by W. F. Morris
“It is long enough this time,” said Pagan as he tested the knots. “Now what are we going to tie it to?”
“The bed is the obvious thing. But we should have to pull it across the room, and that would make too much row.”
“Quite out of the question,” agreed Pagan. “But if there is another bell pull in your room, I believe the rope will be long enough to reach the bed where it is.”
“Yes, and when we get our weight on to it the jolly old bed will come skating across the room after us like a pet tank,” retorted Baron.
“Well, damn it all, we must hitch it to something; unless you like to hold it between your teeth like the strong man in the circus.”
“As a member of the strong men’s union I cannot work after hours,” grinned Baron.
The press and the bed were the only pieces of furniture massive enough for their purpose. The press suffered from the same disadvantage as the bed and had the additional disadvantage of possessing no legs round which the rope could be tied. They gazed hopefully at the simple furniture and at each wall, but there was nothing that would serve their purpose. Pagan even tested the thin brass hook to which the curtains were looped back in daylight, but it was obviously unfitted to bear the strain they would have to put upon it.
Baron gazed at the ceiling in despair, and then suddenly with a muttered exclamation, pointed upwards. In one of the dark weathered joists that supported the uncovered floorboards of the attic above was an iron hook that had probably been used at some time to support a hanging lamp. It was opposite the window and about six feet from it.
“Good man! That’s where the old boy hangs his victims, I suppose,” grinned Pagan as he pulled up a chair and mounted it.
“Any good?” asked Baron.
Pagan placed both hands round the hook and cautiously bent his knees till his feet were clear of the chair. He swung for a moment and then dropped back on the chair. “It would hold a battleship,” he announced.
“Good!”
“The only thing is,” said Pagan as he regained the floor, “that being on the ceiling it shortens our rope by a good eight feet or more. It’s about fourteen at the moment. It is twelve at the very least to the ground; add eight: that’s twenty and a bit more for tying—no it won’t reach to within less than eight feet; and that’s being optimistic. And I don’t fancy a drop of even a couple of feet on that slope.”
“Well, there is probably another bell pull in my room,” said Baron. “The rooms are so alike I can hardly tell t’other from which.”
They went into Baron’s room and found another bell pull beside the press. Pagan mounted a chair and detached it. “I have always hated pairs,” he said as he stepped down again. “Hated ’em from pictures of Highland cattle to twins, but after this I swear by ’em.”
They added the second bell pull to the rope and tested the knots.
“Seems sound,” said Pagan.
“Anyway, we shall soon find out if it isn’t,” said Baron grimly. “Hitch it to the hook.”
Pagan mounted the chair and did so. He reached the floor again by sliding down the rope.
Baron picked up the end and coiled it. “Right ’o! Out with the light.”
They turned out the lamp, drew back the curtains and opened the casement. Baron threw out the rope. Pagan peered over the sill. “It is within an inch or two of the bottom,” he announced.
“Good! Who goes first?” asked Baron.
“As the rope was my invention and therefore mine, courtesy demands that I should grant you that honour,” remarked Pagan politely.
“Not a bit of it,” retorted Baron. “I wouldn’t deprive you of it for worlds.”
Pagan sighed and climbed cautiously on to the sill. “If I die it will be for an ideal,” he remarked sententiously.
“Yes—curiosity that killed the cat,” retorted Baron.
Pagan hooked his feet about the rope and gently lowered his body over the sill. “In case of accidents, hops are my favourite flowers,” he murmured.
“Right—I will put a bunch on your grave, Charles; in a glass of Bock Tigre.”
Pagan’s head was now on a level with the sill. “Well, here goes and I sincerely hope that it will not be a case of ‘Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after’. ”
“You can make your mind quite easy on that point,” Baron assured him. “If you fall down I shall not come tumbling after—not me. Besides there will be those hops to be seen to.”
Pagan negotiated the knots and slid gently down till his feet touched the steeply sloping ground. He kicked a foothold for his feet in the sodden grass and let go the rope. “Come on,” he whispered. “But go easy at the bottom; it’s damnably steep and slippery.”
Baron’s dark form came over the sill and moved slowly down the rope. A moment later they stood side by side their bodies leaning inwards and their hands pressed against the rough stone wall of the house, their feet poised precariously in the slippery footholds they had made. Far below them twinkled the tiny cluster of lights; around them was darkness and a scaring sense of emptiness. The damp night wind ruffled their hair.
“Which way?” whispered Baron.
“Right,” answered Pagan. “Always keep to the right: it’s the rule of the road on the continent.”
“But there ain’t no bloomin’ road,” growled Baron as he stepped cautiously sideways after Pagan. “And the bit of continent I’ve got my feet on isn’t big enough to write home about.”
The going was both difficult and dangerous. Pagan moved sideways with his hands pressed against the wall and his back to the black abyss, and before each step it was necessary to kick himself a foothold with his toe. Progress therefore was slow; but his right hand at length encountered the sharp angle of the wall, and he found before him a steep stone-revetted bank some four feet high surmounted by white wooden palings. With a whispered word of warning to Baron, he hooked his fingers between the palings and drew himself up. First his knees and then his feet found a narrow support on the top of the bank; then he scrambled over the palings. Baron followed.
To their left rose the dark gable-end of the house with the one ground floor window. Pagan stole towards it. Baron followed and blundered into something that fell with a metallic thud. He muttered “damnation” and rubbed his bruised shin.
“Clumsy lout!” hissed Pagan. “Why didn’t you bring a gong or a motor horn!”
The moon sailed out across a cloud rift and revealed the obstacle as a little iron table and chair that lay overturned on the sodden gravel. Beyond the palings the abyss showed black and empty, and the dark line of the opposite hill crest took shape against the sky.
Pagan reached the wall of the house and flattened himself against it in the narrow wedge of shadow. “Moon, moon, serenely shining,” he sang softly. “Please go in quite soon.” And as if in answer to his wish the silver radiance died away.
They sidled along the wall to the window. A narrow strip of light escaped from either edge, but the curtains were drawn too closely to allow even a glimpse of the interior of the room. Pagan moved on and reached the angle of the wall. He slipped round it to the front of the house. From the first window a strip of light escaped, but it was impossible to see anything of the room within. The second window likewise was carefully curtained. Baron laid his ear against the glass while Pagan went on past the door to the two windows that lay beyond it. These too yielded no results, and he turned back to find Baron bobbing towards him with long slow steps in an absurd parody of a stage tiptoe. “Shush!” he said in a loud stage whisper, with upraised finger and a broad grin.
“Shut up, you fool!” hissed Pagan. “Could you hear anything?”
“Nothing,” answered Baron with a grin, “except rumblings in my own tummy.”
“What, after that enormous meal! You must have an inside like the Albert Hall,” exclaimed Pagan in disgust. “And if you go about rumbling like an earthquake, how the blazes do you expect to hear anything! Let�
��s go and reconnoitre the other end of the house, anyway.”
They moved off past the remaining two windows beyond the door and reached the angle of the wall. Pagan put his head round it. The low roof of outbuildings and stabling showed dimly against the sky. “Hope to blazes there isn’t a dog,” he whispered. And then remembering that no dog had barked on their first approach to the inn, he moved on boldly round the corner.
On his left was a window, the other end wall window in the long room, but this again was so heavily curtained as to render fruitless his efforts to see inside. Opposite him was a low outbuilding, built out at right-angles from the end wall of the house. The front was open, the roof on this side being supported on two wooden posts which he discovered by blundering into one of them. The floor was of brick, and the structure formed a covered way from the house to the outbuildings, for there was a door under cover in the wall of the house.
Pagan listened at the keyhole and cautiously turned the handle but the door was bolted or locked. They made a cursory examination of the exterior of the outbuildings and returned to the front of the house.
“We might manage to open a window,” said Pagan hopefully.
“We might—and then again we might not,” answered Baron.
“Anyway, we will have a shot at it. It must be one of the end ones. They will give us a view of the whole length of the room, whereas from the others we should be able to see only a bit. And it must be the end one at the other end, on that terrace arrangement where you threw the chairs and tables about: it’s nearer our base of operations and gives a shorter line of retreat with no door to pass.”
“Really, Charles, you were wasted with B. Company,” chaffed Baron. “The War would have been over in ’16 if Haig had had you as Chief-of-Staff.”
Pagan led the way back to the other end of the house where the two tantalizing strips of light escaped from the window. He examined the casement carefully and inserted the blade of his knife between the frames. Baron watched him in silence. “You will never make your living as a burglar, Charles,” he said at last.
Pagan withdrew the knife in disgust. “For two hoots, I’d smash the glass,” he growled. “Here, you have a go.”
Baron took the knife and tried. “You make enough noise to wake the dead,” whispered Pagan. “Steady, man.”
“But not enough to open the window,” answered Baron as he withdrew the knife. “I’m afraid it cannot be done without a proper burglar’s set. The only thing that I can suggest, Charles, is that you do one of your lightning change turns: put on a false beard, ring the front door bell and talk Chinese.”
“If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk at all,” retorted Pagan. And then suddenly he gripped Baron by the arm. “Did you hear that?”
Baron nodded. “Um—sounded like a door banging.”
“Yes,” said Pagan. “The one at the far end under the alleyway arrangement. Come on; but for the lord’s sake, don’t make a row.”
They stole cautiously round the corner and along the front of the house. No further sounds reached them and they gained the far end without mishap. Pagan put his head round the corner inch by inch. All was dark there. He slipped round, and on tiptoe gained the shelter of the covered way where he paused to listen. No sound reached his ears except the faint crunching of Baron’s toes on the gravel. The door was closed, and from it no light escaped.
As Baron’s dim form moved up beside him he whispered, “Let’s scout off along the outbuildings. If anyone came out they must have gone that way or we should have seen them.”
They moved off silently in single file past a stable, a cart shed and a small barn. From the barn wall ran a fence with an open gate where their feet sank deeply in the churned up mud. Beyond the gate the ground rose steeply, and the dark line of the col crest showed dimly against the sky.
Baron moved slowly to the left along the fence and end wall of the barn; Pagan moved a few paces uphill and then stopped abruptly, listening. A moment later it came again, the sound of stealthy movement ahead, and then ceased.
A soft diffused light crept down the hillside before him as the moon sailed behind a thin mist of cloud. Twenty yards ahead a clump of bushes loomed indistinctly. On the margin of the clump something moved. The diffused light grew momentarily stronger and revealed dimly the blurred head and shoulders of a crouching figure. Pagan took a step forward, but his foot slipped on the short wet grass and he stumbled on to one knee. At the same moment a flood of clear moonlight slid like a flashlamp beam down the slope and was gone; and in that brief radiance the crouching figure turned its head.
Pagan, agape, remained motionless on one knee as though petrified, while obscurity again enshrouded the slope. Then the soft pad of Baron’s feet on the grass roused him. He straightened his bent body and gripped Baron’s arm. “There is something in those bushes straight ahead,” he said in a low voice that quivered with suppressed excitement.
“Is there, by gad!” whispered Baron. “You go to the right; I will go to the left.” And he started forward.
“For God’s sake go carefully, Dicky,” whispered Pagan as he circled to the right.
From either side the two men closed cautiously in upon the dim dark patch that was the clump of bushes. They met on the far side, and Baron turned and pushed his way through the clump. Pagan followed.
“Well,” said Baron as he emerged on to the short springy turf, “there is nothing there. It was probably the local cow you saw, Charles, having a night out.” He put his hand over his mouth and yawned. “I’m getting damned sleepy. How about toddling back to by-byes? I think we have done enough detecting for one night.”
Pagan raised no objection, and they went back down the slope through the open gate and crept cautiously past the front of the house. Pagan said not a word, not even when Baron blundered again into the chair on the little terrace at the end of the house. They climbed over the palings and edged their way sideways step by step back to the knotted rope that hung against the wall. Baron seized it and swarmed up. His dark form hung heavily and kicking for a moment as he struggled over the sill; then it disappeared through the dark aperture of the window. A moment later his head reappeared. “Right ’o, Charles. Come on,” he whispered.
Pagan swarmed up the rope and was lugged over the sill and into the dark room by Baron. Baron pulled up the rope, closed the window and drew the curtains. “A light, Charles,” he said.
Pagan obediently struck a match and lighted the lamp. Baron set to work industriously untying the knots and restoring each part of the rope to its original place.
“I have been thinking over this locked door business, Charles,” he chattered complacently as he untied the rope from the hook in the ceiling. “And I believe I have got the idea. Our friend the landlord is an ex-Bosche, and he is probably mixed up with some political party malcontents. Before the war Alsace was mostly anti-German, but now that it belongs to France it is probably anti-French. They are like the Irish—agin the government. That chap in Strasbourg said there were a lot of meetings and things going on sub rosa. I expect our gentle landlord belongs to one of these secret political clubs and had arranged a meeting here for to-night—I mean to say, what place could be more suitable? A remote spot on top of a mountain, … plenty of space in that room downstairs, and drinks available. Well, the pub being empty, he arranges that meeting for to-night, and then at the last moment we butt in and asked to be put up. We go off to bed early, but he locked our doors to make quite sure we shouldn’t listen to his friends’ Hyde Park stuff. That is what has happened, I bet you a fiver. And as far as I am concerned they are welcome to get on with it.” He got down from a chair by the press where he had been re-hanging a bell pull. “I believe in self-determination; and if they want to make Alsace German, Swiss or Chinese I don’t feel called upon to interfere. What do you say?”
Pagan, sitting on his bed abstractedly unlacing his shoes, shook his head. “No—I don’t give a damn either way.” He pulled off his shoes th
oughtfully. “There may be something in what you say, Baron, but anyway it does not explain what I saw to-night.”
Baron began to unlace his own boots. “But, my dear Charles, after all what did you see to-night? Some movement in a dark clump of bushes!”
“I saw more than that,” answered Pagan. “It was light enough to see that the noise in the bushes was caused by someone crouching there.”
“Well, there you are! It was one of our landlord’s pan-Alsatian, or whatever they call themselves, friends. He probably thought that you were the gendarmes on his track.”
Pagan shook his head. “No,” he said as he took off his coat. “The moon came out brightly for a second or two so that I could see quite clearly; and in that second it turned its head.”
“Well,” answered Baron lightly, “who was it? Our seductive Bertha! Was it a face you recognized?”
Pagan picked up the crumpled pink pyjamas that had been thrown on the bed when he had slipped hurriedly into his clothes. “No,” he answered slowly after a pause, “I didn’t recognize it. You see, it hadn’t a face at all—not a human face.”
Baron gaped. “But, my dear old Charles …” he began after a pause.
“It only turned half towards me,” went on Pagan slowly and abstractedly, “and I am sure it did not see me. But I naturally expected to see a face in profile—nose, chin and all that. But I didn’t—it was just a dark, blunt blob like—like an ape. But it was as big as a man.”
Baron stood up. “My dear old Charles,” he said in business-like tones, “what is wrong with you is that you have been reading too much Edgar Wallace—or drinking too much Bock Tigre; I don’t know which. What with those clouds hareing across the moon and causing the light to jump up and down like a stage storm, and the aforesaid Edgar Wallace, combined with too much Bock Tigre you imagine you have been seeing things. Now you go quietly off to by-byes and you will feel better in the morning.”
Pagan who was already in pyjamas said nothing. He shrugged his shoulders and climbed into bed.
