Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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I inquired no further. I was well aware of my aunt’s opinion, but I did not agree. I had no intention of letting Benita know what I thought of her and I did my best not to admit it to myself. It was not my business to know which of them had proposed the visit.

“After that it was easy,” Benita went on. “Georgina’s girl friend telephoned all the other horsy people, and we soon heard you were at the barn. Why don’t you stay at the farm and be comfortable?”

“Too many dogs,” I said. “Nur Jehan and I don’t like them.”

It evidently puzzled her that I, who was always looking around and behind me, should choose to sleep in so lonely a spot.

“You are not expecting anybody?” she asked.

That was too close to the bone. Since I detected a faintly jealous note in her voice, I replied with deliberate vulgarity that men of my age generally preferred luxury hotels to haystacks.

“But you,” she said, “would be quite likely to choose a gorse bush. What’s that under your coat?”

She had caught a glimpse of the Mauser in its holster as I moved my kit to make room for her between the smooth roots of a great beech. I told her that it was a wooden horseman’s flask and ascribed it vaguely to the Carpathians.

“What do you keep in it?”

“Wine. The wood gives a bitter taste. You wouldn’t like it.”

She looked disappointed. Some form of hospitality would ease the perceptible tension between us. I offered her whisky and spring water, which I mixed in vicar’s daughter proportions. I always found it difficult to remember that she was also a commercial artist.

I think it was because her face had that exquisite mixture of liveliness and innocence which belongs to seventeen rather than twenty-three, and is in any case more common among French than English. She had no lack of worldly wisdom. Her tough profession saw to that. She accepted life as it was; but she was rooted so firmly in her beloved countryside that life as it was seemed to her more to be enjoyed than pitied. I don’t mean that she was insensitive. She did not think of natural beauty as an escape from humanity. She had no need of escape at all.

“We have talked so much about you, Charles, since you left,” she said, when I had settled down on the dry leaves by her side.

I replied that I hoped Aunt Georgina had given me a good character.

“Not altogether. She said you had lost your youth before you had time to enjoy it.”

“No! I did enjoy it. Vienna, America, a profession which I loved —Good Lord, I knew I was having the time of my life!”

“I suppose she meant that you couldn’t pick it up again.”

I agreed that she probably did and was prepared to leave it at that.

“Don’t you ever feel that you belong here now?”

Her great, heavily lashed gray eyes were on me and forced me into sincerity. I pointed to the sweep of the turf, the golden stone walls and a church tower rising above the trees in a distant valley, all delicate and unreal in the beginning of the clear evening light. I told her how often in my ride I had thought of this as her country, each pervading the other, and how I longed to come out of my spiritual forests and could not. I tried to explain that I thought of myself as a European living gladly and appreciatively in England but that I had no real right to the union of love.

“Why on earth not?” she asked. “You have earned every right.”

“I haven’t earned anything.”

“Georgina has told me all about you, Charles,” she replied impatiently. “The Austrian underground and the Gestapo and the rescue of the women from Ravensbrück. And then you wouldn’t even take our George Cross. You are the most absurdly proud man I ever came across!”

I must admit I had never thought of myself as proud, and I said so.

She let me have it. No sweet seventeen about her at all. She reminded me of a falcon suddenly loosed from the fist: a lovely, brooding thing detonated into a bronze and silver arrow of energy.

“You’re still a boy,” she accused me. “You’ve never got over being the Graf von Dennim. You won’t admit there is anything higher than that. What you do is what you think a Dennim ought to do. You never take. You never give other people a chance. It’s all giving, giving, giving, by your own laws and nobody else’s. I wish to God the Dennims still owned half Europe or whatever they did own. And then perhaps you could just be content with giving away material things and not be too proud to take and not have to hide yourself in squirrels and that damned horse.”

“About Nur Jehan,” I said, firmly changing the subject after a silence. “We all accept so much nonsense without thinking. Of course he can be ridden by a woman!”

“Who has ridden him?”

“No one yet. But the cause is simple. Your legs aren’t long enough.”

“No?” she asked, looking along the slim length of her outstretched jodhpurs until she arrived at her toes.

“For Nur Jehan, I mean,” I replied desperately. “And Georgina’s legs are shorter still. He has a very sensitive rib – from an old wound probably. My heel goes behind and below it. Yours doesn’t and a boy’s wouldn’t. But your father and I have long legs, and so, I expect, did his former owner.”

I think Benita then remarked that it was delightful how kind old maids and bachelors were to animals, but I do not remember.

I am compelled to dehumanize her. I find that in writing autobiography you cannot please a woman. You are bound to say too much or too little for her. Benita complains with reason that I have devoted far more space to Nur Jehan than to her. But when I have ventured upon more detailed description either of her or of that late afternoon in the windbreak outside the barn, down comes the censorship upon my pages. She insists and very rightly that it is nobody’s business but our own.

And there was I with my utterly misplaced chivalry! I made one last effort by calmly identifying myself with the old maids and bachelors. We knew very well, I said, that we had plenty to give to an animal, but were too humble to believe we had much left to offer our fellows.

“Too proud,” she answered. “Suppose you or I died tonight, which would be older than the other?”

That was the end of my self-control. It should, of course, have doubled it. After all, I was quite likely to die that night – which was by far the best of all my reasons for pretending to Benita that my affection for her was fatherly. But I was so moved that I behaved like a boy of twenty who believes that no one has ever known such love before. And why the devil not? I very often do believe it.

It was after seven when Nur Jehan and her pony cantered along the top of the plateau and down to the east. At the main road Benita insisted that Nur Jehan’s day had been long enough and that he should not walk the six miles to Stow-on-the-Wold and back again.

I accepted the excuse, though I knew the stallion was not in the least tired. It was best that we should separate quickly. On the way down through cut woodland, where hazel and alder grew close to the path, I had once heard another horse. There was nothing surprising in that, but I had to know who the rider was – and I was not going to revive her memories of the valley below the Wen Acre Plantation by suddenly playing Red Indians through the undergrowth and leaving her with the impression that her future husband was in need of a psychiatrist.

To avoid the close cover I took Nur Jehan straight up the bare, sharp slope and back towards the barn along high ground. The long fields were still bathed in light and deserted as prairie. The routine of the farms was over for the day.

I too felt permeated by the light. Benita brought this dear land with her just as surely as if she had been heiress to a thousand acres. I could neither analyze nor recognize myself. It is a startling rebirth to begin living in the future after ten years of obsession with the past. I found myself thinking of the economics of marriage with all the responsibility of a sound young man at the beginning of his career. I was at the beginning in a way. I had never bothered with half a dozen different appointments which were quite certainly within my reach. The next one with a decent salary would be mine. That and her pencil – any zoologist would jump at the chance of getting her as an illustrator – would keep us in reasonable comfort for a start. I smiled with amusement at my own dreaming.

“Good evening, sir! That is a splendid animal.”

Hearty, perfectly in keeping with his surroundings, the man rode out of a little covert of thorn on the edge of the escarpment. He appeared to have just passed through it. There was nothing to suggest that he had watched me take leave of Benita, noted my route back and waited for me.

His face was strong and casual. If I had not seen him before I might never have noticed its quality of intentness. He wore a bowler hat, breeches and boots, a faultless jacket. The bushy eyebrows were not there. My guess that they had been stuck on was right; their purpose was to prevail as the dominant point in any description of him. Nor was his hair dark any more. It was white, prematurely white. Yet we had all called him the dark gentleman. He looked older and more distinguished than at Hernsholt. He was riding a chestnut mare, a Cots wold hunter of sixteen hands, up to his weight and with powerful quarters.

My start disconcerted Nur Jehan. In collecting the stallion I managed to collect myself.

“Good evening, sir!” I replied.

How right I had been to tackle him in my own way! He was indeed above suspicion. Even if I could have proved that he had taken a room in my street, the police would be almost bound to accept his innocent explanation of it. It was inconceivable that he should have blown a postman in half, murdered Sporn and Weber, and ingeniously kept Dickfuss praying three days for death before he allowed him to die. I could have sworn the man was a magistrate and in the running for sheriff of the county.

“Are you going far?” he asked.

“Just exercising.”

It would have been the end of me if I had admitted that I was bound directly for the lonely clump of trees on the horizon half a mile ahead where, as he must have known, I was camping. My only hope was to keep him off and lead him, without arousing any suspicion, suddenly down to the world of farms and villages. He had caught me on the only evening when I had for a moment forgotten him. I was completely at his mercy. I had no chance of beating him to the draw, since the clumsy holster of the Mauser was under my left armpit.

“A worthwhile job,” he said cordially. “Of course we have all heard of you and Nur Jehan.”

“You live here?” I asked.

“No. I am just staying with friends.”

His manners were pleasant and assured. Evidently he had not the least idea that I had recognized him. Inside me I was screaming to myself that if he killed me he was doomed, that my friends knew enough about him to establish his identity, and that I must tell him so. But would he think it true? Was it in fact true? There was no evidence against him but mine. And I was not going to be alive to give it.

He came up on my right, for he had to. We were now walking our horses side by side. Imperceptibly the pace slowed. I could not allow him to drop behind and shoot me through the back, but I could not stop without some explanation. I could not even sit up, touch Nur Jehan with my heel and bolt for it. True, I might get clear. I was familiar enough with his character to know that he never took a chancy shot. But the fellow was an experienced horseman; he would spot at once that it was deliberate flight. It was quite possible that he would raise his bowler hat ironically and vanish – to reappear on some other evening when love had made me careless at whatever home I shared with Benita.

“He is only half trained,” I said in order to put the blame for any sudden move on Nur Jehan. “He was brought up as a pet.”

“Yes. Always disastrous. Is he excitable?”

“No. And your mare?”

He was evasive. He did not know. That proved at any rate that the mare did not belong to him. He was the sort of man who would unhesitatingly be lent a good horse.

Whatever move I made must not be obvious. It must appear to this purring tiger that Nur Jehan was solely responsible. I sat loosely and continued to chat. Then I drove my left heel hard into the stallion’s tender rib and prayed that I wouldn’t be thrown.

Nur Jehan failed me. Instead of bucking or bolting, he snorted, shook his head and continued to walk. He clearly liked the horse alongside him and was not going to be deterred from a promising acquaintanceship by carelessness on the part of his rider.

My companion noticed nothing, for he could not see my left leg and I had not gathered my horse. I tried it again. This time Nur Jehan stopped dead, offended and puzzled. He did not particularly resent pressure which he felt to be accidental; what he would not stand was deliberate use of a sore rib to give orders. But the friend on his back was sitting easily and not giving any orders. The circumstances were all wrong.

This considerate rider also stopped. That was what I dreaded and had been trying to avoid. Unless we were to stay there all night I had to start first and allow him to remain for a decisive second or two behind me. I played the inefficient horseman and sawed at Nur Jehan’s mouth, who began to dance.

“Completely untrainable!” I shouted angrily.

“Weren’t you perhaps a little hard on his mouth?”

“Damn his mouth!”

“Patience, my dear sir!” advised my executioner very pleasantly. “Patience always leads to the result you want in the end.”

He had now started to ride with half his right hand stuffed carelessly into his outside coat pocket. He went ahead for a moment and crossed my path on the excuse of looking closely at some sheep which he pretended to admire. He made it extremely difficult for me to avoid coming up on his right. Riding side by side in that position I had no defense against a shot through the pocket and into the liver – or into anywhere if the unseen weapon were of sufficient caliber to knock me off my horse.

To follow him and come up on his left was awkward, but Nur Jehan’s behavior was perfect. He danced just enough to disguise the fact that the edging to the left was deliberate. We rode on over the turf, both breaking from canter to walk a little abruptly but not so unreasonably as to be unnatural. I had an irrelevant and vivid vision of some gymkhana or riding school – so long ago that I could not remember which and certainly did not try —at which I had to turn an obstinate pony among posts. This despairing exercise upon which I was now engaged had equally simple rules. Come up on your companion’s right and you are dead. But you must not be caught avoiding it, nor he trying to force you into it.

The icy sweat which had been dripping down my ribs and over my too imaginative liver was under control. I was a trifle more confident. This man, as I suspected, was not a gambler; otherwise he would have brought his hand up and across the saddle. He had the experience to know it was not so easy as for the cowhands of fiction. At the appearance of the pistol, the target would start, the horse between the target’s legs following the movement of alarm enough to throw off the aim. I myself could have taken the risk. I would have waited for horse and man to steady and still been sure of killing even if the range had opened to ten yards.

That one advantage – though largely imaginary – cheered me a little. And now came another. The man was losing that patience of which he had boasted.

“A wonderful spot for a gallop,” he invited.

It was. Nur Jehan was most unlikely to hold off the challenge of that powerful mare. From my companion’s point of view nothing could stop him overhauling his victim close enough to touch the unsuspecting back with the barrel. But I was not unsuspecting, and he had given me a slim chance. I had to take it, and hope for an opportunity to change direction – down to the farms and human eyes.

I had allowed Nur Jehan a few healthy gallops, but never before had I ridden him flat out. My little Persian Arab was off like a greyhound from a trap, a start with which the heavier mare could not compete at all. My low voice and knees must have communicated to him an urgency which demanded response.

After a hundred yards I looked round. The mare was coming up on my left and ten to twenty paces behind. Nur Jehan seemed to be holding his own, though how much of it he had gained at the start I could not tell. Three hundred yards. Nearly four hundred yards. And then a stone wall, new and without a gap, which meant that I must pull him up.

But away to the right were the chimneys of a cottage and safety. Could Nur Jehan jump? What could he jump? At least he had managed to get over the untidy hedges of Gillon’s glebe meadow. But if he hit a Cots-wold wall it was the end of the pair of us. A pistol shot wouldn’t be necessary. A stone while I was lying on the ground would do the job neatly and leave no evidence of murder.

I did not dare to steady the stallion. I made my intention plain and sat still. Nur Jehan, wildly excited, took off a couple of yards too soon. There was only the faintest click as a hind shoe touched the wall, and he was away again in his stride.

I swung off to the right into a wide grass track leading downhill between wire fences. Once there I could dictate the closeness and position of my companion. I looked over my shoulder in time to see him check the mare and jump compactly. Then he broke into an easy canter as if waiting for me to come back and join him.

I pulled up Nur Jehan and also waited. I was safe. A farmer and some white-coated vet or inspector were examining bullocks in the next field. The upper windows of the cottage which had showed only a tall chimney were in full view. I leaned forward to pat Nur Jehan’s neck, and under cover of the movement extracted the Mauser from its awkward holster and tucked it inside my shirt with the barrel down the waistband of my breeches. It was very uncomfortable and hindered riding at any pace but a walk. I felt confident, however, that from then on if the tiger drew any kind of lethal weapon he would still have his paw in plaster when he came up for trial.

As I showed no sign of moving from where I was, he joined me.

“A remarkable burst of speed for an untrained Arab,” he said genially. “I thought you were down at that wall. But, my dear sir, what a risk to take!”

“He was bolting,” I replied. “He might have charged right into it.”

That earned me a slow, penetrating look, but I had the answer ready to avert suspicion.

“I have no curb, you see,” I explained. “He is not accustomed to it. But of course we should not have allowed you to tempt us.”

I asked him to come down and have a drink with me. Now that I was momentarily safe, contact had to be maintained. I might be able to maneuver him into making an attack before witnesses, or I might discover his identity and regain the initiative.

We walked our horses down to the village below. The only evidence of its existence was a carpet of great tree-tops, the roof of a Jacobean manor and the church tower which I had pointed out to Benita in, as it now seemed, some former life. My companion chatted easily and amicably. He was a superb actor. I should have been left unaccountably dead upon the empty turf above us if I had not been able to take that long look through the hedge on the road from Stoke to Hernsholt and watch his face when it had been undisguisedly intent upon revenge.

The village street was fairly deserted. It was broad enough to hold a small country market and gently curving, with perhaps thirty houses on one side, divided by the inn, and twenty on the other, divided by the church. All were of stone and none – except for a village school in false Gothic – was later than the eighteenth century. The low sun brought out the gold of the Cotswold masonry and tiles.

“They are the most beautiful villages in Europe,” said my companion.

I answered at once that they were, and was surprised that my reply had not been in the least conventional. The Tyrol? Spain? Alsace? Would I have agreed unhesitatingly the day before, or was this the influence of Benita? I confirmed that the essential button of my shirt was undone and the butt of the Mauser free. It would be disgraceful to die just when my eyes had become English.

A short lane led us along the side of the inn to its yard.

There was a garage but no stable. We hitched our horses to the railings and went into the yard, where the flagstones had been roughly diversified by a few rock plants and stone troughs. There were two iron chairs and a rustic table for any customers who preferred to drink in the open.

My companion walked straight to the table and sat down. I remained standing and asked him what he would take.

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and then, as if aware of the oddness of his reply, added with more animation:

“Whisky. Scotch, if you will be so good.”

I had to turn my back on him in order to enter the garden door of the pub. I didn’t like it, but hoped the windows which overlooked us would keep him out of temptation. When I returned from the bar with a tray, both hands occupied, I carefully observed the position of the other pair of hands. They were both on the table and looked a little unnatural. Left alone to do some thinking, he may have come to the conclusion that I did not accept strangers so trustfully as it appeared. That jumping of the wall, that bearing to the right and safety, could well have been deliberate.

With the drinks on the table, I pretended to drop my matches and stooped to pick them up. The Mauser was now on my lap. I was sitting opposite to him and it could not be seen. My coat hid it from the bar window. I drank half my whisky and noticed that my fellow horseman merely touched the glass to his lips.

“Your name is von Dennim, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Dennim. I have dropped the von.”

“Yes, I can understand it. When you have finished your drink may I ride back with you to the top of the hill?”

I asked him if that was his way home. He replied, still quite pleasantly, that it was not, but that he wished for more of my company. He stressed the word “wish.” If I were thinking of escape, I should recognize it as an order. If I were still unsuspicious, there was nothing to frighten me in the slight arrogance of tone.

This was the end. The tiger had committed himself. I could act.

“Lower your head to pick up, for example, your handkerchief,” I told him, “and you will observe that I too have you covered. My legs are crossed and I am sitting sideways. From under the table you can only give me a painful wound. If I see the slightest sign of your raising that pistol above it, I will kill you. Is that clear?”

He looked at me with such a blaze of hatred that I was on the very edge of firing. Very gradually madness died away and was replaced by an ironical detachment far more in keeping with the face.

“So you know what I have to say to you?”

“What you said to Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber. But the game is up.”

“The game is not up, von Dennim. As you say —or did you say it? – you dare not shoot first.”

I pointed out that he had an automatic in his hand, that I should be justified in killing him and acquitted.

“Perhaps,” he answered coolly. “Only perhaps. It is going to be very hard to connect me with any of those executions. However frightened you are, I do not think you will shoot first.”

I was astonished to find that I was no longer particularly frightened.

“If this is stalemate, as you think,” I said, “you may as well tell me what you have against me. You were never in Buchenwald.”

“No – but my wife was.”

“There were no women.”

“Except by invitation.”

I could not understand. My expression must have been exasperatingly patronizing.

“Have you forgotten, von Dennim? Did it mean so little to you? Very well, I will remind you. I like each one of you to know why you are going to die. The Buchenwald officers used certain women from the camp at Ravensbrück for their amusement, did they not? You yourself once fetched a little party of them.”

It was perfectly true. I had conceived the scheme and timed it carefully and at last got the opportunity of fetching such a party from the women’s concentration camp. But I still did not see what it had to do with him or his wife. This was the incident which had brought Olga Coronel over to London after the war to thank me, when she and Georgina decided – rightly, I expect – that I was not in a state to see anyone who could remind me too vividly of the past.

It had been the custom of that unspeakable swine, Major Sporn, to borrow occasionally these unfortunate creatures from Ravensbrück. Besides the political prisoners awaiting the Ravensbrück gas chamber, there were plenty of common criminals utterly demoralized and only too glad of a break in their half-starved lives and a chance to drink themselves into a stupor.

On the afternoon when I myself went to Ravensbrück, I slipped into my busload of gipsies, thieves and prostitutes Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel. They knew that they were to trust me, and that was all. Twelve women had left for Buchenwald – filthy, disheveled, gaudily painted. But was it ten or twelve who arrived?

Sporn, already drunk, didn’t know and didn’t care. I, pretending also to be drunk, had juggled with the two extra – subtracted them, added them, done everything but multiply them. Forty-eight hours later Dessayes and Coronel had been picked up at a secret landing ground and were in hospital in London. Meanwhile I was under arrest; but they couldn’t see how I had worked the trick and they shot the wrong man. At least he was the wrong man from their point of view. Otherwise they could not have chosen a more deserving candidate.

“Your wife could not have been among those women,” I said.

“She was, von Dennim. I know something of what they did to her in every week from her arrest to her death. The men who interrogated her were hanged as war criminals – all but one whom I hanged myself. With Major Sporn and Captain Dickfuss I had the pleasure of dealing when they had served their sentences. And in the course of my conversation with Dickfuss I learned that I had a debt to pay to Weber and you.

It took me some time to find you. I should have guessed you were the type to save yourself by making friends with British Intelligence.”

“What did she look like?” I asked, ignoring this.

“She had long, dark hair,” he said. “Her skin was very pale and transparent even in health.”

The corners of his heavy, mobile mouth twitched twice. He glared at me across the table with eyes in which the obsession of blood-feud had long taken the place of sorrow.

I remembered. The hair had been cut short, but the transparency of the skin was unforgettable. They had housed her, I suppose, among the dregs of the camp in order that she should disappear from all human knowledge. God alone knew how they had drugged and broken her before she was ever interned in Ravensbrück. When I saw her she did not seem to know where she was or to care. She was already dead, though physically in apparent good health.

“What had she done?”

“Done! What had she done? You scum, does the name of Savarin mean anything to you?”

I asked him peaceably if he were Savarin. I was.

Presumably some of the French knew to whom that cover name belonged. London never did, nor, I believe, did the enemy. A leader of the Resistance, incredibly astute and merciless, Savarin had carried on his own private war against the German occupiers. His every act of bloodshed and sabotage carried the stamp of his own temperament – a sardonic savagery which belonged to some sultan of the Arabian Nights.

“But those women,” I began, “were …”

I stopped. I was only making matters worse. And I found unbearable the thought of the revenge which the Gestapo had taken when they suspected that they had caught the wife of Savarin. Dessayes and Coronel could never have known of her presence in Ravensbrück since she was not interned among the politicals. If those two gallant women had guessed that she was in the bus, one of them would have insisted on her escape and given up her own life instead.

“Dickfuss and Sporn I can understand,” I said. “But why did you kill Hans Weber?”

“He went with you and drove the bus.”

Accurate again. Weber was the officer in charge of transport. I had persuaded him to drive for the sake of his quite remarkable stupidity. If a total of ten were repeated to him often enough he could be trusted to swear to it.

“You might as well have executed the man who made it!” I exclaimed.

I was overwhelmed by the cruelty and pity of the thing. I knew I could never kill Savarin in cold blood. To take revenge for acts of revenge was merely to extend the horror and call it justice.

I suppose no man who has given great love to a woman worthy of love could ever guarantee that he would not kill the devils who destroyed her. But on the spur of the moment. To wait ten years without losing, in spite of the wear and tear of sane daily life, the compulsion to avenge her must be rare. And yet not so rare a few centuries ago. I am no psychologist, but I think the true parallel is religious mania. In Savarin’s case the wrathful god was his own very real but perverted sense of honor. He felt that he ought to kill, that he was morally bound to kill and that he must never permit himself to fall into any backsliding. To that, of course, must be added a pleasure in killing. He must always have had a powerful streak of sadistic cruelty – perhaps sublimated in youth, but during the war magnificently released and justified by patriotism.

I was tempted to turn my back on him and ride away. That was how my father would have dismissed him, ignoring his existence at the possible expense of his own. A contemptuous and honorable way out of the dilemma. Pride, Benita would call it. The day before, I too might have turned my back. But the future was no longer my own to relinquish.