He was just dropping off when something again woke him.
This time it was as though something heavy had fallen with a thud against the door.
He sprang up, opened it and looked out.
Nothing.
But to his right, some distance down the corridor, a woman wrapped in a scarlet kimono was retreating from him. At the other end, sitting on his little seat, the conductor was entering up figures on large sheets of paper.
Everything was deathly quiet.
“Decidedly I suffer from the nerves,” said Poirot and retired to bed again.
This time he slept till morning.
When he awoke the train was still at a standstill.
He raised a blind and looked out.
Heavy banks of snow surrounded the train.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was past nine o’clock.
At a quarter to ten, neat, spruce and dandified as ever, he made his way to the restaurant car, where a chorus of woe was going on.
Any barriers there might have been between the passengers had now quite broken down.
All were united by a common misfortune.
Mrs. Hubbard was loudest in her lamentations.
“My daughter said it would be the easiest way in the world.
Just sit in the train until I got to Parrus.
And now we may be here for days and days,” she wailed.
“And my boat sails day after to-morrow.
How am I going to catch it now?
Why, I can’t even wire to cancel my passage.
I’m just too mad to talk about it!”
The Italian said that he had urgent business himself in Milan.
The large American said that that was “too bad, Ma’am,” and soothingly expressed a hope that the train might make up time.
“My sister – her children wait me,” said the Swedish lady, and wept. “I get no word to them.
What they think?
They will say bad things have happen to me.”
“How long shall we be here?” demanded Mary Debenham. “Doesn’t anybody know?”
Her voice sounded impatient, but Poirot noted that there were no signs of that almost feverish anxiety which she had displayed during the check to the Taurus Express.
Mrs. Hubbard was off again.
“There isn’t anybody knows a thing on this train.
And nobody’s trying to do anything.
Just a pack of useless foreigners.
Why, if this were at home, there’d be someone at least trying to do something!”
Arbuthnot turned to Poirot and spoke in careful British French.
“Vous etes un directeur de la ligne, je crois, Monsieur.
Vous pouvez nous dire–”
Smiling, Poirot corrected him.
“No, no,” he said in English.
“It is not I. You confound me with my friend, M. Bouc.”
“Oh, I’m sorry”
“Not at all.
It is most natural.
I am now in the compartment that he had formerly.”
M. Bouc was not present in the restaurant car.
Poirot looked about to notice who else was absent.
Princess Dragomiroff was missing, and the Hungarian couple. Also Ratchett, his valet, and the German lady’s maid.
The Swedish lady wiped her eyes.
“I am foolish,” she said. “I am bad to cry.