Orient Express

by ELEANOR PALFFY

IT TOOK all Mary Elizabeth’s courage to ring the great Viennese doctor’s bell that winter afternoon four years after her marriage. Once inside the office it was worse, for the place was crowded. Hut the doctor kept her waiting only a few minutes, for the name of Palödy was still an open sesame in Central Europe. All that time she kept fingering the bridge of her nose beneath the chiffon veil that she had put on more to hide the discoloration and her trepidation than to conceal her identity.

The examination was brief but definite. “It’s not broken, just badly bruised,” the doctor said; then added casually, “How did you do it?”

“ Well,” she began hurriedly, like a child gabbling its lesson, “I got up in the night to go to—” that had to be amended — “I got up in the night. I didn’t dare turn on the light for fear of waking my husband, so I ran smack-bang into the bathroom door.” He must believe me, Mary Elizabeth was thinking desperately. She looked at him with a hopeful smile.

“Yes, all women say that. It is the classic answer. What really happened?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

The collapse of Mary Elizabeth’s dignity must have been funny, but the doctor looked as though he thought it a little sad. She just sat and stared at him awhile in silence, and he stared back. He was a Jew, and was giving her the complete attention of his race. The need to confide in someone overmastered her New England reticence with such force that the words spilled over in a rush.

“It was late. We were in bed. There had been argument. Endless argument. About money. It is always money, not women, as people think. It was my fault. It was all my fault. I guess I am not used to Magyar men. I finally lost control, and I — well — I slapped his face.” Her anxiety to defend him quickened, “So it really was my fault that he knocked me out, you see.”

She sat on the edge of her chair, waiting for him to speak. The doctor didn’t say anything, just kept right on giving her his complete attention. Mary Elizabeth gulped.

“I thought my nose might be broken; that’s why I came to you. If you say it isn’t, that’s all that matters. He wouldn’t care for a woman with a broken nose.” She laughed, feeling a fool, and then added stupidly, as she fingered the bruised bridge, “He used to tell me it was my best feature!”

The eminent professor continued looking at her speculatively. She’s right, he was thinking, her husband wouldn’t care for a woman with a broken nose, or with any other disfigurement. Béla Palödy didn’t care for any one woman very long anyway. Her time was running out. Yes, it was several years since her marriage had rocked Viennese, even European, society. Bluebeard was his nickname. People were beginning not to be able to remember his wives, just as they had long since ceased counting his official fiancées and all the other women. The doctor wondered if she knew all this, and debated with himself as to whether he should ask her. “Compresses,” was all he finally said, “and this prescription for ointment.”

Mary Elizabeth got up, thanking him. As she reached the door he added, “I wouldn’t provoke the Herr Graf too far again if I were you. He comes of very old stock, and there has been inbreeding. In such families there is often—” the professor searched for a word that would not offend— “a mixed heritage. The Herr Graf’s temper can become what might be called dangerous. I should recommend—” again he hesitated, fearful of going too far— “shall we say caution?”

There was no use enlarging on it, she thought as she went out. Everybody knew that Béla Palödy was a high-tempered man, but up till last night her pride had been that she alone could manage him. That was part of the charm — like riding a difficult horse. There had been many instances of his temper. On one occasion when a young Slovak woman, used to the tempo of oxen, had run across the road in front of the car, just missing the front fender, he had turned white with fury, had got slowly out of the car, and with his long, leisurely stride had gone up to the girl and deliberately knocked her down. It was done with such languor that the whole performance looked like a retarded motion picture.

“That will teach you a lesson,” was all he had said to the girl as he left her among the dust and the geese on the road. But as they drove off he had turned to Mary Elizabeth with his disarming grin and said, “Little fool! If it hadn’t been for my superb driving she’d be dead,”

The peasants respected him for his great physical strength, as well as for his courage and elemental justice. After the revolution in 1918 he was the only one of the Hungarian magnates in the neighborhood to whom they went on doffing their hats, and the older men, as well as the women and girls, continued to kiss his hand in the old feudal way. Men took things from him that they wouldn’t from others, and the women doted on him. It was his vitality that held them — his unalloyed vitality. Of course Mary Elizabeth knew that Bluebeard was his nickname, and she also knew that bets had been laid at the Jockey Club on the probable duration of their marriage, but she didn’t care. None of his women ever did. Why should they? They knew that for whatever time it lasted they at least had a man.

2

WHEN Mary Elizabeth first married she accompanied Béla to Galicia each September for the stag shooting, but lately it had seemed wiser to go to Baden-Baden for the reducing cure. Béla liked a woman to be a good clotheshorse, but all Central European cooking was rich. Baden was the antidote. Dr. Dengler conducted one of the most lucrative, and certainly the most drastic, cures in Europe. The patient got up at six o’clock to be rubbed down by a strong-armed attendant, and from that moment till bedtime lived like a raw recruit.

It was while Mary Elizabeth was at BadenBaden that she first noticed there was something wrong with her right eye. In the beginning it was just a cloudy feeling, as though too heavy a cold cream had been rubbed along the eyelid (she was going in for every form of beauty treatment there was), but long before the cure ended, her eye had begun an inexplicable blinking. In addition to drinking the waters and taking the strenuous baths, the cure consisted of a great deal of walking. Day after day, up and down the long, leafy paths and alleys of the Black Forest, she walked and walked, and as she walked, her eye blinked and blinked. She grew as jumpy as a dog with a fly in its ear — so nervous, in fact, that she decided to go to Munich with American friends, before returning to Palöd, to see if a little music, and the society of people who had known her always, wouldn’t clear up what she was convinced was a tic. People were apt to get overstrained at strenuous reducing cures and imagine all sorts of ailments. Mary Elizabeth was determined not to become a hypochondriac.

Munich was jammed to capacity and most exciting. The opening night Strauss conducted Elektra. It was what is known as a brilliant occasion, and should have been a satisfactory one. But in spite of the pleasure of seeing her friends; in spite of the contrast between the hotel and the bleak sanitarium; in spile of her stern resolve not to give in to fancies, Mary Elizabeth’s eye refused to let itself be forgotten. It went right on blinking, and even at the opera, under the sway of the music, she caught herself closing her left eye and squinting at the backdrop, which was instantly cut in half as if by a veil.

That was on a Thursday. The Sunday following at Salomé, the actors suddenly had no tops to their bodies at all. “Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst!” the skirt of the beautiful Czech prima donna sang with triumph, but, though the platter with the head of John the Baptist was bouncing about in mid-air, the passionate lips that, sought his dead ones were nowhere to be seen. Something, Mary Elizabeth said reluctantly to herself, is very wrong indeed. The next day she found out, in part, what it was.

Munich in those days was a charming old town, though there were parts of it as bare as Fall River, Massachusetts: long, empty streets with no particular beginning, no end, and apparently no purpose. These suburbs were remote from the lovely baroque houses, or the Johannes Kirche, decorated by the Brothers Asam, who had the happy gift of turning churches and convents into airy ballrooms throughout Bavaria. It was in a little-known part of Munich that Mary Elizabeth found the Augen Klinik.

The Outpatient Department was so cold that Mary Elizabeth shivered in her print dress. She sat down on a long wooden bench with the patient poor. The smell of disinfectant mingled with the stench of their misery. Finally a door opened and a woman bawled, “Frau Palödy! The Herr Geheimrat will see you now!”

The eye examination, which went on for hours and hours, gave Mary Elizabeth ample opportunity to appraise the much advertised German thoroughness as well as the German character. Finally, when her nerves were at the breaking point, the Herr Geheimrat rubbed his hands with satisfaction, and without so much as looking in Mary Elizabeth’s direction spoke briskly to his bespectacled assistant: “Ach! how clever you have shown yourself to be! How proud I am that a pupil of mine should have diagnosed the case so successfully. It does me great credit . Very few young men of your, as yet, limited experience would have seen it, for it is yet so small. Growing, of course,” he rubbed his hands again, “but yet so small. You are slated for great things. I shall report this to those in authority at once. In the days that are to come the Fatherland will need young men of — ”

“Please, Herr Geheimrat,” Mary Elizabeth faltered in her inadequate German, “won’t you tell me what is the matter with my eye? This suspense is difficult to bear! Is there anything really wrong?”

He glared at her as if she had been a presumptuous student interrupting a lecture at its climax.

“Wrong!” he barked. “Wrong! Gott in Himmel, wrong! The retina is being pushed forward by a growth — probably malignant — maybe a sarcoma. It is impossible to tell as yet. It is a very serious affair, very serious indeed, and you ask me il anything is wrong! There is no time to be lost. You must not wait to be operated on: three weeks at the utmost. Else you will be dead or blind. Such things are not to be trifled with. Do you understand?” He raised his voice as though she were deaf. “Dead or blind!” Then, without any change in voice, or manner, “Here is my bill. You can pay the nurse as you go out.”

“But Herr Geheimrat—”

“You are not going to allow me to operate on you here in Munich?”

“I — I have scarcely had time to think. This is so — so — unexpected.” The room seemed to be reeling and she put out a hand to steady herself. “ Perhaps it would be better in Paris. I have friends there. I know no one here and my husband is very busy at this season —”

“Then good day. I have no time for idle conversation. No one in Germany has time for idle conversation.” It had grown very hot and the noon sun made an intolerable glare on the shadeless street. There were no taxis. Mary Elizabeth walked, and long before she reached the Hotel Continental the tears had stopped sliding down her cheeks. She was glad to have been alone. It gave her time to accept her destiny. She never cried again.

3

THE next day her friends, who gave up their holiday program without a murmur, took her to Paris. In the past she had often enjoyed the trip, for the train runs through some of the most fertile country in the world — the kind of symmetrically cultivated country that Mary Elizabeth preferred to virgin forests or the great open spaces. But she couldn’t look out the window, for the lights and shadows crackled inside her head like fireworks if she so much as opened her eyes. When they finally reached Paris it was hot and the streets were filled with trippers. It was only luck finding the great oculist in town. He waved aside a letter that Mary Elizabeth had brought him. “My respect for my German colleague is, of course, profound, but I prefer to make my own diagnosis.”

So the whole wearisome business was gone through again. The chart, which she could no longer see at all; the following of the white spot on the machine, and the losing of it; the drops; the waiting for them to take effect. When he had finished, tears were streaming down the doctor’s face, to accumulate and drip off the point of his beard.

“Alas, my child, I weep for you. It is terrible for anyone, but for a woman it is so much more grave. Especially,” and he made a little old-fashioned bow, “for a jolie femme like yourself. It is always bad to have an eye removed.”

“You mean — ” Mary Elizabeth could not recognize her voice, or believe the sounds it was uttering — “you mean that my — eye — must — come — out? You mean it must come out like the eye of a fish?” The strange voice trailed off.

The doctor nodded his head as miserably as though he had never before had to break such news to anyone, and he spread his surgeon’s hands in a gesture of regret.

For a moment Mary Elizabeth was stunned, then to her horror she heard herself burst into a peal of laughter and remark, “And I have been taking beauty treatments and going to reducing cures! Only a short time ago was worrying about the possible disfigurement of a broken nose!”

Then, as the tears continued to drop off the point of the old doctor’s beard, she added, more to cheer him up than be flippant, “It is I who should weep, cher Maître, not you. I think instead that I shall buy some new clothes. I can always be laid out in them, you know.”

The old Frenchman’s face brightened. “Bravo!” he cried. “People decry vanity. Myself, I have always found it carried some of them over the worst crises of their lives. Did you know that the Chinese write the word ‘crisis’ with two characters? The first meaning ‘danger,’ the second ‘opportunity’? But tell me, my child, did you never receive a blow? Think back. Perhaps a motor accident? A fall when riding or skiing? A tennis ball? Did anything, or anyone, ever hit you?”

Mary Elizabeth opened her mouth to say no, when an incident that she had wanted to forget came back crystal clear, each detail as though etched on steel.

She was just off the Orient Express. (What a part trains had played in her life! She would have chosen for her crest not the curled ostrich plume of heraldry but the smoke of an express train dropping over the horizon.) Throughout the twenty-four hours from Paris to Bratislava she had been living for the moment of reunion with Béla. After a two weeks’ absence, she was carrying the feel, and the smell, and the bulk — the joy of him — in her senses. She had been savoring it in advance. First, there would be the grinding of the brakes, then he would be shouting at her, filling the station with his thunderous welcome. Then there would be his kiss, his mustache stiff with little icicles from the bitter Slovak cold; the feel of his old hussar’s coat, against her cheek; the smell of the pomade with which he slicked back his tawny hair.

But the Bratislava station was empty of Béla’s gay, towering presence. Without him the place seemed stark and very foreign. Vilmós, the short Hungarian chauffeur waiting at the exit, seemed more alien than a gorilla, which he closely resembled.

It was a long drive back. Long and cold over bumpy roads. The wind, which seemed as though it had cut the gap through the Little Carpathians by its very intensity, shrieked through the canvas curtains of Béla’s racing car till even the heavily furred Vilmós shivered. Finally it was over and she was back at Palöd, past the barrage of menservants waiting to kiss her hand, up the chilly stairs, and sitting on Béla’s bed, where a bout of flu had kept him for the last few days. (It was a large bed, but his panther-like bulk made it seem restricted.) He didn’t believe in fresh air for a cold, and Mary Elizabeth’s head ached and spun with the heat given out by the porcelain stove and the vapor from the steam kettle. The antlers against the whitewashed walls became a forest of trophies that danced before her eyes. On the old-fashioned bed table the potions his old Slovak cook, whom he always sent for when he was ill, brewed for her idol’s grippes and migraines jostled a handful of cartridges that surrounded his army revolver.

It was late. The conversation had been going on for a long time. Too long. There was argument. Endless argument. This time not about money. Not even about women. This time it was about men, or, to be more exact, a man — the banker fiancé Mary Elizabeth had thrown over to marry Béla, a dried, very correct Bostonian. All pleasure in her brief holiday had vanished; all joy in her homecoming had gone. Though a child could have seen that she was desperately tired, Béla would not let Mary Elizabeth go.

“It isn’t true!” she repeated for the twentieth time. “It isn’t true, I tell you. Why should I lie to you? How can you think such a thing of me? You know how I feel about infidelity. Surely you know that I care only for you? Haven’t I proved it over and over again? Yes, I went out to dinner with him. Why not? Don’t be so medieval. Do you want to put me in une ceinture de chesteté? You know perfectly well that we dine alone with men in America!”

Then, as the disbelief kept mounting and mounting in him, she almost shrieked, “It isn’t true, I tell you. I wouldn’t think of such a thing. You know I wouldn’t!”

Perhaps he himself had a guilty conscience, but by then Béla’s conviction of infidelity on her part was driving all sanity before it. As well try to stem a flood tide as convince him now. Watching him through a haze of exhaustion, she saw his pupils grow slitted, like a cat’s. Then, spitting out a short word, he reached for the revolver.

Her hand got to the cartridges one split second before his did. As long as she lived she would hear the clatter of them on the hardwood floor. Long before their din had fallen away the great revolver came down over her temple with a crash. For the first time in her complacent life she knew the meaning of fear, the value of flight. She took to her heels, and locked and bolted the double doors of her room.

The next morning, across the breakfast table, Béla looked at her with genuine amazement. “ Why, my Elizabeth,” he said, “what is the matter with you? That is the very worst black eye I have ever seen. Where did you get it? What could you have done?”

“Don’t you remember?” she said wearily; then, when she saw he didn’t, still more wearily she told him.

“But my Elizabeth,” he said, taking her into his arms, his voice deeper than ever with tenderness, “ that is a quite impossible story, for I love you so!”

That was the incident Mary Elizabeth wanted to forget; but it came back to her crystal clear as she stood looking out the old French oculist’s windows at the most beautiful city in the world. The long line of chimney pots, the Eiffel Tower straddling the world, the golden bubble of the Invalides floating above the luminous grayness that is the essence of Paris, the Seine flowing by the bookstalls, the flower markets, the towering, fleecy clouds — would she ever see it again? The chances seemed slim. But there was no use telling all that to the old doctor. So presently she turned to him and shook her head.

“No, cher Maître, I can recall no blow or accident. What day do you wish to operate?” Then, because he looked as though he were going to weep again, she added, “Be sure you give me time enough to get together a few clothes!”

After that her marriage disintegrated. Little by little she adjusted herself to a new existence in Paris. Rumors of Béla came to her, but she had lost all interest, as if what she had been through had atrophied all feeling towards him. She bore no resentment, for you cannot resent a force of nature, but that chapter was over.