Read Online Stamboul Train by Graham Greene - Free Book Online Page A

He shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly; he might have been a pawnbroker undervaluing a watch or vase. ‘Why not? I didn’t want you to be disturbed. I had to see the guard. Can I come in?’
    â€˜Of course. It’s your compartment.’
    He smiled and was unable to resist a spread of the hands, a slight bow from the hips. ‘Pardon me. It’s yours.’ He took a handkerchief from his sleeve, rolled up his cuffs, made passes in the air. ‘Look. See. A first-class ticket.’ A ticket fell from his handkerchief and rolled on the floor between them.
    â€˜Yours.’
    â€˜No, yours.’ He began to laugh with pleasure at her consternation.
    â€˜What do you mean? I couldn’t take it. Why, it must have cost pounds.’
    â€˜Ten,’ he said boastfully. ‘Ten pounds.’ He straightened his tie and said airily, ‘That’s nothing to me.’
    But his confidence, his boastful eyes, alienated her. She said with a deep suspicion, ‘What are you getting at? What do you think I am?’ The ticket lay between them; nothing would induce her to pick it up. She stamped her foot as the gold faded and became no more than a yellow stain upon the glass and cushions. ‘I’m going back to my seat.’
    He said defiantly, ‘I don’t think about you. I’ve got other things to think about. If you don’t want the ticket you can throw it away.’ She saw him watching her, his shoulders raised again boastfully, carelessly, and she began to cry quietly to herself, turning to the window and the river and a bridge that fled by and a bare beech pricked with early buds. This is my gratitude for a calm long sleepy night; this is the way I take a present; and she thought with shame and disappointment of early dreams of great courtesans accepting gifts from princes. And I snap at him like a tired waitress.
    She heard him move behind her and knew that he was stooping for the ticket; she wanted to turn to him and express her gratitude, say; ‘It would be like heaven to sit on these deep cushions all the journey, sleep in the berth, forget that I’m on my way to a job, think myself rich. No one has ever been so good to me as you are,’ but her earlier words, the vulgarity of her suspicion, lay like a barrier of class between them. ‘Lend me your bag,’ he said. She held it out behind her, and she felt his fingers open the clasp. ‘There,’ he said, ‘I’ve put it inside. You needn’t use it. Just sit here when you want to. And sleep here when you are tired.’ I am tired, she thought. I could sleep here for hours. She said in a voice strained to disguise her tears: ‘But how can I?’
    â€˜Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ll find another compartment. I only slept outside last night because I was anxious about you. You might have needed something.’ She began to cry again, leaning the top of her head against the window, half shutting her eyes, so that her lashes made a curtain between herself and the hard admonishments of old dry women of experience: ‘There’s only one thing a man wants.’ ‘Don’t take presents from a stranger.’ It was the size of the present she had been always told that made the danger. Chocolates and a ride, even in the dark, after a theatre, entailed no more than kisses on the mouth and neck, a little tearing of a dress. A girl was expected to repay, that was the point of all advice; one never got anything for nothing. Novelists like Ruby M. Ayres might say that chastity was worth more than rubies, but the truth was it was priced at a fur coat or thereabouts. One couldn’t accept a fur coat without sleeping with a man. If you did, all the older women would tell you the man had a grievance. And the Jew had paid ten pounds.
    He put his hand on her arm. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me. Do you feel ill?’ She remembered the hand that shook the pillow, the