As I bowled down that road between the pine trees, the darkness on either side of my headlamps expanding and contracting in an alarming manner, I tried to marshal my thoughts. It wasn’t easy. The fact is I was over-driven. I had eaten nothing for more than thirty-six hours, and was already in the sharp grip of fever. I had the stars to steer by. The Austrian-Yugoslav frontier line lay due west, and I had a very limited time to make the most of the enormous slice of fortune that had dropped into my lap.
Expressions such as “Sealing all exits” and “Warning all posts” flashed into my mind and I tried to consider them dispassionately. How quickly, in fact, could road blocks be set up around a given area? First of all they would have to pick up what was left of Colonel Dru; then the guards would have to telephone the headquarters; and a plan would have to be made; and instructions sent out. It was not as if they were expecting anything of the sort to happen.
I decided that I had at least half an hour in hand. Very probably more. I looked at my watch. It was ten past one. Say I had been going for ten minutes. I then glanced casually at the speedometer and noticed that it registered ninety. Kilometres, not miles, but it was a lot too fast for a blindish road, at night and I eased my foot on the accelerator.
The frontier would lie between twenty and thirty miles away. Clearly I could not drive right up to it. But with any luck I could break the back of the journey.
Road fork. Locate Orion. Fork right.
Twenty minutes.
Scattered light ahead. A village. No, a town. Steady, boy. This is one of the places you don’t want to go through. Even if there’s no one briefed to stop you. Towns have ears.
I brought the car down to a crawl, and turned out the headlamps. We were already in the outskirts. A road lined with tall, solid houses set back in their gardens; just like the Banbury road where it runs into Oxford.
What I wanted was a turning. Not just something that was going to lead me a dance through the residential quarter and back into the main road again, but a real turning, that turned. Preferably to the right, for in that direction lay the frontier.
It was whilst I was worrying about this that the petrol gave out. The car gave a warning cough. I looked at the gauge, and the next minute there I was, coasting slowly down the road, with nothing behind me but the power of my own momentum.
Luckily we were on a gentle slope. On my left I saw an open drive way, swung across the crown of the road, and put the car in. We made perhaps ten yards before we crunched to a final stop. Around me the silence was complete. Such noises as there were came from inside my own head.
It was only when I got out, that I realised just how shaky my legs were.
I tottered back to the entrance. It was a Private Sanatorium. Doktor Coloris. Pathology and Remedial Exercises. Quite so. Since my car was blocking the Doctor’s front drive I could only hope they didn’t get up too early at the Sanatorium.
My legs came back to me a little with use. I recrossed the main road, took the first turning to the right, and set my course westward. It took an infinity of time to shake off that town. First the big houses gave way to small houses. Then the small houses degenerated into shacks and bungalows. And finally, at about the turn of the century, I struck the allotment belt.
Don’t stop now. All you’ve got to do is lift one foot and put it down. Then lift the other one and put it down in front of the first. If you do it long enough it gets you somewhere in the end.
As I dragged myself up on to the shoulder of the hill, out of the town, up into the woods and fields, a breeze began to blow against my hot face. It was the little, old, cold wind that heralds the dawn.
Most of the time, Colin was walking with me. I could hear his voice, bland and reassuring, just behind my left shoulder.
“The Shah, of course, has a personal distrust for the Kaiser.” Of course, of course. “The Kaiser, despite their comparable family background, has little use for the King of Spain.”
When I got to the top of the ridge, and the down slope started helping my legs, I started on another instalment of thinking.
Ahead of me lay the frontier. In the growing light I could see that same line of hills that I had looked on, in reverse, from the ramparts of Obersteinbruck. It seemed attractively near and I could get up to it, if my legs would keep on working.
And once I got there, I should be recaptured. In my present condition if a girl guide jumped out and said Boo to me I should fall flat on my back.
When I got over the crown of the ridge, I saw that attaining the frontier line was not going to be as easy as it had looked.
About a mile ahead of me, hidden before by the swell of the ground, was a broad cleft. Occupying the cleft were a river, a railway line, and enough houses to make a long village or a short town.
My legs carried me a hundred yards or so closer before my mind ordered me to stop, and I sat down on a rock.
This was no place for me. Lights were coming up in the windows, an engine was shunting on the line, and, even as I watched, some hooter began to blow.
The sound seemed to blow a small measure of sanity back into me.
What I had to do was to get back into the open country behind me and lie up for the day. At the same time, since any search must start from the car, the greater distance I put between it and me the better. My best course would be to go along my side of the valley, until I was clear of the town ahead of me, and there find shelter.
I wanted a lateral path, and after a short cast I found one going in the right direction. Perhaps I ought to have been warned by the fact that it was going downhill. For ten minutes later I turned a corner and the path became a roadway among houses.
And there was at least one man in the roadway.
I swung quickly to my left, saw an opening, and went up it. It was a steep place, with rock steps cut in a clay gulley; probably a spate of water ran down it in the winter months. I turned the bend, and squatted down, my heart bumping.
I heard the man pass by the entrance, and move on up the road. His pace was unhurried and I guessed he had not seen me.
The gulley was too public for me to think of stopping in it. I prayed it might lead me out on to the hillside.
I went up it slowly. At the top it opened out, on to a small plateau, on which stood a square, stone building. What I was in was a short cut or back entrance to this building.
The main road continued on round the side of the hill and served the front of the house which looked like a farm house. No it wasn’t. It was a shop. There was a board, with something written on it.
I crawled closer and read “Josef Radk. Importer of and Dealer in Fine Wines” and in smaller letters, underneath, was something which brought the blood to my face: “Agency Schneidermeister.’’
It was an outside chance, but any chance was better than the certainty of discovery. My legs would take me no further. And if I sat where I was, the first village child using the path as a short cut to school would fall over me.
I scrambled up, and shambled across the open space in front of the house. The front door was open, and I fell through it.
Sitting on a high stool, at a desk littered with papers, a cup of coffee in one hand and a pen in the other, was a man.
He looked up quickly as I came in, put down his cup, and said: “You look as if you have come far and fast.”
I had an impression of a square white face and of steel-rimmed glasses, behind which lived a pair of watchful eyes. His manner was reserved, but I noticed that he did not seem unduly surprised or alarmed by my irruption into his counting-house.
“Yes,” I said. “I have come far and fast. Not that I am unused to travelling. A recent journey with young Franz Schneidermeister—’’
“Ah, yes,” he said. “You know Franz. Might I suggest that you sit.”
He pushed a chair quickly under me and I folded into it. Waves of fatigue were billowing up round me like smoke clouds, and the fever was playing tricks with my eyes. I heard a clinking behind me and a glass was pushed into my hand.
“Drink it,” said the man sharply. “All of it. Don’t play with it.” It was schnapps, half a tumbler of it.
“Now,” said the man, “tell me no more than I must know if I am to help you.”
I said, “I got away last night from Police Headquarters. I don’t know exactly when it was. I stole a car and drove for about fifteen miles. Then I left it, in a town.”
“How far away?”
“Hard to say. Perhaps four or five miles. It is over the crest, and in the next valley.”
“Feuering, yes.”
“Then I walked.”
“Who has seen you?”
“So far as I know, no one.”
“You are English?”
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
I told him.
“I thought it might be you. How is Lisa?”
“Miss Prinz,” I said, “was quite well when I saw her last.”
I tried to think about Lisa and was alarmed to find that I could not see her face. As I tried desperately to focus her, she turned into Henry, sitting, foursquare, on one of the terrace seats at Twickenham.
And they were playing now. The stands were packed from floor to roof. There go the forwards, working the ball down the field, a check, then out, scrum half to centre, centre to wing, streaking for the line, the crowd roaring; rising as one man and roaring, roaring.
My next clear memories are of the pinpoint flashes from a torch, coming and going between long ages of blackness; blackness in which my mind wandered free, mostly traversing the past few weeks of my life; sometimes I woke for a moment at the sound of a scream, realised that I was listening to my own voice, and dropped back again into the hinterland of illusion. Then there was the taste of soup, which I drank from time to time; and over all, pervading the darkness, assaulting my eyes and ears and nose until it became so much part of the background that I came to accept it, the sour smell of the lees of wine.
On the third night my fever left me, and some time after that I awoke to full consciousness of my surroundings.
I was lying on a pallet bed, swathed in a cocoon of blankets. The floor under me was packed earth, and the wall, a few inches from my left side, was brick.
The darkness was almost complete, but using my fingertips I made out, more or less, that I was lying under the actual staging which supported two or three huge wine barrels. The left side and foot of my bedroom were the rough cellar wall, the right hand side was the wooden staging. I felt backwards behind my head, and in doing so touched a pitcher which held, as I found when I tasted it, a weak mixture of wine and water. I gulped down a mouthful and went to sleep again.
Next time I woke there were several lights showing, and one of the barrels was being shifted. The steel spectacles of Radk gleamed round at me, and his voice from the darkness said: “Lie still, we are moving you to more comfortable quarters.”
Hands seized both ends of my pallet bed, and it was lifted.
“I expect I can walk,” I said.
“I doubt it,” said Radk. “In any event it will be quicker to carry you.”
It wasn’t a private suite at the Dorchester, but it was a nice, clean little room in the attic, and there, that evening, Radk came to talk to me.
“We have been able to bring you out,” he said, “because the search has passed on. The police have been here twice in the last five days. Not to ransack us, you understand, but on routine searches. The strength of the ripples, out here on the circumference, suggest that you must have dropped quite a large stone into the centre of the pool,” and he looked at me owlishly through his glasses.
“Five days,” I said. “How long have I been here altogether?”
“Today is the seventh day.”
“How soon can I move?”
“It was only, I think, the fever of exhaustion. You should recover now quite quickly. If you get about and use your legs a little tomorrow and more the following day, you should be strong enough to make the frontier on the third day. It is only five miles. But we must see how you go. Have you reason for haste?”
“I was thinking of you,” I said, lamely. “I don’t want to get you into trouble now—”
But I lied. It was the hellish country that I was in a fret to be clear of.
“As I was about to say, there should be no difficulty in reaching the frontier. Whether you could cross it at this moment.” He shook his head.
“Is it so difficult?”
“Normally of course not. But now! I forget that you have been out of the world for so long.”
He went away, and came back with a handful of newspapers.
There was a good deal in them that I found interesting. The first item which caught my eye was an account of the funeral of Colonel Allesandro Dru. It appeared that he had died in a motor accident. Swerving to avoid a child his car had left the road and struck a telegraph post. Szormeny had attended the funeral in person.
Promotion for Major Becker.
But this was small beer. It was the happenings on the political front page that took the eye.
At first, the references were guarded. Labour unrest had occurred in isolated centres due to dissatisfaction over differentials. Heavy Industry and Transportation were chiefly affected. The police had made a number of arrests of agitators and the situation was in hand.
Like hell it was in hand! The headlines grew thicker as the storm gathered.
Two days later the word “General Strike” was first mentioned and prominence was given to a pronouncement by Szormeny.
“I shall not disguise from you,” he said in black type, “that the situation is grave. It is by no means desperate, and, if all do their duty, this latest attempt to throttle our economy and disrupt our regime will fail, as earlier attempts have failed. I myself have taken personal charge, during the crisis, of the essential supplies. Coal, electricity and water undertakings. And of all goods and passenger transport. There is not the least cause for alarm. Hoarding will be punished. My message to you all is – defeat this attempt by continuing to live your normal lives.”
There was a heavy, competent, common-sense ring about this announcement which I found disquieting. Could a strike ever make headway against a state-in-arms?
However, I could not help noticing that whilst urging his compatriots not to take any alarmist precautions, David Szormeny was not practising all that he preached. A very small item caught my eye. It said: “Madame Szormeny, with her two children, has moved from her home in the Eastern Provinces to be near her husband, who is at his post of action in the west. In times like the present, she told our representative, a wife’s place is near her husband.”
Radk came in at this moment, and I said, “How much have the papers got?”
“About half the truth,” he said. “It started slowly, but yesterday, at Kaposvar, men were ordered to take out certain trains and refused. The leaders were shot. That stiffened the resistance.”
“Can it succeed?”
“Of course it cannot succeed.” He sounded cross. “There is a division of infantry in Kaposvar already. If necessary they will add tanks, guns, aeroplanes. How can it succeed?”
“Perhaps it has succeeded already.”
Radk looked at me sharply, as if he suspected a good deal more meaning than I had intended.
“The mere fact of a strike,” I explained. “The fact that the authorities have not been able to conceal it from their own people and from Western observers. I should call that a victory.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Radk. “Certainly.” He added, “A friend of yours reached Pecs yesterday.”
“A friend? Do you mean Lady?”
“The same. He has his courage, that one.”
Of a sudden I felt a fever to be gone.
“The frontier was never more difficult,” said Radk gloomily. “You will need your legs and your arms, and your wits. You should sleep now.”
No doubt I needed sleep. But it was long before I attained it. My mind was in turmoil.
Next day the papers were ominously quiet, but Radk, who seemed well informed, told me that the centre of resistance had moved south to Pecs. I spent the day eating and drinking and doing Mullers exercises on the attic floor to try and get some strength back into my legs and arms.
The next day Radk had some reassuring news for me. “The watch on this frontier has slackened,” he said. “One of our men got through last night. I think the truth is that the people they wanted to keep out are all inside Hungary by now. Attention has shifted south with them. You could try your luck tonight, if you wished.”
For an hour that evening he instructed me in the ways of the ‘passeur’.
“You cannot go directly into Austria,” he said. “The country is altogether too flat, and too open. And since it is the obvious way, it is closely guarded. But I will take you on the back of my motor-cycle. Here, you see, on this map. We pass between Pecica and Nadlac and I drop you about – there.”
After that he made me memorise the route, until I came to a place called, in Hungarian, the Valley of Twists and Turns.
“It is a strange place,” he said. “Twisting sharply, as its name implies, and very steep, like the course of some ancient river. Only there is no water at the bottom. Simply fine white sand. You will know it at once when you see it. Beyond is broken ground, with good cover, rising steeply. The actual frontier line is a mile on, and almost unmarked. The guards are all on the valley, but it is a very difficult place to watch. That is why we choose it for crossings.”
“The Yugoslav frontier?”
“Yes. You will be touching the extreme north-eastern tip of Yugoslavia. It is quite deserted. There is a cabin, which you will reach after an hour’s further climb—”
“It also is deserted,” I said.
“So. You knew Thugutt?”
“I found him,” I said. “And his wife and child.”
That was the last talk I can remember with Radk. He took me, by back ways, that evening after dark, to the place he had indicated on the map. He was a brave, cheerful little man, who looked more like a family grocer than a smuggler or a conspirator. I believe he was caught out and shot soon afterwards.
There was a quarter moon, and the night was clear and still, a fact which both helped and hindered. The first part of the journey I took easily, using a little compass Radk have given me. And counting my paces as a rough check on distance.
By midnight I was comfortably settled in a thicket of broom overlooking the Valley of Twists and Turns. It was an eerie place. The moonlight picked out the thread of white sand at the valley bottom, so that it was hard to realise that it was not a river.
The night wind had got up and was moving the leaves and bushes and walking amongst the dried grasses. I gave myself a full hour, and I neither heard nor saw any sign of a human being.
I found this more than a little disturbing. The shining silver ribbon ahead of me was the actual frontier; not the geographical line, but the one on which authority had put its veto and set its watch. And I have never yet met a frontier guard who could hold himself still for an hour. My plans were upset.
I had foreseen myself locating the post on either side of me, timing the movements of the watchers and slipping between them. But there was an unexplained gap. Something which I could not understand and at once suspected.
After tormenting myself with possibilities for a further ten minutes, I moved forward again. The lie of the rocks was forcing me into a used track. I felt like a mouse, treading the first mazes of some elaborate mechanical trap.
From rock to rock, from shadow to shadow. With painful slowness I reached the bottom of the ravine. Sooner or later, now, I must come out into the open. As I gathered myself for the dash I noticed, on the track beside me, and more clearly on the sand ahead of me, a confused trail of footsteps.
A number of other people, perhaps five or six of them, had passed that way, and recently.
If it was a patrol it was a very odd one, for at least one of the shoe-prints had been made by a woman.
Before I had done thinking about it I was across, and going fast up the other side of the valley. The gates of the fortress had been raised, for some purpose that I could hardly define, and it was up to me to squeeze through before they came down again.
Only when my legs started to remind me that I was a convalescent did I drop into shelter.
Not a shout, not a shot. Nothing but my own heaving lungs and pumping heart, and, as these quieted, the ordinary noises of the night.
After a short rest I went on, regulating my pace to conserve my strength. It took me more than the hour that Radk had predicted to reach Thugutt’s homestead. The plateau looked creepy enough in the moonlight, but so far as I was concerned it held only kindly ghosts.
Authority had sealed the doors and windows of the cabin, but the grave at the edge of the tree was, so far as I could tell, undisturbed.
More than once, in the next two hours, I had a feeling that there were people moving, at a distance from me, but going in my direction. The wind had dropped, and the night was still; but listen as I would I could never be quite certain. Hearing plays odd tricks up in the hills. Once I thought I heard the sharp clink of iron on stone and could hardly tell whether it came from behind me or in front.
I felt no fears of the railway tunnel. It was the easiest part of the journey.
As I came out at the other side and plunged down the hill, dawn was coming up. It was not, as I had seen it come before, a red line in the east, for light clouds lay across the sky, and there was a heavy mist in all the hollows, but the birds weren’t fooled. Like me, they knew it was going to be a lovely day.
I had forgotten that such a thing as fatigue existed; and I might have broken my leg half a dozen times as I cascaded down that slope, with the wind in my face, the birds singing like glory and the light growing every minute.
By my watch it was six o’clock when I reached the track, and ten more minutes brought me to the walls of Obersteinbruck. The main gate was wide open, but there was no sound of anyone stirring. All asleep, or all gone?
I pushed up the cobbled ramp into the courtyard.
Standing at the front doorway, his hands in the pockets of his old service greatcoat, was Major Piper.