Night Journey Read Free Page B

for those who were used to it. I was not. Very far from it. I had always had too much imagination, and too much solitude in which to exercise it, to be a brave man. This thing I was being offered might need courage of a higher order. Better to refuse now than to fail miserably later and involve others in the failure.
    â€œWhat physical qualifications?” I asked.
    â€œNone.”
    â€œThere’s no question of my having to—to impersonate someone else?” As soon as I asked I was ashamed of the question.
    â€œNothing like that. We might perhaps have preferred someone a little older, but …”
    A vitally important and unpleasant factor was that I knew myself still to be an Austrian citizen. If I were discovered in Italy and not shot out of hand I would be sent at once back to German. In the back of my mind hung the menace of the concentration camp and the totschläger . Even after two years in England I could still wake up in the night sweating. And we had only been under direct Nazi rule for four months before we left. It is well to be brave. It is very enviable to be brave …
    â€œHave you anyone else in view?”
    â€œNot anyone nearly so suitable.”
    â€œWhat assistance would I have?”
    â€œAll that could be given you. You’d make contact with some of our agents over there and they would have everything arranged. With luck you could be back in England for Christmas.”
    Agents. Cardboard figures. Notes pushed under doors and hidden in bouquets of flowers. Passwords, secret signs, seedy men standing in shadowy doorways scattering cigarette ash. Cardboard figures who would become real.
    â€œI still don’t understand what you would expect. What would I have to do?”
    â€œAttend a conference of Italian and German scientists in Milan on October the fourteenth and fifteenth.”
    I got up and walked across to the window, peered out. It was a reaper. I wiped the palms of my hands with a handkerchief. In a very nasty way indeed I was caught with my own grievance. As Colonel Brown had said, my complaint all along had been that England was mistreating her adopted sons by putting them behind barbed wire. The least she could do was give them a rifie and let them fight. I’d said as much to Inspector Donnington. Well, now I had the opportunity I had been demanding. But it was neither what I wanted nor what I had expected. I would have given two years of my life to get out of this piece of war work that was being offered me. But the challenge was flung down. And in a sense it was a private challenge. How would I live with myself if I refused?

Chapter Three
    Great adventures seldom start ostentatiously, and the second stage of this one began even more quietly than the first. There was in fact, I suppose, a certain proper drama in my arrest, the sharp severing of an ordinary life, my laboratory left untidy, a letter half written, a meal in preparation, a book open face down on the bedside table. But the second stage had only secrecy to commend it.
    I left Liverpool in a little tramp steamer, one unit of a miscellaneous and ragged convoy bound for Lisbon. No one even came to the quayside to wish me luck. I walked up the gangway with a single suitcase, hat brim turned down and collar pulled up against the thick Merseyside drizzle. I thought of that distinguished English lady who had been in the Bahamas at the time of Dunkirk and had immediately left to return to her own country to see how she could help at such a time of danger and catastrophe. To the first person she met in England—the officer examining her passport—she had exclaimed: “ Isn’t it dreadful! Isn’t it dreadful!” And the officer had looked up and said: “What? What? Of … yes, it’s been raining like this for three days.”
    The thought and what it implied was a comfort to me now. I wished I had more of that spirit myself. I felt I might need to remember its