To the Ends of the Earth Read Free Page A

Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself (“As I couldn’t take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger’s Pacific 231,” Greene writes in the introduction to
Stamboul Train)
. The fictional source of the romance is
La Madone des Sleepings
(1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra’s heroine, Lady Diana (“thetype of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin”), is completely sold on the Orient Express: “I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the color of the eyes of my neighbor in the compartment.”
    My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.
    “Anybody else in here?” It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.
    The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette—it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion on her lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size—well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes—traveling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman’s cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill: three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin—he was obviously going some distance.
    Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gabardine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.
    “I’m up here,” he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.
    “How far are you going?” I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was countingon having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.
    He said, “I won’t get in your way.” His parcels were on the floor. “I just have to find a home for these.”
    A half hour later I returned to my compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a gray corpse-like look, and his pajamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn’t sleep at first; my cold and all that I’d drunk—the fatigue itself—kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.
    Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a