This is the story which I heard later from Mary . . .
She was at Milan with the new Anglo-American hospital when she got
Blenkiron’s letter. Santa Chiara had always been the place agreed
upon, and this message mentioned specifically Santa Chiara, and fixed
a date for her presence there. She was a little puzzled by it, for she
had not yet had a word from Ivery, to whom she had written twice by
the roundabout address in France which Bommaerts had given her. She
did not believe that he would come to Italy in the ordinary course of
things, and she wondered at Blenkiron’s certainty about the date.
The following morning came a letter from Ivery in which he ardently
pressed for a meeting. It was the first of several, full of strange
talk about some approaching crisis, in which the forebodings of the
prophet were mingled with the solicitude of a lover.
‘The storm is about to break,’ he wrote, ‘and I cannot think only of
my own fate. I have something to tell you which vitally concerns
yourself. You say you are in Lombardy. The Chiavagno valley is within
easy reach, and at its head is the inn of Santa Chiara, to which I
come on the morning of March 19th. Meet me there even if only for half
an hour, I implore you. We have already shared hopes and confidences,
and I would now share with you a knowledge which I alone in Europe
possess. You have the heart of a lion, my lady, worthy of what I can
bring you.’
Wake was summoned from the Croce Rossa unit with which he was
working at Vicenza, and the plan arranged by Blenkiron was faithfully
carried out. Four officers of the Alpini, in the rough dress of
peasants of the hills, met them in Chiavagno on the morning of the
18th. It was arranged that the hostess of Santa Chiara should go on a
visit to her sister’s son, leaving the inn, now in the shuttered quiet
of wintertime, under the charge of two ancient servants. The hour of
Ivery’s coming on the 19th had been fixed by him for noon, and that
morning Mary would drive up the valley, while Wake and the Alpini went
inconspicuously by other routes so as to be in station around the
place before midday.
But on the evening of the 18th at the Hotel of the Four Kings in
Chiavagno Mary received another message. It was from me and told her
that I was crossing the Staub at midnight and would be at the inn
before dawn. It begged her to meet me there, to meet me alone without
the others, because I had that to say to her which must be said before
Ivery’s coming. I have seen the letter. It was written in a hand which
I could not have distinguished from my own scrawl. It was not exactly
what I would myself have written, but there were phrases in it which
to Mary’s mind could have come only from me. Oh, I admit it was
cunningly done, especially the love-making, which was just the kind of
stammering thing which I would have achieved if I had tried to put my
feelings on paper. A
nyhow, Mary had no doubt of its genuineness. She slipped off after dinner, hired a carriage with two broken-winded screws and set off up the valley. She left a line for Wake telling him to follow according to the plan—a line which he never got, for his
anxiety when he found she had gone drove him to immediate pursuit.
At about two in the morning of the 19th after a slow and icy journey
she arrived at the inn, knocked up the aged servants, made herself a
cup of chocolate out of her tea-basket and sat down to wait on my
coming.
She has described to me that time of waiting. A home-made candle in a
tall earthenware candlestick lit up the little salle-a-manger, which
was the one room in use. The world was very quiet, the snow muffled
the roads, and it was cold with the penetrating chill of the small
hours of a March night. Always, she has told me, will the taste of
chocolate and the smell of burning tallow bring back to her that
strange place and the flutter of the heart with which she waited. For
she was on the eve of the crisis of all our labours, she was very
young, and youth has a quick fancy which will not be checked.
Moreover, it was I who was coming, and save for the scrawl of the
night before, we had had no communication for many weeks . . . She tried
to distract her mind by repeating poetry, and the thing that came into
her head was Keats’s ‘Nightingale’, an odd poem for the time and
place.
There was a long wicker chair among the furnishings of the room, and
she lay down on it with her fur cloak muffled around her. There were
sounds of movement in the inn. The old woman who had let her in, with
the scent of intrigue of her kind, had brightened when she heard that
another guest was coming. Beautiful women do not travel at midnight
for nothing. She also was awake and expectant.
Then quite suddenly came the sound of a car slowing down outside. She
sprang to her feet in a tremor of excitement. It was like the Picardy
château again—the dim room and a friend coming out of the night. She
heard the front door open and a step in the little hall . . .
She was looking at Ivery. . . . He slipped his driving-coat off as he
entered, and bowed gravely. He was wearing a green hunting suit which
in the dusk seemed like khaki, and, as he was about my own height, for
a second she was misled. Then she saw his face and her heart stopped.
‘You!’ she cried. She had sunk back again on the wicker chair.
‘I have come as I promised,’ he said, ‘but a little earlier. You will
forgive me my eagerness to be with you.’
She did not heed his words, for her mind was feverishly busy. My
letter had been a fraud and this man had discovered our plans. She was
alone with him, for it would be hours before her friends came from
Chiavagno. He had the game in his hands, and of all our confederacy
she alone remained to confront him. Mary’s courage was pretty near
perfect, and for the moment she did not think of herself or her own
fate. That came later. She was possessed with poignant disappointment
at our failure. All our efforts had gone to the winds, and the enemy
had won with contemptuous ease. Her nervousness disappeared before the
intense regret, and her brain set coolly and busily to work.
It was a new Ivery who confronted her, a man with vigour and purpose
in every line of him and the quiet confidence of power. He spoke with
a serious courtesy.
‘The time for make-believe is past,’ he was saying. ‘We have fenced
with each other. I have told you only half the truth, and you have
always kept me at arm’s length. But you knew in your heart, my dearest
lady, that there must be the full truth between us some day, and that
day has come. I have often told you that I love you. I do not come now
to repeat that declaration. I come to ask you to entrust yourself to
me, to join your fate to mine, for I can promise you the happiness
which you deserve.’
He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. I cannot put down all that he
said, for Mary, once she grasped the drift of it, was busy with her
own thoughts and did not listen. But I gather from her that he was
very candid and seemed to grow as he spoke in mental and moral
stature. He told her who he was and what his work had been. He claimed
the same purpose as hers, a hatred of war and a passion to rebuild the
world into decency. But now he drew a different moral. He was a
German: it was through Germany alone that peace and regeneration could
come. His country was purged from her faults, and the marvellous
German discipline was about to prove itself in the eye of gods and
men. He told her what he had told me in the room at the Pink Chalet,
but with another colouring. Germany was not vengeful or vainglorious,
only patient and merciful. God was about to give her the power to
decide the world’s fate, and it was for him and his kind to see that
the decision was beneficent. The greater task of his people was only
now beginning.
That was the gist of his talk. She appeared to listen, but her mind
was far away. She must delay him for two hours, three hours, four
hours. If not, she must keep beside him. She was the only one of our
company left in touch with the enemy . . .
‘I go to Germany now,’ he was saying. ‘I want you to come with me—to
be my wife.’
He waited for an answer, and got it in the form of a startled
question.
‘To Germany? How?’
‘It is easy,’ he said, smiling. ‘The car which is waiting outside is
the first stage of a system of travel which we have perfected.’ Then
he told her about the Underground Railway—not as he had told it to
me, to scare, but as a proof of power and forethought.
His manner was perfect. He was respectful, devoted, thoughtful of all
things. He was the suppliant, not the master. He offered her power and
pride, a dazzling career, for he had deserved well of his country, the
devotion of the faithful lover. He would take her to his mother’s
house, where she would be welcomed like a princess. I have no doubt he
was sincere, for he had many moods, and the libertine whom he had
revealed to me at the Pink Chalet had given place to the honourable
gentleman. He could play all parts well because he could believe in
himself in them all.
Then he spoke of danger, not so as to slight her courage, but to
emphasize his own thoughtfulness. The world in which she had lived was
crumbling, and he alone could offer a refuge. She felt the steel
gauntlet through the texture of the velvet glove.
All the while she had been furiously thinking, with her chin in her
hand in the old way . . . She might refuse to go. He could compel her,
no doubt, for there was no help to be got from the old servants. But
it might be difficult to carry an unwilling woman over the first
stages of the Underground Railway. There might be chances . . .
Supposing he accepted her refusal and left her. Then indeed he would
be gone for ever and our game would have closed with a fiasco. The
great antagonist of England would go home rejoicing, taking his
sheaves with him.
At this time she had no personal fear of him. So curious a thing is
the human heart that her main preoccupation was with our mission, not
with her own fate. To fail utterly seemed too bitter. Supposing she
went with him. They had still to get out of Italy and cross
Switzerland. If she were with him she would be an emissary of the
Allies in the enemy’s camp. She asked herself what could she do, and
told herself ‘Nothing.’ She felt like a small bird in a very large
trap, and her chief sensation was that of her own powerlessness. But
she had learned Blenkiron’s gospel and knew that Heaven sends amazing
chances to the bold. And, even as she made her decision, she was aware
of a dark shadow lurking at the back of her mind, the shadow of the
fear which she knew was awaiting her. For she was going into the
unknown with a man whom she hated, a man who claimed to be her lover.
It was the bravest thing I have ever heard of, and I have lived my
life among brave men.
‘I will come with you,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t speak to me,
please. I am tired and troubled and I want peace to think.’
As she rose weakness came over her and she swayed till his arm caught
her. ‘I wish I could let you rest for a little,’ he said tenderly,
‘but time presses. The car runs smoothly and you can sleep there.’
He summoned one of the servants to whom he handed Mary. ‘We leave in
ten minutes,’ he said, and he went out to see to the car.
Mary’s first act in the bedroom to which she was taken was to bathe her eyes and brush her hair. She felt dimly that she must keep her head clear. Her second was to scribble a note to Wake, telling him what had happened, and to give it to the servant with a tip. ‘The gentleman will come in the morning,’ she said. ‘You must give it him at once, for it concerns the fate of your country.’ The woman grinned and promised. It was not the first time she had done errands for pretty ladies.
Ivery settled her in the great closed car with much solicitude, and
made her comfortable with rugs. Then he went back to the inn for a
second, and she saw a light move in the salle-a-manger. He returned
and spoke to the driver in German, taking his seat beside him.
But first he handed Mary her note to Wake. ‘I think you left this
behind you,’ he said. He had not opened it.
Alone in the car Mary slept. She saw the figures of Ivery and the
chauffeur in the front seat dark against the headlights, and then they
dislimned into dreams. She had undergone a greater strain than she
knew, and was sunk in the heavy sleep of weary nerves.
When she woke it was daylight. They were still in Italy, as her first
glance told her, so they could not have taken the Staub route. They
seemed to be among the foothills, for there was little snow, but now
and then up tributary valleys she had glimpses of the high peaks. She
tried hard to think what it could mean, and then remembered the
Marjolana. Wake had laboured to instruct her in the topography of the
Alps, and she had grasped the fact of the two open passes. But the
Marjolana meant a big circuit, and they would not be in Switzerland
till the evening. They would arrive in the dark, and pass out of it in
the dark, and there would be no chance of succour. She felt very
lonely and very weak.
Throughout the morning her fear grew. The more hopeless her chance of
defeating Ivery became the more insistently the dark shadow crept over
her mind. She tried to steady herself by watching the show from the
windows. The car swung through little villages, past vineyards and
pine-woods and the blue of lakes, and over the gorges of mountain
streams. There seemed to be no trouble about passports. The sentries
at the controls waved a reassuring hand when they were shown some card
which the chauffeur held between his teeth. In one place there was a
longish halt, and she could hear Ivery talking Italian with two
officers of Bersaglieri, to whom he gave cigars. They were
fresh-faced, upstanding boys, and for a second she had an idea of
flinging open the door and appealing to them to save her. But that
would have been futile, for Ivery was clearly amply certificated. She
wondered what part he was now playing.
The Marjolana route had been chosen for a purpose. In one town Ivery
met and talked to a civilian official, and more than once the car
slowed down and someone appeared from the wayside to speak a word and
vanish. She was assisting at the last gathering up of the threads of a
great plan, before the Wild Birds returned to their nest. Mostly these
conferences seemed to be in Italian, but once or twice she gathered
from the movement of the lips that German was spoken and that this
rough peasant or that black-hatted bourgeois was not of Italian blood.
Early in the morning, soon after she awoke, Ivery had stopped the car
and offered her a well-provided luncheon basket. She could eat
nothing, and watched him breakfast off sandwiches beside the driver.
In the afternoon he asked her permission to sit with her. The car drew
up in a lonely place, and a tea-basket was produced by the chauffeur.
Ivery made tea, for she seemed too listless to move, and she drank a
cup with him. After that he remained beside her.
‘In half an hour we shall be out of Italy,’ he said. The car was
running up a long valley to the curious hollow between snowy saddles
which is the crest of the Marjolana. He showed her the place on a road
map. As the altitude increased and the air grew colder he wrapped the
rugs closer around her and apologized for the absence of a
foot-warmer. ‘In a little,’ he said, ‘we shall be in the land where
your slightest wish will be law.’
She dozed again and so missed the frontier post. When she woke the car
was slipping down the long curves of the Weiss valley, before it
narrows to the gorge through which it debouches on Grunewald.
‘We are in Switzerland now,’ she heard his voice say. It may have been
fancy, but it seemed to her that there was a new note in it. He spoke
to her with the assurance of possession. They were outside the country
of the Allies, and in a land where his web was thickly spread.
‘Where do we stop to-night?’ she asked timidly.
‘I fear we cannot stop. To-night also you must put up with the car. I
have a little errand to do on the way, which will delay us a few
minutes, and then we press on. To-morrow, my fairest one, fatigue will
be ended.’
There was no mistake now about the note of possession in his voice.
Mary’s heart began to beat fast and wild. The trap had closed down on
her and she saw the folly of her courage. It had delivered her bound
and gagged into the hands of one whom she loathed more deeply every
moment, whose proximity was less welcome than a snake’s. She had to
bite hard on her lip to keep from screaming.
The weather had changed and it was snowing hard, the same storm that
had greeted us on the Col of the Swallows. The pace was slower now,
and Ivery grew restless. He looked frequently at his watch, and
snatched the speaking-tube to talk to the driver. Mary caught the word
‘St Anton’.
‘Do we go by St Anton?’ she found voice to ask.
‘Yes,’ he said shortly.
The word gave her the faintest glimmering of hope, for she knew that
Peter and I had lived at St Anton. She tried to look out of the
blurred window, but could see nothing except that the twilight was
falling. She begged for the road-map, and saw that so far as she could
make out they were still in the broad Grunewald valley and that to
reach St Anton they had to cross the low pass from the Staubthal. The
snow was still drifting thick and the car crawled.
Then she felt the rise as they mounted to the pass. Here the going was
bad, very different from the dry frost in which I had covered the same
road the night before. Moreover, there seemed to be curious obstacles.
Some careless wood-cart had dropped logs on the highway, and more than
once both Ivery and the chauffeur had to get out to shift them. In one
place there had been a small landslide which left little room to pass,
and Mary had to descend and cross on foot while the driver took the
car over alone. Ivery’s temper seemed to be souring. To the girl’s
relief he resumed the outside seat, where he was engaged in constant
argument with the chauffeur.
At the head of the pass stands an inn, the comfortable hostelry of
Herr Kronig, well known to all who clamber among the lesser peaks of
the Staubthal. There in the middle of the way stood a man with a
lantern.
‘The road is blocked by a snowfall,’ he cried. ‘They are clearing it
now. It will be ready in half an hour’s time.’
Ivery sprang from his seat and darted into the hotel. His business was
to speed up the clearing party, and Herr Kronig himself accompanied
him to the scene of the catastrophe. Mary sat still, for she had
suddenly become possessed of an idea. She drove it from her as
foolishness, but it kept returning. Why had those tree-trunks been
spilt on the road? Why had an easy pass after a moderate snowfall been
suddenly closed?
A man came out of the inn-yard and spoke to the chauffeur. It seemed
to be an offer of refreshment, for the latter left his seat and
disappeared inside. He was away for some time and returned shivering
and grumbling at the weather, with the collar of his greatcoat turned
up around his ears. A lantern had been hung in the porch and as he
passed Mary saw the man. She had been watching the back of his head
idly during the long drive, and had observed that it was of the round
bullet type, with no nape to the neck, which is common in the
Fatherland. Now she could not see his neck for the coat collar, but
she could have sworn that the head was a different shape. The man
seemed to suffer acutely from the cold, for he buttoned the collar
round his chin and pulled his cap far over his brows.
Ivery came back, followed by a dragging line of men with spades and
lanterns. He flung himself into the front seat and nodded to the
driver to start. The man had his engine going already so as to lose no
time. He bumped over the rough debris of the snowfall and then fairly
let the car hum. Ivery was anxious for speed, but he did not want his
neck broken and he yelled out to take care. The driver nodded and
slowed down, but presently he had got up speed again.
If Ivery was restless, Mary was worse. She seemed suddenly to have
come on the traces of her friends. In the St Anton valley the snow had
stopped and she let down the window for air, for she was choking with
suspense. The car rushed past the station, down the hill by Peter’s
cottage, through the village, and along the lake shore to the Pink
Chalet.
Ivery halted it at the gate. ‘See that you fill up with petrol,’ he
told the man. ‘Bid Gustav get the Daimler and be ready to follow in
half in hour.’
He spoke to Mary through the open window.
‘I will keep you only a very little time. I think you had better wait
in the car, for it will be more comfortable than a dismantled house. A
servant will bring you food and more rugs for the night journey.’
Then he vanished up the dark avenue.
Mary’s first thought was to slip out and get back to the village and
there to find someone who knew me or could take her where Peter lived.
But the driver would prevent her, for he had been left behind on
guard. She looked anxiously at his back, for he alone stood between
her and liberty.
That gentleman seemed to be intent on his own business. As soon as
Ivery’s footsteps had grown faint, he had backed the car into the
entrance, and turned it so that it faced towards St Anton. Then very
slowly it began to move.
At the same moment a whistle was blown shrilly three times. The door
on the right had opened and someone who had been waiting in the
shadows climbed painfully in. Mary saw that it was a little man and
that he was a cripple. She reached a hand to help him, and he fell on
to the cushions beside her. The car was gathering speed.
Before she realized what was happening the new-comer had taken her
hand and was patting it.
•••••
About two minutes later I was entering the gate of the Pink Chalet.
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