THE CICERONE
suffering, and the young lady clucked sympathetically as he gasped
out,
((The Possessed, The Possessed."
To the newcomer in the com–
partment, however, the young man's condition appeared strange.
"What is the matter with him?" the young man, deep in the depths
of
his
joy, heard an odd, accented little voice asking; then the young
lady's voice was explaining, "Dostoevsky ... a small political center
... a provincial Russian town." "But no," said the other voice, "it is
Togliatti, the leader of
Italian
Communists who is in the next com–
partment. He is coming from the Peace Conference where he talks
to Molotov." The words,
Communist, Molotov, Peace Conference,
bored the young man so much that he came to his senses instantly,
sat up, wiped his glasses, and perceived that it was the Bounder
who was in the compartment, and to whom the young lady was now
re-explaining that her friend was laughing because the scene on the
platform had reminded him of something in a book. "But no," pro–
tested the Bounder, who was still convinced that the young lady had
not understood
him.
He appeared to come to some sort of decision
and ran out into the corridor, returning with a Milanese newspaper
folded to show an item in which the words,
Togliatti, Parigi, Pace,
and
Molotov·
all indubitably figured. The young lady, weary of ex–
planation, allowed a bright smile as of final comprehension to pass
over her features and handed the paper to the young man, who could
not read Italian either; in such acts of submission their conversations
with Europeans always ended. They had got used to it, but they
sometimes felt that they had stepped at Le Havre into some vast
cathedral where a series of intrusive custodians stood between them
and the frescoes relating with tireless patience the story of the Nativity.
Europeans, indeed, seemed to them often a race of custodians, didactic
automatons who answered, like fortune-telling machines, questions to
which one already knew the answer or questions which no one would
conceivably ask.
True to this character, the Bounder, now, had plainly taken a
shine to the young lady, who was permitting him to tell her facts
about the Italian political situation which she had previously read
in a newspaper. That her position on Togliatti was identical with his
own, he assumed as axiomatic, and her dissident murmurs of correc–
tion he treated as a kind of linguistic static. Her seat on the
wagons-
(
55
