Stamboul Train by Graham Greene

this map. And these scrawls. I’ve put two and two together.’ She had expected some protests of fear or indignation, but he was still brooding over her first guess. His attitude puzzled her and for an anguished moment she wondered, Am I missing the best story? Is the best story not here at all, but at a south-coast school among the red-brick buildings and the pitch-pine desks and ink-stands and cracked bells and the smell of boys’ clothes? The doubt made her less certain of herself and she spoke gently, more gently than she had intended, for it was difficult to modulate her husky voice. ‘We’ll get together,’ she growled in a winning way. ‘I’m not here to let you down. I don’t want to interfere with you. Why, if you succeed, my story’s all the more valuable. I’ll promise not to release anything at all until you give the word.’ She said plaintively, as if she were an artist accused of deprecating paint, ‘I wouldn’t spoil your revolution. Why, it’ll be a grand story.’
    Age was advancing rapidly on Dr Czinner. It was as if he had warded off with temporary success five years of pitch-pine smells and the whine of chalk on blackboards, only to sit now in a railway carriage and allow the baulked years to come upon him, together and not one by one. For the moment he was an old man nodding into sleep, his face as grey as the snow sky over Nuremberg. ‘Now first,’ said Miss Warren, ‘what are your plans? I can see you depend a good deal on the slums.’
    He shook his head. ‘I depend on no one.’
    â€˜You are keeping absolute control?’
    â€˜Least of all myself.’
    Miss Warren struck her knee sharply. ‘I want plain answers,’ but she got the same reply, ‘I shall tell you nothing.’ He looks more like seventy than fifty-six, she thought; he’s getting deaf, he doesn’t understand what I’ve been saying. She was very forbearing; she felt certain that this was not success she faced, it resembled failure too closely, and failure she could love; she could be tender and soft-syllabled towards failure, wooing it with little whinnying words, as long as in the end it spoke. A weak man had sometimes gone away with the impression that Miss Warren was his best friend. She knelt forward and tapped on Dr Czinner’s knee, putting all the amiability of which she was capable into her grin. ‘We are in this together, doctor. Don’t you understand that? Why, we can even help you. Public opinion’s just another name for the Clarion. I know you are afraid we’ll be indiscreet, that we’ll publish your story tomorrow and the government will be warned. But I tell you we won’t breathe so much as a paragraph on the book page until you begin your show. Then I want to be able to put right across the middle page, “Dr Czinner’s Own Story. Exclusive to the Clarion. ” Now, that’s not unreasonable.’
    â€˜There’s nothing I wish to say.’
    Miss Warren withdrew her hand. Did the poor fool, she wondered, think that he would stand between her and another four pounds a week, between her and Janet Pardoe? He became, old and stupid and stubborn on the opposite seat, the image of all the men who threatened her happiness, who were closing round Janet with money and little toys and laughter at a woman’s devotion to a woman. But the image was in her power; she could break the image. It was not a useless act of mischief on Cromwell’s part to shatter statues. Some of the power of the Virgin lay in the Virgin’s statue, and when the head was off and a limb gone and the seven swords broken, fewer candles were lit and the prayers said at her altar were not so many. One man like Dr Czinner ruined by a woman, and fewer stupid girls like Coral Musker would believe all strength and cunning to reside in a man. But she gave him, because of his age and because he reeked to