Stamboul Train Read Online Free PDF

firm it would be the purchase of a rocky business beaten by our competition.
    The figures began to swim before his eyes in a mist of sleep. Ones, sevens, nines became Mr Eckman’s small sharp teeth; sixes, fives, threes re-formed themselves as a trick film into Mr Eckman’s dark polished eyes. Commissions in the form of coloured balloons floated across the carriage, growing in size, and he sought a pin to prick them one by one. He was brought back to full wakefulness by the sound of footsteps passing and re-passing along the corridor. Poor devil, he thought, seeing a brown mackintosh disappear past the window and two hands clasped.
    But he felt no pity for Mr Eckman, following him back in fancy from his office to his very modern flat, into the shining lavatory, the silver-and-gilt bathroom, the bright cushioned drawing-room where his wife sat and sewed and sewed, making vests and pants and bonnets and socks for the Anglican Mission: Mr Eckman was a Christian. All along the line blast furnaces flared.
    The heat did not penetrate the wall of glass. It was bitterly cold, an April night like an old-fashioned Christmas card glittering with frost. Myatt took his fur coat from a peg and went into the corridor. At Cologne there was a wait of nearly forty-five minutes; time enough to get a cup of hot coffee or a glass of brandy. Until then he could walk, up and down, like the man in the mackintosh.
    While there was nothing worth his notice in the outside air he knew who would be walking with him in spirit the length of the corridor, in and out of lavatories, Mr Eckman and Mr Stein. Mr Eckman, he thought, trying to coax some hot water into a gritty basin, kept a chained Bible by his lavatory seat. So at least he had been told. Large and shabby and very ‘family’ amongst the silver-and-gilt taps and plugs, it advertised to every man and woman who dined in his flat Mr Eckman’s Christianity. There was no need of covert allusions to Church-goings, to the Embassy chaplain, merely a ‘Would you like a wash, dear?’ from his wife, his own hearty questions to the men after the coffee and the brandy. But of Stein, Myatt knew nothing.
    â€˜What a pity you are not getting out at Buda, as you are so interested in cricket. I’m trying—oh, so hard—to get up two elevens at the embassy.’ A man with a face as bleak and white and impersonal as his clerical collar was speaking to a little rat of a man who crouched opposite him, nodding and becking. The voice, robbed of its characteristic inflexions by closed glass, floated out into the corridor as Myatt passed. It was the ghost of a voice and reminded Myatt again of Stein speaking over two thousand miles of cable, hoping that he would one day soon have the honour of entertaining Mr Carleton Myatt in Constantinople, agreeable, hospitable, and anonymous.
    He was passing the non-sleeping compartments in the second class; men with their waistcoats off sprawled along seats, blue about the chin; women with hair in dusty nets, like the string bags on the racks, tucked their skirts tightly round them and fell in odd shapes over the seats, large breasts and small thighs, small breasts and large thighs hopelessly confused. A tall thin woman woke for a moment to complain: ‘That beer you got me. Shocking it was. I can’t keep my stomach quiet.’ On the seat opposite, the husband sat and smiled; he rubbed one hand over his rough chin, squinting sideways at the girl in the white mackintosh, who lay along the seat, her feet against his other hand. Myatt paused and lit a cigarette. He liked the girl’s thin figure and her face, the lips tinted enough to lend her plainness an appeal. Nor was she altogether plain; the smallness of her features, of her skull, her nose and ears, gave her a spurious refinement, a kind of bright prettiness, like the window of a country shop at Christmas full of small lights and tinsel and coloured common gifts. Myatt