Free Stamboul Train by Graham Greene Page B

poems I’ve written her, and he’ll laugh and she’ll laugh and they’ll go to bed laughing. I had better make up my mind that this is the end, that she will never come back from this holiday. I don’t even know whether it’s really her uncle she’s visiting. There are as many fish in the sea as ever came out of it, Miss Warren thought, crumbling a roll, desperately aware of her uncared-for hands, the girl with the Jew, for instance. She was as poor as Janet was that evening in the cinema; she was not lovely as Janet was, so that it was happiness to sit for an hour and watch every motion of Janet’s body, Janet doing her hair, Janet changing her dress, Janet pulling on her stockings, Janet mixing a drink, but she probably had twice the mind, common and shrewd though it might be.
    â€˜Darling,’ Janet Pardoe asked with amusement, ‘are you getting a pash for that little thing?’ The train rocked and roared into a tunnel and out again, eliminating Mabel Warren’s answer, taking it, as an angry hand might take a letter, tearing it across and scattering the pieces, only one phrase falling face upwards and in view: ‘For ever,’ so that no one but Mabel Warren could have said what her protest had been, whether she had sworn to remember always or had declared that one could not be faithful for ever to one person. When the train came out again into the sunlight, coffee-pots glimmering and white linen laid between an open pasture, where a few cows grazed, and a deep wood of firs, Miss Warren had forgotten what she had wished to say, for she recognized in a man who entered the restaurant-car Czinner’s companion. At the same moment the girl rose. She and the young man had spoken so seldom Miss Warren could not decide whether they were acquainted; she hoped that they were strange to each other, for she was forming a plan which would not only give her speech with the girl but would help her to nail Czinner once and for all to the bill page of the paper, an exclusive crucifixion.
    â€˜Good-bye,’ the girl said. Mabel Warren, watching them with the trained observer’s eye, noted the Jew’s raised shoulders, as of the ashamed habitual thief who leaning forward from the dock protests softly, more from habit than any real sense of injustice, that he has not had a fair trial. The casual observer might have read in their faces the result of a lover’s quarrel; Mabel Warren knew better. ‘I’ll see you again?’ the man asked, and she replied, ‘If you want me, you’ll know where to find me.’
    Mabel Warren said to Janet, ‘I’ll see you later. There are things I must do,’ and she followed the girl out of the car over the rocking bridge between the coaches, stumbling and grasping for support, but with the ache in her head quite gone in the warmth and illumination of her idea. For when she said there were things to do, ‘things’ meant nothing vague, but a throned triumphant concept for which her brain was the lit hall and a murmuring and approving multitude. Everything fitted, that she felt above all things, and she began to calculate what space they were likely to allow her in London; she had never led the paper before. There was the Disarmament Conference and the arrest of a peer for embezzlement and a baronet had married a Ziegfeld girl. None of these stories was exclusive; she had read them on the News Agency tape before she went to the station. They will put the Disarmament Conference and the Ziegfeld girl on a back page, she thought. There’s no doubt, short of a European war or the King’s death, that my story will lead the paper, and with her eyes on the girl in front, she considered the image of Dr Czinner, tired and shabby and old-fashioned in the high collar and the little tight tie, sitting in the corner of his compartment with his hands gripped on his knee, while she told him a lot of lies about