I did not look round at Duyker. He said nothing, content for the moment to follow me wherever I wanted to go with my little two-foot steps. Perhaps he thought I would fall, when it would be easier to go to work at once than to make the futile gesture of helping me up. Perhaps he too was remembering silence under stars at a time when race and religion had been matters of easy, kindly pride instead of secret torture.
I bore a little to my right towards the tinkle of water. I could just distinguish the shape of a noble chestnut, beyond which streaks and patches of grey moonlight suggested that the sparse woodland opened out into a glade. Over the mould of last year’s leaves I hobbled to the bank of a shallow, clear stream, a couple of yards wide, which any long-legged man would normally cross by a jumping stride from one sloping slab of stone to another on the far bank.
Normally. Yes, if he didn’t know the sweet, cold waters of my Vizcaya. My heart began to beat as if I was running. I thought Duyker must see me quivering. I was, as I have tried to explain, in a pantheist mood of unity with my surroundings; so prayer was easy and instant without the necessity for any Name and Address. I begged whatever could hear me that Duyker would do what he ought to do, and that this special moss did not grow by the sunbaked tributaries of the Vaal. Meanwhile I hobbled meekly over the gravel just downstream from the stones, and took my time over it.
I had nothing to lose if I were wrong, so I turned on him before his foot hit the other side. That solid-looking moss under his shoe stripped off the slope and disintegrated in slime. As soon as his outstretched hand hit the ground, I grabbed the sjambok out of it. It was the only weapon I had, so I used it with full force and fear while he was still on one knee. That awful lash took him across the mouth and immediately widened it to double the size.
Spouting blood, he sprang straight at me from his half-up position, hard and low as if in a football tackle. I went down, for I could not use my feet. Quite what happened then I hardly know. There can be little rememberable thought in the speed and instinct of the cornered buffalo. Instead of falling on top of me, he must have jumped back and taken a revolver out of his pocket. At any rate he widened the distance between us, either despising me because of his weapon or forgetting that though I was down on one elbow I still had the sjambok in my other hand.
I struck upwards, again at his face. He got the flick of the tip this time, and the effect of it on the open wound was hideous. Gasping and choking, he gave me time to fasten on his hand and force it down. I could not loosen his grip on the gun. He was too strong for me to bend his arm. In the course of this I was on the ground again with him on top of me and the blood coming down as if one had knocked over a jug of warm milk. It is really very difficult to be academically exact.
My concentration was entirely on where his gun was pointing. At the moment it was wavering over my feet, so I suddenly curled up and brought the lashings round my ankles close to the muzzle. He didn’t see what I was trying to do. Even when he was coughing, his arm locked in my grip was surprisingly steady. I forced a finger over his and pulled the trigger. The rope was only grazed, but enough for a jerk to break it. He was no match for me as soon as I had a proper purchase on the ground, so I threw him off and ran for it.
It must have been all over very quick. At any rate the Algerian did not leave the car and come to the rescue until the sound of the shot. Or perhaps he didn’t interfere because two blows of the sjambok, some grunts and a bit of a struggle were what he expected to hear. By the time he came up I was an impossible target, a shadow vanishing into the trees. Once safely out of the clearing I waited to see what would happen, mopping myself up with leaves. I had a sudden revulsion against Duyker’s blood getting into my various abrasions. About as sensible as his horror of miscegenation!
Duyker was now lying on his back, quite still. The Algerian glanced at him, jumped into cover and stayed quiet. After five or ten minutes he came out. It may have occurred at last to his ultra-military mind that the revolver was still in Duyker’s hand and that I had possessed no arm of my own. He knelt down by Duyker and delicately felt his heart. Then he stood still for a moment, looking all round as if to impress the precise scene on memory. I could almost hear him thinking whether he ought to take any initiative without orders. He decided to risk it. No doubt there had been sufficient precedents. He removed the gun, put it in his pocket and started to lope off down the road. I heard the soft strides die away, and there was at last an awkward silence.
I, too, left Duyker lying, for I had had quite enough of practising as an unregistered mortician. It seemed to me that the runner was right to leave the body untouched and the car on the roadside, and to report with the utmost speed to his superior officer. What Vigny would do I could not imagine—presumably invent a credible story to account for Duyker being where he was and call in the police to investigate his murder. They could not pin it on me, since I was not in Spain. With that thought I took to the hills, not caring where paths and tracks and guesswork led me so long as I reached some other stream from that by which Duyker lay.
No soap so he died, and she very imprudently married the barber. The childhood nonsense ran round my head as I tried to wash away the blood stains from my clothes in a cold depressing dawn which only emphasised the brown and purple. But when the sun came up and my clothes were drying on the grass I saw that my fate need not be as bad as all that. My dirty blue shirt and trousers might have been stained by anything—dark, thick Rioja for example. My coat I painted with a wisp of grass and the last of the hair dye. They hadn’t bothered to empty my pockets. The reason why I had no soap was simply that I had not had time to buy a fresh cake in Lequeitio.
Echeverría would have been more shocked than ever by my appearance. I tried to look like an unemployable labourer recovering from a three-day binge. The cheap cotton pullover I buried together with the sjambok. Don’t ask me where! I wandered off, dazed with the sensation of being an outcast.
Every half hour I argued with myself so fiercely that I had to sit down to do it. I told myself that I had killed in self-defence and was plainly guiltless; but the blunt truth, so soon after the shock, would not stick. I had no proof that Duyker’s life was not worth more than mine. What had I preserved for the world by killing? A minor authority on Comparative Philology. What had I destroyed? A man of action who appeared to my fallible judgment to be mentally unbalanced but might be a prince of good fellows out in his native bush. A totting up of human values gave no certain answer. As for religion, it should hold us both equally guilty. But there I grope. Religion is like rhubarb. Years must pass before anyone educated at an English boarding-school can taste again the freshness of either.
All my fault? In a way it was. I accused myself of utter folly in ever accompanying Bozec to Zarauz when nothing prevented me from making a jump on to Lequeitio quay and leaving Bozec and Bernardino to wonder uneasily who the devil I had been. Yet philologists are not conditioned to realise that an active minority of their fellows lack any sense of the sacredness of human life, and that for a Vigny the only valid objection to murder is that it may be inconvenient.
Instinctively I was heading west for Maya. When I had been released from Madrid just seven agitated days earlier—days which had telescoped themselves into an uncomputed, animal memory of trees, hills and movement—I could only complicate matters for Olura by impulsively trying to arrange a secret meeting. Now, however, it was essential that she and you, the unknown guardian, should know the true story of the death of Livetti. Afterwards I intended to recross the Pyrenees and return home secretly, where I hoped to find some friend to swear that I had been in England since my release. But I did not really believe that I should ever be accused of killing Duyker. It seemed so unlikely that Sauche and Vigny would mention my name if I did not mention theirs.
Again I had to walk. I would have broken my rule and risked public transport, but I was too filthy and questionable a character for even the most ramshackle country bus. So I played up to my appearance,
eating and drinking in dark, foul taverns and pretending to be a lamentable bum permanently pickled in alcohol.
After two days striding along the high ground—except when there was anyone about to observe such an unlikely sense of purpose—I crossed our river where it was still a fast mountain stream, and cautiously approached Maya from the west. The village and its estuary were hidden, but through a gap I could see the Hostal de las Olas, the island of the Ermita and the curve of the great open beach where first I had talked with Olura.
By six in the evening I was in the woods where we had started our futile attempt to escape. I avoided the estuary, for it was Sunday; the sands were dotted with picnic parties just packing up before returning to Bilbao and the miniature industrial centres of the valleys. More with the intention of catching a glimpse of Olura than of reconnoitring possible approaches, I climbed a pine-tree which overlooked the villa and the cove on its southern side. There was no sign of life in house or garden, and no guard at the gate. It seemed as if I could walk straight in after dark, but I was determined not to be impatient.
On the sands immediately below me were two men leaning against a beached dinghy. Though dressed as if they belonged to the foreshore, their appearance was unfamiliar, and they ought—at that hour and after a calm week of profitable fishing—to have been in the inn. It was possible that they had come to Maya for a Sunday outing, but they showed no intention of starting home.
I distrusted them even more as soon as I spotted a Pair of the Civil Guard who were sitting and smoking behind a screen of bushes just above the road into the village. They might have been enjoying the chance for a quiet cigarette or keeping an eye open for cases of Sunday evening immorality, but it seemed wiser to assume that the authorities were employing a lot of tact and money on the surveillance of Olura.
If so, the watch need not be so discreet after dark and would close in on the villa. In any case an unobserved entry was not going to be easy. The man who levelled the top of that miniature promontory and built a house on it had an eye for a charming site but did not consider the convenience of illicit visitors. Perhaps he had a wife or daughter whose standards became too relaxed when on holiday.
The low cliff on the south side, which faced me across the cove, would have offered an easy scramble up if not for the two figures, still unaccountably there at dusk, on the sands below it. The north and east cliffs dropping straight into the river were stepped by convenient ledges and could be reached by swimming or wading downstream. But both seemed to me then to be far too public. Allarte and his fellows might be loading gear into their craft by the light of flares, and there would be faint luminescence everywhere from the open doors of houses and the terrace of the inn.
So the best bet was to enter from the west: in fact by the normal way in. By cautious approach across the sand, well above high-water mark, I thought I could reach the low wall to the right of the entrance, avoiding the road and the gate itself. The trouble was that there seemed to be a small light burning above the front door. So far as I could tell in the gathering dusk, it was very inadequate, yet probably sufficient for all my movements to be dimly glimpsed once I was over the wall and in that exposed front garden.
I came down from my tree and walked back through the woods to the ruined cottage on the banks of the river. After stumbling about among the brambles in the last of the light I discovered the stone under which we had buried, three weeks earlier, Olura’s Red Riding Hood cloak. She had never retrieved it. I did not think she would, even if she were allowed to walk that far.
It was still in fair condition. I shook out the cocoons, ants and woodlice and carried it off. In spite of the whiff of mould I could still detect the fragrance of Olura. That was an incentive rather than a misery, for I was sure that I would be with her in half an hour.
By the time I returned to the cove it was dark. The villa was showing no lit windows on its southern side, but there was a gleam in the air above the terrace, possibly from the living-room, possibly from flares on the village beach. That damned light over the porch was stronger than mere optimism had reckoned. I grumbled to myself that if there were anything in telepathy Olura would have inexplicably got up from her chair to turn it out.
The powdery sand at the top of the cove was two or three feet below the level of the road. I crawled along it on hands and knees, popping up my head at intervals to keep track of the movements of the few pedestrians. The two suspicious characters by the dinghy, which I had to pass closely, were no longer there. When one of them obligingly lit a cigarette, I discovered that they had moved across the cove until they were immediately below the villa. I again wondered what the devil you and Olura had been doing to attract such keen supervision. Allarte had given me the impression that you were more or less on parole.
At last I came up against the corner of the west wall. The exdinghy party was thirty yards away near the edge of the water and could not possibly distinguish anything at that distance. The only risk I ran was that someone in the tavern across the road or one of the Pair—if they had left their screen of bushes for the dark alley alongside the tavern’s pool of light—might have his eye on the wall at the moment when I slid over it. That, after all, was unlikely. First I threw the cloak over; then I pulled myself up, keeping as flat as possible, and dropped down into the garden.
In the darkness under the wall I put on Olura’s cloak. It was of course too short, but the flower beds and their edging of low shrubs hid my legs. In any case nobody out in the road could see more than a moving figure, whose identity would be taken for granted so long as the outline was familiar.
Insensate daring? A typically academic contempt for the common sense of plain humanity? Well, I agree with you that perhaps it was speculative; but in normal circumstances I should have got away with it. In fact I did, so far as that particular manoeuvre was concerned. If you will house your goddaughter on the sort of peninsula which would be chosen by a robber baron in a small way of business, you compel anyone who desires access to her into some degree of impudence.
Drifting slowly up to the house and slopping at intervals as if to enjoy the night scent of flowers, I reached the flagged terrace on the east. To my bitter disappointment there was still no light to be seen. The french windows were unlocked, so I went in, closing them behind me. Nobody was about. It seemed early for Olura to have gone to bed—and, if she had, at least one window would be blazing with light.
I explored the passage down the middle of the house from the living-room to the front door. As my only means of illumination was a box of wax matches and I did not dare to switch on the lights, I could not tell whether you had just left the house for a stroll or were no longer living in it.
I was just about to return to the living-room when a sudden draught blew out my match. Someone had opened the window. Immediately afterwards I saw the beams of two powerful torches playing over the room. I squashed myself into the corner between the walls of living-room and passage. A second later a beam lit up the whole length of the house.
It was the Pair of the Civil Guard—presumably the same whom I had seen earlier watching the road into the village. I could hear their low-voiced conversation. One of them asked if they should search the house.
‘Better not,’ the other replied. ‘There is politics in this.’
About the only time in my life that I have thanked God for politics! If they came down the passage I hadn’t a hope.
‘Was he sure?’ the first asked.
‘Quite sure. He said that the poor señorita was in the garden in tears.’
‘She’ll have something to cry for. Headquarters believe she is an English terrorist. You saw her too?’
‘No. But since I knew she and her uncle had not come home …’
‘Good! You take the front, and I’ll stay on the terrace.’
They went out, leaving the french window open. I returned to the living-room, and from the cover of an arm-chair watched the man on the terrace. He shone his torch
on the rocks and the water, and then appeared to be signalling across the sands. Soon afterwards I heard a horse cantering over the beach.
This was hell. Evidently you would both be back at any moment. Ought I to stay or not? So far as I was capable of any constructive thought, I decided that my discovery and arrest—both pretty certain—might compromise Olura. I blamed myself for impatience. I should have waited until I knew more of her routine and why she was being guarded by horse and foot.
So the only thing to do was to get out and get clear. It was a hard decision to take—the more so, since I doubted if it were possible. With a man at the front door, the garden route was out. So was a climb down to the cove. If I slipped or dislodged a stone, the two chaps on the sand below would hear me; and if I fell, it would be slap into their hands. The only practicable way was from the terrace silently down over the rocks into the water of the estuary.
Somehow I had to get rid of the guard outside the window. One obvious trick was to switch off the light over the front door. That ought to bring both of them into the house to investigate. However, they could then be sure that there was really somebody about, which I wanted to avoid. So fuse the circuit? Difficult without any light to work by, but the wiring of any village of that age was sure to be rather slap-happy. I was inclined to put my trust in the local electrician and to hope that he had not been an efficient Basque.
First I folded up the red cloak and deposited it among the cushions of the living-room couch. The Pair had only flashed their torches round the room and could not possibly be sure how many cushions there were. Then I tip-toed down the passage to the front door and had a look at the switch. My luck was in. The screws which held it to the wall were loose. With a handkerchief round my hand—memories of Mgwana and silk stockings—I wrenched it out from the wall a little and stuck the blade of a knife underneath. Sure enough the insulation had worn off a wire, or a wire had been pulled partly out of its terminal by the loose switch. There was a satisfying pop, and darkness outside.
Olura Page 20