Be Shot For Six Pence (26 page)

On the third night my fever left me, and some time after that I awoke to full consciousness of my surroundings.

I was lying on a pallet bed, swathed in a cocoon of blankets. The floor under me was packed earth, and the wall, a few inches from my left side, was brick.

The darkness was almost complete, but using my fingertips I made out, more or less, that I was lying under the actual staging which supported two or three huge wine barrels. The left side and foot of my bedroom were the rough cellar wall, the right hand side was the wooden staging. I felt backwards behind my head, and in doing so touched a pitcher which held, as I found when I tasted it, a weak mixture of wine and water. I gulped down a mouthful and went to sleep again.

Next time I woke there were several lights showing, and one of the barrels was being shifted. The steel spectacles of Radk gleamed round at me, and his voice from the darkness said: “Lie still, we are moving you to more comfortable quarters.”

Hands seized both ends of my pallet bed, and it was lifted.

“I expect I can walk,” I said.

“I doubt it,” said Radk. “In any event it will be quicker to carry you.”

It wasn’t a private suite at the Dorchester, but it was a nice, clean little room in the attic, and there, that evening, Radk came to talk to me.

“We have been able to bring you out,” he said, “because the search has passed on. The police have been here twice in the last five days. Not to ransack us, you understand, but on routine searches. The strength of the ripples, out here on the circumference, suggest that you must have dropped quite a large stone into the centre of the pool,” and he looked at me owlishly through his glasses.

“Five days,” I said. “How long have I been here altogether?”

“Today is the seventh day.”

“How soon can I move?”

“It was only, I think, the fever of exhaustion. You should recover now quite quickly. If you get about and use your legs a little tomorrow and more the following day, you should be strong enough to make the frontier on the third day. It is only five miles. But we must see how you go. Have you reason for haste?”

“I was thinking of you,” I said, lamely. “I don’t want to get you into trouble now—”

But I lied. It was the hellish country that I was in a fret to be clear of.

“As I was about to say, there should be no difficulty in reaching the frontier. Whether you could cross it at this moment.” He shook his head.

“Is it so difficult?”

“Normally of course not. But now! I forget that you have been out of the world for so long.”

He went away, and came back with a handful of newspapers.

There was a good deal in them that I found interesting. The first item which caught my eye was an account of the funeral of Colonel Allesandro Dru. It appeared that he had died in a motor accident. Swerving to avoid a child his car had left the road and struck a telegraph post. Szormeny had attended the funeral in person.

Promotion for Major Becker.

But this was small beer. It was the happenings on the political front page that took the eye.

At first, the references were guarded. Labour unrest had occurred in isolated centres due to dissatisfaction over differentials. Heavy Industry and Transportation were chiefly affected. The police had made a number of arrests of agitators and the situation was in hand.

Like hell it was in hand! The headlines grew thicker as the storm gathered.

Two days later the word “General Strike” was first mentioned and prominence was given to a pronouncement by Szormeny.

“I shall not disguise from you,” he said in black type, “that the situation is grave. It is by no means desperate, and, if all do their duty, this latest attempt to throttle our economy and disrupt our regime will fail, as earlier attempts have failed. I myself have taken personal charge, during the crisis, of the essential supplies. Coal, electricity and water undertakings. And of all goods and passenger transport. There is not the least cause for alarm. Hoarding will be punished. My message to you all is – defeat this attempt by continuing to live your normal lives.”

There was a heavy, competent, common-sense ring about this announcement which I found disquieting. Could a strike ever make headway against a state-in-arms?

However, I could not help noticing that whilst urging his compatriots not to take any alarmist precautions, David Szormeny was not practising all that he preached. A very small item caught my eye. It said: “Madame Szormeny, with her two children, has moved from her home in the Eastern Provinces to be near her husband, who is at his post of action in the west. In times like the present, she told our representative, a wife’s place is near her husband.”

Radk came in at this moment, and I said, “How much have the papers got?”

“About half the truth,” he said. “It started slowly, but yesterday, at Kaposvar, men were ordered to take out certain trains and refused. The leaders were shot. That stiffened the resistance.”

“Can it succeed?”

“Of course it cannot succeed.” He sounded cross. “There is a division of infantry in Kaposvar already. If necessary they will add tanks, guns, aeroplanes. How can it succeed?”

“Perhaps it has succeeded already.”

Radk looked at me sharply, as if he suspected a good deal more meaning than I had intended.

“The mere fact of a strike,” I explained. “The fact that the authorities have not been able to conceal it from their own people and from Western observers. I should call that a victory.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Radk. “Certainly.” He added, “A friend of yours reached Pecs yesterday.”

“A friend? Do you mean Lady?”

“The same. He has his courage, that one.”

Of a sudden I felt a fever to be gone.

“The frontier was never more difficult,” said Radk gloomily. “You will need your legs and your arms, and your wits. You should sleep now.”

No doubt I needed sleep. But it was long before I attained it. My mind was in turmoil.

Next day the papers were ominously quiet, but Radk, who seemed well informed, told me that the centre of resistance had moved south to Pecs. I spent the day eating and drinking and doing Mullers exercises on the attic floor to try and get some strength back into my legs and arms.

The next day Radk had some reassuring news for me. “The watch on this frontier has slackened,” he said. “One of our men got through last night. I think the truth is that the people they wanted to keep out are all inside Hungary by now. Attention has shifted south with them. You could try your luck tonight, if you wished.”

For an hour that evening he instructed me in the ways of the ‘passeur’.

“You cannot go directly into Austria,” he said. “The country is altogether too flat, and too open. And since it is the obvious way, it is closely guarded. But I will take you on the back of my motor-cycle. Here, you see, on this map. We pass between Pecica and Nadlac and I drop you about – there.”

After that he made me memorise the route, until I came to a place called, in Hungarian, the Valley of Twists and Turns.

“It is a strange place,” he said. “Twisting sharply, as its name implies, and very steep, like the course of some ancient river. Only there is no water at the bottom. Simply fine white sand. You will know it at once when you see it. Beyond is broken ground, with good cover, rising steeply. The actual frontier line is a mile on, and almost unmarked. The guards are all on the valley, but it is a very difficult place to watch. That is why we choose it for crossings.”

“The Yugoslav frontier?”

“Yes. You will be touching the extreme north-eastern tip of Yugoslavia. It is quite deserted. There is a cabin, which you will reach after an hour’s further climb—”

“It also is deserted,” I said.

“So. You knew Thugutt?”

“I found him,” I said. “And his wife and child.”

That was the last talk I can remember with Radk. He took me, by back ways, that evening after dark, to the place he had indicated on the map. He was a brave, cheerful little man, who looked more like a family grocer than a smuggler or a conspirator. I believe he was caught out and shot soon afterwards.

There was a quarter moon, and the night was clear and still, a fact which both helped and hindered. The first part of the journey I took easily, using a little compass Radk have given me. And counting my paces as a rough check on distance.

By midnight I was comfortably settled in a thicket of broom overlooking the Valley of Twists and Turns. It was an eerie place. The moonlight picked out the thread of white sand at the valley bottom, so that it was hard to realise that it was not a river.

The night wind had got up and was moving the leaves and bushes and walking amongst the dried grasses. I gave myself a full hour, and I neither heard nor saw any sign of a human being.

I found this more than a little disturbing. The shining silver ribbon ahead of me was the actual frontier; not the geographical line, but the one on which authority had put its veto and set its watch. And I have never yet met a frontier guard who could hold himself still for an hour. My plans were upset.

I had foreseen myself locating the post on either side of me, timing the movements of the watchers and slipping between them. But there was an unexplained gap. Something which I could not understand and at once suspected.

After tormenting myself with possibilities for a further ten minutes, I moved forward again. The lie of the rocks was forcing me into a used track. I felt like a mouse, treading the first mazes of some elaborate mechanical trap.

From rock to rock, from shadow to shadow. With painful slowness I reached the bottom of the ravine. Sooner or later, now, I must come out into the open. As I gathered myself for the dash I noticed, on the track beside me, and more clearly on the sand ahead of me, a confused trail of footsteps.

A number of other people, perhaps five or six of them, had passed that way, and recently.

If it was a patrol it was a very odd one, for at least one of the shoe-prints had been made by a woman.

Before I had done thinking about it I was across, and going fast up the other side of the valley. The gates of the fortress had been raised, for some purpose that I could hardly define, and it was up to me to squeeze through before they came down again.

Only when my legs started to remind me that I was a convalescent did I drop into shelter.

Not a shout, not a shot. Nothing but my own heaving lungs and pumping heart, and, as these quieted, the ordinary noises of the night.

After a short rest I went on, regulating my pace to conserve my strength. It took me more than the hour that Radk had predicted to reach Thugutt’s homestead. The plateau looked creepy enough in the moonlight, but so far as I was concerned it held only kindly ghosts.

Authority had sealed the doors and windows of the cabin, but the grave at the edge of the tree was, so far as I could tell, undisturbed.

More than once, in the next two hours, I had a feeling that there were people moving, at a distance from me, but going in my direction. The wind had dropped, and the night was still; but listen as I would I could never be quite certain. Hearing plays odd tricks up in the hills. Once I thought I heard the sharp clink of iron on stone and could hardly tell whether it came from behind me or in front.

I felt no fears of the railway tunnel. It was the easiest part of the journey.

As I came out at the other side and plunged down the hill, dawn was coming up. It was not, as I had seen it come before, a red line in the east, for light clouds lay across the sky, and there was a heavy mist in all the hollows, but the birds weren’t fooled. Like me, they knew it was going to be a lovely day.

I had forgotten that such a thing as fatigue existed; and I might have broken my leg half a dozen times as I cascaded down that slope, with the wind in my face, the birds singing like glory and the light growing every minute.

By my watch it was six o’clock when I reached the track, and ten more minutes brought me to the walls of Obersteinbruck. The main gate was wide open, but there was no sound of anyone stirring. All asleep, or all gone?

I pushed up the cobbled ramp into the courtyard.

Standing at the front doorway, his hands in the pockets of his old service greatcoat, was Major Piper.

When he saw me the Major blinked twice, which I took to be a sign of grave emotion.

“Glad to see you,” he said. “I had some news three days ago that suggested you might be back with us soon.”

“Where’s Lady?”

“We last heard of him at Pecs. He had a good day on Tuesday. The men derailed two engines across the track, and no traffic got in or out. It can’t last, of course.”

I remember feeling surprised. I suppose it had been at the back of my mind that it was Lady and his party who had passed ahead of me during the night.

“Will he ever get out?”

“It’s a difficult question to answer. To my mind a strike’s an easier thing to start than it is to stop. As long as there’s any life in it Lady won’t run away. That’s my guess. The trouble is Gheorge and Lisa insisted on going with him.”

“And the General?”

“He’s returned to The Hague. He’s in charge of the section now. I expect the routine work’s piled up a bit whilst they’ve been away. That’s the trouble with an office. Things go on piling up.”

The question had to be asked some time.

“What about Trüe?”

“Trüe?” said the Major. He seemed to be speaking of someone in the remote past. “Oh, Miss Kethely. Yes. I fancy they cleaned up before they left.”

His eye wandered towards the greenwood that carpeted the slope behind the castle; and I knew then that in some hidden glade the busy ants and the wood-lice were making their last bargains with her beautiful, often-sold body.

“I believe they had to put the dogs down. They got out of hand after she had gone. They were very attached to her, you know.”

“They weren’t the only ones,” I said.

The Major seemed disinclined to dwell on the subject.

“I suppose you had quite an easy passage last night,” he said.