“This is the sort of job that strips the frills off you, Mencken. You might make a service man yet.”
“No, thank you.” I had the very unpleasant feeling that he was already casting about in his mind for a successor to Dwight.
“Listen,” he said. “Next station I’m going to get Dwight off if it’s humanly possible. He’s still just strong enough to walk and there may be a chance if he gets to a doctor. You and Jane will leave first and keep your distance. You don’t know us—under no circumstances do you know us—understand?”
I said: “ You can’t manage him alone. I’ll stay with you, and Jane can go ahead.”
Dwight jeered. “ You see what happens, Andrews, when the boss gets lily-livered. You’re both fools! Save your own skins!”
For once his eyes were easy to read. Behind his bitter tongue his mind was calm, and clearer than ours, and he meant exactly what he said.
“Mencken,” Andrews said, “and you, Jane; these are orders. Obey them. Go out into the corridor and move to the end of the carriage. When the train stops get out—I don’t know the name of the station, but I’ll get out with Dwight too. From there on we’ll play it as it comes.”
We were in another of the endless tunnels, rattling and swaying. I looked at Jane and she pushed back her hair and half smiled back. Then she lifted her shoulders just perceptibly and bent to take the wedge from the door. I followed her out. The door slid to behind us.
She was fumbling for a cigarette; her face looked paper-coloured in the subdued light; when she got the cigarette out she could hardly hold it between her fingers. I lit it for her. For a moment our faces were together and I brushed my cheek against hers. Again she half-smiled, and she put her hand over mine.
“Low tide,” she said.
I nodded. “This journey seems to have taken half a life-time.”
She said: “It’s taken all of Dwight’s.”
I could see Dwight collapsing on the platform, railway officials running, the police called. If Andrews got him out alone he was doomed too.
“Ah, so, we have met again,” said a voice behind me.
I swung round. It was the little man who had been waiting outside the lavatory. I stared at him nonplussed, unable to think.
“Ah, so this is your wife.” He beamed and bowed, holding on to the rail. “Gnädige frau, I am delighted. Yes, I must say she does not look at all well.”
“She is better,” I said stiffly.
“Of course stuffy carriages and cabins are the worst possible places. And smoking, I would have thought, no help …”
Jane tapped the ash off her cigarette and looked at me for a lead.
“Not many minutes ago, gnädige frau, I was talking to your husband on the problem of travel sickness. Possibly he has told you?”
“No,” said Jane.
I groaned and tried to turn my back on him.
“Oh, well, I was telling him of my mother, who was greatly troubled and at length consulted a specialist is Zürich …”
He went on and on. I peered with sickly anxiety out at the countryside, now glimmering in long-shadowed moonlight. I doubted if Dwight would even make the station barrier. If, just possibly, we could get him as far as a hotel. But once he moved …
“… all connected with the question of balance.”
“Yes,” said Jane. “ Yes.”
Was that the pull of the brakes? Gods yes! Now was the testing time. If this fool did not leave us I felt inclined to knock him on the head and put him with the others.
“You will excuse me,” I said. “ This is where we get out. So we will wish you good might, sir.”
We went over a bridge and heard the rush of water before we could see the hastening stream. A few houses showed, and a glimmer of light in one of them. The overhead trolley ran among a clutch of wires, and the tiny station we were entering was lit by a blue electric flash. What hope here? What prospect of competent medical aid?
The train came to a stop.
“A very lonely district for a holiday,” the man was saying to Jane. “But——”
“Good night,” I said.
I grabbed Jane’s arm and we squeezed past him and climbed out of the train. I do not know if he wondered at our lack of luggage.
The change in temperature from Milan was drastic. This was mid-winter. I put my arm round the girl and we moved in the semi-dark away from the circle of a shaded lamp, stood in a doorway and waited.
Only one other person had climbed down from the whole long train. We were almost opposite the exit. If Andrews and Dwight came now, at least there would be only a few steps to walk.
They did not come.
Jane was shivering.
A porter swung a storm lantern. After the noise oi the train the night again seemed unnervingly still; we could hear a single conversation going on along the platform. The station was dark and steamy, with a fine wet mist hanging in the air around the dismal blue lamps. In the distance you could hear the whispered sibilants of a waterfall.
They did not come.
There was a whistle. The train was going to start again. Vile indecision.
“Nur zu!” I said.
She seemed by the movement of her body to be obeying almost before I spoke. As the train moved we clambered hurriedly aboard again.
Chapter Twenty
We stared breathlessly down that corridor I had come to hate more than any corridor I had ever seen before. There was a woman in it now, at the farther end: she had come out of one of the other compartments and was leaning on the rail looking out of the window.
“Stay here,” I said. “I’ll find out what’s wrong.”
“Why, I thought you were alighting here.” It was the thrice-accursed bore again, his pink face shining. “Did I misunderstand you?”
“We mistook the station.” I pushed roughly past him, nerves going now. Jane, keeping her head, stayed to talk with the man; her pleasant voice in its broken German followed me until it was drowned by the rattle of the train.
As I stood outside the reserved compartment a sudden frightening thought came to me that the two men had perhaps got off the train at the other side, that they would now be looking for us and we would still be on the train.
As I hesitated the compartment door opened and Andrews lurched out. For a moment he did not seem to see me.
“So it could not be managed?” I said.
He continued to stare out of the window. “Blast you! I told you to get off the blasted train!
“We did, and waited for you to follow. Can you not move him?”
“No need,” said Andrews. “Dwight is dead.”
Still one more tunnel. So that was the end of the adventure for one of us. Von Riehl and now Dwight. An eye for an eye. Sound Old Testament philosophy.
I suddenly began to feel terribly tired. Even capture seemed better thas this prolonged, never-ending tension. Odd that all Dwight’s problems were solved. No need for him to worry about getting out of the country; he had given all his pursuers the slip. How strange one could get out of it that way. His body went jogging on but they could do nothing about it. It was not keeping to the rules somehow.
A waiter came down the corridor precariously carrying a tray of coffee. He squeezed past, went on past that self-important little fool who was prattling to Jane.
Andrews coughed and granted. “I shall miss Dwight.”
As we came out of the tunnel rain spattered on the window. Andrews took a swig of brandy from the flask and then handed it to me. In the better light he looked dishevelled, suddenly rather adrift, as if for s surprising moment he had lost purpose and decision.
“We’re in a hell of a mess,” he said. “ No good blinking that. Particularly you two. I can get along, but that German bitch will remember every detail of you two. She’d, be better put out of the way like her master.…”
At last Jane had succeeded in getting rid of the man. I went down the corridor.
“Drink this.”
She took a short gulp of the brandy. “What went wrong?”
“Dwight is dead.”
“Of …”
“Drink it all. There’s little enougn there.”
She made a face at the second gulp and shuddered. “ Oh, God, what do we do now?”
“Out at the next station, I suppose. It’s a question of luck.…”
The lady who had been standing at the other end of the corridor now came past us. She looked at us disdainfully as if she suspected—rightly—that we had no business in the first class.
We listened to the beat of the train. The countryside was lightening every miaute, even though the moon was obscured by cloud. Three compartments down, Andrews’s bulky figure blocked the way.
Jane stirred against me. “Have you a cigarette?”
“Not now. Here it is. You can feel …”
You could feel the pull of the brakes. Andrews turned sharply into the compartment behind him, and the train was almost in the station by the time he came out with Dwight’s haversack. He put a wedge under the outside of the door. In the dark it would be difficult to see.
More houses about a station somewhat larger than the last. Sidings, a signal box, some electric driving-coaches. More lights.
Andrews beckoned us as the train stopped. “ Not yet. In here.”
We followed him into the empty compartment which the Swiss gentleman had unwillingly vacated. He slid the door. We stood about. Two or three people getting on and off.
“Sit down,” Andrews said.
“You’re cutting it fine.”
“We’re not getting off here.”
“What? …”
“I’ve been working it out. The next station is Lucerne. We shall be there in twenty minutes.”
Jane looked at me helplessly and then stared at Andrews. It crossed my mind that Dwight’s death, which had obviosuly hit him harder than one would have expected, had brought on him this sudden collapse into weakness and indecision. Whether one should try to take control …
“A place like this,” said Andrews. “A junction and a few dozen houses. We should have to leave the town and we might have difficulty is hiring a car. If we leave at Lucerne the chances are no one will remember us in a crowd. And once in Lucerne I know of places.”
The train was still in the station, tempting us to disobedience.
But Jane did not move, and so I did not. This freak decision of Andrews, though perhaps at base the logical one, had every natural impulse against it. And sometimes natural impulses are best. If we calculatingly rejected this last bolt-hole in favour of a better one twenty minutes ahead, what might happen in twenty minutes? …
The train began to move.
“I’m backing my judgement in this.” Andrews took off his beret and glowered at himsef thoughtfully in the mirror over the centre seat. “ It’s unlikely any official will want to come is these compartments before we reach Lucerne. And unless I’m forced to I’m not going in next door again either.”
“You’re not——”
“The train stops fifteen minutes in Lucerne.” He began painfully to pull out tufts of his beard. “ They may be discovered then or later. In either case the first question will be: who has done this? The second will be; where did they leave the train? If all the captives say: the last station before Lucerne, it will divert pursuit and give us an extra chance. See?”
I saw well enough. But it was a gambler’s threw.
“They will be left free to struggle for twenty minutes,” I said.
“It’s taking a chance on the knots.” Almost all his beard was off now. “Let the window down.”
I did this, and he screwed the crisp black hair into a ball and dropped it out. I caught a view of the broadening stream, swift-moving, oil-green and yellow in spate, twisting among the boulders on its ever noisier way to join the still ness of the lake.
I sat beside Jane, knees giving way from wariness and nervous exhaustion. Her hand when I found it was very cold.
“Have my coat.”
“No … it’s not that …”
Andrews said: “When we do leave the train we move fast. You’re travelling on a false passport, Jane?”
“Hilda Fenburgh.”
“Good. The question is how quickly you can get back to Venice.”
I said: “ You cannot possibly send her back! for trouble.”
He stared at me. “ I can see the dangers as well as you. The chief one is this Volkmann woman. But if Jane can return to Venice undetected she has her usual alibi there, and there should be no reason to link her with this case. Every foreigner in Italy can’t be paraded in front of Volkmann. Had you those gloves on all the time?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s a help. I wiped everything in the carriage——”
I said: “It won’t be enough! Fräulein Volkmann has been with Jane for a quarter of an hour: she will remember everything, what perfume she uses, the size of her shoes, the shape of her finger nails——”
Jane laid a hand on my arm. I knew then that, in spite of everything that had happened since, the decisions of Garda still held. It was a bitter knowledge.
“You can’t, of course, take a train straight back,” Andrews said to her. “The hunt will be up too soon. But I think I can fix something for you. It will depend. The first thing is for us all to go to earth in Lucerne. You needn’t think, Mencken, that I shall run her into more danger than can be helped. She’s only useful to us as long as she’s free.”
I did not say anything at all.
“As for you.” He pushed his beret into the haversack, took out a crumpled trilby hat. “Your job’s done and the sooner you’re out of this the better. Your best course may be to make for Yugoslavia—via Innsbruck and Klangenfurt—though I don’t suppose you’ll relish passing through German territory.”
I should not. The prospect filled me with extreme foreboding. “D’you mean we have to separate soon?”
“The minute we’re out of Lucerne station.”
“Oh, but surely——”
“And I want you to memorise these addresses. First you, Jane.…”
I peered under the blind again and saw we were now running near the lake. The water was in the shadow of the precipices on the farther shore and looked like a great black chasm in which nothing lived or stirred.
“And you, Mencken, to this address. Whoever answers the door you must say you come from Cousin Peter in St. Gall … Fortunately we have many friends is Switzerland.”
Footsteps down the corridor. We all waited and listened. They came, passed, died. What was happening next door? Supposing one of them managed to stand on the seat, get some sort of hold of the communication handle.
“I wish,” Jane said, “I wish none of this had had to happen this way.…”
Andrews grunted. “Well, I’m sorry about Dwight. He’ll be hard to replace. Here, Mencken, put this rucksack on.”
I got into it with difficulty, for Dwight had been a narrower built man; Andrews began to adjust the straps.
“You never liked him, did you?” he said.
“Who? Dwight? Oh, that’s not so.” It had been Andrews I had not liked, but I could hardly say so.
“Probably not your type, Mencken. He was the sahib type … Not that his career had ever been very distinguished. He got turned out of Sandhurst for some shady business and went into the last war in the ranks. He only rose to be acting-major when the others were killed off. What difference does it make? He was a serviceman you could rely on for anything. He came to Italy in the first place because of his lungs. Did all sorts of poor jobs before he drifted into this.…”
The train was fairly racing now. Andrews dabbed his face with cream, and then wiped it.
“Some people thought him a snob. Maybe you did. Maybe snobbery is different in Vienna. Dwight hated soiling his hands … And mad crazy about horses, even though he’d never owned one since his Sandhurst days. I think he took this work not
so much became he liked it as because it helped him to live nearly the way he wanted to. Hungarian with a bit of money. Flat in Rome. Enough to eat and drink and smoke. But it was no good asking him to do dirty work. He’d got to be the gentleman. Oh, well. But for this piece of dirty work to-night he insisted on taking she chief part.…”
I peered out again. The lake had now come full into view, glimmering like a silver dish in the moonlight.
“Your ticket,” I said sharply to Andrews. “Did you not book only to one of the mountain stations?”
He nodded. “ But I helped myself to one of the through tickets to Basle. They’ll pass me out on that.”
The brakes were on.
“Good-bye, Mencken,” said Andrews. “I’m not coming through the barrier with you. You and Jane can risk it together if you feel like it.”
He had a soft greasy hand.
We were in the suburbs of the town. Sweat was on my forehead again and I brushed it away. I had never known a train to take so long to stop.
At last signals, another train, lights, points, we came into the station. And stopped. The platform was on the corridor side. Jane rose, but Andrews held up his hand. There were footsteps and we waited for them to pass. Voices on the platform, the usual bustle, the usual shouts.
Andrews got up.
At that moment, from the compartment next to ours, a woman began to scream.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Fräulein Volkmann,” said Andrews, “ has got rid of her gag.”
These were the last words I heard him speak as he led the way towards the door of the carriage.
Our wait after the train had stopped had cleared the corridor, and there was no one about. So far no one, it seemed, had heard the screaming. We reached the door and were blocked going down the steps by a porter lifting down baggage.
“Porter, monsieur?”
“No,” said Andrews.
“Porter, mad’moiselle?”
Jane shook her head.
I was last out, and as I got down I thought I heard someone going down the train towards the screaming. It was almost inaudible from outside the train because of all the other noises. There were not enough people about to hide us. And the lights were too bright.