“He won’t be back for another week,” she said.
“Where has he gone this time?” I asked. “Not Istanbul, I hope.”
She said, “Are you looking for Richard Duffill?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her hand went to her face, and I knew before she spoke that he was dead.
“HIS NAME WAS RICHARD CUTHBERT DUFFILL. HE WAS A most unusual man,” said his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Duffill. She lived at Glyndbourne, a bungalow just beyond the churchyard. She did not ask who I was. It seemed only natural to her that someone should be inquiring about the life of this strange man, who had died two years before, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been as old as the century — seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. Mrs. Jack said, “Do you know about his adventurous life?”
I said, “I don’t know anything about him.” All I knew was his name and his village.
“He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard’s father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. Those were the days of servants. The Hall was the manor — Mr. Uppleby was the Lord of the Manor — and of course the Duffills were servants, and rather poor.…”
But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at math, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish while still a teenager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when Richard was twelve his father died. Mr. Uppleby took an interest, but the young boy usually just stayed inside and read and did his lessons, or else he went for long solitary walks.
His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with Howson and dragged him to shore, saving the boy’s life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline A PLUCKY BARROW BOY.
For this, Duffill, a Boy Scout, was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honor had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterward, the Carnegie Heroes’ Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch “for gallantry,” and gave him a sum of money “to help him in his education and future career.”
In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebiscite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One — sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klagenfurt (Austria) and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia — now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving — fleeing, some people said — for England.
Politically, he was of the left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. (“One felt he would have made the ideal agent,” an old friend of Duffill’s told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly, it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents or wolves from the Sturm Abteilung. He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany (“an exceedingly clever and daring feat,” another friend told me. “His fortune was considerable.”).
He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, reemerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company. Two years later, a letter of reference said that Duffill was “thoroughly acquainted with various sides of the film trade.” In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly — but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, “Richard never discussed his working life or his world traveling with us.”
In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and traveled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, “for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration.”
After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser — waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill’s snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.
He wore a rug-like wig, I was told. “It stuck out in the back.” He had had brain surgery. “He once played tennis in Cairo.” He had gone on socialist holidays to Eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very “spiritual,” one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. “And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes,” Bennett’s widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said — to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!
But what I wanted to know was what had happened to him after the Orient Express pulled out of Domodossola.
Mrs. Jack said, “He got out at a station. He didn’t tell me where. He had left his luggage on the train. Then the train pulled out. He had inquired when the next train was, and they told him the time — five o’clock. Only a few hours, he thought. But he had got mixed up. He thought they meant P.M. and they actually meant A.M. — five the next morning. He had a very bad night, and the next day he went to — where was it? Venice? Yes, he collected his luggage”—the paper bags I had left with the controllore—“and eventually got to Istanbul.”
So he had made it!
I told Mrs. Jack who I was and how I had met Mr. Duffill.
She said, “Oh, yes, I read your book! My neighbor’s son is an avid reader. He told us about it. He said, ‘I think you should see this — I think this is our Mr. Duffill.’ And then everyone in Barrow read it.”
I was eager to know whether Mr. Duffill himself had read it.
“I wanted him to see it,” Mrs. Jack said. “I put a copy aside. But when he came over, he wasn’t too good. He didn’t see it. The next time he came over I forgot about the book. That was the last time, really. He had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it—”
Thank God for that, I thought.
What an interesting man that stranger had been! He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been — brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him, the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected — that he had almost certainly been a spy.
Looking out the Window at Yugoslavia
THERE WERE WOMEN, BUT THEY WERE OLD, SHAWLED against the sun and yoked to green watering cans in trampled cornfields. The landscape was low and uneven, barely supporting in its dust a few farm animals, maybe five motionless cows, and a herdsman leaning on a stick watching them starve in the same way the scarecrows — two plastic bags on a bony crosspiece — watched the devastated fields of cabbages and peppers. And beyond the rows of blue cabbage, a pink pig butted the splintery fence of his small pen and a cow lay under goalposts of saplings in an unused football field. Red peppers, as crimson and pointed as clusters of poinsettias, dried in the sun outside farm cottages in districts where farming consisted of men stumbling after oxen dragging wooden plows and harrows, or occasionally wobbling on bicycles loaded with hay bales. Herdsmen were not simply herdsmen; they were sentries, guarding little flocks from marauders: four cows watched by a woman, three gray pigs driven by a man with a truncheon, scrawny chickens watched by scrawny children. “In Yugoslavia we have three things,” I was told, “freedom, women, and drinking.” A woman in a field tipped a water bottle to her mouth; she swallowed and bent from the waist to continue tying up cornstalks. Large ocher squashes sat plumply in fields of withering vines; people priming pumps and swinging buckets out of wells on long poles; tall narrow haystocks, and pepper fields in so many stages of ripeness I first took them for flower gardens. It is a feeling of utter quietness, deep rural isolation the train briefly penetrates. It goes on without a change for hours, this afternoon in Yugoslavia, and then all people disappear and the effect is eerie: roads without cars or bicycles, cottages with empty windows at the fringes of empty fields, trees heavy with apples and no one picking them. Perhaps it’s the wrong time — three-thirty; perhaps it’s too hot. But where are the people who stacked that hay and set those peppers so carefully to dry? The train passes on — that’s the beauty of a train, this heedless movement — but it passes on to more of the same. Six neat beehives, a derelict steam engine with wildflowers garlanding its smokestack, a stalled ox at a level crossing. In the heat haze of the afternoon my compartment grows dusty, and down at the front of the train Turks lie all over their seats, sleeping with their mouths open and children wakeful on their stomachs. At each river and bridge there were square brick emplacements, like Croatian copies of Martello towers, pocked by bombs. Then I saw a man, headless, bent over in a field, camouflaged by cornstalks that were taller than he; I wondered if I had missed all the others because they were made so tiny by their crops.