The Sword of Fate (2 page)

It was just as I put out my hand to touch her dark hair that a slight sound behind me made me turn my head. For a moment I remained utterly still; it was as though I had suddenly been gripped by a painless but acute paralysis. My muscles were numbed by the same horror and fear that one might experience on bending to smell a bunch of sweet-scented flowers and suddenly seeing coiled among their leaves a deadly snake, within a few inches of one’s eyes and just about to strike.

Von Hentzen was standing framed in the arched doorway at the top of the stone steps and a big German Service automatic was gripped firmly in his hand.

He was now wearing a
feldgrau
Brigadier’s uniform. It hardly showed against the grey stone walls, but his heavy-jowled face and high-domed head stood out white and livid.

Utterly unexpected and ill-timed for us as his sudden appearance was, it was not that which filled me with such indescribable dread. It was the fact that he seemed entirely oblivious of my presence. He was staring straight past my head at the sleeping girl. His gun was pointed not at me but at
her
, and from every line of his powerful bulky form there radiated cold, horrible purpose.

Next second the pistol spurted flame; the whole cellar seemed to rock with the deafening thunder of its repeated explosions. Before I could draw my gun or spring up and charge the stairs, the bullets thudded into the pile of rugs where Daphnis lay sleeping.

She half sat up, her mouth open, her eyes staring. Her hands fluttered helplessly.

But it is useless now to dwell upon that terrible moment. If I am to tell the story of my great love and of those fateful days in Egypt and Greece, I must begin at the beginning.

.     .     .     .     .

When the war broke I was at Splitz on the Dalmatian coast. All through the long hot August days I had enjoyed the bathing among the holiday crowd mainly composed of foreigners. For over two years past I had avoided English people of my own class for very excellent reasons.

During those years there had been so many war scares that by the time the real crisis came one’s apprehensions had been blunted. It seemed almost certain that the French would urge us to give way, as they did at Munich, or that Hitler’s bluff would be called at last and that he would climb down. Of course, there had been quite an exodus of the panicky ones during that last fateful week, but, to most of us, even on the Sunday morning when we learned that the time limit for the ultimatum was up and that Britain was once again at war with Germany, the whole thing seemed unreal.

Those who remained, mostly Central Europeans, gathered to drink their usual
Vermouth-Cassis
or
Amer-Picon
in the smart French bars that morning and it was only in the afternoon that they began to pack for a hurried return to their own countries lest these too should be drawn into a swift spreading of the conflagration.

Léonie lunched with me in my private suite at the hotel. She was a blonde and bewitching Dane, tall, blue-eyed, slender, and one of the most graceful swimmers that I have ever known. The strong sunshine of the Adriatic had bronzed her fair skin until she now looked like a golden goddess as, with easy strokes, she sped or twisted through the water. Naturally, Léonie assumed that inoffensive little Denmark was beyond all danger of being involved in the war, so she had decided to stay on, but, seeing that I was only twenty-six, she took it for granted that I should be going home to volunteer at once and I did not attempt to disillusion her. She had made my stay at Splitz a very happy one, so our farewells after luncheon were long and tender.

Léonie had been a delightful companion for those idle summer
days, but when, for the last time, the doors of my suite closed behind her, she left nothing in my heart or in my rooms but a friendly memory and a lingering breath of intriguing perfume. As I felt sure the feeling, or rather lack of depth in it, was mutual, I had nothing to reproach myself with, and, going back into the bedroom, I lay down again to face the bleak uninviting future.

Yet, was it bleak and uninviting? For most people, definitely yes. The world had gone mad again and it might be years before it recovered. In the meantime, the lives of countless thousands of men and women would be prematurely ended in an abrupt and ghastly manner, while countless millions more would suffer every kind of hardship and privation quite unnecessarily and without any gain to show for it afterwards.

Even as I lay there, the Nazis might be preparing their air armada for its first ‘devastating attack on London. At Munich Hitler had threatened Chamberlain that he would send over a hundred bombers an hour for twenty-four hours in succession. By morning two-thirds of the British capital might be in ashes, with half a million people slain or maimed. That was the way that most of us visualised large-scale air raids before they actually happened.

In any case, for the great majority, the war would mean the breaking-up of homes, the halting of careers, the ruin of businesses and the sacrifice of all personal ambitions. But what had I to lose?

It was over two years now since I had severed all connection with my family and the friends of my youth. I had a comfortable fortune, inherited from my father, which was skilfully dispersed in investments mainly in the Americas. I had no business, profession or occupation which could be smashed by the war and no home of my own which the war could wreck. In fact, except for a few weeks of hectic excitement the previous winter, during which I wrote the fore-runner to this journal, calling it
The Quest of Julian Day
, I had lived utterly without purpose ever since I left the Diplomatic Service.

Those days were still near enough for me to remember clearly how glorious I thought it would be to wake up every morning with no tiresome telegrams to decipher, no dreary routine reports to compile and no boring elderly people upon whom I was expected to dance attendance. But I soon found that nothing can be so wearisome as idleness or so desperately depressing as the thought that there’s no one to give a tinker’s cuss if you stay in
bed for the rest of your life, provided that you pay your hotel bill regularly each week.

Here, then, seemed to be the very escape from myself for which I had been longing. Instinctively, from the moment I had learned that the war was definitely on, I felt the natural urge to volunteer, but what I had not realised was that to me it might prove a real blessing in giving my life new usefulness and direction.

The only question was where and how should I get into the Forces? Owing to my peculiar position I still did not fancy the idea of going home, where I should certainly run into many of my old friends, and if I applied for a commission there was the horrid possibility that, at some stage of the formalities, those ghosts of my past might rise again to shame me.

It was then that I suddenly got the idea of going to Egypt. The previous winter, during my quest for Cambyses’ treasure, I had come into contact with that great English police chief, Essex Pasha. He was one of the few people who knew the whole truth about the grisly skeleton that lay locked in my cupboard, yet I felt confident that he would smooth the way for me into one of the Services without my having to answer too many questions.

In the course of my self-imposed exile I had got to know the Balkans and the Near East fairly well, so I needed no travel expert to tell me that, apart from the airways which would be impossible at such a time, the quickest route to Egypt was by train through Sarajevo and the old Serbian city of Uskub, or Skoplje as they now call it, down to Salonika and by ship from there across to Port Said. I managed to catch the evening train and six days later I was in Cairo.

Essex Pasha received me very kindly, and after a short talk it was decided that I should be attached to the Arab Bureau. But please don’t get the idea that I was booked for all sorts of exciting Secret Service work just because you happen to know that Lawrence of Arabia was attached to the Arab Bureau in the last Great War. I was recommended solely on the fact that, in addition to several European languages, I speak fairly fluent Arabic, and it was reasonably certain that later on a considerable number of interpreters would be required for attaching to troop formations.

It was abominably hot and dusty in Cairo, so I was glad enough, a few days later, to be posted to Ismalia on the Suez Canal, where I was to lend a hand in organising new levies of Arabs which were being recruited as extra police to patrol the
canal banks as a precaution against attempts at sabotage. Everything was very rough and ready in those early days, so I carried out such orders as I could get and for the rest exercised my common sense, working for the best part of eighteen hours a day until we got things into some sort of order.

Later on, my position was regularised. The Major under whom I had been working gave me a decent chit; I did an abbreviated two months’ course in Cairo and emerged from it at the end of January, 1940, with a commission as a full-blown second lieutenant of the Interpreter Corps.

By that time the first Australian and New Zealand units were arriving in Egypt for advance training before being despatched to France and I was attached to a New Zealand battalion. They were grand fellows and my duties were absurdly light, consisting almost entirely of arbitrating in an occasional dispute where an Arab farmer claimed that his crops or property had been damaged by the troops, and assisting the military police in keeping under control the swarm of beggars and hawkers that were always endeavouring to get into the camp.

As we were stationed no great distance from Cairo, I was able to go in and dine at the Semiramis or Shepheard’s or Jimmy’s whenever I felt like it and, for the purpose, in a patriotic effort to economise petrol, I bought a motor-bike—a form of transport that I found both novel and exciting.

Early in April, my first leave came along. Cairo was getting pretty hot again, so I decided to take it in Alexandria, and instead of going by train I thought it would be fun to use my new toy for the journey. Having strapped a suit-case on to the back of the bike, I set off in the cool of the morning and was there easily in time to lunch at the Cecil.

As I had stayed in Alex before, I already knew something of that extraordinarily cosmopolitan city. King Farouk has a palace and most of the wealthy Egyptians have summer places there, but it is not really an Egyptian town at all. The bulk of the population is either Greek or Italian, although, of course, there is a good sprinkling of English, French and Levantine Jews, with the Arabs forming the poorer classes.

When approached from the land Alexandria is not much to write home about, as it appears to consist of a long straggling line of mud-walled houses and tumbledown shacks; but from the sea Alex presents a
very different picture as the eye takes in its thirteen miles of fine buildings, spread out along a whole series of great bays. The fact remains, however, that Alexandria is really a fine façade with an unrivalled water-front, but little depth and few buildings of importance behind it, so, to get from place to place along the seemingly endless front, considerable distances have to be covered and I found that my motor-bike saved me quite a lot in taxi fares.

During the first week of my leave we had the excitement of the war at last breaking out in earnest with Hitler’s sudden invasion of Norway; but that made little difference to life in Egypt. I got to know quite a number of Anglo-Egyptians at the English Club, of which all British officers had been made honorary members, and among them a nice family called Wishart. The father was, I think, something to do with the railways; anyhow, it was on the eighth day of my leave that the two girls, Barbara and Dorothy, asked me to go out to their home at Ramleh for tea and tennis. Ramleh is the fine suburb at the extreme eastern end of Alexandria in which most of the English live, and with my flannels in a small bag, I set off on my motor-bike.

I had hardly covered a third of the distance and was still passing through the Park Lane of Alexandria, where the very rich Greeks live, when an Arab in a rickety Ford, just in front of me, ignoring all the rules of highway procedure, swerved right across the road. In trying to avoid him my front wheel ran over a patch of grease. The bike skidded violently. The front wheel twisted, the handle-bars were jerked out of my grip and I found myself sailing through the air over them, head foremost, straight for the nearest lamp-post.

I don’t actually remember hitting it or anything else at all until I came to. I was lying in a large cool room on a comfortable sofa; a wet ice-cold compress was bound tightly about my head and as I opened my eyes Daphnis was bending over me. Her lovely face was within six inches of mine, and as our eyes met, in that very first glance, I knew that, if only I had the courage and resolution to win her, here was the one woman who would prove the crown and glory of my life.

I’ve had quite a lot of love affairs; to be honest, more than my fair share. Perhaps the gods gave me certain qualities which are attractive to women as a sort of compensation for the evil that they did me when they sabotaged my career in the Diplomatic at its very beginning and made me an outcast with no profession and no home. The very fact of my enforced idleness during the two years before the war had led me into all sorts of amorous adventures in half a dozen European countries and in the Near East as well.

I don’t want to sound a prig, but it isn’t good for a young man’s morals to have no background, nothing to do except to amuse himself and plenty of money to do it with. Mind you, I’m not suggesting for one moment that I regret those locust years. Each of my affairs taught me something, not only about women but about their nationalities and a score of other things of which I should know little except for them. All the same, this constant seeking of forgetfulness in the company of good-looking girls, to which I had more or less been driven by my loneliness, had certainly tended to make me rather blasé.

That blasé attitude evaporated utterly the very instant that I set eyes on Daphnis. She was not just another potential mistress, like Léonie or Anita or Oonas, and to be honest I doubt if she would have won the prize in a beauty contest embodying all the young women that I had kissed since leaving England for the last time. Yet there was something breath-taking and compelling about her which stirred me more deeply than anything I had felt since my very first calf-love.