Chapter Eighteen. The Underground Railway

Mr. Standfast

by John Buchan

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.
Anyhow, 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 chateau 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 tonight?' she asked timidly.

'I fear we cannot stop. Tonight 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. Tomorrow, 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.