“No, they were the coves who did the knocking,” replied Pagan. “It’s Neanderthal man he means.”
The patron nodded his head emphatically. “Yes, yes, Neanderthal. What happened to him?” He went on seriously. “I have studied history, Messieurs. Always the remnants of the early race are driven into the mountains or deserts. Your Britons in Wales, your Picts in Scotland, your Bushmen in Africa. And Neanderthal man also, yes? That is why the folk-lore of wild forests and mountains is always full of demons and half-men. And here in the Vosges, where that folk-lore persists so strongly …” He finished with an expressive gesture of his hands.
“Then you actually think,” said Baron incredulously, “that the … the whatever-it-is up there is … is …?”
“A lone survival of that race, for evidences of which the scientists of all nations are hunting—and it is under their very noses,” answered the man solemnly.
Pagan struck a match and held it to the glowing bowl of his pipe, but he made no comment.
As they sauntered back to the hotel Pagan said, “That’s about the most amazing suggestion I have ever heard. I know that the miracles of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu and I could possibly believe in an ape-man in the dark interior of savage Papua, but in the heart of civilised Europe—in the Vosges … I ask you!”
“Don’t ask me, old Charles,” retorted Baron. “Most amazing rot I should say. But I would rather like to get to the bottom of it anyway.”
Pagan nodded. “So would I.” He walked on for a few steps in silence. “Suppose we put off the Honneck till another day and climb up to Bertha’s pub to-morrow instead,” he suggested presently.
Baron considered a moment and then he yawned. “Yes, suppose we do,” he agreed.
II
In the course of the next morning Pagan discovered that the ancient motor van of a village carrier in a neighbouring valley ran into Munster every morning and returned each evening, crossing the dividing ridge by a col that was little more than a mile from Bertha’s inn; and since, in his opinion, a tramp of a mile along the top of a ridge was infinitely preferable to one of three or four up the steep side of it, he contracted for the carriage that evening of himself and Baron as far as the col.
They retained their rooms at the Munster hotel for the following night and left there their suitcases and Pagan’s pack, taking with them only mackintoshes and one pack containing pyjamas and washing kit. And before setting out, Pagan bought a powerful electric torch and half a kilo of candles. “They will come in handy if we go messing about dug-outs in the dark,” he said as he stuffed them into the pack.
The ancient motor van proved to be an even more ramshackle affair than its unpromising appearance indicated. Broken places in the woodwork had been repaired with rough, unpainted boxwood, fastened with nails and string, and several broken or loose metal parts were held together by lengths of twisted wire. The gears rattled and scraped at every change, and the engine wheezed and knocked in a manner that raised grave doubts of its ability to mount the steep gradients ahead. The brakes doubtless were in the same crazy condition, and Baron regarded with a gloomy apprehensive eye the steep sharp zigzags by which the narrow road mounted the hillside. “If the box of loose scrap metal this optimist calls an engine conks out on one of those hairpin bends, Gawd help us!” he said gloomily.
“Amen to that,” answered Pagan piously. “But you can’t expect much of a ride for twelve francs, you know.”
“Twelve francs!” echoed Baron. “It’s rank robbery. Damn it, man, you could have bought an ounce of arsenic for five and committed suicide in comfort.”
The seating accommodation was not as comfortable as they could have wished. The interior of the little van was cramped and low, and the floor space was occupied by a miscellaneous collection of packages, parcels and knobbly sacks. It is true that the carrier had arranged a plank across a couple of sacks as a seat, but the swaying of the van caused it to slide off every few minutes, and owing to the lowness of the roof and the violent jolting of the apparently springless body, they had to sit with their shoulders bowed and their necks bent forward in order to avoid bumping their heads. Finally Baron unshipped the plank in disgust and made himself a less uncomfortable seat on the floor among the sacks and packages.
His spirits rose, however, as soon as they were clear of the houses and the long steady climb upwards had begun. Uncomfortable though the floor of the van might be, it was certainly very pleasant to lie there in the cool evening air and watch the mellow sunlight gilding the great wooded mountain-side across the valley; and as the crazy vehicle twisted and turned on its tortuous path upwards his view extended now down the valley between green long-shadowed slopes, and now up the valley towards the great purple ridge behind which the sun was setting. And at the precipitous hairpin bends he caught glimpses of the town below, fast dwindling in size and already shadowed by the approaching dusk.
Pagan steadied himself on one elbow to apply a lighted match to his pipe. “Reminds one … of the old days … of lorry jumping,” he murmured jerkily as he drew at the stem and the flame was sucked down to the bowl in a series of little swoops.
Baron nodded. “Do you remember the old box-body the Machine-Gun people used to take us into Amiens in?” he asked reminiscently.
Pagan pitched the burnt match over the tailboard. “The old bus Sweet Fanny Adams used to drive! Rather!” And he began to croon softly, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile …” Baron joined in. One air led inevitably to another, and encouraged by the carrier in front, they went through their repertoire of old war songs, timing them all to the bumping of the car and the coughing and wheezing of the crazy engine.
The sun had set before they reached the top, and a bank of purple night clouds loomed dark above the ridge westwards when the narrow road finally straightened out and curved gently over the bare crest between two grassy shoulders. The carrier brought his steaming, rattling vehicle to rest. Baron threw out the mackintoshes and pack, and they climbed rather stiffly out.
The silence was almost uncanny when the van had driven off and dropped below the crest. Up there in the translucent twilight there was no sound except the distant tinkle of a cow-bell. The great vault of the sky stretched overhead and swept down, it seemed, almost beneath their feet. Westwards it was opalescent above the wine hued bank of clouds: eastwards the light had faded to a purple haze. Pale stars began to shimmer one by one.
Pagan slung the pack over one shoulder. “There’s a long, long trail a-winding,” he crooned, and they set off through the twilight, up the slippery grassy slope eastwards. There was no path to guide them, but they knew that somewhere ahead lay the depression down which they had tramped that first rainy night to the inn.
A cool breeze fanned their cheeks as they trudged at last over the crest; and although the last rays of colour were fast fading in the western sky behind them, there was light enough to distinguish the stark, bare stumps of the shattered wood on the sickle shaped ridge ahead.
“There’s the old battlefield, anyway,” said Baron. “Bertha’s pub cannot be very far off now.”
“Somewhere half-right, I should think,” murmured Pagan with his eyes on the distant ragged stumps that showed black against the sky. “We shall see it when the next Very light goes up,” he added with a chuckle.
“Shut up, Charles,” growled Baron. “It’s too damned like it at this hour. I swear my ears have begun to stick out in the old way, listening for the scream of a crump!”
“Funny how it all comes back to one!” exclaimed Pagan. “Half-right here, I think.”
The ground sloped suddenly to a shallow, trough-shaped depression through which ran a narrow track that glimmered palely through the dusk. Baron turned down it confidently. “We know where we are now. And there’s the pub,” he added a moment later when the dark outline of a roof took shape against the sky. Five minutes later they were knocking at the door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE door was opened by a tall clumsy youth whose big bony wrists and ankles protruded prominently beyond the limits of his rough, soiled farm clothes. He stared at them stupidly for a moment, and Pagan’s exuberant French produced only a bewildered movement of his coarse, black-nailed fingers through his shock of dark hair; but as he stood just inside the doorway mumbling to himself in German, Bertha herself called from the kitchen to ask who was there.
Pagan stepped forward into the room. “Belle Bertha, Bold Baron, Charles Pagan, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all!” he answered cheerfully.
Bertha appeared suddenly in the kitchen doorway, ladle in hand like an avenging goddess, but her fierce expression gave place to a slow smile when her eyes rested on Pagan standing there beneath the lamp. He dumped the pack upon the brick floor and made her a bow.
“Bonjour, Bertha, and likewise guten abend,” he cried.
She dropped the ladle on a table and came forward, inclining her head to each in turn. “Bon jour, Messieurs,” she said.
Pagan regarded her with arms akimbo. “I declare she doesn’t look a day older than when last we met; does she, Baron?” he exclaimed.
“Well, you didn’t expect her to have produced grey hairs and a family since Tuesday, did you!” growled Baron.
“M’sieu dit?” asked Bertha.
“M’sieu dites through his hat—par son chapeau,” retorted Pagan. “And he’s not nice to know—nicht goot wissen.”
Baron groaned at this wholesale mutilation of three languages, but Pagan continued imperturbably, “Mein lieber Bertha, the question is—le question vraiment brulante—can you give us a meal? Je, I mean moi, and my boy friend here?”
“But yes, M’sieu, in one half hour.”
“Goot! And rooms for the night?”
She nodded her head and answered in English. “Ye-es, se same two chambers.”
“Encore goot!” exclaimed Pagan. “Bertha, your English gets better every day. Well, we will go and powder our noses—mettre la poudre sur nos nez, vous comprenez, while you get the meal, but mind it’s a big one—comme ca!” He held his hands wide apart horizontally. “And big bock aussi—comme ca.” He held them still wider apart but vertically.
The long room was empty of customers, but one of the tables was laid for one. “This pub is looking up,” commented Pagan, nodding towards the table, as they mounted the stairs. “We have a guest—unless it’s our friend with the mourning fingernails and the schoolboy complexion.”
“What beats me,” said Baron in an undertone, “is how they came up the other night and locked us in without our hearing them. Those stairs creak like the deuce.”
“They may have come through one of those other doors there,” said Pagan in the same low tones. “Evidently they lead to more rooms, and there may be a back staircase leading up to them.”
These two other doors opened on to the indoor balcony, on that portion of it which turned at right-angles and crossed the room below like a bridge. Pagan tiptoed to the balustrade and bent over it so that he could see nearly the whole length of the long brick-floored room. “Coast is clear,” he whispered. “Shall we have a look inside?”
But before Baron could reply, Pagan straightened quickly and turned the handle of his own door. “Well, here we are again,” he said aloud, and then added in a whisper, “Bertha!”
Bertha came up the stairs with two steaming cans of hot water. Before leaving, she smoothed out a wrinkle in the gay patchwork counterpane on Pagan’s bed and expressed the hope that he had slept well there.
“Like a log all night,” he fibbed. “Comme un grand morceau de bois!”
She nodded her head appreciatively and eyed the huge old bed admiringly with her hands clasped before her. “Mais oui, c’est vraiment magnifique,” she said in an awed voice, and then hurried back to the kitchen.
Baron came in from his room next door and lounged on the bed which had so excited Bertha’s admiration.
“How about having a peep at the other side of those two doors?” suggested Pagan.
Baron rested his head against the huge post at the foot of the bed and yawned. “The only thing is, Charles, that those rooms are probably occupied—or one of them at any rate. That table downstairs evidently means that there is someone else staying in the pub.”
“Well, we can pretend we have made a mistake in the room,” answered Pagan. “And it’s a fifty-fifty chance which room he is in, anyway. You keep cave while I have a look-see.”
“Right ’o,” agreed Baron.
But when Pagan opened the door and stepped out on to the indoor balcony, it was to find Bertha laying a table in the room below, and they had no choice other than to walk straight downstairs. They seated themselves on the padded seat against the wall facing the staircase and ordered Martinis. The landlord himself brought the drinks and at Pagan’s invitation joined them.
He seemed a simple, decent fellow, and during the conversation that was carried on in a mixture of French, English and German, both Pagan and Baron carefully avoided any reference to the real object of their return visit to the inn. The subject of the war cropped up inevitably and, as Baron had surmised, the landlord, whose name it appeared was Kleber, had served in the German Army but as a field hospital orderly. According to his own account he was pro-French, and quite satisfied with the present state of affairs, though he admitted that he had no grudge against the Germans.
“All this does not agree too well with your theory of a secret political club meeting here,” Pagan remarked when Kleber had gone.
“No, it doesn’t,” admitted Baron. “Still, as far as these very moderate opinions of his are concerned, we have only his word for it, and if he really is a secret agitator, it is not to be expected that he would avow his real opinions to two chance strangers like ourselves.”
“That’s so,” agreed Pagan. “Still, the fellow’s appearance and manner rather support his account of himself.”
“Well, what is the programme for to-night, anyway?” asked Baron.
Pagan tossed off the last of his drink. “Oh, have our meal. Keep a weather eye open meanwhile, and if nothing interesting happens we will take a stroll over the battlefield afterwards.”
Presently Bertha bustled in with two large steaming bowls of soup, one of which she placed upon the table laid for one, and the other upon the table laid for Pagan and Baron. Then she retired and rang a cracked gong.
“That ghastly row is for the benefit of the other guest, I suppose,” said Pagan. “I’m rather curious to see what he will be like.”
“So am I,” agreed Baron. “Though it is probably only another tourist on a holiday tramp.”
Baron had half risen from his seat, but Pagan pulled him back again, for a door had banged on the bridge part of the balcony above their heads. They were too directly beneath it to allow them a glimpse of anyone standing there, but the remainder of the balcony, that part of it which turned at right-angles along the side wall past their own two bedroom doors to the stairs, was immediately facing them. Footsteps sounded above their heads, and they watched that turn in the balcony beyond Baron’s door with some curiosity.
Their first glimpse of the stranger was of a hand and a red and gold sleeve sliding along the top of the carved balustrade.
“It’s a woman,” whispered Pagan.
Then a figure came into view passing Baron’s door, a graceful figure in a flimsy black frock and scarlet and gold bridge coat below a dark-dainty shingled head.
“Good lord, it’s Clare!” exclaimed Baron.
At the sound of her name she turned and looked down at them. “Why it’s Dicky and Mr. Pagan,” she exclaimed in surprise. She paused and leant upon the balustrade. “And what, pray, are you doing here?”
“Come down, Juliet, and we will tell you,” laughed Baron. “Though it seems to me a much more pertinent question is, ‘What are you doing here?”
She came down the stairs and they met her at the foot.
“Did you ever see such
a person, Charles?” smiled Baron. “She comes down to dine in a lonely inn …”
“Upon a misty mountain top,” put in Pagan.
“All togged up in fine clothes and soft raiment!” ended Baron.
“Like the lilies of the field,” contributed Pagan.
“Which toil not neither do they spin,” grinned Baron. “It can’t be that she has designs on you or me, Charles, because she didn’t know we would be here.”
“Perhaps she has a secret passion for mine host, Kleber—or our awkward friend of the black fingernails,” suggested Pagan.
“Perhaps it’s just vanity,” said Clare with a smile.
“Anyway, I think we ought to amalgamate these two tables,” said Baron. “What do you say, Clare?”
“Of course,” she agreed.
They transferred to their own table the knives, forks and spoons from the table laid for one. Then they sat down. Clare sat at the head with Pagan and Baron, one on each side.
“Are you here alone?” asked Baron.
Clare nodded her head. “Um-m!”
Baron assumed a severe expression. “You know, Clare, you really are the limit. You have no business to be here alone.”
“Why not?” she asked innocently.
“Why not?” he echoed. “Because this lonely inn is not the sort of place any woman ought to come to alone.”
“You play the heavy uncle awfully well, Dicky, but it’s all right since you and Mr. Pagan are here.”
“Yes, but you didn’t know that when you came. Why did you come, anyway?”
“Well, you see, Mr. Pagan’s account of this inn was so terribly enthralling that I simply had to come.”
“Yes, but why alone?” persisted Baron.
“Because I came on the spur of the moment, and in any case Cecil would not have been interested. He was called away to Gerardmer, and I went with him, intending to return to Munster to-morrow. But Gerardmer was too terribly dull, all Rolls Royce and pretty ladies—the sort of place I loathe. And so I started back this morning, and then on the way it occurred to me to spend the night here. Griffin and I consulted the map and found that we could get the car within half a mile or so, and—well here I am.”
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