Bertha looked at him with gratitude in her eyes. “Bonne nuit, M’sieu—and thank you.”
Clare said Good night from the foot of the stairs, and Baron called, “Bon soir, Bertha,” from out of sight on the balcony.
Pagan hummed a little tune as he went up the stairs.
“Well?” asked Clare with raised eyebrows as they met outside Baron’s door.
“Don’t go to bed for half an hour,” he whispered, and then he added aloud, “Good night.”
“Good night, Clare,” said Baron.
“Good night, Dicky. Good night, Mr. Pagan.”
II
Baron came in to Pagan’s room through the connecting door. “Well, there is one thing I am certain of at any rate,” he remarked. “And that is that there is something behind all this. I very much had my doubts at first, but after Bertha’s exhibition to-night, I have none—unless she has fallen for you, Charles, and is terrified that you will break your neck in the dark.”
Pagan slowly unrolled his oilskin tobacco pouch and began to fill his pipe. “She has got the wind up all right,” he said. “But not on my account.”
Baron lit a cigarette. “What was it she whispered?” he asked casually.
“Them as ax no questions isn’t told a lie,” Pagan quoted with a grin.
“Anyway, Charles, I think you were a mug to give in so easily.”
Pagan shook his head. “A desperate woman doesn’t respond to argument—or force either for that matter. And she was desperate. I swear I have never seen a more perfect impersonation of an animal defending its young. Didn’t you see the look in her eyes? She was scared stiff; but not for herself.”
“For whom then?” asked Baron. “Kleber—her father?”
Pagan shrugged his shoulders. “That remains to be seen.”
“What did she whisper, Charles?” asked Baron again.
Pagan laughed. “Why nothing, you old lout. Except to ask me to make you take your coats off; which I did—because I knew that nothing short of brute force, and a good deal of that, would get us through that door.”
Baron sat down upon the bed. “There is always the window,” he remarked.
Pagan held a match to his pipe. “Yes. That’s why I made sure of having our coats up here.”
Baron hooked his arm round the huge bedpost. “Do you think there is any chance of her going to bed and giving us a chance to slip out?”
“I doubt it. You know what these peasants are. At the best of times they don’t go to bed till after midnight and are up again at four.”
Baron wandered restlessly about the room. “Shall I have a peep out and see what is happening?” he asked presently.
“No harm in that,” assented Pagan; and just before Baron reached the door, he added, “Bet you twenty francs it’s locked.”
Baron turned sharply and looked at Pagan, and then he moved quietly to the door and laid a hand upon the handle. “The young bitch!” he exclaimed. “You win, Charles.”
Pagan stood up and grinned. “Just what I expected,” he remarked. “And I’m rather glad in a way. It means the window now. All along I haven’t been too happy about taking Clare on a stunt like this. At least the window settles that question, and I’m glad. She can’t go down the rope.”
Baron smiled cryptically. “You think so? By the by, Charles, I was very much amused at you treating Clare rough, so to speak. She’s not used to that sort of thing.”
Pagan took his pipe from his mouth and regarded the glowing bowl thoughtfully. “Um! She took it rather well on the whole, I thought.”
“Very well indeed,” asserted Baron. “She was half-amused and half-indignant. But, by Jove, Charles, if she hadn’t liked you she would have let you have it.”
Pagan stood up. “Anyway we must let her know what we are going to do and tell her she need not stay up.”
Baron nodded agreement. “Yes, but how? Our bashful Bertha has probably locked my door too—and Clare’s.”
“That’s pretty certain,” agreed Pagan. “We shall have to move the press in your room, that’s all.”
“By Jove, yes, the door. I had forgotten. Well what about it?”
Pagan glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Yes, there’s no point in keeping her up. But we must be careful not to make a row.”
They went into Baron’s room, and inch by inch and without noise swung the heavy press round till it stood almost at right-angles to the wall. Baron rapped softly upon the door that was disclosed behind it. The sound of movement came from the next room, and then Baron put his head close to the jamb and called softly, “Clare, Clare! You can open the door now; we have moved the press. But don’t make a noise.”
A key grated in the lock and the door swung slowly open. Clare’s head came round the edge of the door.
“Come on,” grinned Baron. “There’s not much room, but you are not fat and forty yet.”
Clare squeezed round between the door and the press into the room. She still wore her hat and walking shoes, but had discarded her mackintosh. Pagan pulled up a chair. She sat down and looked from one to the other. “Well?”
“Bertha has locked us in again,” explained Baron. “At least she has locked Charles’s door and mine, and it’s a hundred to one that yours is locked as well.”
“I like that girl’s spirit,” said Clare decisively. “But she badly wants spanking.”
“Hear, hear!” agreed Baron. “Well the only way out now is by the window—the way Charles and I went last time. And so Charles has brought you in here to tell you that presently he and I are going down the rope and you …” he smiled knowingly at her, “you are to go to bed.”
She smiled back at him amusedly and glanced at Pagan.
Pagan said, “I’m sorry, Miss Lindsey, but you see there is no other way.”
“You are not sorry at all,” she retorted. “You are glad.”
Pagan grinned guiltily.
“You think I should be a terrible nuisance.”
Pagan shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’m not thinking about myself: I’m thinking about you.”
“Since you are smoking in your bedroom, Dicky, I suppose I may.”
“Sorry!” said Baron, and he offered her his cigarette case.
She took a cigarette and he held a match. She blew a little cloud of smoke upwards.
“Anyway, you are glad I cannot come with you,” she continued to Pagan.
Pagan smiled. “Yes, I’m afraid I am.”
She looked up at Baron. “He’s very callow, isn’t he?”
“Very,” agreed Baron with a grin.
“What makes him think that I cannot come just because the door is locked?” she asked innocently.
Baron lit a cigarette. “I expect it’s the rope, you know,” he said confidentially as though Pagan were not within hearing. “Old Charles has early Victorian ideas about women. And a female with vapours in a crinoline would be rather a distressing sight on a rope.”
“It would!” agreed Clare.
“But really,” protested Pagan, “it is out of the question. You know yourself, Baron, that we didn’t find it too easy getting back again and …”
“Don’t be an ass, Charles,” retorted Baron. “I have never seen Clare on a rope, but I’m willing to bet she can shin up one as fast as you or I. She has legs like us, hasn’t she?”
“Really, Dicky!” protested Clare.
Baron grinned. “When I say like ours, I mean more ornamental but just as useful.”
Pagan shrugged his shoulders with comic hopelessness. He looked at Clare. “You are determined to come?”
“Absolutely,” she answered.
“Very well then, put on your coat while Baron and I rig up the rope.”
“There is one thing about old Charles,” said Baron. “He’s not pig-headed: he does know when he’s beaten.”
“He is quite docile really,” said Clare smiling at him.
They took down the bell-pulls and the curtain loops and knott
ed them together. Baron stood upon a chair and fastened one end to the hook above the window. They put on their mackintoshes and hats. Pagan pulled the torch from his pocket and took a last look round. “Now we are ready,” he said. “Out with the light.”
CHAPTER NINE
I
THEY turned out the lamps in all three rooms. Baron drew back the curtains and revealed his dark form silhouetted vaguely in the dim rectangle of the window. Pagan threw out the loose end of the rope.
“I go first,” he said. “And then Miss Lindsey. Don’t get on the rope till I am off it; and be very careful at the bottom. It is a steep slope and a drop that will not bear thinking about.” He climbed on to the sill. “Will you be all right?” he asked.
“Quite,” she assured him.
“You would not rather be tied and have us lower you?”
“Of course not,” she laughed. “What a long time you take!”
He twisted his feet about the rope and lowered himself gently over the sill. Her head came out of the window above him, and as he hung just below the sill with his head thrown back, her face was close above his, so close that in spite of the darkness he could see the sparkle of her eyes.
“Do be careful,” he whispered.
She nodded her small head at him. “I will. Promise,” she answered.
He slid down, and at the bottom dug a foothold. Then he shook the rope gently. “All right,” he called softly.
A dark shadow came over the sill, and Clare’s dim form came slowly down the rope. He put an arm round her to steady her. “Don’t let go the rope till your feet are firmly in the footholds I have dug,” he whispered. “Then put your hands against the wall and lean inwards.”
She did as he had said and moved sideways away from the rope. Baron slid down and closed up beside her. “Right ’o, Charles,” he whispered. “Go ahead.”
“I make the footholds,” whispered Pagan to Clare. “And you step into each when I’ve left it. It’s slow work, but we can’t afford to make a mistake here. Lean well inwards all the time, and don’t look behind you.”
He moved off to the right, kicked a foothold, and put a hand back to Clare. “Now then—into the last one I was standing on. Have you got it? Good! Stay there while I make the next one.”
Slowly, in this laborious fashion they progressed sideways and reached the end of the wall where the bank and the pailings faced them. Pagan scrambled over. “Wait,” he said to Clare. Baron followed him; then they each took one of Clare’s hands and bodily they swung her up and over.
“That’s all right,” whispered Pagan. “We are on the little terrace beside the house. Another fifty yards and we shall be clear—unless Baron kicks over a few tables and chairs as he did last time.”
They stole across the terrace and climbed the palings that bordered it. Twenty yards further on they halted.
“Now then, Charles, which way? You remember the lie of the land?”
“Rather,” answered Pagan. “There is a choice of two. Either to the right, round the shoulder of the hill and down on to that old road that leads up on the other side past all the dug-outs, or else keep to this side and pass over the saddle by the quarry. That would be straight ahead and then bear off to the right.”
“The quarry is the nearest way to the middle of things,” said Baron.
“Yes, but it’s the roughest going. It is all right once we are over the saddle, but it is pretty badly ploughed up all round the quarry.”
“If you are thinking of me,” interposed Clare, “don’t—unless I have not come up to expectations so far.”
“You have been perfectly wonderful,” Pagan told her. “Well, Baron, what do you think—the quarry?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Come on then.”
They set off up the hill. It was tiring work trudging along in the dark over the rough grass, and on more than one occasion they nearly blundered into outcrops of rock. Distantly from far below them in the valley they heard the shrill whistle of an engine, but around them all was dark and very silent. A chill night breeze penetrated the upturned collars of their mackintoshes.
“There will be a moon later on,” said Pagan, “and I wish it would hurry up. I don’t want to have to use the torch and advertise our presence to half Alsace.”
To the right they were aware of rising ground, a loom of concrete darkness against the obscurity of the night. Pagan peered at the faint line against the sky till his eyes ached. “I think that is the saddle half-right,” he said at last. “The ground seems to dip a bit there. But we don’t want to turn in too soon or we shall run into a ghastly mess up of wire and holes.”
They trudged on another hundred yards, and then Pagan edged cautiously to the right. They seemed to be on a rough track which threaded a maze of shell-holes, and they moved slowly in single file, Clare in the middle. Presently a dim, ghostly light crept down the tortured ground ahead. Behind them a bright silver rim peeped above the hard black outline of a hill that had been invisible.
“The moon at last,” exclaimed Pagan. “If we give him a chance to get a bit higher we shall be able to go ahead much faster.”
They halted and stood close together watching the moon sail slowly above the hill-top. The chill night breeze blew in their faces.
“It is pretty cool up here,” remarked Baron.
“Ay, ’tis a nipping and an eager air,” said Pagan. “Forward to the breach.”
They turned to find the saddle now bathed in soft silvery light. Tangles of rusty wire stood out black and web-like against the silver sheen of the grass; countless shell-holes were little pools of darkness. Shivered tree trunks stood black and silver edged upon the debris-littered slope to the right; the quarry to the left was dark and menacing, but the concrete pill-box on top shone like liquid aluminium in the moonlight. It was as though the whole immense charnel house and rubbish heap had risen dripping from a phosphorescent sea. Nothing moved: there was no sound.
Clare uttered a little gasp of dismay and clutched Pagan’s arm.
“Scene, a blasted heath,” he murmured grimly. “When shall we three meet again! In thunder, lightning or in rain.” But he was more conscious of the pressure on his arm than of the desolation surrounding him.
Clare let fall her hand. “I did not know it would be like this,” she said in an awed voice. “And so silent and still.”
Pagan nodded. “I have known it almost as quiet as this in the line even during the war,” he answered in a low voice. “Just such nights as this. The moon sailing away up there … no sound. Beautiful in a way, don’t you think?”
“Yes—very,” she whispered. “But so … so terribly desolate and dead.” She gazed at it in silence for some moments, and then she spoke in a low voice without turning her head. “So it was like this, Dicky, where—where Roger died.”
Baron stirred uncomfortably. “Well, yes—pretty much. Though the country is much flatter up there at St. Quentin, you know.”
She nodded. “Yes, I saw it—last year. I thought it very desolate, but they told me it had been tidied up. Now I know what they meant. It was like this once.”
“Perhaps you would rather we did not go on,” suggested Baron.
“No, no,” she answered hurriedly. “It’s horrible, but it’s fascinating too, and I am glad I have seen it. I used to picture it, you know, all those years ago—particularly at night. Now I—know.”
They moved on slowly along the track in single file amid the tangles of wire, the shell-holes, the crumbling, half-filled trenches and the riven tree stumps. Often they stopped to listen, but no sound reached them except the creaking of a shivered branch in the wind or the faint squeak of rats in a mouldering trench. The moon sailed serenely above the hill-tops.
“Like being out on patrol,” murmured Baron. “Just the quiet sort of night that always put the wind up me.”
“It really was as quiet as this sometimes?” queried Clare.
“Almost,” answered Baron. “A
Very light would go up, and then you stood stock still—like this.” He remained motionless in an absurd attitude. “I’ve seen some comic looking groups out in no-man’s-land at night. But often it would be nearly as quiet as this. A low rumble north or south—distant gunfire, you know, and an occasional crack of a rifle. Then you would hear the round go whimpering down the valley perhaps, or it would ricochet off a bit of wire which would twang like a guitar. But I never liked quiet nights. I had too much imagination, I suppose. My ears used to stick out a mile listening for the guns to open up.”
“Horrible!” she said. “Horrible.”
They passed safely over the saddle and down to the narrow road on the other side. “Which way?” asked Baron.
“Oh up, I think,” answered Pagan. “Up and round back along the top by that track that follows the old fire trench.”
It was dark on that narrow road that slanted up the steep flank of the debris-littered ridge. The moon was hidden by the ridge itself, but the shivered poles of the trees on top stood out above them black and stark against the silver radiance of the sky. The deep valley to the right was a pit of inky darkness from which a bare silvery-grey summit rose island-like into the moonlight.
“These are old Bosche dug-outs on the left,” remarked Baron to Clare. “Some of ’em still have names painted over the door. Lend me the torch, Charles.”
Pagan handed over the torch, and Baron flashed the light upon the concrete wall of a dug-out that stood, half-overgrown with weeds beside the track.
“Would you like to peep inside?” he asked.
Clare nodded. “Yes, terribly.”
“Nothing much to see, I’m afraid,” he said when they stood inside and the beam of the torch revealed only bare, greeny-grey concrete walls and a heap of earth and rubbish on the floor. “Pretty mouldy now, but this must have been quite snug when it had bunks and things in it.”
Clare shivered. “Is this the sort of place you used to live in, Dicky?”
“Well, hardly as palatial as this,” he answered. “You see, this is a Bosche dug-out—concrete and all that. I never had the luck to run across this sort of thing on our side of the line, did you, Charles?”
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