The City of Comrades

by Basil King

It was, however, the second day out before I actually came face to face with her. Her absence from the deck had been part of the mystery. Having swung into the Mersey, we remained there all Sunday night—it was a Sunday we had gone on board—and much of Monday. Accepting as necessary the secrecy which in war-time enshrouds an Atlantic voyage, the passengers had made themselves as comfortable as the conditions permitted, and taken air and exercise by promenading the decks. There could have been no better opportunity for finding familiar faces, but, apart from one or two distant acquaintances, I saw none. The three nurses’ uniforms I had noted already were continually about; but I never found the fourth.

And then on Tuesday, after we had lost sight of the Irish coast, there was another queer little incident. As I could walk but little, I had been reading in the music-room. Tired of doing that and eager to continue my search for the missing uniform, I had limped to the doorway, screened by a heavy portière, leading out toward the companionway. But while I stood turning up the collar of my overcoat the portière was suddenly pulled aside, and we were before each other, with a suggestion of a similar occurrence three and a half years before.

The very differences in my appearance—the mustache, the patch over my left eye, the military coat—must have helped to recall the earlier occasion by the indirect means of contrast. As for her, she was what she had seemed to me then—two great flaming eyes. They were tired eyes now, haunted, tragic perhaps, and I saw later that when you caught them off their guard they were pensive, if not mournful. They were, indeed, all I could see of her, for the rest of her features were hidden by the veil over the lower part of the face which women occasionally copy from the Turkish lady’s yashmak. A small black cap, held by a jade-green pin, and a long, shapeless black ulster or coat completed a costume quite unlike the uniform for which I had been looking.

I can only describe that encounter as the meeting of two transmigrated souls. She had gone as far in her direction as I in mine; but I couldn’t tell at a glance in what direction she had gone. It was what struck me dumb. When Paolo and Francesca met in space they had nothing to say to each other except with the eyes. In some such case as that we found ourselves. The pressure of topics was too great to allow of immediate selection. She seemed to wait for me to utter the first word, and as I was at a loss she dropped the portière behind her, inclined her head, and passed on into the saloon.

Though it was my place to follow her, I couldn’t, for the minute, take so obvious a course. I was not only too mystified by what I had heard of her, but too confused as to our standing toward each other. I couldn’t begin with a “How do you do?” as if we had parted on the ordinary social terms, while anything more dramatic would have been absurd. Hobbling along the deck, I took refuge in the smoking-room in order to reflect.

Reflection was not easy. Over its calm fields emotion spread like water through a broken dike. For two and a half years the emotional had been so stemmed and banked and dammed in me that I had thought it under control forever. I had had enough to do in giving orders or carrying them out. But, now that the repressed had broken its bounds again, the tide swept everything away with it.

Not that I knew just what I was experiencing; on the contrary, I couldn’t have disentangled the element of anger from that of curiosity, nor that of curiosity from that of joy. All I could say for certain was that never in my life had I been so anxious to keep free; never had I so much needed concentration and single-mindedness. The task to which I had vowed my undivided energy and heart demanded a genuine celibacy of the will; and now of all the women in the world....

I was working on this train of thought when I became aware that people were running along the deck. Glancing about me at the same moment, I saw I was alone in the smoking-room. A whistle blew, piercingly, alarmingly. By the time I had struggled to my feet the ship changed her course so sharply as to throw me against a chair.

I knew what it was, of course. We had been talking of the possibility ever since we left the Mersey. However much we tried to keep the mind away from the subject, it came back to it, as a mischievous boy makes straight for the thing forbidden him.