CHAPTER XV

St Anton

Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the tough and

shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old velveteen

shooting-coat bequeathed to him by a former German master—speaking the

guttural tongue of the Grisons, and with all his belongings in one

massive rucksack, came out of the little station of St Anton and

blinked in the frosty sunshine. He looked down upon the little old

village beside its icebound lake, but his business was with the new

village of hotels and villas which had sprung up in the last ten years

south of the station. He made some halting inquiries of the station

people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him to the place he

sought—the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an English

_interné_, one Peter Pienaar.

The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey. A

fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British major-general. As

such he had been the inmate of an expensive Paris hotel, till one

morning, in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he had taken the

Paris-Mediterranean Express with a ticket for an officers’ convalescent

home at Cannes. Thereafter he had declined in the social scale. At

Dijon he had been still an Englishman, but at Pontarlier he had become

an American bagman of Swiss parentage, returning to wind up his

father’s estate. At Berne he limped excessively, and at Zurich, at a

little back-street hotel, he became frankly the peasant. For he met a

friend there from whom he acquired clothes with that odd rank smell,

far stronger than Harris tweed, which marks the raiment of most Swiss

guides and all Swiss porters. He also acquired a new name and an old

aunt, who a little later received him with open arms and explained to

her friends that he was her brother’s son from Arosa who three winters

ago had hurt his leg wood-cutting and had been discharged from the

levy.

A kindly Swiss gentleman, as it chanced, had heard of the deserving

Joseph and interested himself to find him employment. The said

philanthropist made a hobby of the French and British prisoners

returned from Germany, and had in mind an officer, a crabbed South

African with a bad leg, who needed a servant. He was, it seemed, an

ill-tempered old fellow who had to be billeted alone, and since he

could speak German, he would be happier with a Swiss native. Joseph

haggled somewhat over the wages, but on his aunt’s advice he accepted

the job, and, with a very complete set of papers and a store of

ready-made reminiscences (it took him some time to swot up the names of

the peaks and passes he had traversed) set out for St Anton, having

dispatched beforehand a monstrously ill-spelt letter announcing his

coming. He could barely read and write, but he was good at maps, which

he had studied carefully, and he noticed with satisfaction that the

valley of St Anton gave easy access to Italy.

As he journeyed south the reflections of that porter would have

surprised his fellow travellers in the stuffy third-class carriage. He

was thinking of a conversation he had had some days before in a café at

Dijon with a young Englishman bound for Modane....

We had bumped up against each other by chance in that strange flitting

when all went to different places at different times, asking nothing of

each other’s business. Wake had greeted me rather shamefacedly and had

proposed dinner together.

I am not good at receiving apologies, and Wake’s embarrassed me more

than they embarrassed him. “I’m a bit of a cad sometimes,” he said.

“You know I’m a better fellow than I sounded that night, Hannay.”

I mumbled something about not talking rot—the conventional phrase. What

worried me was that the man was suffering. You could see it in his

eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than ever before, and he and I

became true friends, for he laid bare his soul before me. That was his

trouble, that he could lay bare his soul, for ordinary healthy folk

don’t analyse their feelings. Wake did, and I think it brought him

relief.

“Don’t think I was ever your rival. I would no more have proposed to

Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She was so sure of

herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she terrified me. My

type of man is not meant for marriage, for women must be in the centre

of life, and we must always be standing aside and looking on. It is a

damnable thing to be left-handed.”

“The trouble about you, my dear chap,” I said, “is that you’re too hard

to please.”

“That’s one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate

more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our

mainspring. Odd, isn’t it, for people who preach brotherly love? But

it’s the truth. We’re full of hate towards everything that doesn’t

square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves.

Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that they’ve no time

or inclination to detest what thwarts them. We’ve no cause—only

negatives, and that means hatred, and self-torture, and a beastly

jaundice of soul.”

Then I knew that Wake’s fault was not spiritual pride, as I had

diagnosed it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.

“I see more than other people see,” he went on, “and I feel more.

That’s the curse on me. You’re a happy man and you get things done,

because you only see one side of a case, one thing at a time. How would

you like it if a thousand strings were always tugging at you, if you

saw that every course meant the sacrifice of lovely and desirable

things, or even the shattering of what you know to be unreplaceable?

I’m the kind of stuff poets are made of, but I haven’t the poet’s gift,

so I stagger about the world left-handed and game-legged.... Take the

war. For me to fight would be worse than for another man to run away.

From the bottom of my heart I believe that it needn’t have happened,

and that all war is a blistering iniquity. And yet belief has got very

little to do with virtue. I’m not as good a man as you, Hannay, who

have never thought out anything in your life. My time in the Labour

battalion taught me something. I knew that with all my fine aspirations

I wasn’t as true a man as fellows whose talk was silly oaths and who

didn’t care a tinker’s curse about their soul.”

I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. “I think I

know you. You’re the sort of chap who won’t fight for his country

because he can’t be sure that she’s altogether in the right. But he’d

cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.”

His face relaxed in a slow smile. “Queer that you should say that. I

think it’s pretty near the truth. Men like me aren’t afraid to die, but

they haven’t quite the courage to live. Every man should be happy in a

service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn’t get on in any

service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can’t swallow things merely

because I’m told to. My sort are always talking about ‘service’, but we

haven’t the temperament to serve. I’d give all I have to be an ordinary

cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded outsider who finds fault with

the machinery.... Take a great violent high-handed fellow like you. You

can sink yourself till you become only a name and a number. I couldn’t

if I tried. I’m not sure if I want to either. I cling to the odds and

ends that are my own.”

“I wish I had had you in my battalion a year ago,” I said.

“No, you don’t. I’d only have been a nuisance. I’ve been a Fabian since

Oxford, but you’re a better socialist than me. I’m a rancid

individualist.”

“But you must be feeling better about the war?” I asked.

“Not a bit of it. I’m still lusting for the heads of the politicians

that made it and continue it. But I want to help my country. Honestly,

Hannay, I love the old place. More, I think, than I love myself, and

that’s saying a devilish lot. Short of fighting—which would be the sin

against the Holy Spirit for me—I’ll do my damnedest. But you’ll

remember I’m not used to team work. If I’m a jealous player, beat me

over the head.”

His voice was almost wistful, and I liked him enormously.

“Blenkiron will see to that,” I said. “We’re going to break you to

harness, Wake, and then you’ll be a happy man. You keep your mind on

the game and forget about yourself. That’s the cure for jibbers.”

As I journeyed to St Anton I thought a lot about that talk. He was

quite right about Mary, who would never have married him. A man with

such an angular soul couldn’t fit into another’s. And then I thought

that the chief thing about Mary was just her serene certainty. Her eyes

had that settled happy look that I remembered to have seen only in one

other human face, and that was Peter’s.... But I wondered if Peter’s

eyes were still the same.

I found the cottage, a little wooden thing which had been left perched

on its knoll when the big hotels grew around it. It had a fence in

front, but behind it was open to the hillside. At the gate stood a bent

old woman with a face like a pippin. My make-up must have been good,

for she accepted me before I introduced myself.

“God be thanked you are come,” she cried. “The poor lieutenant needed a

man to keep him company. He sleeps now, as he does always in the

afternoon, for his leg wearies him in the night.... But he is brave,

like a soldier.... Come, I will show you the house, for you two will be

alone now.”

Stepping softly she led me indoors, pointing with a warning finger to

the little bedroom where Peter slept. I found a kitchen with a big

stove and a rough floor of planking, on which lay some badly cured

skins. Off it was a sort of pantry with a bed for me. She showed me the

pots and pans for cooking and the stores she had laid in, and where to

find water and fuel. “I will do the marketing daily,” she said, “and if

you need me, my dwelling is half a mile up the road beyond the new

church. God be with you, young man, and be kind to that wounded one.”

When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in Peter’s

arm-chair and took stock of the place. It was quiet and simple and

homely, and through the window came the gleam of snow on the diamond

hills. On the table beside the stove were Peter’s cherished

belongings—his buck-skin pouch and the pipe which Jannie Grobelaar had

carved for him in St Helena, an aluminium field match-box I had given

him, a cheap large-print Bible such as padres present to well-disposed

privates, and an old battered _Pilgrim’s Progress_ with gaudy pictures.

The illustration at which I opened showed Faithful going up to Heaven

from the fire of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that has just been

flushed. Everything in the room was exquisitely neat, and I knew that

that was Peter and not the Widow Summermatter. On a peg behind the door

hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a pocket I recognised a

sheaf of my own letters. In one corner stood something which I had

forgotten about—an invalid chair.

The sight of Peter’s plain little oddments made me feel solemn. I

wondered if his eyes would be like Mary’s now, for I could not conceive

what life would be for him as a cripple. Very silently I opened the

bedroom door and slipped inside.

He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss

blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep. It was the old

Peter beyond doubt. He had the hunter’s gift of breathing evenly

through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his forehead

was what I had always remembered. The only change since I last saw him

was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was grey.

As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through together

flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at being beside

him. Women, bless their hearts! can never know what long comradeship

means to men; it is something not in their lives—something that belongs

only to that wild, undomesticated world which we forswear when we find

our mates. Even Mary understood only a bit of it. I had just won her

love, which was the greatest thing that ever came my way, but if she

had entered at that moment I would scarcely have turned my head. I was

back again in the old life and was not thinking of the new.

Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.

“Dick,” he said in a whisper, “Dick, my old friend.”

The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were stretched out

to me. I gripped his hands, and for a little we did not speak. Then I

saw how woefully he had changed. His left leg had shrunk, and from the

knee down was like a pipe stem. His face, when awake, showed the lines

of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by half a foot. But his eyes

were still like Mary’s. Indeed they seemed to be more patient and

peaceful than in the days when he sat beside me on the buck-waggon and

peered over the hunting-veld.

I picked him up—he was no heavier than Mary—and carried him to his

chair beside the stove. Then I boiled water and made tea, as we had so

often done together.

“Peter, old man,” I said, “we’re on trek again, and this is a very snug

little _rondavel_. We’ve had many good yarns, but this is going to be

the best. First of all, how about your health?”

“Good, I’m a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow. I have been

lonely sometimes, but that is all by now. Tell me of the big battles.”

But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case. He had

no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like Germans. The

doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and had done their

best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones had been so wrecked

that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had all the Boer’s dislike

of amputation. One doctor had been in Damaraland and talked to him of

those baked sunny places and made him homesick. But he returned always

to his dislike of Germans. He had seen them herding our soldiers like

brute beasts, and the commandant had a face like Stumm and a chin that

stuck out and wanted hitting. He made an exception for the great airman

Lensch, who had downed him.

“He is a white man, that one,” he said. “He came to see me in hospital

and told me a lot of things. I think he made them treat me well. He is

a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he has a round, merry

face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who could put a bullet through

a pauw’s head at two hundred yards. He said he was sorry I was lame,

for he hoped to have more fights with me. Some woman that tells

fortunes had said that I would be the end of him, but he reckoned she

had got the thing the wrong way on. I hope he will come through this

war, for he is a good man, though a German.... But the others! They are

like the fool in the Bible, fat and ugly in good fortune and proud and

vicious when their luck goes. They are not a people to be happy with.”

Then he told me that to keep up his spirits he had amused himself with

playing a game. He had prided himself on being a Boer, and spoken

coldly of the British. He had also, I gathered, imparted many things

calculated to deceive. So he left Germany with good marks, and in

Switzerland had held himself aloof from the other British wounded, on

the advice of Blenkiron, who had met him as soon as he crossed the

frontier. I gathered it was Blenkiron who had had him sent to St Anton,

and in his time there, as a disgruntled Boer, he had mixed a good deal

with Germans. They had pumped him about our air service, and Peter had

told them many ingenious lies and heard curious things in return.

“They are working hard, Dick,” he said. “Never forget that. The German

is a stout enemy, and when we beat him with a machine he sweats till he

has invented a new one. They have great pilots, but never so many good

ones as we, and I do not think in ordinary fighting they can ever beat

us. But you must watch Lensch, for I fear him. He has a new machine, I

hear, with great engines and a short wingspread, but the wings so

cambered that he can climb fast. That will be a surprise to spring upon

us. You will say that we’ll soon better it. So we shall, but if it was

used at a time when we were pushing hard it might make the little

difference that loses battles.”

“You mean,” I said, “that if we had a great attack ready and had driven

all the Boche planes back from our front, Lensch and his circus might

get over in spite of us and blow the gaff?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “Or if we were attacked, and had a weak spot,

Lensch might show the Germans where to get through. I do not think we

are going to attack for a long time; but I am pretty sure that Germany

is going to fling every man against us. That is the talk of my friends,

and it is not bluff.”

That night I cooked our modest dinner, and we smoked our pipes with the

stove door open and the good smell of woodsmoke in our nostrils. I told

him of all my doings and of the Wild Birds and Ivery and the job we

were engaged on. Blenkiron’s instructions were that we two should live

humbly and keep our eyes and ears open, for we were outside

suspicion—the cantankerous lame Boer and his loutish servant from

Arosa. Somewhere in the place was a rendezvous of our enemies, and

thither came Chelius on his dark errands.

Peter nodded his head sagely, “I think I have guessed the place. The

daughter of the old woman used to pull my chair sometimes down to the

village, and I have sat in cheap inns and talked to servants. There is

a fresh-water pan there, it is all covered with snow now, and beside it

there is a big house that they call the Pink Chalet. I do not know much

about it, except that rich folk live in it, for I know the other houses

and they are harmless. Also the big hotels, which are too cold and

public for strangers to meet in.”

I put Peter to bed, and it was a joy to me to look after him, to give

him his tonic and prepare the hot water bottle that comforted his

neuralgia. His behaviour was like a docile child’s, and he never lapsed

from his sunny temper, though I could see how his leg gave him hell.

They had tried massage for it and given it up, and there was nothing

for him but to endure till nature and his tough constitution deadened

the tortured nerves again. I shifted my bed out of the pantry and slept

in the room with him, and when I woke in the night, as one does the

first time in a strange place, I could tell by his breathing that he

was wakeful and suffering.

Next day a bath chair containing a grizzled cripple and pushed by a

limping peasant might have been seen descending the long hill to the

village. It was clear frosty weather which makes the cheeks tingle, and

I felt so full of beans that it was hard to remember my game leg. The

valley was shut in on the east by a great mass of rocks and glaciers,

belonging to a mountain whose top could not be seen. But on the south,

above the snowy fir-woods, there was a most delicate lace-like peak

with a point like a needle. I looked at it with interest, for beyond it

lay the valley which led to the Staub pass, and beyond that was

Italy—and Mary.

The old village of St Anton had one long, narrow street which bent at

right angles to a bridge which spanned the river flowing from the lake.

Thence the road climbed steeply, but at the other end of the street it

ran on the level by the water’s edge, lined with gimcrack

boarding-houses, now shuttered to the world, and a few villas in

patches of garden. At the far end, just before it plunged into a

pine-wood, a promontory jutted into the lake, leaving a broad space

between the road and the water. Here were the grounds of a more

considerable dwelling—snow-covered laurels and rhododendrons with one

or two bigger trees—and just on the water-edge stood the house itself,

called the Pink Chalet.

I wheeled Peter past the entrance on the crackling snow of the highway.

Seen through the gaps of the trees the front looked new, but the back

part seemed to be of some age, for I could see high walls, broken by

few windows, hanging over the water. The place was no more a chalet

than a donjon, but I suppose the name was given in honour of a wooden

gallery above the front door. The whole thing was washed in an ugly

pink. There were outhouses—garage or stables among the trees—and at the

entrance there were fairly recent tracks of an automobile.

On our way back we had some very bad beer in a café and made friends

with the woman who kept it. Peter had to tell her his story, and I

trotted out my aunt in Zurich, and in the end we heard her grievances.

She was a true Swiss, angry at all the belligerents who had spoiled her

livelihood, hating Germany most but also fearing her most. Coffee, tea,

fuel, bread, even milk and cheese were hard to get and cost a ransom.

It would take the land years to recover, and there would be no more

tourists, for there was little money left in the world. I dropped a

question about the Pink Chalet, and was told that it belonged to one

Schweigler, a professor of Berne, an old man who came sometimes for a

few days in the summer. It was often let, but not now. Asked if it was

occupied, she remarked that some friends of the Schweiglers—rich people

from Basle—had been there for the winter. “They come and go in great

cars,” she said bitterly, “and they bring their food from the cities.

They spend no money in this poor place.”

Presently Peter and I fell into a routine of life, as if we had always

kept house together. In the morning he went abroad in his chair, in the

afternoon I would hobble about on my own errands. We sank into the

background and took its colour, and a less conspicuous pair never faced

the eye of suspicion. Once a week a young Swiss officer, whose business

it was to look after British wounded, paid us a hurried visit. I used

to get letters from my aunt in Zurich, sometimes with the postmark of

Arosa, and now and then these letters would contain curiously worded

advice or instructions from him whom my aunt called “the kind patron”.

Generally I was told to be patient. Sometimes I had word about the

health of “my little cousin across the mountains”. Once I was bidden

expect a friend of the patron’s, the wise doctor of whom he had often

spoken, but though after that I shadowed the Pink Chalet for two days

no doctor appeared.

My investigations were a barren business. I used to go down to the

village in the afternoon and sit in an out-of-the-way café, talking

slow German with peasants and hotel porters, but there was little to

learn. I knew all there was to hear about the Pink Chalet, and that was

nothing. A young man who ski-ed stayed for three nights and spent his

days on the alps above the fir-woods. A party of four, including two

women, was reported to have been there for a night—all ramifications of

the rich family of Basle. I studied the house from the lake, which

should have been nicely swept into ice-rinks, but from lack of visitors

was a heap of blown snow. The high old walls of the back part were

built straight from the water’s edge. I remember I tried a short cut

through the grounds to the high-road and was given “Good afternoon’ by

a smiling German manservant. One way and another I gathered there were

a good many serving-men about the place—too many for the infrequent

guests. But beyond this I discovered nothing.

Not that I was bored, for I had always Peter to turn to. He was

thinking a lot about South Africa, and the thing he liked best was to

go over with me every detail of our old expeditions. They belonged to a

life which he could think about without pain, whereas the war was too

near and bitter for him. He liked to hobble out-of-doors after the

darkness came and look at his old friends, the stars. He called them by

the words they use on the veld, and the first star of morning he called

the _voorlooper_—the little boy who inspans the oxen—a name I had not

heard for twenty years. Many a great yarn we spun in the long evenings,

but I always went to bed with a sore heart. The longing in his eyes was

too urgent, longing not for old days or far countries, but for the

health and strength which had once been his pride.

One night I told him about Mary.

“She will be a happy _mysie_,” he said, “but you will need to be very

clever with her, for women are queer cattle and you and I don’t know

their ways. They tell me English women do not cook and make clothes

like our vrouws, so what will she find to do? I doubt an idle woman

will be like a mealie-fed horse.”

It was no good explaining to him the kind of girl Mary was, for that

was a world entirely beyond his ken. But I could see that he felt

lonelier than ever at my news. So I told him of the house I meant to

have in England when the war was over—an old house in a green hilly

country, with fields that would carry four head of cattle to the

_morgen_ and furrows of clear water, and orchards of plums and apples.

“And you will stay with us all the time,” I said. “You will have your

own rooms and your own boy to look after you, and you will help me to

farm, and we will catch fish together, and shoot the wild ducks when

they come up from the pans in the evening. I have found a better

countryside than the Houtbosch, where you and I planned to have a farm.

It is a blessed and happy place, England.”

He shook his head. “You are a kind man, Dick, but your pretty _mysie_

won’t want an ugly old fellow like me hobbling about her house.... I do

not think I will go back to Africa, for I should be sad there in the

sun. I will find a little place in England, and some day I will visit

you, old friend.”

That night his stoicism seemed for the first time to fail him. He was

silent for a long time and went early to bed, where I can vouch for it

he did not sleep. But he must have thought a lot in the night time, for

in the morning he had got himself in hand and was as cheerful as a

sandboy.

I watched his philosophy with amazement. It was far beyond anything I

could have compassed myself. He was so frail and so poor, for he had

never had anything in the world but his bodily fitness, and he had lost

that now. And remember, he had lost it after some months of glittering

happiness, for in the air he had found the element for which he had

been born. Sometimes he dropped a hint of those days when he lived in

the clouds and invented a new kind of battle, and his voice always grew

hoarse. I could see that he ached with longing for their return. And

yet he never had a word of complaint. That was the ritual he had set

himself, his point of honour, and he faced the future with the same

kind of courage as that with which he had tackled a wild beast or

Lensch himself. Only it needed a far bigger brand of fortitude.

Another thing was that he had found religion. I doubt if that is the

right way to put it, for he had always had it. Men who live in the

wilds know they are in the hands of God. But his old kind had been a

tattered thing, more like heathen superstition, though it had always

kept him humble. But now he had taken to reading the Bible and to

thinking in his lonely nights, and he had got a creed of his own. I

dare say it was crude enough, I am sure it was unorthodox; but if the

proof of religion is that it gives a man a prop in bad days, then

Peter’s was the real thing. He used to ferret about in the Bible and

the _Pilgrim’s Progress_—they were both equally inspired in his

eyes—and find texts which he interpreted in his own way to meet his

case. He took everything quite literally. What happened three thousand

years ago in Palestine might, for all he minded, have been going on

next door. I used to chaff him and tell him that he was like the

Kaiser, very good at fitting the Bible to his purpose, but his

sincerity was so complete that he only smiled. I remember one night,

when he had been thinking about his flying days, he found a passage in

Thessalonians about the dead rising to meet their Lord in the air, and

that cheered him a lot. Peter, I could see, had the notion that his

time here wouldn’t be very long, and he liked to think that when he got

his release he would find once more the old rapture.

Once, when I said something about his patience, he said he had got to

try to live up to Mr Standfast. He had fixed on that character to

follow, though he would have preferred Mr Valiant-for-Truth if he had

thought himself good enough. He used to talk about Mr Standfast in his

queer way as if he were a friend of us both, like Blenkiron.... I tell

you I was humbled out of all my pride by the sight of Peter, so

uncomplaining and gentle and wise. The Almighty Himself couldn’t have

made a prig out of him, and he never would have thought of preaching.

Only once did he give me advice. I had always a liking for short cuts,

and I was getting a bit restive under the long inaction. One day when I

expressed my feelings on the matter, Peter upped and read from the

_Pilgrim’s Progress_: “Some also have wished that the next way to their

Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with

either hills or mountains to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there

is an end.”

All the same when we got into March and nothing happened I grew pretty

anxious. Blenkiron had said we were fighting against time, and here

were the weeks slipping away. His letters came occasionally, always in

the shape of communications from my aunt. One told me that I would soon

be out of a job, for Peter’s repatriation was just about through, and

he might get his movement order any day. Another spoke of my little

cousin over the hills, and said that she hoped soon to be going to a

place called Santa Chiara in the Val Saluzzana. I got out the map in a

hurry and measured the distance from there to St Anton and pored over

the two roads thither—the short one by the Staub Pass and the long one

by the Marjolana. These letters made me think that things were nearing

a climax, but still no instructions came. I had nothing to report in my

own messages, I had discovered nothing in the Pink Chalet but idle

servants, I was not even sure if the Pink Chalet were not a harmless

villa, and I hadn’t come within a thousand miles of finding Chelius.

All my desire to imitate Peter’s stoicism didn’t prevent me from

getting occasionally rattled and despondent.

The one thing I could do was to keep fit, for I had a notion I might

soon want all my bodily strength. I had to keep up my pretence of

lameness in the daytime, so I used to take my exercise at night. I

would sleep in the afternoon, when Peter had his siesta, and then about

ten in the evening, after putting him to bed, I would slip out-of-doors

and go for a four or five hours’ tramp. Wonderful were those midnight

wanderings. I pushed up through the snow-laden pines to the ridges

where the snow lay in great wreaths and scallops, till I stood on a

crest with a frozen world at my feet and above me a host of glittering

stars. Once on a night of full moon I reached the glacier at the valley

head, scrambled up the moraine to where the ice began, and peered

fearfully into the spectral crevasses. At such hours I had the earth to

myself, for there was not a sound except the slipping of a burden of

snow from the trees or the crack and rustle which reminded me that a

glacier was a moving river. The war seemed very far away, and I felt

the littleness of our human struggles, till I thought of Peter turning

from side to side to find ease in the cottage far below me. Then I

realised that the spirit of man was the greatest thing in this spacious

world.... I would get back about three or four, have a bath in the

water which had been warming in my absence, and creep into bed, almost

ashamed of having two sound legs, when a better man a yard away had but

one.

Oddly enough at these hours there seemed more life in the Pink Chalet

than by day. Once, tramping across the lake long after midnight, I saw

lights in the lake-front in windows which for ordinary were blank and

shuttered. Several times I cut across the grounds, when the moon was

dark. On one such occasion a great car with no lights swept up the

drive, and I heard low voices at the door. Another time a man ran

hastily past me, and entered the house by a little door on the eastern

side, which I had not before noticed.... Slowly the conviction began to

grow on me that we were not wrong in marking down this place, that

things went on within it which it deeply concerned us to discover. But

I was puzzled to think of a way. I might butt inside, but for all I

knew it would be upsetting Blenkiron’s plans, for he had given me no

instructions about housebreaking. All this unsettled me worse than

ever. I began to lie awake planning some means of entrance.... I would

be a peasant from the next valley who had twisted his ankle.... I would

go seeking an imaginary cousin among the servants.... I would start a

fire in the place and have the doors flung open to zealous

neighbours....

And then suddenly I got instructions in a letter from Blenkiron.

It came inside a parcel of warm socks that arrived from my kind aunt.

But the letter for me was not from her. It was in Blenkiron’s large

sprawling hand and the style of it was all his own. He told me that he

had about finished his job. He had got his line on Chelius, who was the

bird he expected, and that bird would soon wing its way southward

across the mountains for the reason I knew of.

“We’ve got an almighty move on,” he wrote, “and please God you’re going

to hustle some in the next week. It’s going better than I ever hoped.”

But something was still to be done. He had struck a countryman, one

Clarence Donne, a journalist of Kansas City, whom he had taken into the

business. Him he described as a “crackerjack” and commended to my

esteem. He was coming to St Anton, for there was a game afoot at the

Pink Chalet, which he would give me news of. I was to meet him next

evening at nine-fifteen at the little door in the east end of the

house. “For the love of Mike, Dick,” he concluded, “be on time and do

everything Clarence tells you as if he was me. It’s a mighty complex

affair, but you and he have sand enough to pull through. Don’t worry

about your little cousin. She’s safe and out of the job now.”

My first feeling was one of immense relief, especially at the last

words. I read the letter a dozen times to make sure I had its meaning.

A flash of suspicion crossed my mind that it might be a fake,

principally because there was no mention of Peter, who had figured

large in the other missives. But why should Peter be mentioned when he

wasn’t on in this piece? The signature convinced me. Ordinarily

Blenkiron signed himself in full with a fine commercial flourish. But

when I was at the Front he had got into the habit of making a kind of

hieroglyphic of his surname to me and sticking J.S. after it in a

bracket. That was how this letter was signed, and it was sure proof it

was all right.

I spent that day and the next in wild spirits. Peter spotted what was

on, though I did not tell him for fear of making him envious. I had to

be extra kind to him, for I could see that he ached to have a hand in

the business. Indeed he asked shyly if I couldn’t fit him in, and I had

to lie about it and say it was only another of my aimless

circumnavigations of the Pink Chalet.

“Try and find something where I can help,” he pleaded. “I’m pretty

strong still, though I’m lame, and I can shoot a bit.”

I declared that he would be used in time, that Blenkiron had promised

he would be used, but for the life of me I couldn’t see how.

At nine o’clock on the evening appointed I was on the lake opposite the

house, close in under the shore, making my way to the rendezvous. It

was a coal-black night, for though the air was clear the stars were

shining with little light, and the moon had not yet risen. With a

premonition that I might be long away from food, I had brought some

slabs of chocolate, and my pistol and torch were in my pocket. It was

bitter cold, but I had ceased to mind weather, and I wore my one suit

and no overcoat.

The house was like a tomb for silence. There was no crack of light

anywhere, and none of those smells of smoke and food which proclaim

habitation. It was an eerie job scrambling up the steep bank east of

the place, to where the flat of the garden started, in a darkness so

great that I had to grope my way like a blind man.

I found the little door by feeling along the edge of the building. Then

I stepped into an adjacent clump of laurels to wait on my companion. He

was there before me.

“Say,” I heard a rich Middle West voice whisper, “are you Joseph

Zimmer? I’m not shouting any names, but I guess you are the guy I was

told to meet here.”

“Mr Donne?” I whispered back.

“The same,” he replied. “Shake.”

I gripped a gloved and mittened hand which drew me towards the door.