Tales of Adventurers
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Authors: Geoffrey Household
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Geoffrey Household
For Ted Weeks
Contents
The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy
“
I
EXCHANGED
,” he used to say, “a foot for a stomach. I have no regrets.”
He said it rather too often, perhaps, but that could be forgiven to so jovial and so excellently served a host. And it was true that he had no regrets. He looked contented. That, when you come
to think of it, is a rare quality in our contemporaries: to look contented, to give out, even, a feeling of contentment.
The marked limp bothered him little – a deal less than if it had been caused by gout or any of the other ills that befall a man in his late fifties who has been generous to his body and
allowed his soul to sit in at the entertainment. Devenor could afford to be generous. Between the wars Roumanian oil had so rewarded him that the loss of concession and capital equipment was more
annoyance than disaster. He was the younger son of a younger son, but he had made more money than all the rest of his distinguished family put together.
“Twenty years of merry life,” he would say. “Twenty years of near heaven. All very wrong by our present standards. All very immoral. I was most certainly a parasite. Ah, but a
parasite has duties!” – he chuckled with ironical self-satisfaction – “And the most important is to appreciate.
“To appreciate! Wasn’t there a school of philosophy – in quieter days – which maintained that nothing could exist unless there were an observer to observe it? Well, there
you are! The first duty of a parasite is to observe and enjoy. And if he isn’t around to do it, there won’t
be
anything to enjoy.”
His Roumanian heaven had been in miniature, confined to a few thousand individuals of, by international standards, quite moderate wealth. They liked their women to be decorative and of a warm
delicacy, and gave almost equal importance to their food. They were determined to enjoy the best of two traditions – the Parisian and the Byzantine.
Their supreme achievement, the seventh seal of their culture of the palate, was the Gradina Restaurant. It was unique. No kitchen in the world, Devenor insisted, could give such a variety of
fare. Through its hundred odd years of life, the Gradina had collected the most self-indulgent recipes of three empires – the Russian, the Austrian and the Ottoman – and refined them by
careful attention to French craftsmanship. In summer Devenor had placed his stomach and both feet – all heartily intact – under a garden table, where he could look up from lights and
linen and silver into the cascading branches of a willow. In winter he had his corner seat near the entrance to the long, narrow dining room that smelt freshly of tarragon and white wine.
The utility food of post-war London was hard to bear. It had deprived him, said Devenor, not only of nourishment but of ambition. What was the use of money when the utmost luxuries obtainable
were an old goose or a slice of dead cow with the same gravy poured over both? True, he might have lived in Paris, but he had spent too many years in looking forward to retirement, his friends, his
club and London, for him to return to exile gladly.
He dreamed of Bucharest as a man dreams of his once passionate enjoyment of poetry. Yet he was careful to distinguish the ingredients of regret: youth, freedom, women, food. Youth and freedom
had gone beyond recall. Women – well, he had for them a tender and sentimental affection, as for a superb bottle that might at any moment be opened but had much better be left in the cellar
to mature still further. There remained food.
For long he could get no news of his Gradina. Then at the club he met a diplomat, all fresh from his expulsion from Roumania, who told him that the beloved restaurant was reserved for
workers’ recreation.
Devenor, still living with his memories, was almost turned into a communist on the spot. To open that supreme flower of luxury to any of the masses who could appreciate it – that, if you
like, was a justification of revolution. He said so, and his generous dream was instantly shattered.
“A tenpenny lunch, old boy. Soup and one greasy course.”
Devenor used to swear that inspiration, there and then, had come to him. Very possibly it had. Shock is a stimulant. He retired behind his newspaper to think it out. What had happened to the
Gradina’s cooks – any of them who hadn’t been commandeered for official banquets? Surely a Gradina cook must have the artist’s horror of communism? Surely he would be glad
to leave? Rescue was a duty.
From that moment in the club, Devenor, converted to the possibility of heaven, went at his task like any fanatical missionary. He saw the parallel.
“My intention,” he said, “was to save two human souls from destruction. And I don’t see that it matters a damn if one of them was my own.”
He had friends enough alive in Bucharest, and even a worthless and affectionate godson. Cautiously he wrote to them all, but received only a few picture postcards of greeting in reply. He tried
for his Gradina cook through consuls and labor exchanges and refugee organizations and old pals in the Board of Trade. He told the truth and was laughed at. He told ingenious lies and was
obstructed. At last he lost his temper with all this paper and politeness. It was plain that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the frontiers, and possibly do the job himself. It would
be an occupation, a joyous return to his early days of adventure. He loved and understood Roumanians, but all his life he had refused to take them seriously when they told him that what he had
decided was impossible.
He made no plans at all for his penetration of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to make any. Roumania might be visited by students or delegates who were prepared to wait six months for a
visa, but Devenor, a former oil magnate, would have to wait for a revolution. As for illegal entry, that no doubt was possible to some lean and hardened desperado. Devenor, however, was neither
hard nor lean; he was only desperate. He hadn’t had a decent meal in his own house for five years, and worse outside it.
For a start he flew to Istanbul. He did not confide his business to anyone, least of all to Roumanian refugees. He listened; he enjoyed his holiday; and never for more than ten waking minutes
did he forget his objective. But he could take no action beyond the patient acquisition of large sums in Roumanian and Turkish bank notes. He considered himself, he said, entirely justified in
breaking the currency laws of his own and any other country for so worthy a cause. After all, had he intended to rescue a scientist or politician, his illegalities would have had general approval.
It was not his fault that government officials could not see the superior importance of a cook.
He tried out, in imagination, many a plan. Most of them involved crawling through barbed wire, for which he was quite unfitted, or jumping overboard in darkness, which, though of buoyant belly,
he intensely disliked. He was perfectly well aware that he might have to risk his liberty, but he wished to do so without avoidable discomfort. Finesse was his game, not youthful exercise. It was
just a matter of waiting for an opportunity which would allow him to use his perfect knowledge of the Roumanian language and character.
He had to wait a month. Not idly, he insisted, not at all idly. Hotel bars, obscure cafés, frontier villages, the docks – he frequented them all as assiduously as any spy. Then, in
the course of one of his morning patrols, he found on an unguarded quay, awaiting shipment to Constantsa, the topmost section of a fractionating column. It was familiar, friendly, a section not
only of steel but of the continuity of his life. He knew the refinery that must have ordered it, the route it would take, and could even guess at the accident which had made so urgent its
delivery.
This gigantic cylinder of steel was labeled and scrawled with injunctions for speed – speed in handling as deck cargo, speed in unloading, speed in railing to Ploesti. The very written
word
Ploesti
comforted him. Even in that tough and smelly oil town there had been a restaurant where the proprietor, if you gave him warning, would joyfully attempt the standards of the
Gradina.
To Devenor the cavernous, complicated tube was home. It wouldn’t be the first time he had explored the interior of a fractionating column. And he knew its journey so well –
twenty-four hours to Constantsa and, in the merry evening of capitalism, not more than two or three days on the docks, provided his agent had dealt generously with customs officers and
stationmasters. Those minor bureaucrats would certainly do a better job now – would rail the column at once to Ploesti in a real Roumanian panic, for fear of being accused of sabotage.
He admitted that it was entirely illogical to treat a strange section of fractionating column as an old friend, and that a journey inside it was likely to be just the sort of adventure he wanted
to avoid. Still, there it lay – about to be transported into the heart of Roumania like a prince’s private railway coach. It was even divided into compartments by the bubble trays,
with, as it were, a corridor down the middle.
Devenor bought an inflatable mattress and a hamper of nourishing food. He entered the column through the manhole in what would be the top when it was erected at Ploesti. The hole was large
enough to admit his stomach, but too small to light the recesses of the interior, the forbidding labyrinth of trays and take-off legs and leads. The other end of the section was shored with timber
and effectively plugged.