Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  There must be a way up. There must be a way to do it. That was what her wits were for. Now was the time to use that wild imagination of hers and find some way of getting up. She turned about on the slanting buttress and leaned against it. In dismay she saw that the mists had thickened and Cape Town had vanished except for a faint glow. This was going to be even worse than she had feared.

  Her foot had struck her handbag as she turned and she bent to pick it up, slung the strap over her shoulder. In an instant the possibility came to her. Eagerly now she stood on tiptoe, reaching toward the rough, just-out-of-reach projection overhead. When she had located it, she stood under it and looped the long strap of her handbag into a noose. Awkwardly she jumped and reached the noose up the wall above her. Twice she missed, and then the loop caught, hooked securely over the horny irregularity in the buttress.

  With each hand she grasped one side of the strap and pulled herself up, praying that the leather would hold her weight. With almost ridiculous ease she walked up the buttress a few steps to the place where she could stand on the tiny ledge. Holding to the loop with one hand, she reached with the other and found the edge of the mountain only a little way above. She had no need for the strap now. She flung her handbag on top ahead of her and pulled herself up the remaining few feet, crawling breathlessly onto a flat slab of rock. She was once more on top of the mountain.

  For a few moments she lay upon the cold stone, breathing hard with relief. Then she crawled away from the edge to safety and stood up in a pocket of rock to look about and plan a course of action. Now, surely, it would be possible to reach the teahouse and get help and a telephone. If she could find the way.

  If.

  She had never seen mist so thick. No lights were visible anywhere and there was an eerie stillness. Even the wind which had brought cold air into warm and created this heavy fog had stopped blowing and could not be counted on to clear the mountain of this quilting of cloud. The important thing was to keep her sense of direction. Behind her as she stood lay Cape Town, so she must move to her right. If she kept going in a more or less straight line she would reach the end of the mountain where safety lay.

  But in the mists were no landmarks to enable her to hold to a straight line. Laboriously she felt her way, clambering over rocks, edging around them, stumbling now and then, moving ahead. But there were boulders too large to climb and the mists blotted out what lay behind her and in ten minutes she knew she had lost all sense of direction.

  It was a dreadful feeling. The plain was so vast that she could wander on it for days if her directions were confused and she moved in circles. And there was always the danger of finding another precipice and this time falling to her death. Despairing and defeated, she sat down upon a low rock and leaned her head upon her knees, trying to think, praying for guidance. But now no inventive notion came to mind. There was nothing to do but sit where she was until the clouds thinned enough so that she could regain a sense of direction. Now there was no earthy ledge to lie upon, but only hard damp rock on every hand, rough and porous to her touch. Indeed, she was lost on the bottom of a prehistoric ocean bed and the world she knew had vanished from existence.

  24

  At first the faint glow in the mist at her left meant nothing. She supposed the clouds had drifted a little thinner there. Then she sat up with a start, realizing that a light was indeed moving about, shedding a faint radiance far away in the fog. She jumped to her feet and cupped her hands around her mouth, calling, shouting, unnerving herself by the very urgency of her unexpected hope.

  Had Dirk come back for her? But he would not have carried a light.

  The fourth time she called the answer reached her faintly and she wondered if she heard only an echo. Then the sound of a voice came distinctly through the mist. Someone was calling her name.

  “I’m over here!” she shouted. “Here, here!”

  The voice reached her more clearly, and the intensity of light increased. She knew the voice now—it was John’s. He had not waited till morning, he had come up through the dark and the mist. He had come for her!

  When he loomed out of the fog close by, she saw that he was not alone. Another man had come with him. Thomas Scott leaped lightly down from a high boulder and stood beside him.

  Susan waited on no ceremony. She flung herself into John’s arms and felt them close about her securely. She wept in relief against his shoulder and he held her there, stroking her hair gently. She had seen tenderness in his eyes earlier today and had turned away from it. Now she wanted it safely around her.

  “You’re all right now,” he said. “I couldn’t have made it up here without Thomas, but he knew the way, and the mist isn’t so bad down below.”

  She lifted her head to smile at Thomas. He held his own flashlight toward the ground, but his face was lighted indirectly by the torch John carried and there was a grim, unsmiling look in his eyes.

  “Dirk left you up here deliberately, didn’t he?” John said.

  “Yes!” She did not want to stir from the security of his arms. “It’s such a long story. I’ll give it to you later. But he didn’t try to hurt me. He only took the diamond away from me and went down the mountain.”

  “The diamond?” John said and looked at Thomas.

  Reluctantly Susan drew herself out of his arms. There had been enough of weak relief and it was time to regain her self-possession.

  “Yes. I found the diamond earlier down at Protea Hill. Dirk suspected that I had it and he made me give it to him. He’s gone now—down the mountain. He means to get out of the country with it. I was caught on a ledge up here—”

  “Don’t try to tell us everything now,” John said. “Do you feel a little better? Strong enough to try the way down?”

  “The way down? Can’t we go to the teahouse first? Why must we go down now?”

  Again John and Thomas exchanged glances.

  “The story isn’t as long a one to tell as you think, Susan,” John said gently. “We know some of it. Another batch of diamonds came to the house today. I’d warned Thomas to keep a lookout for any sort of package that Miss Bellman took charge of. Tell her, Thomas.”

  The colored man spoke in an expressionless monotone. “It was a package of drugs addressed to Mr. van Pelt. I watched and saw Miss Bellman take it up to her room before I went out today. When Mr. Cornish came home, I let him know.”

  “Mara had to talk,” John said, sounding grim. “There was nothing else she could do. So we got a picture of the whole scheme. Almost any convenient means was used for smuggling the diamonds to Cape Town, but always in a way that would point to Niklaas if they were discovered. From what Mara said, I gather Dirk intended to involve him deliberately just before he got out of the country. She turned a bit hysterical then and told me about your going up the mountain with Dirk. She said you’d never come down. So Thomas and I drove to the cable house and watched the last cars empty. We checked every man and woman who came down those steps until the cars stopped running. Then we drove to the place where an easy trail starts up and left the car.” He held out his hand to her. “Come along, Susan.”

  Someone else had said that to her tonight. “Come along, Susan.” But now the words were different, comforting. She could go with confidence and trust. She did not understand why the climb down the mountain was necessary when she felt so sore and weary, but she would do as John said.

  Thomas moved a little ahead to choose the way, holding his flashlight downward to light the rocks immediately at their feet. The mist did not defeat him as it had Susan.

  “Dirk has the diamond now,” she repeated dully as they started over the rocks. Somehow this was the only clear thought her mind clung to.

  “Don’t worry about it,” John said. “Let’s think of nothing except getting down the mountain. The police will have to come into this now and your father hasn’t a notion of what’s up. Before we call them in, he must know the whole story. That’s why we’re not going to the teahouse first.”
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  Thomas seemed to have a sixth sense about direction or else there were landmarks he knew even on this desolate sea bottom. She kept thinking of it that way—as the bottom of the sea. It was only a mountaintop when you could see across it and know there was a world somewhere lower down.

  The easy trail was not very easy in darkness and mist, but no fog was so thick that it could hide the immediate ground beneath her feet, and the flashlights made it possible to proceed a few steps at a time. John’s hand was always firmly about her own and she did not slip or fall. As they descended the mists began to thin. The tablecloth lay only across the top of the mountain. Now and then, through trees growing in the cleft of ravine they followed, lights far below were visible.

  Once, for Susan’s sake, they stopped to rest. She sat upon a grassy slope and tried to catch her breath and gather her wits. Somehow she felt a little numb and capable of only one or two persistent thoughts.

  “Will the police stop Dirk tomorrow?” she asked. “Perhaps it would be better if he could just get away.” Better for everyone, she thought, remembering the threats he had made against her father. “He has the diamond now—what more can he want?”

  Thomas moved impatiently. “Tell her. It’s better to tell her.”

  John nodded. “Thomas is right. You’ll have to know and it’s better to tell you now. This is the trail by which Dirk chose to come down. We met him—not very far from the top.”

  Susan sat still and tense, listening as he made her see what had happened.

  Thomas had been climbing ahead, finding the way. Dirk must have heard him coming up, and he stepped off the trail to let him go by.

  “I doubt if he knew who it was,” John said. “But I was throwing my light close to my feet and it reflected upward so he must have recognized me. We didn’t realize he was there. He had only to wait till I went by and he could have had the trail to himself. But he didn’t wait. He came at me swinging a bicycle chain before I had time to get out of his way.”

  Susan winced, remembering the chain.

  John had ducked just in time. The chain had cut him across the face, but it had not knocked him out as Dirk intended. And John still knew his commando tricks. Dizzy though he was from the blow, he dived in for a hold and made Dirk drop the chain. After that a fair fight might have been possible, but Thomas, hearing the sounds, had run back down the trail. His flashlight caught the shine of metal on the ground and he picked up the bicycle chain.

  “That was when Dirk saw him,” John said. “He forgot me as though I didn’t exist. My torch was on the ground and it showed Thomas standing there looking at Dirk with that chain in his hand.”

  John paused and glanced at Thomas, listening grimly to his words.

  “This is the hard part to tell you, Susan,” John said.

  Susan spoke softly. “Dirk hated you. I think he would have killed you if he could. Tell me what happened.”

  “Thomas never touched him with the chain,” John went on. “Or in any other way, for that matter. I didn’t need help at that point. But Dirk saw him and I think his own conscience did the rest. I’ve seen frightened men before and Dirk was frightened. He knew the things he had done in the past and I think he expected no mercy from a man whose skin was dark. He thought Thomas meant to kill him with that chain and he was more afraid of him than he would have been of me or any white man. Because there was so much reason. That time with the sjambok, perhaps, and other times as well.”

  Susan could see the picture as John made it clear. Dirk had stood frozen in fear, staring at the chain in Thomas’s hands. He said something like “Don’t!” but the word choked in his throat. Thomas had known what was happening to him. Scornfully he threw the chain at Dirk’s feet, knowing the white man could not use it.

  “Dirk picked up the chain,” John went on. “But his hands were shaking and his eyes never left Thomas. I said, ‘Drop that!’ but instead he stuffed it into his jacket pocket. Then he lost his head and turned to run. He fled without sense or reason—and we were still high upon the mountain and it was dark.”

  John took Susan’s cold hands into his own warm ones and held them.

  “He fell a long way,” Thomas said quietly. “Down into a rock gully.”

  “We climbed down to where he was,” John said. “But there was nothing we could do. He was dead when we got to him. We had to go on to the top after you. We emptied his pockets so he wouldn’t be robbed in the event that anyone found him before the police could reach him in the morning. Then we covered him with his jacket and climbed to the top. Thomas has everything in his pockets. We can show you when we reach Protea Hill.”

  Susan was glad that John was holding her hands so tightly. Now she could think only of Dirk’s fair head bent before her up there on the mountain ledge. And of Dirk as a boy down at Camp’s Bay, laughing at a little girl who wanted to take his picture with a broken camera. All else was wiped away. There were no tears, only a thickness of old grief in her throat. She was aware that both John and Thomas were watching her.

  “I’ll be all right,” she told them. They could not know that she had lost Dirk long before this and that her pity now was only for a man who might have been so much more than he was. A man who had been destroyed by what he had become. “Let’s go down,” she said. “Let’s get back to my father.”

  Later she remembered few details of that climb down the trail in the dark. It was a relief when they came out at the bottom and found Niklaas’s car where Thomas had left it at the foot of the path. It was Thomas who drove them home. Susan sat in the back seat with John’s arm about her and they talked not at all.

  Niklaas van Pelt was waiting in his study when they reached the house. They went in at once to see him.

  “I’ve been waiting,” Niklaas said. “Something has happened, hasn’t it? Something is wrong. I think Mara has gone away.”

  “She can’t get far,” John said, “The police will pick her up tomorrow.”

  He told the story then as simply as he could and there was a deep sadness in her father’s face as he learned of the smuggling of diamonds that had gone on in this very house, with himself as a shield. Now Susan could tell what she had seen in the flower market.

  She picked up his heavy cane with the three flags embossed upon the silver head and ran her fingers down to the tip. The reinforced lower section was difficult to turn; no casual hand would have found the secret compartment. But when she unscrewed it the tube was revealed, where diamonds could be hidden. Under the shelter of the bench that held her tubs of flowers, the woman in the market had been able to remove the tiny industrial stones from their hiding place. This had been the next step on the way out of Cape Town—and again Dirk would have seemed free of any involvement and Niklaas van Pelt would have been incriminated if there had been a slip. No wonder Mara and Dirk, learning of the pictures Susan had taken, had been worried. Mara must have persuaded Thomas that the pictures could injure Niklaas in some way, and he had told Willi to destroy them.

  But now it was over. Now the police could learn the truth without danger to her father.

  While Susan told him about the cane, Niklaas took it into his hands and found the hiding place for himself. Sorrow lay heavy upon him and Susan knew that, no matter what Dirk might have thought, Niklaas had loved him and now grieved over what he had done.

  “Diamonds have been destroying men ever since they were discovered,” he said softly; “women too,” and Susan knew he was thinking of Claire. “But there’s something more important that concerns me now. John, have you made up your mind? Have the things I’ve told you this afternoon convinced you?”

  “You have convinced me,” John said gravely. “You and Thomas.”

  “Can we use him, Thomas?” Niklaas asked.

  Listening in bewilderment, Susan looked from one to the other, and Dirk’s puzzling words on the mountaintop about her father’s notion of helping the country returned to her mind.

  “We can use any who will work with us
in good faith,” Thomas said. There was an air of quiet invincibility about him.

  “Men like you, John,” Niklaas pointed out, “can’t run away from South Africa in its time of greatest need just because you dislike some of the things that are happening here.”

  “I know that now,” John answered gravely. “I mean to stay.”

  “But doing what?” Susan asked in bewilderment. “What is there anyone can do?”

  “There’s no such thing as a situation in which nothing can be done,” her father said. “Not while there are men of courage. There are those in South Africa today, both black and white, who are in need of aid. A few of these have found a haven in this house. And it has been a quiet place for men to come and talk. And plan. There are more of us who believe in freedom than you might think—among Afrikaners as well as English-speaking South Africans. Many who believe that the only hope for the country is to act in whatever way we can against despotism and prejudice. And to make sure our numbers grow. There’s work for you too, Susan. Perhaps through your pictures. The pressure of outside opinion matters more than it ever has before. Even Hans with his thumb in the dike must listen eventually. So, will you stay? Here in this house?”

  “South Africa is my home now,” Susan answered simply.

  She was beginning to understand many things: her father’s long and careful testing of John, his arguments that seemed to take the wrong course in order to challenge the younger man. Behind her eyes there was a stinging of tears, but they were tears of pride and love for her father. There was something tremendous about him and she could delight now in being his daughter.

  “You brought Dirk’s things?” John asked Thomas. “We might have a look at them before the police come.”

  Thomas reached into his pocket. One at a time he placed upon Niklaas’s desk the articles that had been in Dirk’s pocket. His billfold and loose change. His cigarette case and lighter. Then something that clanked as he set it down on the polished surface—the coiled bicycle chain. And after that a small gold ring with an orchid-pink stone in its setting. Susan looked quickly away at the sight of it. It had not brought Dirk the luck he needed, after all.