by Ann Bridge
While Julia was telling Colin to come straight on to ‘the house of Niemöller’s colleague’ Germaine was consulting the time-table. ‘Tell him to take the train of 15 hours 55 minutes to Lausanne, and change there. He will get a connection in a few minutes, and we will meet him at the station.’ When Julia had rung off she said, ‘Even if he spoke from the airport he will have time to catch that train.’ She brushed some fallen peony-petals off the table in the hall into her hand, adding, ‘Quite so much discretion is really hardly necessary here for internal calls; since everything is automatic there are no operators to overhear. But discretion never does any harm.’ She returned to her stove and Julia went out to cut the asparagus for supper, and get fresh flowers for the dining-room.
‘Cut some roses for your cousin’s room,’ Germaine called through the kitchen window. ‘They are just beginning.’
It was Julia who took the hand-cart down through the clean sunny little village to meet Colin; he gave his boyish giggle over this novel arrangement. ‘Don’t kiss me at La Cure,’ Julia said, after his cousinly hug on the platform.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Jean-Pierre was a little suspicious because I signed that telegram “Darling”. I told him it was just a code-word, but don’t go and wreck it all.’
‘Is he stuffy and portentous? How frightful.’
‘No. You’ll see.’
Colin saw, over a late tea in the arbour beside the lawn, now festooned with the washing of a daughter-in-law. The Pastor was obviously studying his ward’s fiancé with the deepest interest, and when they repaired to the study to talk les affaires, Julia could see that he was favourably impressed by the young man’s passionate concern over the loss of the documents, and complete indifference about the money—he never asked a single question about that.
De Ritter told Colin that the Swiss police, very discreetly, were on the look-out for the party, and asked if he could supply a photograph of his fiancée? Colin, jerking his thumb out, an obstinate look on his face, said that he couldn’t. He however produced the information that in London it was thought improbable that the impostors had yet left Switzerland; it was considered more likely that they would wait in this ultra-neutral country to contact their principals and hand over their haul. The Pastor innocently asked who the principals were?—Julia laughed at him. ‘He couldn’t tell you even if he knew.’
It was settled that Colin should go on next day to Berne to see ‘our people’ there, and take them Julia’s description of the party of three; Julia then explained that she ought to return to Gersau, to take Mrs. Hathaway to Beatenberg.
‘But how you come and go!’ de Ritter exclaimed regretfully. ‘We like long visits.’
‘Some time I’ll come and pay you a proper one, and stay ages,’ Julia told him, ‘when the job’s done’—and rang up Herr Waechter to announce her return next day to take Mrs. Hathaway to Beatenberg the day after.
Later the Pastor drew her aside. ‘I approve,’ he said. ‘A little immature still in some ways, but time will remedy that. C’est un charmant garçon’ Colin for his part, up in Julia’s room, said, ‘He is most frightfully nice, isn’t he? As an in-law I can’t imagine anyone I should like more.’
‘He’s only a god-in-law,’ Julia said. ‘But I agree.’
Though Colin was going to Berne and Julia had to pass through it, they carefully arranged to travel not only by different trains but by different routes, he by Neuchâtel, she via Lausanne—to the Pastor’s incredulous amusement. ‘But you are in Switzerland!’ he said.
‘So are some other people,’ Colin replied.
At Gersau next day in the salon Julia, idly turning over the pages of a fortnight-old Paris-Match, came on a page devoted to Aglaia and her story; there was a full-length studio photograph and, as often with Paris-Match, a snapshot (probably bought from a servant) of Colin and Aglaia together, looking very lover-like, in the garden of some country-house. Julia was normally rather scrupulous about other people’s newspapers, but in this instance she did not ask Herr Waechter’s permission, but took the magazine up to her room and removed the whole page; she cut out the studio portrait, borrowed a large envelope, and posted it herself to M. Chambertin at the bank with a note clipped to it—‘This is the likeness you require. J. P.’ The snapshot she put in her note-case.
Chapter 6
Beatenberg and the Niederhorn
Beatenberg is a mountain village perched on a ledge facing South above the Lake of Thun; its chief claim to distinction, apart from its remarkably beneficent air, is the fact that it is over seven kilometres, or nearly five miles, long. A bus careers at fairly frequent intervals up and down the long straggling street, set with hotels, pensions, convalescent homes and shops, from Wahnegg, at the head of the road up from Interlaken at one end, to the top of the funicular railway going down to Beatenbucht to connect with the lake steamers at the other—there is no way up or down in between, only sheer cliff. The drive up from Interlaken in the Post-Auto is rather hair-raising: for much of the way the road is narrow, with blind hairpin bends, and the bus vast; it proclaims its advent by blaring out a pretty little tune on six notes, and cars squeeze into the rocky bush-grown banks to allow the great machine to edge past, its outer wheels horribly near the lip of the steep wooded slope. A notice in three languages at the front of the bus adjures passengers not to address the driver, but this is cheerfully ignored both by the local passengers and the driver himself—if a pretty young woman is on the front seat there is often practically a slap-and-tickle party the whole way.
By this route Mrs. Hathaway, Julia, and Watkins—Watkins audibly disapproving of the blond driver’s goings-on with a black-haired girl—arrived at the Hotel Silberhorn, a medium-sized hotel three-quarters of the way along that endless village street. Since Herr Waechter, brought up in the hotel trade, had recommended the place they had expected something rather good, and were startled by the extreme smallness of the rooms: Mrs. Hathaway’s, a double room with one bed taken out, and a cubby-hole of a private bathroom, was quite small enough; as for Julia’s and Watkins’s singles, they were like prison cells, though each had a minute balcony with a chair—and all alike shared the view: the whole Blümlisalp range stood up, white, glittering and glorious, across the lake. The keynote of the hotel was extreme simplicity—coconut matting along the corridors, the minimum of furniture in the rooms; but the food was excellent, served piping hot on plastic boxes with pierced metal tops, over night-lights. The huge plate-glass windows of the restaurant commanded the view too; waitresses in high-heeled sandals pattered to and fro across the parquet floor, their heels making a loud clacking noise; their activities were supervised by a grey-haired woman known as Fräulein Hanna, who appeared to be a sort of combination of house-keeper, head barmaid, and general organiser.
It was all rather scratch, but there were the essentials, as Mrs. Hathaway said: comfort, cleanliness, good food, and, from Fräulein Hanna especially, the utmost consideration. Like all English travellers in Switzerland today Mrs. Hathaway and her party liked to brew their own morning and afternoon tea in their bedrooms, partly because then it was tea, but also because these items were not included in the very high prix fixe; if one took both of them, and coffee after lunch and dinner as well, it added ten shillings a day to one’s expenses. Mrs. Hathaway and Watkins both had small electric saucepans with long flexes which would plug in in place of any electric light bulb; on seeing these objects Fräulein Hanna, far from showing any resentment, enquired earnestly what their voltage was?—it proved to match that of the hotel, to her manifest satisfaction. All three of course used Mrs. Hathaway’s private bathroom; the hotel bathrooms were kept locked, and a charge of five francs, or nearly ten shillings, made for a bath. Watkins was outraged by this. ‘Well really! How do they expect people to keep clean? And with all that water running to waste down-hill all the time!’ (This fantastic charge for baths is in fact a thing which the Swiss hôteliers would do well to remedy.)
For the next two days Julia and Mrs. Hathaway explored their end of the village. They found a nice little shop barely three hundred yards away, set in a grove of pine-trees, at which to buy their sugar and Nescafé; they walked gently up a fenced path between flowery meadows to the Parallel-Weg, a narrow road running parallel to, but a short distance above the village street, with seats at frequent intervals; they peered in at the open door of the cow-stable just opposite the hotel garden, and saw the huge cream-and-yellow Emmenthaler cows, still tied in their stalls, munching away at fresh-cut grass—out in the meadows the hotel cat, also white and yellow, sat at the edge of the high uncut grass in the evenings, watching for field-mice. Mrs. Hathaway delighted in the place: besides the exquisite view, here was peace, calm, and a native community leading its own pastoral life, untroubled by the tourists, who so early in the season were relatively few.
Colin rang up on the second evening to say that he was coming next day, and would Julia book him a room? He came up on the Post-Auto, which always pulled up opposite a petrol-pump next to the cow-stable; before dinner he and Julia strolled up the little path to the Parallel-Weg, and leaning back on one of the wooden seats, with not a soul in sight, he told her what he had learned in Berne. ‘They’ had quite definitely not left Switzerland; they were waiting there to make contact with their principals, who would be coming in from abroad—meanwhile the Swiss police were conducting enquiries at all hotels.
Julia told him about finding the photograph of Aglaia in Paris-Match, and how she had sent it to Chambertin.
‘Oh well, I think that was quite all right—really rather useful,’ Colin said.
‘You’d got one all the time, hadn’t you?’ Julia asked.
‘Yes, of course I had—but why should those bastards have it? If they’d had any wits they’d have looked at Paris-Match themselves.’ He sniffed the sweet air, and gazed across at the Blümlisalp range, now turning to a pale rose as the sun sank. ‘How nice it is here! Do let’s relax for a few days till something happens. What’s the food like at the pub?’
‘Good,’ Julia told him.
In fact something happened the very next day. Mrs. Hathaway had quite got over the journey from Gersau, and was perfectly happy either sitting in the garden, or pottering up and down the village street with Watkins, so Julia and Colin decided to go up the Niederhorn, the mountain immediately behind Beatenberg, in the Sessel-Bahn; see the view, and walk down.
The now universal practice of winter sports in Switzerland has conferred one great benefit on travellers at all times of year. Every mountain with slopes suitable for skiing has been provided either with a funicular railway, or at least some form of ski-lift, by which the lazy modern skier can be carried to the summit without effort, shoot down, be carried up again, and shoot down once more—they function in the summer too, so that any tourist can reach the tops of the lesser mountains. The Niederhorn Sessel-Bahn is one of the more elegant of these contraptions, with twin seats (slung from a strong steel cable) complete with foot-board and a little sun-canopy overhead, into which an attendant clamps the passengers by a metal bar across their stomachs. Julia and Colin, so clamped, were wafted out of the small station and up through the tops of the pine-trees. It was delicious sailing through the sunny air; people on other seats coming down on the opposite cable, a few feet away, waved to them out of sheer joie de vivre. Colin pulled out a map and looked out the way down—he was very map-minded. One path was visible, zig-zagging through the trees close below them; the only other slanted across the upper slopes to descend at the far end of the village—sheer cliffs cut off the section in between.
Half-way up they swung into a large shed, where the seats were hitched onto an overhead rail and hauled by hand round a semi-circle, to be hooked onto another cable for the upper section of the journey; the sides of this shed were full of enormous white-metal milk-churns.
‘What can those be for?’ Julia speculated. ‘The cows aren’t up on the high pastures yet.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because they’re still down in the village in their stalls—I’ll show you. They’re only taken up when the lower grass is finished, and it has grown properly up on the alps—a peasant was telling Mrs. H. about it. You can see that there’s hardly a bite up here yet,’ Julia said, peering down; they were now above the tree-line and swinging up over open pastures, still pallid and brownish after the recently-departed snow. ‘Oh, look!’ the girl exclaimed—‘Those must be gentians. We must pick some for Mrs. H., she’s mad on wild-flowers.’ Colin, also peering from his seat, saw some brilliant blue stars shining in the drab grass. ‘Good idea,’ he said.
But on arrival at the small summit station it was at once evident that picking gentians would be a very bad idea indeed. Large placards in four languages proclaimed that the whole Niederhorn-Gebiet was a Natur-Reserve, where the picking of any flowers was most strictly forbidden. ‘Oh dear,’ Julia regretted as they strolled up to the platform on the top, where a panorama of the visible mountains was spread out under a glass frame beside a large telescope. Both panorama and telescope were crowded with tourists, jostling one another for position; Julia and Colin left them alone, and went over and looked down on the farther side. Here the Niederhorn, sloping up easily from the South, ends in a series of vertical cliffs, dropping some hundreds of feet to steep slopes of grass and forest above the Justis-thal, a long narrow valley running in from the Lake of Thun to a grey scree-covered col at its head. The valley is bounded on the farther side by similar slopes and cliffs, and a thin white thread of road runs up through the flat green meadows along the valley-floor. Julia was rather startled by the Flüh, or cliff; she drew back her head. They left the platform and walked away from the tourists, eastwards along the ridge, till from a projecting buttress they again looked over into the valley.
‘What’s the little town down on the lake?’ she asked.
‘Merligen,’ Colin said, without consulting his map.
‘Merligen? I have an acquaintance there,’ Julia said, remembering the little man from ‘Corsette-Air’. ‘Colin, wouldn’t it be nice to take Mrs. H. to Merligen on the steamer and hire a car, and drive her up the Justis-Thal?—I call it a darling valley. Why Justice, by the way?’
‘Two English missionaries, Justus and Beatus, originally converted this part of Switzerland to Christianity. ‘Ence the word orse-’air,’ Colin said, using an old Glentoran nonsense. ‘Beatenberg, too. But one can’t drive up the Justis-Thal; it’s a military area, where no cars are allowed.’
Julia cautiously peered over into the green depths. ‘It doesn’t look very military,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any barracks, or anything.’
‘No, you don’t; that’s the point. The barracks are in the mountains. Those cliffs opposite, and these plumb under us here, are bung full of ammunition and guns and so forth—in some parts they even have military hospitals inside the mountains, so I heard in Berne. Terrific people, the Swiss.’
Julia sat down on the yellowish turf and lit a cigarette.
‘I’m beginning to think so.’
Colin gestured back at the Lake of Thun, of which a segment was visible at the mouth of the valley.
‘That’s full of stores, too—years’ and years’ supply of butter and cheese and flour and corn, sunk in metal containers hundreds of feet down. These lakes are very deep.’
Julia was entranced by this.
‘But doesn’t it get stale?—especially the cheese and butter?’
‘Oh, they howk up the containers every so often, and empty them and put in fresh. A Swiss I met was telling me about it. The butter they always get out while it’s still usable; and if the cheese is a bit dry they grate it and sell it in bottles.’
They wandered on a little farther, and came on a patch of still unmelted snow, dirty and pock-marked; round its edges small white crocuses were springing from the brown sodden turf, making a new snowiness to replace the old. ‘Oh, I wish I could take just one to Mrs. H.,’ Julia said.
‘Better not—they mean what they say about picking flowers, as about everything else,’ Colin said. ‘I saw a type in uniform wandering about near the station. Come back to the pub and have a beer before we go down.’
The pub was a long low building with a restaurant and a broad terrace outside, on which numerous people sat drinking beer or coffee at little tables; Colin and Julia sat there too and drank their beer in the sun. ‘It’s a nice clean wash-place,’ Julia said; ‘boiling hot water.’
‘I wonder how they get their water up here,’ Colin speculated. ‘There’s no sign of a spring.’
‘Pumped, I suppose,’ Julia replied indifferently.
They had strolled and idled so long on the top that Julia said they had better not walk down, or they would be madly late. ‘Let’s come up another day and walk right along and down to the village at the far end.’ Colin agreed to this, and presently they were swinging down through the air again, over the high meadows.
Now on the Sessel-Bahn you can see passengers travelling in the opposite direction a hundred yards away or more; and coming up towards them Julia now saw the girl she had seen at Victoria, perched in a seat beside the dark young man. ‘Colin, look!’ she breathed.
Colin stared. ‘It can’t be!’ he exclaimed.
‘No, it isn’t. It’s her double. But look well at the man—it’s them all right.’
Colin looked hard at the pair as they were borne past in the air, only a few feet away; then he and Julia discussed rapidly what to do. They decided that Julia should get out at the half-way halt and return to the summit, to see what she could of the pair, while in case she was not in time to meet them, Colin should go on to the bottom and wait there; when they came down he would follow them, whether they took the bus to Interlaken, or the funicular to Beatenbucht and the lake. ‘They certainly can’t get away at the top,’ Julia said, thinking of that dizzy range of limestone cliffs and buttresses.