sea and I do not like it.”
Mr. Kusitch leaned across to speak, fumbling with the straps of his seat. Dr. Maclaren nodded vaguely. He was annoyed with Mr. Kusitch for formulating the thought in his own mind.
“Very little to worry about,” he mumbled. “With radar and beams and things, there’s nothing to it.”
Mr. Kusitch failed to notice the irritability in the young man’s voice. His round, mournful face was as trusting as a dog’s.
“You relieve me, Herr Doktor. It would be very inconvenient to spend the night in Brussels. Not that I am unfamiliar. Do you know Brussels?”
There was something of the limpet and a good deal of the bore about Mr. Kusitch. He had introduced himself before the Acropolis had been out of sight, and all the way across Europe he had chatted. He, too, was booked for London, yet Dr. Maclaren had never once thought of him as a neighbour. Mr. Kusitch was, in every stitch of his clothes, a foreigner; a foreigner with a return ticket in his wallet. An amiable little man with a pathological need for company.
The girl two seats ahead was regrettably without that need. She sat alone, an isolate. She was obviously so sure of herself, so self-contained, that it was difficult to imagine her responding to any approach from a stranger.
Her name was Miss Meriden. He had heard the air hostess address her as Miss Meriden.
“You do not know Brussels?” Mr. Kusitch was not to be ignored.
“No. I’ve never been in the place.”
It was a mistake. Andrew Maclaren realised it at once.-”Don’t be grieved, Herr Doktor. If the sad fate swallows us, I shall make it the pleasure to be your cicerone.”
The wide mouth with the overhanging upper lip expanded in a smile, but the eyes were anxious, seeking reassurance from the Herr Doktor. The eyes were a cold grey, and there was something peculiar about them in addition to the slight cast in one of them. The strangeness, though, was only a momentary phenomenon, fugitive. You might even say furtive. Something looked out that should have been hidden. You decided that here were the eyes of a frank nature, pleading the honesty of their possessor. “See,” they said. “This little Kusitch is a good fellow. He puts everything on the counter. There is nothing up his sleeve.” Then it came: the flick of a shutter that hinted at some unnameable mystery.
It was a common peculiarity these days. Andrew Maclaren had met it frequently among the outcasts and fugitives who had been his patients. Sometimes he had known it for the mark of a concentration camp, or of some other horror endured. Sometimes its origins had remained unknown. Then it had made him uneasy, and his mind had been filled with tales he had heard of secret collaborators, of fears and betrayals, of greed and desperation more terrible than ordinary suffering.
Yet for this odd little man, Kusitch, you could surely accept one of the more innocent implications. He was a clerk, a messenger, a government servant. At most he would be the chief of some minor bureau in one of those countries beyond the Adriatic. The Slavonic suggestion in the name meant little. Mr. Kusitch could be a currant merchant from Smyrna, a tobacco salesman from Beirut, a shipping agent from Port Said. All Andrew knew was that he was a passenger from Athens to London.
“You are very kind,” Andrew said, “but I don’t imagine we’ll see anything of Brussels. The plane will be waiting to take us on.”
He was wrong. When they landed a few seconds later, the airport officials met them with the announcement that the fog was thick over southern England and all services to London had been suspended. Andrew damned the weather. Kusitch expressed himself in what was probably his native tongue. Andrew hurried across the tarmac, looking for the girl. He had lost sight of her in the process of disembarking. She had been one of the first out, and by the time he reached the top of the gangway she had disappeared. There was a turning and milling of passengers and friends who had come to greet them. Only a few of those passengers were booked to go on; for the rest, Brussels was the end of the journey. A second plane had just arrived and there was some congestion at the passport control.
He squeezed ahead of a stout woman with a bulging suitcase.
The girl might be in difficulties. The self-assurance so manifest on the plane might not be equal to this situation. There were circumstances in which it might be no joke to be stranded in an alien city. Dubious characters were only too ready to take advantage of the lone foreigner. Now, if ever, was the time for a neighbour to keep a neighbourly eye open.
It is possible that Dr. Maclaren’s prolonged acquaintance with the terrors and confusions of a vast social upheaval had induced in him a certain naivete about the better-ordered centres. It is also possible that his capacity for self-deception had suddenly increased. The suspicion did, indeed, cross his mind that his anxiety about the girl might be related to his appreciation of her profile, but he promptly rejected it. It had been agreeable to examine that profile when he found the opportunity, agreeable to speculate on the character of its owner, to see nobility in the line of the brow, sensitivity and delicacy in the fine modelling of the nose, warmth and gentleness in the curve of the lips, firmness in that nice chin. It had been agreeable, too, to think of chances that might promote acquaintance, because he thought a man might find a good companion in such a girl; but he was not one to make a fool of himself over an attractive girl. Aesthetic appreciation was one thing, practical assistance to a distressed fellow countryman another.
So his eye was really neighbourly when a group in front of him dissolved and he saw the girl arguing with a porter. And, just as he had feared, she was in difficulty. The porter was waving his hands and shaking his head, and it seemed that she was trying to make him understand something. Now was the time to walk up and take charge of the situation, to give the man in his stammering French the order that her English could not convey to him. Yet now was the time when shyness seized Andrew, and he could not budge.
She frowned. She spoke with obvious insistence about something. The porter shrugged and waved his hands again. She seemed more disturbed, and looked round the long hall as if seeking something or someone. She needed aid. Her eyes rested upon Andrew or they looked through him, beyond him, not seeing him. For a moment he wasn’t sure. Then he was. He saw appeal in her look, and, once positive, he acted on impulse. She had seen him on the plane, and now, in distress, she knew she could turn to him.
In the instant he was guiltless of opportunism. She was just another displaced person in need of assistance. He crossed the narrow space between them with assurance.
“Can I be of any help?”
Her blue eyes opened more widely in mild surprise. He was near enough to see that the profile was not an entirely adequate index of her loveliness. Or he had been too long away from her kind and saw more beauty than was there. At least one might not deny the eyes. They could be devastating.
They were. The surprise in them seemed to change to apprehension and cold suspicion. They were plainly seeing him for the first time. They were made of blue ice.
“I beg your pardon,” she said.
He felt himself shrivelling. There was an eternity of horror in which he tried to think of something to say.
“I was on the plane. I thought I might be able to help you.”
“Thank you,” she answered. “I can manage.”
She turned her back on him; then, crying a name, she ran towards the far door to greet effusively an elderly fur-wrapped woman who had just entered. It was a moment before he realised that Mr. Kusitch was at his side again.
“Ah, Herr Doktor. I have found out the arrangements. They hope for resumptions to London in the morning. Seats are reserved for us on the plane at ten hours. Soon we go by autobus to the terminal building. The air people will help us with accomodations for sleeping the night.”
Andrew watched the girl leave the building with the fur wrapped woman. He was almost trembling now with anger and humiliation. So that’s what came of trying to help people! For his part she could sleep the night on a concrete floor.
He looked at the little man at his side and felt a twinge of compunction. Kusitch was at least human and friendly. He was talking now, gesturing towards a counter on one side of the hall. There were formalities.
Andrew recovered his humour suddenly. He laughed.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Mr. Kusitch beamed.
