Graham Greene (11 page)

I followed at his heels as we went quickly ever down toward the sea. When at last the incline of the cutting ceased, and we came upon a level way, I could perceive four lines of rails running up to platforms as for the terminus of a station; and beyond them the narrow mouth of a tunnel which carried but two tracks, and seemed to be nothing else than a tube of steel thrust into the mud which here covers the chalk of the Channel bed. All the lines converged to the tunnel's mouth, but beyond was utter darkness. This was our journey's end, then.

God knows that even then I dare not ask myself the meaning of the things I saw. When, without presage, there is revealed to us, as in the twinkling of an eye, the truth of some mystery which appeals alike to the more terrible phase of our imagination and to our fear, we are slow to reckon with that truth or to admit it. I set it down that I knew from the first instant of inspection the whole meaning of that which the French contemplated against my country—there, seven miles from Calais upon the Paris road. But to claim that I realised the moment of it, or would embrace the knowledge in my innermost mind,
would be to boast a prescience I have no title to. Excited if you will, driven to a varicosity which defies any measure, telling myself that I should never live again such an hour as this, I followed the man to the tunnel's mouth; I watched him kindle a flare at another a workman held; I heard his odd exclamations, that racking laugh which no other in all the world ever laughed so ill. If my life had been the stake, I must go on. Curiosity drove me now as with a lash. I neither reasoned nor apologised, for a voice within me said, You shall see.

Jeffery raised the flare and stood an instant at the very mouth of the tunnel. The waving, ugly light displayed a face hard-set as in some exciting memory. Again he looked at me as he had looked when I met him on the road to Paris.

“Sonny, ever been in a tunnel before?”

“Once, a Metropolitan tunnel.”

“Nasty, eh?”

“Well, it wasn't pleasant.”

“Ah, but you had the dry land above you there. You were never under the sea, I suppose?”

“Not farther than any decent swimmer goes.”

“So! We'll take you deeper down than that. Come on, my boy. It does me good to hear you.”

He entered the tunnel upon this and began to walk very quickly, while I, when we had left the last of the daylight behind us, stumbled after him with all a newcomer's ungainliness. Such a glare as his torch cast showed me the polished rails of steel, the circular roof above us already blackened by the smoke of engines; but the track I scarcely saw, and tripped often to his amusement.

“Miss your eyes, eh, Captain? Well, you've got to pay your footing. Listen to the music—it's a train going home to tea. You'd better step in here, my lad—we can't afford to waste your precious life like that. Do you know you're standing in what
ought to be the four-foot-six, but isn't? Come out of it, come out of it.”

He pulled me from the track to a manhole in the wall, and crouching there together we watched the engine go clattering by, all the roof of the tunnel incarnadined with the glowing iridescence of the crimson light, the very faces of the workmen standing out white and clear in the glow which the torch cast upward. But the tunnel seemed shaken to its very marrow, and the quivering earth, which held the steel, appeared to live while the trucks rolled over it. Again, as often before, I realised the majesty of the engineer's life; nevertheless, the greater question rang unceasingly in my ears, Why had I been seduced to this place? What did the French Government want with a tunnel beneath the sea seven miles from Calais harbour? God is my witness that I did not dare to answer myself—did not dare until many hours, nay, days were lived and I could doubt the truth no longer.

We had come by this time a mile at the least, as I judged it, from the tunnel's mouth, and must be very near to the sea, if not actually beneath it. By here and there upon our way we passed a soldier patrolling, lantern in hand, a section of the tunnel; and once, when we had gone on again a quarter of a mile, we found a great bricked shaft, at the foot of which men were hauling sleepers and steel rails by the light of a coal fire and many flares set about it. The picture was rude and wild; the faces of the men shaped pale and hard-set wherever the light fell upon them; the environing darkness, so complete, so unbroken, suggested the mouth of some vast, unfathomable pit; whereunto all this burden of steel and wood was cast; wherefrom these shadowy figures had emerged to claim a due of the outer world. But the illusion was broken when Jeffery halted to exchange rapid words with the men and to give them their directions. Again I observed the quick obedience, the respect he
commanded. Of all that unnumbered army of workers I had seen he, indisputably, was General. And he knew his power.

“Clever chaps, these Frenchies,” he said, as he went on again. “Direct them plainly and they'll get there, though they've a devil of a lot to say about it on the road. That shaft was an idea of mine, which I'm proud of. We'll ventilate there by-and-by; meanwhile the Belgian barges can beach their rails and send them down to us. I save two days' labour in three, and that's lucky in a job like this. Are you beginning to wonder where the coal is?”

I answered him by a question.

“Does the shaft come out on the beach, then?”

“Growing curious, eh? Well, perhaps, we'll go up by it and see as we go back. Meanwhile, you and I must have a bit of a talk for the sake of auld lang syne. Sit down, siree, sit down. The plank's not exactly Waldorf-Astoria, but it's next door to it, seeing you're in a tunnel.”

We were then, I suppose, the third of a mile from the shaft he had spoken of. I knew that we were deep down below the bed of the Channel; and there was in the knowledge a sense of awe and mystery, and something beyond awe and mystery—it may be something akin to terror—which I realised then for the first time, but have lived through, waking and sleeping, many a day since that terrible hour. I was down below the sea in a tunnel that struck toward my own country. Above me were the rippling waves, the rolling ships, the flashing lights of the busiest waterway in the world. What lay beyond in the darkness, where the last tubes of this tremendous high-road were to be seen, I knew no more than the dead. The grandeur of it, the mystery of it muted my tongue, fascinated me beyond all clear thought. The road lay to England, to my home; it could not point otherwise. And I, alone of Englishmen, had come to knowledge of the mystery.

Jeffery, I say, set his flare in a crevice of the track and made a rude seat of a couple of boards and a bench which here stood in the six-foot way. Work had been progressing at this place before the siren was blown, I imagined, and the tools of the men—jacks, drills, heavy hammers—lay about as a testimony to French confusion. My guide pointed to them with an ironical finger, and, kicking a hammer from the track, made another bench similar to his own for me.

“Look,” he said, “that's your Frenchman's love of order. If a ticket were needed for the Day of Judgment, he'd go aloft without it. Sit down, Hilliard, and watch me drink a sup of whisky.”

He seated himself on the bench and took a long pull from an old black flask, which he passed to me when he had done with it. My refusal to drink seemed to annoy him. It was an excuse the less for his own habit.

“Well,” he snapped, “you know best. But you'll get little drink where you're going to. Here's luck on the road.”

I rested my arms on my knees and looked him as full in the face as the guttering light permitted me.

“What do you mean by that, Jeffery?”

He laughed to himself, a soft, purring laugh that meant all the mischief he could command.

“Hark!” he said, raising his hand for silence; “do you hear the old girl throbbing? That's my shield—my own. There's some in Europe who would pay a penny or two if I'd make ‘em another like it. But I'll wait till this job's through. Oh! sonny, wouldn't you?”

I did not answer him, but listened to the pulsing machine which, at some great distance from us, as I knew it must be, thrust its steel tongue into the soft chalk of the Channel's bed, and cast tons of the earth behind it, as though to make a burrow for a mighty, human animal which thus would cheat the seas. The tube of steel in which we had walked quivered at every
thrust of the engine. Nevertheless, I knew that the work was far away; for I could hear no voices, could not even see the twinkling lamps of those who gave life to the tongue and controlled it. The very sense of distance appalled and fascinated in an appeal to the imagination surpassing any I had known.

“Jeffery,” I said, asking him a plain question for the first time, “why did you bring me here?”

He answered me as plainly, “To still your d—d tongue for ever.”

The words (and never a man heard seven words which meant more) were spoken in that half-mocking, half-serious key which characterised the man. To this hour I can see him squatting there upon the wooden bench, his sallow face made sardonic in the aureole of dirty light, his thin, nervous fingers interlaced, his deep-set eyes avoiding mine, but seeking, nevertheless, to watch me. And he had trapped me! My God! I tremble now when the pen recalls that hour! He had trapped me, brought me to that place because he believed that I had his secret, the secret which France had kept so well from all the world.

Fool! thrice fool I was to follow him. As one blind I had stumbled on to the mouth of the abyss; and now I could see the depths, could, in imagination, reel back from them appalled. He had trapped me!

MAX PEMBERTON

can never look upon the black cotton or lisle-thread gloves worn by a servant-maid without experiencing a twinge of horror.

WILLIAM LE QUEUX

t was after midnight when we drove out. Conditions being favourable, it was expected that the drive over the ice to a point well along the Finnish coast—a distance of some forty miles—should take about three hours. The sleigh was of the type known as
drovny,
broad and low and filled with hay, mostly used for farm haulage. Nestling comfortably at full length under the hay I thought of long night drives in the interior in days gone by, when someone used to ride ahead on horseback with a torch to frighten away the wolves.

In a moment we were flying at breakneck speed over the ice, which was windswept after recent storms. The half-inch of frozen snow on the surface just sufficed to give grip to the horse's hoofs. Twice, bumping into snow ridges, we capsized completely. When we got going again the runners sang like a sawmill. The driver noticed this too, and was alive to the danger of being heard from shore; but his sturdy pony, exhilarated by the frosty air, was hard to restrain.

We were rapidly approaching the famous island fortress of Kronstadt. Searchlights played from time to time across the belt of ice separating the islands from the shore, to detect the smugglers who frequently used this route as we were now doing. The passage through the narrow belt was the critical point in our journey. Once past Kronstadt we should be in Finnish waters and safe.

To avoid danger from the searchlights the Finn drove within a mile of the mainland, the runners of the sleigh still hissing and singing like saws. As we entered the narrows a beam of light
swept the horizon from the fortress, catching us momentarily in its track. But we were near enough to the shore to merge with its black outline.

Too
near, perhaps? The dark line of the woods seemed but a stone's throw away. You could almost see the individual trees. Hell, what a noise our sleigh-runners made!

“Can't you keep the horse back a bit, man?”

“No, this is the spot we've
got
to drive past quickly.”

We were crossing the line of Lissy Nos, a jutting point on the coast marking the narrowest part of the strait. Again the beam of light shot out, and the wooden pier of Lissy Nos was lit up by the flash, receding once more into darkness as we regained the open sea.