The character Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) in Hitchock’s The Lady Vanishes,
released in 1938, the year Mandelstam died,
having tea in the dining car with the charming
but penniless musicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave)
when she glimpses the name that Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty)
had left on the window, a second before it evaporates.
She bolts from the table and desperately addresses the travelers around her:
“I appeal to you, all of you—stop the train. Please help me.
Please make them stop the train. Do you hear?
Why don’t you do something before it’s too late?”
Redgrave and duplicitous psychiatrist Dr. Harz (Paul Lukas)
attempt to restrain her but she breaks away.
Before pulling the train’s emergency cord and collapsing in a dead faint,
she cries out: “I know! You think I’m crazy, but I’m not.
For heaven’s sake, stop this train. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
Amid the fascist shadows she is driven to hysteria
because a text has disappeared before it could acquire other readers.
Raphael Rubinstein, “Poem Begun on a Train”