‘Very well, if these two cowards won’t tell you, it seems I must. The only thing about you that annoys the Cossack is the fact that you’re here at all. You see, he — well, he fancies he’s in love with me — me, six years older than he is.’
‘What’s six years, after all,’ Reynolds began judicially. ‘If you — ‘
‘Oh, do be quiet! Then one night he got hold of the remains of a bottle of szilvorium the Count had left lying around and he told me. I was surprised and confused, but he’s such a nice boy and I was wanting to be kind so like a fool I said something about waiting until he was grown up. He was furious. . . .’
Reynolds wrinkled his brow. ‘What has all this — ?’
‘Don’t be so dense! He thinks you are a — well, a rival for my affections!’
‘May the best man win,’ Reynolds said solemnly. Jansci choked on his pipe, Sandor covered his face with one massive hand, and the stony silence from the head of the table made Reynolds think that he himself had better look elsewhere. But the silence stretched out, he felt compelled to look eventually, and when he did so he found neither the anger nor the blushing confusion he had expected, but a composed Julia, chin on hand, regarding him with a thoughtfulness and just possibly the faintest trace of mockery that he found vaguely disquieting. Not for the first time, he had to remind himself that underestimating the daughter of such a man as Jansci might be foolish in the extreme.
Finally she rose to clear away the dishes and Reynolds turned to Jansci.
‘I take it that was the Cossack we heard departing. Where has he gone?’
‘Budapest. He has a rendezvous with the Count on the outskirts of the town.’
‘What! On a big powerful motor-bike you can hear miles away — and in those clothes that can be seen from about the same distance?’
‘A small motor-bike only — the Cossack removed the silencer some time ago because not enough people could hear him coming. . . . He has the vanity of extreme youth. But the loudness of both machine and clothes is his surest safeguard. He is so conspicuous that no one would ever dream of suspecting him.’
‘How long?’
‘On good roads, he’d be there and back in just over half an hour — we’re only about 15 kilometres from the town. But Tonight?’ Jansci thought. ‘Perhaps an hour and a half.’
It took in fact two hours — two of the most unforgettable hours Reynolds had ever spent. Jansci talked nearly all the time, and Reynolds listened with the intentness of a man aware that he was being accorded a rare privilege which might never come his way again. The mood of expansiveness, Reynolds divined, came seldom to this man, so much the most remarkable, the most extraordinary man Reynolds had ever met in a chequered and dangerous lifetime that all others, with the possible exception of Jansci’s alter ego, the Count, seemed to fade away into insignificance. And for two unbroken hours Julia sat on a cushion by his side: the mischief and laughter that were never long absent from her eyes were gone as if they had never been, and she was grave and unsmiling as Reynolds had imagined she could never be: during these hours her eyes left her father’s face hardly at all, and even then only to gaze at the scarred and shattered ruins that were Jansci’s hands before seeking his face again. It was as if she, too, shared Reynolds’ irrational presentiment that this privilege would never come her way again, as if she were seeking to memorise every detail of her father’s face and bands so that she would never forget them: and Reynolds, remembering the strange, fey look in her eyes in the truck the previous night, felt queerly unaccountably cold. It cost him almost physical effort to shake off this abnormal feeling, to dismiss from his mind what he knew could only be the first tentative stirrings of superstitious nonsense.
Jansci spoke of himself not at all, and of his organisation and its method of operation only where necessary: the only concrete fact that Reynolds gathered in the course of the evening was that his H.Q. was not here but in a farmhouse that lay in the low hills between Szombathely and the Neusiedler See, not far from the Austrian frontier — the only frontier of any interest to the great majority of those escaping to the west. He talked instead of people, hundreds of people whom he and the Count and Sandor had helped to safety, of their hopes and fears and terrors of this world. He talked of peace, of his hope for the world, of his conviction that that peace would ultimately come for the world if only one good man in a thousand worked for it, of the folly of imagining that there was anything else in the world worth working for, not even the ultimate peace, for that could only come from this. He spoke of Communists and non-Communists, and of the distinctions between them that existed only in the tiny minds of men, of the intolerance and the infinite littleness of minds that knew beyond question that all men were inescapably different by virtue of their birtihs and beliefs, their creeds and religions, and that the God who said that every man was the brother of the next man was really a pretty poor judge of these things. He spoke of the tragedies of the various creeds that knew beyond doubt that theirs was the only way that was the right way, of the religious sects that usurped the gates of heaven against all comers, of the tragedy of his own Russian people who were perfectly willing to let others do this, for there were no gates anyway.
Jansci was wandering, not arguing, and he drifted from his own people to his youth amongst them. The transition seemed pointless, inconsequential at first, but Jansci was not an aimless wanderer, almost everything he did or said or thought was concerned with reinforcing and consolidating, both in himself and all his listeners, his almost obsessive faith in the oneness of humanity. When he spoke of his boyhood and young manhood in his own country, it could have been any person, of any creed, remembering with a fond nostalgia the happiest hours of a happy land. The picture he painted of the Ukraine was one touched, perhaps, with the sentimentality felt for that which is irrecoverably lost, but none the less Reynolds felt it to be a true picture, for the sadly remembered gladness in those tired and gentle eyes could never have arisen from self-deception, however unaware. Jansci did not deny the hardships of the life, the long hours in the fields, the occasional famines, the burning heat of summer and the bitter cold when the Siberian wind blew across the steppes: but it was essentially a picture of a happy land, a golden land untouched by fear or repression, a picture of far horizons with the golden wheat waving into ‘ the blurred and purpling distance, a picture of laughter and singing and dancing, of jingling horse-drawn, fur-collared troika rides under the frozen stars, of a steamboat drifting gently down the Dnieper in the warmth of a summer’s night and the soft music dying away across the water. And it was then, when Jansci was talking wistfully of the night-time scents of honeysuckle and wheat, of jasmine and new-mown hay drifting across the river that Julia rose quickly to her feet, murmuring something about coffee and hurried from the room. Reynolds caught only a glimpse of her face as she went, but he saw her eyes were dimmed with tears.
The spell was broken, but somehow a trace of its magic lingered on. Reynolds was under no illusion. For all his apparently aimless generalisations, Jansci had been talking directly to him, trying to undermine beliefs and prejudices, trying to make him see the glaringly tragic contrasts between the happy people whose portrait he had just drawn and the sinister apostles of world revolution, making him question Whether so complete reversal lay within the bounds of credulity or even possibility, and it had been no accident, Reynolds thought wryly, that the first part of Jansci’s rambling had been devoted to the intolerance and wilful blindness of humanity at large. Jansci had deliberately intended that Reynolds should see in himself a microcosm of that humanity, and Reynolds was uncomfortably aware that he had not entirely failed. He did not like the unsettling, questioning half-doubts that were beginning to trouble him, and pushed them deliberately aside. For all his old friendship with Jansci, Colonel Mackintosh, Reynolds thought grimly, would not have approved of Tonight’s performance: Colonel Mackintosh did not like to have his agents unsettled, they were to keep their thoughts on the ultimate objective, the job on hand and only the job on hand, and not concern themselves with side issues. Side issues, Reynolds thought incredulously, then pushed the matter from his mind.