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Tales of Adventurers

Geoffrey Household

For Ted Weeks

Contents

The Cook-Runner

The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy

The Hut

Debt of Honor

Low Water

Heart in the Mouth

The Pejemuller

First Blood

Culture

Woman in Love

Brandy for the Parson

Railroad Harvest

Three Kings

The Cook-Runner

“I EXCHANGED,” he used to say, “a foot for a stomach. I have no regrets.”

He said it rather too often, perhaps, but that could be forgiven to so jovial and so excellently served a host. And it was true that he had no regrets. He looked contented. That, when you come to think of it, is a rare quality in our contemporaries: to look contented, to give out, even, a feeling of contentment.

The marked limp bothered him little – a deal less than if it had been caused by gout or any of the other ills that befall a man in his late fifties who has been generous to his body and allowed his soul to sit in at the entertainment. Devenor could afford to be generous. Between the wars Roumanian oil had so rewarded him that the loss of concession and capital equipment was more annoyance than disaster. He was the younger son of a younger son, but he had made more money than all the rest of his distinguished family put together.

“Twenty years of merry life,” he would say. “Twenty years of near heaven. All very wrong by our present standards. All very immoral. I was most certainly a parasite. Ah, but a parasite has duties!” – he chuckled with ironical self-satisfaction – “And the most important is to appreciate.

“To appreciate! Wasn’t there a school of philosophy – in quieter days – which maintained that nothing could exist unless there were an observer to observe it? Well, there you are! The first duty of a parasite is to observe and enjoy. And if he isn’t around to do it, there won’t be anything to enjoy.”

His Roumanian heaven had been in miniature, confined to a few thousand individuals of, by international standards, quite moderate wealth. They liked their women to be decorative and of a warm delicacy, and gave almost equal importance to their food. They were determined to enjoy the best of two traditions – the Parisian and the Byzantine.

Their supreme achievement, the seventh seal of their culture of the palate, was the Gradina Restaurant. It was unique. No kitchen in the world, Devenor insisted, could give such a variety of fare. Through its hundred odd years of life, the Gradina had collected the most self-indulgent recipes of three empires – the Russian, the Austrian and the Ottoman – and refined them by careful attention to French craftsmanship. In summer Devenor had placed his stomach and both feet – all heartily intact – under a garden table, where he could look up from lights and linen and silver into the cascading branches of a willow. In winter he had his corner seat near the entrance to the long, narrow dining room that smelt freshly of tarragon and white wine.

The utility food of post-war London was hard to bear. It had deprived him, said Devenor, not only of nourishment but of ambition. What was the use of money when the utmost luxuries obtainable were an old goose or a slice of dead cow with the same gravy poured over both? True, he might have lived in Paris, but he had spent too many years in looking forward to retirement, his friends, his club and London, for him to return to exile gladly.

He dreamed of Bucharest as a man dreams of his once passionate enjoyment of poetry. Yet he was careful to distinguish the ingredients of regret: youth, freedom, women, food. Youth and freedom had gone beyond recall. Women – well, he had for them a tender and sentimental affection, as for a superb bottle that might at any moment be opened but had much better be left in the cellar to mature still further. There remained food.

For long he could get no news of his Gradina. Then at the club he met a diplomat, all fresh from his expulsion from Roumania, who told him that the beloved restaurant was reserved for workers’ recreation.

Devenor, still living with his memories, was almost turned into a communist on the spot. To open that supreme flower of luxury to any of the masses who could appreciate it – that, if you like, was a justification of revolution. He said so, and his generous dream was instantly shattered.

“A tenpenny lunch, old boy. Soup and one greasy course.”

Devenor used to swear that inspiration, there and then, had come to him. Very possibly it had. Shock is a stimulant. He retired behind his newspaper to think it out. What had happened to the Gradina’s cooks – any of them who hadn’t been commandeered for official banquets? Surely a Gradina cook must have the artist’s horror of communism? Surely he would be glad to leave? Rescue was a duty.

From that moment in the club, Devenor, converted to the possibility of heaven, went at his task like any fanatical missionary. He saw the parallel.

“My intention,” he said, “was to save two human souls from destruction. And I don’t see that it matters a damn if one of them was my own.”

He had friends enough alive in Bucharest, and even a worthless and affectionate godson. Cautiously he wrote to them all, but received only a few picture postcards of greeting in reply. He tried for his Gradina cook through consuls and labor exchanges and refugee organizations and old pals in the Board of Trade. He told the truth and was laughed at. He told ingenious lies and was obstructed. At last he lost his temper with all this paper and politeness. It was plain that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the frontiers, and possibly do the job himself. It would be an occupation, a joyous return to his early days of adventure. He loved and understood Roumanians, but all his life he had refused to take them seriously when they told him that what he had decided was impossible.

He made no plans at all for his penetration of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to make any. Roumania might be visited by students or delegates who were prepared to wait six months for a visa, but Devenor, a former oil magnate, would have to wait for a revolution. As for illegal entry, that no doubt was possible to some lean and hardened desperado. Devenor, however, was neither hard nor lean; he was only desperate. He hadn’t had a decent meal in his own house for five years, and worse outside it.

For a start he flew to Istanbul. He did not confide his business to anyone, least of all to Roumanian refugees. He listened; he enjoyed his holiday; and never for more than ten waking minutes did he forget his objective. But he could take no action beyond the patient acquisition of large sums in Roumanian and Turkish bank notes. He considered himself, he said, entirely justified in breaking the currency laws of his own and any other country for so worthy a cause. After all, had he intended to rescue a scientist or politician, his illegalities would have had general approval. It was not his fault that government officials could not see the superior importance of a cook.

He tried out, in imagination, many a plan. Most of them involved crawling through barbed wire, for which he was quite unfitted, or jumping overboard in darkness, which, though of buoyant belly, he intensely disliked. He was perfectly well aware that he might have to risk his liberty, but he wished to do so without avoidable discomfort. Finesse was his game, not youthful exercise. It was just a matter of waiting for an opportunity which would allow him to use his perfect knowledge of the Roumanian language and character.

He had to wait a month. Not idly, he insisted, not at all idly. Hotel bars, obscure cafés, frontier villages, the docks – he frequented them all as assiduously as any spy. Then, in the course of one of his morning patrols, he found on an unguarded quay, awaiting shipment to Constantsa, the topmost section of a fractionating column. It was familiar, friendly, a section not only of steel but of the continuity of his life. He knew the refinery that must have ordered it, the route it would take, and could even guess at the accident which had made so urgent its delivery.

This gigantic cylinder of steel was labeled and scrawled with injunctions for speed – speed in handling as deck cargo, speed in unloading, speed in railing to Ploesti. The very written word Ploesti comforted him. Even in that tough and smelly oil town there had been a restaurant where the proprietor, if you gave him warning, would joyfully attempt the standards of the Gradina.

To Devenor the cavernous, complicated tube was home. It wouldn’t be the first time he had explored the interior of a fractionating column. And he knew its journey so well – twenty-four hours to Constantsa and, in the merry evening of capitalism, not more than two or three days on the docks, provided his agent had dealt generously with customs officers and stationmasters. Those minor bureaucrats would certainly do a better job now – would rail the column at once to Ploesti in a real Roumanian panic, for fear of being accused of sabotage.

He admitted that it was entirely illogical to treat a strange section of fractionating column as an old friend, and that a journey inside it was likely to be just the sort of adventure he wanted to avoid. Still, there it lay – about to be transported into the heart of Roumania like a prince’s private railway coach. It was even divided into compartments by the bubble trays, with, as it were, a corridor down the middle.

Devenor bought an inflatable mattress and a hamper of nourishing food. He entered the column through the manhole in what would be the top when it was erected at Ploesti. The hole was large enough to admit his stomach, but too small to light the recesses of the interior, the forbidding labyrinth of trays and take-off legs and leads. The other end of the section was shored with timber and effectively plugged.

He took only water to drink. He prided himself on that. It was proof of a disinterested missionary spirit.

“I thought,” he would say, “that in the heat I must expect as deck cargo even wine-and-water might reduce efficiency.”

It was hot. He chose a part of the column which was shaded by wood and sacking, but he could not avoid the heat of the Black Sea sun on steel. He had lost pounds in his Roumano-Turkish bath when the cranes lifted him off the deck and dropped him onto the waiting railway truck. The drop was uneven. He used to protest, with professional indignation, that the fools must have strained every joint in the section.

He anchored himself firmly in his corner seat between bubble tray and take-off leg, while the great flatcar was violently shunted up and down the yard. At last he felt himself moving purposefully in one direction, and relaxed upon his mattress with all the self-satisfaction of a traveler who had successfully cheated the customs.

“But I was frightened,” he admitted. “Yes, sheer panic underneath. There wasn’t a minute when I didn’t wish I had stayed in London. Still, when the train started, I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself.”

He looked cautiously out of the manhole. The flatcar was at the tail of the train with only the caboose behind it. On the platform of the caboose a sentry was settling down to sleep. He was glad to see that the Roumanians still posted their unemployable military on trains to prevent pilfering. It was a comforting reminder that the national character had not changed.

The train rumbled over the Danube, and idled across the starlit Wallachian plain. Whenever it halted, Devenor, kneeling at the manhole, heard the dear sounds of his second homeland: the barking of dogs in distant villages, the sigh and swirl of the streams past their willows, the croaking of frogs. Frogs fried Colbert – that was the way the Gradina used to do them. He dozed uneasily until shaken up by renewed shunting. When that was over, he could not resist deep sleep.

The discomfort of his own perspiration awoke him a little before midday. He poked head and then shoulders out of the top of the column. He was in the shadeless, dusty marshaling yards to the south of Bucharest. So long as he drew no attention to himself, there seemed no reason why he should not walk out into the city. He did so, greeting with an air of genial authority the casual groups of railway workers who were munching their loaves in the open doors of unloaded wagons.

Devenor did not want to show himself in the center of the city. There were too many people who knew his face and liked it well enough to cross the road with outstretched arms and a whoop of welcome. His tentative plan was to get in touch, as unobtrusively as possible, with Traian, a former headwaiter at the Gradina and a staunch friend. He wandered through the suburbs until he came to a garden café, dirty and barren, but large enough to possess a telephone.

Traian no longer had a number, but there was one in the name of Devenor’s godson Ion. He was not at all surprised to find that Ion had not only ridden out the storm but provided himself with an excellent address. As an irresponsible youth of twenty he had had a police record of dangerous socialism. True, his opinions were a pose, adopted merely to annoy his intolerably correct relations at court, but those of his set who could have given him away were dead or in exile. Devenor was prepared to bet that war and revolution had only changed his godson into an irresponsible youth of thirty.

“He treated me as if I’d just dropped in from the fields,” Devenor said, “as if there were no reason in the world why I shouldn’t be in Bucharest. He even sent his car round to the café for me. He just told me that of course he had a car – how the devil did I think he was going to live without a car?”

Over lunch in Ion’s luxurious flat, this show of idle riches was explained. Godson was an undersecretary – for he had always enjoyed yachting – in the Ministry of Marine.

Devenor asked if he were a genuine communist, and got himself rebuked for indiscretion.

“My good Uncle,” Ion had said, “you really must learn not to ask such frank and English questions. Do you suppose I want to be shot by your venerable side?”

The excellent lunch was entirely unreal. Devenor seemed to himself to have moved back ten years in time, and not at all in space. Bucharest was going on – at any rate in the flat of a government official – exactly as before. At street level the June air was thunderous as ever and, six stories up, the geraniums of Ion’s window boxes stirred in the light breeze. Devenor’s favorite white wine was on the table and cool in the decanter. There were rather less cars on the boulevard below and paint was needed and the inhabitants were shabby – but no shabbier than in the early nineteen-twenties.

“I couldn’t believe it was possible to be shot,” Devenor would declare. “It was just as improbable as my godson being a communist undersecretary.”

Over the coffee he explained how he had arrived in the country and why. His godson followed the story with irreverent laughter and keen questioning. Then, at the end, he asked the most devastating question of all.

“Uncle John,” he said, “how many of us would it hold?”

Devenor couldn’t understand that at all. He asked Ion why in the world he should want to go to Ploesti by fractionating column instead of by car.

“Not Ploesti, Uncle. Turkey.”

“It isn’t going to Turkey.”

“But why shouldn’t it?”

Godson Ion accused him of becoming intolerably insular, of wholly underrating the lively genius of the Roumanian character and the powers of the people’s ministries. He ordered his godfather back to the column, insisting that it was by far the safest place for him, and told him to keep quiet and see what happened.

“But I want to talk to Traian.”

“You leave it all to me.”

Devenor disliked leaving anything to any Roumanian, and especially to his godson; but there was really nothing else to do. Godson sweetened the pill by giving him an imposing button for his lapel, a basket of food and drink, and a car to return him to the outer suburbs.

The button aided bluff. He had no difficulty in returning to his comfortable and now well-furnished seat between the bubble trays. About six in the evening he heard a good deal of fuss around the column. The curved plates transmitted the sounds of the outer world like a telephone receiver. He could not mistake orders, arguments, excitement and the slapping-on of labels. At dusk a locomotive came to fetch the flatcar and dragged it ceremoniously – like, said Devenor, a choirboy walking backwards before a bishop – along the loop line round Bucharest. The locomotive then steamed off, rocking and lighthearted, leaving the column on a remote siding in the middle of a belt of trees.

Devenor ventured out. He and his column were alone, except for the frogs and a nightingale, upon the soft Roumanian plain. There was just enough light to read the labels on the car. They were even more urgent, menacing and precise than before; but the destination was Constantsa instead of Ploesti. The waybill in its frame at the side of the car was resplendent with new red ink and rubber stamps.

“It was quick work,” Devenor admitted. “They have plenty of energy for anything utterly crazy. But it looked to me as if my damned godson had consigned us both to the salt mines. I very nearly cleared out.”

He didn’t, however. He got back into his refuge and had a drink from Ion’s basket, and then another. The effect was to make him less disapproving when Ion and a friend arrived, and shoved two suitcases through the manhole.

Uncle John was formally presented to George Manoliu of the Ministry of Mines, and was compelled by every convention of courtesy to refrain from saying what he thought. Indeed he found himself in the position of host, extending with proper flowers of speech the hospitality of his fractionating column and showing the two undersecretaries to their rooms between the bubble trays.

Godson Ion and George Manoliu spread out their blankets, and arranged a third compartment for the subdirector of Roumanian State Railways who would shortly join the party. Devenor began to think that his chance of escaping death or Siberia had improved. These two young men and the third to come, able to administer between them – at any rate for twenty-four hours – the refineries, the railways and the shipping of the State, presumably had the power to order the column to be returned to Istanbul, to move it at the expense of any other traffic, and to direct the same or another ship to stand by at Constantsa to load it. And from what he knew of Roumania, communist or not, he was certain that the respective ministries wouldn’t catch up with what had happened for at least the better part of a week.

He said that while they were waiting for the sub-director of railways he would see about his cook.

“Don’t bother, Uncle John,” Ion assured him. “That’s all arranged.”

He hoped that it was; but the more he considered the character of his godson, the more sure he was that in the excitement of organizing his influential colleagues there could have been no time for a visit to Traian or the Restaurant Gradina.

Ten minutes later the subdirector of railways arrived, with no baggage but a bottle and what looked like an official cashbox. He announced that in another hour they would be on their way to Constantsa.

“And my cook?” Devenor asked again.

“Look here, Uncle John, we’ll write for him,” said Godson Ion.

Devenor crawled out of the manhole, and from the safety of the outer air addressed the undersecretaries. He told them that he was going to get his cook, that if they wanted to stop him they would have to catch him among the trees in pitch darkness, and that if they left without him he would go straight to the political police.

“They’re still accustomed to foreign exploitation,” he would explain. “There was nothing, really nothing, that they could do with a determined Englishman in a temper. No doubt they would be equally helpless with a Russian.”

Ion quickly related the fanatical resolution which had brought his godfather to Bucharest. His two friends were delightfully sympathetic, enthusiastic indeed. This penetration of the Iron Curtain merely to obtain a cook appealed both to Roumanian pride and Roumanian love of a jest. A plan swiftly emerged from committee. It was for Ion and his godfather to call on Traian – who was still alive, and whose son might be the very man for Devenor – and then to catch the column in the marshaling yards or anywhere along the line to Constantsa.

Fortunately the trust of the three functionaries in one another was not so great that they had entirely burned their boats. Each of them had kept a car and driver waiting on a dirt road, beyond the belt of trees, all ready for swift return to Bucharest in case of accident or treachery. Mines and Railways now dismissed their cars, and returned to the column in high spirits. As soon as the road was clear, Devenor and his godson drove off in the third car.

Traian had been the headwaiter at the Gradina for twenty years, and had retired shortly before the war. If Devenor had known his address, he would, he said, have gone to see him at once, and left his damned godson to the inevitable end of his career as a commissar. Traian was a man you could trust. In all the years of his highly civilized trade he had never lost his peasant integrity.

He lived exactly where he ought to live: in the old eastern suburbs of Bucharest, where the streets of white, single-storied houses preserved something of the character of an untidy and once prosperous village. At the back of a yard, where the dusty earth just kept alive a tree, a few flowers and a couple of hungry hens, they found Traian sitting under the eaves of his house in the melancholy idleness of the old. He looked ill fed and disintegrating; otherwise he was the same Traian who had hovered for twenty years at Devenor’s shoulder, whose middle-aged wedding Devenor had attended (and attended for a full riotous fourteen hours), whose retirement had been put beyond the reach of poverty by the subscriptions of Devenor and his friends.

Traian and Devenor embraced with tears in their eyes.

“And why not?” Devenor insisted. “Why not? Hadn’t we known each other at our best and proudest? We embraced the splendor of our past manhood.”

The old man – aged by undeserved and unexpected hardship rather than years – had no fear of godson Ion. To him gilded youth, whether it was communist or whether its checks were frequently returned to drawer, was gilded youth. He talked freely. His wife was dead. His son, Nicu, trained in the kitchens of the Gradina and destined – for the Gradina thought in generations – to be the next chief cook but one, was working in a sausage factory. Traian himself was destitute. He could no longer be sure that he even owned his modest house.

“The tragedy of communism,” said Devenor, “is that the State won’t help those who can’t help themselves. Even so, Traian wanted me to take his son. Yes, at an hour’s notice. Nicu was asleep inside, before going on the early morning shift. Yes, he begged me to take his son.”

Devenor, of course, turned the offer down flat. There couldn’t be any question of taking Nicu’s support away from his father. Like a couple of old peasants, they talked the problem out unhurriedly, with many mutual courtesies, while the precious minutes of the night slipped away. Godson Ion fumed with impatience. He told Devenor not to be a sentimental fool. He told Traian not to spoil the boy’s chances. He was remarkably eloquent in pointing out that there was no future at all for Nicu in Roumania, or for any man of taste and ability who hadn’t, like himself, had the sense to join the party.

Meanwhile Traian’s voice was growing firmer, and the ends of his white mustache began to twitch into life. Devenor remembered that Traian was only sixty-eight; he decided to take the responsibility of abducting father as well as son. He felt, he said, damnably ashamed of himself for shifting such fragile cargo, but, after all, that well-fitted steel cylinder was little less comfortable than a Roumanian third-class coach. He ordered Traian into the column regretfully and decisively, as if he had been sending back a Chateaubriand for another five minutes on the grill.

“And look at him now,” Devenor invited, “when he brings in the brandy! I have to let him do something, you know. Oh, and he’ll take a glass with us, too – but I can’t make the old fool sit down to it when there are guests.”

Traian’s son was collected straight from bed, and packed into the car. He had no objection to any change, however immediate and revolutionary, so long as it took him out of the sausage factory and included his father. He was on his way to the marshaling yards before he had really got clear of a nightmare that he was making his palate into sausages; his palate, he said, had appeared to him as a large, white lump of lard.

The column had left for Constantsa. So insistent were the instructions of Railways, Mines and Marine that the yardmaster had presented it with a powerful, fine locomotive of its own. That fractionating column was going to be on board by dawn, all ready to be returned with ignominy to the corrupt capitalists who had sold it. The yardmaster expected a pat on the back from the ministry. No doubt, when he got it, it was a hard one.

Ion’s driver did what he was told without question; he knew what happened to undersecretaries’ chauffeurs who talked out of turn. They crossed the plain like a pair of headlights on the wind, but always the column kept a little ahead – for at intervals they had to bump over rutted country roads to the railway, or show Ion’s credentials to saluting police.

They caught up with their flatcar at last, halted in the sidings before the bridge over the Danube and now with a train at its tail. A more awkward place couldn’t have been found for a return to the safe recesses of the column, but they had no choice. It was their last chance, the absolute last chance. One side of the cylinder was flooded by the arc lights of the yard, as if some monstrous camera were about to take a farewell picture of it; on the other side was much coming and going of officials, and of the sentries who would ride every truck across the Cernavoda bridge.

Godson Ion told his driver to return to Bucharest if he did not come back in half an hour. He did not seem unduly alarmed.

“Of course he wasn’t! Of course he wasn’t!” Devenor crowed indignantly. “That dam’ pup had a perfect right to go wherever he wanted. As for the rest of us, we were just a problem to be shelved.”

In ten minutes Godson returned for Nicu, who went with him unwillingly. But there was no object in protesting against Ion’s plans; he controlled their fate. Devenor didn’t know what he intended, and couldn’t make head or tail of his explanations; he was only rendered thoroughly suspicious by a lot of high-flown nonsense about the young clearing the way for the old.

Traian and Devenor occupied a patch of darkness whence they could watch both the car and the column. They saw the two shadows of Ion and Nicu dive under the train. Shortly afterwards they saw the sentries posted. They waited for five more anxious minutes. Then the train started, and they watched its red taillight swaying down the track towards the bridge and the impassable Danube.

After a journey of two hundred yards the train stopped. Devenor was so angry that he marched Traian straight up the line after it. He intended, he said, to get hold of the sentry and consign the whole heartless bunch of undersecretaries to Siberia, even if he had to endure their company on the way.

The sentry was on the platform of the flatcar, just outside the manhole. He was hidden from his fellows by the bulk of the column and the tender of the locomotive. Within the column there was the silence of steel; there couldn’t be anything else from the moment the sentry was posted. That excused Nicu’s behavior. He dared not make sound or protest for fear of getting his deserted father into incalculable trouble with the police.

It was sheer anger which gave Devenor his inspiration. He informed the sentry that a man was hiding in the fractionating column, and told him to winkle the fellow out with his bayonet while he kept him covered.

“I knew my Roumanian soldiery well enough to risk it,” Devenor said. “An air of authority. A little mystery. And they’ll do what you tell ’em. There was the button, too, in my lapel – that seemed to impress him. I can’t tell you what it was. I meant to ask Ion. But thereafter I was rather painfully occupied.”

As soon as the sentry was inside, Devenor put his head and shoulders after, and gave his orders. They were obeyed on the instant, and with only one quick rumble of sound. That unfortunate sentry – no, no, now living peaceably in America – was buried under desperate politicians leaping from the corners of the bubble trays. Then Devenor told his graceless godson to put on the sentry’s uniform and take his place on the platform.

“Dam’ play actor! He stayed on guard till the cranes hoisted us off the Constantsa water front, without anyone suspecting him of worse than obstinacy, and then managed to slip inside. That was that. They discharged us onto a deserted wharf at Istanbul, and all seven of us just walked out through the gates. Or, rather, six of us walked. I was carried by Nicu and the sentry.”

At this point it always pleased Devenor to expand and beam and wait for questions.

“No,” he would answer, “nothing dramatic – no police, no bullets! Just sheer clumsiness. After the sentry had been nobbled, Nicu came out onto the platform of the flatcar, and I got down in order to pass Traian up to him. It was a bit of a strain on us two old gentlemen, and I couldn’t pull my toes clear of the wheel when the train started. Nicu grabbed, and pushed the rest of me inside the column; but all the medical supplies we had were oil and wine, like the good Samaritan. Well, at my age a foot is far from a prime necessity. But Nicu! Don’t you agree that for me, without him, now, life would be inconceivable?”

The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy

MY DEAR JOE:

It’s good to hear that at least one government has had the sense to put a round peg in a round hole, and that some small part of the security of the United States is in your hands. And thanks for kind words. My memory is that we learned from you, not you from us. But that we should both have this impression is probably what Eisenhower wanted.

So Marton Hevessy has given me as a reference. I have no reason to believe that he was ever a communist. I must confess, however, that his father always said he would end in jail. He used to say it lovingly, if you see what I mean, for he was very proud of Marton; but he was afraid, like any other father, lest his son’s nonconformity should draw upon him the resentment of the herd.

First, here is a solid fact to reassure you. In old days any Budapest bank would have given Marton Hevessy a tiptop reference. From a banker’s point of view – I’ll come to mine later – he was an honorable, enterprising commercial man who had built up his own business from nothing. Industrial design, it was. If you invented an ingenious electric shoe cleaner, for example, you called on Hevessy to give it the form which would most appeal to the public – though once in a while he would turn out a design so preposterously imperial that it would have won a gold medal at the Exhibition of 1851. That was the aristocrat in him; he considered it his duty to set standards, not to accept them. The Hevessys are a very ancient family, and Marton cannot help looking like one of his ancestors. I don’t suppose that so much tall, audacious elegance has ever been to him anything but a handicap.

What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Jo, it’s like a question set in an examination paper. State shortly what you know of Don Quixote.

I can guess what sort of answer you want: some little definite sentence which will enable you to stand up as a supporter of the traditional liberalism of the last hundred years. I wish I could slap it down on your desk; but I am not in the confidence of the Almighty. I cannot imagine Marton – so rounded, so passionate a European – as a contented American unless one of his unpredictable loyalties were engaged. I think it has been, but that is for you to judge. None of his friends could ever foretell how he would react to any new landscape of humanity, though we had absolute faith that the personal expression of his emotions – when, as it were, complete, varnished and framed – would be just as satisfying as his notorious gesture in defense of Sarita’s religion.

You’ve met Sarita Hevessy, of course. I am certain that it was she, not he (for the one time he never appealed to his friends was when he was in trouble), who told you to refer to me. I can imagine her facing you across the files on the table, all fragrant with common sense and her very great love of her husband. You refused to be impressed by all that beauty, didn’t you? You kept a professional poker face, and reserved judgment. But your first impression was right. She’s gold from the heart outwards.

Sarita! So un-Hungarian a name may have made you uneasy. Her family were Sephardic Jews, who chose to remain behind at Budapest when the Turks retreated. Reverence for their religion sat pretty lightly on her and her family. They were refreshing and agreeable citizens of the capital. And Budapest was an Eden, you remember, where nobody bothered, until Nazi and Zionist had coiled themselves around the Tree of Knowledge, how host or guest elected to walk with God. If Marton had married Sarita five years earlier than he did, she would merely have mentioned – between casual drinks, perhaps – that she supposed she was a Jewess if she was anything, and left it at that.

In 1938, however, there was a tough crowd round the Tree of Knowledge. They ate the apples and threw at each other those they couldn’t digest. Marton despised the lot of them, and took action. He wasn’t a man to address a public meeting or write a letter to the press; his revolt was personal. He told Sarita that before he could allow her to honor him with her hand in marriage he would become a Jew.

Sarita protested. She was a most capable and tolerant child, and she tried to laugh Marton out of this misplaced loyalty. Still, she was Magyar all through – for her family had loved and lived and drunk their wine and ridden their horses on Danube banks for five hundred years – and as a Magyar she couldn’t help being impressed by irresistible extravagance of gesture on the part of her lover. Marton had put himself in the class of those Hungarian magnates who ordered from Nice a special train of flowers merely to pave the courtyard for the entrance of a bride, or built a Cinderella’s glass coach that she might be carried to a single birthday picnic in the forest.

She wasn’t conceited. She didn’t think that she was worth such fantasies. She never suspected that any good citizen of Budapest would have been ashamed of his ignorance if he couldn’t tell to a visiting provincial the name of that golden arrow flighting down the Corso, with the chestnut hair and the velvety warm skin of Magyar horse and woman. No, it wasn’t any sense of her own value that made her give way to Marton’s insistence. It was just the glowing unnecessariness of any such sacrifice at all.

The Hevessy marriage was near perfect – as soon as Sarita had managed to stop her husband’s sober visits to the synagogue, which were embarrassing to everyone but himself. She didn’t prohibit, of course. She just knew how long Marton needed to tire of any of his exciting perversities. Moral for a policeman, Jo!

On which side did he fight? But what a question! Hasn’t Sarita told you that he is the most loyal man she ever met, that the key to his whole character is loyalty? He’s a Hevessy and a patriot, and of course he fought for Hungary against the hereditary enemy. Marton went off to war with Russia as a dashing captain of cavalry. A little elderly for the part, perhaps, but for youth he substituted enthusiasm – or as much of it as his hatred of Hitler allowed.

Ah, but what happened to Sarita, you’ll ask. Isn’t it easy to account for Marton’s communist sympathies? Didn’t the coming of the Russians save her from an extermination camp? No, it didn’t. Even the most rabid Hungarian Nazis would have thought it ridiculous to pester Hevessys, however they might describe their religion on a government form.

What do you know of Marton Hevessy? Well, I can answer for him in the post-war years. Siege, slaughter and Russian occupation looted from him everything movable, including, we thought, his romanticism. Just to feed his wife and children and remake his business were tasks of knight-errantry valiant enough even for him. He succeeded, and he was content. He wasn’t a worker to be bullied, or a capitalist to be ruined. He was a specialist; and whether he designed for private clients or for the State, his living was secure. Sarita was a little sad. She found herself married to a sober, tranquil professional of industry. He even used to spend free evenings with his lawyers.

I am surprised that these unusual absences did not worry her, especially since he avoided all discussion. Still, his character appeared to have changed. She might easily have thought him obsessed, like any other solid citizen in his middle forties, by some dull and technical affair such as patent rights. And lawyers are indestructible; they continue to function under the milder forms of communism so long as there is any private property left in the deed boxes.

No, there was nothing to arouse a wife’s suspicion until Marton began to take an interest in history. History, he insisted, would judge their period as one of necessary but too drastic reforms. It was the duty of a loyal citizen not to allow all the links with the past to vanish. For example the Hungarian Nobility should not be forgotten. Whatever its sins in the past, it might again – in a hundred years perhaps – be needed.

I expect that at first Sarita merely listened from one tolerant little ear, and received these magnificent lectures with a proper pleasure that her husband was enjoying his dinner. It was hardly tactful to point out that in the ten years of their marriage she had never heard Marton allow to the hereditary Nobility any value whatever.

He held his great-grandfather to be disgracefully typical of the whole class. Great-grandfather had lost every cent of the Hevessy money at cards, and was left with nothing but an entailed estate which he couldn’t sell. He returned his estate and barony to the Emperor with a request – and a model it was of dignified Hungarian prose – that his Imperial and Royal Majesty should be pleased to pay the Hevessy debts and save the Hevessy honor. He then dressed himself in full regalia and galloped his favorite hunter over a cliff, with the reins – so far as rigor mortis permitted an opinion – still lightly grasped in his left hand. It was a death in style which should have appealed to Marton, but did not.

So when Marton’s sudden passion for aristocracy grew and flourished before as well as after dinner, Sarita at last took it very seriously and connected it, quite rightly, with the mysterious visits to his lawyers. She couldn’t help assuming that her disappointingly sober husband was engaged in some crazy plot to restore the old regime and – though no doubt preserving the motherly smile on her delicious face – she panicked. She began, all unknown to Marton, the long series of intrigues and letters and pullings of gossamer wire by invisible hands, which were to take the Hevessy family out of Hungary and into your office files, Jo. She should have remembered that Marton’s revolts were always personal and unlikely to draw upon him the wrath of governments – even communist governments – but her haste was forgivable. Of every four men she had known in 1939, at least one must have been killed by politics. That omits, of course, those who were killed by war.

While Sarita was worrying herself sick over state trials and searching the papers for news of any arrests which could possibly lead to her own circle, Marton, I have no doubt, preserved an exasperating complacence – until one evening, in the midst of a terrifying week of militant communism on the march, he came home from the office and kissed Sarita’s hand with gay, exaggerated deference and addressed her as Baroness Hevessy.

She was. That was his business with the lawyers. He had been proving to the satisfaction of the High Court that great-grandfather, when he so flamboyantly paid his debts, had a son two years old, the existence of whom, in all that dignified excitement, he had omitted to mention to the Emperor. Consequently the Imperial and Royal action was void. The entail could not be broken. The barony could not revert to the Crown.

There was nothing at all that Sarita could do about it. The case was simple and, for the courts, a joyous holiday from legalizing the dictates of dictators. The lawyers had all gone to work with immense professional zest to settle a claim that was satisfyingly constitutional and wholly useless. Beyond a shadow of doubt Marton and Sarita were Baron and Baroness Hevessy.

Their friends – and believe me, Jo, every one of them will be grateful to you for giving him the chance to speak – were as delighted with Marton as at his solemn circumcision. I am told that even hardened communists took a careful look round and laughed. There is still a wry sense of fun in Budapest.

I can hear you remarking sternly that he doesn’t call himself Baron Hevessy. But of course he doesn’t! The title was only for use in reddest Hungary. It was his personal protest. He wouldn’t dream of using it in a country where it might be of some use to him.

I don’t know how Sarita got him to leave his (in spite of everything) beloved country when her schemes came to fruition. My personal opinion is that the government unofficially expelled him. He was too well known in low cafés and high, and his exquisite, unpunishable gestures might have started a fashion. However that may be, there they are in your hands. Sarita, Marton and the children.

He had a good job in America, too, you say regretfully. It must have been, if his employers bothered to make him declare whether he had ever been a communist or not.

And so he refused to answer, did he? And Sarita refused to answer for him. God, there’s loyalty for you!

Well now, Jo, I admit these questions have to be asked, for one can’t run a great country with gloves on. But at the same time I know what the effect would be on myself if I were asked to declare my politics as a condition of employment. I should answer like a wide-eyed sheep, and be ashamed of myself afterwards for not having had the guts to tell the questioner to go to hell.

But then I am not a citizen in the magnificent class of Marton Hevessy. Nothing on earth would induce me to become a Jew in a swarm of Nazis, or to provoke confession-forcing commissars by creating myself a baron, or to pass myself off as a possible communist in the America of 1951. What courage the man has for doing the right thing at the wrong time – the wrong time for his own personal benefit, that is.

Jo, what do you know of Marton Hevessy?

The Hut

THERE WAS a matter which they did not at first discuss, those two; for it was not until repeated doses of gin had deadened sensitivity that they were able to look each other in the eyes without uneasiness. Meanwhile their store of common memories, past misadventures that were always good for a laugh whenever two ex–security officers met, was rich enough to support unthinking conversation. Their enigmatic trade had been far fuller of the comic than of inhumanity. It was their job to suspect, but they were thankful when – with perhaps one yearly grim exception – their suspicions were proved lamentably wrong.

“Fayze was a bastard,” said the older man suddenly.

“He was. But I can’t say he bothers me at this distance.”

Virian meant to say “it bothers,” but couldn’t quite manage the word. The other, however, understood him.

“No. Nor me. But it did. Spoilt my sleep for a bit. I don’t mind saying so now. How did you – well, get on afterwards?”

“Sat on it,” answered Virian noncommittally.

He was obviously a man with a fine tradition of mental discipline behind him. His thin, dark face was mellow, and implied that he drew his strength from knowledge of human limitations and acceptance of human tragedy. He might have been twenty-five or so at the beginning of the war, that far-off period of which the two were talking, and a promising officer – a shade indecisive, perhaps, but slow to blame and much beloved by his men.

Medlock, the older man, was of a more plebeian type, with no more molding about his face than the accidental contours of a chunk of rock. The hammer of fate could smash him into smaller pieces than Virian, and he knew it. He was contented, however, to be as he was, and hadn’t much use for complications. He was convinced – or once had been – of his own essential decency.

“I didn’t like it,” he muttered. “Didn’t like it at all. I’d been a regular sergeant-major and just got my commission, you see.”

“That was why you didn’t protest?” Virian asked.

“What about yourself?” Medlock retorted, catching the irony. “And why didn’t you?”

“Oh, obedience,” answered the other easily. “As an amateur soldier I felt I had to do what I was told. It’s a bit hard to analyze. The enemy outclassed us in skill and material. Well, all that was left in which we could equal him was an obstinate Teutonic obedience. His not to reason why, his but to do and die. A good many of us felt like that. You, as an old soldier, were far too sensible to find romance in mere obedience any longer.”

“Hell of a thing to do,” grumbled the ex–sergeant-major. “Order us to go out and shoot a civilian!”

“They only asked us to see that he was shot,” Virian corrected him.

“Wouldn’t do you much good to tell that to the judge! We were present at a murder. Accessories. You get hung just the same.”

They began to go through the happenings of that day all over again, proper old soldiers (or old murderers) recalling every foot of the terrain, every hour of agony and disapproval since they had emerged from Colonel Fayze’s secretive office with set faces and a feeling that their integrity, their little personal shares in Christendom and civilization had been outraged.

The newly commissioned sergeant-major had been the more horrified of the two. He was accustomed to see his instructions in black and white before he paid serious attention to them. War had to be orderly, and not for nothing was his temple called the orderly room. He claimed now, ten years later, that he had been on the verge of refusal, that he hadn’t seen any necessity for violence at all.

“You did. You saw it,” Virian insisted. “Don’t make things worse for your conscience than they need be. It had to be done. What was the name of that fat crook we bumped off?”

“God, you don’t have to put it like that!”

“But what the devil was his name?”

“I don’t remember,” Medlock answered impatiently.

“Nor do I. Revealing, isn’t it? Gallant memory, always in the breach, always protecting us from night starvation! Well, it was some very common French name, so let’s call him M. Dupont.

“Dupont had betrayed – and don’t you forget that! – a whole honeycomb of French resistance cells. As a direct result, the Gestapo shot twenty-seven men and women, and sent Dupont to Spain for his own safety. Fayze’s organization kidnaped him there, and brought him to England in a submarine chaser. You knew that. And then they dressed him up in uniform and put him in a military prison as if he were an Allied soldier being held for suspected espionage.

“All very neat work! Secret-service stuff right out of the books! But Fayze and the fool who did his dirty jobs in Spain hadn’t worked out what was to happen next. They couldn’t bring Dupont to trial because he hadn’t committed any offence under English law. And they couldn’t intern him because at that period in the war there wasn’t any quiet spot where no questions at all were asked. So they had to get rid of him, and persuade the Free French to do the shooting. I don’t wonder you forget why Dupont’s death was necessary. He was a sacrifice to inefficiency. But inefficiency is a much more potent factor in war than logic.”

“Do you remember that dam’ tough with the blood on his boots whom they sent with us?” asked Medlock with a movement of the shoulders that had been turned from a shiver into a shrug.

The dam’ tough had been the only man in the party who really looked as if he had been employed on this sort of mission before. A mysterious commando lad. At least they supposed he was commando, or from someone’s private army – though he wore a gunner’s badges on his neat, new battledress. He never said a word about himself, and asked no questions. The uniform, which lacked the individuality given by daily use, made it difficult to guess what he had been in civil life. He had a simple, unimaginative face, knocked about a bit by boxing or some other violent exercise, and it was firmly set to the job in hand. Virian and Medlock had been glad that they were accompanied by an apparent professional to whom as much as possible might be left.

They knew him only by the assumed name of Smith, and it was he who drove the car – a big, black saloon with two extra seats in the back. There were five of them altogether in the car when they went to fetch M. Dupont: Virian, Medlock and two Free French. One of the Frenchmen, who was the – well, it was understood that he had a personal score to settle with M. Dupont – was a small, sad, determined man in civilian clothes; the other, in uniform, was very much an officer of the French regular army. He was of their own sort, keyed up to the inevitable by a sense of duty, and with distaste clearly mapped upon his humane and honorable countenance.

They drove to the prison. Medlock and Virian signed for the body of M. Dupont, who was officially being held as a doubtful Free French soldier until his antecedents could be investigated. Dupont had gladly accepted and lived up to this fiction. He was clever enough to realize that the longer he was kept, the harder it would be to dispose of him.

When he was in the car, Dupont’s nerve began to fail. He asked Virian hesitatingly what their intentions were. They had the answer ready for that. Dupont must be reassured. If he were to put his head out of the window and yell for help, the law of England would automatically be on his side, war or no war. Keep him quiet till the end – those were Virian’s and Medlock’s orders.

Virian told M. Dupont that he was being handed over to his compatriots: that they were driving to a rendezvous out in open country where a Free French detachment would take charge of him. This made Dupont less apprehensive. He could have little doubt what his own countrymen would do to him sooner or later, but he was also very well aware that, being good Frenchmen, they would have to invent a show of legality – which would be difficult when they were guests in a country with a tender conscience. A formal handing-over meant, for a time, reprieve.

M. Dupont sat on the back seat between Virian and the French major. Facing them, on one of the extra seats, was the sad, determined personage, looking determinedly out of the window. In front were Medlock and the uncommunicative Smith. Dupont and Virian kept up a polite and desultory conversation.

“Never been able to understand, I haven’t,” said Medlock, “how you could sit there chatting away. In French, too,” he added, as if an assassin’s proper language should be English.

“It was easier than sitting grim, and saying nothing,” Virian explained. “And Dupont helped. He was a very civilized creature. He didn’t like social embarrassment either. Good Lord, if I hadn’t known his record, I should have put him down as just a bland, fat Frenchman! All for peace and decent living, he was. That was probably what made him take the Vichy side – that and money.”

They drove away over the sweep of the Wiltshire downs in the direction of Bath. It was a golden day of late autumn, with just enough wind to ripple the massed spearheads of dying grass and to check the high hovering clouds from ever settling on the sun. M. Dupont, released from the discipline and scrubbing soap of a military prison, was enchanted, and lavished courteous praise upon the English countryside. It reminded him, he said, of Picardy.

Their destination was a disused mine-shaft with a tumble-down building above it. Colonel Fayze had given them the map reference, assuring them that Smith had visited the spot already and that the building was unlocked. Two of the planks which covered and completely hid the mouth of the shaft had been loosened, said Fayze with an obscene wink, and could be lifted out. He had shown pride – a legitimate pride from the point of view of his office chair – in the excellence of his arrangements. The disposal of Dupont on paper had had his personal attention.

After an hour’s run, Smith stopped the car below the mine-shaft. Nothing was to be seen but an isolated hut of timber and corrugated iron, with a strong door from which the padlock had recently been wrenched loose; no derrick or abandoned machinery revealed the purpose of the building and the dark emptiness beneath the floor. Fayze had well chosen his theater for the operation. There was no need for any bumping through country lanes into a suspicious remoteness, or for scrambling on foot through dense woods with a reluctant victim. The hut was within fifty yards of a main road. A carful of men could stop on the verge for a short while without arousing uneasiness in Dupont or other curious but less essentially interested travelers.

The only disadvantage was the frequent passing of traffic on the road which ran, level and clear, for a hundred yards past the hut and a little below it. At one end of the straight was a blind hill, and at the other a corner. To ensure privacy, both those points would have to be watched.

Dupont was left in the car with Smith, while the four others got out for consultation at a decent distance.

“If Medlock stays at the corner,” said Virian, “and I go to the top of the hill, we shall be able to signal to you when the road is empty.”

The French major appeared suddenly forlorn, his face that of a man who had known all along that he was an unreasoning optimist.

“I thought that you …” he began.

“No,” Virian answered firmly. “My instructions are just to keep the ring. It was definitely understood that you …”

“I could not myself … my honor as an officer …”

“Naturally, mon commandant,” Virian replied, and looked questioningly at the other, so sad and wirily small and determined.

“I have had my orders,” that second Frenchman murmured, “to accord to M. Dupont the justice he has so richly merited. I shall obey. I beg you to believe that I do not say it with pleasure. But –” he sought their eyes with a simple honesty that, in the circumstances, was monstrous “– he is a heavy man, and I shall need some help.”

“This Smith,” Medlock suggested. “The colonel said he was to make himself useful.”

True, Fayze had airily assured them that the mysterious driver was ready to do whatever he was told; but Virian was unwilling to force such responsibility upon any human being till there was some evidence of a real lack of sensitivity.

“I’ll get hold of him and see what he says, if you’ll just stand by the car, Medlock, and keep an eye on Dupont.”

He took Smith a little apart, and asked him what exactly his orders were.

“To assist you in every possible way, sir,” Smith answered.

Virian was uneasy. There was a light in the young eyes which looked uncommonly like hero worship. Yet Smith’s expression was tough and set. The very smoothness of the skin hid emotion more absolutely than the mobile lines of an older face.

“You understand, of course, just exactly what the job is?”

“I did the reccy with the colonel,” Smith assured him.

He produced the word reccy with a certain pride, which suggested to Virian that he had not been long in the army. Well, God knew what some of these young commando chaps, quickly, violently trained, must have seen and done already!

“Then will you go up with that gentleman and the prisoner to the mine-shaft? He, of course, is going to – to take the necessary steps. And, look here, Smith, refuse if you want to! This is no part of your duty as a soldier.”

“I understand that, sir.”

There wasn’t any shaking that firm professional. His attitude was so matter-of-fact that Virian began to doubt the value of his own scruples. He gave full credit to Fayze for choosing a murderer’s mate whose cold-blooded morale was an example to them all.

They took Dupont out of the car. The polite smile with which he had brightened his formal conversation was fixed at half its full extent. He looked at them, his eyes searching each face in turn with the uneasy instinct of an animal at the shambles gate.

The French major reassured him with deliberate ambiguity.

“This is the rendezvous,” he said. “It is here that you will shortly meet certain Free Frenchmen.”

Dupont again anxiously reviewed the faces. What he saw relieved him – for their orders were to keep him quiet, and even their eyes were obedient. His smile returned to its natural mobility. Two big drops of sweat trickled down his fat cheeks, shaved to a piglike smoothness for the morning inspection of his person and his cell.

Smith, Dupont and the executioner walked up over the grass towards the hut. The French major remained by the car, torturing a cigarette between his fingers. Medlock went to the curve of the road; Virian to the top of the hill. So long as both held their hands in their pockets, the road was clear. When their hands were exposed, it was a sign that traffic was approaching. Smith stood by the door of the hut, relaying their gestures to the interior.

Virian could see quarter of a mile of empty road. He put his hands in his pockets, dismissing quickly a thought of Roman thumbs. On a distant slope was a small convoy moving down towards him, but the job would be over by the time it arrived.

Medlock, at his end, kept his hands very plainly in sight. A baker’s van came round the corner, along the straight and up the hill past Virian – who now also revealed his hands, for the approaching convoy was too close. A motorcycle, a truck and six heavy lorries bumbled interminably past at regulation intervals and twenty miles an hour, adding to Dupont’s store three more minutes of October noon.

Medlock put his hands in his pockets. Virian waited for a faraway car, and damned the wheels that flashed in the sunlight for not turning more slowly. They passed, and he found his hands playing noisily with the coins in one pocket and keys in the other. He waited for the shot. It didn’t come. He was furiously angry. What were they doing inside the hut? After all this trouble! Why couldn’t they get on?

Ten minutes went by with no movement on the road but the lumbering, swift shadow of a carrion crow impatient to return to his perch. Then Medlock’s hands came out with a gesture as if he were flinging at the hut the contents of his pockets. An oldish man, instantly recognizable as a retired colonel or general, deprived – and no doubt uncomplainingly – of petrol, drove round the corner in a dogcart with his two little granddaughters. He called in cheerful comradeship that it was a lovely day. Bitterly Virian put him down as a merciful and honorable man. He could afford those virtues in the simpler wars that he had known.

Again both ends of the road were clear for long minutes, and again there was no shot. Medlock came striding back from his corner, his face that of a sergeant-major who was about to tell his paraded and incompetent squad exactly what he thought of it. Virian, too, hastened back to the car in fear lest his companion should hurl some blunt protest or, worse still, some unfeeling denial of protest, into so delicate an occupation.

“Man doesn’t know his job!” Medlock stormed.

“Would you expect him to?” retorted Virian.

The French major at the car turned on them, illogically angry as themselves. Some cutting irony at the expense of the English came beautifully shaped from his lips and died away as he became conscious of the brutal absurdity of any blame.

While they were staring at the hut, a melancholy procession came down the hill towards them – Dupont, Smith and the Frenchman, more sad than ever. Even Dupont looked disappointed. Very likely, he was. The Free French detachment, the larger public among which he would, for a little while, be safe, had not turned up.

Dupont was again left with Fayze’s tame tough, while the other four went aside.

“Couldn’t Smith relay the signals to you?” Virian asked.

“Yes,” the French civilian replied. “Yes.”

“Well, then? Well then, for God’s sake?” the major demanded.

“The hut is too small. I cannot get behind him. Perhaps he will not let me get behind him. And to draw the pistol before his eyes – no, I cannot do it.”

“Well, we daren’t hang about here any longer,” said Virian. “Someone may get inquisitive, and start watching us. We had better drive off now and come back later.”

The party packed into the car, still unexpectedly six. Dupont conversed with polite, tacit sympathy, identifying himself with the unknown derangement of plans which all had suffered. He behaved as if he were an embarrassing but useful prisoner – a double agent, for example, about to be sent off on some dangerous journey. He may even have persuaded himself that such a destiny was possible.

He addressed himself particularly to the French civilian, perhaps trying to allay his own suspicions. Dupont was a type to be successful, Virian decided, as minor businessman or major traitor, for he had an insistent cunning. He talked and talked, closely watching with eyes that held a decent pretense of geniality the impact of his words. The failure in the hut was very understandable. Dupont was tiresome; Dupont’s fat face was that of a crook; but it was impossible to treat him with anything but courtesy. To draw a gun before his face was a task as awkward as to get him out of the office without giving him a small order.

Smith had been pale and self-controlled when he returned from the hut. He now returned to his puzzling and casehardened temperament. He asked sharply where he was to go.

Well, where? Just a drive. Out for a drive. A pleasant occupation for a family on Sunday afternoon. Such aimlessness was intolerable. An order had to be given, some destination found.

“Oh, stop at the first pub when we’re off the downs,” Virian replied, his voice military and exasperated.

It was a considerable place, more of a roadhouse than a pub, which had no doubt been gay enough before the war with thirsty and fast-driving youth. Now, however, the long lounge was vacant and frustrated of purpose. Fireplace and imitation beams had been excitably decorated with paper flags and regimental badges. All this dust-laden patriotism, exposed to sunlight, had the depressing unreality of a night club on the morning after. Smith, Dupont and the Frenchman sat down at once and together, as if bound by a hard, common experience, in a corner of the room.

“I won’t drink with him,” Medlock whispered. “God damn it, there are limits!”

Virian carried three drinks to Dupont’s table, and himself remained with Medlock and the French major at the bar. For once he found himself in wholehearted sympathy with Medlock. A curious atavism, to refuse to drink with a man you were about to kill. He couldn’t remember that there was any such law of hospitality in the Christian religion; it was wholly pagan – a rule of Viking hovel or Arab tent. Where the devil, he wondered, had he inherited it? And why should Medlock observe it, too?

The French major seemed also unwilling to join Dupont, either from the same scruples or because he was busy disassociating himself from the whole affair and its mismanagement. The three of them drifted through the door to a bench on the clean stone flags outside. After a while the other Frenchman joined them, confidently leaving Smith alone with Dupont.

“I must offer my excuses,” he said. “I did not anticipate—”

Here, away from the victim, his character no longer appeared of any extraordinary determination. He admitted nothing (and one could hardly put the direct question) but plainly for him as for them this was a first experience.

“Look here!” Virian exclaimed, suddenly as compassionate for the civilian as for Dupont. “I am prepared to go back and report that this can’t be done.”

“But, alas, it must be done.”

“Why? We can keep the blighter in prison for you. If they can’t find a way of holding him, it’s their business to think of one. What do you say, sir?” he asked the French major.

“Me? I have not the right to interfere. It is your service which took Dupont, and your service which has requested us to get rid of him. Sooner or later our duty as Frenchmen must be done, but I admit I should prefer it to be by due process of law.”

So, even to him, there was no point in immediate punishment. There was a more complex, far more insistent motive for Dupont’s death than mere justice. Fayze and his precious colleague in Spain were terrified lest their too impulsive act should become known to the enemy, with whom they had a rogues’ agreement that kidnaping and assassination were barred. Such unsporting practices would have interfered with the daily game of collecting information. The end of all fun and promotion – like placing a bomb on a football field. Fayze didn’t at all want his agents kidnaped by way of retaliation; so Dupont could never be allowed to mix with other internees, to appear on any list, to write a letter or answer a question. He had to vanish for good.

It was the uncleanness of this necessity which revolted Virian. For this, for the sake of what in the end was nothing but inefficiency, he and Medlock and young Smith – it was the youth of Smith which appalled him, whether or not the man was callous – were to be turned into murderers.

“What about our orders?” Medlock asked.

“Damn our orders! If we report that the thing is too risky, they must accept our opinion. I’m not saying that Dupont doesn’t deserve to be shot. I’m saying that we can’t take the responsibility.”

“That is between you and your superiors,” the French major remarked unhelpfully.

“And mercy – doesn’t that come in?”

“One can have too many scruples,” added the other Frenchman, his voice bitter with longing for the simplicities of peace.

He, at least, had no doubt that Dupont’s sentence was just. He had become more deeply obsessed than they by the demands of war and civil war, so that in his eyes this killing served a spiritual purpose which transcended its vileness. It was only the incapacity of his own hand which tormented him.

“Well, we’ve got them. So why not admit it? We hate this. We can’t go on expecting you to do it, and looking the other way. We can’t go on testing Smith to breaking point by making him drink with Dupont just as if the man weren’t a ghost come back from the grave. Why not admit that we do have scruples and take the brute back to prison?”

Virian let himself go. A limited and painful eloquence. It couldn’t be for the defense, since his client – they all acknowledged it – was guilty; it couldn’t even be for mitigation of sentence, since that sentence, though highly irregular, though the motives behind it stank to heaven, was just. No, it seemed to him in retrospect that he had preached the virtue of mercy in futile abstract, as any poet or parson.

“The defeated cannot afford mercy,” cried that tortured executioner.

It was astonishing that a man could pronounce so neat and closed a phrase with such emotion. Evidently it was the profession of faith with which he comforted his soul – and unanswerable by citizens of a nation which did not for a moment believe itself to have been defeated.

Virian got up – it would do no harm to let the leaven of mercy work in his absence – and went into the lounge to look after Smith. His conscience was raw on every surface.

Smith was playing shove ha’penny with Dupont, like an old, experienced warder in the condemned cell.

“All right?” Virian asked. “How are your glasses?”

“Don’t mind if we do, sir.”

Virian went over to the bar and ordered two stiff gins. He beckoned to Smith to join him.

“Would you like to go outside for a breath of air?” he asked.

“I’m all right, sir,” Smith answered, with a strong, impatient accent on the right.

Hidden in the impenetrable sternness of youth he carried the drinks away to his corner, and resumed his game with Dupont. Virian returned to the others, telling himself that he was the only man among them who was not fit to be a soldier.

The French civilian, with the quick sympathy of his race for emotion, put a friendly hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and said:

“I cannot permit Dupont to live. The responsibility is mine.”

“But what do you suggest?” Virian asked harshly. “Are we to go back to that damned mine-shaft?”

“No. Somewhere else, I beg you.”

“I can’t take you anywhere else. My superiors have worked this out very well. I’ll say that for them at least.”

“In the hut I cannot – arrange it.”

“But that is only what I am saying,” Virian insisted. “It can’t be done – for the reason that it’s humanly impossible for us.”

“You would report that?” asked the French major.

“Certainly. Without hesitation.”

“We should appear to be cowards.

Medlock gave a grunt of scorn. As an old professional soldier, he had no objection to appearing a coward so long as the situation called for cowardice. Only amateurs and Latins bothered about appearances.

“And who the hell cares?” he said.

“Alas, it must be done,” repeated the civilian.

“But you’ve just said it can’t be done.” Virian almost shouted.

“I say the hut is too small,” the other insisted. “You are slow. You wait for traffic. I wait for you. And then by that time Dupont is not where I want him. I say that I cannot –” and his voice, though it was low, vibrated with agony “– I cannot raise the pistol before his eyes.”

It was the note which Virian had already heard, for a single instant, in Smith’s voice also. Through the door he could see him still playing his forced and melancholy shove ha’penny with Dupont. The situation, futile and mismanaged, was intolerable to all of them. They were like children who had broken the back of an animal by brutal thoughtlessness and then were without courage to put it out of pain – and he himself the worst of them.

This couldn’t go on. Mercy. No mercy. It can’t be done. It must be done. That civilian and Smith had first call on any mercy. If this infirmity of purpose went on much longer, one of them would hysterically free Dupont, or take him out and shoot him before the eyes of some astonished farm laborer.

“Damn Fayze! Damn his precautions!” he cried. “Listen! We get out of the car. You walk at once up to the hut with Dupont in front of you and Smith behind you. Medlock and I go to our posts on the road. We shall all arrive at about the same time. Unless there is traffic right on top of us, we shall give no signal. As soon as Dupont is over the threshold – do it! He’ll have his back to you, and he will never know a thing.”

The decision was instantly and gratefully accepted. Virian had fought for Dupont’s life and Virian had condemned him to death. He himself was well aware of what he had done. Inconsistency be damned! If one couldn’t have heaven, then hell was preferable to chaos.

“Well, Dupont,” he said, breaking up the shove ha’penny game, “let’s have another shot at it.”

The sound of his own voice in that unfortunate phrase, which he had cheerfully pronounced without thinking, made him wince and turn away.

Dupont hoped politely that the luck would be better, ingratiating himself like a circus pig that had been trained to smile. He left the board, and took down his coat and hat. He had plainly decided that for this day at least he had nothing to fear. The drinks, the genial delay and the resolute acting of his companion had put him at ease.

As Dupont heaved at his tight overcoat, Virian caught Smith’s questioning eye and beckoned to him to remain behind for a moment.

“Same positions, but it will be done through the back of the neck the moment he steps into the hut. A few seconds, and all over.”

Smith ran his tongue round his lips, and seemed about to speak. There was no longer any light of adventure in his sturdy blue eyes; they had matured, as if searching deeply, far down beyond the presumed limit of his vision, into probable consequences.

“Yes? What is it?” Virian asked, trying to put into his smile the eagerness which he dared not show in his voice.

“O.K., sir,” said Smith.

He drove the party back to the mine-shaft. The journey had the nightmare quality of life in reverse. Pub to lowland hedges, to gray villages under the downs, to clean sweep of hill turf, to the crest of the road and first glimpse of the hut – all the way back, inevitably, to the hated beginning that should have been left forever.

The French civilian told Dupont to get out and walk up to the hut. He himself followed a pace or two behind, and Smith strolled purposefully after.

Medlock hurried to the curve of the road; Virian up the blind hill. There was a car approaching which would be on them in twenty seconds. He made no signal. That was time enough if all went smoothly.

He looked round. Dupont was just entering the door of the hut. He saw the Frenchman’s pistol sweep up in a curve and cross the threshold alone, as if it were some tenuous body independent of those before and behind. The shot, too, was thin and strained. Louder and more final was the double thud of planks thrown back into place. When the car passed, Smith and the French civilian were already walking down the hill.

On the way home they all talked very heartily. Someone laughed, and there was a sudden silence. After that, they all laughed if there were reasonable excuse. Smith put his bravado into his driving. It was brutal. He didn’t seem to care whether they ever reached London or not.

“God, he put the wind up me!” Medlock said to Virian, obsessed by his companion of ten years before, “And that blood on his boots—”

Smith hadn’t noticed the blood. He had only heard it when he lifted Dupont’s shoulders. They made him get out and wash it off in a stream.

“God, he was a tough, and no mistake!” Medlock persisted. “I don’t mind telling you – he used to chase me around in my dreams.”

“He said the same of you,” Virian answered.

“Eh? What do you mean? What do you mean? I thought you didn’t know him.”

“No, I didn’t know him. But I saw a letter of his.”

“He wrote about me?” Medlock barked indignantly.

“About you … and me … and especially Fayze. Smith was just one of his civilian clerks. Temporarily unfit for general service, worshiping his boss and longing to work for him on a real secret mission. Fayze wasn’t the man to lose a chance like that; so he used him, and put him into uniform for the job. He told Smith that it was a trial trip, that if he had the nerve to assist us in every way …”

Medlock put down his drink and retched.

“That bastard Fayze!” he shouted.

“Yes. But, if it’s any comfort to you, in his dreams there are two of them to chase him around. Smith killed himself a week later. It was his letter to his parents that I saw. Fayze got it before the police. I need hardly tell you that it went no further.”

Debt of Honor

IT WAS NOT in the nature of the Bagai to weep. Their training, like that of the district commissioner now standing by the loaded lorry which was to take him from them to the coast, forbade the expression of emotion in public. Dark eyes stared over the deep-breathing line of the giraffe-hide shields. The district commissioner stared back without a word. To a stranger it would have seemed that the Bagai were parting with their most hated enemy, for he would have known nothing of the long councils, the swearings of blood brotherhood, the agony of old men who had come alone and in the night to the beloved tent, terrified for their people’s future in a changing and hostile world, as children whose father should be compelled, without hope of return, to leave them.

Overhead the clouds wallowed lazily up from the Indian Ocean, rolling westward through the gray morning like a herd of leisurely Bagai cattle towards the Bagai hills. The faint, deep lowing of thunder echoed from the edge of the escarpment where the spears of sun, radiant as in the steel engraving of some family Bible, pierced through a screen of straight-falling rain. To north and south the clouds were spreading into the heart of Africa without shedding any of their burden upon farms of white men and parched clearings of black. It was the copper-colored Bagai who had all the luck.

The warriors, their backs towards their country and the long-needed rain, paid no heed to this good fortune. At such a crisis in the little nation’s life, pasture and crops were irrelevant. Grief – collective, overwhelming grief – obsessed them. Yet their only gesture of farewell was the silent stare, answered and for the same Spartan reasons by the lonely man standing at the side of his lorry. They had no royal salute with which to send Mark Lee-Armour on his way, for they had no kings. No slaying of men or cattle could appease their sorrow, for they had no tradition of sacrifice.

The two officials, one of State and one of Church, who accompanied Lee-Armour effaced themselves from the scene so far as dignity permitted, standing apart from the austere leave-taking with the delicacy of those who are present at a friend’s parting from his beloved wife. One was the new district commissioner of the Bagai; the other was the Archdeacon of the Sultanates who had been on tour through the diocese and was seizing the opportunity of Lee-Armour’s departure to travel down with him to the coast.

The vigil of grief ended, sharply and by almost telepathic consent between Mark Lee-Armour and his Bagai. He climbed into the cab of the loaded lorry and drove off. The new district commissioner, after a few halting words of promise and sympathy to the Bagai, mounted his pony and rode away. The archdeacon’s black and gaudy driver followed the lorry, playing hosannas on his horn; he wore a clerical collar, as self-chosen badge of office, above the open neck of his yellow shirt, and he despised the uncivilized. The warriors themselves stood still, eyes raised to the mist of dust that hung, until it merged with the westward-flowing clouds, above the narrow road of rammed mud.

The archdeacon watched the swaying, uncompromising back of the lorry, a blind wall against farewells, and envied this departing district commissioner his life of devoted service to the neighbor. It was the life for which he himself, with half his being, had longed as a young man. The other half, however, had demanded from him a still higher service. Africa had happily integrated the two.

He was of the caste of the colonial officials, of their dress – at any rate when on tour – and even of their build except for a slight ecclesiastical portliness; but, unlike these younger sons of empire, he had no material need to make a career in Africa. Even the missionaries had to admit – however strictly they preserved their charity for their converts – that a man of his fortune and family who had chosen a droughty diocese of three million square miles rather than the fat lawns of an English cathedral close could not be wholly worldly. They were also glad – and glad the archdeacon, too – that his checkbook was wide open as any apostle’s moneybag.

He had looked forward to the journey. To pass three days and nights in sole company with greatness would be a memorable experience. Yet when the sun had gone down and the scrub thorn around the camp was black lace against a crimson sky, the confiding dusk was full of disappointment. Lee-Armour never came out of the shadows. In a physical sense, as well, that was true. He followed as any shy animal the pattern and contours of darkness, and after supper – an unrevealing interlude as well-bred as any formal dinner party – while they sat and smoked by the fire, his face was always half obscured by the straight column of smoke or caught at evasive angles by any sudden spurt of flame. The archdeacon assumed that the cause of this reserve was just unhappiness. He knew that Lee-Armour’s heart was still on the Bagai plateau, and would remain there, perhaps for years, until some other helpless people won his second and calmer love.

For three long days of travel and camp there was no getting close to the man. His courtesy, his solicitude for his companion’s comfort were beyond reproach, but he himself seemed to be writhing in some abyss which he did not dare to have others contemplate, or to contemplate himself. Only once did he show any emotion, and that was when the archdeacon referred to the religion of the Bagai.

“Little and uncomplicated,” said Lee-Armour. “They believe in a sort of collective soul of the people and another collective soul of the cattle. All the rest they leave to professionals.”

“Their priests?”

“A family group of witch doctors – if one can call them priests.”

“One can,” the archdeacon answered cheerfully. “Clergy is clergy the whole world over. Provided always that what they serve is the best they can imagine.”

“God knows what they serve,” Lee-Armour exclaimed with sudden bitterness.

“That is just what I meant,” said the archdeacon.

When the journey down to the sea was done and Mark Lee-Armour had gone to his hotel – that, too, was odd when there were a dozen officials in the capital, including the governor himself, who would have been delighted to put him up – the archdeacon unlocked his three-room bungalow, and spent the night awake and upon his knees. Such was his custom and pleasure on return from all the soul-deadening administrative problems of a tour. He looked forward to the long act of worship just as the district commissioner he might so easily have been would have looked forward to his bath and the ice that tinkled in long glasses.

The Archdeacon of the Sultanates had much to occupy the long hours of self-questioning, for he knew what was said of him: that he was discouraging to missionaries, that he was a politician, that he cared more for his few, powerful white rams than his uncounted flock of black sheep. He admitted that the accusations were true, and hoped that the motives ascribed to him were wrong. He was not a snob; but certainly he was convinced that no missionary, if it came to the mere measurement of good works, could surpass the utter devotion and Christian selflessness of such administrators as Lee-Armour, and that it was through them he should work.

He arose refreshed, weary only in body, and at breakfast turned to his timetable of work and engagements – an optimistic schedule which he was never allowed to fulfill. It was so that morning. With the toast and marmalade came a message from the governor, begging him to drop in as soon as possible for a private chat. His imperial self was flattered by so urgent a request, while his other self indulgently smiled at such boyishness.

Governor and archdeacon, as they sat side by side in easy chairs at a significant distance from the official desk, seemed to form the nucleus of a club. They were of the same physical structure, though sedentary life had diverted their bodies, once hard and lean, in two opposite directions. The dark-haired governor was very thin and tall, with an almost professorial stoop; the archdeacon was fairer and smoother and rounder, as if decorously to fill out the apron which he never wore. He had not avoided those worries which contracted the stomach of the governor; he merely placed them in the hands of higher Authority than the Colonial Secretary.

“Toby,” said the governor – for they were on terms of Christian names – “you traveled down with Mark Lee-Armour. What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” the archdeacon answered. “I wish I did.”

“Then look at that and tell me what you think,” the governor appealed, handing him a letter.

It was an urgent private note from Lee-Armour’s successor. It told the governor that the accounts of the Bagai Agricultural Development Fund were twelve hundred pounds short when Lee-Armour handed over, that he had quite calmly admitted the deficit and that he had been unwilling to explain why there were neither vouchers nor receipts. The new commissioner, jealous for the honor of his service, had written unofficially to the governor in the hope that the loss could be adjusted or hushed up before any official cognizance had to be taken of it.

“It can’t be true!” the governor exclaimed, exasperated by the certainty that it was.

“He was moved unexpectedly?” Archdeacon Toby asked.

“Yes. They’ve got a high commissionership for him when he gets home, and he only had a few weeks’ notice. That’s the damnable part of it. It looks as if he had been caught short with his fingers in the kitty, and didn’t have time to pay the money back. But I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Lee-Armour of all people!”

The district commissioner’s reticence during the journey down was convincingly explained. The archdeacon remembered, too, that when he had watched Lee-Armour saying good-by to his successor, there had been a tension between them which could not wholly be explained by the inevitable feeling of one that his work would henceforth be in less loving hands, and of the other that he had been given too hard, too individual an example to follow.

“This letter was in the mail he carried down himself?”

“Yes, of course it was,” the governor answered testily.

“That’s a pretty good tribute to him from his successor.”

“Tribute? Damn his tribute! What does a chap like Lee-Armour want with tribute from any of us? What on earth am I to do, Toby? And with this thing hanging over us, I’ve got to make a speech at his farewell banquet tonight. And he and I both knowing that the very next day I may have to refuse him permission to leave!”

“He has always played a very lone hand,” the archdeacon suggested thoughtfully.

“Well, what of it? What else could he do?”

It was true that for eight years Lee-Armour had surrendered his life, his thoughts, his pleasures and the society of his own kind to the welfare of the Bagai. He spoke not only the Bagai language but the private dialects of the family groups, which were almost separate languages in themselves.

They were not everybody’s meat, those cattle-owning warriors who drank cow’s blood as a staple diet, and shed human – whenever they were reasonably sure they wouldn’t be caught. But those who loved them said they were the only free men left in the world. They looked free. They had an engaging habit of painting golden armor on their deep copper skins, and they plastered their hair with cow dung to resemble – though they did not know it – the graceful headdress of their far-distant Egyptian ancestors. They still lived a little before the dawn of history. Their cattle and their women shared, as necessary companions, this idleness of paradise.

“And I never heard of a missionary making a single worth-while convert among ’em,” said the governor aggressively, for he was thinking of Lee-Armour and resented all competition with his selfless leadership.

“The Bagai will give us none or all,” said Archdeacon Toby. “And I may live to see the day when we have all.”

“What? Those bloodthirsty savages?”

“I expect they said the same to Augustine about the Anglo-Saxons,” the archdeacon retorted cheerfully.

Lee-Armour’s task had been to begin civilization, while preserving the flavor of the Golden Age. The Bagai knew very well that if you dug the land and planted seeds you could live on the results. But nothing had ever induced them to try the experiment. They despised agriculture as an occupation proper for the thick-lipped black man whose death at the end of a broad Homeric spear barely counted for graduation from youth to warrior; in fact it didn’t count unless carried out with secrecy and craftsmanship, wounds of ingress and egress being checked for neatness by a delegate of the old men’s committee. That was the tribe whom Lee-Armour must persuade to till the soil.

It had to be done. The Bagai plateau was overstocked with cattle, and there was no more land available. Left to themselves, the warriors would have solved the problem by creating a large empty quarter where their people could wander for the next hundred years; but that solution they knew was finished forever. The only other was the slaughter of unwanted herds – which to them was quite as infamous as to a Christian was Hitler’s slaughter of the unfit and undesirable.

The main reason for Lee-Armour’s success was his discovery that, although the Bagai would be ashamed to grow food and eat it, there was an absence of tradition either for or against growing food to sell it – a discovery simple enough once stated, but demanding three years of patience in mud huts, of standing to a lion’s charge with shield and spear, of visits, interested and respectful, to that hill where the hereditary witch doctors preserved, but seldom, even to the old men, expounded the beliefs and practices of their ancestors.

The result was the much-photographed marketing on the border of the Bagai country. Caravans of government lorries, loaded with sacks of wheat and maize, rolled down from the plateau with chosen warriors sitting on top. The drivers were black, for the Bagai had a truly aristocratic attitude towards engines. A gentleman did not manage such things himself; he employed a chauffeur. Nor did a gentleman haggle over the price. He decided it – and remained for a week, if necessary, casually polishing his spear until it was received. Rather than argue, the Bagai had been known in early days to order drivers and loads back to the highlands. For later harvests, however, Lee-Armour learned to persuade the stern and dung-plastered marketing board that the fair price to ask was exactly that which the government intended to pay.

The crops were rich and regular. As the Bagai were starting from scratch, with no bad habits of their own, they did what the agricultural experts told them. And they had the most amazing luck – beginner’s luck, the governor called it. Their experimental estates were not as yet very extensive, but the rains never passed them over in the spring; and if there were storms when the corn was in ear, they broke conveniently on the cattle-lands or beyond the borders of the Bagai.

“What makes me so wild,” said the governor, “is that I have to bust a saint like Lee-Armour for mislaying twelve hundred pounds. And if he had lost twelve million in that crazy ground-nut project, he’d probably get a knighthood for it. What on earth did he need it for? What made him take such a risk?”

“Better ask him.”

“Of course I’m going to ask him,” the governor fretted. “And I want you here.”

“Not I,” said Archdeacon Toby.

“You must. I’m not going to expose Lee-Armour even to my own A.D.C. I won’t have anyone official in on this yet. But there it is – I don’t know what I’m going to run into. He may be mad. I may find myself compounding a felony. There ought to be a witness.”

“He’ll resent it.”

“He won’t. He knows as much about this job of mine as I do. He’ll realize at once why you are here, and he’ll ignore you with the utmost good manners.”

The governor resumed his official chair. The archdeacon effaced himself so far as possible in the hot dusk of the shuttered room. He stayed for Lee-Armour’s sake rather than the governor’s. That amiable and worried bureaucrat wasn’t at his best in any situation of human delicacy, and an audience might stimulate him into his most intelligent behavior. It did. When the district commissioner came round from the hotel where, puzzling his hospitable colleagues, he had hidden himself, it was as a great, a very great administrator, who had saved the Bagai from despair and his country from a hateful punitive expedition, that the governor greeted him.

Lee-Armour accepted the archdeacon’s presence with a tense, charming smile that made the other wince with pity for him. It was a smile which acknowledged the governor’s limitations and welcomed the intruder not as a mere necessary evil, but as an obvious first choice. After that he gave his undivided attention to his superior.

Mark Lee-Armour was very much the standard colonial official – sandy, wiry, soldierly, his clean-shaven face burned Arab brown – but the eyes, in a sense, were shifty. They were responsible; they met the governor’s own without effort; and, when they looked, they looked straight into the soul; but they would wander off, proudly and impassively, like the eyes of an animal. This uncertainty of glance, giving an impression that there were far more important realities than the present interview, disturbed the archdeacon until he remembered that it was the bored, leonine look of the Bagai warriors themselves.

“Do you feel up to all this tonight, Mark?” the governor asked.

“Yes, sir – if you don’t expect me to make much of a speech. I’ve lost the habit.”

“Just tell us stories about the Bagai,” suggested the governor.

For ten minutes they talked the shop of their devoted trade, occasionally throwing a courteous ball to the archdeacon. Then the governor, his hollow cheeks flushing as they had hardly done since he was at school, came awkwardly to the point.

“Mark, when you handed over were your accounts in order? Balance, you know, and all that? Your successor has dropped me a note—”

“He is quite right,” Lee-Armour interrupted.

“But – but didn’t you give him any explanation?”

“None. I have none.”

“But what in God’s name did you spend it on?”

“I’d rather not say, sir, if you don’t mind.”

And again the glance flickered off into the corner of the room as if the smell of the dung fires and the sweet breath of the cattle must somehow be hidden behind the office furniture and could be captured by sudden attention.

“But you – you, Mark! Look here, you know you’re booked for a high commissionership?”

“I heard it,” he answered without much interest. “They would take me away for something like that.”

The governor was justifiably annoyed. If ambition were slighted, what was the incentive for a career? Remembering the archdeacon’s presence, he pulled himself up. Did men like Lee-Armour – or himself in his first beloved district – ever have to think of promotion in order to give their best?

“Can you repay the money? Here and now, before the matter goes any further?”

“No, sir.”

“But, man, you must have saved something in the last eight years!”

“Nothing. The funds were never quite enough for what I wanted to do. You know.”

The governor did. There were always expenses that seemed essential to the man on the spot, and yet could never be justified to any government auditor. A district could be a costly mistress to its lover.

“Wire home for it. I’ll risk doing nothing for a couple of days. There must be some way of raising the money.”

“No, sir. No rich relatives,” Lee-Armour replied with a shade of irony. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything already.”

“Then you realize there will have to be an inquiry?”

“I realize to the full that there is a criminal charge hanging over me.”

It was with the coldest inhumanity towards himself that Lee-Armour pronounced the words – words that the governor had tried hard to keep in the back of his mind lest he too should pronounce them. And the man’s self-discipline was so absolute that his voice was not even bitter.

“Mark,” begged the governor, shocked into complete unself-consciousness, “there must be a receipt of some sort. There must be some perfectly honorable explanation. I know you spent that twelve hundred quid on your blasted Bagai.”

“In a way, sir, yes.”

“Then why on earth don’t you remember I want to help, and tell me what it was for?”

“Because it would be your duty to take it away from the person I gave it to,” Lee-Armour replied with the directness of a man who, through weeks of agony, had decided how that very question should be answered. “And that I cannot allow.”

“Bribery?” asked the governor sharply.

It was not unknown for a weak district commissioner to pay out money to possible troublemakers for the preservation of his own peace rather than the King’s.

“No, sir. Payment for value received. Received, pressed down and running over.”

Through the half-opened blinds of the long north windows governor and archdeacon watched Lee-Armour walk back across the courtyard to the gates, take the salute of the guard and vanish into the jet-black shadows of the avenue.

Archdeacon Toby, remembering the straightforward accounts of the diocese and his own incompetent arithmetic, said – for the silence had to be broken – that considering all the money which had passed through Lee-Armour’s hands for seeds and tools, granaries, lorries and roads it was a marvel to him that twelve hundred pounds could be traced at all.

“You can trace twopence,” the governor snapped.

And so you could. Yet the system was so cumbrous that he had come up before against accounts that wouldn’t balance – especially the accounts of queer devoted fish like Lee-Armour who, with one half of his mind, must be thinking in terms of cattle and tribal custom. The eyes tortured by sun glare, the obsessions, the strain not only of doing justice day by day but of explaining why it was justice – all those could so unbalance a man that he would scream at the inhuman rulings of a ledger.

“We’re all worked out beyond sanity,” the governor cried. “Do you realize what we’re doing? Do you realize? It isn’t any longer to make the black man white? It’s to give him a culture that in two generations shall be more satisfying than our own. And we have all got quite ordinary brains! We aren’t gods!”

“There are other Auditors who know it,” said the archdeacon.

“Oh, yes, damn ’em!” answered the governor, missing the overpious comfort in his agitation. “Some of them can be helpful when they like.”

And he reminded the archdeacon of a case like Lee-Armour’s where the grim accountants had immediately broken down in smiles at the simplicity of the bookkeeping mistake which had wrecked for months the peace of mind of a first-rate man who imagined he had spent the money when he hadn’t.

The archdeacon did not say what he thought. It was Lee-Armour’s pride which bothered him, his awareness that he was wrecking his career for the sake of the Bagai. There had been no bookkeeping mistake. Lee-Armour was a man to take routine accounting in his stride. And even if there had been a mistake, his successor, coming straight from leave with a fresh mind, would have spotted it. However, there was no point in depriving the governor of the grain of comfort he had found for himself.

“I’m sure that for tonight, at any rate,” said Archdeacon Toby, “we should assume this is a case where the accountants would only smile.”

The farewell dinner was in the hotel garden. Dark was hot as day, but an illusion of coolness, satisfying as coolness itself, was created by the plashing of a fountain, the smell of wet earth and night-flowering shrubs, the ice in the wine-buckets, the white uniforms of servants, and of the guests who numbered themselves among Lee-Armour’s friends. They should more truly have been called acquaintances. His intimate friends were scattered among the provinces that bordered the Bagai country – one of them to perhaps every fifty thousand square miles.

For Lee-Armour’s sake the archdeacon was glad; it would be easier for him to keep up pretenses in the presence of people who were either attaching themselves to his legend, or eagerly following the star that was inevitably going to rise to the zenith of the Colonial Office. Archdeacon Toby, in the intervals of talking archidiaconally to the ardent churchwomen placed to right and left of him, watched the group at the head of the horseshoe table. Lee-Armour, sitting between the wives of governor and chief justice, was impassive, playing with perfect good manners the easy part of strong, silent man. The governor, too, seemed to be acting without effort. Such a party was, of course, routine for him once it had begun, once he had fairly accustomed himself to entertaining and praising the man whom, the very next day, he must order to remain in the colony while his accounts were investigated. He had presided over so much false and real geniality that when he rose to speak the right words came to him. Indeed, it was the warmest little after-dinner speech that Archdeacon Toby had ever heard the governor deliver – the result, no doubt, of a deliberate effort not to be cold. In a social crisis, thought the archdeacon, world, flesh and devil certainly had their uses.

Mark Lee-Armour rose to reply. Platitudes, interesting platitudes (what a governor he would make!) until suddenly a moving sincerity quickened his voice. The archdeacon knew that he was listening to his swan song, to words that Lee-Armour intended to be remembered after the truth came out.

“Honor. That, I think, is the common bond. It doesn’t matter how primitive a people are; they still have some conception of honor. I remember – you all have these memories – one of my Bagai warriors. He killed an Arab trader. I gave him five years. That’s the death sentence of course; they don’t last in prison more than one. He took it like a man. You see, to his way of thinking, he had done the honorable thing. He told me so. ‘And this sentence,’ I answered, ‘is for the honor of my King.’ ‘Then, my lord,’ he said in that casual tone of an eighteenth-century aristocrat they can put on, ‘we both suffer for the welfare of my people, for both are ants crushed between the Bagai and your King.’”

Lee-Armour sat down amid an uproarious rattle of applause. Nobody except archdeacon and governor perceived any special point in the story, but it was enough that Lee-Armour had told it and that the party was going well.

The women had seen to it that there was dancing after the dinner. Groups splitting up between the hotel bar, the dance floor and the gardens, allowed Archdeacon Toby to withdraw unnoticed. He had no intention of going home, for he knew very well where his duty lay, and hoped that Providence would give him an opportunity to perform it.

Lurking in the shadows – meditating, he preferred to call it – he kept a careful eye upon the garden bar where Lee-Armour drifted along the edge of a little crowd, avoiding confinement in its center. He was certain that the man longed to be alone, and that his mood would now be of deep melancholy brought on by the moderate drinking which, as guest of honor, he hadn’t been able to evade. Lee-Armour would not endure much longer the bitter irony of his farewell dinner; on the other hand he would not yet retire – since that would be churlish – to his hotel bedroom.

Archdeacon Toby told himself that he had no intention of thrusting his society upon private loneliness, nor – certainly not! – of spying upon it. Yet, when he saw Lee-Armour slip away from the bar and vanish into the cultivated jungle of tropical shrubs which bordered the garden, he followed. Beyond the garden, on the edge of the river flats, the shadow of Lee-Armour moved among the moon shadows of a line of silent palms which striped the sand. And then indeed was Archdeacon Toby guilty of all that hypocrisy with which the missionaries reproached him. With his hands behind his back and an air of pious abstraction he too began to pace among the palms.

He had already passed the lonely figure and wished it good-night when he pretended to recognize who it was.

“I am so very sorry about this morning,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been there.”

“I was glad it was you,” Lee-Armour answered frankly. “I suppose H. E. had to have somebody, and it was decent of him not to call in anyone official as yet.”

“He’s inclined to think now that you made a mistake in the accounts,” said the archdeacon.

Lee-Armour’s low voice was angry – a man who was never afraid to face facts exasperated by the proneness of his opposite type to self-deception.

“Good Lord, didn’t I make it clear? Didn’t I make it clear that I never did anything more deliberate in my life?”

“You made it crystal clear.”

“Good Lord, it was a deliberate payment when I knew that I was going! The best I could do for my people – for both my peoples. The Bagai must not despair. I won’t have police and shooting after I’ve gone.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” said the archdeacon, “but if it would do you any good to tell a neutral. …”

“It would do me good. In all this nonsense –” he waved a hand towards the distant lights and the unfamiliar beat of drums in a sentimental waltz “– I’m wondering if I’m mad, if I have or haven’t gone native. Do you people still observe the seal of confession?”

“Doubtfully,” answered the archdeacon, “like so much. Perhaps it would be more honest if at this hour and place I offered you my word of honor.”

“Look here – I gave that money to a witch doctor. I don’t know what he serves. I doubt if he knows himself. But it is not our God.”

“There is no other,” Archdeacon Toby replied. “The First Commandment is, for our days, rather oddly worded. Thou shalt have none other gods should be, There are no other gods. What did you want God to do for the witch doctor?”

“To make the rain fall when it was needed. To prevent the rain falling when it was not.”

“Twelve hundred pounds seems a lot,” the archdeacon heard himself saying, as he tried to order his thoughts into an act of divine worship and human understanding.

“No. The bargain was for as long as he should live. He was to do nothing else. And he has expenses, and no cattle like the rest of them.”

“He can do it?”

“He always has in the past. Look at the statistics.”

“That was what they called beginner’s luck?”

“Yes. Luck. A little tilting of the balances. I don’t know how they do it. But it’s no good telling me – or most of us out here – that they can’t.”

“If I told you that they couldn’t, I should be unworthy of priesthood,” the archdeacon answered gently, knowing himself to be on the solid ground of theology.

“They have powers we have not got?”

“We have all the powers that they have. But to use them – that demands, I fear, a simplicity which only our saints can attain.”

To him, as a deeply read churchman, every religion – of the past or of primitive present – had its value in so far as it foreshadowed the mysteries of the Faith. He believed with all his heart that those truths which man had feebly tried to utter through myth and magic were finally formulated by God in Christianity. Thus the prayers of the Church for rain and for delivery from storm and tempest were the divinely established ritual, but not the only possible ritual.

“I thought you would be the last person to approve,” said Lee-Armour wonderingly.

“I did not say I approved,” the archdeacon replied. “Only that I believed. Dear son, I have been in Africa long enough to know that sometimes, very rarely, men are given control over rain and over animals. I myself am so made that I have never doubted God shut the mouths of the lions for Daniel in the den. Nevertheless one’s faith is firmer when one has seen – as I have seen – the tribal priest shut the mouths of the crocodiles at the bathing pool.”

“Yes,” said Lee-Armour, “I’ve heard of that. It’s quite safe to swim when he has given the word.”

“I found it so.”

“Then you at least will understand that I am paying a small price for my Bagai.”

“The price was twelve hundred pounds,” Archdeacon Toby answered, smiling. “Not a big check for me to draw, I think, for rain and peace. And for my own peace, too. Shall we go back to the hotel? I want to tell the governor that there has been a mistake, a very subtle mistake, and that the money has now been debited to the right account.”

Low Water

GINO’S WAS AN ISLAND. Its inhabitants had a single culture; it was surrounded by a sea as acquiescent as they. In summer the happy Mediterranean disturbed Gino’s not at all; in winter harsh little waves, last remnants of storm beyond the narrow bay, spat fiercely at the weed-draped jetty and gurgled away in dark impotence beneath the flooring. The piles which supported Gino’s were rotten; the planks that joined the café to the mainland stayed in place by sheer inertia. Every year the many slopes of the tiled roof, the angles of the wooden walls became crazier by another inch. When anything fell off, Gino, eventually, put it back again. Neither screw nor nail would grip in the soft timber. A hole under the eaves which had mildly annoyed his clients for two seasons he stopped with a broken frying pan, leaning a balk of driftwood against the wall to hold the patch in place.

The culture of Gino’s island was listless and Levantine. His passport was Syrian; his father was unknown; his mother had been half Kurd and half Maltese. The ancestry of his girls resembled his own, in so far as they were of mixed blood and obscure nationalities. The island industry was the provision of routine entertainment for summer visitors. Somebody had to undertake the job. It called neither for shame nor self-congratulation; it merely filled a social need, like unloading coal or selling hashish or cleaning sewers or becoming a policeman, and demanded – at any rate from Gino – no undignified activity of the body.

Gino was very long and very thin. His interior was full of national and foreign parasites, for he had been poor and a traveler. To him his island was home at long last; and upon it was no more need for energy or emotion. His only token of feeling was an undulation of the spine, which might have expressed satisfaction, at the same hour every morning when he rose from breakfast, took rod and line and started to fish from the stage outside the kitchen door. He fished from eleven to six, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, hunched over the Mediterranean which sparkled and laughed at the foot of his steps and spread out beneath his island into a still lake of deep greens and browns, sown with traps and nets of his own devising.

He caught fish. He caught fish continuously. They came, it was said in the town, all the way across the Mediterranean for him to catch; and indeed Gino’s island was about as far east as they could swim. It seemed to be a fish terminus and round point; after a quick nip from Gino’s garbage or the soft ooze beneath his island, there was nothing for it but to turn back to Greece and Gibraltar and the rich North African banks.

Gino himself looked like an old gray mullet set up by a bad taxidermist who had put back the skin over insufficient stuffing. His head was hairless and his dull eyes were too large. His fishlike mind knew none of the enthusiasms of humanity except the cooking of his catch. For this he was famous. Whether he fried to biscuit hardness in deep oil, or adventured in the casseroles and herbs and wine of French cuisine, or served his fish boiled and cold and decorated, they were products of high human art. His other cooking was vile. Indeed all of Gino that was not fish was distasteful.

He employed six performers. Each year they were sent to him by an agency in Alexandria. One of the batch had to be able to dance efficiently; two must be endurable, however sordid their acts; the remaining three had just to get on and off the stage without incident, and were usually over forty. He paid wages and commission to the upper three and commission only to the lower three, and put them all up in rooms like sunlit bathing hutches on the floor above the café. Gentlemen were strictly forbidden both by Gino and the police to visit this second floor; but the holiday season was short, and the police were very poorly paid. As for Gino, he had signed a Notice to Customers, and thereafter was indifferent to what went on upstairs unless the noise was too great. Then, in a barely audible voice, he pointed out that the house was very old and might fall down. If anyone were injured, he said, there would be a scandal.

That year there were scandals enough. They were the fault of Tatiana. She was an Egyptian with a Russian mother; and in her character a faint and purely traditional Russianness had remained proof against the lethargy of Egypt. Tatiana was the star performer, and neither better nor worse than dancers whom the Alexandria agency had sent to Gino in other years. Her morals, which mattered to nobody, were above the usual standard. Her behavior, for so conventional an island, was indiscreet. She gave parties to her favorites. She considered the whole upper story as her own, and dashed in and out of bedrooms at awkward moments. Her colleagues, who themselves observed the decent melancholy proper to Gino’s, accepted Tatiana’s instability as a new fashion from worldly Egypt and a useful topic of conversation.

The other two paid performers were Miriam and Elena the Greek. Miriam, being half Sudanese, was too black for popularity; Gino’s clients preferred to cherish the illusion that they were being entertained by pure Europeans. Elena the Greek was born at Marseilles of port parentage, into which, somewhere, had entered a strain of Chinese blood; she was called the Greek, because that was the language she spoke most fluently. The three girls who worked for commission alone had the names and nationalities that the agency had given them. They were old, pink animals who answered to these names. How or in what memory each addressed herself could not be known. They lived in a dead present, untroubled by remembered suffering. They had no clear thought left to them, and little revealing speech.

Gino’s season was short, and it was not much of a season. People with money went to Alexandria or the cool heights of Lebanon. From June to September the two hotels of the little town and the red and white villas, set irregularly among dusty country lanes, were reasonably full of Christian Arab families attracted by the hard and waveless beach. The fathers and the elder sons, dignified and respectable by day, considered it proper to relax at night. Gino’s represented for them the smart cabarets of French plages and Florida beaches familiarized by the cinema.

Upstairs and downstairs Tatiana disordered the island. She was always surrounded by two or three young admirers, who were fascinated into outrageous behavior, though not into any lavish spending. She had a dashing habit of throwing her cocktails overboard “to feed the fishes.” This might have been good for trade if she and her parties had not thrown the glasses and crockery as well. To Gino Tatiana was a liability, a shock, a devastation. She kept the older, slow consuming, steadily paying clients away. The noise and scandal raised the weekly subvention paid to the police. The glasses were replaceable only at fantastic prices.

Gino increased the bills by erratic and exaggerated items which led to endless arguments with the clients and, after all, had to be reduced. He left his basic charges unaltered. They were reasonable – little more, indeed, than those of the hotels – although there were a band and three waiters and the performers to be paid, and a cook who attended to Gino’s stove when Gino himself was, reluctantly, gazing at the dance floor. He felt that he ought to gaze – so far, that is, as ought had any meaning for him – but he said no word, he took no action. He had no interest in women, individually or collectively. They were like the bottles of Egyptian whisky. There was a demand for the stuff, and he supplied it.

His fitful attempts to keep up with rising costs and wages were always a year behind. He had made his calculations when he bought and fitted out the island, and felt that the one effort should be sufficient for his life; it had to be done, but thereafter there should be no necessity for thought. Beneath the floor the bountiful sea worked for him in darkness. Above was modest catering for the eternal desires of men. Neither one nor the other could fail.

The season was disastrous. At the beginning of September there was nothing in the bank, and the night’s takings were paid out every morning. The wages of Tatiana, Miriam and Elena fell into arrears. As yet they did not complain. It was not the first time in their experience that the boss had been in difficulties.

On the next payless Saturday morning there was a row. Wages and commission were now three weeks overdue, and obviously lost forever. Even the three working crones, holding around their shapeless bodies wraps of pink and pale-blue chiffon, stared at Gino with sad eyes in which was understanding of their fate. Tatiana, trim and terrifying in a beach suit, screamed at him in good Egyptian Arabic. He was impassive. He bent his shoulders humbly over the till, as if it were the sea, and opened it and showed that there was nothing in it. Tatiana raged around the unswept room, buzzing like an angry insect of undoubted grace and comparative cleanliness between four greasy, wine-splashed walls, foul ashtrays, spilt food, tables stinking of sweat and debris. She hurled a bottle into the sea, and was led upstairs, weeping, by Miriam and Elena. The other three returned to bed and their long daydreams of the impossible. Gino went out to fish.

The sun shone. The paintless wooden balconies of the upper story gave back the light of the day and the stored light of a hundred years, sparkling with the fawn and white of timber on the southern edge of a forest. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena lay in the shade of the eaves, cursing Gino. When they were silent, they could hear the plop of his tackle, re-entering the water, or the reverberation of a sea-bream smacking its arched body against the planks of the back-door jetty.

Night brought the end. There was no band. There were no waiters. There was no assistant cook. All had gone to the hotels to make what they could in the last week before the season finished. A few habitual customers drifted in across the creaking bridge of planks. They listened to abuse of Gino, and agreed. They helped themselves and the girls to drinks, and paid what they liked or nothing at all. Gino did not appear.

In an hour the café had emptied. There was no gaiety, no romance. The island and its inhabitants appeared exactly what they were. The girls, like the clients, had looked to the night and music, even at Gino’s, to create an endurable illusion. Now there were only themselves and the sea and the slap of moths and beetles, before unnoticed, against the glaring lights. They sat still, scattered about the room at the tables where they had been left, without energy or desire to move together.

Gino came in from the kitchen, bearing a huge casserole of fish. The scent, rich and appetizing, overwhelmed the staleness of the room. He put the dish on a table, with six flat cakes of bread, beckoned to the girls and went out.

They moved to the food slowly, and as if ashamed by their failure to retain a single customer. Then Tatiana, with a brisk exclamation, threw away the filthy tablecloth. The others, catching her mood of self-respect, swiftly washed knives and forks, glasses and plates left untouched since the previous night. They chose clean chairs and sat down at the bare table, three a side, as in some institution for homeless females deserted by all but themselves. They began to laugh and chatter. Gino’s fish was in no way institutional. It warmed and delighted.

They went to bed early, breathing for an extra four hours, instead of smoke, the cool air currents of the bay, and awakened to a vague feeling of holiday rather than disaster. Miriam made coffee, and they breakfasted on the balcony. Then, as the heat of sand and dusty tracks consumed the morning, they saw their position in all its hopelessness.

It was Gino’s responsibility to return them to Alexandria, and it was certain that he could not do it. They all spoke loudly of their contracts and of the Law that would, if necessary, compel him to sell his island to pay their fares. They gesticulated at a just and imaginary judge, but in their hearts they knew that they were terrified by the Law, upon whose edge they lived, and had no intention of calling to their aid the unknowable, uncontrollable gods of policemen.

They were too far east for chivalry. Tatiana and Miriam ran over the characters and probable bank balances of their devoted followers, in the hope of finding one who might be gallant. Any, they decided, would provide food and especially bed for the few more days that he would remain at the seaside; not one would commit the generous folly of advancing the fare to Alexandria, or even – in view of their known economic distress – of allowing it to be earned. There were no capitalists among the fathers and sons who took their holiday by that horned beach. Money counted, even when Tatiana was feeding the fishes and creating an illusion of imperial excess.

Either Miriam or Tatiana might perhaps make enough for herself to go, but not enough to release a companion as well. Though they had not hitherto been conscious of much liking for each other, and though the three wage earners despised the three commissionaires, as Tatiana christened them, the solidarity of their profession – they called it the theatrical profession – prevented them from leaving behind any of their number to end, with certainty, in some horrible village brothel.

Tatiana could raise – probably – from an old friend in Alexandria the money for her fare. Miriam had a contract half promised for the winter, and thought, not very hopefully, that the agency might lend her what she needed. Elena the Greek, who could dance just enough for a joint such as Gino’s, but looked, without make-up on a blazing morning, like a slender Chinese grandmother, had no hope at all. The three commissionaires listened with dazed attention to the discussion among their betters. They would not have been surprised if Tatiana had produced thousands of piasters from a hat or if she had told them to go and prostitute themselves upon the beach. Whatever she decided, they would perform.

Tatiana and Miriam decided nothing. They dived, exasperated, from the balcony into the caressing sea, two worn but serviceable arrows of black and white, startling Gino and wrecking his fishing for that morning.

The day passed in intolerable nervousness. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena the Greek were not accustomed to be idle, to be without some vague and nearly objectless occupation. They rose usually at midday, fiddled with their breakfasts and complexions for a couple of hours, practiced a few dance steps, showed themselves in whatever public place was temporarily in fashion, then passed the evening with some admirer until it was time to go to work. Now, however, with Gino’s island ruined and the season nearly over, there was nothing to be gained by visiting the town, nor had they the heart for it. They remained in their rooms or on the balcony, quarreling, screaming, in tears, demoralized.

At sunset Gino shut the wooden doors on the gangway to his island, and put up a notice of CLOSED in Arabic and French. Then he took his boat and lamp and fish spear, and disappeared into the darkness of the bay. He said nothing whatever to the girls, accepting their forced occupation of his island without resentment, without pity, without helpfulness.

The soft splash of Gino’s oars recalled them to sanity. They stared after him into the calm blackness of the sea. They could hear him; they could see the twin phosphorescent puddles of the oars receding into the distance, but the boat itself was invisible. Their fear of this isolation was extreme. All quarrels forgotten, they drew together on the balcony. The lights of the little town glittered half a mile away. The villas were nearer, but their lit windows were so scattered over the coastal plain that they only increased the sense of loneliness. In the girls’ minds, and indeed in fact, they were castaways; it mattered nothing that their island was joined to all Asia by only a dozen planks.

They crept downstairs and turned up the lights in the kitchen. All day they had not had the energy to eat. There were bread and vegetables and a few eggs. Fish there was none, for Gino never kept it overnight. Miriam again turned cook. They ate in silence, exhausted and hopeless.

The effort of cooking and feeding did them good. Their washing-up extended itself spontaneously from the plates to Gino’s revolting kitchen. They were six women who had seldom had goods of their own to scrub and polish. Not one of them would have done a stroke of work for Gino, but this was for themselves. The silence, the closed door, the sea around and under impressed on them that it was for themselves.

By morning the unconscious communal spirit of discipline was dead. No one made breakfast. They drifted down to the café and drifted back into the bedrooms to continue the interminable discussions. At least they were all calmer. One of the commissionaires had a touch of sunburn; it made her pudgy face look firm and elastic.

At ten Tatiana took command and persuaded Miriam to the kitchen. It was clean as they had left it. On the table were two flat baskets, a yard in diameter, piled with fish, among them a dozen fat, expensive soles. Tatiana, pacified by this industry, observed that Gino had eaten nothing. Outside on the jetty his indifferent back was towards them, hunched over the rod. Patronizingly she offered him a cup of coffee and the last of the bread. He accepted without pleasure or surprise, and thanked her. His words were formal Arabic courtesies, meaning nothing: phrases by which two human beings could converse for minutes without the need of any thought at all. She asked him what to do with the fish. Gino shrugged his shoulders. If people came to eat, they ate it; if they didn’t, nobody ate it. He landed a red mullet and paid no further attention to Tatiana.

For all their working lives Tatiana and Miriam had depended on manager or proprietor. His was the responsibility, theirs the obedience. Even Tatiana’s Russian liveliness was purely professional. Her plan for living was to make the clients spend in return for her wages and commission. Her future was a succession of engagements at third-class cabarets. Her firm faith, founded on nothing, was that they would become first-class cabarets before she was too old.

The boss of the moment might be inefficient or exacting, lecherous or contemptuous, broke or miserly or generous; but the boss he was. He did not merely live, as they, between four walls from nine in the evening to three in the morning. He was in the mysterious outer world of contracts, arrangements, recommendations. Looking at Gino’s back, it was evident to Tatiana and Miriam that they were, for the first time, without a boss, and that Gino was in their own world of helpless resignation. He might as well have been the ghost of a fisherman sitting outside his own back door.

Even this understanding of Gino did not move them to any constructive plan. Indeed their angry chatter reached new depths of futility. All former schemes, however wild, had depended on Gino being forced to do something. They had at last realized that nothing would force him to do anything.

It was the fish that made the plan. There it lay, in quantity, luxurious. Alongside the baskets was the empty bread bin. Without need of imagination, the economic problem solved itself. Two of the commissionaires put on aprons of sacking and Gino’s shoes – for their own had the high heels of their vocation – and shuffled off to the town with the fish baskets upon their heads. They returned at midday, weary, humiliated, miserable, but with bread and groceries and money over. Fresh sole was fifty piasters a kilo on the market. The girls were all ignorant of common commerce, and amazed.

Day after day passed while they ate and slept well, and fussed frantically to get themselves away. Gino wandered through and among them on his own plane, occasionally cooking, always unseeing, and, after a while, unnoticed. Those who could write with ease wrote letters to the Alexandria agency, to cabaret proprietors in Beirut and Cairo, to old admirers, to anyone they had ever known with money to lend or employment to offer. The only result of all that fevered, impractical planning, that seesaw of hope, those hysterical visits to the post office to insist that letters had been lost, was that Elena the Greek was lent a pound by her sister. They tried to plan how it should be spent, but the island imposed its own solution. The pound immediately went on soap and a washtub.

The town returned to its winter peace, Gino and his girls had provided a week of scandal, conjecture and conversation, and a week was all they were worth. Nobody bothered them. They bothered nobody. On the island they were brown, healthy and rested, but neither knew nor felt the improvement. They were dull with fear of poverty, illness and starvation, and, when they thought, they had no hope; but they had little time to think. The island was their taskmaster.

Organization grew, though they intended none. Tatiana, by reason of her education, was general manager. Miriam was assistant cook. Elena the Greek, who had a passion for neatness perhaps inherited from that unknown Chinese ancestor, expended it upon the crusted dirt of Gino’s hidden corners. Two of the commissionaires were becoming known in a more friendly fish market. The third was washerwoman. To all the girls their life seemed inactive and frustrated, for they were unaware of their achievement. Their only comfort was the superb fish supper that Gino often made for them. He seemed to enjoy their appreciation. He said nothing, but his body undulated graciously as he set the dish upon the table.

At the end of October the first storm roared down the Mediterranean and over the town. With Gino’s island it merely played, for wind and sea were diverted by the sheltering promontory to the north. The wind was neither cold nor convincing; it whistled merrily round the ill-fitting eaves and slammed the bedroom doors. The sea, excitedly sucking and splashing, managed to wet three steps of Gino’s jetty that had been dry all the summer. Gino lit the iron stove in the café, packing it with cut driftwood. Where the plates were thin with age and the blacking worn away, the stove glowed red and comforting.

Wind, sea and fire emphasized the passing of time. Tatiana revolted. She shouted that they could not stay, that winter was coming, that this could not go on. She crashed a plate upon the floor and earned a reproachful look from Elena. They all listened while she cried and cursed; they had no answer to her repeated question of what they were to do. They looked at her, disconcerted by her vehemence, as if she were destroying some feminine, delicately poised, illusive truth. In the silence the washerwoman spoke.

“Here we eat,” she said.

The comment was unanswerable. It referred to the present, that present in which the commissionaires had learned through timeless suffering to exist; yet in its profundity was hidden an illimitable future. If they wished, on Gino’s island they might eat forever. The warmth of the stove blended serenely with the warmth of the food within them. The storm was for others, not for them. Their dreams changed in that moment: those vague intentions which supported the lonely, personal life of each battered individual. They were back in the field of women – of eagerness and the possibility of love, of industry and of abounding health. They even had a willing servant, who asked only to remain, unresisting, upon his island. Impulsively Tatiana began the new world by a single act of creation. She rose from the table to give Gino orders for the morrow.

Heart in the Mouth

THE DEATH of General Covadillas? Yes, of course there was something that didn’t come out in the papers. He died of a fit of laughter. When five of his political opponents escaped from jail and forced a pilot to fly them out of the country with a gun at the back of his neck and then shot him by mistake just as he had taken off, Covadillas was so amused that he had a stroke. That was the only fact about the story which wasn’t public knowledge.

Assassination? Now look here, old man – I know who you are and all that, but I earn my living in this country and I don’t want to be expelled for offending the national dignity. If they like to say the general was murdered, it has nothing to do with us. The general was a cattleman, and he didn’t approve of the oil interests. And there’s the motive, and who am I to contradict the voice of the people? When North, South or Central Americans decide that a myth is worth believing, you just have to let them believe it.

Good Lord, no! I don’t believe it! I know most of the oil executives out here, and in fact they rather admired the general. As dictators go, he was a gentleman. A trifle ruthless, of course. But most of his competitors turned up at his funeral and dropped tears. One of thankfulness to one of sorrow, and that’s as much as any of us can expect.

The funeral was a wonderful show. There was the old boy laid out on ice in the cathedral – oldest Christian building on the American continent, they say – with eight tall lancers, all plumes and pennons, round the bier, like weeping willows providing shade for a horticultural exhibit.

I’m the resident correspondent for a group of British newspapers. It’s hard to get anything at all printed about this happy country, but just to please my friends here I have to try. I was wandering round the cathedral after visiting hours, hoping to get a touch of atmosphere, when in came a newspaperman from New York insisting that he must take a few shots for the world.

It was the word world that flattered them – though it may have been the name of his paper. We feel a bit out of the world down here and, instead of thanking God for it, we take it as a reproach. So they propped Covadillas up for his photo and shoveled away some flowers and moved the candles. The dean told the lancers to look sorrowful, and preached them such an impromptu sermon on the nation’s loss that they wept buckets. Then the reporter flashed his shots and strolled out – whipping off his hat again when he suddenly remembered where he was – and the old boy was eased back to a more comfortable position on the ice. It takes an American to understand Americans.

Well, I couldn’t compete with that. A quarter inch of space was the utmost my papers would give to Covadillas’ funeral. It wasn’t news. After all, nobody can plant a statesman as magnificently as we can ourselves – as we’ll know very well if we are ever buried in Westminster Abbey and have any bit of us left that isn’t too bewildered to be impressed.

So I decided that my only chance of persuading the Republic that the London dailies knew it existed was to describe the quiet country ceremony. Editors would at least be interested. It’s a queer thing about the English – like the general, they all want to be planted in two different places, and one of them is usually in the country.

Covadillas, you’ll remember, had asked that, whatever the politicians did with his body, his heart should be buried on the estancia at Manzanares where he was born. He had no illusions about all the pomposities of Church and State. That was why the people who loved him really did love him.

Manzanares is eight hours from the capital on a line that goes wandering up over the savanna to nowhere in particular. It has one train a day; and that I took, the morning before the ceremony, in order to avoid the crowd on the funeral special which was traveling up that night with a load of bigwigs and personal friends, and leaving again in the afternoon.

Now that I’ve got as far as this, I’d better tell you the rest. After all, you’re sailing tomorrow. My dear fellow, the evidence for assassination was overwhelming! It’s a revolting story. Ha! Ha! Ha! Just plain revolting!

When I got to Manzanares, I found that there was no village at all. There was a patch of dust on the plain, where stood the station, two iron huts and the fonda, and no landmark but the railway which cut the visible world into two exact semicircles. It was obvious that no one could lose his heart to a station, so I made some inquiries. The estancia and its chapel turned out to be over that featureless horizon, and seven miles away. There must have been other estancias over other bits of horizon, for dirt tracks radiated away from the station into the purple haze of the evening.

The fonda was the usual drink-shop plus general store plus hotel. It was owned by the stationmaster, an old Hungarian immigrant called Timoteo who had been there for the last thirty years and made himself pretty comfortable. He had sunk an artesian well, and installed some very classy pale-green sanitary ware – which must have been left on his hands when one of the local cattlemen went bust. In spite of the blowing dust and corrugated iron and the feeling of being all alone at the center of an invisible world, the fonda was an oasis of civilization. I gladly took a room for the night.

Timoteo was overpleased to see me. There was no doubt that he was harassed and in need of help, like those chaps in ghost stories who have been all alone till the stranger pulls the doorbell. At the time I put down his manner to alarmed anticipation of the next day. The guests were to have a light breakfast on the train and start straightaway for the estancia, but Timoteo was sure to be overwhelmed by politicians demanding drinks in a pious whisper.

Well, I had a bath and an excellent meal, cooked and served by the mestiza staff, and shared by Timoteo’s tomcat: a great, friendly, short-haired beast who stood much higher on his fore legs than his hind, and looked like an amiable hyena. In a joint of that sort you’d have expected nothing but canned goods, but there were fresh fruits and vegetables and meat in plenty – good evidence that somewhere across the savanna was rich country which Covadillas could well have chosen as a resting place for his spare parts.

There was no one in the drink-shop. It was between paydays. So Timoteo and I took our glasses and settled down on the terrace. It was a night of black velvet, and there wasn’t a sound in the soft heat but the muffled thump of the electric power plant.

Timoteo felt he should apologize for making his home at the center of an empty circle. I asked who lived in the two iron huts. His staff. Two men in each hut. A stationmaster, he explained with patient dignity, could not be expected to load and unload trucks. I protested that such a thought had never occurred to me, that my question was mere idle curiosity, that I had noticed there was no sign of life in the huts – no light, no guitar, no woman complaining of the universe. Oh, he said, they had all gone off to collect the cars and buses from the neighborhood and see that they got to the station in good time. It was obvious that Timoteo, as a former subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still considered he should set an example to the weaker Latin brother. A stationmaster was a public servant; there could be no hitch allowed in his arrangements.

After a while the thump of the power plant seemed to me to have developed a disturbing echo. I was about to suggest that we go and see if the big end had broken, when the thump became a gallop – a real gallop, though still very distant. Timoteo listened and cheered up at once. He put his glass under his chair and took out a comb and swept the drooping gray hairs out of his mouth until his mustache looked decently stationmasterish.

Four cavalrymen charged up into the light of the doorway, covered with dust and sweat and all in full-dress uniform, as if they’d just finished an old-fashioned battle. There were a captain, a sergeant and two troopers, themselves and their horses bristling with firearms. So much lethal modernity was incongruous with all that pale blue and gold.

Timoteo trotted happily down the steps to meet them, and got a reception that startled him. The captain jumped off his horse and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Are you mad?” he yelled. “Is it all right? I hold you responsible. You are responsible towards the State.”

The captain feared he was going to be blamed for something, and was taking the initiative in shifting the blame onto Timoteo. Anyone who knows these people like I do could see that.

“Of course it’s all right,” Timoteo answered solidly. “You come a little late, Captain.”

“Late? By God, we knew nothing till a telegram two hours ago! How long have you had it?”

“Since the day before yesterday,” said Timoteo. “They sent it straight from the hospital.”

The captain delivered a really eloquent speech on surgeons and hospitals and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He finished with a classic peroration on the virtues of General Covadillas – which gave me plenty of time to work out what had happened.

The hospital, told to send Covadillas’ heart to Manzanares, had simply and sensibly sent it there. Meanwhile the Ministers had been so intent on preparations for the cathedral ceremony and on keeping their successors out of the treasury till the accounts had been cooked, that they forgot all about the heart; and when some wretched little clerk, probably, with a salary of forty bob a week, remembered the blessed thing and went round to the hospital to inquire, he found it had been sent off by the daily train to Manzanares like any other parcel. No guards of honor. No fuss and bother. I repeat, it seemed to me remarkably sensible. But governments never like to do anything the obvious way.

I said so to the captain when Timoteo introduced me – as representative of all the chief papers of Europe – and the captain seemed to think my point of view fresh and delightful. “Governments never like to do anything the obvious way,” he kept on declaring and slapping his breeches. He changed over to the most complete geniality. That’s one reason why I love this country so much. They dramatize whatever they think they ought to feel; and then if you puncture the grand attitude – of course with the politest lace ruffles and the most delicate touch of the point – their Spanish horse sense gets the better of them and they roar with laughter. I don’t want my anatomy distributed. They can plant the lot right here where it has enjoyed itself, and good luck to it!

There we were, surrounded by nothingness and with a secret of our own. It was an excuse for a party. The captain, once he had cooled down, was a delightful chap, and turned out to be a great-nephew of Covadillas. He was full of yarns about the old boy, and they rang true. The general’s character was simply incrusted with stories – generally of his unusual punishments. That accounted for his power. Not his cruelty, I mean, but his perverted sense of humor. Be an original, and you can do anything with the Spanish-American!

The captain was patting Timoteo’s shoulder and telling him what a fine public official he was, and Timoteo liked it, and kept filling up their glasses. After thirty years in the country he still hadn’t got rid of his Central European conviction that a stationmaster is a long way below a cavalry officer. Then they decided all of a sudden that the world would be improved by imported lager, and went out to the refrigerator to collect bottles. The sergeant, the troopers and I stuck to wine.

When the two came rolling back with their lager, their conversation was fragmentary. The captain asked if that was the way they had sent it up; and Timoteo replied that it was, and he had thought it best, the weather being warm, to keep it in the refrigerator. The captain said he didn’t think the surgeons had been complimentary to his great-uncle in using a plain wooden box, and Timoteo said a wooden box was all we got anyway, and no absorbent packing in it at that.

This aroused my curiosity, and when I went out to attend to the needs of nature I had a look at Timoteo’s refrigerator. The happy pair had left the door open. As I say, we were having quite a party. There was the wooden box, all right, just as it came from the hospital – except that Timoteo had wisely forced up the lid so that the cold could circulate round the contents. But what surprised me was that there were no contents.

On my return I told Timoteo I had shut the refrigerator door – just in case he had left it open for any particular reason – and asked him where was the object of his lonely vigil. I had a feeling that the captain might have taken it out in order to hold it in one hand for appropriate gestures while he made a speech to the empty kitchen.

“Hombre! In the box,” Timoteo replied.

“It isn’t,” I said.

The five men were on their feet in an instant, and all jammed in the doorway. Then they tumbled over their spurs into the kitchen and stared over each other’s shoulders into the refrigerator and swore that the heart must be in the box. But it wasn’t.

The captain called his sergeant to attention, and asked him why he had been sitting at drink when he should have been guarding the most precious possession of the nation. The sergeant saluted and turned to the troopers and insisted that they should repeat their orders – which, in loud military voices, they did. Timoteo, yielding to the Latin atmosphere, prophesied for us that he would no longer be stationmaster at Manzanares, but begging his bread and lifting loads among Negroes in intolerable swamps. He was still developing the intolerable swamps, when he suddenly shut up and went pale yellow.

He dropped on all fours, looking under the stove and the dressers, and calling:

“Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu!”

We stared at each other. I could feel the cold sweat outside and the wine inside trickling down, as it were, to my feet, and leaving me sober as – as a man in a nightmare.

We swooped on the yard outside the kitchen window, and Timoteo snapped on the lights. The yard was empty; but in that tenth of a second before we realized its emptiness we were overtaken by infinity, by a vision of cause and complicated effect that could endure, I tell you, tunelessly. We saw Timoteo’s tomcat vanish, quick as the movement of the switch itself, from light into darkness with a shadow in his mouth.

He had all the Americas before him, and night on his side. On the other hand, fine cat though he was, he couldn’t go very far with such a burden to carry.

You’ll understand that it was absolutely essential that Tsiu should not be allowed to settle down for a moment. We fanned out and advanced across the plain. We had four torches between us. They were good enough within friendly walls, but in a blank outdoors their beams were just pool after pool of dust and stones and waving grass. They merely limited our fantastic world.

Timoteo managed to contact reality. His torch picked up a long tail, held straight and gripping the ground. Tsiu had crouched down and was about to get to business. Timoteo cautiously approached, offering a piece of prime liver that he had grabbed from the refrigerator as we dashed out. Tsiu was interested. There was no doubt that he was interested. We stood still, waiting for our daily life to return.

Tsiu let his master come near enough to reach out a hand. Then he skipped out of the circle of light with a little kittenish wriggle and dance, and the nation’s most precious possession still in his mouth, saying as plainly as grace and muscle could put it: What I have stolen, I have stolen.

The captain called us together to give a few swift orders, in a hoarse voice which kept choking on the word desecration. It was his duty to speak, and by speech he was able to relieve himself and us. He detailed the two troopers and the sergeant to keep Tsiu on the move, while the rest of us went back to the fonda for weapons. Action restored us to sanity. I could even feel sorry for Tsiu, but he should not have taken upon himself the mischievousness of the immortals.

The captain chose two rifles for the troopers and one for himself. He murmured savagely that the only army equipment his sergeant could understand was a typewriter. He was whispering to himself all the time. Myself, I borrowed a .45 automatic – in an experienced fist there’s no more accurate weapon at close quarters – and Timoteo stuffed his pockets with fresh fish.

When we returned to the distant flicker of the torches, we found that the soldiery had successfully prevented Tsiu from breaking off the engagement. I think he didn’t want to. This was a new and entertaining game, so he kept bobbing about just at the extreme range of vision.

At last the captain got him in the full, fair light of the sergeant’s torch, and let him have it. Tsiu sacrificed one of his nine lives then and there, and the bullet kicked up a spurt of dust exactly where he had been standing when the captain squeezed the trigger. He streaked for the Southern Cross with nothing in his mouth, and we all ran forward to recover our trust. The beams of the torches were wavering, of course, all over the sky and then over segments of savanna that were quite indistinguishable one from the other, and we arrived at six different positions.

The captain – as is, after all, the right of captains – insisted that his position was correct; so we joined him and began to search. The sergeant, who should have pinpointed the right spot, had brandished his torch in excitement, and then directed it heaven knows where. Timoteo was the only one of us who had any sense. As soon as he saw that some of the party were wandering off, eyes on the ground, quarter of a mile of nothingness from the proper area, he sat down where he was, right or wrong, and told us whenever we got impossibly far away from him.

We went over that ground for two frantic hours. I must have picked up and put down at least fifty stones, and when the battery began to run low I tried to pick up one of my own footprints. The only landmark was a little ditch or hollow that we all agreed was very near the right spot; but when the sergeant found a similar hollow two hundred yards away, and Timoteo was sitting right between the two, we were no longer sure which was the original.

Outside our own circle Tsiu was roaming about in one of his own. Every now and then, plaintively, as much as to say that he would like to call it all off and go home, he sung out:

“Morow!”

And his master would answer invitingly:

“Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu!”

At last Timoteo suggested that Tsiu was in the mood – if we all lay down and stayed quiet – to come back and find the Possession for us.

Patience was a lot to ask of desperate men, for we had little time. Dawn was not far away, and the special train from the capital would arrive soon after the sun. The captain, exhausted, lay down by my side. He asked me what I proposed to do in case we should not recover anything presentable. I replied that I was going to hire at any price one of the cars that would be waiting for the guests, and drive straight for the nearest frontier. I meant it, too. Americans have a lamentable habit of blaming the first available foreigner for anything that goes wrong.

His voice moaned in the darkness:

“What can you be thinking of us?”

I said heartily that it might have happened anywhere, and then, more cautiously, that there was a certain element of comedy of which only our late and revered leader could be trusted to appreciate the full flavor– though possibly he would appreciate it more if the object of our search had belonged to someone else.

“That is unjust!” answered the captain severely, and stopped for thought.

“Unjust!” he exclaimed. “My great-uncle was very much a man! My great-uncle, if he could but see us from purgatory –” the captain began to make peculiar noises into a tuft of grass, and I feared I should never reach that frontier “– if he could see us at grips upon the empty savanna with a cat, if he could read the agony in our hearts, my great-uncle would … he would … O Amigo mio, in all hell there never would have been heard such a shout of laughter!”

And the captain imitated it upon earth. Well, well, they all have a lot of Indian blood.

After that we lay still for about half an hour. The captain moved off somewhere along the line, and I was alone, with one of the two hollows to my immediate front. We formed more or less of a semicircle, Timoteo being out on the left wing. The sky hadn’t noticeably got any lighter, but I realized that at last I could distinguish, ten yards away, one piece of blackness from another piece of blackness.

Tsiu, too, lay still, wondering what we were up to. Occasionally he asked Morow? to let us know he was still about and ready to join the party if invited for any really practical purpose. Timoteo would answer Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu! but he didn’t use his fish– for we wanted Tsiu, I remind you, to show us what he had done with the most precious possession of the nation. On the other hand he could not be allowed to pick it up. Any determined move of his was certain to draw fire.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

“My God, look out!” yelled Timoteo. “I am over here. Me, Timoteo!”

BANG!

I felt sure that the last shot was the captain’s. There was a certain drill-book deliberation about it. It was an exhibition of the right way to shoot cats in darkness. I don’t know how near the bullet went to Tsiu, but it continued through the grass about one foot from my ear. I took refuge in the ditch, calling Tsiu, Tsiu! very loudly to show that I was on the move.

After a bit something told me –as the big-game hunters say – that I was being stalked. The two troopers were in no mood for trifling. They didn’t care whether they killed or were killed. If the essential part were not in fit condition for the family ceremony, the captain and the sergeant would pass the blame downwards through the usual channels, and the troopers, I expect, were praying that half the party, including themselves, would be safe in the hospital. So before they started to shoot imaginary cats in my hollow I chucked my hat up the bank and over as far as I could. Sure enough the results were startling.

As soon as I heard them reloading with fresh clips, I cleared out to the left wing, well behind the present battle front. When I had settled down, I saw Tsiu’s head peering out from behind a tuft of grass. I was very careful. I had had enough of irresponsible firing. I rested my elbows fairly on the ground, and clasped my right wrist in my left hand. I could just see the foresight of the automatic, and I took my time.

BANG!

Old Timoteo jumped up cursing. I had shot the heel off his boot at seven yards.

Then we all heard the cat purring and growling behind us. As we turned round, the names addressed to him and his mother showed that we had taken up a pretty straight line. Unconscious self-preservation, I suppose.

“Don’t shoot!” Timoteo appealed. “I’ll get him! I’ll get him!”

And he crawled forward, murmuring Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu!

It was a gallant deed. He was fond of that cat. Up to now he had accepted insistent necessity, but at last there was a chance of recovering the stolen goods without slaughtering the thief.

Tsiu still didn’t understand that this was a serious crisis. He laughed. At least that’s the only way I can explain a soft, merry sound like eeyo, eeyo. Then he jumped into the air with the nation’s most precious possession in his mouth.

Timoteo had the sense to fall flat. The army were all round and all over the target. I got a clear shot and heard the bullet strike – though I’m never admitting that officially, mind you. Up to then Tsiu hadn’t realized that these noisy flying things were intended to hit him. People didn’t shoot when he stole; they said Tsiu, Tsiu. You never saw such a surprised cat in your life. He bolted in the general direction of the railway. I wouldn’t put it past him to think of boarding the first familiar train that came along.

We picked up what Tsiu had left us. It was in fairly good condition, except that it had a bullet hole through the middle. It also needed a wash.

There was much to do before that special train arrived, and the light was already gray as we hurried back to the fonda. The mestiza cook and her maids were weeping and praying in the yard. The captain shoved the Possession under his tunic, and passionately explained to them that for the greater glory of the nation’s army, so dear to the heart of their late and revered leader, he had employed, while others rested, the idle hours of the night in giving his men some battle practice. You couldn’t have failed to believe him. Stern duty and military science shone through every word.

Timoteo again became the solid functionary. He told the captain to leave all arrangements to him, and surreptitiously took over the essential object. Then he provided the cavalry with brooms, clothesbrushes, petrol, hot water and polishes, and he and I retired to my bedroom. He was solemnity itself, just as if he’d been trained as an undertaker.

Manzanares station was beginning to fill with limousines, and the drivers were flicking the dust of the rough tracks off the coachwork and examining their springs. Timoteo summoned two of his underlings, and called to them from the window to cut the flowers off every plant in the garden and every creeper in the patio, and to pile the lot in the dining room. Meanwhile, with only forty minutes to go, we were working desperately on the Possession. Tsiu had left some dainty marks along the outer edges, but they might have been caused by anything, and a little crushed ice did wonders. The bullet hole, however, was a nightmare problem. We couldn’t sew it up in case the stitches were noticed. So at last we tried carpentry. We took the hospital’s box to pieces, made it two inches narrower and put it together again, so that it fitted tightly round the contents. The lips of that unfortunate wound disappeared in the crush.

Timoteo propped up two legs of a table in the dining room, covered it with a beautiful lace cloth and tacked on a batten to prevent the box slipping down the slope. While I dealt with the ice and the flowers, he stuck up candles and all the religious emblems that he could find in the servants’ bedrooms. We heard the train in the distance, and he just had time to leap into his best uniform and lumber over to the station like a dignified butler a bit late with the drinks.

I stayed on guard, for the military were still before their mirrors. It was as well that I did, for who should drop in (through the window) but our old friend Tsiu. He was none the worse for his night’s adventure, and explained to me, with a great show of affection, that he was hungry. I shoved him through the service hatch and locked it.

The cortege of generals, family friends, politicians and dear old boys from the Jockey Club was already at the fonda’s front door, when the cavalry, damning and blasting away, dashed into the dining room. They had taken the big black cloaks off their saddles, and put them on. You could see just enough pale blue and gold underneath, but not too much. The captain drew his sword, took a swipe at the nearest trooper with it, and then, as the dining room was thrown open, fell into an attitude of profound mourning.

I skipped out by the door into the kitchen, and watched through the glass panel. The old boys were immensely impressed by the reverence and foresight of Timoteo and the glorious army.

“Qué espectáculo dignísimo! Qué hermoso! Qué nobler!” they exclaimed, and all began to file past.

The guard of honor stood motionless. They were putting on a very good show indeed for scratch troops from provincial barracks, and they knew it. I felt that great-uncle, if he had stopped laughing, would approve.

The Jockey Club had provided a handsome little chest of gold and mahogany. When the time came for the transfer, Timoteo, who was respectfully hovering in the foreground and was accepted without question (since, as you’ve gathered, official organization had been overlooked) as master of ceremonies, took the initiative, and tried to pop the hospital box, all complete, into the chest.

They weren’t having any. There was an aged cousin who had been detailed for that job. He leaned his ebony stick against the table, the starch of his linen creaking and scraping at every movement, and fluttered his hands. At the last moment he didn’t like the actual touch, and beckoned to Timoteo to act as his proxy.

Timoteo used the most firm and solemn care, but as soon as he laid the heart in its permanent home, it expanded a little. The captain, watching out of his downcast eyes, jumped in front of the table and saluted, and his chaps presented arms. It was an inspiration. All those cloaks, swirling in bull-ring verónicas, distracted attention just long enough for Timoteo to slap the lid on – but I’d seen the antique cousin adjusting his glasses as if he couldn’t believe his eyes; and the reporter from the Noticias de la Tarde, who was out at the side of the room and hadn’t got the captain between him and the table, started a little drawing in his notebook to refresh his memory. There may have been others who saw. I don’t think there were. But those two were the biggest gossips in the capital.

Timoteo and the captain both received minor decorations from the President of the Republic – For Devotion to the National Honor. They aren’t likely to mention the refrigerator door. And, as for me, who am I that I should deny the assassination of Covadillas? Especially since I’m almost certain the bullet through his heart was mine.

The Pejemuller

THEY WERE so angry that they entirely missed the point. Their voices were hoarse with fury, and gasping for insults as for breath; so that, at the end, they never knew whether they had witnessed an atrocious crime or a supremely chivalrous act of deliverance. The little Andaluz was equally capable of either.

That fairground was no place for creatures compounded of fire or, perhaps, of water. Magnificently earthy was the crowd of tall Basques: farmers, fishermen and townsmen full of the vigorous Rioja wine which rooted them to their soil and gave to their good-humored spirits the cruelty and luxuriance of trees, overshadowing all but their own kind. The spirit of the Andaluz was rootless and extinguishable as a flame.

The town was two fields distant from the turbulent circle of lights, and that was far enough for the calm of deep stone wall and murmuring plaza to have lost their influence – more especially since few respectable women were at the fair. The sea was only a lane away, but lying unobtrusive in its summer silence. Bounded by the darkness of a ring of oaks, the fair became an individual world with its own repetitive pattern of life, gay in the clinking of glasses and money, the clattering of hoopla rings and balls, exasperated by the clarion music of Spanish roundabouts, the cries of showmen and the popping of the shooting galleries.

Paco Igarzábal and Salvador Aguirre strolled tolerantly along the outer aisle of booths. They were well dressed, but showed their solidarity with fellow Basques by wearing boinas on their heads and no ties around their collars; only by an air of patronizing joviality did they reveal that either of them could have bought the fair and fairground.

They had visited the Six-Legged Calf and the Hairy Woman. They now halted outside the booth of the Mermaid, feeling in massive pockets for small change. The entrance was not painted with any of the exciting monsters that decorated other booths. It was surmounted by a large, severe and well-lettered placard, announcing PEJEMULLER AUTÉNTICA (Genuine Mermaid); it added OF CANARY ISLAND WATERS – as if there were different and no less authentic breeds of mermaids from other waters.

Paco and Salvador entered the booth and joined the half-dozen men who were standing on the dusty turf before a curtained recess. The mermaid’s proprietor, seeing that there was now a quorum, closed the stretched canvas door. He was a little fellow with slender, flaring nostrils, thin lips and pointed chin. He looked more like a clerk than a showman, for he was dressed in neat-shabby black. A drooping bow tie, though only a length of black tape, suggested the minor intellectual.

He delivered no advertisement, seeming to trust in the rarity of his exhibit. He turned out the central light, drew apart the curtains and said Señores, look! in a tone of modest pride, as if wondering that to him it had fallen to catch or make or care for the mermaid.

The glass tank was some five feet long. The top was open, so that the customers could see it was brimful of water. The sides and the back were hidden by a stucco of pebbles and marine growth, some real, some painted. A faint green light illuminated the pejemuller.

Her body to the waist was that of an undernourished girl of twelve, the breasts just forming. From the waist down she was the conventional fish. The tail was a marvel of its creator’s artistry, for it sprang from the skin in little, irregular scales, leaving no definite line at which the skeptic could declare it to be attached. The scales grew larger over the full and powerful curve, sliding upon each other sleekly and naturally; then lessened as they passed, as imperceptibly, into the smooth membrane of the flukes.

She lay supported on one thin arm, facing the customers. Her face was yellowish, and small even for her dwarfed body. The eyes were pale and expressionless. The sandy hair was long and sparse, and so tangled among the rock and seaweed at the bottom of the tank that it could not be said to float, or not to float. She breathed, sometimes violently, but no bubbles came to the top of the water. Her only other movement was a slight and graceful swaying of her flukes. This she performed as if it were a drilled duty, now forgetting for too long an interval, then offering an extra wave or two to show repentance.

Paco Igarzábal leaned upon the rope which divided him from this phenomenon, and gave himself up, with a lusty pruriency, to close examination of its anatomy. He was a wholesale grocer and he best appreciated life when it was delivered in good coarse truckloads. He and his friend, Salvador Aguirre, were boon companions whenever they were not engaged in making money. They played billiards together on two evenings a week; they went to the bulls together, and they visited the stews of Bilbao together. The chief reason for their friendship was that they did no business together.

Salvador was a man of some education; that is to say, his system of bookkeeping was up-to-date; he could carry on the correspondence of his timberyard in correct Spanish; and he did not believe in God – though not, of course, a declared atheist, for that would have been to identify himself with the enemies of timber merchants. He was immensely busy within the limited area of his interests, and his workmen called him the wood-louse.

Salvador twisted himself this way and that among the onlookers in order to examine the tank from various angles. He apologized importantly and continually, and at last delivered his opinion.

“I will tell you how it is done,” he said. “There is a glass sheet which runs away from us diagonally –” he belched and had another shot at the word “– diagonally across the tank from top to bottom. Thus, friends, you see an unbroken sheet of water, but the mermaid is in an empty compartment.”

“Then how does she breathe?” asked a fisherman. “There would be no air.”

“She is wholly immersed in water,” answered the showman, the Andaluz. “The pejemuller, gentlemen, does not, as I have myself observed, breathe like a Christian. She admits water into her body through a system of gills.”

“But where?” roared Paco. “Where does she keep them?”

He suggested several possible positions.

“Caballero!” protested the showman abruptly. “Be decent! She can hear.”

The pejemuller showed no sign of hearing. She waved her tail in languid response to the enthusiasm of the world outside her tank.

“But can she understand?” asked Salvador Aguirre with a precise little smile. “She seems to me to be an idiot.”

“She understands as much as you,” replied the Andaluz with a show of courtesy.

Paco shouted with laughter, and slapped his friend on the back.

“I say it is a little girl,” declared Salvador, his wrinkled face working with an excited obstinacy that hid humiliation. “I say that the tail is of colored scales of mica, and that diagonally—”

“It is a pejemuller,” interrupted the showman.

“It would not be your daughter, perhaps?”

The face of the Andaluz burned and went white as ash.

“It appears I am among brutes,” he said.

“And whom, señor, do you call brute?”

“Since you have said, señor, that I would exhibit my daughter …”

“Man, I said there was a diagonal and—”

“There is no diagonal.”

“There is a diagonal.”

“You know as much of diagonals as of your father.”

“You lie!”

“Stupendous bastard!”

Paco Igarzábal swayed forward his big frame between the two smaller men.

“Let us see, friends! Let us see! What is this? Are we going to kill one another for a little difference of opinion? This gentleman says that there is no diagonal and that, by logic, the pejemuller is a pejemuller. My companion says that there is a diagonal, and that the gentleman is perhaps exhibiting his afflicted daughter.”

The Andaluz leapt at him, just as Paco expected – for he was never one to miss a chance of sport.

Paco grabbed him by the opening of his black waistcoat, and held him at arm’s length. The Andaluz twisted and stamped, answering the renewed insults of Salvador, who was kept back by Paco’s other arm.

“Let us see!” repeated Paco. “A little calm, gentlemen! All this for a diagonal, that can be settled in a moment!”

“Hijo de puta!” hissed the Andaluz.

“Big names!” Paco answered, unaffected. “How much will you take to show us the tank?”

“More than I paid for your mother,” the Andaluz retorted, and spat in his face with a clean trajectory parallel to the arm which held him.

Paco Igarzábal barked with anger and flung him to the ground. Onlookers crashed down upon the struggling men, trying to separate them. The tank rocked on its trestles and spilled water over the edge. The mermaid held her pose, ceasing only, since no eyes stared at her, to move her tail.

At last the tumult of bodies cohered into two groups. The fisherman, huge and benevolent, held the Andaluz. Paco and Salvador were surrounded by the rest of the onlookers, all counseling prudence at the tops of their voices. Not a word could be distinguished in the uproar. The tent heaved and shook as passers-by pushed down the door to listen to so magnificent and delectable a row.

Paco was now more angry than Salvador – if indeed there could be any choice between two men who were living in a fantasy of rage – but, seeing himself surrounded by fellow townsmen who were wont to respect him for his supercilious calm, he choked on his stream of oaths and shouted at the Andaluz in a voice that quivered with the effort of control:

“Listen you! This is to end all argument. I will buy your mermaid and your tent! Understand?”

This astonishing offer brought silence. The Andaluz seemed to recoil as if his spirit were about to leap into passion beyond the reach of all humanity. The fisherman who held him tried with sincere simplicity to conciliate.

“Sell him the mermaid at your price, friend!” he said. “Don Paco has money. And thus – in peace!”

“Ten thousand pesetas,” offered Paco.

“I am a caballero,” answered the Andaluz, each word a slow, reluctant gasp of pain. “I carry this vile trade among brutes who have no upbringing, but I am a caballero. You have called me a liar. You have said that this unhappy thing is my daughter. Now you think that for your money –” his voice rose to a scream “– Where, among whom am I? Ay, my pride! My shame! Cabrones! Must I show you what it is to have a heart?”

He fell upon his knees, and the fisherman, not knowing whether this unexpected limpness was a mere feint or the illimitable appeal of a defeated soul, rested a light, embarrassed hand upon his shoulder. The Andaluz dived beneath the rope and flung himself at the nearest trestle. The green light went out. The tank thudded on the ground, and the water flopped in two solid masses against the canvas of the booth. The plate glass tinkled and crashed as the Andaluz flailed it with the trestle.

Men fumbled for the switch, heaving and swearing in the corner where the showman had turned off the central light. No one crossed the rope to enter that shadowy hell where a spirit translated its devastation into the material.

White light glared. At the back of the booth stood the Andaluz, the trestle in his right hand, his left around the waist of the pejemuller. She clung to him with her arms round his neck, pitiable as a shivering monkey. She was even smaller than she had seemed in the tank; her tiny yellow head was against his cheek, but the glittering tail did not reach his knees. Except that she clung to what she knew, she was not human.

The Andaluz walked through the tent and over the prostrate door. He still held the trestle in his hand, but it was no fear of physical violence that parted the crowd of powerful Basques. He passed under the harsh lights of the roaring fairground, blood and filth upon his face, clothes dripping water. He walked proudly. What march, what music of sunlit trumpets he heard, that too was accepted by the onlookers. They followed.

He took the lane to the sea, where, beyond the circle of trees, only the softness of the night gleamed on the black and changing mirrors of that marvel which flapped against his thigh. He strode over the rock and down to the boat-slip. The ripples of the Atlantic, inch-high, hissed as they parted over the descending stone.

“God guard thee, little friend!”

He loosened the thin arms from his neck, and flung the pejemuller into the night sea. She took the water cleanly, rose once and went under, her tail seeming to flick the starlit surface.

“And now – leave me in peace!” cried the Andaluz.

He stumbled away across the rocks, unnoticed, uncared for. The crowd were arguing, shouting with a recrudescence of anger, gaping into the darkness for another sight of the pejemuller.

In the morning, when they wanted the Andaluz, he had gone, leaving behind him only the debris of the tank, impossible to reconstruct. They understood that he had flung away his living for the sake of his honor; that was no thought foreign to any of them, except perhaps to Salvador. But what it was that he had flung away neither high-tide mark nor the passing of the months disclosed.

First Blood

SHE WAS a treaty cruiser, built for speed. Urgency was in her lines, urgency in the deep hum of the engines. Urgent were even the seemingly casual attitudes of the men in open shirts and gray flannel trousers who crowded her decks. She was jammed full as a refugee ship; yet this was no ragged cargo hysterical with relief and embarrassing the ship’s company by their gratitude and misery. The men on deck were lean well-fed army officers returning hastily to the Middle East from their canceled leave. They were not yet in uniform. War had not been declared.

Mr. Avellion sat on a locker, watching the two huge curves of Mediterranean that raced towards the horizon from the cruiser’s bows. There was no other movement on the water and no cloud but a dark patch of haze astern hanging over Marseilles. Ships, more sensitive to threat of war than of weather, were in port. The sea was an empty blue pool.

He was a civilian. In that eager warship, racing to deliver her packed human freight at Alexandria, there was a small group of businessmen, all specialists in shipping, oil and cables, or obscurer but imperial trades. None of them was important enough to command an unpurchasable air passage, but all were badly needed at their stations before Mussolini, if he meant to move, could delay their arrival.

There was peace in Avellion’s heart; quivering and uncertain, but peace. He drew a deep breath as if to float this unaccustomed ardor of well-being more securely in an expanded soul, and coughed.

He was of use; he was wanted. What was it that the Board of Trade chap had said to him? Mr. Avellion, your local knowledge will be invaluable. To ask him to leave in twenty-four hours was a bit stiff. Still, chaps like himself were important in times of war. Nobody could tell what value they mightn’t find in his little business at Suez. He was sometimes hazy about the details of what he did there, especially in the morning with always a gaggle of silly Arabs shouting at him; but objectives became beautifully clear at sundown when his boy brought in more ice and the second bottle. Whatever he might feel for the rest of the day, there were two hours every evening when his life was full of interest. The dreams of those hours had, after all, been true. Invaluable – that was what the Board of Trade chap had called him.

He became aware of a voice.

“Eh? What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Not much chance if they catch us.’”

The speaker, by profession a cable manager, was as obvious a businessman as Mr. Avellion, but his fat was more neatly distributed throughout his person. Avellion was pear-shaped, with much of his weight far to the south of his belt; he cultivated a small white military mustache, above which was a powerful nose sprouting blue-gray buds like a tree in winter; his appearance was raffish and faintly disreputable, at any rate when compared to the plumpness, the round clean-shaven face, the precise little mouth and nose of his fellow passenger.

Avellion’s bloodshot eyes twinkled at him.

“They won’t try, my boy.”

“First thing we’ll know about it will be the whole Italian Navy on us,” grumbled the cable manager.

“They won’t start till we do,” said Avellion, “not they! They’re still hoping we shall rat, like we did at Munich.”

“Hope you’re right. But I don’t like it,” replied the cable manager judiciously. “I don’t like it. The ship can’t even fight. Do you know we have fifteen hundred passengers on board?”

“A fine lot of boys!” Avellion boomed. “Proud to be with ’em. Well, how about a little drink?”

“There isn’t any.”

“What?”

“There couldn’t be enough, you see. So they’ve closed down altogether. We’ll be short of food, too. Bound to be.”

“Bound to be,” echoed Avellion dully.

All around the afterturrets the deck was strewn with men lounging on blankets and reading, sun-bathing, playing bridge, or asleep. The more energetic strolled back and forth, picking their way through and over the tangle of feet. The lifeboat against which Avellion leaned his shoulder was full of men; an orderly shambles in which everyone seemed to be unpacking and repacking kit. Scraps of conversation drifted past him, mingled of annoyance, indignation, and sardonic amusement.

“Thirty-six hours in the train, and we drank it all up. … No time to buy any. … Well, who the devil would think of packing his cellar? … Now you know what war is like, old boy!” Then laughter at the sorry plight of eight hundred officers on the quarter-deck and seven hundred men in the flats that did duty as troop decks, all torn at two days’ notice from the delights of leave, and all without a drink.

Avellion had done just as they – packed his immediate needs and drunk them up. He was allowed only such baggage as he could carry; there had been no room for more than two bottles. They had left Newhaven on the night boat, sleeping wherever there was space to sit or lie, then spent an unshaven dawn at Dieppe, where the six special trains stood hissing in the sidings and the French children cheered and the adults watched with grim, set faces these forerunners of another war. So passed a day and a night, while they waited in sunbaked railway yards or trundled slowly southwards to Marseilles, until the trains emptied themselves into the cruiser and that weary, merry crowd sorted itself out on her decks.

It was magnificent, thought Avellion, a memory forever. During the last war he had been out East, clerk in a merchant’s office. He had since accused himself of – well, not funk but lack of spirit. He had been indispensable, they said; and it was true that, so far as the business went, he was. He had always told himself that next month the rush of work would ease, and that then he could enlist; it never did ease, and suddenly the war was over.

Yet now, twenty years later, here he was among these careless, loose-jointed boys and men, off to war with the first party of the professionals. Followed their mercenary calling and took their wages and are dead – that was one of the bits he would chant in his imperial solitude. And he was proud of himself. At fifty-five it wasn’t so bad to have completed the journey and shared the hardships, such as they were, without feeling one penny the worse – except that, God, he couldn’t endure many more hours without a drink!

Dusk fell. The blind turrets lifted their guns like the antennae of insects feeling for the night, and fired blank charges. The professionals jumped, and for a moment searched sea and sky for the enemy; then smiled as if they had known all along that these muted bangs were some naval ritual of active service. Avellion did just as they, but with effort. Though his mind was calmly convinced that there was no chance of war for at least another week, his nerves were uncontrollable. Thereafter he started at any sound at all.

A bugle summoned his mess to supper. He followed the notices which led him down, through hot and hotter boxes of steel, into the Marines’ flat. The ship’s company seemed little affected by August in the Mediterranean. The soldiers blenched as they insinuated themselves between the steel walls, and the sweat leapt to their skins. Avellion felt faint. He slid onto one of the long wooden benches and smiled dimly at his neighbors across the table until he recovered. The meal was simple; there were tinned stew, tinned and now liquid butter, and marmalade. He pecked at them. There was warm water to drink.

The man who sat opposite him, sunburned as an Egyptian, said, as if apologizing for the shortcomings of the senior service:

“Not much in the way of grub, I’m afraid. They were given no warning that they had to pick us up, and it’s a marvel how they manage to feed us at all.”

The speaker’s silk shirt was open to the waist, and beads of perspiration trickled between the iron-gray hairs of his chest. Avellion knew the type. The man would turn out to be a colonel at least, when he changed into uniform in Cairo.

“Jolly good show, I call it!” said Avellion stoutly.

The military eye rested on him pityingly and approvingly.

“They shouldn’t have sent civilians out this way.”

“It was the fastest,” Avellion replied. “We have to be there before the balloon goes up.”

A good phrase that. He had learned a number of them in the train: to say “browned off” for “fed up,” to speak of “armor” instead of “tanks.” Thirty-six hours in the train. In his compartment one other businessman and four young chaps on their way to rejoin their units. All the whisky gone as well as some bottles of red wine they bought at a station. Whisky. It was hard to eat a meal without it.

The senior officer left. Avellion asked who he was, and immediately aroused enthusiasm. Yes, he was a colonel and certain to be commanding a division in a year, and had all sorts of new theories about armor. He had been invited to mess with the captain of the cruiser, but as soon as he saw how bloody uncomfortable everyone else was going to be, he insisted on coming along to share. Just like him! Grand fellow!

With this shot of romanticism in his water, Avellion managed to drink two glasses of it. The liquid poured through his skin, leaving no satisfying body behind.

He staggered up on deck and retired to the space of forty square feet, between some ventilators and a pompom, where the civilians had drawn apart and spread out their bedding – two blankets per man issued by the ship, and whatever they could find in their baggage to mitigate the hardness of the deck. Once by themselves, the businessmen were outspoken in their condemnation of the cruiser, the discomfort, and the various government departments that had facilitated or demanded their voyage.

The ship raced southwards at thirty knots, and for a little while the contrast between the cool wind of her passage and the sweltering heat below decks was calming as whisky to Avellion. He took no part in the general conversation. His inflated imperial mood had vanished, but nevertheless he was disgusted with his fellow civilians. They were wrong, and he was weary, and the world was very wrong. If only he could sleep!

The night passed. It seemed an interminable twisting from one hip to the other; yet at times there was a glassy unconsciousness and at times a wild succession of half-wakeful thoughts, so mad that they could only be explained as dreams.

At dawn he watched his companions crawl from their blankets, ridiculous in untidy scraps of clothing or wormlike in nakedness. He stayed still. The dreams bothered him. There was no way of waking up from them; yet he was, he knew, awake. It was familiar enough, that feeling, but shadowed by the apprehension of some horror still unrealized.

The horror rose to the surface. There was to be no whisky that day and nearly all the next day. No whisky till Malta, thirty hours away, and no guarantee that one could land at Malta. But of course they would be allowed to land. He clung to that. Only thirty hours away. And of course they would be allowed to land.

“Good morning to you.”

It was the cable manager. He had washed and shaved and extracted enough from a well-packed suitcase to give himself the dapper niceness of a holiday-maker.

“Got a touch of fever?”

Avellion tried to concentrate his thoughts.

“Fever? Fever?”

“You’re shaking all over.”

Avellion held out his hand and looked at it stupidly. It did not seem to belong to him. It was dancing. He put the tips of his index and third finger on his knee and let them gambol like the legs of a ballerina. That was an old trick of his at parties – to wrap a handkerchief round his wrist to form the skirt and let his fingers dance. They danced now. His whole hand danced furiously, and there was nothing at all he could do to stop it. He felt a rush of anger at the man who stared.

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he said. “Always like this in the morning. Everybody is. Where the devil do I get a wash?”

He could not shave, but the cool water in which he dipped his face and wrists revived him. He dressed, and strolled round the deck, stepping with care over the prostrate bodies of the army. With many he exchanged smiles. They felt, obviously, that their discomfort was comic, that nothing whatever could be done about the inefficiencies of the War Office as a travel agency, and that one might as well enjoy the enforced idleness. For Avellion there was comfort in the prevailing bonhomie, and again a measure of calm in the exhilarating rush of the ship across a perfectly flat Mediterranean. He could not face breakfast or lunch, but it was not so bad. Not so bad. And he was four and a half hours nearer Malta.

In the afternoon he had trouble with a very primitive Avellion who wanted to scream. He kept him in order, but was driven to cadge – very decently – for drinks. Drink was the subject of his conversation with all casual acquaintances. But the passengers’ baggage was bone dry. Everyone to whom he spoke was also hoping to God that Mr. Avellion – his nose looked so promising – would produce a bottle and himself offer treat. A naval officer murmured uncomfortably that the wardroom too was dry; they couldn’t, he said, very well open the bar for themselves alone when the ship was full of devastatingly thirsty soldiers. He moved uneasily away.

Avellion clung for support to that invaluable local knowledge. He had it all right. His line had always been the native trade, and he knew the dhow skippers from Oman to Suez, their ships, their reputations, and their rackets; little cargo could run the blockade to Abyssinia and no gossip of it be repeated in his office. He looked forward to new, stern friendships, more dutiful than his innumerable bar acquaintanceships, more familiar than the strange attachments occasionally and passionately formed by Arabs for those they could not understand.

No more of just making and losing money. At last, he told himself, he had something to serve, and in good company like that colonel’s. For an important man, an important man in good and gallant company, not to be able to stand two days without a drink was absurd. Self-control! Mustn’t make a fuss.

Two more hours passed, long as the whole voyage. The bugle summoned him to eat, but he could not face the mess flat and the sweating alleyways. The open deck was fresh and cool as sanity.

The cable manager had pity on him and, suspecting that the oily smell below had upset Mr. Avellion, brought him a sandwich. Avellion ate it and swallowed water. Nothing had taste or even feeling.

“Bothered by the sea, old chap?”

Avellion shook his head. The confession broke from him.

“I’ve got to have a drink,” he cried harshly. “You don’t understand. I’ve shifted a lot in the last twenty years. Not real heavy drinking. Only just what one needs in the tropics. It doesn’t do me any harm, but being cut off like this—”

His hand danced in the air describing a vague figure eight, a complicated gesture of emptiness.

“Ask the doctor for some,” suggested the cable manager. “You ought to taper off gently. He’ll know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I will. Of course.”

Avellion got up from his two blankets spread on the deck. He did not look back at them. There had been a queer shadow close to his ear, at the limit of vision. He scuttled off towards the sick bay, and then could not remember why he wanted to go there. He sat down heavily on a stanchion. To go to the doctor – of course that was it: to ask the doctor for a drink.

The cruiser hurled herself through the water, white ensign at the stern stiff with the wind of passage as the tin flag on a toy ship. The mercenaries of the Middle East strolled leisurely past Avellion; they could, he gathered, endure the steady diet of stew and marmalade; they could sleep well enough on blankets and the deck; they were ribald at the overcrowding, so close that one man’s head was between the feet of another; but they still cursed bitterly at the lack of any alcohol to beguile the tedium of the voyage.

It seemed to Avellion that he was not alone in his torment. He was again ashamed. He too was a servant of the state, and invaluable. If they could endure privation, he could. Good God, he had recaptured his youth during those long hours in the train!

The doctor? It might be less than twenty hours to Malta at this speed. Then he could soak in it, and afterwards taper off gradually. That colonel, the one who sat and sweated into his marmalade, wasn’t asking for special privileges. What? Go squealing to the doctor with all his comrades as thirsty as he? Comrades – comrades – he kept rolling the young word through his mind as he walked back to his blankets.

The night was peopled with strange images. It seemed busier and less long than the last. Once he screamed.

“Sorry, chaps. Must have had a nightmare.”

It cost him a physical effort to say so. He wanted to go on screaming and tell them why. He screamed twice more – simply couldn’t help it – but managed to make them sound like violent coughs.

In the morning he felt better. The shadow in the corner of his eyes had gone. He decided that he hadn’t felt so well for a long time. That was what came from self-control, from really knocking off the drink. He had a pet, too. As soon as the others had gone to breakfast he played with it. It seemed quite tame, but stayed always out of reach of his hand.

When the cable manager came back, Avellion showed it to him.

“Look at him!” he said. “Animals know whom to trust.”

“Look at what?”

“Here, man, here! See him?”

“See what?”

“Little black rat. His Majesty’s rat! Look at him.”

The cable manager did not always appreciate jokes. He was therefore unduly willing to accept them when they were not there.

“Very good! Very good!” he said with an embarrassed laugh, and trotted away to take his exercise.

Several people watched, disturbed, the flitting of Mr. Avellion’s hands and listened to the endearing terms in which he spoke to the invisible; but he looked sane, though unshaven, and they gave him the benefit of the doubt – an eccentric passing the hours of idleness in his own way, with, undoubtedly, the help of a secret bottle.

In a dream Avellion waited for Malta. There was nothing clear in his brain out a longing and a prohibition. “It will be all right when you get to Malta,” he said to himself. “Do nothing till you get to Malta.” Desire was no longer so simple that it could be defined as wanting a drink. At Malta there would be an end to unknown agony.

The colonel sat down by Mr. Avellion. He did not know what was wrong, or indeed if there was anything seriously wrong at all. He talked very casually with the eccentric businessman, and at last, as a good regimental officer, he understood and he admired the rat. He also said that Malta was in sight. Mr. Avellion began to weep. He then screamed luxuriously, and kept on screaming while the colonel led him to the sick bay.

Mr. Avellion got his whisky, but it was of little interest to him. He even reached Malta, or at least the launch which came out to carry him to the hospital. The ship reported him as a case of delirium tremens caused by a habitual drinker’s sudden want of alcohol. There were plenty of such cases in the books, due to poverty or isolation in desert or at sea. The ship was doubtful whether d.t. could be caused by sheer courage, but could give no other explanation of Mr. Avellion’s abstinence and death.

Culture

PRIVATE KIRIAKOS VACLIS was in his middle thirties, and not so handy an infantryman as he had been when he completed long ago his military training. His heart and mustache were exceedingly fierce, but his belly was still round – though conforming, after a month of Greek rations and mountain warfare, more nearly to the platoon average. He was in civil life headwaiter in an Athens café. When the military smiled at this former profession, he explained to them, with passionate eloquence, that the culmination of the soldier’s art was nothing but great efficiency at great speed – and who should know more of that than he?

They were at the bottom of an uncomfortable valley. The clouds wreathed down it towards Greece, carrying either freezing mist or sleet. Five hundred feet higher, on the two ridges that commanded the plain, the clouds brought snow. Up there were the Italians. To Vaclis the damp seemed colder than any imaginable snow. His section was huddled under the lee of a ruined wall with two stout blankets, supported by stones and sticks, for shelter. They had no fire, since any flicker of light at once became the target for Italian mortars. The enemy never hit the offending unit, but scored freely among innocent comrades who had obeyed orders and remained shivering in the dark.

The beastliness of their bivouac did not damp their spirits. They were victorious, and in the first flush of romantic patriotism. Their morale was terrific. Any one of those unlettered peasants was ready to declare his war aims in oratory that would have dispatched a northern soldier to the cookhouse or the psychiatrist. They were full of classical allusions to Salamis and Thermopylae, for ancient history was their own. They invoked the conquest of Greece by the Romans as if it had happened yesterday, and called on the apostles for revenge.

Kiriakos Vaclis shared the fanaticism of his fellows, and, as an educated man, added a vigorous editorial rotundity to the expression of their common feelings. He was proud to be an Athenian, and prouder still – since it reflected glory on his city – of knowing the ways of foreigners and of speaking French. The language was not as orientally courteous as his own, but the possession of it gave him a sense of polite internationalism which he was at pains to cultivate.

Vaclis shivered as spurts of wind trickled round the protecting wall, and stabbed into the wet wool of his uniform. He was in physical misery, warmed only by good Greek thoughts of defiance. At first light they were to attack the western ridge. He had misgivings lest he, the townsman, should not keep pace with sure-footed peasants, but he was sure of his skill at arms. A civilized Athenian was, he told himself, at an advantage in handling modern weapons.

He damned the Italians who compelled urbanity to leave the luxurious warmth of a café, the comfortable sweat of kitchens, to sit on an Albanian mountain in the middle of winter. He swore aloud to bathe in their warm blood. The phrase was heroic, and had pleasing associations of steaming gravy. He rolled it out again. His mates applauded, though they knew very well that blood, up there among the Italians, was neither liquid nor warm. One couldn’t bathe in it. One could, if so minded, pick up a lump and throw it.

The night had paled enough to distinguish a snowflake from a stab of rain. Formless bundles stirred on the ground, and rose; rocks detached themselves from rocks, bushes from bushes. The gray bodies in the gray mist took on shape and purpose as the company, huddled in sheepskin coats, moved to the forming-up area like animals driven by the wind to gather in herd. The sleet hissed down the valley, hiding them under an icy web of showers from each other and from the enemy.

Kiriakos Vaclis plodded up the goat track which zigzagged along the foot of the ridge. His platoon objective was the highest of all: an Italian post well out to the right flank of their main position. He knew that there was a fierce climb ahead of him, and certainly a fierce reception waiting at the top. His Mediterranean blood was up, and he cared for neither. To get his hands on the invader of his sacred land – that was what he wanted.

The platoon halted in dead ground, and deployed. Then his section was away, hands hauling on the tough scrub, feet searching for crannies in the rock. He squirmed upwards, flat against so steep a slope that even the belly which remained to him was an encumbrance. Soon they were clambering upon slush and gravel, sharp frozen by the night; then at last upon an easier gradient where deep snow slowed and silenced movement.

The wind howled over the slopes of the plateau. Vaclis realized that the enemy position was even crueler than their own. He wondered how humanity could endure to remain on the defense, inactive in such cold, and then remembered that the Italians, so it was said, would certainly run away if they were not frequently shot by their own officers.

His heart pounded with the effort of the climb. Only his fingers were frozen, and they did not matter. There would be little trigger pulling; the Greeks went in with the bayonet. They had no grenades.

When he topped the ridge, the snow was immediately flecked with little holes. He yelled defiance, but was practical soldier enough to drop into cover as he did so. The snow did not spurt like dust or earth; it just received the machine-gun bullets and forgot about them. His section was pinned down. That was to be expected; but he could see the platoon Bren gun – mysterious and effective gift of the British, if only one had enough ammo – working into position on the flank. A few bursts, and his section would rush the last hundred feet. In the excitement of his patriotism he had no fear of death, and certainly none of the Italians.

The enemy fire became ragged. The section was up from the snow and plunging forward.

“Aera! Aerar!”

The effort of finding still more breath for the battle cry was too much for Vaclis. He forgot his feet, and tripped over a loose strand of wire. Cursing and damning, he picked himself up and stumbled after his comrades who had overrun the Italian post and were storming on towards their next objective.

“Aera!” he yelled, and charged over the beaten track, with bayonet ready for any enemy who might be left.

Ten yards ahead a little figure in thin Italian uniform rose from the snow, shivering and weaponless. He made no gesture of surrender, but his whole body was evidence that he had had enough of cold. Even death – if anyone could be bothered to kill in such weather – was a mere incident compared to the endless misery of cold. He regarded the terrible Greek, and smiled nervously.

“Monsieur,” he stammered in excellent French, “il fait bien froid.”

As a greeting it was adequate; and as comment on the only fact that mattered, it called for a civilized response.

Vaclis stopped and stared. The enemy was conversational. It spoke French.

In his astonishment he answered automatically and with equal politeness.

“Oui, monsieur, il fait bien froid.”

Woman in Love

IT WAS the nearest he had ever come to sending an agent to his death. Her death, rather. He admitted that he shouldn’t have taken the risk, that a man with his experience of women should have known better; but there he was with the enemy order of battle – or ally’s peaceful deployment, according to how you look at it – all along the southern fringe of the Iron Curtain from Bratislava to the Black Sea. The list was complete, and accurate up to the previous Saturday; and there wasn’t a chance of getting it out to the west. No handy secret wireless. No landing grounds. Not a trustworthy agent who had the remotest hope of being given a passport in time to be of use. Theotaki had found his job much easier when operating under the noses of the Gestapo.

He was a Roumanian of Greek origin, with all a Greek’s hungry passion for the ideal freedom which had never in practical politics existed, and never could. He had also the Greek’s love of adventurous intrigue for its own sake. One gets used to the trade, he would say. Steeple jacks, for example. They couldn’t be thinking all the time about risk. They took, he supposed, meticulous care with all their preparations – blocks and tackle, scaffolding, belts – and then got on with the job. It was only when a man had scamped the preliminaries that he need worry about risks.

Normally there was no need to scamp them, no disastrous demand for hurry. Cold war wasn’t like hot war, and there weren’t any impatient generals howling for immediate results. So caution, caution, caution, all the time. It was a bit dull, he said, but the main objective had to be to keep his organization alive.

He admitted, however, that this had been an occasion for desperate measures. The only chance he could see of getting that enemy order of battle into hands that would appreciate it was D 17. D 17 was going the very next day to Stockholm to be married. She would never have been allowed to leave for less neutral territory; but it was hard, even for communist bureaucrats, to think up a really valid excuse for preventing a citizen – an entirely useless citizen whose parents were living on the proceeds of their jewelry and furniture – from taking herself off to Sweden and matrimony, when a firm request for her had been passed through diplomatic channels.

Alexia – D 17 – was a very minor agent: somewhat too enthusiastic, said Theotaki, for her sister had been mishandled by the Russian advance guards when they entered Bucharest and had died the following week. The unfortunate incident had had some effect on Theotaki’s ideals of freedom, too. But he never confessed to emotion. To judge by his jowled, dead, decadent face, you wouldn’t have thought him capable of feeling any.

Since he had moved before the war in the social circle of the parents and their two daughters, he knew Alexia very well. She had, of course, no idea that he was in any way responsible for the occasional orders received by D 17. She couldn’t have given away more than the three names of the other members of her cell – at least she couldn’t up to the time when Theotaki was forced into gambling against his better judgment.

He kept her under observation all the morning. She was shopping for a few clothes and necessary trifles that she could much better have bought abroad. But she didn’t know that. Alexia visualized the outside world as seething with unemployment and economic distress. Of course she did, of course she did, exclaimed Theotaki, defending this absurd shopping. Even when you are aware that all your news is tainted, you have to believe some of it. For all Alexia knew, the shops of Stockholm might well have been looted by starving rioters or bought out by dollar-waving American troops.

She was obviously happy. Well, why wouldn’t she be? She was a tense and luminous woman in her middle twenties escaping to her lover and doing a bit of buying to please his eyes. When, however, she sat down, alone, in the huge barren hall of a cheap café, she was ashamed of herself. Theotaki guessed it from her bearing, from the uncertainty of her eyes. He was clever as any woman at guessing mood when not a word had passed. To be ashamed of yourself for being happy was, he explained, one of the most damnable, minor, nagging aches of political tyranny. Your personal tastes and joys could not be altered by the common discontent, yet you felt they should be. Love and the flighting of duck at first light and the relish of wine to a man and the feel of dress to a woman – they don’t come to an end because your country is enslaved and terrorized.

So that was the position – D 17 sitting in a café, thinking of her beloved with one half of her mind, and with the other her duty to hate; and Theotaki moving behind her to find a table, not too far away, where she couldn’t see and greet him.

He took one of the café’s illustrated papers in its cane frame, and began abstractedly to write a poem across the blank spaces of an advertisement. When he had finished his drink and his casual scribbling, he paid his bill and sent the waiter to Alexia with the paper. He then vanished from his table and stood talking to a casual acquaintance by the door, whence he could watch in a mirror the effect of his inspiration.

The waiter suspected nothing. It was a quite normal act to send a paper to a customer who had asked for it – especially if the customer were a pretty girl. At least it appeared quite normal when Theotaki did it. That he was alive at all was largely due to his naturalness of manner.

Alexia received the paper as if it were expected. Theotaki approved her presence of mind, and well he might. Any gesture of surprise could have led – if the waiter earned a little extra money by giving information to the police – to prolonged questioning of both of them. He admitted that he had been apprehensive. He hadn’t been able to arrange much training for her and her like.

She glanced idly through the coarse rotogravures of factory openings and parades, and found the doodling of some previous reader. There were girls’ heads, and jottings for a very commonplace love poem to sweet seventeen. Among the half lines, the blanks to be filled in, the notes for promising rhymes, was a phrase your garden at three in the morning continually repeated, toyed with and crossed out because no order of the words could be made to scan. Then came a row of capital D’s, as if the lovesick doodler, failing to succeed as a poet, had tried to design the most decorative letter with which to begin his work,

D 17’s garden at 3 A.M. – the message would have been instantly clear to Theotaki who never read anything that was misplaced, even a printer’s error, without wondering why it was misplaced. But he didn’t expect the same alertness from D 17; he only hoped. As a man of imagination he had, he insisted, the keenest sympathy for romance, and therefore thought it more than likely that Alexia would be too absorbed by justifiable dreams to notice his vulgar scribblings. He was very pleased with her indeed when her hand began to fiddle with ashtray, saucer and saltcellar, arranging them into a group of three to show, if there were anyone watching her, that she had read and understood.

D 17’s garden – or rather her parents’ – was a reasonably safe spot for a rendezvous. A high but climbable wall separated its overgrown shrubbery from the state-disciplined bushes of a public park. In happier days Alexia and her sister had been very well aware of its advantages.

High-spirited young ladies, said Theotaki. Yes, and they had had their own uproarious methods of discouraging unwelcome suitors. When he dropped over the wall that night, for the second time in his life, he remembered that ten years earlier there had been a cunning arrangement of glass and empty cans to receive him, and a crash that woke the uneasy summer sleepers in four blocks of flats that faced the park.

This time there were only silence and soft leaf mold. Theotaki in a whisper reminded the darkness of his last visit and of the two excitable policemen who had burst with Alexia’s father into the garden. Even in those days he had been skilled at evading policemen.

The darkness did not answer. Very rightly. This might be a trap. D 17 had not received her orders through the usual channels.

Theotaki sat down with his back against the wall and waited. After a while he again addressed the dark shapes of the bushes. He warned them that if they were not alone they had better say so, for he was about to speak of the relationship – the 1951 relationship, that is – between himself and Alexia.

Alexia detached herself from her background, and assured him that she was alone. As proof of his authority, he told her the names and numbers of the other members of her cell and what their recent activities had been.

“Will that do?” he asked. “Or do you want more details, D 17?”

She murmured that she couldn’t know … that she would never have believed it possible … that never in all her life had she respected him – or anyone – so much. …

Theotaki apologized for being desperate. Caution – caution, he told her, was the only road to success. There was no hurry, no room for either risks or enthusiasm. Still, sometimes – regretfully – one had to improvise. Where was it safe to talk?

She led him away from the wall into a tunnel of green darkness, and begged him to say what he wanted from her. Always that dangerous feminine enthusiasm. Yet it was a little forced. Theotaki could tell by her voice that she was uneasy at the unexpected mixture of her social life – such as it was – with her very secret service.

He apologized again for his inefficiency, for the urgency – there should never be any urgency – which had compelled him to appeal to her directly.

“It isn’t fair to any of us,” he said.

“Whatever happens to me, I shall not talk,” Alexia assured him in a passionate whisper.

Theotaki considered the eager, small-boned body with the pitying eye of a professional. It would be capable of exquisite suffering, but he was inclined to share Alexia’s faith in its resistance. Torture had little effect upon a flame. Better technique was to confine it closely and have patience until it went out. He reckoned that about three months would be enough to draw out full confession from an Alexia who by then would be Alexia no longer.

Three months. Or much less, if she were caught without possibility of blank denials. Good God, when he thought, afterwards, how nearly it had happened, how but for the most amazing luck. … .

“You are in love?” he asked.

“Doesn’t it stand to reason?”

Theotaki quickly answered that he hadn’t doubted it for a moment. Nor he had. She wasn’t the type of woman to marry, just to escape from the country, without love. No, he wanted to know what she would answer – to hear, as it were, the worst from her own lips.

He remembered the man who taught him his trade. He liked to remember him very carefully, for, since the man was dead, there was no other method of consultation. This teacher of his used to say that a female agent was every bit as good as any male. What she lacked in attack, she made up in human understanding. But never, the dead man had insisted, never choose a woman in love!

Something of this, by way of warning, he repeated to D 17.

“I think your friend did not understand women,” she answered.

Theotaki explained that his friend had been talking only of women of character, who worked for patriotism, not money. He had not implied that such a woman’s devotion would be any less because she was in love, nor that she would be likely to sacrifice the cause to her private happiness. No, he had only meant that any woman of outstanding intensity was, when in love, Love Itself. She became possessed by hormones and happiness, and ceased to bother with details.

“And I wouldn’t choose any woman but a woman in love,” Alexia laughed. “Because until she is, she’s only half alive.”

Theotaki admitted there was something in that. The will of a woman in love dominated her environment; though it couldn’t, perhaps, burn its way through armor plate, it would certainly try.

“But don’t forget my friend’s experience,” he warned her. “He was a man of very wide experience. And so be a little more careful over details than you would be ordinarily. Just to compensate.”

He gave her the precious sheet of foolscap, closely typed over with the positions, the strengths, the armor of corps, divisions and independent brigades.

“Learn that by heart,” he said, “and then burn it. Burn it and crush the ashes. When you get to Stockholm, make an excuse, as soon as you reasonably can, to be alone, and go straight to the address you will read at the bottom of the sheet. Say you come from me, and recite your lesson. That’s all. Then you can be happy with a good conscience. I, your leader, tell you so.”

When she had vanished silently into the house, Theotaki flowed, inch by careful inch, like the battered tomcat he resembled, back over the wall. He walked from the park to his flat through streets deserted by all but the police. Several times during the journey he showed his papers. He was a privileged person, kept rather contemptuously by the Ministry of the Interior for the sake of his general usefulness. Nobody could possibly have suspected Theotaki of any idealism.

D17 – well, what D 17 did when she was alone in her bedroom could only be reconstructed from his knowledge of her and the story that reached him weeks later. She had a quick, reliable memory, and in the gray hour before dawn she learned those dull military numerals as conscientiously as she had learned poetry for school examinations. She would remember, said Theotaki – who had practiced, earlier in his career, the same exact and desperate memorizing – every fact and figure for the rest of her life. That done, she would have been relaxed and beautifully at ease. The last service had been asked of her; she had an honorable discharge. She could give her whole attention to dreaming of the joy that would begin next day.

She must have sat down about sunrise, in the last of her spare time, too excited to sleep, to write to her fiancé. That was like her. She was rich in forethought and expedients. Her departure might still be delayed by some incalculable change in the official mind. If it were, her lover would have a letter to comfort him. If it were not, they would read the two pages together, and laugh for relief from their common fears which had not come true.

Then, when the letter was in its envelope and stamped, came all the fuss of leaving, the weeping mother, the insistence that she should have enough breakfast, the last-minute closing of her four suitcases, the drive to the station.

At the frontier Theotaki took up direct observation again, for, if D 17 should walk into trouble, he wanted to have first news of it. He was astonished at the ease, the gallantry of her departure. The Roumanian officials searched two of her cases and left the rest unopened. It was the starry-eyedness of her and youth and her own infectious certainty that no one could stop so innocently blissful a girl which carried her through. A perfect example, Theotaki pointed out, of the woman in love dominating her environment. That grim frontier post, on both sides of the line, was all bows and smiles.

Theotaki could go no farther. That he had been allowed to come so far, and on the flimsiest of excuses, was a severe test of his nuisance value to his Ministry. He hastened back to Bucharest, very relieved but unable to get rid of an aching nervousness. He put it down to his dislike of breaking the rules of the trade. By short-circuiting his own organization, he had hopelessly committed its safety to the hands of D 17. He assured himself that she could have no further difficulties, but she had still to cross a frontier between Budapest and Prague; and at Prague, before she took the plane to Stockholm, there would be a last, thorough and envious examination of her papers and her baggage.

Theotaki spoke of Alexia’s journey as if he had been on the train with her. In thought, hour after hour, so he was. He knew to the minute – though that of course was mere calculation of schedules – when the blinds of the train would be pulled down so that no passenger might see the possible presence and activities of Russian troops. Thirtieth Assault Division, she would say to herself, and inevitably her mind would run over the bare details of its strength and its experimental bridging equipment. She wouldn’t be able to help this silent recitation, and would try to stop herself forming the mental words lest they might be magically overheard.

All that was true enough. Nevertheless Alexia, as he heard afterwards, had passed most of the journey in a dream of romantic confidence. It had been broken, while she sat in the train, by moments of vague inexplicable worry; but whenever she and her baggage were in contact with the enemy, she treated officials as if they were as gay and careless as she herself, in twelve hours more, hoped to be. She turned the future into the present with an audacity that no mere man could have imitated and which she didn’t even recognize as unreal – with the result that when police and customs and their informers on the train gave her a look, they saw only a girl neither immorally rich nor suspiciously poor, and much too happy to have anything in their line of business upon her conscience.

At Prague, however, the solid and bad-tempered Czechs turned her inside out. They flung the upper layers of her bags aside and angrily rummaged the bottom for antisocial contraband. They interrogated her. They gave her a fresh batch of forms to sign. And when they had punished her so far as they could for wanting to leave the Russian orbit at all, they had to allow her to leave it.

After that it was all plain sailing. She was met by her fiancé on arrival, and Swedish smiles passed her straight into their country, and let her loose in a blue and white Stockholm which sparkled like her mood. No, not sentimentalists, Theotaki explained. They had merely done their investigation of Alexia at the proper time, and once her visa had been issued there was no further point in annoying her. That was the mark of a civilized country. Communists hadn’t yet learned to make up their minds and stand by the decision.

It must have been very difficult for D 17 to shake off fiancé and future parents-in-law and the odd score of hospitable friends who were determined to cherish her; but she did it. She had, after all, long experience in concealing her intentions. Somehow she established her right to a moment of privacy, and claimed it. She delivered her message, word perfect, and kept the taxi waiting and was back in her bedroom in half an hour.

Then she started, said Theotaki, to unpack. He heard of that unpacking when he met his Stockholm correspondent in the quiet course of their business, and even then they couldn’t laugh. He was right. He had never come nearer to sending an agent to certain death. On the top of the first case Alexia opened was her writing pad, just where she had hastily thrown it in the unworldly light of dawn, after finishing that last letter, that all-absorbing letter, to her fiancé. The bag was the only one of the four that had never been examined by Roumanians or Hungarians, and the Czechs had gone like burrowing dogs for the bottom while scattering out the top between their legs. In the writing pad, hidden only by its flimsy cardboard cover, was the sheet of foolscap, gloriously forgotten, not crushed at all to ashes, not even burned, which Theotaki had given her with such delicate precautions.

Brandy for the Parson

MY PARTNER, Tony, says that only an Englishman could be as crazy as this. He is English himself, but it pleases him to be amused by the simple reactions of his own countrymen. Of course I am not a good citizen – I don’t like being a good citizen – but because, strictly speaking, I swindle my country, it doesn’t mean that I am prepared to see her landed in international trouble when I could get her out. That is why Petronilla and I must convince the suspicious that the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society never existed at all.

In the second year of the war I transferred to Commandos, and was appointed skipper of a native schooner operating in the Aegean. They only gave me a six months’ course in navigation, but never once did I scrape the bottom. So I took to the sea for a hobby, and when I was demobilized, and had married Petronilla, I bought from the Army the ketch Antigua for us to live in.

On the Disposals Board which sold the Army craft there were two chaps who wanted their girl friends shipped to England from occupied territory – so I got Antigua cheap. They wrote off her Diesel as seized up – which it wasn’t – and saw no reason to mention to busy inspectors that her missing spars and sails had been properly laid up and cared for during the war.

I sent for a couple of hard cases from my old crew, and we all went to work on Antigua. Then we sailed away on our maiden voyage, brought home the Disposal Board poppets and landed them on the Essex marshes without bothering the immigration authorities at all. The job was so easy that it gave us ideas for our future. Antigua could provide a living, as well as living quarters.

We fell in with Tony when he was exploring the commercial possibilities of a deserted wharf up Restronguet Creek. He had been in the Navy as a Port Control officer. He never went further to sea than two miles from his office, but he had learned all there was to know about the habits and routine of Coast Guards, Customs and Port Police. So a firm of importers gave him a swell civilian job. They weren’t anxious to fill out forms in quadruplicate for everything they wanted to import, and Tony was just the man for them.

Petronilla, who is a fine judge of character, said he was sour but sound, and we agreed to work for him. Our cross-channel service was easy – perfectly straightforward, routine smuggling. Tony gave us our orders and organized the discharge. All we had to do was to turn up on a dark night at the right place on the right tide.

The bottom was knocked out of the business when our politicians withdrew the basic petrol ration. From then on the police had the right to stop any truck, anywhere, and check its reason for being on the road. Night traffic was as likely as not to be questioned and examined. Tony’s importers decided the risk had become too great for a respectable firm.

He knew too much for the directors to be impolite, so they didn’t exactly fire him; they gave him a gratuity and told him that his department was closed for reorganization. He came down to spend Christmas with us. I don’t want to say where we were. Let’s call it the Coombe River, and when I talk of the ketch Antigua owned by Bill and Petronilla Rancy, you mustn’t expect to find just those names in Lloyd’s Register.

Coombe River was as warm in the winter sunshine as the Mediterranean. We lay in deep water, close to the shore. The trees came down to the edge of the gray rock, just above high-water mark, and the channel was dull and green as a pond. Up the valley you could see a bare hill and the telegraph posts at the side of the main road to the east, which marched along the high ground, clear of interruption by all the little fingers of the sea pointing and twisting inland. Within two miles of us there wasn’t anything you could call a road – just paths through the woods, and muddy farm tracks.

Over the Christmas week we did ourselves pretty well. Petronilla used to be a high-class accountant. What with our moves from port to port, our ration books and temporary ration cards, she could get Food Offices, butchers and grocers so hopelessly muddled that we were always allowed to buy twice as much grub as we were entitled to. The Customs were impressed when they never found anything on board Antigua that we couldn’t have purchased at the local shop.

Well, of course one can live amply on double rations, and Petronilla and I and George and Henry (my ex-commando crew) were feeling poetical after lunch. We wouldn’t have changed our life for any other. Tony was mopping up the government-imported Madeira, worrying about his future and jealous of the general serenity.

Petronilla sat at the top of the companion, so that only her ankles kept us company, and very good company they were.

“I’d like to get on a horse and ride for miles and miles,” she murmured.

I looked up the hatch and saw her gazing at the empty creek. Wine and a lovely landscape often made her dreamy.

“Better than the Middle East, eh, skipper?” said George.

George had been my mate in the Aegean. He didn’t like a yellow shore, and every time he saw woods and green fields he would purr and remind himself that he was back in England.

“Over the hills and far away, Petronilla?” – Tony was often a bit short with her – “What’s the matter? A long time since the last evening out?”

“Nothing you would understand, Tony,” Petronilla replied with a sweet melancholy.

I passed the bottle up to her, and we went on digesting our lunch. After a bit she put on that thrilling voice again.

“Far away from crowded roads,” she yearned, “and the stink of petrol and prying eyes.”

“That’s the stuff!” George said. He could stand a lot of sentiment.

“You mentioned horses just now,” I encouraged her.

“Yes. Riding up from the sea, with the wind blowing through my hair and a keg of brandy across the horse’s saddle. …”

“You’d break his bloody back, Petronilla,” Tony remarked.

“That’s just the trouble,” she answered. “I’ve no experience.”

I began to follow her inspiration as closely as if it had been my own. Her thoughts had started – I knew it – from a little footpath that came down through the woods to the foreshore, and had wandered on over the high turf, mile after mile to the east among the rabbits and the sheep.

“In old days,” I said, “smugglers used a string of pack horses.”

“What weight can a pack horse carry?” she asked immediately, taking out a pencil and the back of an envelope.

There Henry chipped in. You could forget for hours that Henry was on board at all, for he never opened his mouth unless he had a simple fact to tell.

“Two ’underd pounds,” Henry answered.

“Do you know anything about horses, Henry?”

“Ay,” said Henry.

Then I remembered that when he had been drafted to my unit, with a crime sheet as long as your arm, he had some inarticulate story about not liking mechanical transport and being used to horses in India. As soon as I discovered that whatever was made of metal just depressed his spirits, he gave me no trouble at all – and, as for sail, he learned all we could teach him in a week.

When Tony returned to London, he called on his firm of importers. They would not finance us or organize us, but they did say that any brandy of reasonable quality which we delivered to a warehouse in the suburbs would be paid for at three to four pounds a liter.

Petronilla worked it out. Five ponies could carry five hundred liters. After deducting cost of brandy, gear, packsaddles and ponies, there would be a profit of a thousand pounds on the first trip and a lot more on subsequent trips. She called it amortization of transport, but that’s what she meant.

Our creek in the Coombe River was perfect. We could come up with any night tide, discharge the cargo and at dawn be on a yacht club mooring in the main channel, all clear and ready for Customs. While Tony was away, we rehearsed the drill. We found that at half water Antigua could anchor within fifty feet of the shore, and that we didn’t need a boat. We could lower the barrels overboard and drag them ashore on a line.

Organization on land was much more tricky. When we had our first full-dress conference with Tony, the whole beautiful dream began to fade away.

“We’ll have to give it up,” I said at last. “There hasn’t been a string of pack horses seen in England in living memory. How the hell are we going to explain them? Circus horses?”

Tony suddenly looked up, with a flashing grin on his tired, naval face. He had acquired the professional features, which make you think that a man has been up on the bridge for three nights running, staring through the lashing spray. That weary, clean-cut strength impresses policemen, but, if you ask me, it’s caused by pink gin rather than weather.

“The British Imperial Andean Exploration Society exercising its ponies,” said Tony.

It was one of those irresponsible suggestions that knock you cold. When we came round, Petronilla and I began to point out the difficulties.

“Nonsense, children!” Tony interrupted. “Don’t you see that it puts the whole world with us from the start? Why, you couldn’t possibly get more good will unless you said what we were really doing! All the countryside delighted! Cops benevolent! Farmers helpful! And the dear old ladies running out of their gardens with the last of the week’s sugar ration for the sweet ponies!”

“But suppose people start writing letters to the Imperial whatever-it-was?” Petronilla asked.

“Let ’em! Who the hell expects a reply from a public body in less than three months? And I’ll find a safe address just so that the letters won’t be returned.”

Well, we decided that the plan was worth a trial. We bought five Exmoor ponies, and my old friends who sold me Antigua put me in touch with another Disposals Board which handled packsaddles and harness, and of course had no market for them. Lovely stuff it was, and dirt cheap. It did you good just to stroke the leather. Then we found accommodation for Tony and Henry and the ponies at a remote Devon farm, where they could all get used to each other and to the packsaddles. Tony was right. Nobody questioned our story of the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society exercising the pack ponies for its forthcoming expedition.

Petronilla and George and I ran down to the Loire for freight. That sounds a simple statement, but I wouldn’t like any of my readers who have a bit of capital lying idle to think that smuggling is easy. Buying is as risky as selling, for Customs informants are everywhere and well paid. So don’t take it for granted that you won’t be caught just because you step ashore on a wooden leg full of wrist watches. The chances are that the Customs know who supplied them and how much he charged; and when they start to search you’ll be lucky if your wooden leg is the only one to be sawn in half.

That’s by the way. I just want to point out that you must be sure of your supplier. Ours was an old-fashioned wine shipper with long experience and a reliable staff. His customers paid in pound notes, and anything they wanted for their little ships was brought quietly alongside as extra water in casks. He was expensive, of course, but quality and discretion were guaranteed.

There is also the sea to be considered. To sail round Ushant in March and into the Bay is no pleasure trip. We should never have tried it so early in the season if we hadn’t been short of funds after fixing up the Society and ponies. Antigua can ride any sea like a duck, but she made fifty miles of westing hove to on a sea anchor. You can imagine the discomfort. When the weather cleared and we made the Loire, Petronilla did not look like a woman any longer. She was a pillar of salt with a raw-beef complexion. Lot’s wife on a foundation of sweaters and oilskins. But, mark you, she’s not one of those Englishwomen who enjoy that kind of appearance! She spent the cash we had left, after buying brandy, in the beauty parlors of Nantes. It was worth it. She came on board again looking all fit for a week end in calm waters with an American millionaire.

Our passage home, running before half a gale from the southwest was too damn quick. I couldn’t carry less canvas with safety, and Lord knows we had little enough! We were just four days from the Loire to the Coombe River, and we never touched the engine once till we were nosing round the woods into our own creek.

I had wired Tony to expect us in anything from five to eight days – a period when there was no moon and the night tide would serve. He was to camp on the high ground, and watch the estuary every night for the yellow flash of our signal. That four-day passage, however, was the devil; there was a horrid risk that the expedition would not have arrived, or that they would not be looking out for us. I had to take it. The only alternative was to heave to off the Devon coast, and probably be reported as in difficulties or acting suspiciously.

Henry saved us. Plodding down to the west into the teeth of that wind which howled across the downs, he had been thinking of Antigua. For two days, according to Tony, the only remark he made was to state as a fact that the missus wouldn’t let her jibe. She didn’t, or I should not be here now. Henry silently bullied them into forcing the pace, and the first thing he did when they reached the last camp was to have a look at the creek. He had not been up under the telegraph posts for more than half an hour when he saw our flash and answered.

The tide had turned. It was touch and go whether we could run the cargo ashore in time to get out of the creek into the main channel. An hour after the signal, we heard the ponies rustling down over the dead leaves on the hillside. We were ready for them, tubs in the water and lines ashore. It was half tide, and the weed was showing on the banks. We just had a moment for a word with Tony, who couldn’t understand, being brought up on harbor launches, why the hell we didn’t sail a bit slower. We left George behind with the pram to help with the landing of the tubs and the loading; and then Petronilla and I took Antigua out into the main channel in the dark.

That was a nightmare, if you like. At this stage of the ebb the twisting channel was never more than fifty feet across, and the last thing we wanted was to be found high and dry on the mud in the morning. In the third bend the propeller was fouled by weed, and the tide swept us out stern foremost while we kept steerageway on her with the jib. It was a damn wonderful piece of navigation, but in our trade artistry of that sort is out of place. Everything should go like clockwork. George joined us just before dawn. He had had to come out at the bottom of the tide, walking down the bed of the channel on his hind legs and pushing the pram in front of him.

In the morning, after we had checked in and dropped our cards on the yacht club, we left George on board and started out to join the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society. It took us most of the day to catch up with and find them.

They were ten miles from the coast. They couldn’t go farther because the ponies had had no rest the previous night; but when you are inland in southern England the sea has no longer any effect at all on the lives and thoughts of the local inhabitants. The villager will suspect eccentric strangers of coming two hundred miles from London, but never of coming ten miles from the sea.

The camp was in a dry, sheltered valley, under the lee of a clump of thorns. There was a fire going, and Henry was grilling rabbits. Two green pup tents were pitched, and the ponies, all in neat little blankets, were picketed, and munching happily. The packs and harness were piled on top of the barrels, all dressed by the right in some smart order that Henry had probably learned in cavalry lines on the Northwest frontier. You never saw anything so disciplined, gentlemanly and romantic. Again I had to admit that Tony was right. That camp could no more be suspected of smuggling than the Archbishop of Canterbury. We belonged, obviously, to the world of Church and State.

Church, I know, seems farfetched – but wherever you find a sort of Naval and Military Club atmosphere, there’s a chaplain just round the corner. And just as I was thinking out what I meant, and Petronilla was gnawing the last of the rabbit bones with her stockinged feet stretched out to the blaze, up the hill came the Rector and his wife. They had heard all about the Society – though Tony swore he had only seen a shepherd and only said good-evening to him. I hadn’t even seen a barn or building till the Rector appeared. Then I spotted the top of a Norman church tower sticking up above a clump of trees in the vale.

They were as charming as could be, and wanted to know if there was anything they could do for us. Tony kept them amused with stories of the Navy in Valparaiso (which he must have heard in the Port Control mess) and Petronilla had the effrontery to ask for a bath. She went off down the hill with the Rector and his wife, and, the last I heard of her, she was promising to lecture to the Women’s Institute on the objects of the expedition.

She came back in the dark, full of tea, with the salt washed out of her hair. The camp equipment was sketchy (for it had to be kept light), but when we had crawled into the second tent we found our night’s rest luxurious. Our sleeping bag was cozy; the ground was dry and stayed parallel to the horizon; and we didn’t have to turn out every four hours to relieve the wheel. Tony complained that the cold at the top of the Andes couldn’t possibly be worse than that of an English spring; but even he got a kick out of the open-air life. Of course he was carrying on both hips enough gin and angostura to make him feel a hero at the end of the day’s march.

It was a convincing expedition when we had loaded up the ponies in the morning. Ground sheets, blankets and tents were neatly folded, and hanging down on each side of the ponies to hide the barrels. Here and there Henry slung some odd frying pans and junk, in order that the packs should not look too tidy. He and Tony seemed to have no difficulty in walking twenty-five miles a day. Petronilla and I, who prefer anything but our feet to move us, marched along with them till eleven. That became the routine. We walked just as long as we enjoyed it, and then took a train or bus to some point within easy reach of their next stop.

All went smoothly till we were tramping over the bare downs between Blandford and Salisbury. It was a morning when the wind and rain swept across the grass, and the air was dull gray like an elephant’s back. You could see that the farmers in those parts preferred plenty of rich space. They had it. Give me trees and hedges and little sheltered fields – uneconomic, perhaps, but more comfortable for man and beast.

A chap came bowling out of the low clouds, driving a tractor as if it were his personal tank, and drew up alongside us while we plodded through the driving damp. He was all muffled up in leather, wool and mackintoshes, and showed nothing but a lock of lank, dark hair flopping over one amused dark eye.

“Dirty weather,” he said, clearing a space in his wrappings to talk through. “Are you going far?”

“Camping under Clearbury Ring,” Tony answered.

“The glass is still falling. And, if you like,” he offered, “I’ve plenty of room for you and the ponies.”

We didn’t much care for close inspection, but it was hard to refuse; and, with the weather as it was, we didn’t want to refuse.

“Are you doing this for pleasure?” he asked. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham or something?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I replied, “as a matter of fact, we are just hardening the ponies of the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society.”

Tony congratulated me afterwards. He said I had the proper apologetic tone of an Englishman who is caught doing something out of the ordinary.

“This will harden ’em all right,” the man agreed. “Well, come along, and get dry. My name is Redworth and my farm is down in the dip there.”

And he charged off in his tractor as if he had just got the order to get into position hull down on the ridge.

We struck across a long slope of ploughland, and turned into the yard of an old, gray stone manor. Redworth showed us a fine barn, and told us to do what we liked with it. The barn might have been made for us; there was plenty of light, but when the high doors were shut, farm hands couldn’t see inside. Bales of hay were provided for the ponies, and glad we were to have them. Forage had been the chief difficulty all along. We couldn’t carry much extra weight, so we had to stop and buy. This usually meant that the farmer offered us stabling. Then we had to refuse it, on the weak excuse of hardening the ponies.

Henry stayed on guard over the barrels – and again our excuse that he would not be separated from his animals sounded pretty feeble, though it happened to be true. The rest of us trooped into the farmhouse for lunch. Redworth did us well, with a pre-war hospitality. When the port had circulated, he remarked:

“I was born in La Paz.”

“How romantic!” said Petronilla, who had been cooing at him for some time. “Where is it?”

“In Bolivia. On top of the Andes.”

“Our experience,” I said quickly, “Petronilla’s and mine, I mean, has been wholly in Central Asia.”

“But your Exploration Society?” he asked. “I suppose it’s all planned by experts on the Andes?”

Tony immediately began to throw around the names of patrons and financiers, keeping carefully off geography. The trouble was that we had thought of everything except looking up some patter on the Andes.

“You’re going to the Montaña, of course?” Redworth insisted.

He said it as if there were no other possible territory for exploration, so we agreed.

“With those ponies?”

“They have been specially selected by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for high-altitude work,” said Tony impressively.

“Then they certainly won’t live long in the Montaña. And why do your people go to the expense of shipping ponies, when you could get mules on the spot? Don’t think me rude,” he added, “but I know the country.”

I won’t spin out the agony. Even when Petronilla pretended her garter had broken, she couldn’t head him off. Redworth found out just how much we knew about the Andes, and kept circulating bottles.

“Now, look here, boys and girls,” he said at last, “I’m only a farmer, but I’ve knocked around the world a bit. What’s the racket? And let me say that whatever it is I think you’re sports.”

Petronilla is a clever girl. She stopped Tony just as he had started on a marvelous story about selling pack ponies for mountain guns in Palestine.

“Tell him the truth,” she said. “He’s going to laugh.”

Tony and I looked fools, so she didn’t wait. She told him the whole venture right from the beginning, and it didn’t lose in the telling. When she dealt with our March voyages to and from the Loire, I felt like Sir Francis Drake.

“And you’re going to give this stuff to some black marketeer at three quid a liter, when he’ll sell it at seven?” he asked. “What you poor fish need is a marketing board. Now, Rancy, is this stuff drinkable?”

“If it’s the same as we tasted in the shipper’s office,” I said, “it’s good, and we’ll get four pounds easy.”

“If it’s the same as you tasted!” Redworth exclaimed. “Do you chaps trust the first fellow who comes along?”

“Any complaints?” Petronilla asked.

Well, that made him chuckle. Then we went out and prized Henry off the barrels, where he was sitting as obstinately as a broody hen, and tapped one.

“I imagine,” said Redworth, running the brandy over his palate, “that this is what you tasted.”

He drew himself another, and lectured us on the decay of country life. You were not allowed petrol, he said, to visit your neighbors; and, when you broke the law and did visit them, there was little or nothing to drink. We revived, he told us eloquently, the glories of the past when every country gentleman defied the government, and filled his cellars and dressed his wife off the backs of the pack horses.

We had another all round, and he began to declaim Kipling in a voice that was far too loud even for the heavy barn doors which contained us:

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark,

Brandy for the parson,

Baccy for the clerk.

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie –

Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!

“Can I have the rest of that puncheon at five pounds a liter?”

“Six,” said Tony.

“I’ll make it five ten,” he offered, “and we’ll talk business for future shipments. Why the hell should those spivs in London have all the good stuff while we have to put up with government port in the country? I’m going to form a syndicate. There’s a lot of money in this district since we found out how to keep dairy cattle on the open downs all the year round.”

Redworth thought that his local market could consume the product of two more trips – and two more were certainly all we dared undertake. People would begin to wonder why the Society’s ponies needed so much practice.

As for our march to the London suburb, he suggested that we should call it off then and there.

“Send your tubs up by rail,” he proposed, “two by two from different stations. Stencil your preposterous Society’s name all over them, and mark them Spoiled Stores for Analysis! The only risk is that one of them might be holed, and that’s very unlikely if you put them on a passenger train yourselves.”

We took his advice, and sent the nine remaining tubs by four different routes. Tony’s firm of importers disliked sending their plain van all round London to pick up the cargo, and I gather they approached the barrels pretty cautiously; but they collected them, and they paid out at three ten.

The next trip was uneventful. No story in it at all. Antigua had a fine run out, with a change of wind just when we wanted it, and there was calm all over the western Atlantic on the way back. That came a bit heavy on the Diesel fuel, but we didn’t worry. We had earned, so Petronilla said, twelve hundred pounds clear profit on the first trip, and – with a guaranteed market at five pounds the liter – we stood to make two thousand on this. The cross-country march was a picnic. We kept clear of Redworth’s farm, to avoid any connection between him and us, and unloaded in a remote barn belonging to one of the syndicate, where we rebuilt a potato clamp over the top of the barrels. They were ten-liter puncheons this time, to make distribution easier.

Redworth met us at the barn, and paid in pound notes on the spot. He said that half a dozen country houses were taking the stuff, and that two tubs – just to keep up the tradition – were going to the cathedral close in Salisbury. The next cargo, he told us, had been largely ordered by the lawyers and land agents, and he had a request for a small lot of the finest armagnac obtainable at almost any price we liked to ask.

He was a queer fellow, Redworth. Tony says I am wrong, but I swear he never took a penny profit – and Petronilla agrees with me. He was a passionate country lover, and he was determined to take some of the melancholy out of country life. And then, of course, if you have been born in a Latin civilization, you have no patience with governments which put punitive taxes on the juice of the grape. He didn’t object to paying for what he wanted; he just resented the utter incompetence of government buyers. In questions of drink he was a pure idealist.

Tony was all against running a third cargo into the Coombe River. Petronilla and I, who had less respect for the Customs, disagreed. We insisted that the first trip did not count, for the ponies, owing to the luck of our quick passage and Henry’s eye for weather, had come and gone in the dark, and had never been seen near the coast at all. Antigua was not suspected. The yacht club had even invited us to serve on the regatta committee.

Down in the Loire we had no trouble, and loaded up some first-class expensive wallop for those lawyers and land agents. We lost the jib and, very nearly, me off the Lizard, but George fished me out as I came roaring along the lee quarter on top of a sea. Meanwhile Tony was having one scare after another.

On the second trip he had, of course, called on the local landowner, and obtained his permission to exercise the Society’s ponies on his hillsides. The steep wooded slopes, he said, were just the practice ground we needed to test the ponies for the Montaña. We knew all about the Montaña now from Redworth.

That second cargo had been landed in heavy rain, and the path through the woods, which at first had been hard, was thoroughly churned up. Tony thought it wise to find out how much the owner had noticed before he committed himself to those woods for a third time.

He left Henry and the ponies a day’s march away, and went to pay a call at the big house in the most correct naval manner. The landowner was cordial as could be, but much too curious; he was puzzled by the hoof-marks.

“I see you give your ponies more weight coming uphill,” he said. “What do you load them with?”

“Water,” Tony replied.

He says that he fired the answer straight back, but I’ll bet there was a good deal of humming and hawing and hesitation.

“We pack it in skins,” Tony explained, “to find out what weight they can carry on any angle of slope. Every detail is scientifically checked.”

The man was not in the least suspicious, but it was certain that the whole district would know that the Society had taken its pack ponies down to the water, and certain that the Customs would wonder why. In the country an exciting visitor such as the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society is a heaven-sent topic for conversation.

When the local sergeant of police deliberately came up to the camp for a longish chat, Tony told him plenty about weights and angles, and added that this was the last journey before the expedition embarked for South America and that the ponies were moving back towards London the next day. The sergeant went away happy, but the game was up.

Tony had to work fast, for we were due in a couple of days. The first, immediate essential was to send Henry and the ponies twenty more miles to the east; and that he did. He said good-bye to the landowner and other casual friends around the Coombe River, and thanked them for their help and courtesy. In our experience there’s no man or woman in England – especially if not asked for a subscription – who isn’t thrilled to help explorers.

For us in Antigua it was always nervous work creeping upriver in the dark, for we couldn’t tell what might have happened while we were away. We were ready for any disaster; so it was not altogether a surprise when we nearly ran down Tony in a hired dinghy as we were about to change course into the creek. He had been out there for two nights pretending to fish. I told you that ours was not an easy way to earn a living.

We took him aboard, and he gave us the news. If the ponies again left tracks down to the shore, he explained, on the very night of Antigua’s arrival, someone was sure to notice the coincidence, and the police would have every excuse to call at the camp and search the packs.

“It has cost us three hundred quid,” he said, “but I think we’ll get away with the cargo. Can you take Antigua alongside the road, Bill?”

“What the hell do you think she is?” I snapped. “A pontoon?”

Knowing Tony’s nautical proficiency as I did, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had proposed to tie up Antigua in a car park. I misjudged him. He had a really promising plan. He explained with some warmth that at the entrance to the next blasted creek a bend in the road came down to within a hundred feet of my blasted high-water mark.

We dived into the saloon to look at the chart. There was a mile of mud between us and the road, and it was doubtful if there would be enough water for Antigua to get close inshore. The tide was making, however, and would float us off again if we went aground. So the gamble was good.

“Run up as close as you can,” Tony said. “Then I’ll row ashore. I’ve a bicycle hidden under the hedge, and in about an hour I’ll bring the transport.”

We waited long enough for him to be well on his way, and then began to close in to the shore on the top of the tide. There was little traffic on that road after midnight. We only saw the lights of two cars and a motorcycle. All depended on silence and speed just as in old days, when we would unload anywhere, even at a wharf, so long as Tony was sure of ten undisturbed minutes.

George paddled ahead in the pram, taking soundings. Once across the mud, he found a steep-to beach of broken shale. I went ashore and looked at the afternoon’s high-tide mark. I reckoned that I could risk shoving Antigua’s bow into the land foot by foot until she touched, especially if we piled all the cargo forward, ready to be lowered overboard.

We could hear Tony’s transport half a mile away. When it arrived – a great black bulk against the sky, looking unnecessarily large – I touched the beach. As soon as the barrels were overboard, the bow rose clear, and Petronilla, who was standing by the engines, went astern and anchored.

Of all the things! That transport was an enormous caravan, marked MACGINNIS’ MAMMOTH FAIR, towed by a Diesel traction engine. The three of us and MacGinnis had the stuff inside, where the swing boats were carried, in under fifteen minutes. Tony told us where to find his camp, and they rumbled off into the night.

We were all safe on our moorings in the morning, and the Customs turned us inside out. I don’t blame them. They had – thank the Lord! – no reason to connect us with the ponies, but it was the third time that we had come into the river after dark. They searched even the fuel tanks and the mattresses, and when we complained of the damage they merely told us in a nasty way that it would teach us to arrive during daylight.

They found nothing. There wasn’t even a smell except Petronilla’s perfume – bought in England of course. She broke a bottle accidentally in case the tubs of brandy had left a faint memory behind them – and then painted herself up to look like a girl who had to have her own particular Fleurs de Castor Oil even on the High Seas.

We remained in Antigua for twenty-four hours, putting things to rights, and joined the Society’s camp. We found Tony asleep. He had had four nights without shutting an eye, and only cat naps in the day. When he woke up, he filled in the gaps of his story that he hadn’t had time to tell.

After sending Henry and the ponies further back inland, he had a tough day in the local market town looking for transport. One truck driver, when asked if he would like to earn a hundred quid, had simply walked off. Another, in charge of a furniture van, had said he wouldn’t risk any monkey business for less than five hundred. It was only when Tony was bicycling out of town, convinced that we should have to throw the cargo overboard, that he had seen the three caravans of swings and Dodge’em Cars belonging to MacGinnis’ Mammoth Fair. It wasn’t very mammoth, and he guessed that MacGinnis might be glad of some spare cash while wintering on the south coast. MacGinnis turned out to be a sport. Most show people are. He stood out for three hundred quid when he heard what the job was, but he did it.

They drove inland with the cargo, and at first light had a desperate half hour, beating about for a place near the roadside where the load could be safely dumped. At last they turned up a gravel drive which led to some important house and was bordered by a neglected shrubbery of laurels and rhododendrons. They shoved the tubs into the bushes, and prayed that the gardener wouldn’t choose that day to start pruning or sweeping up the leaves. The next night Tony and Henry picked up the load with the ponies, and returned to camp.

For this last journey we chose a new route, well to the north of our usual track, through the deep lanes and meadows of the Somerset border. Some of our camps were not so lonely as we should have liked; on the other hand, the curiosity we aroused was all fresh and innocent – until, that is, we fell in with the Press.

We never had any trouble with reporters – they don’t look for stories on top of the downs – but in the vale, passing close to one bustling little market town after another, we were News. On the night before we reached the sheep and the short turf and safety, we had a call from an enterprising lad who worked for the local paper.

Tony filled him up with pink gin and Redworth’s yarns of the Andes. In three more days we intended to sell the ponies and disappear into the mass of respectable citizens, so it didn’t much matter what he said about the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society. The only information Tony would not give him was the personnel of the expedition. He threw out broad hints that the object of the Society was to look for a rare mineral in the Montaña, that we were prominent scientists and that on no account should our names be mentioned.

The reporter ate that up. He was enormously impressed by the trust we had placed in him. He asked if he might take a photograph of the string of ponies when we climbed up to the downs at dawn. We said that we should be delighted, so long as he didn’t mind our hats being pulled well down over our faces.

He took his shots of us, and we went on our way, striking southeast along the edge of Salisbury Plain, then over Cranborne Chase and home like the swallows (who were just arriving) to that lonely barn and the potato clamps. Tony remained on the spot to collect from Redworth, and Petronilla, Henry and I took the ponies down to Dorchester market. At our last camp we made a bonfire of the packsaddles, and that, we thought, was the end of the British Imperial Andean Exploration Society.

Tony joined us in Dorchester with the cash. Our total profit for the three trips (after Petronilla had conscientiously deducted repairs to Antigua and yearly depreciation) was nearer six thousand than five. The ponies were in fine condition; on them, too, we made a profit, and handed it over to Henry as a special bonus.

We were feeling on top of the world, and I telephoned Redworth that we would all like to go down to the farm and say good-bye. He was in a flap. What with Bolivian excitement and English reticence, he was so obscure that I could get no sense out of him. At last he said Haven’t you read The Times? and hung up.

I hadn’t. I grabbed a copy off the table in the hotel lounge, and had a look. You know those gorgeous photographs on the back page of The Times. English countryside. Fields of wild daffodils. Flights of geese on the marshes. Old cider presses under snow. And so on. This was one of the finest they ever printed. You looked up to the crest of the downs, and thorn and grass were bending before the wind, and there on the skyline was the string of ponies, beautifully spaced, moving together, looking like a frieze modeled against the racing clouds. Underneath was the caption:

THE RETURN OF THE PACK HORSE. THE BRITISH IMPERIAL ANDEAN EXPLORATION SOCIETY EXERCISING ITS PONIES.

We hired a car, and within twenty minutes we were out of that hotel and on our way down to the Coombe River. After that publicity, and a fake address for the Society, and no answer to any of the letters addressed to it, the cops were sure to make some inquiries. So we all sailed over to Ireland, where our faces weren’t known. By the grace of God there was nothing whatever to link Antigua with the Society and its ponies!

When we had settled down comfortably in a sheltered little anchorage on the Galway Coast, I sent Redworth an unsigned picture postcard with our address. In a few weeks he wrote us a most discreet letter, just giving the local news as if it had nothing at all to do with us.

He said that he and a dozen other farmers had been bothered by the police about a certain British Imperial Andean Exploration Society, and that none of them knew why. The Society had seemed to them quite genuine.

“I have been making a few inquiries on my own,” he went on, “and it seems that our poor old country is being shot at again. I cannot imagine what on earth induced this Society to call itself Imperial. I hear that there have been strong protests from every single South American republic that owns a slice of Andes, and that when the Foreign Office swears there isn’t and never was such a Society, it’s accused of covering up some imperial bit of monkey business. The liberals are going to make matters worse by asking a question in the House, and there’s not a thing that anybody can do about it.”

But that is where he was wrong. I could write this story, and I have.

Railroad Harvest

WE, THE FRENCH – said Maître Braillard, stretching his feet under the table and swallowing a draught of the acid white wine which was all the café had in 1946 to offer – are ever ready to accept tradition. I speak to you as a lawyer and perhaps I exaggerate. But in my opinion the worst that the occupation did to us was to destroy our sense of continuity with the past.

This wine is revolting, but will do while we wait for better. And I assure you that within two years the tradition of the Gallic palate will have triumphed.

It is customary – he went on – to prophesy that the revolution we are undoubtedly about to suffer will be more drastic than our revolution one hundred and fifty years ago. I do not believe it. We wish to order our lives by the law. We accept immediately the law. It is only when we know not what the law is that we become a little difficult.

I will tell you a story. It has a slight piggery, but we are after dinner – if indeed we may dignify by the name the small portions of antique horse and salad that we have just consumed.

Do you know the municipality of Saint-Valery-sur-Marne? No? I am not surprised. Saint-Valery is ten kilometers from the fortifications and remarkable only for its ugliness and its extensive railroad yard. If you travel round Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Quai d’Orsay, your train will inevitably pass through Saint-Valery. But why should you be in it? You will of course spend some hours in Paris, and will pick up your train again at the Quai d’Orsay.

Saint-Valery has a black canal, and some small industries without any permanence, built of cement and corrugated iron. There is no architecture. There are only hoardings, and houses of a startling melancholy. It is quite evident that one is compelled to inhabit Saint-Valery; one does not choose it.

In the middle of this tasteless wilderness are the railroad tracks, and in the middle of the tracks is a little tower of dirty brick. The tower is old. I do not know how old, nor what it was for; it might have been the base of a round dovecot. But now the interior has been rearranged – you understand – as a convenience for railway men.

It stood, this tower, upon a triangle of blackened gravel between the canal sidings and the main loop line round Paris. In spite of this little-promising situation, the brickwork was covered by a resplendent vine. There was no other green thing within three hundred meters; not even a dandelion could live in such a waste of steel and cinders. But the vine was older than the railroad, and its roots were far down in good French soil. It was well nourished by the iron that filtered in solution through the gravel and had, no doubt, some other excellent sources of fertility.

In August of 1945 the vine was superb. It rejoiced in its liberation. The walls and parapet of the tower were jeweled with bunches as long as my forearm. The grapes were of that indescribable tint which is purple, yet not quite purple. All the station staff of Saint-Valery were agreed that it needed but twenty-four more August hours for fifty bunches to be at their perfection.

Mme. Delage, who was the wife of the stationmaster and impatient for good morsels as befitted an admirable housekeeper who was tormented by the impossibility of a decent table, was the first to lose her self-restraint. One had not yet decided upon the ultimate destiny of the grapes; one had perhaps deliberately avoided so delicate a subject. Mme. Delage, however, had set her heart upon a bunch, already and indubitably ripe, which hung on the south wall immediately above the window of the tower.

I knew her well. She had a black mustache, and her rotundities, though massive, were more square than round. She had no reason to hope for those attentions which traditionally await the wives of stationmasters. She wore high-heeled shoes, as was proper for the consort of an important functionary, but they did not become her ankles. She resembled, I thought, a hippopotamus on skates. Nevertheless M. Delage was a model husband. She had fine brown eyes, one must admit, and then he was very afraid of her.

At six in the morning Mme. Delage, with a basket and a pair of scissors, waited before the door of the tower. I say she waited, for the tower was occupied; and she could only reach the chosen bunch through the window from the inside. After a while she permitted herself to hammer on the door.

This intemperate gesture being without effect, she approached Lulu, who was waiting on the track, and climbed upon her footplate and blew her whistle loudly. It was Charles Cortal, the driver, who had christened his locomotive Lulu. He loved little else but Lulu and all humanity, for he was a communist. But humanity is too large to love with enthusiasm. His true affection was for Lulu.

Charles Cortal launched himself in a fury from the tower.

“Madame!” he cried. “It is forbidden by the regulations of the company to climb upon a locomotive!”

“It is also forbidden,” Madame replied, “to leave a locomotive unattended.”

I was not present, you understand, but I can imagine what Cortal retorted. I have had dealings with him. He answered, with a beautiful selection of obscenities, that there were times when locomotives had to be left, above all when his cretinous fireman had gone to pour coffee into his filthy guts, and that if he had known Madame so urgently required the tower he would have made other arrangements.

To this Madame replied, with the exasperating calm in which she was accustomed to address the angry proletariat, that he knew very well she desired only to gather a bunch of grapes.

“Then gather them, nom de Dieu!” shouted Charles Cortal. “But without disturbing me!”

“One can reach the grapes only from the inside,” answered Madame.

She was, you will agree, in the wrong. And to Cortal she exhibited plainly, immediately, the shocking inhumanity and acquisitiveness of the bourgeoisie. He therefore demanded why Madame should gather grapes which had been the property of the company’s drivers and firemen as long as the Third Republic existed. Then Madame began to tell him what she thought of this right he had so brilliantly invented. And Cortal said that for one old cow she made more noise than a whole veterinary surgeon’s back yard.

And patati, patata! And before anyone knew of the quarrel, Mme. Delage was off to swear a procès-verbal against Cortal for insult and contumely, and Cortal had gone to complain to the local secretary of the union.

Meanwhile Lulu remained where she was as a protest. M. Delage and the signalmen might say what they liked, but not a driver would move her. The loop line was blocked, and on the telephone from Paris were jolly things to be heard.

After a hasty breakfast, M. Delage placed upon his head the gold-braided hat of office and visited the Café de la Gare, where Charles Cortal was expressing his opinions over a glass of very bad eau de vie. Before them all Delage accused Cortal of sabotaging the transport system of France. Cortal, without hesitating an instant, called him a collaborator, a Pétainiste, and a pro-Boche. After that there was no more to be said.

M. Delage was a man of duty. It was his business to see that trains ran, and he saw that they did run, even during the occupation. He did not understand the Resistance; he was paid, he said, by the company. All the same, he looked the other way when it was required of him, and he kept his mouth closed. I would never call him a collaborator, but he was narrow.

At midday arrived from Paris the general secretary of the union. He was a reasonable man. True, he had the hungry and farouche appearance of a revolutionary assassin; but it was expressly cultivated. In manner he was tactful as a director of funerals. Though his sympathies were naturally with Cortal, he was determined to restore discipline at Saint-Valery.

After he had wholly failed with the drivers and firemen, he took it upon himself to make Delage laugh at this petty affair – as between men of the world, you understand. But Delage was in no laughing mood; there was, he said, a question of principle involved. He pulled out the railroad regulations and made the secretary read the powers of the stationmaster: how he was responsible to the company for all property, movable and immovable, in or upon the station and the yards, and in the event of any attempt upon such property might call upon the civil power – and so on. Delage was prepared to admit that he might have no right to eat the grapes. A court of law, he said, would settle that. But as to his right or that of his wife, acting as his agent, to pick the said grapes at maturity there could be no doubt at all.

The secretary was inclined to agree, but to excuse Cortal, he suggested that an overworked and honest driver, disturbed in a moment of tranquillity, might permit himself expressions which –

“Monsieur,” said Delage gravely, “she waited a reasonable time.”

“But, Monsieur, consider the impropriety!”

“Monsieur accuses my wife of impropriety?”

“Of no such thing, I assure you. I wished to say that Madame with her delicate susceptibilities would not have desired to gather grapes had she been aware—”

“Madame is above such petty considerations. And then, I repeat, she waited a reasonable time.”

“Monsieur would be good enough to define a reasonable time?” asked the secretary, who was beginning to forget his tact.

“Ah, par exemple! Let us say five minutes!”

“It is in the regulations, perhaps?”

“It is in the regulations that a driver shall not leave his locomotive unattended.”

“When France mourns for so many missing sons,” said the secretary sharply, “one cannot manage labor by red tape, especially at 5.00 A.M.”

“It was six, Monsieur.”

“In any case, Monsieur, it was a suspiciously early hour that Madame chose to sneak her grapes.”

“Monsieur, I forbid any criticism of my wife!”

To which the secretary, at last under the infectious influence of the vine and angry as lesser men, replied by a pleasantry in the poorest taste. And then M. Delage slapped his face.

They were separated by the chief clerks of the Grande Vitesse and the Petite Vitesse. Those two were invaluable. They were calm, you see. They voted for the Catholic center and had all that was necessary to their convenience upon the station. They had thus no conceivable right to the grapes.

It was quite otherwise with the shunters. They disagreed entirely with the impulsive claim of Charles Cortal that the fruit had always been the perquisite of drivers and firemen. The shunters had just as good a case in all respects; two of them had even pruned the vine.

The solidarity of the working class vanished altogether when the shunter, Hippolyte Charvet, took it upon himself to remove Lulu while she still had steam. He made a speech from the footplate explaining that the act he was about to perform must not be interpreted as having any bearing upon the future of France, and had nothing to do with the dispute between the stationmaster and the locomotive engineers. In that argument the engineers were right and Delage, the so-called stationmaster, was a fascist who would shortly receive his deserts. No, comrades, he removed the locomotive merely because in its present position it kept the afternoon sun from the shunters’ grapes.

He thereupon returned Lulu to the sheds. I think he is still in the hospital. Charles Cortal did not even permit the oiling of Lulu by any but himself.

To hear the arguments, you would have thought that every man remembered exactly what had happened before the war. Even Cortal’s claim, which he had obviously invented merely because he was angry, was taken seriously. But nobody in fact remembered any tradition at all. For five years the Boche RTO in charge of the yards and his Boche staff had eaten the grapes themselves and allowed no one else to approach them. That alone was certain.

I will now give you the intelligence summary for Saint-Valery at nightfall. M. Delage was prostrated, partly by answering telephone calls from Paris and partly because he feared to be shot as pro-Boche. Mme. Delage was at her lawyer’s for the third time. The drivers and firemen were on strike. Charles Cortal was summonsed for the attempted murder of Hippolyte Charvet. The shunters had a peaceful picket round the vine. Grande Vitesse was occupied in composing an apology for the union secretary, who had not the least wish in the world to fight a duel, and Petite Vitesse was doing the same for Delage. And Saint-Valery yards were just as idle as when all the employees used to pretend they heard an air-raid warning.

The next day it was hot. But how hot! Only to think of it gives me a thirst even for this wine. We descended, a horde of officials, upon Saint-Valery. I was among them, being the union’s attorney. There was the undersecretary of the Ministry; there were two big men of the Resistance; there were all the union officials and the company officials. There were even some soldiers. In these days one can never have a row between civilians without soldiers desiring to be present.

First of all we held a quite informal conference at the station. We arrived at the facts. And then we protested that the whole affair was ridiculous. The Resistance men laughed. That started us off. A complainant had only to mention the tower for us to giggle like boys, all of us and uncontrollably. On a hot day one laughs easily. One’s companions are themselves comical. They mop their faces. The poor railway men of Saint-Valery were more furious than ever.

It was Charles Cortal who imposed more gravity upon us. He mounted on a barrow and addressed the union officials.

“We,” he bellowed, “we, the drivers and firemen, we were the heart of the Resistance in Saint-Valery. A month after the liberation we were thanked. And now, a year after the liberation, observe how they allow us to be stuffed up with insults from a sort of pig of a collaborator! Comrades, one steals our birthright!”

And then he called Delage by the names of various animals, and commented, without any regard for zoology, upon his probable descent from others.

This wiped the smiles off the faces of the company officials; they were about to be nationalized, and it would do no good to their salaries to have the reputation of capitalist tyrants.

Mme. Delage had dressed herself like a pretty countrywoman, but in surprisingly good taste. She chose her moment to direct a few words to the General Manager. Everybody listened.

She was going, she said quietly, in the freshness of the dawn to cull a bunch of grapes.

Our chivalry leaped to our hearts. She had a fine voice, and she made one see French Womanhood, all pure and laborious, going about its simple tasks at sunrise.

She had been insulted, she sighed, but that was nothing. There were gentlemen in plenty to defend a French-woman in distress. No, it was not for herself that she asked justice, but for her husband.

Delage was in his best cap and uniform, looking handsome and pale and very much the old soldier. Of course she touched that string too. His service in the last war. Wounded for France. Twice mentioned. And now to be called a collaborator!

She picked up Delage’s hand and kissed it passionately.

“That is what I think of him!” she cried. “And I – will anyone dare to say that I, Susanne Hélène Delage, am a collaborator?”

That wiped the smiles off the union officials too. Lack of discipline, inability to appreciate the plight of the country, incitement to rebellion against the government – those were the accusations they saw coming.

It was time to treat the affair with all the dignity of public men. One whispered. One formed lobbies. One admitted the need of subcommittees. And at last we constituted ourselves into a commission and decided to sit in the upstairs hall of the Café de la Gare. We summoned all witnesses and representatives to accompany us.

There was a yell from Charles Cortal.

“And leave these camels here to steal our grapes while we are away?” he asked. “These thieving sons of mackerels?”

Two of the shunters were still unobtrusively picketing the tower. A third was inside. We formally ejected them. Grande Vitesse and Petite Vitesse were called upon to stand guard.

“And if one wishes to enter?” asked Grande Vitesse timidly.

“It cannot be permitted,” the General Manager ordered. “One can find everything necessary on the station.”

“That I forbid absolutely!” shouted Delage.

“Bien! One will be instructed to make whatever arrangements one can,” said the General Manager in his most conciliatory manner.

I cannot say that the commission was a success. The hall had not been used for a long time. We could not expand in an atmosphere which reeked of mice and the ancient smoke of locomotives. And then – we could not create tradition where none existed.

We suggested that the grapes be given to a hospital. Not one of the railway men agreed. They said that next year and for all the years we liked they would send enough grapes to hospitals to resurrect the dead; but this year it was unthinkable. There had been insults. There was a question of principle to be decided – though heaven alone knows what cursed principle it was.

So we offered a third to the drivers and firemen, a third to the shunters, and a third to the stationmaster. No takers! Each wanted a half, and the other half to be divided.

The property of the company, then? Delage, being legal-minded, agreed to this, but the engineers and shunters would not have it. They explained with superfluous precision their right to the grapes, and demanded whether a company which had, in the immortal phrase, neither soul to be saved nor backside to be kicked could in any way be held responsible for the vine’s luxuriance.

It was, I think, one of the big men from the Resistance who at last proposed that we should analyze the problem more closely by counting the bunches to be divided. He was used to the open air and desired an excuse to return to it. He was very bored by the commission.

The suggestion was ridiculous, but really we could think of nothing useful to do. So Grande Vitesse and Petite Vitesse were put to counting bunches, while we, the others, broke into groups, according to age and political inclination, up and down the yard. The heat was abominable. I sympathized with Eve. One heard the tempter merely by looking at those grapes. They were magnificent, and the last twenty-four hours had brought them to perfection.

Between the shunters and the drivers the military were compelled to take a little promenade. As for us, the visitors, we argued courteously and from an academic point of view; but it was not difficult to see that strong words would be used if we permitted ourselves to take the affair seriously. The Resistance man had already described Mme. Delage to the General Manager in terms for which I had to persuade him to apologize.

No one noticed the man with the wheelbarrow. He arrived unobtrusively. He was so much a part of France that one did not question his right to be in the railroad yard. He was a little old peasant, bent by labor in the fields, and with the long, gray mustache of an ancient Gaul. He was wheeling a barrow with a ladder on it.

He stopped at the tower and looked benevolently at Grande Vitesse, who was on the roof counting bunches, and at Petite Vitesse, who was performing the feats of an acrobat through the window. He knew at once that their intentions were honest – they understood each other, those children of old France.

“They are just right, my grapes!” said the ancient, rubbing his hands. “Ah, how I know you! You have not changed in the war.”

And he patted the trunk of the vine as if to congratulate it upon so punctual a response to the season.

He was quite unaffected by the crowd. I doubt if he even noticed us. Or perhaps he thought that we had come to watch. He had the face of a man who enjoys all the protection of his conscience and the law. I hastened to his side before everyone could speak at once.

“Is it your vine?” I asked him.

He sat down on the wheelbarrow and drew from his vast coat pocket a portfolio. The documents were imposing. They dated from the time of Napoleon III. Paper like that is not made nowadays. And he read them aloud, on and on – that the said Sieur Henri Duval sold to the railroad company the property as set forth in the accompanying schedule with all buildings and land and produce growing thereon with the exception of the said vine, and the said Sieur Henri Duval should have access at all times for the purpose of cultivating the said vine and the fruit of the said vine should belong to him and his heirs and assigns, and the said railroad company on their part –

“I am François Duval, voyez-vous,” he declared, “son of Henri Duval, and I have here my birth certificate and copy of the will of Henri Duval.”

“But it is plain the grapes are his!” grumbled Charles Cortal, who, you will remember, was a communist, and did not believe in private property. “Why worry about the damned documents? He can just as well leave them for us in the tower.”

He shrugged his shoulders and strolled off to prepare Lulu for the road. We returned to Paris.

Three Kings

HE CRAWLED OUT of his sleeping bag and shivered in the Persian dawn until the sun rose in countable inches above the flat edge of the salt desert, and the temperature leapt up as if there were no atmosphere at all to soften the transition between night and day.

It was a Martian, not an earthly landscape. In such barren immensity he was conscious of his truck, his only companion, as if he were seeing it from the air. It was an indiscernible brown spot at the foot of a brown mountain. There was no green by which its shape and unity could be remarked – and this in spite of the fact that a narrow channel of water roared between truck and mountain. The stream itself was barren. Bed and banks were smooth as those of an aqueduct. The speed of the water had cleaned the rock of every obstruction where gravel might accumulate and soil grow into life.

He had intended, when he left Ispahan, to turn his back on that stream after filling his water tank, and to drive two hundred miles into the heart of the desert – an easy enough run over the baked, glistening surface, but foolhardy for a man alone. On foot and carrying water, the point of no return was fifty miles out; thus an injury, a breakdown or an unexpected patch of soft ground might well mean death from thirst or exhaustion. Two men, however, could have dealt with pretty well any emergency that was likely to befall a fifteen-hundredweight truck in first-class mechanical condition, with ample spares, water, petrol and wire netting in the back.

It was mere bad luck that he was alone. Aslan, his tough Turkoman servant and driver, had gone down with dysentery. And that, if you like, was a marvel, considering that Aslan, for the better part of his life, had eaten nothing that had not been tasted by fourteen thousand flies before him, and had taken no harm. But there it was. Aslan had been left, weak and cursing, in the care of a friendly village headman, and Gwynn had gone on, telling himself that he would just reconnoitre the approaches and would not risk the journey.

Laurence Gwynn was no passionate pilgrim for wealth or far horizons. He did not look a man likely to be alone in deserts, for he was slight and fair-complexioned and by no means in his first youth. His manner, even towards his truck, had something of indecisive courtesy. This, however, was only a conscious and easy adoption of the standards of the East, and it concealed a thoroughly Western honesty of purpose. He was a consultant geologist, and he knew Persia as well as any European, and a great deal better than any native Persian. He didn’t claim to love the country, but he readily admitted that it never bored him. He had reached a point of content, as in some successful mariage de convenance, whereat it was impossible to distinguish between love and continual interest.

Curiosity – and at that a curiosity more personal than scientific – was the motive tempting him to take the jeweled road of salt crystals which led straight into the rising sun. Yet the story of the hill and its rocks that gleamed in darkness was nothing but a bazaar rumor. So, at least Gwynn told himself – repeatedly – as he tried to ensure the victory of caution over curiosity. Bazaar rumors flared up with the speed of epidemics. The scrap of knowledge was always present, like the typhus, but nobody bothered to recollect or to express it. Then, one noon under the arches, a whole street would discuss some fact that was perfectly familiar to their fathers, and embroider it with lies until, instead of truth with no publicity, they had publicity with no truth.

The Russians had taken the rumor seriously, and dispatched, with what they hoped was secrecy, an old-fashioned expedition. They were right, of course, to use horse transport. You couldn’t report on possible routes and water supplies and geology from a plane. Gwynn considered this Russian excitement quite absurd. It confirmed, however, his own opinion that there was enough truth in the story to give an object – and no more – for a couple of weeks of pleasurable exploration.

The gap between horizon and red sun grew to a hand’s breadth, and the stab of warmth, instant and relentless, was as keenly appreciable as had been, ten minutes earlier, the bitter cold of dawn. Gwynn’s common sense triumphed without more ado. It was folly to go on. There was no point in adding to the loneliness of that lonely desert.

He let down his canvas bucket into the river, and washed and breakfasted. The taste of fruit, coffee and fried bacon reminded him that he was out for his pleasure, and that danger was not at all a necessary spice. He stowed his gear, and followed the river up its valley along a track worn by the hooves of herds and pack animals that had come down to the edge of the desert and moved along it until they could strike northwards again into the hills.

Some ten miles up the ravine, the mountains drew away from the river, and rock and dust changed into soil. There were crops and a village. There were even trees – a line of slender poplars by the water, apricots in the terraced plots around the houses. It was a harsh, windswept, isolated site for human habitation, but its people, for Persian villagers, were by no means poor. They lived at a forbidding distance from government and the taxgatherer.

Laurence Gwynn perceived at once, by the slight constraint that greeted his arrival, that there must be another stranger in the village. When he came to the open space of beaten earth by the village watering place, the elders were flurried as some hostess greeting a visitor of unexpected distinction at her own quiet party. They instantly surrounded his truck, revealing, though not isolating, the former center of attraction.

On the communal bench, beneath the scanty line of poplars, sat a Negro. He was wearing a dented but carefully polished helmet which had once belonged to a trooper of the Horse Guards. His body, dressed in the remnants of European clothes, was slung about with oddments – a water bottle, an old messtin, a primus stove, a cluster of small and dirty jute bags, and a pair of shining cymbals. His gigantic, black, boat-like feet were bare, and the heels protruded so far aft that his shin seemed to be stepped into his foot at about the position of a mizzenmast.

“Good morning, boss!” he remarked with a deep, assured voice.

“Good-God-Good-Morning!” answered Gwynn in a single breath of surprise.

The Negro rose, clashed his cymbals and broke into a shuffling dance that suggested the sinister spasms of a witch doctor. The villagers drew back in horrified curiosity. Gwynn watched with an interest that, at first, was by no means patronizing. It then occurred to him – and he admitted disappointment – that he could put on the act just as well himself. Those capers were pure fake – evidently a successful fake, for the Negro must have received a night’s lodging and, to judge by the empty bowls on the bench, a breakfast of bread and beans.

“You do pretty well out of it,” said Gwynn.

“If,” answered the Negro, pointing to the remains of the stomach-cheating beans, “you call this well.”

He leapt, clattering, up and down as if to counteract or perhaps emphasize, for the sake of the villagers, the effect of his calm, sane utterance in the foreign tongue. The impression, Gwynn thought, might be that of an oracle speaking with solemn lucidity between the writhings of the spirit.

“How long has the afflicted been with you?” he asked the headman.

“He came last night. He could depart,” the headman added hopefully, “with your lordship. He will make the way short with fooleries and magic since he speaks your lordship’s tongue.”

“He speaks Persian?”

“A little. Like a child.”

“What on earth are you doing here all alone?” Gwynn asked the Negro.

“Seekin’ the light, oh ma lord!” he answered, merrily changing his cultured English to the dialect of the American colored man.

“And when you’ve found it?” Gwynn invited, showing by a smile that he had caught – if he were meant to catch – the allusion to that bazaar rumor which had sent him too, though not on bare black feet, into this heart of aridity.

“A small share, boss, a small share. I assure you I don’t expect to be allowed to keep very much of it for myself.”

“You choose an odd way to travel.”

“Oh, my dear sir – or boss, I mean – there are only two ways for an African to preserve his liberty. He can frighten you, or he can play the fool. And if he can do both at once, the world is open to him. It’s a lot more fun, you know, than being a crook politician on the Gold Coast.”

“Like a lift?” Gwynn asked.

It was partly interest in this sure, fantastic and obviously well-educated mountebank, and partly pity for the villagers who would never get rid of the incubus until it wanted to go.

“Where to, boss?”

The question was unanswerable. There was really nowhere to leave the man unless he were driven back to the Ispahan road; and, since that was the road from which he had fooled, begged and tramped his way into the hills, presumably he didn’t want to return there. Nor did Gwynn, yet.

“Did you come along the river?” he asked.

“Over the mountains.”

“There’s a path?”

“Just for two feet and four.”

“Has it been used recently?”

“Mr. Fomin is two valleys east of here with seven ponies and three men.”

This answer, so detailed, so unreserved, was what he least expected. He knew that the Russians must be in or approaching the district, but that Fomin, a thoroughly competent geologist, should have fallen for this bazaar rumor of uranium was astonishing; he must have known very well how improbable it was that radioactivity could be the cause of this luminescence – if indeed there really was any. No doubt he had received an unarguable order from the ambassador or one of his satellite commissars. Nothing happened in Persia that they didn’t know, but, since their credulity was so immoderate, no truth was of any value.

So there they all were – Fomin with ponies, himself with a truck, and this confounded Negro on the vast leathers of his feet, all chasing a story that had filtered down from a bunch of shepherds, a wandering tribe which, for one spring in twenty years, had found enough young grass to leave their usual route by the east of the hill and pass below its western face. And they had reported – what they pleased. A star imbedded in the hillside, a nameless glory, a whole hill that shone in the night.

The older the civilization, he thought, the more mysterious the country. In the unexplored you knew exactly what you would find; the next, the unknown hundred miles had every chance of being exactly like the last, and if there were anything of humanity that was new, its precise degree of degradation would only excite an anthropologist. But in lands whose every mile had, sometime, been known to the priest or merchant, there was no guessing what you might discover.

It wasn’t the first time he had followed a rumor. There was the story of the eternal flame and its altar – persistent among the nomad tribes of Luristan, though every educated Persian laughed at it. The legend had seemed worth investigation, for, to a mining engineer, there was nothing impossible about an eternal flame in oil-bearing hills. Sure enough he had found it, and sure enough it was eternal – or at any rate old enough to possess a rough altar four thousand years old. It was of no commercial value – there wasn’t a city within five hundred miles that would pay for the piping of natural gas – yet he had come again upon a mystery that was ancient before the first Zoroastrians had worshiped it.

Something of this nature – known but forgotten, interesting but valueless – was what he expected to find, certainly nothing that was worth driving Fomin into a frenzy of suspicion. He didn’t want to meet the Russian. Fomin was too willing to change the history of the world on evidence which, if it were geological, wouldn’t have sufficed him for the drilling of a wildcat well; the mere presence of Gwynn would send him rushing back to Teheran with stories of imperial plots. Well, with luck, a meeting might be avoided. By batting straight across the desert he could reach the hill, be back at the river and away to Ispahan while Fomin and his ponies were still toiling down their valley to the edge of the salt.

“Can you drive a truck?” he asked the Negro.

“No, boss. But I could mighty near lift it.”

That honest answer clinched the deal. There was, of course, risk in lying out in the desert with a helmeted and cymbaled eccentric. But Gwynn rejected it; he unhesitatingly placed his man in that class of pilgrims who, before the war, could be found in Persia or on any of the walkable routes round the world, selling picture postcards of themselves as a means of subsistence.

“Jump in!” he said.

The Negro settled his helmet, and saluted the assembled villagers with an impressive upward thrust of the arm that suggested the lord of Africa dismissing his black and blood-stained legions. He followed this dignified improvement upon Mussolini by a fair attempt at all the Persian politenesses of leave-taking. The villagers evidently felt that he had been well worth the price of admission.

It was midday when Gwynn and his companion reached his solitary camp of the previous night. There, under the shade of the truck’s canvas cover, they drank and forced themselves to eat a little – even the Negro’s appetite failed in such an oven – and drove out into the desert on a compass course.

The route of the wandering shepherds was by no means a certainty; and the map, such as it was, depended on a mid–nineteenth century survey by the Government of India. That name at the head of the sheet seemed an imposing enough authority, but Gwynn knew well that the accuracy of the map depended on nothing but the lonely integrity of a young Englishman and his Punjabi assistant, both of whom, on a subsequent journey, had died of thirst.

Still, there were only two hills the shepherds could have passed. One was at the end of a narrow peninsula of broken rocks that ran far out into the desert; the other, a more isolated hillock, was twenty miles beyond it – at any rate, according to the triangulation of those brown and white hands, sweating, unsteady, and long since mummified.

The truck made fifty miles of easting with as little effort as if it had been running on tarmac. Only the high and trailing cloud of gray dust behind showed that the surface was friable. To the north, curving to meet the Hindu Kush, was the line of yellow mountains where Fomin was waiting in one of the folds for the heat of the day to pass, or perhaps debouching onto the plain with full water skins gently compressing the ribs of the ponies. To the south was nothing until a man came to the old caravan route to India; and that was so nearly nothing that he might cross without noticing it.

Conversation was easy on so smooth a ride. The Negro, feeling himself to be trusted, relaxed into simplicity. He introduced himself as John Mahene, B.A. of London University and without profession. He didn’t think much of the opportunities of West Africa. He was the grandson of a king, he said, and he would gladly serve a king, but not a bunch of schoolmasters – and that was what they were, those colonial officials: kindly schoolmasters.

“Boss,” he asked, “how would you like to spend your life as a head prefect?”

“The name is Gwynn,” Laurence reminded him.

“Well, Mr. Gwynn, I didn’t. I don’t want to learn democracy. The rule of the strongest, that’s what suits me. Not of the smartest. No, sir!”

The solemn imitation of white man by black was not for him. As soldier, docker, tramp and circus performer he had traveled the world. He had worked as a laborer for a team of oil drillers in eastern Arabia, where his magnificent physique had attracted the admiration of a local sheikh. Mahene had then gone back a century or two in time. He became the picturesque bodyguard of tradition, inspiring terror in the disaffected by the ripple of his black muscles and the weight of his scimitar.

“They took you seriously?” Laurence asked.

“Boss – Mr. Gwynn, I mean – they surely did. Suppose you’ve got a gun and I’ve got a sword. Well, a little hole is all you’ve got time to make, and if you don’t put that little hole in the right place, I’m going to separate a piece of meat you can’t do without.”

His employer, traveling in state, had taken him on a visit to Persia. There John Mahene, feeling in need of rest and comparatively Western ways, had attached himself as porter and privileged clown to the consul of a certain chocolate-colored republic. He was well fed but unpaid, he said, and so this bazaar rumor …

“And what do you expect to find?” Gwynn asked, turning in the driving seat and regarding his companion with tolerant amusement.

“If a man doesn’t get in on the ground floor,” Mahene answered, “he won’t find anything.”

“It’s not uranium, you know.”

“Mr. Gwynn, if the chance is good enough for the Russians, it’s good enough for me.”

“Well, if you were a geologist, it wouldn’t be. How did you guess that I was after the shining light, by the way?”

“What else could you be after? There’s nothing to hunt and nothing to dig up.”

In the late afternoon they came to a low reef of rock jutting out into the desert. Nowhere did it seem to be more than three hundred yards in width, but their even course to the east was checked as absolutely as if the truck had been a motor launch. Gwynn turned south to find and circumnavigate the end of the peninsula; it took him a good hour to reach the point where the rock dived beneath the desert. There, with the sun behind him and the gray, forbidding flats ahead, he had to decide whether to close in again towards the mountains, or to stay far out – keeping, as it were, his sea room, and possibly missing the landfall he wanted. The map, naturally enough, ignored these long reefs across his course. Its makers, never dreaming of wheels in the desert, had not considered conditions of surface.

He compromised, and gradually closed in towards the main range on a northeasterly course. Another reef, no higher than a man but impassable, provided a gap. He took it, and was led into more trouble. The only sensible move was to run back through the gap, camp there, and take to the open desert at first light. He reckoned that he could still find the hill and return, without ever embarrassing Fomin by a trace of his presence.

John Mahene proved himself a useful man in camp. He took Aslan’s gear and duties, and, unlike Aslan, stripped and washed himself from head to foot in a basin of water – a desert luxury permitted by the sixteen-gallon tank in the back of the truck. He spread out his filthy clothes on the ground, and dressed himself for dinner in a blanket.

He had evidently decided that the relationship was to be one of master and man. Laurence Gwynn, however, preferred partnership, for he disliked to give orders when he did not know whether they would be obeyed, or even why they should be. It seemed to him more courteous and less embarrassing to the expedition to uphold Mahene in the position of fellow and equal to which his education entitled him. He had lived long enough in Moslem countries for this attitude to be entirely natural. To him, as to the good Mohammedan, color was a mere accident and breeding the whole world.

To emphasize the desired relationship he gave Mahene a whisky and water while he himself symbolically opened tins. Mahene caught what he was up to, and accepted the drink with a broad Negro’s grin in which was neither insolence nor exaggerated gratitude, but plain, friendly intelligence. Gwynn found himself suddenly enjoying his companion. When the helmet and cymbals were put aside, this Negro was worthy to be the grandson of a king.

They made ready for an early start and settled down, Gwynn in his sleeping bag, Mahene rolled in Aslan’s blankets. They slept at some distance from the truck – for there was no need to keep watch – in a cove of the reef where the wind had piled a beach of soft gray dust. The utter silence, the absolute surety that the oxygen of the desert was theirs and theirs alone to breathe gave the two travelers a sounder rest than man in the open is permitted by his subconscious guardian to enjoy. That guardian had no creep of insect or flutter of grass to hold him ready to wake the sleeper. There was not even nourishment for snakes. Nothing ventured out so far into the salt but the leaping, fast-traveling caravans of the gazelle.

Twice Gwynn thought he heard a stirring in the empty desert. He paid no attention. It seemed to be one of those sounds that the country Persians ascribed to Jinn. For them – and not for them alone – the conception of a noisy mineral was hard to assimilate. To Gwynn, however, the crackle and purr and even singing of inorganic matter subjected to extreme changes of temperature was perfectly familiar. He was no unreasoning skeptic and wouldn’t have denied the possibility of a spirit life upon the otherwise lifeless salt, but all such manifestations as had come his way could be – though sometimes with difficulty – explained by the cooling and contraction of minerals.

On this occasion he put too much trust in the vagaries of inorganic chemistry. The visitor had been organic, decidedly organic. It had worn good Russian boots. It had opened the cock of the sixteen-gallon tank, buried the end of the piping in the ground so that the drip of water could not be heard, and then – as was clear from its tracks in daylight – walked a couple of miles back to its pony.

John Mahene was up first, and discovered the disaster. At his shout Gwynn ran to the truck. The Negro was standing by the tailboard with a dignity that even for him was unusual. He almost stood to attention. That he expected to be blamed was obvious. He had, after all, somewhat overdone his eccentricities in the village, and the incalculable white man might fairly think him mad or a murderer.

The thought, however, never occurred to Gwynn. He didn’t even waste time in curses.

“We had better get back to the river before the heat,” he said.

There was a canvas chatti of water hanging by the driving seat, which the raider had missed. It held about three quarts, enough for drinking and the radiator – which under that sun and in anything but top gear could be nearly as thirsty as a man. The run back to the river alongside their own tracks could not take more than three or four hours.

They loaded kit and supplies. The engine started with two devastating backfires and stopped. The self-starter was so dead that it seemed an indecency to pull it a second time. Gwynn opened the bonnet. One cylinder head was cracked, and in another the plug was loose. To a miner the smell of the fumes was unmistakable. The visitor had unscrewed a couple of plugs, dropped in two detonators and replaced the plugs.

“The bloody, bloody fool!” Gwynn muttered. “What harm did he think I could do?”

His exasperation with the Russian’s unnecessary cruelty met with no response from John Mahene.

“He sure made certain that you couldn’t do any,” the Negro answered, as a man of action defending another man of action.

The hard ground held little trace. It was the merest luck that half a mile away they found the tracks of a single man plowing through a bed of windblown detritus such as that on which they had slept. From the reef above it Gwynn picked out with his glasses a pile of droppings and a roughening of the baked surface where the close-hobbled pony had awaited the return of its rider.

“How in hell could he know where we were?” Mahene exclaimed.

“Dust. The dust behind the truck. You could see that cloud twenty miles away. And if he were watching from the mountains – well, he’d only to follow the right reef to come to us. It’s my fault. I came in too close. But I never dreamed of this.”

“Where he is, there’s water,” said Mahene.

“Not necessarily. He’s probably carrying enough to get there and back, as we were. I wouldn’t bet on there being any water at all in the southern valleys.”

They looked at the great folds of the mountains, which changed from magenta to copper to yellow in the furnace of the risen sun.

“There’s nothing for it but to march back to the river in a couple of nights,” Gwynn went on. “We’ll cut across the bad ground and pick up the tire tracks on the other side. Then it’s only sixty miles with a good gallon between us if we empty the radiator. Lying up by day will be the worst. It’s pretty bad without shade, you know.”

“You’re the boss, Mr. Gwynn,” Mahene agreed. “Still I’d just like to catch him asleep.”

“You haven’t got a pony.”

They returned to the truck and breakfasted. They had no need to start on the precious chatti of water until the march. There were tins of fruit which would be awkward to carry, but provided enough liquid for the day.

Mahene prowled impatiently between the truck and a flat-topped crag, from which the lower slopes of the mountains could be watched. He did not easily accept defeat. Pride, Gwynn thought, was perhaps the essence of his character. Only a man whose sense of his own worth was unshakable could allow himself, quite calmly, such buffooneries.

“They won’t march till five in the afternoon,” Gwynn assured him. “Lie down and rest.”

Mahene controlled himself till four. Then he settled on top of the crag with Gwynn’s powerful binoculars and a doubled blanket to lie on – for even his black skin was instantly blistered by the rock. Gwynn squatted in the patch of shade that was beginning to grow on the northern side. At five he asked.

“What’s the good, Mahene?”

“Give me another hour, Mr. Gwynn. That won’t make any difference to us. I hate to let him get away with it.”

Mahene had his reward. When the rays of the sun had lengthened from heat that would fry to heat of a slow oven, he called out. Gwynn joined him on the rock. There were seven small specks moving diagonally down the slope where once the delta of a river had dropped into the prehistoric sea whose salt was all about them.

“What’s the distance, Mr. Gwynn?”

“Fifteen miles, more or less.”

“What sort of men has Fomin?”

“All communists from Azerbaijan. But desertworthy.”

“I watched their camp one evening,” said Mahene. “I was far above them, but I could see they didn’t pray.”

“Quite likely. I don’t suppose they are practicing Mohammedans any longer. There is no God, and Stalin is his prophet.”

“Mr. Gwynn, if I had a pony with water, would you go on?”

“No.”

“Can we wait here another day if we have to?”

“No.”

“Will you wait half an hour for me at the foot of this rock?”

“Yes, Mahene. But what’s the good?”

The sincerity and keenness of the man were pathetic. Gwynn’s answer was just to humor a child, a child who might very well be dead in forty-eight hours. Then, when the Negro had gone, he said to himself: O my God, he’s taken the chatti and cleared out.

It was hard to sit there and trust his own judgment of character. He comforted himself with the thought that, after all, there was nothing else, never had been anything else he could trust. He couldn’t fight Mahene, or even catch him.

The shadow of the crag was very long. By watching closely he could see it crawl from pebble to pebble like a rising tide. To his tired eyes the lifeless desert was a world sharp and uncolored as a photograph. Then the singing began. It was a little tune of great sweetness in no human voice, and there was no telling where it came from. His whole body tingled. For three seconds he felt that this was a symptom of death, commanding panic and worship together. In the next second he knew, and sprang up to face the rock.

Over the top of it appeared a black face, streaked with white paint. The white hair from a horse guard’s helmet was stuck to the sides of the mouth, forming a nightmare mustache. The mouth contained a remarkable set of tin teeth, two of which hung down outside the lips like the fangs of a leopard. There was little doubt what the effect would be on an Azerbaijan driver in the dead of night, with no faith in the Prophet to protect him.

“How on earth did you make that noise, Mahene?” he asked.

The Negro produced it. At close quarters there was no mystery at all. It was a soprano hum, of singular, reedy clarity, warbled through the nose with mouth closed. It still seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere, to be as directionless as distant bird song.

Mahene removed his tin teeth and grinned.

“Think it will work?”

“If they aren’t still more afraid of Fomin,” Gwynn answered. “But, my dear man, how are you going to reach them?”

“Run.”

“And find their camp?”

“I reckoned you could tell me how to do that, Mr. Gwynn.”

John Mahene slithered down the rock and joined his companion in the shade. He was stark naked, and painted down to the navel with fine white lines. Lower markings were more solid and of great complexity. It was hard to tell what the effect would be against a background of pitch-black shadow, but certainly that of a tenuous, indefinite horror growing out of a base of terrifying indecency.

“One of my aids to travel,” said Mahene, apologetically. “The paint is luminous. And why not, Mr. Gwynn? Didn’t you like a ride on a ghost train yourself when you were the age of a Persian villager?”

With this extraordinary figure squatting by his side and eagerly unfolding the map, Gwynn was overcome by a sense of unreality. Not only was he, Laurence, at last and as a fact in that desert disaster where imagination had often placed him, but he was accompanied by a black man – a friendly and on the whole delightful black man with a horsehair mustache and tin teeth. Though never more sober, he felt that lifting of the spirit, that willing surrender to fantasy with which a drunken man accepts the unfamiliar.

“We are about here,” he said, placing a tiny pencil cross in a blank space of the map. “We know where Fomin is now –” and he put another cross on the last hatchings of high ground. “We know where he is going, and that there is every reason why he should march on the shortest line. Hell stop at latest when the moon sets, and perhaps an hour or two earlier. He’ll pass within about twelve miles of us, and he’ll camp along this straight line from fifteen to twenty miles away from us.”

Then he pulled himself together.

“Mahene, this is lunacy. If you aren’t killed, you’ll be lost in the desert. I can’t allow it.”

“That’s understood, Mr. Gwynn. But you can’t stop it. Now, if you like to start back, I’ll come after you with any ponies and water I can get. And if you like to wait – well, I don’t look much like the Managing Director of Consolidated Persians without my trousers. But I’m near enough not to want to turn back.”

Gwynn pressed him to take half the contents of the chatti. He would not. Fomin’s water was what he wanted, and if he failed to get it, he would return, he said, by morning. No, he couldn’t get lost any more than Fomin had. The reefs running out at right angles to the main range were as good as a compass.

John Mahene loped away over the desert, with an hour of twilight ahead of him which would merge into the stranger but even clearer light of a waning moon. Naked, long-legged and steady-paced, Gwynn saw him go, and thought that for him as for the gazelle the salt flats might be ally rather than enemy. To a build and stride like his, forty miles in a night were no impossibility.

Gwynn returned to the truck. He ate a little, and poured out a fair and careful ration of water. With dusk and in the absence of any companion, he was full of melancholy foreboding. He wished to heaven that he had not lent himself to Mahene’s fantastic confidence. The Negro’s damn-fool scheme had brought death a good deal nearer than it need have been. He had no doubt that the immediate result would be startling, but afterwards? Mahene would either be shot by Fomin, or lose his way. Gwynn saw himself wandering hopelessly over the salt with the last of the water to find nothing but a body.

He rested, not daring to sleep too heavily. Before dawn he heard the tumble of hoofs, and rolled out of his bag with the shotgun that he used in kinder country to supply the pot. He never carried any other weapon.

Mahene’s voice hailed him. He blinked at the formless thing above the salt, dimly perceived to be riding one pony and leading a second. In the semidarkness there were no legs to be seen. It appeared to be a sort of loathsome idol balanced upon the saddle by supernatural attraction.

It let loose a deep scream of laughter, easily recognizable as the very human release of nervous tension.

“Got here, boss! Three ponies and all the water and Fomin, boss! That’s what we have. The three drivers bolted – oh my Lord, like a donkey race! Slashed the halters and off they were. Bareback. One man on each of them and a loose horse. They won’t stop till it’s too far to come back. And then a nice walk with pony blood to drink. That’ll teach ’em not to believe their eyes, Mr. Gwynn. Ya-ha! Ya-ha! Ya-ha!”

“And Fomin?”

“Ran after ’em, shouting. He gave it up pretty soon. And when he came back to his tent, I sort of uncoiled myself from the pile of blankets. He’s a brave man, Mr. Fomin – but he did spend a second wondering just what the target was. And that was one second too long.”

“He’s all right?” Gwynn asked, dreading the answer.

“Sure! I tied him up tight and left him in the open. It won’t do him any harm to lie in the sun awhile and wonder if I’m coming back.”

“I’ll have to let him go after his men, you know. He’d better take two ponies and a waterskin, and clear out.”

“It’s my breakfast I was thinking of,” John Mahene replied.

Gwynn suddenly laughed as unrestrainedly as the Negro.

“For God’s sake clean yourself up while I get it,” he said. “I take it we haven’t got to worry about water any more?”

There was enough for coffee and the journey, but not for a wash. Mahene rubbed his skin with petrol and fine dust, and then resumed his clothes. After a full day spread out in the sun, the seams were empty of life as if they had passed through a delousing oven.

They packed such extra food as could easily be carried, and mounted. Gwynn found a holster and pistol strapped to his saddle.

“You keep that,” said Mahene.

Laurence Gwynn shook his head, and pitched the holster into his derelict truck.

“Fomin might get it back,” he replied. “We’ll sleep sounder without it. And we’re two to one anyway.”

At ten o’clock they reached Fomin’s camp. It looked like a huddle of gypsy rags upon the desert. Three ponies were trampling the remains of the matting that had been stretched over them in readiness for the heat of the day. Fomin’s tent had been hurled upwards and collapsed by the struggle beneath it. The drivers’ blankets were scattered over the salt. Cooking pots and saddlery showed every sign of a stampede of terrified men and horses. Fomin, shapeless as another waterskin, lay on his side with his wrists tied behind his back and his ankles lashed together.

Gwynn untied the ropes, and supported Fomin while the painful blood flowed back along his arteries. He had met the Russian at several diplomatic parties in Teheran, and had even exchanged publications with him; yet he recognized, with a shade of surprise, that the present bond of attempted murder which lay between him and this very angry man was a deal more natural than the heartiness with which they had clinked their glasses of vermouth and vodka. He had never felt, as with a colleague of any other nationality, that their interest in the common science could overcome their political allegiance. Fomin had remained far more of an impenetrable Asiatic, in spite of his fair and handsome features and his excellent English, than the dark, stag-eyed Persians whom he loved and understood.

“You might at least have left us water,” said Gwynn, as conversationally as he could manage.

“Why should I?”

“Well – let us say, as one prospecting geologist to another.”

“What has the profession to do with it?” Fomin stormed. “I tell you this shall be settled between Moscow and London.”

“Will it? It’s just your word against mine – and that won’t make a diplomatic incident.”

“My men will report straight to the Embassy.”

“And say that they saw a ghost and left you to die? They won’t, my dear Fomin. They are Persians first, and communists after. They’ll take the easiest way out and just disappear. And if Mahene and I don’t talk, it will simply be assumed they murdered you.”

John Mahene returned from picketing and watering the ponies. He showed as little resentment as Gwynn, and contented himself with a grin and an exhibition of shadowboxing, as if inviting Fomin to join in the memory of a violent but amusing experience.

His clowning was the last straw. Fomin passed in one beautiful blaze of emotion from anger to martyrdom. He liked to strike an attitude, even when he was sincere. He had been told so often by heroic comrades that his face was noble – as indeed it was.

“Kill me then, you and your hired slave! I don’t need hypocrisy.”

Gwynn obediently withdrew his supporting arm, and Fomin dropped to the ground in an undignified bundle.

“What shall we do with him for the day, Mahene?” he asked.

“Shove him in his tent, Mr. Gwynn, and encourage him to have some sleep. See here, commissar—”

“I have already told you I am not a commissar,” Fomin interrupted.

“Russian for boss,” said Mahene. “And you listen to me! If you stick your head outside the flies of that tent, I’m going to bat it straight back again.”

Fomin gave no trouble. He seemed to have the acceptance of the Asiatic in face of violence. Or was it, Gwynn wondered, that the long and illogical party training helped a man to recognize the occasions when revolt was hopeless?

Mahene slept through the day, while Gwynn kept watch on the silent tent. Horses and men sweated under the mat awnings. There was nothing to do but to endure heat without movement; that itself was an occupation.

When the sun was low, they called to Fomin. The Russian, pacified by deep draughts of cooler air as much as by food and drink, grudgingly permitted conversation.

“When did you last water?” Gwynn asked Fomin.

“In the afternoon, the day before yesterday.”

“Well or spring?”

“Mudhole.”

“Yes, it tastes like it. Are you sure of its position?”

“I am not a child.”

“Then you’d better take a pony and a waterskin and start now. You should reach the hole some time tomorrow night.”

“I will not,” said Fomin. “I shall follow you.”

“Very well, if you prefer it. We are returning straight to the river.”

“You are not going on?” Fomin exclaimed, as if shocked by such a dereliction of duty.

“Good God, no – not enough water! You took a crazy risk, Fomin.”

“I took no risk. We were all mounted and could move fast. I was going on to the spring migration track and home by it. There is a well half a march to the east of the hill. My drivers were sure.”

Gwynn looked at the map. The valley by which shepherds and flocks must enter the mountains was clear enough, but there was no guessing their track across the desert. It was a reasonable assumption, however, that somewhere to the east of the shining hill was water.

“Mr. Gwynn,” said Mahene, “if the drivers could find it, we can find it.”

“Mahene, what the devil do you think there is in this that is worth risking your life for?”

“Money,” replied John Mahene.

“And you, Fomin?”

“My orders are to report on that hill.”

“Just fear of the consequences?” Gwynn asked.

“No. My duty to the future. But you will not understand that, imperialist!”

“Oh, Mahene is the only imperialist – as near as we can get to it today! All he wants is a concession. But look here, Fomin! Speaking as one geologist to another, do you for one moment suppose that the luminescence of that hill is due to radioactivity?”

“That is not my business.”

“And what happens when you come back and say: I told you so?”

The dead nobility of Fomin’s profile suddenly twitched into life. He replied with a proverb, speaking perfect Persian. The use of that aristocratic language seemed for a moment to relieve him of party discipline.

“Falsehood with good intentions is preferable to truth with controversy.”

“You believe that?” Gwynn asked indignantly.

“What I believe does not matter. That is what they may tell me.”

“And yet you obey!”

“For the sake of mankind, I obey.”

“Oh hell!” said Gwynn, giving it up. “We haven’t a sane motive for going on between us. Very well, let us go on! Fomin, if I promise not to tell a soul of your co-operation with the enemy, will you give me your word that you won’t try to sabotage this expedition?”

Fomin struggled with his conscience, and then shook Gwynn’s hand with extreme proletarian heartiness.

“It is wrong,” he said, “and I know it. But we Russians – ah, we are far too ready to be friends. Come now, a bottle! I have a bottle in my tent. We drink a bottle to the shining light.”

“I think we’d better keep it till we get there,” said Gwynn mildly. “Shall we start now?”

There was water enough for two full marches and the intervening day. They trudged over the salt on a compass course, walking alongside the three ponies laden with food, water, Fomin’s instruments and a long strip of matting rolled around its bamboo poles. At midnight they rested and mixed some of Fomin’s bottle with their water. Then at first light, they forced the pace for a couple of hours, and camped.

The hill, their objective, was now in full view – a crouching black bulk that blotted out the sunrise. It performed no spectacle for them. It was a dead lump of minerals on a dead plain.

They waited, impatiently accepting the uneasy sleepiness of the heat, and knowing that the bodies of men and horses, in spite of idleness, were ticking away their water with the regularity of a clock. In the afternoon, earlier than was prudent, they started across the desert in order to have some light for the examination of the hill. The short daylight march exhausted men and horses, and the carefully calculated ration of water had to be increased.

On the western side the rocks were mercilessly hot, and would have been hard climbing even if bearable to the naked palm. Fomin took a pony and rode round the hill. On his return to camp an hour later, the pony died. Yet they admitted that his ruthless speed was justified. He had found a gully on the northern side up which they could climb in the shade, with a fair chance of reaching the top in daylight.

The height was only twenty feet more above the plain than the five hundred and sixty that the long-dead surveyors had allowed. Even so, the effort to all but the tireless Mahene was very great. There was nothing to see on the top or upper slopes but an outcrop of gneiss and signs of slight volcanic activity in the Tertiary period. Worse still, there was no sign whatever that flocks or any living thing had ever crossed the featureless plain of salt to the east of the hill, where the track of the shepherd’s regular migration should be.

The second hill, the other possibility, was some forty miles to the southeast. The surveyors, who could only have glimpsed its cone from the main range in the clear air of morning or evening, had put it too low and too near. It was far more than the hillock shown, with a question mark, on the map.

Gwynn trained his glasses on its fast-fading image. Then he lay down and steadied his elbows, and remained motionless for a full minute.

“Tell me what you see,” he said, handing the glasses to Fomin.

“A star through a gap,” Fomin pronounced, and added more hesitantly, “but – but it has size, and it is too faint.”

“Let Mahene try.”

From toe to lens, Mahene’s recumbent body pointed at the hill with the concentrated purpose of a black gun barrel. Then he rolled over on his back, kicked, and with an acrobat’s arching of the spine sprang upright.

“That’s it! That’s it, Mr. Gwynn! That’s what we’re after!”

“It might as well be in the moon,” Gwynn answered.

His voice was angry, and he checked himself. A casual curiosity, just enough for what should have been a casual and uneventful trip – that had been his motive. And now that he found he couldn’t reach it, he had to see that the damned phenomenon was really there, and as inexplicable to a geologist as it had been to half-naked nomads.

“We know there is water beyond,” said Fomin.

“We hope,” Gwynn corrected him sharply.

“There’s nothing much left to carry, Mr. Gwynn,” Mahene suggested. “You both ride, and I’ll run. I can do it. You’ll see I can. How long would it take us then?”

“Six hours or so – if the ponies can stand it. But what afterwards? Only our feet and about two quarts apiece.”

“For a Russian soldier that is enough,” said Fomin superbly.

Gwynn didn’t ask exactly what it was enough for. The recklessness of his two companions appalled, but fascinated him. He contented himself with pointing out that if they rode northeast towards the mountains, they had at least a better chance of water and life. The speck of light upon that distant hill, whose outline had now vanished, made his argument seem empty even to himself.

An hour after midnight they started. The two remaining ponies were still thirsty and in doubtful condition. One carried Fomin, their food and a little grain; the other, Gwynn and two nearly empty waterskins that hung down from the saddle like the slack udders of an old goat. The speed that Gwynn had estimated was impossible. In five hours they covered only twenty miles.

Then the sun rose, and soon afterwards Fomin’s pony stumbled and laid out upon the desert, relieved and accepting, the head it could no longer raise.

“Shoot him,” said Fomin.

“Nothing to shoot him with.”

“My pistol – isn’t it in your pack or his? Why not?”

“How the hell do I know why not?” Gwynn replied irritably. “I hate the things. I suppose I’d rather give my own life than take someone else’s.”

Mahene unroped a cooking pot. He took out his knife and laid the pot by the horse’s throat.

“Pity to waste it, Mr. Gwynn,” he apologized.

The blood spurted into the pot and over Mahene’s arms.

“Tomorrow I shall wish I had,” Gwynn said, “but I can’t yet.”

The pot was offered to Fomin. He made an effort to drink. It was his logical, material duty to drink, but he could not.

Mahene slowly sipped half a pint, and smacked his lips and grinned.

“No need, John,” said Gwynn. “You didn’t like it, but you’re the only one of us with any sense.”

“Mr. Gwynn, I want to live about twice as much as the rest of you. And that’s the truth,” Mahene answered.

There was a little more water now for the last pony, and its effect was instant. He had accepted an end to weariness, but now he shied away from the blood and from Mahene, and gave trouble in the reloading.

They went on. There was no other hope but a march straight through the heat of the morning. They went on steadily. Mahene’s even pace kept them from falling into the exhausted spurts and sudden halts of the dying caravan.

At midday the character of the desert changed. The salt crystals no longer waited and winked from their flat gray world. There was a scattering of black dust on the surface which gradually thickened. Soon they came to pimples and corrugations, of infinite relief to the eyes, where the wind had piled dust against the roots of vegetation that had lived for a few weeks in spring.

Gwynn scraped with his foot one of these tiny mounds, and found a dead tuft of coarse grass and a sheep dropping. He called to his companions to look. It was plain that they were crossing the route of those shepherds who, once in a generation, had found green growth and wandered by the western side of the hill, whose curious report had brought three men and a staggering pony into this desolation.

They were more cheerful for the sign of humanity. As if they themselves had been present, they chattered wildly of the vanished green and the shallow rain pools, until pain insisted that parched tongues must be kept covered. In their imaginations, as mile after mile they weakened, this journey became a walk to the world’s end, to riches, to an infinite source of proletarian power. Though two of them, at least, knew that whatever they discovered would be only a geological curiosity, worth no more than a picture postcard, they could not admit, in self-protection, that such suffering was only for such an end.

The shade of the outlying rocks promised sanity as well as rest – freedom at last from the overwhelming temptation to lie down and drink. The rocks, the blessed rocks, were a far more compelling objective than the hill itself. That was a mere forbidding cone. There was no trace of the phenomenon of the night. On and on they dragged their feet over the dust until there was reason at last for a man to look where he was going.

The sun was still so high that there was no patch of shade large enough for them all. They drank, and then lay down, each at the foot of his own rock or in the curve of his own gully, clinging to the darkened strip that was soothing as a woman, and no wider. The pony did not look as if he were likely to rise again.

There was so little time. The last brackish quart from the skin had gone to the pony. The men had each a full water bottle left. That allowed them the evening, and only the evening, in which to climb the hill, to look eastwards from the top and to spot the migration track and its well or wells which might, with luck, lead them back alive to the mountains. It was the hope of water rather than the secret of the hill which persuaded them at last to their feet.

The climb was steep but of no difficulty. They traversed the lower slopes and turned onto the northern face. There in the comparative coolness they rested, and breathed deeply of air that seemed to wash their lungs. They allowed themselves a cup of water apiece. It acted on their spirits as if it had been alcohol, and reminded them that for all their weariness they were still fit men. Fomin and Gwynn began to exchange their professional impressions of the hill. It had undoubtedly been formed by some volcanic upheaval in geologically recent times. The lava flow had been slight. There was no sign of any mineral of commercial value except zinc. The ore suggested that it was rich even for Persia.

After climbing some four hundred feet, they were stopped by a low, precipitous ridge which had once been the lip of a crater. Mahene settled himself on a ledge halfway up, and from his shoulders Gwynn reached the top. He looked down into a rough bowl, two hundred yards across. He remained quite still. Detail, every detail, was clear, so what he saw could not be a mirage. And it was credible. A warm spring in such a place was in accordance with the laws of nature. Sulphurous, of course, it would be. Perhaps undrinkable. He fought down his ecstasy lest the resulting disappointment should be unbearable. And all the time he was conscious of Mahene’s grip on his ankle.

“Anything wrong, Mr. Gwynn?”

“No. No. Nothing wrong. There’s water. Or I think I see it.”

He pulled himself up and firmly turned his back on the deceptive paradise. He anchored one hand with sudden strength, and stretched down the other to haul up Fomin and Mahene.

Below them was a shallow crater, craggy, riven, terraced, and resembling an immensely magnified rock garden. On the eastern slope was a rough pool of water, obviously artificial. Little dug channels, choked and disused, led the water across the floor of the crater. Along the ditches and in flat damp patches grew a tangle of cultivated plants that had gone wild. Wheat, corn and some kind of cabbage competed for the soil; their supply of light and water was unbounded.

Mahene rushed for the pool in great dancing strides, and plunged in. Fomin knew as well as Gwynn what to expect. With a show of unconcern, he asked:

“How – how does it taste?”

“Commissar,” shouted Mahene, “it’s a change from your old saddlebags. I wouldn’t say better than that.”

They joined Mahene in the water. Its touch was heaven to their dried skins. Its flavor was no worse than that of a spa water, and its effect was unlikely to be more than inconvenient. With the crater for a base to which, in emergency, they could return, they were free at last of time, and could find the vital homeward well at leisure.

Mahene cut a load of green stuff, and took down the three full water bottles for the pony. While he was away, Gwynn and Fomin searched for the unknown builder of the pool and channels. That he was dead or had long since departed was certain. They found his dwelling, a cool hollow in the crater wall. There was nothing in it but his bed of cornstalks, crude pots of cut lava and some packets of seeds, printed in Russian. Scratched on the wall were Russian characters, like the scrawling of child or cave man.

“Here – lived – Pyotr – the – monk – to – the – glory – of – God,” Fomin translated. “And a list of years beginning at 1920. And the word Glory written up everywhere again and again.”

“He hadn’t even any fire,” Gwynn said. “He must have lived on raw grain and vegetables.”

“Why not?” Fomin asked, with a touch of indignant sympathy for the unknown. “He was a hermit.”

A hermit. He certainly was. To Gwynn a hermit was a historical curiosity. Fomin, however, seemed to find such fanaticism wholly natural and contemporary.

“His choice was wrong,” he said. “But it was truly Russian.”

He looked proudly over the crater, as if it were his duty to annex it for some spiritual union that was not altogether the Union of Soviets.

Mahene returned at sunset with food and the primus stove. He reported that the pony was eating, and that it would certainly recover if they could find an easy route for it up to the water.

They started for that glowing western face which they and the shepherds had seen across the desert. A path, with steps roughly cut in the rock, led upwards out of the crater, then curved to the west and down. It ended abruptly in a much trampled space at the top of a cliff. They knew that they must be directly above the shining light.

Below them the side of the hill fell away in what was rather a rough glacis than a cliff. It was far too steep to climb, but a man could rest against it if he had some slight means of support. Both the man and the support – what was left of them – were visible. At the bottom, lying on a narrow platform of gravel, was a body. At the top, tied round a boulder, was the broken end of a grass rope.

Another path, very narrow and worn smooth by the ascents and descents of a single pair of feet, skirted the edge and then plunged downwards, zigzagging across the normal slope of the hill until it led them back to the cliff’s foot. The monk Pyotr lay with his hands crossed on his breast; he must have been some time a-dying after his fall. He wore the remains of his black frock tied round his waist. It had not rotted. The knots showed that this rag was all he had in life. Where his flesh had been exposed to the sun it had dried; where it was covered by his long, gray hair, it had disappeared. In the wash of the light wind the hair moved back and forth over white bone.

He held a heavy hammer in his hand. The debris upon which he lay was not gravel, but chippings from the rock face, fallen week after week and year after year during his strange, singlehanded quarrying. The bank of debris was two hundred feet long, proving that he had worked on the end of his rope right across the face of the glacis.

Gwynn picked up a handful of the chippings. They were composed of a hard deposit left by water which had seeped over the glacis and dried, or even boiled, before it reached the bottom. This mineral skin the monk had cleaned away from the underlying rock.

Fomin knocked out a specimen of the rock itself.

“Zinc again,” he said. “But what use did he think it was without any possible transport? Why did he want it? Did he think his God would make the railway?”

“He wanted it to make the shining light,” said Gwynn.

“They did not teach chemistry in monasteries.”

“No. They taught patience, Fomin. Patience till death. Patience for the glory of God. Glory he wrote, didn’t he? Oh, it’s quite plain! He saw after dark the luminous patches of rock where sulphide of zinc had been exposed to the sun, and wanted more of it.”

“A natural sulphide of zinc in that purity is impossible,” Fomin answered shortly.

“But there it is, my good colleague. There it is! It is also impossible that one man should clear 30,000 square feet of it with nothing but a grass rope and a hammer. One square foot an hour. Four hours a day. Ten thousand days. That would do it, Fomin, if he came in 1920. You should be proud of your compatriot. A Stakhanovite, eh?”

“But for what? For what, I ask you?”

“To light the desert.”

“For aircraft?”

“For us, commissar,” replied Mahene impatiently. “My Lord, all that work! And how he must have hoped that someone would see it!”

Quarter of a mile to the south was a steep ridge from which they could look, at an angle, onto the face of the rock. Twilight was on them when they reached it. Faint luminous patches were visible where Pyotr had been at work and on raised surfaces where water had never run. Then the night came down and the glacis began to glow with the merciless light it had received during the day.

The pattern of the monk’s quarrying appeared. It was very rough, and only to be distinguished after long watching, for gullies, angles and pinnacles broke the outline. The design was intended to be a solid eight-pointed star. The eighth point was incomplete, barely started. It stood exactly above the dead body of the monk.

In the middle of the star – or so nearly the middle that Pyotr plainly had the eye of a craftsman – was a black spot which seemed to be a hollow, too deep to catch the sun during the day. A black line which was a ledge ran across the star to its center.

They found the bottom of the ledge. That, too, had been worn into a path. It was a vile place, nowhere more than two feet wide, but the going was firm and the way could clearly be seen. The light, when they were in the midst of it, was not so powerful as it had appeared from a distance; the rock was luminous as the bow wave of a summer boat, revealing the shapes of objects without detail.

The black spot was a natural cleft, of which the outer edge had been knocked into a rough circle by Pyotr’s hammer. It was quite shallow. At the back they could see a dim gleam of metal which drew a gasp of anticipation from John Mahene.

An icon of the Virgin and Child stood upon an altar crudely chipped from the surrounding rock. The two Byzantine heads stared at the intruders from a massive frame of gold. The devotion which had inspired that indefatigable monk to rescue it from destruction or theft could be understood, but how he had carried an object of such breadth and weight and value across frontier and mountains, whether hidden in sacks or under his cassock, was beyond conjecture; nor could they guess how he had come to the hill, over the face of which, for his remaining years, he had labored to extend the deep and golden frame of his treasure. As likely as not, Gwynn thought, he had gone up to die, and found, like themselves, a reprieve.

“Worth the journey, Fomin?” he asked.

“I will not let you take it. It stays here,” Fomin answered with quiet and absolute determination.

“I was not thinking of its worth in Bond Street,” said Gwynn gently.

Fomin’s lack of comprehension wasn’t surprising. He served his own kingdom of the spirit. So did they all, he thought, all different kingdoms, the European, the Asiatic and the Negro. They had risked their lives for such utterly distinct reasons, and God alone knew whether one was more valid than another.

Mahene’s upright body was tense with reverence. He was not a man to kneel. When he felt Gwynn’s eyes upon him, he found it necessary to speak.

“We shan’t get rich this time, Mr. Gwynn,” he said.

He did not sound disappointed, merely regretful that it was too much for any human being to expect profit as well as success.

“Not this time, John,” Gwynn answered. “This time we have come with our gifts.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1952 by the Estate of Geoffrey Household

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

978-1-5040-1048-1

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

The Cook-Runner

The Picket Lines of Marton Hevessy

The Hut

Debt of Honor

Low Water

Heart in the Mouth

The Pejemuller

First Blood

Culture

Woman in Love

Brandy for the Parson

Railroad Harvest

Three Kings

Copyright