The Saint in Europe (12 page)

He bent her over his knee and did exactly what he had promised to do, with an impersonal efficiency quite devoid of heat. When he released her she was sobbing with imнpotent rage and real stinging pain. She turned and ran blindly up the bank: if she had had a knife she would have driven it into his throat, but without it her one idea was to get away. Half unconsciously she found the path which he had pointed out as the one that ran into Austria. There must be a road somewhere further on: there would be cars, someone would give her a lift. Her eyes were hot and swimming with shame and anger.

Then she looked back and saw him following her. She glimpsed his tall figure through the trees, rucksack on back, swinging lithely along without making any effort to overtake her. She plunged on till her lungs were bursting and the agony of her stiffened joints made every step a torture; but he was always the same distance behind, unhurried and inescapable as doom. She had to rest or fall down. “Go away! Go away!” she cried, and struggled on with her heart pounding.

The trees thinned out, and she saw telegraph poles on the other side of a field. She ran out into the road. A truck was coming towards her, headed south: she stood in the middle of the road and waved to it till it stopped.

“Take me wherever you’re going!” she babbled. “Take me to Innsbruck! I’ll pay you anything you ask!”

The driver looked down at her uncomprehendingly.

“Innsbruck?” He pointed down the road. “Dorthin; aber es ist sehr weit ze laufen—”

She pantomimed frantically, trying to make him underнstand. Why couldn’t she speak German? … And then the Saint’s clear voice spoke cooly from the side of the road, in the driver’s own idiom.

“Permit me to introduce my wife. A little family arguнment. Please don’t bother. She’ll get over it.”

The driver’s mouth and eyes opened in an elaborate “Ach, so!” of intelligence, the bottomless sympathy of one woman-ridden male to another. He chuckled, and engaged his gears.

“Verzehen Sie, mein Herr! Ich habe auch eine Frau!” he flung backwards as he drove on.

Belinda’s strength drained out of her. She threw herself down at the side of the road and wept, with her face hidden in her arms. The Saint’s quiet voice spoke from above her head like the voice of destiny.

“It’s no good, Belinda. You can’t run away. Life has caught up with you.”

4

Days followed through which she moved in a kind of fog -days of physical exhaustion, dark rooms in inns, meals tastelessly yet ravenously devoured, washing of dishes and ruin of manicured hands, lumpy beds on the bare ground, scorching sun, dust, sweat, rain, and cold. Once, after a day of ceaseless drizzle, when she had to sleep in her sodden clothes on earth that squelched under the flimsy ground-sheet, she was certain she must catch pneumonia and die, and felt cruelly injured when the fresh air and healthy life refused even to let her catch a cold in the nose. She had those moods of self-pity when any added affliction would have been welcome, so that she could have looked up to Heaven like Job and protested that no one had ever sufнfered so much. Self-pity alternated with the hours when her mind was filled with nothing but murderous hatred of the man who was always beside her, calm and unchanging as a mountain, blithely unruffled in good weather and bad. She carried out the tasks he set her because she had no choice; but she swore she would die before he could say he had broken her spirit. At first she washed the frying-pan perнfunctorily, and brought it back with scraps of earth still clinging to the stubborn traces of egg: he said nothing about it, but that night he scrambled only two eggs and gave them to her, grey and gritty with the remains of mud she had left.

“That’s your ration,” he said remorselessly. “If you don’t like it, have the pan clean next time.”

Next time she finished her scouring with the towel, and when she wanted to wash she tried to take his. He stopped her.

“Egg is grand for the complexion,” he said. “But if you object to drying your face on a dishcloth, the usual remedy applies-plus washing the towel.”

Sometimes she thought she would steal his knife while he slept and cut his throat: the impulse was there, but she knew she would have been lost without him. Even when the rain had poured all day and everything was drenched, he conjured dry wood out of empty air and had a fire going in no time; he introduced unexpected variety into their simple fare, and robbed orchards for apples with abandoned enнthusiasm of a schoolboy. He was never bad-tempered or at a loss: he smoothed difficulties away without appearing to notice them. For thirty-six hours after her spanking she sulked furiously, but it made no mark on his tranquility. The tension of labored silence slipped perforce into a minimum of essential conversation-strained and hostile on her part, unfailingly natural and good-humored on his. Three days passed before she discovered that his eyes were soundlessly laughing at her.

Nothing is more difficult than for two people to be toнgether every hour of the day and punctiliously ignore each other’s existence. Nothing, she found out miserably, can grow more irksome than keeping alive a grudge against the someone who is utterly untroubled by rancor. Sometimes the loneliness of her self-imposed silence welled up on her so that she could have shrieked aloud for relief. Imperнceptibly, the minimum of essential remarks seemed to inнcrease. Every detail of their daily life became an excuse for some trivial speech which it was torment to resist. She found herself chattering for a quarter of an hour about the pros and cons of boiled and fried onions.

And then came the incredible night when she slept straight through until morning, and woke up contented. For a while the feeling baffled her, and she lay on her back and puzzled about it.

And then it dawned on her in a surprising flash. She was no longer tired! They had covered twenty miles the previous day, by the Saint’s reckoning, and yet her limbs felt supple and relaxed, and her feet were not sore. Had they chosen an exceptionally soft piece of ground on which to camp, or had her body learned to adapt itself to the unyielding couch as well as to the abrupt changes from heat to cold? She could not understand it, but the night lay behind her as an interval of unbroken rest, blissful as a child’s or a wild animal’s. The consciousness of her surroundings came to her with a sense of shock. They had rolled into their blanнkets high up on a wooded slope on the southern shores of the Achensee: from where she lay she could see fragments of the placid waters of the lake gleaming like splinters of pale blue grass between the trees. On her left, the woods curved up and away in a rich green rolling train to the mighty shoulders of a white-capped peak that took the morning light to its brow in glistening magnificence. When she looked directly upwards, nothing came between her gaze and the arching tent of the sky where three fluffy white clouds floated slowly eastwards with the red glow of the recent sunrise catching them like the reflection of a fire. She had never really seen a sky before, or the glory of trees and rolling hills.

Belinda drank in a picture of unimagined beauty whose very strangeness made it unforgettable. In truth it was nothing scenically startling, not in any way the kind of view to which tourist excursions are run: it was only an odd corner of the natural splendor of the world, all of which is beautiful. But it was the first corner of the world to which her eyes had ever been opened with emotion, a starting point of undreamed-of experience which must be for ever as unique as all beginnings. Dazed with it as if she had awakened on a different planet, she climbed out of her blankets at last and searched mechanically for comb and mirror. The reflection that met her eyes seemed like the portrait of a stranger. Wind and sun had tinted a delicate gold into her skin, and there was a soft flush in her cheeks that had never been there before unless she dabbed it on. Her lips were riper, her eyes clearer and brighter than she had ever thought Nature could make them. She was enнtranced with herself.

She put her bare feet on the grass, and the sweet touch of the dew on them made the rest of her body aware of being soiled and sticky. Reluctant to separate her toes from the green coolness, and yet eager to perfect that physical joyousness in every way, she strapped on her sandals. In the days before that, she realized with amazement, she had been too weary, too numb with self-pity, to care about anyнthing but superficial cleanliness.

She dug out the soap and went down to the lake shore, carrying her towel. What a perfume there was in the chill of the air, what a friendly peace in the stillness of earth and sky! She stood on the road by the shore and looked to her left towards the sleeping white houses of Pertisau, the specks of gaudily striped cafe parasols on the lakeside terнraces; and it was like looking at the vanguard of an invasion, and she was a savage come down from the clean hills to gaze in wonder at this outpost of civilization.

She stripped off her clothes and washed, and swam out a little way into the crystal water. It was very cold, but when she had dried herself she was tingling. She went up the hill again slowly, filled with an extraordinary happiness. She had no more envy of those people who were sleeping in soft beds half a mile away, who would presently rise and straggle down to eat their breakfasts in stuffy dining-rooms. How much they were missing-how much she had missed!

Breakfast… She was hungry, in a clear, keen way that matched the air. She delved into the Saint’s pack for food, picked up the frying pan and inspected it. The fire was out, and when she turned over the heap of fuel beside it the wood was damp. How did one kindle a fire?

Simon Templar rolled over and opened his eyes. He hitched himself up on one elbow.

“Hullo-am I late?” he said, and glanced at his watch. It was half-past six.

Belinda saw him with a start. She had forgotten … she hated him, didn’t she? She remembered that she was still holding the frying-pan, and dropped it guiltily.

“It’s about breakfast-time,” she said. Her mouth felt clumsy. Odd, how hard it had become to make every word as impersonal and distant as she had trained herself to do-to convey with every sentence that she only spoke to him because she had to.

He threw off his blankets, and dived back into them again to return with two handfuls of twigs.

“Always sleep with some firewood and keep it dry,” he explained.

In a few seconds flames were licking up among the dead ashes, steaming the moisture from the other wood as he built it up around his tinder in a neat cone. He gathered the eggs together, and one of them escaped from his corral and went rolling down the hill. He ran after it, grabbed for it, and caught his toe on the projecting root of a tree: the chase ended in a headlong plunge and a complete somerнsault which brought him up with his back to the bole of a young sapling. There was something so comical about him as he sat there, with the rescued ovum triumphantly clutched in one hand, that Belinda felt a smile tugging at her lips. She fought against it; her chest ached, and the laughter tore at her throat; she gave way because she had to laugh or suffocate, and bowed before the gale. Simon was laughing too. The wall, the precious barrier that she had built up, was crumbling like sand in that tempest of mirth; and she could do nothing to hold it together …

Presently she was saying: “Why don’t you show me how you do those eggs; then I could take a turn with them.”

“It’s easy enough when you know how. Like everything else, there’s a trick in it. You’ve got to remember that a scrambled egg goes on cooking itself after you take it off the fire, so if you try to finish them in the pan they’re hard and crumby when you serve them. Take them off while they still look half raw, and they end up just fine and juicy.”

She had never enjoyed a meal more in her life; and when it was finished she could not bear to think that they must leave that place almost at once. It was like a reprieve when he announced that his shirt was unspeakable, and they must pause for a washing day. They scrubbed their clothes in pools formed by the tiny waterfall that cascaded close by their camping-ground, and spread them in the sun to dry. It was mid-afternoon before she had to tear herself away: she went down with him to the road feeling newly refreshed and fit for a hundred miles before sundown, yet with the knowledge that she left part of her heart behind up there with the trees and sky.

As they reached the road a band of twenty young people were coming towards them, singing as they came. The men wore leather shorts and white linen shirts; some of the girls wore the same, others wore brief leather skirts. All of them carried packs, and many of the packs were heavy. Belinda saw one man laden with an enormous iron pot and a collecнtion of smoke-blackened pans: he looked like a huge metal-ized snail.

“Gruss Gott!” cried the leader, breaking the song as he came up with them, in the universal greeting of Tirolese wayfarers; and Simon smiled and answered “Gruss Gott!” The others of the party joined in. A couple from the middle fell out and stopped.

“Wohin gehen Sie?” asked the boy-he was little more. Simon told him they were on their way to Jenbach and thence to Innsbruck. “We go also to Jenbach,” said the boy. “Kommen Sie mit!”

The group re-formed around them, and they went on together, past Seespitz and down the long hill that leads to the Inn valley. Belinda was happy. She was proud to be able to keep up with them tirelessly, and their singing made light of the miles. She was seeing everything as if she had been blind from her birth until that day. At one place a gang of men were working on the road; once she would have passed by without looking at them-they would have been merely common workmen, dirty but necessary cattle to serve the needs of those whose cars used the road. Now she saw them. They were stripped to the waist, bodies muscled like statues and polished with sweat like oil, harmonies of brown skin and blue cotton trousers. One party called “Gruss Gott!” to the other, smiling, fellow freemen of the air.

“What does that mean-Gruss Gott?” she asked the Saint.

“Greet God,” he answered, and looked at her. “Isn’t that only gratitude?”

The boy on her other side spoke a little English. She asked him where they came from and what they were doing.