Some of this I told Trüe as we sat in the summer-house. The easy bits. When I reached England I had suffered so much at the hands of interrogators, official and unofficial, that I had got little sequences off by heart and they tripped out readily, like a favourite after-dinner story, worn a bit thin with repetition but nice and smooth.
When I reached the end I realised that I had two listeners. Besides Trüe there was Lisa who had perched herself on the bank behind the summer-house.
“If you’re quite finished entertaining the jeune fille,” she said, “I’ve got a message for you. Lady wants you.”
“If it’s all that urgent, you could have given it to me without sitting there eavesdropping.”
“But I love hearing you tell it,” she said. “Never, never, do I get tired of it.”
“There is no need to sneer,” said Trüe. “And he was telling it to me, privately. Not to you.”
“I am sorry if I intruded. Next time I must knock.”
I left them at it. In the hall I met Major Piper. He was coming down the stairs and looked pleased with himself.
“Morning, Waters,” he said.
“If you’ve been talking to Lady, as I gather you have,” I said, “you are perfectly well aware that my name is not Waters.”
“Matter of fact,” said the Major, “knew it all along. See you soon.”
He tripped away down the steps into the forecourt, whiffling his stick.
Buffoon.
By the time I reached Lady I was in a cold temper.
“Before you start telling me what I can do and what I can’t do,” I said belligerently, “let me tell you something. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to see Thugutt tonight. All I want from you is a decent map and I can find my own way.”
“Of course,” said Lady. “But why a map? I had already arranged for a guide.”
“Oh, you had, had you,” I said, feeling deflated, and looking for some further cause of offence. “About time too,” was all I could think of.
Lady grinned like a cat. It always pleased him to get someone on the wrong foot.
“The delay is regretted. Normally this journey affords no difficulty at all. There are men in the frontier trade who make it six times a week. But recently there have been complications. Unforeseen complications.”
He wandered across to the map.
“Unofficially the frontier has been shut. Unofficially, but quite effectively Why, I do not know. The Hungarians have staged an exercise for their so-called Western Army. It has been going on for three days.”
“Just why should that worry me? I don’t want to go into Hungary at all. Thugutt lives in Yugoslavia.”
“That would be a valid argument if the frontier was a nice straight line and if it were on the plain. Unfortunately it is far from straight and far from flat. In fact the only easy way to Thugutt’s used to involve two crossings of the Hungarian frontier. That is now impossible. But we are not idle. An alternative route has been worked out. It involves its own hazards. I think you will find it amusing. I believe that rock climbing is one of your numerous accomplishments.”
“When do I start?”
“Young Franz Schneidermeister is taking you. He will be here at seven o’clock.”
I thought a bit about footwear and decided in the end to stick to my rubbers. It didn’t look like rain, and anyway I couldn’t have got hold of a set of nails and broken them in by seven o’clock that evening. Franz turned up to time and we set out. He was a pleasant youth, and had, as I soon noticed, all the tricks of the mountaineer’s trade, including the deceptive, short paced, shuffling stride which seems slovenly on the flat but takes you up mountains at a pace you need to be very fit indeed to keep up with.
He didn’t talk a lot. We started by making a long cast back, into the foothills, striking almost due west, and keeping off all roads. Then, very slowly, we veered south, and began to climb. We must have made a seven mile point from Obersteinbruck (it was every bit of ten on the ground) before we halted. We had reached an outcrop of rock, shaped like a fish standing on its head; and here we rested, and Franz smoked a cigarette.
“Harder now,” he said, with a grin.
We turned almost back on our tracks and began to climb steeply. Night had come whilst we rested. The moon would not be up for another two hours. I kept one eye carefully on Franz’s white shirt collar, which bobbed before me in the darkness like a rabbit’s scut and the other on my footholds. It was difficult to judge, but we seemed to be running head on into a wall of rock.
Suddenly, incredulously, I found I was treading on railway sleepers.
It wasn’t old, disused line either. The metal rail of the single track was gleaming in the starlight.
Franz stopped for me to catch up with him and we squatted down beside each other.
“Where the hell does this line go?” I said. “And what construction gang of angels flew up here with it? Don’t tell me it takes us through the mountains into Yugoslavia.”
Franz was enjoying my bewilderment.
“It goes through the mountains—yes. But not into Yugoslavia. No. We are in Yugoslavia already.”
“Come again.”
“We crossed the frontier line ten minutes ago. It is not always along the peaks. Here it lies on this side.”
I knew enough about European-style frontiers to realise that this might be true. Not all frontiers in Europe – in fact very few of them – are marked with fence lines. Usually they are invisible to the eye of anyone except the cartographer and the diplomat; and in mountain country the actual custom and control stations lie well back, in the foothills.
“Where do we go from here, then?” I said. “And what’s the snag?”
“The snag,” said Franz, “is that.” He indicated the cliff face which stretched across our front. It must have been the result of a geological fault. It looked sheer and dangerous.
“If we go round it, we run into trouble. Guards at both ends. So we go through it.”
“By the railway tunnel?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds all right,” I said. “Lead on.”
“It is far from all right,” said Franz, seriously. “And you must listen very carefully to me and do what I say. First, you must understand, it is not a passenger line. It is a working line for the Gold-Kranz High Ore Mine. Second, if they did not need this ore very badly, I do not think the tunnel would be used at all. It is more than a mile long, and has no ventilation except at the ends. There is a pump which drives the air along, but that does not always work. Last year a train broke down. The driver and his assistant were both dead when they reached them.”
I swallowed twice and said, “All right. We’ll just have to hope the ventilation doesn’t break down tonight.”
“That is not the greatest danger,” said Franz. “One of the reasons we made such a long detour was so that I could watch for trains. It is a single track. There is only one engine used. If we had seen a train go past, in either direction, we should have been safe for six hours.”
“I didn’t notice any train,” I said, thoughtfully.
“No,” said Franz. “No train. We just take a chance, yes?”
“Do they run at night?”
“Sometimes at night, sometimes by day. There is no time-table.”
“What do we do if a train comes? Run ahead of it?”
“If a train comes, you must throw yourself forward, quite flat, against the side of the wall. You will be in the angle, you understand. There is no room to lie beside the track. And throw your arms above your head. That way you will occupy less space.”
I looked hard at Franz to see if he was joking. He seemed quite serious. When we reached the tunnel I began to believe him. The people who had cut it had not wasted an inch. The engines were diesel-electric, and there was no smoke disposal problem, and therefore very little head room. There was very little room anywhere. The tunnel had simply been tailored to fit the engine.
“We walk on the right,” said Franz. After that we stopped talking, and started walking.
Whether the air-drive was working or not I don’t know, but before I had gone a hundred paces I was pouring with sweat. It was easy going, if somewhat lopsided. My left foot was on the sleepers. My right in the very narrow channel between the end of the sleepers and the wall.
The darkness was more than absolute. It seemed to take on a positive quality of its own. If you shut out every scrap of light from a room, and then shut your eyes, and then put a black cloth over your head you would get a notion of it. When I looked down at my watch the figures were startlingly bright. We had been walking for ten minutes. It was at that moment that I knew that a train was coming.
At first I had thought it was my imagination. I had been hearing trains inside my head ever since I got into the tunnel. Then I found that I could see Franz. A faint glow of light was diffusing the absolute darkness. Then the rail began to shake beside my foot.
When Franz looked back over his shoulder it was light enough to make out the expression on his face, and I saw, with a sick start, that he was afraid. I realised suddenly that all his glib talk about the tunnel was second-hand. He had never been this way before; or else he had never been caught in it.
“Could we not run?” he said.
“Useless,” I said, sharply. “It’s travelling five times as fast as we are. We’ll do just what you said. And get down now. We don’t want to be spotted.”
I thought, privately, that being seen was the least of the dangers. The engine carried a single headlamp, slung rather high, and even if the driver had been looking down, the edge of the track must have been in bewildering shadow.
I was flat on my face, half of me pressed against the wall and half against the granite chips of the rail bed. I wished that I had had a few minutes to scratch out even the shallowest of graves.
Noise, and more noise. Light and the smell of hot metal.
Alphabet forward. Alphabet backwards. Kings and Queens of England.
Things I have said all my life, when waiting to be hurt.
I reached William and Mary before the engine got there.
The only thing I was not prepared for was the built up pressure wave, which hit me, and, I thought for a wild moment, actually lifted me, clear of the ground.
A hot iron finger passed up my back.
Then a roaring diminuendo; and comparative silence.
Shakily, we climbed to our feet. Ten minutes later we were in the open. My coat was hanging loose from my shoulders. Some projection from the engine had caught it and ripped it from hem to collar. I rolled it into a ball and hid it in the bushes.
“Now we climb,” said Franz.
It was a difficult little piece of work and it put us both back into humour with ourselves. We were climbing sideways out of the mouth of the tunnel – presumably to avoid a guard post in the opening of the valley. I could have done it alone by day. By night, I am not sure. The moon was a help but it would have taken time to make out the holds, and any sort of difficult climb is best done with a quick, smooth rhythm.
Following Franz was a pleasure. Once or twice, to start with, he looked back at me, but as soon as he saw that I could handle myself he went straight ahead. There was a piece of chimney work near the top that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Tiger’s route on Clogwyn d’ur Arddu. Then I could feel the summit ahead of me, and the soft breeze of dawn.
We rested for ten minutes. Without my coat it was too cold to stop longer. Then we started slowly down. First the bare rock, changing to undergrowth, and after that the dwarf pines of a nursery plantation. When we came out of the woods the dawn was on us. The sky lightened and a streak of red ran across the eastern horizon; then, with almost tropical speed, the sun was up, chasing the long, black shadows to the west.
Franz said, with a grin: “Ready for breakfast, Major?”
I noticed that we had come to the top of a man-made pasture. Lower down, peeping from a fold in the ground, was a chimney.
It was a log cabin, solidly but prettily built with its carved and painted shutters, standing on a shelf, one end cut back into the lee of the rock. A pocket handkerchief of flower garden spilled down from the open side.
I was so enchanted by the picture it made that I did not at once realise that Franz was worried.
“What is it?” I said.
“Why no smoke?”
“Perhaps they are not up. It’s very early.”
“There should be smoke,” said Franz.
We slithered down the stony path, and went up to the door. Franz knocked. There was complete silence.
He turned a very white face.
“There’s something wrong,” he said. “He has a dog. A wolf hound. He at least would have heard us.”
“Perhaps they are away.” I was whispering too.
Franz pushed on the door. It swung open. The main room was quite empty, the fire cold. For form’s sake we climbed into the attic, and then came down and looked into the lean-to. Then we came out again, and looked at each other.
“I hope,” said Franz. “I hope—” He stopped, and added quickly. “There was a little girl, you see.”
I had known, for some minutes. Now I was coldly certain.
(It was evening, and I was back, in a forest in south Poland, peering from the undergrowth at a ravaged farm.)
The beast had placed his foot down on that upland clearing. I could almost smell the fresh spilt blood.
It took us an hour to find them. They were in a shallow grave, under the turf at the bottom of the garden, the child and the dog with them. They cannot have been more than twelve hours dead. They looked very peaceful.
We put the turf back and let them lie. It was a pleasant place, and they were together.
In the early afternoon we started back.
This time we took no chances. We lay up in the bushes overlooking the tunnel mouth until the train had gone through. Then we followed after it. I knew it must be all right but even so I was sweating before we started. There was no point in making a big detour on the way back, so as soon as we got out we went straight down the hillside. Just under the escarpment I spotted a small white stone, which may have been a frontier mark.
It was scrambling more than climbing and an hour of it brought us out of the woods, to a vantage point.
Far below us, artificially small, Steinbruck huddled against the river. On our upland shoulder the sun still warmed us but the shadows had already reached out to envelop the town.
A violent spasm of shivering took hold of my whole body. I could keep no part of me still and the sweat was running in a cold stream off my face.
Franz said: “It is nothing. A night’s sleep will cure it. If you do not fancy the castle, I can lend you a bed.”
“Lead me to it,” I said, between chattering teeth.
We turned off the path a mile or so, I judged, above the castle. A few yards inside the wood stood a cottage which might have come straight out of Hans Andersen. An old lady opened the door to us and cackled at the sight of Franz.
He said something to her in dialect and I found myself sitting in front of a fire with a bowl of hot milk.
Ten minutes later I was in bed, and dropping down. Down a’down the deeps of thought. I seemed to turn, three times, right over in the air as I fell; into a pit of unconsciousness that was deeper than any sleep.