Night Journey Read Online Free

message in the days ahead.
    Shaded blue lights on the quay, the throb of engines; crew all too busy to pay me attention, but one detached himself to show me my cabin. I had hardly unpacked my few things before the little tramp was under way. I had already seen the last of England, for when I went on deck half an hour later the land had vanished into mist and darkness.
    For some days the weather had shown signs of breaking, and we met autumnal winds. I am a miserable sailor, and the long trek round the north coast of Ireland was an experience which only Biscay forced me to forget.
    Not a pleasant trip, but between bouts of nausea I re-read Bergendorff’s Der Chemische Krieg , and Meyer’s Der Gaskampf und die Chemischen Kampstoffe and several others. I felt myself out of date and out of toucin.
    The Tagus safely, and not an enemy plane or ship; but once or twice I had been so low that a periscope would have been a diversion. Lisbon as the only neutral Atlantic port was a clearing house of gossip, and I found it crowded with refugees washed up like flotsam by the tide of Nazi aggression. All nationalities and political colours rubbed shoulders in the common misfortune: French socialists and Polish aristocrats, Belgian cabinet ministers and Rumanian oil magnates, Dutch bankers and Spanish republicans. Germans too, men of importance in the National Socialist world. One I recognised whom I had last seen in the third car of Hitler’s triumphal entry into Vienna. Perhaps they wished to be sure that Portugal should not feel neglected.
    Feeling better with dry land underfoot, I went at once to seek out the man who had been told to expect me. I located him in a maze of narrow streets below the National Library and near that pleasant shady, the Prace. A Jew and a seller of antiques, he was so much like Gielgud’s Shylock that I expected him at any moment to cry, “An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven: Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? No, one for Venice.”
    In the event it would not have been inappropriate.
    But in fact he was not concerned for my soul nor for his own, but only for my personality. I lost it. In the back room of his little shop, I lost it, together with luggage, books, clothing and Anglo-Austrian identity. No change in actual appearance, but I found that my name was now Edmondo Catania, that my passport had been issued by the Italian government, that I lived in Lisbon and occupied a comfortable flat overlooking the gardens of St. Pedro de Alcantara and had an office in the city from which I carried on a business as agent representing one of the largest silk exporters in Rome. My hair, said my passport, echoing my old one, was dark brown, my eyes grey, my height five feet ten inches. I had been born is Turin and my age was 35. I was, it seemed, returning to my own country to volunteer for military service.
    This patriotic plan I now put into practice, travelling over-land to Madrid and thence to Barcelona. From here I caught another tramp steamer bound for Venice, and spent the early days of the voyage reading some papers which bad been provided and which I was respectfully requested to commit to memory and then burn.
    Colonel Brown had really told me very little of what was ahead, and these papers were nothing to do with the future. They only told me what sort of a man Edmondo Catania had been in the past.
    Even though this little tramp was a neutral, the captain seemed in no mind to take undue risks, with the sudden collapse of France, and trigger-happy Italian and British warships liable to appear over the horizon at any time, so we hugged the coastline most of the way, and as a result we did not reach Venice until the afternoon of October the ninth, when she berthed four days behind her own pessimistic schedule.
    I was very anxious now. Four important days had been lost and might ruin the whole enterprise for lack of time. No one had said where I must stay, so I booked a room in a hotel