The staff captain’s lips formed the words, “Awfully sorry! Good luck!” but his articulation was indistinct, and he went off hurriedly, still murmuring.
Carfax stood in the snow, watching him clamber down among the rocks, where an alpinist orderly joined them.
Gary presently appeared at the door of the observation station. “Has he gone?” he inquired, without interest.
“Yes,” said Carfax.
“Is he going to do anything for us?”
“I don’t know.... No!”
Gary lingered, kicked at a salamander, then turned and went indoors. Carfax sat down on a rock and sucked at his empty pipe.
Later the three officers in the observation station came out to the door again and looked at him, but turned back into the doorway without saying anything. And after a while Carfax, feeling slightly feverish, went indoors, too.
In the square, whitewashed room Gray and Flint were playing cut-throat poker; Gary was at the telephone, but the messages received or transmitted appeared to be of no importance. There had never been any message of importance from the Falcon Peak or to it. There was likely to be none.
Ennui, inertia, dry rot — and four men, sometimes silently, sometimes violently cursing their isolation, but always cursing it — afraid in their souls lest they fall to cursing one another aloud as they had begun to curse in their hearts.
Months ago rain had fallen; now snow fell, and vast winds roared around them from the Alps. But nothing else ever came to the Falcon Peak, except a fierce, red-eyed Lämmergeyer sheering above the peak on enormous pinions, or a few little migrating birds fluttering down, half frozen, from the high air lanes. Now and then, also, came to them a staff officer from below, British sometimes, sometimes French, who lingered no longer than necessary and then went back again, down into friendly deeps where were trees and fields and familiar things and human companionship, leaving them to their hell of silence, of solitude, and of each other.
The tide of war had never washed the base of their granite cliffs; the highest battle wave had thundered against the Vosges beyond earshot; not even a deadened echo of war penetrated those silent heights; not a Taube floated in the zenith.
In the squatty, whitewashed ruin which once had been the eyrie of some petty predatory despot, and which now served as an observatory for two idle divisions below in the valley, stood three telescopes. Otherwise the furniture consisted of valises, trunks, a table and chairs, a few books, several newspapers, and some tennis balls lying on the floor.
Carfax seated himself at one of the telescopes, not looking through it, his heavy eyes partly closed, his burnt-out pipe between his teeth.
Gary rose from the telephone and joined the card players. They shuffled and dealt listlessly, seldom speaking save in monosyllables.
After a while Carfax went over to the card table and the young lieutenant cashed in and took his place at the telescope.
Below in the Alsatian valley spring had already started the fruit buds, and a delicate green edged the lower snow line.
The lieutenant spoke of it wistfully; nobody paid any attention; he rose presently and went outdoors to the edge of the precipice — not too near, for fear he might be tempted to jump out through the sunshine, down into that inviting world of promise below.
Far underneath him — very far down in the valley — a cuckoo called. Out of the depths floated the elfin halloo, the gaily malicious challenge of spring herself, shouted up melodiously from the plains of Alsace — Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! — You poor, sullen, frozen foreigner up there on the snowy rocks! — Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
The lieutenant of Yukon infantry, whose name was Gray, came back into the room.
“There’s a bird of sorts yelling like hell below,” he said to the card players.
Carfax ran over his cards, rejected three, and nodded. “Well, let him yell,” he said.
“What is it, a Boche dicky-bird insulting you?” asked Gary, in his Yankee drawl.
Flint, declining to draw cards, got up and went out into the sunshine. When he returned to the table, he said: “It’s a cuckoo.... I wish to God I were out of this,” he added.
They continued to play for a while without apparent interest. Each man had won his comrades’ money too many times to care when Carfax added up debit and credit and wrote down each man’s score. In nine months, alternately beggaring one another, they had now, it appeared, broken about even.
Gary, an American in British uniform, twitched a newspaper toward himself, slouched in his chair, and continued to read for a while. The paper was French and two weeks old; he jerked it about irritably.
Gray, resting his elbows on his knees, sat gazing vacantly out of the narrow window. For a smart officer he had grown slovenly.
“If there was any trout fishing to be had,” he began; but Flint laughed scornfully.
“What are you laughing at? There must be trout in the valley down there where that bird is,” insisted Gray, reddening.
“Yes, and there are cows and chickens and houses and women. What of it?”
Gary, in his faded service uniform of a captain, scowled over his newspaper. “It’s bad enough to be here,” he said heavily; “so don’t let’s talk about it. Quit disputing.”
Flint ignored the order.
“If there was anything sportin’ to do — —”
“Oh, shut up,” muttered Carfax. “Do you expect sport on a hog-back?”
Gray picked up a tennis ball and began to play it against the whitewashed stone wall, using the palm of his hand. Flint joined him presently; Gary went over to the telephone, set the receiver to his ear and spoke to some officer in the distant valley on the French side, continuing a spiritless conversation while watching the handball play. After a while he rose, shambled out and down among the rocks to the spring where snow lay, trodden and filthy, and the big, black salamanders crawled half stupefied in the sun. All his loathing and fear of them kindled again as it always did at sight of them. “Dirty beasts,” he muttered, stumping and stumbling among the stunted fir trees; “some day they’ll bite some of these damn fools who say they can’t bite. And that’ll end ‘em.”
Flint and Gray continued to play handball in a perfunctory way while Carfax looked on from the telephone without interest. Gary came back, his shoes and puttees all over wet snow.
“Unless,” he said in a monotonous voice, “something happens within the next few days I’ll begin to feel queer in my head; and if I feel it coming on, I’ll blow my bally nut off. Or somebody’s.” And he touched his service automatic in its holster and yawned.
After a dead silence:
“Buck up,” remarked Carfax; “think how our men must feel in Belfort, never letting off their guns. Ross rifles, too — not a shot at a Boche since the damn war began!”
“God!” said Flint, smiting the ball with the palm of his hand, “to think of those Ross rifles rusting down there and to think of the pink-skinned pigs they could paunch so cleanly. Did you ever paunch a deer? What a mess of intestines all over the shop!”
Gary, still standing, began to kick the snow from his shoes. Gray said to him: “For a dollar of your Yankee money I’d give you a shot at me with your automatic — you’re that slack at practice.”
“If it goes on much longer like this I’ll not have to pay for a shot at anybody,” returned Gary, with a short laugh.
Gray laughed too, disagreeably, stretching his facial muscles, but no sound issued.
“We’re all going crazy together up here; that’s my idea,” he said. “I don’t know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your silence. Both make me sick.”
“Some day a salamander will nip you; then you’ll go loco,” observed Gary, balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. “Give me a shot at you?” he added. “I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look soft as a pudding to me.”
Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came floating up to the
window.
To Flint, English born, the call meant more than it did to Canadian or Yankee.
“In Devon,” he said in an altered voice, “they’ll be calling just now. There’s a world of primroses in Devon.... And the thorn is as white as the damned snow is up here.”
Gary growled his impatience and his profile of a Greek fighter showed in clean silhouette against the window.
“Aw, hell,” he said, “did I come out here for this? — nine months of it?” He hurled the tennis ball at the wall. “Can the home talk, if you don’t mind.”
The cuckoo was still calling.
“Did you ever play cuckoo,” asked Carfax, “at ten shillings a throw? It’s not a bad game — if you’re put to it for amusement.”
Nobody replied; Gray’s sunken, boyish face betrayed no interest; he continued to toss a tennis ball against the wall and catch it on the rebound.
Toward sundown the usual Alpine chill set in; a mist hung over the snow-edged cliffs; the rocks breathed steam under a foggy and battered moon.
CHAPTER III
CUCKOO!
Carfax, on duty, sat hunched up over the telephone, reporting to the fortress.
Gray came in, closed the wooden shutters, hung blankets over them, lighted an oil stove and then a candle. Flint took up the cards, looked at Gary, then flung them aside, muttering.
Nobody attempted to read; nobody touched the cards again. An orderly came in with soup. The meal was brief and perfectly silent.
Flint said casually, after the table had been cleared: “I haven’t slept for a month. If I don’t get some sleep I’ll go queer. I warn you; that’s all. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s so.”
“They’re dirty beasts to keep us here like this,” muttered Gary— “nine months of it, and not a shot.”
“There’ll be a few shots if things don’t change,” remarked Flint in a colourless voice. “I’m getting wrong in my head. I can feel it.”
Carfax turned from the switchboard with a forced laugh: “Thinking of shooting up the camp?”
“That or myself,” replied Flint in a quiet voice; “ever since that cuckoo called I’ve felt queer.”
Gary, brooding in his soiled tunic collar, began to mutter presently: “I once knew a man in a lighthouse down in Florida who couldn’t stand it after a bit and jumped off.”
“Oh, we’ve heard that twenty times,” interrupted Carfax wearily.
Gray said: “What a jump! — I mean down into Alsace below — —”
“You’re all going dotty!” snapped Carfax. “Shut up or you’ll be doing it — some of you.”
“I can’t sleep. That’s where I’m getting queer,” insisted Flint. “If I could get a few hours’ sleep now — —”
“I wish to God the Boches could reach you with a big gun. That would put you to sleep, all right!” said Gray.
“This war is likely to end before any of us see a Fritz,” said Carfax. “I could stand it, too, except being up here with such” — his voice dwindled to a mutter, but it sounded to Gary as though he had used the word “rotters.”
Flint’s face had a white, strained expression; he began to walk about, saying aloud to himself: “If I could only sleep. That’s the idea — sleep it off, and wake up somewhere else. It’s the silence, or the voices — I don’t know which. You dollar-crazy Yankees and ignorant Provincials don’t realize what a cuckoo is. You’ve no traditions, anyway — no past, nothing to care for — —”
“Listen to ‘Arry!” retorted Gary—”’Arry and his cuckoo!”
Carfax stirred heavily. “Shut up!” he said, with an effort. “The thing is to keep doing something — something — anything — except quarrelling.”
He picked up a tennis ball. “Come on, you funking brutes! I’ll teach you how to play cuckoo. Every man takes three tennis balls and stands in a corner of the room. I stand in the middle. Then you blow out the candle. Then I call ‘cuckoo!’ in the dark and you try to hit me, aiming by the sound of my voice. Every time I’m hit I pay ten shillings to the pool, take my place in a corner, and have a shot at the next man, chosen by lot. And if you throw three balls apiece and nobody hits me, then you each pay ten shillings to me and I’m cuckoo for another round.”
“We aim at random?” inquired Gray, mildly interested.
“Certainly. It must be played in pitch darkness. When I call out cuckoo, you take a shot at where you think I am. If you all miss, you all pay. If I’m hit, I pay.”
Gary chose three tennis balls and retired to a corner of the room; Gray and Flint, urged into action, took three each, unwillingly.
“Blow out the candle,” said Carfax, who had walked into the middle of the room. Gary blew it out and the place was in darkness.
They thought they heard Carfax moving cautiously, and presently he called, “Cuckoo!” A storm of tennis balls rebounded from the walls; “Cuckoo!” shouted Carfax, and the tennis balls rained all around him.
Once more he called; not a ball hit him; and he struck a match where he was seated upon the floor.
There was some perfunctory laughter of a feverish sort; the candle was relighted, tennis balls redistributed, and Carfax wrote down his winnings.
The next time, however, Gray, throwing low, caught him. Again the candle was lighted, scores jotted down, a coin tossed, and Flint went in as cuckoo.
It seemed almost impossible to miss a man so near, even in total darkness, but Flint lasted three rounds and was hit, finally, a stinging smack on the ear. And then Gary went in.
It was hot work, but they kept at it feverishly, grimly, as though their very sanity depended upon the violence of their diversion. They threw the balls hard, viciously hard. A sort of silent ferocity seemed to seize them. A chance hit cut the skin over Flint’s cheekbone, and when the candle was lighted, one side of his face was bright with blood.
Early in the proceedings somebody had disinterred brandy and Schnapps from under a bunk. The room had become close; they all were sweating.
Carfax emptied his iced glass, still breathing hard, tossed a shilling and sent in Gary as cuckoo.
Flint, who never could stand spirits, started unsteadily for the candle, but could not seem to blow it out. He stood swaying and balancing on his heels, puffing out his smooth, boyish cheeks and blowing at hazard.
“You’re drunk,” said Gray, thickly; but he was as flushed as the boy he addressed, only steadier of leg.
“What’s that?” retorted Flint, jerking his shoulders around and gazing at Gray out of glassy eyes.
“Blow out that candle,” said Gary heavily, “or I’ll shoot it out! Do you get that?”
“Shoot!” repeated Flint, staring vaguely into Gary’s bloodshot eyes; “you shoot, you old slacker — —”
“Shut up and play the game!” cut in Carfax, a menacing roar rising in his voice. “You’re all slackers — and rotters, too. Play the game! Keep playing — hard! — or you’ll go clean off your fool nuts!”
Gary walked heavily over and knocked the tennis balls out of Flint’s hands.
“There’s a better game than that,” he said, his articulation very thick; “but it takes nerve — if you’ve got it, you spindle-legged little cockney!”
Flint struck at him aimlessly. “I’ve got nerve,” he muttered, “plenty of nerve, old top! What d’you want? I’m your man; I’ll go you — eh, what?”
“Go on with the game, I tell you!” bawled Carfax.
Gary swung around: “Wait till I explain — —”
“No, don’t wait! Keep going! Keep playing! Keep doing something, for God’s sake!”
“Will you wait!” shouted Gary. “I want to tell you — —”
Carfax made a hopeless gesture: “It’s talk that will do the trick for us all — —”
“I want to tell you — —”
Carfax shrugged, emptied his full glass with a gesture of finality.
“Then talk, damn you! And we’ll all be at each other’s throats before morning.”
/> Gary got Gray by the elbow: “Reggie, it’s this way. We flip up for cuckoo. Whoever gets stuck takes a shot apiece from our automatics in the legs — eh, what?”
“It’s perfectly agreeable to me,” assented Gray, in the mincing, elaborate voice characteristic of him when drunk.
Flint wagged his head. “It’s a sportin’ game. I’m in,” he said.
Gary looked at Carfax. “A shot in the dark at a man’s legs. And if he gets his — it will be Blighty in exchange for hell.”
Carfax, sullen with liquor, shoved his big hand into his pocket, produced a shilling, and tossed it.
A brighter flush stained the faces which ringed him; the risky hazard of the affair cleared their sick minds to comprehension.
Tails turned uppermost; Flint and Gary were eliminated. It lay between Carfax and Gray, and the older man won.
“Mind you fire low,” said the young fellow, with an excited laugh, and walked into the middle of the room.
Gary blew out the candle. Presently from somewhere in the intense darkness Gray called “Cuckoo!” and instantly a slanting red flash lashed out through the gloom. And, when the deafening echo had nearly ceased: “Cuckoo!”
Another pistol crashed. And after a swimming interval they heard him moving. “Cuckoo!” he called; a level flame stabbed the dark; something fell, thudding through the staccato uproar of the explosion. At the same moment the outer door opened on the crack and Carfax’s orderly peeped in.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 840
