Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

She fled away down the corridor. I was feeling pleased with myself as I returned to my coupé. I had made two excellent and useful contacts already.

My mood was spoiled by the sight of a fat, great-coated major with handle-bar moustaches and a single glaring eye (the other was covered by a cap), stumping up from behind me and growling: ‘You should be in bed, young man. What’s the matter? Think the Boche have captured the train?’

‘I was wondering why we had stopped.’

‘Because of the snow. I’ve been to investigate. We’ll be hours late. Cold’s cracked a rail, apparently. Too many trains. They’re doing what they can. They say. A lot of people working out there now. I’m supposed to be joining my regiment. They’ll be at the front by the time I arrive in Peter.’

As on the Odessa-Kiev express, I would normally have been glad to have spent as much time on the train as possible, but Sergei Andreyovitch’s peculiar behaviour had stressed my nerves.

With some reluctance I returned to my compartment. The dancer lay with his arms thrown out of the bunk, dangling down, a dead swan. I had to dodge past the arm to resume my own bed. I kept the light on for a while as I read an old copy of Flight magazine which Captain Brown had found for me. The main article was about Curtiss’s experiments with sea-planes in America. The thought of a ship capable of travelling on air, land and sea had occurred to me before. Under the shadow of Sergei Andreyovitch’s gently swaying limb, I fell asleep planning a gigantic vehicle, part airship, part plane, part locomotive, part ocean-liner. The size of the Titanic, it would be capable of flying over obstacles (such as icebergs) and therefore be the safest vessel known to Man. I imagined my name painted on its sides. All I needed were a few industrialists with faith and vision, and I would change the whole nature of travel. No longer would trains be stuck in snow-drifts, reliant on lines and the weather and workmen digging with shovels. At the touch of a switch they would be able to lift into the sky. Was it possible to produce a form of hot-air cannon able to melt the snow in front of a train? The old-fashioned snow-plough blade was not very efficient.

Our Russian trains in those days frequently ran on time no matter what the weather. The War had begun to affect everything very quickly. Or rather, I suspect, the War became an excuse for the inefficient, just as the Revolution was later to supply similar excuses. Now the excuses have somehow become incorporated into the system itself. Delays in trains are deliberate. Part of some five-year-plan to make the rails rust from lack of use. And if the reader should wonder why all the inventions I dreamed of half-a-century ago are still not a reality, do not blame the inventors. Blame the fools who were too lazy to build them; blame the unimaginative bureaucrats who introduced politics into science and instead of developing, for instance, the Zeppelin range of airships, or comfortable flying boats, or high-speed monorail trains, chose to devote their energies to making useless economies. I sometimes think Icarus must have crashed simply because someone supplied him with sub-standard wax.

The train had moved forward a little by morning. At breakfast Sergei Andreyovitch stayed only to take a cup of coffee and then sauntered back to the coupé when his request for a glass of vodka was refused. I guessed he was going to avail himself of his cocaine. Marya Varvorovna gave me a lingering, conspiratorial look, which I found very pleasurable. She sat some tables distant, with her stiff-backed Scottish nanny: a woman who wore plaid as if she were going into battle at Culloden. It was loud enough to be a weapon in its own right. I imagined people were grateful when she wore her street clothes, which were of an ordinary battleship colour. She had a long, red nose, fading red hair and even her eyes had a distinctive red glint. I was glad Marya Varvorovna thought it inappropriate to admit our meeting of the previous night. If the nanny had approached me I believe I should have dived into a snowdrift rather than cope with that hideous creature. Even Marya had been clad in a tartan dress, though of a less vulgar collection of hues. She wore what I later learned was ‘Royal Stuart’. By special decree any non-Scottish commoner is allowed to wear this particular pattern. Nanny, I now know, wore the plaid of her own Buchanan clan. It emphasised the tight sallowness of her skin.