Free Graham Greene by The Spy's Bedside Book Page B

back again without pause or rest. Of one place, at least where they did lead him, we heard afterwards; and, in the morning, the driver of the first south-shore tramcar, clanging his bell desperately, saw a bedraggled, soaked man without a hat, and walking in the roadway unsteadily with his head down, step right in front of his car, and go under.
    When they picked him up, with two broken limbs and a crushed side, Razumov had not lost consciousness. It was as though he had tumbled, smashing himself, into a world of mutes. Silent men, moving unheard, lifted him up, laid him on the sidewalk, gesticulating and grimacing round him their alarm, horror, and compassion. A red face with moustaches stooped close over him, lips moving, eyes rolling. Razumov tried hard to understand the reason of this dumb show. To thosewho stood around him, the features of that stranger, so grievously hurt, seemed composed in meditation. Afterwards his eyes sent out at them a look of fear and closed slowly. They stared at him. Razumov made an effort to remember some French words.
    â€œJe suis sourd,”
he had time to utter feebly, before he fainted.
    â€œHe is deaf,” they exclaimed to each other. “That’s why he did not hear the car …”
    But hours before, while the thunderstorm still raged in the night, there had been in the rooms of Julius Laspara a great sensation. The terrible Nikita, coming in from the landing, uplifted his squeaky voice in horrible glee before all the company:
    â€œRazumov! Mr Razumov! The wonderful Razumov! He shall never be any use as a spy on any one. He won’t talk, because he will never hear anything in his life—not a thing! I have burst the drums of his ears for him. Oh, you may trust me. I know the trick. Ha! Ha! Ha! I know the trick.”
    JOSEPH CONRAD

23. SEVEN MILES FROM CALAIS
    harsh steam siren blasted for two full minutes as we approached the mouth of the cutting, sent to the countless workmen about me a message of release; and it being then six o’clock of the night, they came pell-mell, from the heart of the earth before us as it seemed—some crowding in the ballast-trucks, some running, some clinging to the very buffers of the little engines, some going at their ease, as though labour were not distasteful to them. That which had been a pandemonium of order andmethod became in a few moments a deserted scene of enterprise. None save the sentries guarded the mouth of the pit. Here and there, in the chasm below, flares began to burst up in garish yellow spirit flames; but those who worked by their light were the chosen few, the more skilled artisans, the engineers. And as we plunged downward and still downward, the great buttressed wall ever raising itself higher above us—even the skilled were rarely passed. A tremulous silence prevailed in the pit. From the distance there came a sound as of the throbbing of some mighty engine at work beneath the very sea toward which I knew we must be walking. But the man who led me downward had no desire to gratify my curiosity. Passing from the daylight to this cavernous gloom, he had become taciturn, morose, strangely self-occupied.
    I followed at his heels as we went quickly ever down toward the sea. When at last the incline of the cutting ceased, and we came upon a level way, I could perceive four lines of rails running up to platforms as for the terminus of a station; and beyond them the narrow mouth of a tunnel which carried but two tracks, and seemed to be nothing else than a tube of steel thrust into the mud which here covers the chalk of the Channel bed. All the lines converged to the tunnel’s mouth, but beyond was utter darkness. This was our journey’s end, then.
    God knows that even then I dare not ask myself the meaning of the things I saw. When, without presage, there is revealed to us, as in the twinkling of an eye, the truth of some mystery which appeals alike to the more terrible phase of our