Stamboul Train by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

interview. Do drink up your gin and come along.’
    Mabel Warren took her glass and drank. Then she rose and her square form swayed a little; she wore a tie and a stiff collar and a tweed ‘sporting’ suit. Her eyebrows were heavy, and her eyes were dark and determined and red with weeping.
    â€˜You know why I drink,’ she protested.
    â€˜Nonsense, dear,’ said Janet Pardoe, making certain in her compact mirror of the last niceties of appearance, ‘you drank long before you ever met me. Have a little sense of proportion. I shall only be away a week.’
    â€˜These men,’ said Miss Warren darkly, and then as Janet Pardoe rose to cross the square, she gripped her arm with extraordinary force. ‘Promise me you’ll be careful. If only I could come with you.’ Almost on the threshold of the station she stumbled in a puddle. ‘Oh, see what I’ve done now. What a great clumsy thing I am. To splash your beautiful new suit.’ With a large rough hand, a signet ring on the small finger, she began to brush at Janet Pardoe’s skirt.
    â€˜Oh, for God’s sake, come on, Mabel,’ Janet said.
    Miss Warren’s mood changed. She straightened herself and barred the way. ‘You say I’m drunk. I am drunk. But I’m going to be drunker.’
    â€˜Oh, come on.’
    â€˜You are going to have one more drink with me or I shan’t let you on the platform.’
    Janet Pardoe gave way. ‘One. Only one, mind.’ She guided Mabel Warren across a vast black shining hall into a room where a few tired men and women were snatching cups of coffee. ‘Another gin,’ said Miss Warren, and Janet ordered it.
    In a mirror on the opposite wall Miss Warren saw her own image, red, tousled, very shoddy, sitting beside another and far more familiar image, slim, dark, and beautiful. What do I matter? she thought, with the melancholy of drink. I’ve made her, I’m responsible for her, and with bitterness, I’ve paid for her. There’s nothing she’s wearing that I haven’t paid for; sweated for, she thought (although the bitter cold defied the radiators in the restaurant), getting up at all hours, interviewing brothel-keepers in their cells, the mothers of murdered children, ‘covering’ this and ‘covering’ that. She knew with a certain pride that they said in the London office: ‘When you want sob-stuff, send Dizzy Mabel.’ All the way down the Rhine was her province; there wasn’t a town of any size between Cologne and Mainz where she hadn’t sought out human interest, forcing dramatic phrases onto the lips of sullen men, pathos into the mouths of women too overcome with grief to speak at all. There wasn’t a suicide, a murdered woman, a raped child who had stirred her to the smallest emotion; she was an artist to examine critically, to watch, to listen; the tears were for paper. But now she sat and wept with ugly grunts because Janet Pardoe was leaving her for a week.
    â€˜Who is it you are interviewing?’ Janet Pardoe asked. She was not at all interested, but she wanted to distract Mabel Warren from thoughts of separation; her tears were too conspicuous. ‘You ought to comb your hair,’ she added. Miss Warren wore no hat and her black hair, cut short like a man’s, was hopelessly dishevelled.
    â€˜Savory,’ said Miss Warren.
    â€˜Who’s he?’
    â€˜Sold a hundred thousand copies. The Great Gay Round. Half a million words. Two hundred characters. The Cockney Genius. Drops his aitches when he can remember to.’
    â€˜What’s he doing on the train?’
    â€˜Going East to collect material. It’s not my job, but as I was seeing you off, I took it on. They’ve asked me for a quarter of a column, but they’ll cut it down to a couple of sticks in London. He’s chosen the wrong time. In the silly season he’d have got half a column among the