Mr. Standfast
tiring. I could feel him drag on the rope, and his movements had not
the precision they had had in the morning. He was the mountaineer, and
I the novice. If he gave out, we should never reach the valley.
The fellow was clear grit all through. When we reached the foot of the
tooth and sat huddled up with our faces away from the wind, I saw that
he was on the edge of fainting. What that effort must have cost him in
the way of resolution you may guess, but he did not fail till the worst
was past. His lips were colourless, and he was choking with the nausea
of fatigue. I found a flask of brandy in his pocket, and a mouthful
revived him.
“I’m all out,” he said. “The road’s easier now, and I can direct you
about the rest.... You’d better leave me. I’ll only be a drag. I’ll
come on when I feel better.”
“No, you don’t, you old fool. You’ve got me over that infernal iceberg,
and I’m going to see you home.”
I rubbed his arms and legs and made him swallow some chocolate. But
when he got on his feet he was as doddery as an old man. Happily we had
an easy course down a snow gradient, which we glissaded in very
unorthodox style. The swift motion freshened him up a little, and he
was able to put on the brake with his axe to prevent us cascading into
the _bergschrund_. We crossed it by a snow bridge, and started out on
the _seracs_ of the Schwarzstein glacier.
I am no mountaineer—not of the snow and ice kind, anyway—but I have a
big share of physical strength and I wanted it all now. For those
_seracs_ were an invention of the devil. To traverse that labyrinth in
a blinding snowstorm, with a fainting companion who was too weak to
jump the narrowest crevasse, and who hung on the rope like lead when
there was occasion to use it, was more than I could manage. Besides,
every step that brought us nearer to the valley now increased my
eagerness to hurry, and wandering in that maze of clotted ice was like
the nightmare when you stand on the rails with the express coming and
are too weak to climb on the platform. As soon as possible I left the
glacier for the hillside, and though that was laborious enough in all
conscience, yet it enabled me to steer a straight course. Wake never
spoke a word. When I looked at him his face was ashen under a gale
which should have made his cheeks glow, and he kept his eyes half
closed. He was staggering on at the very limits of his endurance....
By and by we were on the moraine, and after splashing through a dozen
little glacier streams came on a track which led up the hillside. Wake
nodded feebly when I asked if this was right. Then to my joy I saw a
gnarled pine.
I untied the rope and Wake dropped like a log on the ground. “Leave
me,” he groaned. “I’m fairly done. I’ll come on later.” And he shut his
eyes.
My watch told me that it was after five o’clock.
“Get on my back,” I said. “I won’t part from you till I’ve found a
cottage. You’re a hero. You’ve brought me over those damned mountains
in a blizzard, and that’s what no other man in England would have done.
Get up.”
He obeyed, for he was too far gone to argue. I tied his wrists together
with a handkerchief below my chin, for I wanted my arms to hold up his
legs. The rope and axes I left in a cache beneath the pine-tree. Then I
started trotting down the track for the nearest dwelling.
My strength felt inexhaustible and the quicksilver in my bones drove me
forward. The snow was still falling, but the wind was dying down, and
after the inferno of the pass it was like summer. The road wound over
the shale of the hillside and then into what in spring must have been
upland meadows. Then it ran among trees, and far below me on the right
I could hear the glacier river churning in its gorge. Soon little empty
huts appeared, and rough enclosed paddocks, and presently I came out on
a shelf above the stream and smelt the wood-smoke of a human
habitation.
I found a middle-aged peasant in the cottage, a guide by profession in
summer and a woodcutter in winter.
“I have brought my Herr from Santa Chiara,” I said, “over the
Schwarzsteinthor. He is very weary and must sleep.”
I decanted Wake into a chair, and his head nodded on his chest. But his
colour was better.
“You and your Herr are fools,” said the man gruffly, but not unkindly.
“He must sleep or he will have a fever. The Schwarzsteinthor in this
devil’s weather! Is he English?”
“Yes,” I said, “like all madmen. But he’s a good Herr, and a brave
mountaineer.”
We stripped Wake of his Red Cross uniform, now a collection of sopping
rags, and got him between blankets with a huge earthenware bottle of
hot water at his feet. The woodcutter’s wife boiled milk, and this,
with a little brandy added, we made him drink. I was quite easy in my
mind about him, for I had seen this condition before. In the morning he
would be as stiff as a poker, but recovered.
“Now I’m off for St Anton,” I said. “I must get there tonight.”
“You are the hardy one,” the man laughed. “I will show you the quick
road to Grünewald, where is the railway. With good fortune you may get
the last train.”
I gave him fifty francs on my Herr’s behalf, learned his directions for
the road, and set off after a draught of goat’s milk, munching my last
slab of chocolate. I was still strung up to a mechanical activity, and
I ran every inch of the three miles to the Staubthal without
consciousness of fatigue. I was twenty minutes too soon for the train,
and, as I sat on a bench on the platform, my energy suddenly ebbed
away. That is what happens after a great exertion. I longed to sleep,
and when the train arrived I crawled into a carriage like a man with a
stroke. There seemed to be no force left in my limbs. I realised that I
was leg-weary, which is a thing you see sometimes with horses, but not
often with men.
All the journey I lay like a log in a kind of coma, and it was with
difficulty that I recognised my destination, and stumbled out of the
train. But I had no sooner emerged from the station of St Anton than I
got my second wind. Much snow had fallen since yesterday, but it had
stopped now, the sky was clear, and the moon was riding. The sight of
the familiar place brought back all my anxieties. The day on the Col of
the Swallows was wiped out of my memory, and I saw only the inn at
Santa Chiara, and heard Wake’s hoarse voice speaking of Mary. The
lights were twinkling from the village below, and on the right I saw
the clump of trees which held the Pink Chalet.
I took a short cut across the fields, avoiding the little town. I ran
hard, stumbling often, for though I had got my mental energy back my
legs were still precarious. The station clock had told me that it was
nearly half-past nine.
Soon I was on the high-road, and then at the Chalet gates. I heard as
in a dream what seemed to be three shrill blasts on a whistle. Then a
big car passed me, making for St Anton. For a second I would have
hailed it, but it was past me and away. But I had a conviction that my
business lay in the house, for I thought Ivery was there, and Ivery was
what mattered.
I marched up the drive with no sort of plan in my head, only a blind
rushing on fate. I remembered dimly that I had still three cartridges
in my revolver.
The front door stood open and I entered and tiptoed down the passage to
the room where I had found the Portuguese Jew. No one hindered me, but
it was not for lack of servants. I had the impression that there were
people near me in the darkness, and I thought I heard German softly
spoken. There was someone ahead of me, perhaps the speaker, for I could
hear careful footsteps. It was very dark, but a ray of light came from
below the door of the room. Then behind me I heard the hall door clang,
and the noise of a key turned in its lock. I had walked straight into a
trap and all retreat was cut off.
My mind was beginning to work more clearly, though my purpose was still
vague. I wanted to get at Ivery and I believed that he was somewhere in
front of me. And then I thought of the door which led from the chamber
where I had been imprisoned. If I could enter that way I would have the
advantage of surprise.
I groped on the right-hand side of the passage and found a handle. It
opened upon what seemed to be a dining-room, for there was a faint
smell of food. Again I had the impression of people near, who for some
unknown reason did not molest me. At the far end I found another door,
which led to a second room, which I guessed to be adjacent to the
library. Beyond it again must lie the passage from the chamber with the
rack. The whole place was as quiet as a shell.
I had guessed right. I was standing in the passage where I had stood
the night before. In front of me was the library, and there was the
same chink of light showing. Very softly I turned the handle and opened
it a crack....
The first thing that caught my eye was the profile of Ivery. He was
looking towards the writing-table, where someone was sitting.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Underground Railway
This is the story which I heard later from Mary....
She was at Milan with the new Anglo-American hospital when she got
Blenkiron’s letter. Santa Chiara had always been the place agreed upon,
and this message mentioned specifically Santa Chiara, and fixed a date
for her presence there. She was a little puzzled by it, for she had not
yet had a word from Ivery, to whom she had written twice by the
roundabout address in France which Bommaerts had given her. She did not
believe that he would come to Italy in the ordinary course of things,
and she wondered at Blenkiron’s certainty about the date.
The following morning came a letter from Ivery in which he ardently
pressed for a meeting. It was the first of several, full of strange
talk about some approaching crisis, in which the forebodings of the
prophet were mingled with the solicitude of a lover.
“The storm is about to break,” he wrote, “and I cannot think only of my
own fate. I have something to tell you which vitally concerns yourself.
You say you are in Lombardy. The Chiavagno valley is within easy reach,
and at its head is the inn of Santa Chiara, to which I come on the
morning of March 19th. Meet me there even if only for half an hour, I
implore you. We have already shared hopes and confidences, and I would
now share with you a knowledge which I alone in Europe possess. You
have the heart of a lion, my lady, worthy of what I can bring you.”
Wake was summoned from the _Croce Rossa_ unit with which he was working
at Vicenza, and the plan arranged by Blenkiron was faithfully carried
out. Four officers of the Alpini, in the rough dress of peasants of the
hills, met them in Chiavagno on the morning of the 18th. It was
arranged that the hostess of Santa Chiara should go on a visit to her
sister’s son, leaving the inn, now in the shuttered quiet of
wintertime, under the charge of two ancient servants. The hour of
Ivery’s coming on the 19th had been fixed by him for noon, and that
morning Mary would drive up the valley, while Wake and the Alpini went
inconspicuously by other routes so as to be in station around the place
before midday.
But on the evening of the 18th at the Hotel of the Four Kings in
Chiavagno Mary received another message. It was from me and told her
that I was crossing the Staub at midnight and would be at the inn
before dawn. It begged her to meet me there, to meet me alone without
the others, because I had that to say to her which must be said before
Ivery’s coming. I have seen the letter. It was written in a hand which
I could not have distinguished from my own scrawl. It was not exactly
what I would myself have written, but there were phrases in it which to
Mary’s mind could have come only from me. Oh, I admit it was cunningly