Read Online Stamboul Train by Graham Greene - Free Book Online

annoyed her; she had a splitting headache and felt ‘wicked.’ It was the term she used herself; it meant a hatred of men, of all the shifts and evasions they made necessary, of the way they spoiled beauty and stalked abroad in their own ugliness. They boasted of the women they had enjoyed; even the faded middle-aged face before her had in his time seen beauty naked, the hands which clasped his knee had felt and pried and enjoyed. And at Vienna she was losing Janet Pardoe, who was going alone into a world where men ruled. They would flatter her and give her bright cheap objects, as though she were a native to be cheated with Woolworth mirrors and glass beads. But it was not their enjoyment she most feared, it was Janet’s. Not loving her at all, or only for the hour, the day, the year, they could make her weak with pleasure, cry aloud in her enjoyment. While she, Mabel Warren, who had saved her from a governess’s buried life and fed her and clothed her, who could love her with the same passion until death, without satiety, had no means save her lips to express her love, was faced always by the fact that she gave no enjoyment and gained herself no more than an embittered sense of insufficiency. Now with her head aching, the smell of gin in her nostrils, the knowledge of her flushed ugliness, she hated men with a wicked intensity and their bright spurious graces.
    â€˜You are Dr Czinner.’ She noted with an increase of her anger that he did not trouble to deny his identity, proffering her carelessly the name he travelled under, ‘My name is John.’
    â€˜Dr Czinner,’ she growled at him, closing her great teeth on her lower lip in an effort at self-control.
    â€˜Richard John, a schoolmaster, on holiday.’
    â€˜To Belgrade.’
    â€˜No.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘I am stopping at Vienna.’ She did not believe him, but she won back her amiability with an effort. ‘I’m getting out at Vienna, too. Perhaps you’ll let me show you some of the sights.’ A man stood in the doorway and she rose. ‘I’m so sorry. This is your seat.’ She grinned across the compartment, lurched sideways as the train clattered across a point, and failed to hold a belch which filled the compartment for a few seconds with the smell of gin and shaken notes of cheap powder. ‘I’ll see you again before Vienna,’ she said, and moving down the corridor leant her red face against the cold smutty glass in a spasm of pain at her own drunkenness and squalor. ‘I’ll get him yet,’ she thought, blushing at her belch as though she were a young girl at a dinner-party. ‘I’ll get him somehow. God damn his soul.’
    A tender light flooded the compartments. It would have been possible for a moment to believe that the sun was the expression of something that loved and suffered for men. Human beings floated like fish in golden water, free from the urge of gravity, flying without wings, transport, in a glass aquarium. Ugly faces and misshapen bodies were transmuted, if not into beauty, at least into grotesque forms fashioned by a mocking affection. On that golden tide they rose and fell, murmured and dreamed. They were not imprisoned, for they were not during the hour of dawn aware of their imprisonment.
    Coral Musker woke for the second time. She stood up at once and went to the door; the man dozed wearily, his eyes jerking open to the rhythm of the train. Her mind was still curiously clear; it was as if the golden light had a quality of penetration, so that she could understand motives which were generally hidden, movements which as a rule had for her no importance or significance. Now as she watched him and he became aware of her, she saw his hands go out in a gesture which stayed half-way; she knew that it was a trick of his race which he was consciously repressing. She said softly, ‘I’m a pig. You’ve been out there all night.’