The Saint in Europe (11 page)

He drove her on relentlessly. Hills rose and fell away. Scattered cottages, tilled fields, pastures, woods, blurred by in a crawling panorama. They marched through a deep forнest of mighty trees where woodcutters were working, along a road lined with stacks of brown logs. The sweet-smelling air held the music of whining saws and the clunk and ring of axes; but it meant nothing to her but an interval of blessed relief from the heat of the sun. Even then, the shadowy vastness of it was a little terrifying. She had never been so close to the rich mightiness of the earth: to her, “country” had only been something rather cute and amusнing, a drawing-room picture brought into three dimensions, to be visited as a stunt in the company of sleek automobiles whose purring mechanism drowned the silences with their reassurance of civilized man’s conquest of nature. Without that comfort she was like a child left in the dark. On the rare occasions when a car passed them she watched it yearningly, and then licked the dust from her lips and felt lonelier when it had gone. Once a cart kept them company for a quarter of an hour, while Simon and the driver exchanged shouted witticisms.

Presently their path led beside a small river, with a tall ledge of rock rising on their left. The going was worse there, strewn with loose stones which seemed to slip backwards with her as fast as she went forward. The crunch of them under her plodding footsteps resolved itself into a maddening rhythm of hate. “Beast-bully-swine-beast-bully -swine!” they drummed out, bruising her feet at every step. Then she slipped on one. There was a tearing sound, and she stopped and leaned against the rocky wall. .

“My heel’s come off.”

“What’s holding your toes on?” asked the Saint interнestedly.

Suddenly all her pent-up bitterness boiled over, so that for a moment she forgot her weariness. Her eyes blazed, and his tanned features swam in her vision. Before she knew what she was doing she had smacked his face.

When her sight cleared again he had not moved.

“Belinda,” he said quietly, “there’s another lesson you obviously haven’t learned. When a girl strikes a man she’s trading on a false idea of chivalry. If you do that again I shall put you across my knee.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she panted; but for the first time in her life she was afraid.

He made no attempt to argue with her. Lowering his pack, he opened it and took out a pair of plain leather sandals.

“I thought something like that would happen. These are your size, and you’ll find them much more comfortable.”

He waited while she took off her shoes and threw them into the river, where they floated forlornly like derelict emblems of respectability. Looking down at her feet, she felt the incongruity of her attire and jerked off the jaunty little hat. Shortly afterwards she lost patience with carrying it and let it fall by the wayside-another relic of herself to be marked up in the score of hatred which was etched on her soul in burning acid.

Evening found their path widening out into a bowl of open land, flat and stony, where the river diverged into a network of rambling channels winding and intersecting across an area of hard barren ground broken by a few stunted trees and clumps of patched grass. Simon pointed to a house that was visible on a slight rise in the midst of it.

“That’s an inn,” he said, “and there will be beer.”

She saw it as a prospect of rest, a thousand leagues distant. She was so tired that each individual step called for a separate effort, and she had to keep her eyes fixed on the objective to force herself to complete the distance. The guest-room inside was unlighted and gloomy: she expected it was filthy as well, but she was past caring. She sank on to a wooden bench, put her elbows on the stained bare table, and buried her face in her hands.

By that time there was a gnawing void of hunger below her ribs; and when the serving-girl came she ordered chocoнlate. Simon called for beer, with an extra tankard for the gamekeeper who sat puffing his pipe in the far corner.

The gamekeeper was a big slow-spoken man with a lined weatherbeaten face like a walnut. He wore the costume of the country-small green felt hat with a brush at the back, leather shorts hung on embroidered leather suspenders, striped woolen gaiters which left his ankles bare. Simon steered him on to the subject of camping. The gamekeeper said it was forbidden in the woods on the east, through which a footpath would take them across the frontier into Austria. It was a great pity, said the gamekeeper, because he knew what would have been an ideal spot only a few hundred meters away; and he winked prodigiously, and roared with laughter. Simon bought him another tankard of beer, and they brought the serving-girl into the conversaнtion. The low-ceilinged room rang with the ebb and flow of their carefree voices.

Belinda drank her hot syrupy chocolate, and thought: “He’s vulgar, he’s common, he only wants to humiliate me. How could he have anything to talk about with people like that? He can come in here and flirt with a little servant girl like a tough in a saloon. That man must despise him. It’s horrible! Oh, my God, why didn’t I know what he was like before?” She couldn’t understand a word, and nobody paid any attention to her. She had never been ignored before. “They’re all cheap, all of them,” she thought. “They don’t talk to me because they know I belong to a different class.” She raised her chin and tried to express this superiority in her attitude; but it was cold comfort. When Simon returned to her it was almost a relief.

“I’d like to have something to eat and go straight to bed,” she said.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“You can have some food as soon as we’re settled in; but we aren’t settling in here.”

“I tell you I can’t walk another yard,” she said haggardly. “Can’t you see I’m half dead?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk another three hundred yards or so.”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

He gestured with his tankard.

“We’re sleeping in the woods.”

She stared at him incredulously.

“I don’t understand you.”

“In the woods,” explained the Saint. “1m wald. Dans les bois. Unter den Linden”

“You must be crazy.”

“Not at all. The partridges do it, and suffer no grievous harm. I’ve done it often enough myself, and very rarely died of it. You don’t seem to understand the situation. Ambling along as we are, it’ll take us about a week to get to Innsbruck. At the moment, we are the proud possessors of some thirty-five marks. You pay four marks for a bed in a Gastнhaus; and we’ve still got to eat.”

She realized that the man in the corner was watching her curiously. It came to her that at all costs her dignity must leave that room untouched. The inexorable mathematics of Simon’s argument scarcely made any impression on her; she was in the grip of circumstances that were crushing her till she could have screamed, but she could not make a scene and bring herself down to the level she had just despised.

She stood up and went out without speaking, Simon folнlowing her. It had grown darker; and the twitter and chirp and rustle of night creatures was all around them as they entered the wood. Simon took the lead, humming. The spot the gamekeeper had described was near a tributary of the river they had recently quitted, a grassy hollow away from the footpath and a few feet above the stream, Simon’s expert eye appraised it and found no fault. He lowered his pack to the ground and began to unfasten it.

“Will you get some water while I make the fire?” he said.

He put the billycan down beside her and went off to gather dry logs. In a very short time he had kindled a cheerнful blaze; and she huddled gratefully up to it, for it had turned colder after the sun went down. Simon took bread, eggs, and butter from his rucksack, and picked up the billy. It was empty.

“I asked you to get some water,” he said.

She raised her sullen eyes to him over the fire.

“I’m not a servant,” she said.

“Neither am I,” said the Saint quietly. “You’ll do your share or go hungry-whichever you prefer.”

The girl struggled to her feet.

“Oh, I could kill you!” she cried passionately, and went groping down to the stream.

3

Belinda fell asleep at first out of pure exhaustion; but it was still dark when she woke up again. The fire had died down to a cone of red embers, and there was a chill in the air that made her shiver. She pulled the spare width of her groundsheet over her, as Simon had shown her how to do if it began to rain; but it was too thin to give any warmth. Even a summer night turns cool out of doors towards two and three o’clock: unsuspected little breezes stir the air and strike through the thickest blankets. The body’s warmth, unguarded by the moderating vigilance of walls and ceilнings, drifts away like smoke in the limitless vastness of space.

The grass, which had looked so flat and felt so soft, develнoped innumerable bumps and hardnesses which bruised her bones. A tenuous dampness rose from it and when she moved her head on the unsympathetic pillow of her sandals rolled up in a towel it felt wet and cold. The star-sprinkled sky, lofting billions of empty miles over her head, panicked her with its aloofness from her own microscopic insignifiнcance. Oh, blessed civilization and the flattering barricades of pigmy architecture, which has made us afraid of the supernal majesty of our first home! … The woods around her were full of moving shadows and the whisper of tiny scuttering feet, the flutter of a miniature cosmos hunting and fighting and dying and marching on. The throbbing wings of an owl passing overhead made her heart leap into her mouth …

She lay there aching and fearful, waiting and praying for the sky to pale with the dawn, hating and yet glad of the company of the man who slept peacefully on the other side of the fire. She dozed and woke again, stiff and cold and miserable. Untold ages passed before the roof of the world lightened; other countless aeons went by before the first beams of the sun gilded the topmost leaves of the trees. When the rays reached her they might give her a little warmth, and she would be able to sleep again. A flock of birds whirred cheeping across the faded stars. The golden radiance on the tree-tops crept down with maddening slowнness …

When her eyes opened again it was broad daylight. The fire had been coaxed to life again. It crackled and hissed cheerily, while Simon Templar bent over it on one knee and juggled with the billy and a sizzling frying-pan
“Eight o’clock and a lovely morning, Belinda,” he said.

The fragrance of boiling coffee came to her nostrils, and she felt half sick with hunger and sleeplessness. She pulled herself up, instinctively searching for comb and mirror; and what she saw in the glass horrified her.

“I must get a wash,” she said.

He passed her a cake of soap.

“The bath’s right on the doorstep, and breakfast will be ready in five minutes.”

The cold water nipped her face and hands, but it freshнened her. Afterwards she dealt ravenously with scrambled eggs and two slices of the coarse black bread, and smoked a cigarette with her coffee. When it was done, the Saint climbed to his feet and stretched himself.

“I’ll make the beds,” he said. “It’s your turn to wash up.”

She looked resentfully at the pan, slimy with the conнgealed yellowness of egg, and shuddered.

“How do you expect me to do that?” she asked dangerнously.

“It’s easy enough. I’ll show you.”

He led the way down the bank to the edge of the stream. He scooped a handful of earth into the pan, plucked up a tuft of grass by the roots, and held the two things out to her.

“Scrub the earth around with the grass, and repeat until clean, Rinse and dry.”

All her hatred and disgust was seething up again, but she tried to keep her balance. To lose her temper was the worst way to go about undermining his insolent assurance.

“There are limits,” she said, as evenly as she could, “and I think you’ve reached them.”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you that dishes have to be washed?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that a man could ask me to put my hands into a foul mess like that. But perhaps I still thought you might have some of the more elementary inнstincts of a gentleman. It was rather an absurd mistake to make, wasn’t it?”

“Very,” said the Saint carefully. “Especially after last night. As I explained to you-camp chores are split two ways. Can you make a fire?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“Then it’s safe to assume you can’t. Can you cook?”

“Unfortunately I wasn’t brought up in a kitchen.”

“In that case you can only make yourself useful by fetchнing water and washing up. If you like eating scrambled eggs, you can help by cleaning up after them. If you don’t like that, you can live on bread and water, which involves no washing. The diet is dull, but you won’t starve on it. Let’s have it quite clear. You chose to travel this way-“

“I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.”

“You might have regretted being locked up in a German prison still more. I’m not running a conducted tour with a team of cooks and bottle-washers trailing behind. This is a simple matter of the fair division of labor. There are six more days of it coming, and you may as well try to get through them decently.”

“What do you think I am?” she flared. “A working slut like that girl at the inn?”

His eyes met hers steadily.

“I think you’re an idle loafer who ought to learn a little about honest work. I think you’ve lain so soft all your life that you need some hardship and crude discomfort to catch your spine before it dissolves altogether. Both those things are going to happen to you before we get to Innsbruck. You’ve ceased to be ornamental; so now you’re going to turn into a useful working squaw-and like it!”

“Am I?” she said; and then her open hand struck him across the face.

It was done before she knew what she was doing, an instant after she had knocked the pan spinning out of his light grasp into mid-stream, her thin and ragged self-control bursting like tissue before the intolerable flame of her resentment. The torrent of words came afterwards: she saw his smile quietly, and lashed out in sudden fear at the good-humored white flash of his teeth, but her clenched fist met empty air.