Absent in the Spring (20 page)

Princess Hohenbach Salm.

In the restaurant car she found her new acquaintance eating breakfast and conversing with great animation to a small, stout Frenchman.

The princess waved a greeting to her and indicated the seat at her side.

‘But you are energetic,' she exclaimed. ‘If it was me, I should still lie and sleep. Now, Monsieur Baudier, go on with what you are telling me. It is most interesting.'

The princess talked in French to M. Baudier, in English to Joan, in fluent Turkish to the waiter, and occasionally across the aisle in equally fluent Italian to a rather melancholy looking officer.

Presently the stout Frenchman finished his breakfast and withdrew, bowing politely.

‘What a good linguist you are,' said Joan.

The long, pale face smiled – a melancholy smile this time.

‘Yes – why not? I am Russian, you see. And I was married to a German, and I have lived much in Italy. I speak eight, nine languages – some well, some not so well. It is a pleasure, do you not think, to converse? All human beings are interesting, and one lives such a short time on this earth! One should exchange ideas – experiences. There is not enough love on the earth, that is what I say. Sasha, my friends say to me, there are people it is impossible to love – Turks, Armenians – Levantines. But I say no. I love them all.
Garçon, l'addition
.'

Joan blinked slightly for the last sentence had been practically joined to the one before it.

The restaurant car attendant came hurrying up respectfully and it was borne in upon Joan that her travelling companion was a person of considerable importance.

All that morning and afternoon they wound across the plains and then climbed slowly up into the Taurus.

Sasha sat in her corner and read and smoked and occasionally made unexpected and sometimes embarrassing remarks. Joan found herself being fascinated by this strange woman who came from a different world and whose mental processes were so totally different from anything she herself had previously come across.

The mingling of the impersonal and the intimate had an odd compelling charm for Joan.

Sasha said to her suddenly:

‘You do not read – no? And you do nothing with your hands. You do not knit. That is not like most Englishwomen. And yet you look most English – yes, you look exactly English.'

Joan smiled.

‘I've actually nothing to read. I was held up at Tell Abu Hamid owing to the breakdown on the line, so I got through all the literature I had with me.'

‘But you do not mind? You did not feel it necessary to get something at Alep. No, you are content just to sit and look out through the window at the mountains, and yet you do not see them – you look at something that
you yourself see,
is it not so? You experience in your mind some great emotion, or you have passed through one. You have a sorrow? Or a great happiness?'

Joan hesitated, with a slight frown.

Sasha burst out laughing.

‘Ah but that is so English. You think it impertinent if I ask the questions that we Russians feel are so natural. It is curious that. If I were to ask you where you had been, to what hotels, and what scenery you had seen, and if you have children and what do they do, and have you travelled much, and do you know a good hairdresser in London – all that you would answer with pleasure. But if I ask something that comes into my mind – have you a sorrow, is your husband faithful – do you sleep much with men – what has been your most beautiful experience in life – are you conscious of the love of God? All those things would make you draw back – affronted – and yet they are much more interesting than the others, nicht wahr?'

‘I suppose,' said Joan slowly, ‘that we are very reserved as a nation.'

‘Yes, yes. One cannot even say to an Englishwoman who has recently been married, are you going to have a baby? That is, one cannot say so across the table at luncheon. No, one has to take her aside, to
whisper
it. And yet if the baby is there, in its cradle, you can say, “How is your baby?”'

‘Well – it is rather intimate, isn't it?'

‘No, I do not see it. I met the other day a friend I have not seen for many years, a Hungarian. Mitzi, I say to her, you are married – yes, several years now, you have not a baby, why not? She answers me she cannot think why not! For five years, she says she and her husband have tried hard – but oh! how hard they have tried! What, she asks, can she do about it? And, since we are at a luncheon party, everyone there makes a suggestion. Yes, and some of them very practical. Who knows, something may come of it.'

Joan looked stolidly unconvinced.

Yet she felt, suddenly welling up in her, a strong impulse to open her own heart to this friendly, peculiar foreign creature. She wanted, badly, to share with someone the experience that she had been through. She needed, as it were, to assure herself of its reality …

She said slowly, ‘It is true – I have been through rather an upsetting experience.'

‘Ach, yes? What was it? A man?'

‘No. No, certainly not.'

‘I am glad. It is so often a man – and really in the end it becomes a little boring.'

‘I was all alone – at the rest house at Tell Abu Hamid – a horrible place – all flies and tins and rolls of barbed wire, and very gloomy and dark inside.'

‘That is necessary because of the heat in summer, but I know what you mean.'

‘I had no one to talk to – and I soon finished my books – and I got – I got into a very peculiar state.'

‘Yes, yes, that might well be so. It is interesting what you tell me. Go on.'

‘I began to find out things – about myself. Things that I had never known before. Or rather things that I
had
known, but had never been willing to recognize. I can't quite explain to you –'

‘Oh, but you can. It is quite easy. I shall understand.'

Sasha's interest was so natural, so unassumed, that Joan found herself talking with an astonishing lack of self consciousness. Since to Sasha to talk of one's feelings and one's intimate relationships was perfectly natural, it began to seem natural to Joan also.

She began to talk with less hesitation, describing her uneasiness, her fears, and her final panic.

‘I daresay it will seem absurd to you – but I felt that I was completely lost – alone – that God himself had forsaken me –'

‘Yes, one has felt that – I have felt it myself. It is very dark, very terrible …'

‘It was not dark – it was light – blinding light – there was no shelter – no cover – no shadow.'

‘We mean the same thing, though. For you it was light that was terrible, because you had hidden so long under cover and in deep shade. But for me it was darkness, not seeing my way, being lost in the night. But the agony is the same – it is the knowledge of one's own nothingness and of being cut off from the love of God.'

Joan said slowly, ‘And then –
it happened
– like a miracle. I saw everything. Myself – and what I had been. All my silly pretences and shams fell away. It was like – it was like being born again …'

She looked anxiously at the other woman. Sasha bent her head.

‘And I knew what I had to do. I had to go home and start again. Build up a new life … from the beginning …'

There was a silence. Sasha was looking at Joan thoughtfully and something in her expression puzzled Joan. She said, with a slight flush:

‘Oh, I daresay it sounds very melodramatic and farfetched –'

Sasha interrupted her.

‘No, no, you do not understand me. Your experience was real – it has happened to many – to St Paul – to others of the Saints of God – and to ordinary mortals and sinners. It is conversion. It is vision. It is the soul knowing its own bitterness. Yes, it is real all that – it is as real as eating your dinner or brushing your teeth. But I wonder – all the same, I wonder …'

‘I feel I've been so unkind – done harm to – to someone I love –'

‘Yes, yes, you have remorse.'

‘And I can hardly wait to get there – to get home, I mean. There is so much I want to say – to tell him.'

‘To tell whom? Your husband?'

‘Yes. He has been so kind – so patient always. But he has not been happy. I have not made him happy.'

‘And you think you will be better able to make him happy now?'

‘We can at least have an explanation. He can know how sorry I am. He can help me to – oh, what shall I say?' The words of the Communion service flashed through her mind. ‘To lead a new life from now on.'

Sasha said gravely, ‘That is what the Saints of God were able to do.'

Joan stared.

‘But I – I am not a saint.'

‘No. That is what I meant.' Sasha paused, then said with a slight change of tone, ‘Forgive me that I should have said that. And perhaps it is not true.'

Joan looked slightly bewildered.

Sasha lit another cigarette and began to smoke violently, staring out of the window.

‘I don't know,' said Joan uncertainly, ‘why I should tell you all this –'

‘But naturally because you wish to tell someone – you wish to speak of it – it is in your mind and you want to talk of it, that is natural enough.'

‘I'm usually very reserved.'

Sasha looked amused.

‘And so proud of it like all English people. Oh, you are a very curious race – but very curious. So shamefaced, so embarrassed by your virtues, so ready to admit, to boast of your deficiencies.'

‘I think you are exaggerating slightly,' said Joan stiffly.

She felt suddenly very British, very far away from the exotic, pale-faced woman in the opposite corner of the carriage, the woman to whom, a minute or two previously, she had confided a most intimate personal experience.

Joan said in a conventional voice, ‘Are you going through on the Simplon Orient?'

‘No, I stay a night in Stamboul and then I go to Vienna.' She added carelessly, ‘It is possible that I shall die there, but perhaps not.'

‘Do you mean –' Joan hesitated, bewildered, ‘that you've had a premonition?'

‘Ah no,' Sasha burst out laughing. ‘No, it is not like that! It is an operation I am going to have there. A very serious operation. Not very often is it that it succeeds. But they are good surgeons in Vienna. This one to whom I am going – he is very clever – a Jew. I have always said it would be stupid to annihilate all the Jews in Europe. They are clever doctors and surgeons, yes, and they are clever artistically too.'

‘Oh dear,' said Joan. ‘I am so sorry.'

‘Because I may be going to die? But what does it matter? One has to die some time. And I may not die. I have the idea, if I live, that I will enter a convent I know of – a very strict order. One never speaks – it is perpetual meditation and prayer.'

Joan's imagination failed to conceive of a Sasha perpetually silent and meditating.

Sasha went on gravely, ‘There will be much prayer needed soon – when the war comes.'

‘
War
?' Joan stared.

Sasha nodded her head.

‘But yes, certainly war is coming. Next year, or the year after.'

‘Really,' said Joan. ‘I think you are mistaken.'

‘No, no. I have friends who are very well informed and they have told me so. It is all decided.'

‘But war where – against whom?'

‘War everywhere. Every nation will be drawn in. My friends think that Germany will win quite soon, but I – I do not agree. Unless they can win very very quickly indeed. You see, I know many English and Americans and I know what they are like.'

‘Surely,' said Joan, ‘nobody really wants war.'

She spoke incredulously.

‘For what else does the Hitler Youth movement exist?'

Joan said earnestly, ‘But I have friends who have been in Germany a good deal, and they think that there is a lot to be said for the Nazi movement.'

‘Oh la la,' cried Sasha. ‘See if they say that in three years' time.'

Then she leaned forward as the train drew slowly to a standstill.

‘See, we have come to the Cilician Gates. It is beautiful, is it not? Let us get out.'

They got out of the train and stood looking down through the great gap in the mountain chain to the blue, hazy plains beneath …

It was close on sunset and the air was exquisitely cool and still.

Joan thought: How beautiful …

She wished Rodney was here to see it with her.

Victoria …

Joan felt her heart beating with sudden excitement.

It was good to be home.

She felt, just for a moment, as though she had never been away. England, her own country. Nice English porters … A not so nice, but very English, foggy day!

Not romantic, not beautiful, just dear old Victoria station just the same as ever, looking just the same, smelling just the same!

Oh, thought Joan, I'm
glad
to be back.

Such a long, weary journey, across Turkey and Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and Italy and France. Customs officers, and passport examinations. All the different uniforms, all the different languages. She was tired – yes, definitely tired – of foreigners. Even that extraordinary Russian woman who had travelled with her from Alep to Stamboul had got rather tiresome in the end. She had been interesting – indeed quite exciting – to begin with, simply because she was so different. But by the time they had been running down beside the Sea of Marmora to Haidar Pacha, Joan had been definitely looking forward to their parting. For one thing it was embarrassing to remember how freely, she, Joan, had talked about her own private affairs to a complete stranger. And for another – well, it was difficult to put it into words – but something about her had made Joan feel definitely
provincial
. Not a very pleasant feeling. It had been no good to say to herself that she hoped she, Joan, was as good as anybody! She didn't really think so. She felt uneasily conscious that Sasha, for all her friendliness, was an aristocrat whilst she herself was middle class, the unimportant wife of a country solicitor. Very stupid, of course, to feel like that …