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The Carrington Incident
by Niven Busch
Chapter One
The army had been going through the city for a week — tanks and six-wheeled troop-trucks, infantry, artillery, engineer and supply units, all in a muddle. The business in hand was not moving them up in attack formation but moving them up, to be sorted out later. They were all headed toward the Polish frontier.
Bertha Carrington was sick of looking at them. She was sick of the pounding and the smell of exhausts and the troops in their square steel helmets, purposeful and elated because at last they were going to be tested. They were supposed to be going to maneuvers but everybody knew what was going to happen: the soldiers were all heroes in advance and Bertha was sick of heroes most of all. All she wanted to do was check out of her pension and get in a taxi and on a train and to a boat. As far as she was concerned the heroes stank worse than the vehicles they traveled in and if they were going to take over she didn't want to see it happen.
This time it was another tank unit: it woke Bertha up. Since the room was light she got up in her nightgown and looked out of the window. The tanks were the big ones, they looked as big as circus wagons; they were throttled down but still making a terrific racket, their turrets open so that the crews could get the benefit of the early morning air — even the Diesel exhausts couldn't kill the lovely smell of that. A boy delivering papers paid no attention to them at all. He was a skinny, blonde kid who looked like any kid you might see doing the same job on a street back home. When it was time for him to cross the street and work the other side he timed the twelve-yard interval between a couple of the behemoths and scooted across, turning as he hit the curb to grin up at the driver whose bow he'd crossed. The driver moved his head a fraction of an inch backward and to one side: from above you couldn't tell whether he was reproving the kid or greeting him.
Bertha turned away from the window. She pulled her nightgown over her head and, naked, crossed the room to the chair on which her clothes were lying and began to put them on, her body glistening in the soft gray light. She put on glove-silk panties and brassiere, a skirt of Shetland tweed, still "good" but rather threadbare, and a camel's hair sweater of a blue heather shade. The sweater was expensive and handsome but not in good taste for a woman of Bertha's size. Bertha was big. That was the outstanding fact about her. She was very good-looking in the fashion usually known as Junoesque but her size made it difficult for people to detect this. She was five feet eight inches tall and looked it, even sitting down; she weighed one hundred and sixty pounds.
That meant an awful lot of Bertha. But you didn't get it all in one chunk: the effect, on the contrary, was strictly streamlined. Her hair was blonde and thick, shortened but not bobbed and washed but not bleached, twisted around in back somehow in a fashion that tried to minimize its blondeness and thickness. She had a charming face, rather broad between the eyes and full in the lips, shadowed with small, alluring hollows round the eyes and cheekbones. It was a face which in repose looked almost stupid, but this was a false look and unfair to Bertha. Her face happened to be the kind that art instructors draw when they are illustrating the intersecting planes of flesh and bony structure that must underlie an individual portrait: its eminences and shadows faded into each other harmoniously but somehow without making a perfected whole. Only when she smiled did the components come together and when this happened whoever she was smiling at became a friend of Bertha's.
She smiled now, looking at the trunks. They were packed, thank God, and they had a very satisfactory look in spite of the nostalgia suggested by the brand-new labels of the places people had been going for so many summers but might not be going any more. They were expensive trunks, American-made: Bertha put out her hand and rubbed the glossy hide of one of them. Then she went out of the room, not locking the door, and down the single flight of stairs to the pension lobby. Beyond the fusty red-plush portiéres dishes clinked and Bertha, as she entered, cried out in surprise. "Now, Katy. Don't tell me that somebody's been down before me." Katy, the waitress, nodded. There was no denying the two used places. "Herr and Frau Hause, go this morning. How do you want your eggs, Fräulein Carrington?"
"Boiled, please, Katy," Bertha said, unfolding her napkin. She was sorry to have missed the Hausers — a Danish manufacturer and his attractive, gray-eyed wife: she would have liked to say goodbye, but in these days people dispensed with goodbyes. While they were trying to get a train-berth or a seat on a plane they didn't mention their projected departure; they seemed to have a superstitious fear that if the news got round that they were going something would happen to stop them. The pension had been emptying fast and so had every other place in town: whenever you went past the big hotels, the Palace or the Continental or the International, you saw suitcases and trunks piled on the pavement, waiting for the truck.
In Mrs. Gertner's pension, by time-honored tradition, two newspapers were provided at the breakfast table. Apparently the Hausers, with the thievishness peculiar to those starting on a trip, had taken one of them. Bertha opened the other. Only two days ago the government had announced a non-aggression pact with Russia but today her first glance showed no mention of this deal. The front page was devoted to an editorial denouncing England and a number of items describing "outrages along the eastern frontier." Bertha turned to the movie page. Reading about international affairs was the last thing she wanted to do at breakfast.
"Top o' the mornin' to ye, Miss Carrington. And how are you this warlike morning?"
Bertha looked up cautiously.
"Very well, thank you, Dr. Boylan. Would you care to see the paper?"
"I've seen it, blast these crazy buggers," said Dr. Boylan, seating himself. A stocky, nervous, red-faced man, of no designated occupation, his doctorate as vague as his general background, Boylan was one of those professional Irishmen whose brogue becomes more marked with each mile that they travel from their native shores.
"I've seen it and I've sat up with it," he said, "I've listened to it blathering over these besotted midget radios they give you here — and I'll be shriven and be hanged if I can tell what sense to make of it, can you?" He reached across the table to take possession of the paper he had just declined, catching as he did so the questioning glance of Katy, who was peering round the pantry door. "Fried, if you please," he said. Katy's head disappeared and Dr. Boylan helped himself to rolls and butter. Like Bertha, he was a hearty breakfast-eater.
"Now tell me, Bertha, what do you make of it all? Tell me what you hear around the town."
Bertha tried hard to keep a straight face. Dr. Boylan's way of making conversation with her was to assume that she was an authority on international affairs.
"I'm sure I have no idea, Dr. Boylan," she said primly.
From the glint in Boylan's eye she could tell what was coming next.
"Shush, now, and you a friend of Mr. Big himself! Didn't he pass the word to you, last time you had a bit of a chat?" With his mouth full of buttered roll Dr. Boylan pressed a thick, conspiratorial finger against his nose.
"Come on," he whispered dramatically; "tell us what he said."
Bertha gulped the last of her coffee. In spite of Dr. Boylan's joking manner she always became disturbed when he teased her about her meeting with the Dictator — an incident which had taken place a week ago. It was less the meeting than what had happened in the world during the intervening days that made the memory agitating to Bertha: she didn't want to talk about it, even for a joke.
"I'm afraid he didn't say much, Dr. Boylan. Not about the present situation, anyway. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must take this tray upstairs."
"Must you now?" inquired the doctor comfortably. He slashed a yellow wound across his eggs. "Hurry back, thin, and we'll decide the fate of nations. I'm countin' on your influence at headquarters."
With her light, quick step — unusual in so big a woman — Bertha walked across the pension lobby. She smiled at Hans, the porter, who was sitting at the switchboard, and proceeded up the stairs — the automatic elevator was too hard to fuss with when you had a tray. She went up to the third floor and then down the narrow hallway to the front apartment, balancing the tray with waiter-like dexterity on one raised palm. She felt in her skirt pocket for a key, unlocked the door and entered. She closed the door and for a moment stood with her back to it, looking around her for some place to put the tray — a problem which was complicated by the room's disorder; although this was the living room or parlor of a suite and hence intended rather for social than for bedroom uses, a young woman had evidently undressed here in a hurry. Across a small "occasional" table, the table on which Bertha usually put the tray, a mink coat had been tossed; an evening dress, pulled inside out, lay over a chair and on the floor a frivolous, provocative trail of objects stretched from the center of the carpet to the door of the bedroom beyond. Bertha removed the mink coat, put her tray where the coat had been and started toward the bedroom, tidying as she went. Walking bent over she picked up underwear, stockings, brassiére and garter-belt with the unhurried motions of a peasant weeding a beet field. She opened the bedroom door and spoke relentlessly into its perfumed gloom.
"All right now. Come on!"
Decisive though the words were, they elicited a limited response. The person in the bed, defined chiefly by a patch of black hair on the pillow, seemed to shudder and draw in upon herself. She pulled the sheet over her head, and from this added shelter thrust out unexpectedly six words, uttered with a somnambulistic venom.
"Beat it. I want to sleep."
"Come on," Bertha repeated firmly. She yanked the blind up, letting in the weak, pale-yellow city sunshine, adding over her shoulder the argument traditionally addressed to slugabeds — and as traditionally ignored.
"Your coffee's getting cold."
A sound of sirens from the street below aided at this moment in rousing the sleeper. Pat Denny pushed the sheet down and rolled over. Using only her neck muscles she raised her head and looked with distaste at the sunshine. She ran her small sharp tongue several times over her lips, which still had lipstick on them.
"What's that?" she inquired.
"What's what?"
"Those god damn sirens."
"I don't know," Bertha said without concern; "just sirens I suppose." She got a quilted robe out of the closet and stood beside the bed holding it open.
"Here, Pat, put this on."
"They still marching?"
"Not right now," Bertha said, "but there's going to be trouble. Everybody's going — the Hausers left this morning. Even Dr. Boylan's getting jittery. I talked to him at breakfast."
Pat Denny was suddenly wide awake. She pulled back the covers and with her knees together swung her legs over the side of the bed. Like a polo pony being blanketed she stood docilely while Bertha helped her into the quilted robe.
"Well," she said decisively, "maybe we'll go sometime, but we won't go today."
She started toward the living room, swinging her narrow haunches in the walk that she had invented when she was fourteen, the year she found out men were mad, but simply mad about her. She sat down in front of the breakfast tray, lighting a cigarette before pouring her coffee. She exhaled a funnel-shaped column of smoke and for a bare fraction of a second her eyes flicked over Bertha's face and fixed themselves on the opposite wall.
"So don't nag me," she said. "Turn in the plane tickets, get some others for tomorrow or any time you can. Only we're not going today, see? We're not going, and that's that."
Bertha sat down carefully in one of the stiff pension chairs.
"I don't suppose it makes any difference to you that we've waited a week for those tickets?"
"No, it doesn't, no difference at all." Pat was avoiding Bertha's eyes, studying with assumed attention some object on her tray. "Don't tell me this is English marmalade, not English marmalade. Isn't that treachery or something? Imagine, all those cannon in the streets, and in the pension, English marmalade. We ought to report it to the Gestapo."
Bertha was quiet for a minute, watching the other woman eat.
"Why can't we go today?" she said at last.
"Because we can't."
"I asked you why, Pat. Is it a secret or something?"
"No," Pat said, "it's not a secret." She put down a half-devoured piece of toast and marmalade. Pat never really ate breakfast — she just picked at it.
"I've got a date with Freddy Grafton. We're going dancing at the Tiergarten. I'll want my lamé dress, I'll want it pressed. See to it for me, darling."
The last part of this speech was uttered in a wheedling tone. By Pat Denny's code, there was, of course, a difference between a paid companion and a personal maid. Although their duties might be, had to be, interchangeable, you made up for the difference in their social ratings by an entreating tone when you were giving orders.
Bertha seemed unaware of this new tone; she was still concentrating disagreeably on the question at hand. Freddy Grafton was not a romance. If he had been a romance there would have been no use arguing. But Freddy was just someone Pat went dancing with, a well-bred, partially emasculated young man vaguely connected with the English Consulate. His professional indistinction, aside from his personal insignificance, was rightly indicated by the fact that, with the world about to fall apart, he still had time to take a young American heiress to the Tiergarten.
"Is that so important?"
"It is to me." Pat lit another cigarette. "I've wanted to go to the Tiergarten for years. So don't forget the lamé — it's still in my steamer trunk. And run me a bath, will you?"
Bertha made no reply. She sat bolt upright, big and shapely, on the small, hard chair. Wondering whether her disgust showed in her face, she sat there staring at the girl whom she was paid to chaperon — staring at Pat's robot-like, perfected prettiness of a mannequin or a high-class whore, her narrow, lovely feet in their golden bedroom slippers, her long tapering legs, the ruins of last night's make-up on her small, dark, pretty, crafty face. To hell with the plane tickets, to hell with the war. Pat had a date — not even a date she cared about, but a date. That was enough. You couldn't argue or make an issue or talk common sense. You were paid twenty-five a week and all expenses to take orders and you took them. You needed the money: you couldn't save on a Barnard instructor's salary and the twentyfive paid for the summer. That twenty-five was like the brass pole in the center of a carrousel: around it Bertha's days revolved to broken music, dreamily and monotonously bobbing up and down. You drew the bath. You got the lamé dress pressed. You canceled the plane tickets. You were the paid companion.
"All right," Bertha said.
She stood up. "Anything else?" she asked, smoothing the hate out of her voice.
The question was sarcastic but Pat didn't seem to notice this. She was examining a paper bag, tucked on the breakfast tray behind the coffee pot. "Yes, there is," Pat said. She pointed to the bag. "That's yours, I suppose?"
Bertha colored slightly.
"Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I forgot."
She had stretched out her hand to take the bag but Pat, too quick for her, seized it, holding it out gingerly, suspended between thumb and forefinger like a dead mouse or some similar carious and nauseating article.
"Then don't forget," Pat said, "to take it the hell out of here."
