The harbour in the early morning of a winter day, when the eastern sky is cloudy, is like music. I am reminded—against my will—of the opening of Brahms’s great E-minor symphony: there is a cool, voluptuous quality in the light of air and water, and an underlying rhythm much like that of the horns playing their slow and serious melody above the faint pizzicato of the strings. Sunrise is the moment when the strings themselves take over the melodic line and shed a clear light upon the triplets in the tempo.
It is not encouraged, by true musicians, to associate the sound of music with any visual impressions. Hearing the music, one should see the score; seeing the score, one should be able to hear the music and nothing more. With this I cannot but agree, in theory and argument; yet despite myself music has its visual associations and brings its own visions, so that even now as I imagine the sensuous fourfold first theme of the first movement of the Franck violin sonata I feel that speechless constriction in the throat, that faint tingling in the palms of my hands which a sudden sight of Irma unawares always gave me.
These sensations developed much later when I began to realize and admit what I felt about her. Nothing so personal and intimate touched me on the occasion when I saw her for the first time, although that first meeting remains as vivid in memory as any later one—more vivid, perhaps, since for my part no emotions were involved. I was merely a newspaper man doing a colleague’s job, and not liking it much.
That was in August of nineteen thirty-eight, years ago now, when many of us knew that war in Europe was inevitable, this year or next year, though none of us could have foretold its direction or development or who all the participants would be. The shipping editor of the Gazette was ill for some weeks, and each day one or other of us who were senior staff men was invited to take some of the weight of the job off the shoulders of his junior assistant. Socially and economically, shipping was still more important than airways; most of the people who made news still arrived in Australia by sea, and the Gazette’s cover was thorough.
It meant very early rising as a rule, usually—in my own case—after late night work, and it was not relished; but ships arriving from Europe even then were bringing refugees by the score and the hundred into this country, and were certainly well worth watching, though few of the new arrivals from the dangerous antipodean Old World (which seemed to us to be very old indeed, and increasingly ill-tempered and grotesque) would say much. Many of them had left families still living in the Nazi shadow, and dared not talk, for the remote young continent was fairly well watched by German agents. Most of the newcomers had themselves spent the years since nineteen thirty-three in secret terror or open flight. Australia was their last refuge. They were not going to spoil things here right at the start by indulging that inclination to personal publicity which was, we found, perhaps the most obvious if not the most deep-rooted of all their common characteristics. (Their next most obvious one, it quickly became clear, was an established contempt for Australia and Australians, even before they had descended the ship’s gangways; and this was sometimes so open and arrogant, with such a display of ignorant self-conceit, that there were occasional regrettable scenes between members of the well-disposed host nation and their seemingly unwilling and curiously resentful guests.) By far the greater percentage of them was Jewish, and not notable for emotional stability or outward control, though I always knew the hard inward core was there.
With other journalists and our photographers, I went out in the Press launch to meet the Empire Queen as she came into the harbour. It would have been a Brahms early morning but for the bitterly cold north-east wind coming straight in through the distant Heads and ruffling the steel-grey of the enclosed sea to a troubled darkness streaked with white. It was blowing not hard but steadily, without a pause, as though it had never ceased to blow since the dawn of time. The big passenger vessel, later sunk while acting the futile role of armed merchantman in the Indian Ocean, had just entered the Heads from the cold unease of the winter Pacific outside. For once, we were early on the job, and had to wait, rocked in a sickening swell, until a police launch pulled away from the gangway on the port side to give us room. I had been informed, the night before, that three rather important Communists were aboard in the guise of refugees; this had come from Melbourne, where it had been discovered, or at least confirmed, only after the ship had left two days ago, and I wanted to be in time for any scenes that might develop after the plain-clothes men had gone aboard. I might have saved myself the trouble of being first up the slippery and unsteady gangway, as it happened, for, having identified their men, the police separated to help the Customs officers who had begun a routine search of the vessel for contraband. Passengers’ luggage would wait until it was unloaded into the sheds at Darling Harbour, on the other side of the bridge which, from where we were, looked like a delicate, fantastic silverpoint drawing against the pallor of the western sky. Its huge single arch now had a faery quality, and the dim, incessant rumble, like sustained and remote thunder, made by the electric trains and trams roaring across it without a stop from south to north, from north to south, seemed to come from another world. The screaming of the scavenging gulls in our wake, and the occasional whooping sirens of the tugs ahead, were sounds much nearer, more proper to our dead-slow passage through the white-flecked dark water between distant foreshores green with dark trees or pale where the red-and-white of story-book buildings came down to the harbour’s very edge.
We were seven men and three women in our party (I could seem to hear the voice of every news-editor in town automatically intoning, ‘Get the women’s angle. That’s what we want these days—the women’s angle.’), and as they came up one by one, some carrying cameras, heads were turned and blank or suspicious or dully curious eyes looked us over before the faces were turned abruptly away; for most of the passengers must have been on deck, and there was a subdued noise of excited speech in many languages as these creatures neared the end of their bitter flight, and studied with passionate excitement the shores of final refuge.
Sydney in that year was a hundred and fifty years old, and the ordinary troubles of the Press were being aggravated by what was called—with almost American infelicity—‘the sesquicentenary celebrations’. Post urbe condita ann. CL—if indeed the city ever had been actually founded; and it is still one of the world’s ugliest, beyond the lovely approaches from the sea, as those who work in the heart of it know. It developed without plan from the original huts near the water’s edge, spreading southwards in a tangled sprawl of narrow streets, and westwards to the complex shoreline of the inner harbour; and south and west the factories appeared as time passed, right in the path of the strongest prevailing winds, so that the ineradicable grime of smoke and dust from the enclosing semicircle of high chimneys spiking the horizon is never absent from the exterior and interior surfaces of the cramped and hideous Victorian buildings which scowl above the hopelessly overcrowded traffic lanes. Macquarie and his ex-convict architect Greenway had all too short a term together in their intention to make the town as beautiful as its site must once have been. When they were gone, no other inspired mind followed them with authority to pursue their quest for grace and space; the town became a city irresistibly and without plan, and from the south and west the dirt settled upon it. The men of the good Queen’s era built their mean buildings behind grotesque and hypocritical façades, and the ownership of street frontages passed securely and unalterably from one generation to the next, so that today it is impossible to walk in comfort on the street sidewalks, or travel in comfort on the roadways—or, indeed, to be comfortable and at ease anywhere at all in the public places. Greed, more potent and less patent than even the sincerest show of civic pride, has kept the main streets to a mediaeval narrowness across which office boys can throw paper darts from window to window, and typists and their employers can observe other typists’ clothes and maquillage with unstrained critical eyes. And over all, indoors and out, lies the dark and metallic film of unconquerable grime.
Nevertheless, from the mighty bosom of the harbour the skyline to the south and west is mildly fascinating. With unrestricted ground space it has no cause to tower like the incredible aerial skyline of New York. The clouds may lie low over it without obscuring it, and on mornings such as this, when the wind is fresh from the ocean outside the Heads, the blue haze is gone from the narrow ravines of the streets, and the whole scene has the accurate unreality of a detailed stage backdrop. As I looked at it over the heads of the new arrivals crowding the port rail, the weak August sun rose above a seaward bank of heavy cloud and veiled it in an illusory mist of gold, chilly and pale, and in our wake the grey water coldly sparkled under the following wind.
The Empire Queen’s purser, busy and harassed, with four interpreters adding to the confusion of his last half-hour before the ship berthed, yet made time to go hurriedly through my passenger list with me. After the brisk air of the open deck, the atmosphere below was thick and stale and still, tepid as used bath-water. While I made notes of half a dozen names of possible interest, a melodious gong sounded through the broadcasting system the call to the second breakfast sitting, and the crowd round the gilded grille of the purser’s office thinned somewhat. At such moments, when the journey’s end is near, meals are subtly reassuring to the traveller who feels a strange and alien world at hand beyond the ship’s rail. It was now I, watching the faces and listening to the excited greetings of those who were making their way to their familiar seats in the saloons, who felt like a stranger among the powerful and evanescent friendships of that long voyage into the unknown. The imminence of final separation, after the closed and intimate and unworldly life on board, and the strong community of their alien origins regardless of nationalities, were for the last time uniting them as though, like an army on the eve of invasion, they were wholly of one mind in a simple and desperate purpose. There was about them, in their eyes and speech, a kind of gay defiance of whatever fate awaited them in the crude, traditionless, uncultured country of their choice. I did not doubt they sat down with good appetite.
Ten minutes after that tuneful gong had sounded through the amplifiers, the lower decks had an air of emptiness and desertion as positive as the whole ship would have when, lying at her berth in the still and torpid water of the inner harbour, she was finally emptied of her human freight. Without any certain objective, I made my way down the stair opposite the purser’s office to the second saloon deck, where the atmosphere was even more like used bath-water, slack with steam and the smell of oil, cigarette smoke, linoleum, soap and crowded humanity. Here the cabins, most of which had their doors hooked back as the stewards, in a sudden passion of attentive service, made ready to take up what they could seize of the fantastic assortment of luggage, were of four or six berths, according as they opened inwards, or out upon the second-class promenade deck. Much of the baggage had a cheap smartness about it, the ersatz smartness of poverty, or of wealth disguised as poverty, which characterized so many things—and people—arriving at these shores from Europe in those days of fear.
I walked aimlessly aft along the starboard-side corridor, with the bathrooms and toilets and stewards’ offices on the right, the open cabin doorways on the left. There was a softly-vibrating silence and a noticeable smell of women passengers, their cosmetics and clothes and bodies, mingled with the steamy, astringent odour of hot sea-water and the smell of the imperfectly aseptic toilets. No doubt I noticed this atmosphere more than the passengers would. I was already beginning to find it intolerable, and hastened my steps towards the after companionway which would take me up to the air of the winter morning, when a glance inside one of the cabins made me pause; and so it was I first saw Irma.
She was sitting on the deck of the cabin, on the bare linoleum, with her feet stretched out straight before her, her knees together and her face hidden in both hands. Her dark hair, cut so that it hung like a mediaeval page’s almost to her shoulders, fell forward over her fingers and wrists, and what made me pause, instead of passing on more hastily still, was that as she rocked back and forth she was moaning to herself like someone suffering the pain of a badly aching tooth. It was of toothache, in fact, that I immediately thought; and some impulse entirely foreign to my character, something I can still only describe and think of as a fatal prompting of chance, made me turn towards the doorway and say, ‘What is the matter, mademoiselle? Can I help you?’
I was surprised at myself, and she too was surprised, as she showed by taking her hands from her face and springing easily to her feet in an uninterrupted single movement, like a dancer or an acrobat. Erect, she stood quite still.
I saw she was wearing pyjamas. Later I learned that she wore pyjamas at all possible times of the day, hurriedly changing into them the moment she came in from the street, and sometimes even wearing them out of doors when she walked at night about Kings Cross, visiting friends. I have never considered them proper garments for a woman, even to sleep in; certainly not to wear, uncovered, by day, when they give a grotesque emphasis to whatever bodily beauty they affect to conceal; but her they suited unaccountably. It was not until the last evening of her life that I remarked on what seemed to me their impropriety, and that was only because the pyjama suit she had then put on—a new one added to her large collection only that day—went beyond all bounds of decency, being of completely transparent white nylon.
This morning the pyjamas were wholly decent, and over them she wore a knee-length house coat of some thick warm stuff like felt, dark green and cut in the Chinese style with a high collar closely fastened by a gold button the size of a florin. I imagine she had been up on deck with the rest of the passengers, to observe by dawn’s light the end of the run up the coast past Botany Bay to the dramatic turn and entry into the huge harbour between the vertical cliffs of the Heads. Below decks in that atmosphere of fug such a coat was unnecessarily warm, even though these people from Europe feel the mild Australian cold more than they ever felt their own white icebound northern winters.
I had looked at her apparel, from the thin black leather slippers to the gold medallion at her throat, in one glance and entirely from habit. Even in those early years of my profession I had had to look at many dead bodies, and clothes had come to have a deep, probably an abnormal, significance in my eyes. In the two peaceful years of my marriage, which had ended with my wife’s death eight years before this when I was still a junior on the Gazette staff, I doubt whether I could have described any of her outer clothing with comprehensible accuracy, and her other garments remained to the end something of a mystery, though I suppose I could have enumerated them by name after looking at the clothing advertisements and the shop windows. We had both come from Catholic households which were strict in the matter of personal privacy, when we married. Always we had undressed separately, never had we beheld each other’s body wholly naked—it would have been unthinkable. All this had much bearing on my subsequent association with the young woman who now stood before me.
When my gaze reached her face a second after she had gained her feet on the deck, I saw that it had been distorted by emotion, the wide full lips stretched in apparent anguish over startlingly white teeth, the eyes of curious opaque grey-blue staring at nothing under contracted brows. But abruptly, even as I looked, all expression vanished, and her youthful countenance became like a mask; even the eyes, those habitual traitors of the mind and spirit, contrived to express nothing. I had a moment to observe the cool adolescent perfection of her face and head as she brushed her dark hair back with the back of one wrist, before she spoke.
‘Police?’
The word came, seemingly despite herself, in a sort of gasp.
‘No, no,’ I said, smiling to reassure her, as well as at the mad thought of an Australian policeman with a van Dyke beard and moustaches; for in spite of her lack of expression her voice had betrayed a stabbing alarm. ‘I happened to be passing, and thought perhaps you were in pain—souffrante, vous comprenez?’
‘Pain?’ she said, ignoring my offer of a French translation. ‘No pain . . . Oh—pain! Yes, here is pain.’
She put her right hand to her heart so that under the thick stuff of the house coat her breast stood out innocently above the spread thumb and forefinger. Still I could detect nothing of feeling in the mask of her face, which I now saw was not only elusively beautiful but also tragically young for the habit of such immobility. Despite myself, I was moved by this attitude, and by the strange combination of beauty, youthfulness and self-command. When I was a youth myself we did not know such girls.
‘I am frightened,’ she said with a sort of indifference, as if we knew one another well, and never taking her regard from mine. Her English was precise, like the strange control she always had over her body’s attitudes and movements, no matter what was happening to her body: the perfect and natural control of a full-grown animal whose physical dignity you cannot destroy or pervert. She spoke in the light voice of a young girl, sweetly and with a marked but not distorting accent which she never quite lost; even among a crowd of her fellow-refugees her voice, with its buoyant quick precision, could be heard apart, idiomatic yet forever strange. Only in moments of deepest and most tender passion did it become slurred, as though by an extreme exhaustion which her body’s vigour frankly denied.
‘There is nothing to fear now,’ I said, and at once the words sounded foolish. How was I to know what would be fearful to her, what indelible terrors of memory and what vaguer terrors of anticipations she and all those in her position brought with them from Europe’s mounting nightmare of the flesh and the spirit?
‘You are in Australia now. You are safe. What is your name?’
Self-assurance had come back to me. It was not I, after all, who was the stranger here, but most of the people on this ship, who would disembark and disappear, for the most part, from official ken, and become woven into yet never quite lost in the Australian fabric like the minute individual threads in a tremendous tapestry. I was on my own ground, a newspaperman, a police roundsman, used to asking every sort of question, knowing the most difficult of the ropes, familiar with all sorts of violence, passion and death, securely employed and well paid, with a growing son and an outgrown sorrow for background. As this remembrance passed swiftly through my mind, I stepped through the cabin doorway and looked down into her face. She had not answered my question. I repeated it gently.
‘Irma,’ she said, turning her head away. ‘Irma Maartens—Nederlander. Dutch.’
‘Why were you frightened?’ I said, making my voice as casual and kindly as possible; for something in her mask-like face, something no mask could have concealed, something like the very essence of feminine beauty which is not of flesh or feature but emanates from the depths of intensely conscious being, had as it were gripped me by the throat and stormed imagination, and in that instant I felt what today I still believe to have been a perfectly sane impulse to take her face between my palms and kiss her closed lips. So strong was this impulse that I instinctively stepped back from her again, placing her out of my reach. Whether she correctly guessed what had been in my mind—she with her already shamefully extensive knowledge of men’s passions and compulsions—I did not know; but she smiled, sudden and faint, and her face was no longer so rigidly on guard.
‘Yes, frightened,’ she said; and having begun, she continued rapidly. ‘All the time I am frightened, ever since we are leaving London. Like you, they all tell me Australia is safe, there is plenty money, friendly people, all that. But where is safety for a woman, tell me? Me—I am just another bloody refugee, isn’t it? Go to Australia, they say. There you will be orright. Now I am here. What happens next? What do I do, in Australia? What do I do?’
I learned, long afterwards, that she had been private secretary to the secretary of a local branch of the Dutch Communist Party in one of the smaller industrial centres in Holland. This followed a fantastic escape from Berlin, where she had lived mostly in hiding, though very active in Party interests, since nineteen thirty-three when, like many older and wiser people—in that year she was a precocious thirteen—she had offered her services to the Communists after the election of Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship of the Reich. During the vigorous training that had followed her acceptance by the Party, when she had been investigated by agents from Berlin to Kovno, her forgotten birthplace, her name with thousands of others became ‘known’ to the Nazi police. Just in time, she disappeared from the day-light scene and from all her former haunts. It is likely that her political colleagues would have abandoned her in those days of stealthy terror but for two things: she was already a consummate linguist after a childhood spent wandering about Europe with her father, a musician of sorts; and her integrity, youthfully impassioned though it was, was nevertheless absolute and unwavering. She was thought of favourably as being of great future usefulness, and during her year in hiding she became a sort of pet or mascot—for at that time, I suspect, she was something of a gamin—among the fearful and fanatically determined members of the Party in Germany, and had proved her luck moreover by successfully carrying out, before her fifteenth birthday, several missions of some slight importance within and outside the Reich. She usually dressed as a boy, she told me until the attentions of various official and private members of the Nazi party became dangerously personal. I believe her love of wearing pyjamas began during that period of her life.
‘Well,’ I said, and I was again quite in control of mind and body, ‘what can you do? Have you a profession? What did you do in Holland?’
She said, tilting her chin with a sort of haughtiness I afterwards learned to mean she was not telling all, ‘I was secretary—to a gentleman.’
It seems she was at last allowed to reappear in Berlin, after some months spent in Switzerland letting her hair grow long again. She was manoeuvred into a job in one of the best fashion-houses, where wives of higher Government officials, with much more money to spend than most of them had ever dreamed of gathered to look at and buy the new gowns and furs from France and Britain and America. For security reasons, and others which they did not mention, her directors thought it best for her to join the Nazi Party with a show of enthusiasm, and with the false papers provided by the experts in her own Party she had been able to do this easily—as easily, in fact, as many Nazis had joined the Communists in the same way and for the same purposes.
Meanwhile, she began to enjoy her work in the dress salon when it was discovered that she had a fresh gift for design as well as a natural ability as a model—an ability sprung, I think, from her intense and perfectly controlled femininity. Though she did not much care for the mere wearing and display of clothes, she somehow transformed them; and by this time, Nazi-trained, Communist-schooled, and mercilessly drilled by the mistress of the salon, her control of face and body was perfect and instinctive, without thought, a part of the sum of her conscious being. She began to feel that there was nothing she could not do, no part she could not play.
Today, in the artificial light from the cabin ceiling, she looked forlorn, but not helpless. I never did see her look to be unable to help herself, except once. Now the expression of defensive hauteur faded, and again her face relaxed; again I saw that faint smile move the corners of her mouth, though it did not warm her eyes or soften the cool severity of her brow.
‘I am also,’ she said, ‘couturière. You have those in Australia, no?’
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised; and I had to laugh, for the remark was characteristic of the ignorance of this country which nine out of ten of those foreigners brought with them: an ignorance amounting almost to an unwillingness to know, which largely explained the mixed suspicion and contempt which coloured their whole attitude towards the land and the people who gave them refuge. Today the Government-sponsored immigrants, who—though they are infelicitously styled New Australians—are still refugees from conditions, if not from groups of individuals, over which they have no control, at least learn something of the social and political and economic character and the material resources of the world’s only island continent, the huge leonine mass of barrenness and fertility pitched between the tropic and polar oceans, before they arrive; at least they are aware, however vaguely, that much of human history and forced nationalistic development was crowded into the century and a half of measured time that had passed before they came; at least they have known they were leaving an old and in some sort moribund civilization for no new barbarity of existence. But the earlier ones, the frightened and arrogant refugees from the terror of Europe, exhibiting that remorseless egomania which is the result of intolerable dread seemingly suffered indefinitely, yet suddenly left behind—those came convinced that a land in which black-skinned tribesmen still roamed at large in the west and the north must be a waste-land of beachcombers and bushrangers and futile remittance-men and ignorant fossickers. Like Irma at first, they supposed the social and cultural arts were their own prerogative to reveal as they saw fit and to dispense as they pleased; and this had always made me laugh a little, because so many of them seemed to us to have, not quite concealed beneath the gesture of habit and the glance of scorn, the half-developed minds of badly spoiled children. Even their suffering could seem, at times, like something they had indulged in and whose memory they vainly cherished.
‘You are laughing at me,’ she said in a soft voice, with her strange blue gaze now focused and intent upon my face.
‘Indeed no,’ I said. ‘I was laughing at Europe.’
The casual remark, scarcely a hint of what I had been thinking, effected a startling change in her face, which seemed to darken as though under the shadow of a hand. With a sort of animated impatience she shook her head several times emphatically. Looking back, I realize that by now both of us had to some degree forgotten where we were, and the hour, and the future unrevealed beyond the hour; I because without knowing it I was already fallen under the spell of her young enchantment, secret and ineffable, of absolute womanhood, and could not see the violence it concealed; she because with speech her troubled fear was abating steadily, and also because she was at last confronted with a native of the unknown, whom she must certainly have found to be much like other men on the opposite curve of the world.
‘At Europe?’ she said. ‘Then do not. You are not police. Would you laugh at Jesus while the men hit the nails through his wrists? Before the cross is lifted up? No. That is Europe.’
If there is one human manifestation for which I have neither sympathy nor compassion, it is this sort of melodramatic speech which seeks to impress both by emphasis and by far-fetched metaphor. I was not impressed as she had meant by what she had just said; any hack writer could have thought that up, and even got it into print, in those days of mounting sentimental hysteria, when none of us knew where we were heading. What I did feel was a sense of shock and disappointment, that so much youth and vitality and feminine beauty should have been so well-schooled in the mouthing of spiritless clichés; for I could not then and cannot now believe that the passion for their maggot-eaten homelands which these people so readily put into words is a real passion of body and mind and spirit, and not largely a guileful parade of perfected artifice. What I did believe is that they were profoundly glad Australia did exist and was there unguarded for their exploitation.
Furthermore, I have no patience with the easy use of the image of Jesus which is become in these times of loose and vitiated language a commonplace and a habit. I am a Christian and a Catholic, as the men of my family have been since the sixteenth century; I am not actively devout now, but it is there in my consciousness, never to be spoiled, and I can no more listen to the name of my own inspired prophet lightly spoken for the sake of a phrase than I can myself speak it, or for that matter the names of the other prophets before and since Jesus, lightly for the same purpose.
It brought me at once to my senses: I remembered the work I must do before the ship berthed, and realized that the young woman looking at me so intently and even angrily now could very well take care of herself—this couturière who had been ‘secretary to a gentleman’. An unaccountable disappointment came upon me; I felt that these few minutes in the company of that young stranger, whose mood could change with such apparent sincerity so bewilderingly, were so many minutes apart in my life, to be lived only once but remembered always, with that catch at the throat for something exquisite for ever gone which in the end becomes a conviction that an obscure and priceless opportunity within one’s grasp was in that instant irretrievably lost.
I made a sort of bow without saying anything more, and turned to go, and had taken one step into the dead air of the corridor when I heard her move and felt a touch on my arm. In the same soft, humble voice in which she had accused me of laughing at her she now said, ‘One moment, please. Please? Do not go for one moment.’
Her touch on my arm was like that of a dog asking for food and words; it was at once urgent and diffident, and when I remembered it later, thinking all this over, I was reminded of my golden cocker bitch, Donna, whom I kept at Hill Farm, in the mountains. She had just that trick of asking, shyly but impressively, with her paw on my hand or arm and her eyes, as brown as oiled cedarwood, fixed on my face. There was certainly nothing doglike about Irma’s eyes when I faced her. Their slate-blue gaze shone in the light with perhaps tears, but her voice was steady enough in its softness, her hand was firm and her lips calm.
‘Tell me what I shall do,’ she said. ‘Help me. You are clever, I see it. You will know what is for me to do. I have no friends.’
‘Not on this ship?’ I said. ‘Surely.’
‘Surely not.’ She removed her hand to make a gesture dismissing her fellow-passengers. ‘They are not for me. They talk. They make love. They eat. They sleep—and when they wake up they start the talking again where they stopped, and all the rest—where they stopped. Folly and waste of time.’
Her voice was severe, and its tone expressed perfectly an intellectual disgust which had nothing to do with whatever might have been her physical reactions to such behaviour. She nodded her smooth head weightily, like an old man sitting in judgment.
‘No friends. Five weeks I have of this, this chattering, this—five weeks! And on the ship are three men who would like to kill me. Communists, you understand. Bad men. They come to make trouble here, I tell you, and they hate me because I know them. Once I too was Communist, but not now. I left the Party. It is not permitted, but I do it. And these three men know this. They know I know them. So one of them, he tries to make love to me—it is orders, they wish to find out what I will do, they do not trust me. All three try to make love. It is like the Nazis. I tell them I am no more Communist, and they laugh, but they look—you know—dark.’
She scowled heavily to illustrate.
‘“Once a Communist, always Communist,” they say, but they are a bit afraid.’
She was speaking rapidly and without passion or gesture, her hands clasped loosely together, her opaque eyes on mine as though to compel belief. I was to learn that she had left the Party in a spirit of bitter revulsion, when she heard what went on in the higher councils and what was to be directed eventually by Moscow, and realized that their aims differed from those of the Nazis in the north and west, the Fascists in the south and east, only in name. She who had believed herself to be risking her life and giving her body and her mind for the cause of man’s freedom had finally perceived that she too was fighting, plotting and living only for a rival form of world-domination by a select group of political bigots no less fanatical and one-eyed than the very men against whom, in her small sphere of action, she had fought with all her youth and goodwill, all the zeal of her immortal soul up in arms.
Her revulsion and defection had been complete. Someone had betrayed her ‘gentleman’ and herself to Nazi agents in Holland, whither she had been hastily removed from Berlin when the fact of her Party membership had come fatefully to light. In broad daylight, wearing borrowed furs and jewellery, carrying a mass of hot-house flowers and escorted by inconspicuous fellow-Communists whose laughter hid terror and whose tears were effortlessly real, she had swept on to the main city railway station pretending to be a famous actress leaving for a season in Paris, and with so much glamour and gaiety had tricked the German railway officials into smiles and bows of delight, and their Nazi overseers into a benign tolerance; and so had made good her escape into Holland and a freedom she hoped would last until the inevitable outbreak of the war in Europe. It was the boldest acting of her brief career. She was then sixteen.
Her orders were to make herself known to the Communist secretary of a district whose solidarity was questionable, and to engage herself as his private secretary. As this man’s own adherence to the Party line had for some time been suspect, she was to do what she could to strengthen his loyalty—for he was popular with the masses of workers, and so potentially valuable to the higher organization, which had long foreseen the southward movement of Germany the moment war came. At the same time she was to forward secret reports on him to Berlin. For this purpose, it was made clear to her that as quickly as possible she must become in all ways intimate with him.
Because he was a new type of Communist in her experience—witty, cheerful, usually intelligent and gentle, and fond of all the simpler pleasures of existence—she did not find it hard to obey this order, with the help of her appearance and her vigorous youth; but now for the first time she made a tragic mistake, in spite of the years of indoctrination, in spite of her own judgment and reason. Though he was twenty years older than she was, she found herself after a while to have become deeply in love, for the first time in her life.
The Party did not tolerate bourgeois weaknesses such as sincere and unselfish love among its members, wisely perceiving these individualist emotions to be small defects endangering the whole structure of Party action; and her problem now was to keep her feelings secret, from the world and particularly from her lover. For a young woman of sixteen, however hard the schools through which she had passed, this was no easy task, and she failed, somewhere or other, to round off and seal away her deception. Her directors gave no hint that they knew what they knew. Such was not the way of the European Communists, any more than it was the way of their Nazi opposite numbers. One might have thought that it was only by an unfortunate chance that Gestapo agents in Holland became of a sudden fully cognisant of her lover’s secret political connections, but thanks to a last-minute message from one of her former admirers in the Berlin headquarters, Irma was aware that something was about to happen—and aware of it too late. She found his crushed and shapeless body in the gutter at the shadowy street-corner where they were to have met that night. It was evident that the wheels of a heavy car or truck had been run backwards and forwards over it more than once, to make identification difficult. There were no papers in the pockets except an envelope inscribed in a hand she did not know with her own name and the address at which she lived by day. It had obviously been put there after the wheels had done their work.
Within an hour, she was on her way to England, where she lost herself in London for the best part of two years. By now, both the Gestapo and the hunting-dogs of her own former Party, from which by formal notification she had ‘resigned’, were trailing her, for she was potentially dangerous to both sides—what is called ‘hot’. In the end, silent and alone after having for so long been afraid to speak to or make a friend of anyone, she decided to come to Australia, the unknown and remotely isolated continent farthest from the scenes of her youthful joys and griefs and terrors and triumphs, farthest from what seemed at last to have been a life of evil futility in the service of a murderous ideology and a savagely reactionary ideal.
And, now that she was here at last, the very fact of arrival, of the final journeying finally ended, gave her the feeling that the whole world had actually fallen away from beneath her feet, vanishing downwards into timeless space without a shudder or a sound of warning. She found herself facing Baudelaire’s néant vaste et noir, unable to turn away, without any power or impulse to go forward. It was the realization of this that had as it were struck her to the cabin deck where for one of the few times in her life she gave way to unrestrained, unfathomable despair; and thus I had first seen her.
‘You need not worry much about those three men,’ I said. ‘Their identity is known and the police are already here watching them. They will be watched from now on, and perhaps sent out of the country—it will need only one mistake, perhaps not even that. We too have a law to take care of undesirable aliens.’
‘Yes?’ she said, with what seemed an insincere eagerness concealing utter disbelief. ‘Then me—what will they do to me, these police of yours?’
‘You,’ I said, to make her smile again, ‘will be noted as a very desirable alien indeed, and left alone.’ But she did not smile; her eyes did not waver from my face, and so close was their scrutiny that I felt it like a touch on the skin.
‘You are very kind,’ she said at last. ‘You will help me. I must work, I have very little money, no place to go. You are not police. What are you then, please?’
I told her, and when after some explanation she understood that a police roundsman was not a police officer but a newspaper reporter doing special work, she looked relieved but not impressed. Her look seemed to allow that perhaps it was no worse to work for the capitalist Press than for the Communists; for she had by no means rid her mind of the deep imprint of her early teaching.
‘You must go to your consulate,’ I said. ‘If you have Dutch papers they will help you there more than I can.’
I had no intention of entangling myself in any way with an unknown young woman refugee; I had already seen them at work too often to be readily deceived by the superficial charm of foreign lips speaking bad English. I gave her my card, never foreseeing the day and the circumstances in which I would see it again, never expecting to see it again at all. She read the name and address on it, moving her lips slightly as she looked down, and I took the opportunity of studying her averted face for the last time.
At the time of her death she had a matured beauty proper to her twenty-eight years, which was in fact part of her power of complete repose; and it cannot be denied that such reposefulness can cast over the observer a spell stronger than that of any other womanly characteristic, mental or physical. Already, at eighteen, this ability to become quite still was evident, but the mobility of youth had not yet softened in her face, and its changes were abrupt, not subtle as they later came to be, when knowledge and experience had ripened into a deep wisdom which in any other woman would have been disconcerting, since it had about it more of intellect than of instinct.
Evidently the Nazi investigators did not discover that one of her Kovno grandmothers had been Jewish; but there is no doubt that from that old woman, whom to her knowledge she never saw, she inherited a certain skin-pigmentation which gave her whole body, and particularly the exposed surfaces of hands, throat and face, a colour of creamy ivory most pleasing to see in its subtle contrast with the opaque blue of her eyes and the high line of her wide cheekbones. Apart from this, no trace of Jewish ancestry could be discerned (if even this were indeed Jewish, not Slav)—none of the exaggerated elaboration of line you see in women of that race. Beneath the delicate glowing skin the fine bone-structure was strong and Slavic in its width of jaw and brow, and the faint upward slant of her eyebrows and the outer corners of her eyes gave her an expression at once wistful and mischievous. This was emphasized by her mouth, which suggested in its width and controlled fullness much generosity of heart and hand and a pleasant temper, and in the upward line of the corners an optimistic humour at present modified by her attitude of despondent self-absorption. The heavy house coat and the pyjamas of apple-green linen, creased from sleep, concealed the rest of her, except the fact that she was full-bosomed, and that her back was beautifully straight, like her shoulders. I recalled my recent foolish impulse to take her face between my hands and kiss her mouth; and as I looked at her now I could understand it well enough even while I deprecated it, ashamed of myself. It was an impulse every man who had ever been near her, within the strong and reassuring aura of her intense personal being, must have felt as I had. Not all of them resisted it, I know; for long afterwards she told me she had for years thought of men in terms of hands and mouths to be evaded, and had bathed whenever possible because of a feeling of continual uncleanness. Too many people, she said, touched her.
She looked up at last, after a longer time than it could have taken to read the few words on the oblong of pasteboard which she was now holding out to me diffidently.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you keep that. Then if things get too bad for you, you will know where to find me. You understand that?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I understand. If things get too bad.’
‘But they will not,’ I said. ‘We are in full recovery in this country, after the depression. There is work for all. You will be all right.’
‘Oh—I will be all right. But there will be war,’ she said gently, as though speaking to a child. ‘It is certain. He is not ready this year, not yet. It will be next year.’
Again she nodded her head in that weighty and ancient manner that went so oddly with her youth.
‘That is why,’ she went on to say, ‘those three men come here. They know. They hope to make trouble. We do not know what Moscow will do. We think there will be a—a treaty, yes?—between Stalin and him, sometime. We feel it must be so. Then he will not be afraid of war. Because of Russia, he is still afraid. Of England, no. Of France—ah no! But of Russia, yes . . . But war, it is certain. Inevitable. I have seen it. I tell you.’
Then with another swift change of mood she turned up her face to shake back the smooth dark page-boy hair, looking suddenly gay and mischievous.
‘You know what I think?’ she said. ‘I think that these Nazis have—shall we say?—ripened too quick. You have a proverb, I think it is about money. It says, “Easy come, easy go.” It is true of so many things, you see. That is what I think—it is true of the Nazis. They come quick, they go quick. It must be so. They have no history. People without a history, they always want war—to shed the blood, to make the sacrifice, to become blood-brothers with their own national past. They have no political past, so they make one. Do you agree? It is what I think.’
‘How old are you, Miss Maarten?’
‘I am eighteen years one month. You think that too young? My friend—no! I have lived.’
She looked at me consideringly while neither of us spoke. I had thought her two or three years older, and while I watched her grave eyes regarding me with unselfconscious thoughtfulness above the high cheekbones I felt again the uneasy sensation of pity I had felt earlier, before that remark about Europe on the eve of crucifixion. At length she broke the brief silence.
‘You must call me Irma,’ she said decidedly. ‘Maartens—that is just a name. When the gentleman in Holland was—when he died, I changed my name to his. He was so kind to me, it was—you know—a memorial.’
She looked steadily at me again in silence. Then, quite unexpectedly she stepped forward and took my hand in her two hands, cool and surprisingly strong within their softness. I felt my card being bent across the back of my knuckles.
‘You are very like him,’ she said, ‘but not so old. It is very funny. When you came here, I was almost for one moment frightened. He was always what he called saving me from myself.’
She laughed, for the first time; a half-hysterical laugh with tears beneath its amusement. At the same moment I was aware of steps and shrill voices far away along the corridor, approaching. I withdrew my hand from between hers. Her laughter ceased abruptly, and she sighed, quick and short with a sort of impatient resignation; but the look of mischief haunted her eyes.
‘You must be my friend,’ she said in almost a whisper. ‘My first Australian. You agree?’
‘I do,’ I said, not quite sure where we were now in that fantastic conversation between strangers. ‘I do agree.’
‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Now it is a treaty. Now . . .’
With unexpected swiftness, as the loud voices and the steps drew nearer, bringing with them something of the excitement that seethed through the whole ship and affected both, she raised herself on her toes, took my head between her hands, and kissed me full and lightly on the lips; and was standing away from me, smiling. For a moment I thought I must have imagined the whole thing, which could have taken no more than a couple of seconds; but no—my own lips and her faint smile assured me it had indeed happened. I was so taken aback, in such a confusion of mind whether to be annoyed or glad, that I had nothing to say. It was she who spoke, hurriedly now.
‘A treaty. That was what you wished to do before, I know, to kiss me. I could feel that. And you did not even try. You are a funny man.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said, and went away in haste, to avoid the people coming noisily along the stuffy and dimly-lighted corridor and put myself beyond the reach of that strange young woman’s gentle mockery; and the last impression I had of her was of her voice, calling out quite loudly from the littered interior of the cabin, ‘Do not forget—a treaty. We are friends.’
I’m damned if we are, I thought, going up on deck in considerable confusion of mind, not knowing, of course, that I should ever see her again.
We had passed under the bridge. The sun was once more behind clouds, the whole world was grey, and the cold wind in my face restored me to my normal senses quickly enough. My interview with the youthful refugee below decks soon began to seem like a fanciful and unlikely dream, impossible to perceive whole in retrospect and so impossible to forget.
The voice of the purser beside me made me think of more immediate matters.
‘There’s one of your victims, Mr. Fitzherbert. That chap in the fancy ankle-length black coat there by himself on the rail. That is your German baron—or so he says.’
I thanked him, and went towards the stranger, sorting out a series of questions in my mind as I approached.