Mr. Standfast
with Germans. They had pumped him about our air service, and Peter had
told them many ingenious lies and heard curious things in return.
“They are working hard, Dick,” he said. “Never forget that. The German
is a stout enemy, and when we beat him with a machine he sweats till he
has invented a new one. They have great pilots, but never so many good
ones as we, and I do not think in ordinary fighting they can ever beat
us. But you must watch Lensch, for I fear him. He has a new machine, I
hear, with great engines and a short wingspread, but the wings so
cambered that he can climb fast. That will be a surprise to spring upon
us. You will say that we’ll soon better it. So we shall, but if it was
used at a time when we were pushing hard it might make the little
difference that loses battles.”
“You mean,” I said, “that if we had a great attack ready and had driven
all the Boche planes back from our front, Lensch and his circus might
get over in spite of us and blow the gaff?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. “Or if we were attacked, and had a weak spot,
Lensch might show the Germans where to get through. I do not think we
are going to attack for a long time; but I am pretty sure that Germany
is going to fling every man against us. That is the talk of my friends,
and it is not bluff.”
That night I cooked our modest dinner, and we smoked our pipes with the
stove door open and the good smell of woodsmoke in our nostrils. I told
him of all my doings and of the Wild Birds and Ivery and the job we
were engaged on. Blenkiron’s instructions were that we two should live
humbly and keep our eyes and ears open, for we were outside
suspicion—the cantankerous lame Boer and his loutish servant from
Arosa. Somewhere in the place was a rendezvous of our enemies, and
thither came Chelius on his dark errands.
Peter nodded his head sagely, “I think I have guessed the place. The
daughter of the old woman used to pull my chair sometimes down to the
village, and I have sat in cheap inns and talked to servants. There is
a fresh-water pan there, it is all covered with snow now, and beside it
there is a big house that they call the Pink Chalet. I do not know much
about it, except that rich folk live in it, for I know the other houses
and they are harmless. Also the big hotels, which are too cold and
public for strangers to meet in.”
I put Peter to bed, and it was a joy to me to look after him, to give
him his tonic and prepare the hot water bottle that comforted his
neuralgia. His behaviour was like a docile child’s, and he never lapsed
from his sunny temper, though I could see how his leg gave him hell.
They had tried massage for it and given it up, and there was nothing
for him but to endure till nature and his tough constitution deadened
the tortured nerves again. I shifted my bed out of the pantry and slept
in the room with him, and when I woke in the night, as one does the
first time in a strange place, I could tell by his breathing that he
was wakeful and suffering.
Next day a bath chair containing a grizzled cripple and pushed by a
limping peasant might have been seen descending the long hill to the
village. It was clear frosty weather which makes the cheeks tingle, and
I felt so full of beans that it was hard to remember my game leg. The
valley was shut in on the east by a great mass of rocks and glaciers,
belonging to a mountain whose top could not be seen. But on the south,
above the snowy fir-woods, there was a most delicate lace-like peak
with a point like a needle. I looked at it with interest, for beyond it
lay the valley which led to the Staub pass, and beyond that was
Italy—and Mary.
The old village of St Anton had one long, narrow street which bent at
right angles to a bridge which spanned the river flowing from the lake.
Thence the road climbed steeply, but at the other end of the street it
ran on the level by the water’s edge, lined with gimcrack
boarding-houses, now shuttered to the world, and a few villas in
patches of garden. At the far end, just before it plunged into a
pine-wood, a promontory jutted into the lake, leaving a broad space
between the road and the water. Here were the grounds of a more
considerable dwelling—snow-covered laurels and rhododendrons with one
or two bigger trees—and just on the water-edge stood the house itself,
called the Pink Chalet.
I wheeled Peter past the entrance on the crackling snow of the highway.
Seen through the gaps of the trees the front looked new, but the back
part seemed to be of some age, for I could see high walls, broken by
few windows, hanging over the water. The place was no more a chalet
than a donjon, but I suppose the name was given in honour of a wooden
gallery above the front door. The whole thing was washed in an ugly
pink. There were outhouses—garage or stables among the trees—and at the
entrance there were fairly recent tracks of an automobile.
On our way back we had some very bad beer in a café and made friends
with the woman who kept it. Peter had to tell her his story, and I
trotted out my aunt in Zurich, and in the end we heard her grievances.
She was a true Swiss, angry at all the belligerents who had spoiled her
livelihood, hating Germany most but also fearing her most. Coffee, tea,
fuel, bread, even milk and cheese were hard to get and cost a ransom.
It would take the land years to recover, and there would be no more
tourists, for there was little money left in the world. I dropped a
question about the Pink Chalet, and was told that it belonged to one
Schweigler, a professor of Berne, an old man who came sometimes for a
few days in the summer. It was often let, but not now. Asked if it was
occupied, she remarked that some friends of the Schweiglers—rich people
from Basle—had been there for the winter. “They come and go in great
cars,” she said bitterly, “and they bring their food from the cities.
They spend no money in this poor place.”
Presently Peter and I fell into a routine of life, as if we had always
kept house together. In the morning he went abroad in his chair, in the
afternoon I would hobble about on my own errands. We sank into the
background and took its colour, and a less conspicuous pair never faced
the eye of suspicion. Once a week a young Swiss officer, whose business
it was to look after British wounded, paid us a hurried visit. I used
to get letters from my aunt in Zurich, sometimes with the postmark of
Arosa, and now and then these letters would contain curiously worded
advice or instructions from him whom my aunt called “the kind patron”.
Generally I was told to be patient. Sometimes I had word about the
health of “my little cousin across the mountains”. Once I was bidden
expect a friend of the patron’s, the wise doctor of whom he had often
spoken, but though after that I shadowed the Pink Chalet for two days
no doctor appeared.
My investigations were a barren business. I used to go down to the
village in the afternoon and sit in an out-of-the-way café, talking
slow German with peasants and hotel porters, but there was little to
learn. I knew all there was to hear about the Pink Chalet, and that was
nothing. A young man who ski-ed stayed for three nights and spent his
days on the alps above the fir-woods. A party of four, including two
women, was reported to have been there for a night—all ramifications of
the rich family of Basle. I studied the house from the lake, which
should have been nicely swept into ice-rinks, but from lack of visitors
was a heap of blown snow. The high old walls of the back part were
built straight from the water’s edge. I remember I tried a short cut
through the grounds to the high-road and was given “Good afternoon’ by
a smiling German manservant. One way and another I gathered there were
a good many serving-men about the place—too many for the infrequent
guests. But beyond this I discovered nothing.
Not that I was bored, for I had always Peter to turn to. He was
thinking a lot about South Africa, and the thing he liked best was to
go over with me every detail of our old expeditions. They belonged to a
life which he could think about without pain, whereas the war was too
near and bitter for him. He liked to hobble out-of-doors after the
darkness came and look at his old friends, the stars. He called them by
the words they use on the veld, and the first star of morning he called
the _voorlooper_—the little boy who inspans the oxen—a name I had not
heard for twenty years. Many a great yarn we spun in the long evenings,
but I always went to bed with a sore heart. The longing in his eyes was
too urgent, longing not for old days or far countries, but for the
health and strength which had once been his pride.
One night I told him about Mary.
“She will be a happy _mysie_,” he said, “but you will need to be very
clever with her, for women are queer cattle and you and I don’t know
their ways. They tell me English women do not cook and make clothes
like our vrouws, so what will she find to do? I doubt an idle woman
will be like a mealie-fed horse.”
It was no good explaining to him the kind of girl Mary was, for that
was a world entirely beyond his ken. But I could see that he felt
lonelier than ever at my news. So I told him of the house I meant to
have in England when the war was over—an old house in a green hilly
country, with fields that would carry four head of cattle to the
_morgen_ and furrows of clear water, and orchards of plums and apples.
“And you will stay with us all the time,” I said. “You will have your
own rooms and your own boy to look after you, and you will help me to
farm, and we will catch fish together, and shoot the wild ducks when
they come up from the pans in the evening. I have found a better
countryside than the Houtbosch, where you and I planned to have a farm.
It is a blessed and happy place, England.”
He shook his head. “You are a kind man, Dick, but your pretty _mysie_
won’t want an ugly old fellow like me hobbling about her house.... I do
not think I will go back to Africa, for I should be sad there in the
sun. I will find a little place in England, and some day I will visit
you, old friend.”
That night his stoicism seemed for the first time to fail him. He was
silent for a long time and went early to bed, where I can vouch for it
he did not sleep. But he must have thought a lot in the night time, for
in the morning he had got himself in hand and was as cheerful as a
sandboy.
I watched his philosophy with amazement. It was far beyond anything I
could have compassed myself. He was so frail and so poor, for he had
never had anything in the world but his bodily fitness, and he had lost
that now. And remember, he had lost it after some months of glittering
happiness, for in the air he had found the element for which he had
been born. Sometimes he dropped a hint of those days when he lived in
the clouds and invented a new kind of battle, and his voice always grew
hoarse. I could see that he ached with longing for their return. And
yet he never had a word of complaint. That was the ritual he had set
himself, his point of honour, and he faced the future with the same
kind of courage as that with which he had tackled a wild beast or
Lensch himself. Only it needed a far bigger brand of fortitude.
Another thing was that he had found religion. I doubt if that is the
right way to put it, for he had always had it. Men who live in the
wilds know they are in the hands of God. But his old kind had been a
tattered thing, more like heathen superstition, though it had always
kept him humble. But now he had taken to reading the Bible and to
thinking in his lonely nights, and he had got a creed of his own. I
dare say it was crude enough, I am sure it was unorthodox; but if the
proof of religion is that it gives a man a prop in bad days, then