Mediterranean Nights (19 page)

‘I only had a second, while he spoke to someone in the corridor, but the collar-box with Cazalia's hair in it was on the table by my bed. I picked it up and chucked it on top of the wardrobe, then I opened the drawer where I had put all the clothes that she had left behind and seized the lot, hoping to get them out of sight before the police came in—it was too late; they caught me good and proper with the bundle in my hands.

‘Of course, after that I couldn't say a thing; they searched and rummaged into everything I had, and nearly the first thing they came across was her letter—that did it! I couldn't even say she'd gone off in my clothes without my knowledge, which was the truth, as she'd talked about my help and her devotion to the King.

‘I dressed myself while they stood round, and directly I'd finished they handcuffed me and marched me off to prison. I realised that I had landed myself in an appalling mess.

‘That prison was the devil. Only an hour's exercise a day, no books or papers, filthy food and so full of garlic that it nearly made me sick, and, of course, no baths.

‘The British Consul came along to see me; he seemed a decent chap, but he looked pretty grim. You see, I'd been caught out assisting in a Royalist conspiracy, and the fact that I was a Briton didn't make much odds. It looked as if I was in for a couple of years, at least. The Consul got a lawyer who came to see me several times, but he said he couldn't get me off—he could only try for a minimum sentence, and if things went really badly I might get seven years!… I was in the deuce of a stew.

‘I wonder you didn't see the case in the papers, because of course it got into the Press. I thought I should go dotty when I'd been there a week, and the only relief I had from thinking was when people came to see me. I will say they were decent about that. The people that I'd stayed with in Madrid came to Barcelona, and I was allowed to see them as often as I liked; they used to come at all hours, and the warder brought them straight to my cell. There was no rotten business of being separated from visitors by an open space,
and two wire fences with a warder in between, as we have here, but of course the Spanish prison system is thoroughly old-fashioned! They have bolts the size of battering-rams, and a sentry on the gate, but only about one jailer to every fifty prisoners, and they're so casual they'll even let you walk down the passage to the wash-place on your own.

‘I knew, though, that when my trial came on I should be sent off to a fortress or a penal settlement, and mixed up with all the other felons. It was a frightful prospect, but somehow I couldn't blame the girl. The more I thought of her the more adorable she seemed, and idiotic though I know it sounds, I felt that the hardest thing about my imprisonment was the fact that I should stand no chance of seeing her again for years.

‘I was wrong there. I did see her again, and quite soon, too. When I'd been in that foul prison nine days I was taken to the Superintendent's office one morning, and there she was—just as devastatingly beautiful as ever. She was dressed in girl's clothes again, and her hair was as curly as ever, but not quite such a lovely shade of gold. Of course I knew it must be a wig, but most people wouldn't have noticed the difference, I suppose.

‘At first I thought that she'd failed to get out of Spain, and had just been captured, but that wasn't it at all. She had read in the papers of my arrest, and come back to give herself up.

‘I wasn't given much chance to talk to her, but that was the gist of it, and for the moment I was too staggered to think clearly. She took entire responsibility, and as I was a foreigner they accepted her assurance that I wasn't really mixed up in the conspiracy. They gave me a pretty sharp lecture on the error of my ways and let me go.

‘I didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. I was almost stupid with relief at the thought of the horrors I had escaped; but there was Cazalia, and she'd have to go through that hell instead.

‘Think of the courage of that girl coming back and giving herself up deliberately to get me off! She knew, too, that she would get five years at least—just think what five years in prison would mean to a girl like that: the food and the filth
and the other women—ghastly creatures—the dregs of Barcelona. I darn' nearly broke down when I got back to the hotel.'

Oliver was silent for a moment. ‘Poor kid,' I said, ‘how long did she actually get?'

He laughed suddenly, and laid his hand on the casket. ‘She didn't get anything—the hair saved us.'

‘What
do
you mean?'

‘When I got back to the hotel,' Oliver said slowly, ‘I managed to secure my old room; the collar-box was just where I left it, and when I was looking at that lovely hair I got an idea.' He paused.

‘Yes,' I said impatiently, ‘go on.'

‘I did a bit of shopping, and I dashed off to Anita—the little girl I'd picked up at the Thé Dansant. I knew she was in need of money and had Royalist sympathies as well. It was an old-fashioned prison, so we planned the thing in the good old-fashioned way. Anita was allowed to see Cazalia—she gave her my parcel, and Calalia tied her up. Five minutes later, we were driving like the devil for the mountains. We ditched the car a couple of miles from the frontier, and crossed into France on foot that night. It was a risky business, but we pulled it off.'

‘But the guard,' I exclaimed. ‘How on earth could they confuse her with Anita?'

‘Why, her hair, of course,' laughed Oliver. ‘The police didn't know she had a wig. I sent in a black one—they never recognised her without her golden curls! Out you go, my boy, I've got to change—I'm dining with her at half past eight.'

STORY XIII

A
NOTHER
little episode from the activities of ‘The Man with the Girlish Face' in the early days of the Second World War.

Hampstead is a long cry from Monte Carlo, but in 1939 its population was almost as cosmopolitan. I lived nearby in St. John's Wood, and the majority of foreigners who then frequented those parts could hardly claim to have distinguished themselves by their exquisite politeness.

Why is it, I wonder, that so many foreigners in exile display such appalling manners? Even in Germany, where I have travelled extensively, apart from the comparatively small caste of Prussian officers who were deliberately educated to push civilians off the pavements if they did not get out of the way in time, the bulk of the people were by no means impolite. I suspect that much of this aggressive boorishness is begotten by an inverted inferiority complex arising as the natural reaction to prolonged and often intensive persecution; so I suppose we should be as forbearing as we can with these unbidden and, one only hopes, transitory guests. In any case, London was unexpectedly relieved of most of the strangers within her gates in September 1940; they set out once more upon their tragic odysseys as soon as the bombs began to fall.

An episode in this story shows that when I wrote it the war had hardly become a war.

DEATH IN THE FLAG

V
IVIEN
P
AWLETT
-B
ROWNE
—or plain V. Brown as he was on the register of Sir Charles Forsyth's department—thought
that he had never seen his chief look grimmer. It was Sir Charles's chill manner as much as his snow-white hair that had earned him the name of ‘Frosty', and this morning he was as icy as a Finnish blizzard.

‘Seen that?' he asked, pushing a newspaper-cutting across his desk. And Vivien read:

CASE OF BUBONIC PLAGUE REPORTED IN NORTH LONDON

Miss Sara Neilson, employed as a housemaid at 104 Maresfield Gardens, N.W.3, was suddenly taken ill yesterday and the Hampstead Fever Hospital have diagnosed the case as one of Bubonic Plague. Miss Neilson was removed at once to the isolation ship in the Thames estuary. Cases of this terrible disease are rare in England. The last…

‘Well, sir?' Vivien raised his eyes. They were amazingly quick when no longer screened by those long, curling lashes that had caused so many people to dub him an effeminate young fool. He'd failed every examination for which he'd ever sat; yet those eyes had induced old ‘Frosty' to give him a chance in the only Government department where no examinations are required.

‘Damnable business,' said Sir Charles. ‘As this was a civilian case we couldn't stop it from getting into the papers.'

‘There have been others, then?'

‘Yes; six in the last week. The girl must have caught it from one of them. They're all Service men, balloon-barrage aircraftmen or anti-aircraft gunners, and all of them were stationed in North London. This menace is being spread deliberately; but even the Nazis wouldn't stoop as low as this. It must be some Hitler-worshipping maniac working on his own. Here's a list of the men; they're all on the isolation ship. Go and see what you can find out—and for God's sake do it quickly.'

That afternoon, swathed from head to foot in a white overall and a mask of medicated gauze, Vivien questioned the semi-conscious victims on the isolation ship; but on his way back he had to admit to himself that he learned little of any value. One of the men had been walking-out with Sara Neilson, but they were all complete strangers to each other.
None of them had been down to the docks where they might have been bitten by a plague-rat or caught it off some coloured seaman from the East, and they had all led very normal lives at their respective depots, spending their off-time in cinemas, at the dogs, in pubs, or at home with their families.

The following morning Sir Charles telephoned to say that another case had been reported in Aldershot. So Vivien went down to the ship again to be there when the latest victim was brought in.

Once again the results proved disappointing. The man had had twelve hours' leave two days before. He had gone straight to his home in Hampstead, visited a cinema with his widowed mother, and talked to no one else whilst in London except when he had bought some cigarettes and taken a book out of the local ‘2d. Library' on his way to the station. So, having taken the address of the tobacconist and the library, Vivien wished him a speedy recovery and departed.

That evening he took a bus up to Hampstead, and following the soldier's directions arrived at the tobacconist's. He asked for a packet of Player's and while the girl was wrapping them up he remarked conversationally: ‘Get lots of soldiers coming in here these days, don't you? Keeps you busy I expect.'

She tossed her head and he saw that she was a coquettish piece. ‘If it were only soldiers I wouldn't mind—it's the refugees I can't abide.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. I don't mind telling you it's quite a treat to serve an English customer. The Gateway to the Continent; that's what we call these parts now—and the way these foreigners carry on,' she continued, warming to her theme. ‘They don't think twice about elbowing a lady off the pavement, and they never so much as say “pardon”, not them. Mr. Higgins—that's my boss—was sayin' only yesterday they ought to be ever so grateful for us letting them live here at all instead of behavin' as though they own the earth. The way they look at a girl, too…'

Vivien nodded sympathetically. ‘It must be rotten for you.'

She smiled coyly. ‘Oh, well, things aren't so bad reely—I mean I've got me own friends; then sometimes I get a chat with a nice gentleman like you…'

Vivien blushed furiously and, satisfied that the girl's evident antipathy for foreigners together with the fact that the shop was British-owned rendered it a most unlikely centre for treasonable activities, made his escape.

He was still slightly flushed when he reached the 2d. Library. It was fairly full, so whilst waiting his turn he went round the shelves and, in the pretence of looking for a book, watched the greasy, bespectacled little man serving behind the counter. The librarian was definitely non-Aryan and spoke with a heavy accent. When it was Vivien's turn he handed over the book of his choice and said:

‘I was recommended this thriller. I suppose I'm lucky to find a copy in now there are so many soldiers about. They all go for the lastest thrillers, don't they?'

‘Some, sir, not all. Twopence, pless—excuse.'

The busy librarian turned to a young man in khaki who had come to the shop a few minutes after Vivien.

Having glanced at the title of the soldier's selection he held it up for Vivien to see. It was
How Green was my Valley
, a serious novel of great beauty and power. Then, turning back to the soldier, he said: ‘One moment, pless,' and went through a door at the back of the shop.

When he returned he was pushing a small silk Union Jack between the leaves of the book. ‘Jus' a book-marker—a little present for you,' his wizened face creased into a smile as he returned the book to the soldier.

‘Don't I get one?' Vivien asked.

‘No, no; they're for our brave boys only. I am a refugee from Nazi persecution and I would to show…' Before he could finish Vivien snatched the book from the astonished young soldier and grabbing the librarian by the scruff of his neck pushed him into the back room. There, on a table against one wall, were a row of glass test-tubes, the lower parts of which were opaque with bacilli cultures, a sterilising apparatus, and beside it a neat little pile of silk Union Jacks.

With one heave Vivien pitched the little man head foremost into the row of test tubes so that they shivered to fragments, making a score of cuts upon his face.

‘I'm not charging you for the moment,' he said, ‘but I will if you ever come off the isolation ship.'

STORY XIV

I
T WAS
not until long after I had written this story that in 1938 I first saw Athens, from a giant seaplane. Later that spring I came to it again on my way back from Egypt and stayed there for some time. I also spent a good part of the spring of 1960 in Greece, Rhodes and Crete, in order to get an accurate background for my book,
Mayhem in Greece
, so now know far more about that country and its people.