appear reasonable to him, and possibly humiliating to the passenger, that he should not have heard.
‘Carrick Street.’
‘Then why don’t you say Carrick Street?’ the conductor grumbled as he punched the ticket.
There was a moment’s pause, then:
‘Carrick Street,’ the passenger repeated.
‘Yes, I know, I know, you needn’t go on telling me,’ fumed the conductor, fumbling with the passenger’s penny. He couldn’t get hold of it from above; it had slipped too far, so he passed his hand underneath the other’s and drew the coin from between his fingers.
It was cold, even where it had been held. ‘Know?’ said the stranger suddenly. ‘What do you know?’
The conductor was trying to draw his fare’s attention to the ticket, but could not make him look round.
‘I suppose I know you are a clever chap,’ he remarked. ‘Look here, now. Where do you want this ticket? In your button-hole?’
‘Put it here,’ said the passenger.
‘Where?’ asked the conductor. ‘You aren’t a blooming letter-rack.’
‘Where the penny was,’ replied the passenger. ‘Between my fingers.’
The conductor felt reluctant, he did not know why, to oblige the passenger in this. The rigidity of the hand disconcerted him: it was stiff, he supposed, or perhaps paralysed. And since he had been standing on the top his own hands were none too warm. The ticket doubled up and grew limp under his repeated efforts to push it in. He bent lower, for he was a good-hearted fellow, and using both hands, one above and one below, he slid the ticket into its bony slot.
‘Right you are, Kaiser Bill.’
Perhaps the passenger resented this jocular allusion to his physical infirmity; perhaps he merely wanted to be quiet. All he said was:
‘Don’t speak to me again.’
‘Speak to you!’ shouted the conductor, losing all self-control. ‘Catch me speaking to a stuffed dummy!’
Muttering to himself he withdrew into the bowels of the bus.
At the corner of Carrick Street quite a number of people got on board. All wanted to be first, but pride of place was shared by three women who all tried to enter simultaneously. The conductor’s voice made itself audible over the din: ‘Now then, now then, look where you’re shoving! This isn’t a bargain sale. Gently, please, lady; he’s only a pore old man.’ In a moment or two the confusion abated, and the conductor, his hand on the cord of the bell, bethought himself of the passenger on top whose destination Carrick Street was. He had forgotten to get down. Yielding to his good nature, for the conductor was averse from further conversation with his uncommunicative fare, he mounted the steps, put his head over the top and shouted ‘Carrick Street! Carrick Street!’ That was the utmost he could bring himself to do. But his admonition was without effect; his summons remained unanswered; nobody came. ‘Well, if he wants to stay up there he can,’ muttered the conductor, still aggrieved. ‘I won’t fetch him down, cripple or no cripple.’ The bus moved on. He slipped by me, thought the conductor, while all that Cup-tie crowd was getting in.