The Unconquerable (13)
By:
September 24, 2014
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Helen MacInnes’s 1944 novel The Unconquerable (later reissued as While We Still Live), an espionage adventure that pits an innocent English woman against both Nazis and resistance fighters in occupied Poland. MacInnes, it’s worth noting, was married to a British intelligence agent, which may explain what one hears is the amazing accuracy of her story’s details. Under the editorship of HILOBROW’s Joshua Glenn, the Save the Adventure book club will reissue The Unconquerable as an e-book for the first time ever. Enjoy!
No longer would Madame Knast have thought of calling her paying guest’s rooms ‘nice.’ Here the disorder had spread too. But it was of a different kind. There was a friendliness in the opened suitcases sprawling over the floor, in the bottles standing on the table, in the saucers filled with cigarette-ends, in the sheaves of ill-arranged papers beside the typewriter on top of the bookcase, in the blankets hanging over the armchairs. Candle-ends burned cheerfully in the necks of three empty brandy-bottles. Roughly hacked sardine-tins and a piece of marbled sausage, a knife and a corkscrew and a tin-opener, completed the still-life on the table. The window now was boarded up.
The man who had been washing the cuts on his cheek in a bucket of much-used water paused in drying his face with a shirt to stare at the newcomer. Another man, with a decided wave to his hair, had one foot on a chair and his trouser-leg rolled above the knee while he wound a puttee-like bandage round his calf. He had paused to look up at her, and he kept looking at Sheila while his fingers finished the knot on the ragged piece of muslin round his leg. Sheila recognized the remains of Madame Knast’s best white curtains lying at the man’s foot. A third man struggled with the waist-band of his trousers. He must be Jim. He was staring, too.
“Well, it certainly can’t be Madame Knast,” said the man who was drying his face, and he threw the shirt into a dark corner of the room. He had spoken with a decidedly French accent.
“No, thank God,” the American said. Then he began slowly and carefully in Polish, “Did you come to see Madame Knast or Stevens? Madame Knast hasn’t been here for almost two weeks now. Stevens will be here any moment; We are expecting him.”
Sheila made an incredible effort. “He sent me. Here.” The words seemed to have been uttered by a stranger.
The man called Jim said, with a hint of cockney in his vowels, “You’re English, aren’t you?”
Sheila nodded.
The man with the wave in his hair tucked the last strand of bandage in place, unrolled the wrinkled trouser-leg methodically, and walked stiffly over to her. He bowed with great politeness and said, “Gustav Schlott. You must be Miss Matthews. Steve has spoken of you.”
The men lost their first curiosity. Another kind, more subtle and less staring, took its place.
“Have a chair,” suggested the black-haired American. He tipped one forward to empty it effectively of its mixture of clothing and books, and carried it over to her.
Schlott had noticed her hand and was searching for the first-aid box. It had wandered considerably from its usual place, and no one seemed to remember who had put it where. With Swedish perseverance he found it at last, stuck inside a biscuit-jar.
Jim was saying with humour made heavy in his embarrassment, “Don’t tell me you’ve been out for a stroll in the moonlight.”
Schlott smeared her hand generously with petroleum jelly. His middle-aged, heavy face creased in a smile as he patted her shoulder encouragingly. “That will cure it. Now, would you like vodka or wine or schnapps?”
“Wine,” the Frenchman said decisively. “It’s both nourishment and drink.” He chose a bottle carefully from underneath the table, kissed it mockingly and uncorked it gently. “We can even offer you some food. Bill, our American friend here, has produced a suitcase of delicacies. There is pâté de foie gras or caviare or pâté de foie gras. Bill is a very wise man. He chose to save these tins of food rather than his clothes.”
Bill said, “Nuts. That was the first suitcase I could grab. That and my manuscript. Just didn’t get round to finding my clothes.”
“All I’m dreaming about is a slice of soft white bread, with lashings of butter, and a pot of tea,” Jim said. “Never thought I’d sink to dreaming about them.”
Bill handed her the wine in a kitchen measuring-cup. “Try this,” he urged.
Sheila wished she could smile. They were all so eager to help her, as if they had read in her face all she had seen and heard in these last hours. She raised the cup slowly, but when she tilted it the rim wasn’t at her mouth after all. She only realized that the cup’s rim was pressing below her under-lip when the wine trickled coldly down her chin and splashed on her coat.
The men exchanged quick glances. Schlott unclenched her hand as gently as he had applied the Vaseline, took the cup, and held it to her lips. She swallowed the wine in quick, hard gulps.
“What about resting on the couch?” Bill said. He was already arranging a blanket for her. “Sorry we can’t offer you the bed next door. But there are a couple of fellows in there, dead to the world. You can go on sleeping here until Steve or one of us gets back again. Steve doesn’t know it, but his boarders are increasing. We’re the Bombed-out Brigade. This part of the city is the luckiest, so here we are. Steve’s going to be the most popular guy in Warsaw before the siege ends.”
“A doubtful honour,” murmured the Frenchman, looking around the confusion in the room.
The Swede was tucking the blankets methodically round her legs, folding them envelope fashion. “Warmth is necessary,” he was saying to himself.
Jim, watching him, nodded in agreement. “Lord, the things we’ve learned in the last weeks!” he said as he helped Schlott arrange everything to his satisfaction.
“Try to sleep. Yes?” Schlott said, and then moved away with Jim to sit and talk quietly with the others. They kept their voices low, but everything they said now sounded twice as loud to Sheila, as if, by lying so still and not having to move or talk or make any effort, her power of hearing had been strengthened. She wasn’t listening, and yet she heard every word in spite of the constant roll of noise from outside. She wasn’t sleeping, and yet she felt she wasn’t in this room. It was only the body of Sheila Matthews and not Sheila Matthews which lay so still.
The serious voices argued on. The problem was ammunition: for the last week it had been rationed sparingly. The problem was food: none was left in the shops, and the warehouses had been bombed to bits and the city was surrounded. The problem was water: the waterworks had been destroyed, and the old wells were inadequate now. The problem was the hospitals: with so many in ruins, so much equipment destroyed; thirty-six thousand wounded soldiers and more than that number of civilians lay on floors and in corridors. The problem was the burst water mains; the sewage pipes blasted; the increasing tempo of night raids which made burial more difficult. The problem was the guns which smashed day and night at the city: they were getting worse and worse, and soon people wouldn’t be able to move about the streets to help where they could; no human being could stand this much longer.
The serious voices argued on. The only thing they agreed about was the fact that there were problems.
Schlott came over to her once more. “Not asleep?” he asked gently.
She could answer him now. “I’m much better, thank you. I’m all right now.”
He seemed pleased.
He turned back to the others. “Time to go now,” he said to them. The men gathered up their odds and ends of equipment silently. And then they started to talk again as they left the room. They filed out slowly. Only by their slowness, not by their faces or by their voices, could you tell that they were loath to leave this room. Here at least you could rest. Here at least you were together. Here at least the walls shut out the sight of the streets.
When the storm of sudden tears had passed and she was calm again Sheila listened to the bursts of snoring from the sleeping men next door. How strange, she thought, to be able to sleep like that through all this shell-fire; and then she remembered that she had slept equally deeply through the worst raids in the early part of the siege. But this shelling was worse than the bombing. The centre of the city must be crumbling. Bill, that new American, was right. Steve had chosen a lucky spot for his apartment. Steve… Sheila found herself wanting to smile at the precise way in which she had called him “Russell.” Of course, his friends would call him Steve. Russell was probably only used by his great-aunts. She sat up on the couch and moved her legs on to the floor. She was feeling better now. She had almost smiled for a moment. Are we really all heartless? She wondered in amazement and shame as she reached the boarded window. Two hours ago she couldn’t have smiled. Two hours ago all she could do was to walk and walk and walk. She couldn’t even think then. She hadn’t been afraid of bombs or shells or things lying before her in the street. Now she could smile. She could think. She could be afraid.
The bedroom door was flung violently open, and a thin, dark-haired man stood staring at the candle-lighted room. “They’ve gone, damn them. I told them to waken us.” He spoke bad German. Behind him stumbled a young man, with rumpled hair and a blond beard. They looked at Sheila curiously for a moment.
“Where did they go?” the bearded man asked. He had the soft accent of Vienna.
“I don’t know. They left about an hour ago.”
“You are a German?”
“No. British.”
The two men forgot about her. They were searching for their coats, cursing the others for having left them behind even out of thoughtfulness. The dark-haired man was probably Spanish, Sheila guessed, as he burst into a long stream of fluent phrases which neither she nor the bearded Viennese could understand.
“If we miss them,” the Viennese was saying, “tell them we’ve gone to the Poniatowski Bridge. Tell them to come along there when they’ve had some sleep. They’ll be needed there.”
The Spaniard nodded, took a drink of wine, and passed the bottle to his friend. Together they left the room. The Spaniard was limping. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and an armlet round the sleeve of his torn jacket. The Austrian had stuffed some empty bottles into his pockets and carried two in his hands. They were discussing something about petrol for the bottles.
Sheila was alone once more. She moved a board which had been fastened only at one end so that people could ‘open’ the window. She stared towards the north, to the heart of the city. It was bright red.
RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HILOBROW’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.
READ GORGEOUS PAPERBACKS: HiLoBooks has reissued the following 10 obscure but amazing Radium Age science fiction novels in beautiful print editions: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire.”
ORIGINAL FICTION: HILOBROW has serialized three novels: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic); Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda (which includes original music); and Robert Waldron’s roman à clef The School on the Fens. We also publish original stories and comics. These include: Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Flourish Klink’s Star Trek fanfic “Conference Comms” | Charlie Mitchell’s “A Fantasy Land” | Charlie Mitchell’s “Sentinels” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | John Holbo’s graphic novel On Beyond Zarathustra (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly” | FANFICTION CONTEST: Lyette Mercier’s “Sex and the Single Superhero”