by Ann Bridge
This charming hotel has two rather distinctive features. Opposite the entrance, but separated from it by a road where cars can pull up, is a raised terrace or garden shaded by chestnut-trees and set with tables, where light meals are served; also, for the convenience of passengers boarding or leaving the Lake of Brienz steamers, there is a side entrance giving access—as a discreet notice announces—to Toiletten for both ladies and gentlemen. Julia’s party availed themselves of both; they ordered coffee on the terrace, visited the Toiletten while it was being made, and then returned to drink it. It was nice on the little terrace; even here the air was full of the scent of new-mown hay, and resounded with the song of blackbirds. (The Interlaken blackbirds sing more loudly and richly than any others in the world.) A steamer drew in to the quay, and as they watched the passengers disembark Julia thought of June, so lonely and ‘dull’—impulsively, she decided to ask for her in the hotel, and went in.
As an excuse she first asked the hall porter—who was bearded, fatherly, and chatty, the Swiss hotel version of the English family butler—if he could order them a horse-cab to catch the Beatenberg bus?
‘Yes, certainly’—in his rather peculiar brand of English. Then Julia asked if Miss Armitage was in?
The old man’s expression changed instantly, and rather startlingly, to one of hostility and suspicion.
‘No. They left this morning.’
‘Oh, I am sorry. I’d hoped to see her. How was her foot? Any better?’
The old porter thawed a little at that.
‘Are you the lady who helped her up on the Niederhorn, and bandaged her foot? She said if you came I was to give you this’—he grubbed in his desk and brought out Julia’s head-scarf.
‘Oh yes, that’s mine. Thank you very much. But is her foot better?’
‘Ein wenig, yes—she can walk a few steps, the poor child.’ The porter’s suspicion did not appear to attach to June, and Julia pursued this promising line. At that hour, in mid-afternoon, the hall was practically empty, the guests being either out on expeditions or sleeping off their midday meal upstairs.
‘I hope they did get a doctor to see her?’ she said, putting anxiety into her voice. ‘This young man seemed to me to take her injury rather lightly.’
The porter scowled, and muttered something about a frecher, ekeliger Kerl (an insolent disgusting fellow) into his beard; aloud, and in English, he said, ‘Yes, Miss. The older gentleman told me to get a doctor, and I sent for Doktor Hertz; he is excellent; he has a fine Klinik in the town. I know everyone here; thirty years I am Portier in this hotel! So the Herr Doktor strapped up the foot, but he said she should use it as little as possible, and that he would look at it again tomorrow.’
The porter was now obviously in the full vein of gossip; Julia, delighted, continued to probe.
‘But now they have left? Oh, what a pity, since Dr. Hertz is so good. Did they leave an address? Though I have only met Fräulein Armitage once, I should like to know how she gets on.’
‘No, they left no address,’ the porter said, scowling again. ‘They left hurriedly—and with good reason! Oh, das kleine Fräulein is all right—she is simply an innocent. But the others!’—he shrugged, with an expression of ineffable contempt. ‘Curious customers, if you ask me.’
Julia continued to pursue the June line.
‘Really? I should be sorry to think that this young lady was not with nice people—she told me that she had never left England before, and she is so young. Her mother is a widow, too. Have you any idea why they left so hastily?’
The porter leant over his desk towards her, and spoke in a lowered tone.
‘The police came to enquire about them!’
‘No!’ Julia professed the expected surprise.
‘Aber ja! Of course they spoke with me,’ the old man said importantly, ‘and I showed them the register with the names, and said that, as always, the passports had been sent to the Polizei—this is done in all hotels here. But then the police brought out a photograph and asked if I recognised it as that of the Fräulein Armitage? This is most unusual; in thirty years such a thing has never happened to me.’
‘And was it of her?’ Julia asked, delighted at this evidence that her clipping from Paris-Match was being used.
‘Gewiss! It was badly done, on shiny paper, but certainly it was this poor young lady’s picture—though why the Polizei should seek her, I cannot understand. And while I was looking at it—here at this desk, where we stand—up comes Mister de Ritter himself to ask some question of me, and sees the photograph, and may have heard the questions asked by the police, for all I know.’
‘Good heavens! So then what happened?’
The porter was enjoying his dramatic recital.
‘Oh, I know my duties! It is not my business to give away our clients to the police, whatever I myself may think of them. “Moment” I say—and of Herr de Ritter I ask, “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?” He enquired of me then about the times of the steamer to Iseltwald, on the Brienzer-See; I gave them, and he wrote them down—ah, that is a cool one—while all the time the photograph of Miss Armitage lies on my desk, under his eyes. He looked well at it, and at the two police—though these were in Zivil.’ (Julia knew that he meant plain clothes.) ‘And he thanked me, and went away.’
One up to Mr. B., Julia thought; crook or no, he had good nerves. ‘And after that?’ she asked.
‘Oh, the police went off—to make a report, I suppose!’ the porter said, with some contempt—‘being now satisfied that the Fräulein Armitage is here. But less than an hour later she is no longer here! Within thirty-five minutes the valet comes down with the luggage; they pack, pay their bill, and off! Would not anyone think this odd?’
‘Very odd indeed,’ Julia agreed. ‘And the police made no attempt to hold them?’
’Ach nein! —the police had gone. And now the birds are flown.’
‘Did they go to Iseltwald?’ Julia asked.
‘No. They simply went across to the Ost-Bahnhof. I told Johann, who took their luggage, to note where they booked to; but they had a Carnet of Ost-West Billeten, as all who are wise do in Interlaken, and they used those. So one knows nothing. From the West-Bahnhof one can travel to anywhere in Europe.’
‘All most peculiar,’ Julia said slowly. ‘And did you tell the police they’d left?’
‘Fräulein, guests are guests!’ the porter said pompously. ‘As I said before, it is no part of my duties to lay informations to the police. If they ask questions I answer them, as in the matter of the photograph—but that suffices.’
‘How very right. If I ever marry a crook I shall come and stay at the Fluss!’ Julia said, and went out to rejoin Mrs. Hathaway, leaving the porter bowing and laughing. ‘Don’t forget our cab,’ she called over her shoulder.
‘Dear child, how long you’ve been! Can they get us a cab?’ that lady asked.
‘Oh yes; all laid on. I’m sorry I was so slow; the porter was rather a gossipy old thing,’ Julia said carelessly, and Mrs. Hathaway asked no further questions—she was tired as well as tactful. But all the way back to Beatenberg in the bus Julia was distraite, and rather silent. The reference of the porter at the Fluss to June as ‘an innocent’ exactly matched her own impression of the pretty, silly, good-hearted little thing who proudly gave a lot of her wages to support ‘Mum’, now that ‘Dad’ was dead; and she was filled with a slow, cold anger that international crookery should get hold of such a helpless creature and use her simply as a commodity to serve their beastly purposes. ‘Expendable!’ she muttered angrily, thinking of June’s boredom, and how she had now been reft away from the excellent Dr. Hertz, who would have seen to her ankle, her source of livelihood.
‘What did you say, my dear?’ Mrs. Hathaway asked.
‘Oh sorry, Mrs. H.—I was talking to myself. I must be going round the bend!’
‘Nonsense, dear. I think soliloquies aloud are a sign of intelligent emotion—after all, where would Shakespeare have been wi
thout them? But do look out on the right—oh no, now it’s on the left; these awful hairpins!’—as the bus negotiated another, playing its little six-note tune. ‘There! Do you see that Enchanter’s Nightshade? Unmistakable—but it’s practically blue.’
Julia tried to pick out the small dull plant which so excited Mrs. Hathaway from among the heaths, whortleberry bushes, ferns, and other greenery which clothed the bank above the terrifying road. ‘Oh yes, so it is,’ she said. ‘How odd!’ Then she returned to her private preoccupations. She was no longer so pleased at the use to which her clipping from Paris-Match had presumably been put. It was almost certainly her fault that June’s ankle was now going to be neglected. But when she sent the photograph to Chambertin she hadn’t met June.
Chapter 8
Merligen
Colin rang up after tea. ‘Where on earth have you been all day? I tried to get you three times.’
‘At the Schynige Platte.’
‘Oh. Well something very boring has happened. I gave my friends here that address, but I think the locals must have been a bit slow off the mark—anyhow your new acquaintances have gone.’
‘I know.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just found out. And it was the locals who scared them off, bumble-footing round with a certain photograph, quite openly, silly clots.’
‘Any idea where they’ve gone?’
‘None—I couldn’t learn that.’
‘Well can’t you learn it? Do try. It’s too maddening their vanishing into thin air like this, just when we thought everything was taped. And now we’ve heard that their principals, who were delayed, are probably arriving by air within the next forty-eight hours.’
‘Arriving where?’
‘Well wherever my would-be bride and her escorts have stowed themselves.’
‘Her beastly escorts,’ Julia exclaimed bitterly. ‘Much they care about her!’
Colin ignored this.
‘Well, darling, you see it’s pretty urgent. Do you think you can find out some more, as you’re on the spot?’
‘No, I don’t see how I can, since they now know that the polus’—she carefully used the Highland word for the police—‘are after them.’
‘They do definitely know that?’
‘Yes—I told you. That’s why they left at half an hour’s notice.’
‘How boring. So we’ve absolutely no clue?’
‘No. Oh by the way, what about the detective?’
‘The who?’
‘The man you met yesterday. Is anything known of him by your friends?’
‘Damn! I forgot to ask.’
‘Oh really, you are a tiresome child! I told you, twice, to get a line on him.’
‘Sorry, darling. But does it really matter?’
‘It could matter a lot.’ Julia felt that it probably mattered most to her, but did not say so. ‘Find out—don’t forget again,’ she adjured Colin. ‘Are you coming back?’
‘Don’t know yet. We may have to be spread pretty thin at these air-ports. But do try to think something up, darling; because if they keep the girl under cover, as I imagine they will now, we really have no clue at all.’
‘No clue at all.’ Those last words of Colin’s stuck in Julia’s head all the evening, while she saw to Mrs. Hath-away’s supper in bed, and straightened out some woe of Watkins’s; it was with her as she stepped out onto her balcony last thing, sniffing the sweet air and the scent of the opening rowan-blossom from the tree in the meadow below, and looked across the darkling lake at the Blümlisalp white under the moon. Another phrase of Colin’s nagged at her while she undressed—‘if they keep the girl under cover’. She visualised June locked in her bedroom, starved, anything; people like Wright and Borovali could easily be remorseless, now that she had served their turn. She got into bed and switched off the light, but was too troubled to sleep. Suddenly there flashed into her mind the recollection of the Mass that Father Antal, the old Hungarian priest, had said in the private chapel at Gralheira, away in Portugal, on behalf of Hetta Páloczy, another girl in ruthless hands—and how by a miraculous coincidence Mrs. Hathaway had found and rescued her. Here there was no priest or chapel; the little Catholic church at a bend in the long road through the village only opened on Sundays for two Masses. But prayer was always prayer; Julia hopped out of bed, and kneeling on the scanty mat which covered the pine flooring beside it she prayed urgently for safety for June. Then she hopped in again, and slept soundly.
She woke in the morning with a bounce, as the young and healthy do; switched on her electric bouilloir for her morning tea, and went out in her nightgown onto the little balcony. The sun was striking across the white peaks of the Blümlisalp; she thought of Antrobus, and what he had told her about the Morgenhorn, invisible from Beatenberg. An early steamer was crossing the lake from Spiez towards Merligen, hidden behind a ridge running down from the Niederhorn; as Julia watched it, idly, an idea stole into her mind of itself, as ideas sometimes do. The little man from ‘Corsette-Air’ lived at Merligen—and hadn’t he said that he had been asked recently to act as intermediary between agences of different nations, and pass information from one to the other? Had he said agences or agents? She couldn’t be sure; she hadn’t been paying much attention. But if there were people like him who did this sort of thing, might it not be just worth while to see him again, and try to find out a little more about the nature of the ‘informations’ he transmitted?—learn more of how these things were done? It didn’t amount to a clue—but the idea of going to look him up, having come into her head, persisted. Merligen was so near—she would lose nothing by going. It was only the vaguest of hunches, it might be all a fantasy; but her hunches and fantasies had sometimes served well in the past. Had she still got that card? She routed in her bag—yes, there it was—
Herr Kaufmann,
Villa Victoria. Merligen.
Her bouilloir boiled, and she made her tea and drank a quick cup; had a bath in Mrs. Hathaway’s cubicle of a bathroom, and dressed hastily. It was probably all a nonsense, but Colin, poor sweet, had been so urgent, and she had nothing to do—Mrs. H. ought to keep quiet today, after yesterday. On her way down to breakfast she looked in on that lady, and found her none the worse for her exertions; she had slept well. ‘But I don’t feel like being very energetic today.’
‘Much better not—keep quiet and rest. I’m flipping off on a tiny expedition the moment after breakfast; with any luck I shall be back for lunch, but don’t wait.’
Ninety-nine elderly ladies out of a hundred, in the circumstances, would have asked where her young friend was going? Mrs. Hathaway did not, which was one reason why everyone loved her.
‘Very well, dear child, I won’t. It’s a lovely day for an Ausflug.’
Julia, as Colin had done two days before, went down in the funicular at the end of the village to Beatenbucht, and thence took a trolley-bus along the lake shore to Merligen, at the mouth of the forbidden Justis-Thal. This proved to be a sweet little place, dreamy and tranquil in the spring sunshine, looking across the lake to the shapely blue pyramid of the Niesen behind Spiez; there was a single large hotel on the shore, many old chalets, and an endless crop of small new villas, mostly on streets inland from the lake—but what startled and pleased Julia was that the whole little town was white and sweet as a bride’s bouquet with bushes of syringa and Spiraea canescens flowering in every garden. After enquiries she made her way to the Villa Victoria, in one of the new streets; a neat paved path between the usual bridal bushes led up to the front door. Julia, wondering a good deal how she was to work this interview, rang the bell.
The door was opened by a rather sour-looking middle-aged woman in a spotted black-and-white apron, with her hair in a net. Julia asked if she could speak with Herr Kaufmann.
‘I am Frau Kaufmann,’ the woman said, not at all agreeably.
‘Ah, good day. Is your husband at home? I come to enquire about surgical stays.’
Reluctantl
y, casting on Julia the suspicious glance that ugly women so often bestow on beautiful ones, the woman admitted her, and led her from the cramped little hall into a rather modest-sized room, obviously a sitting-room-cum-office: a huge safe stood against one wall, a very large desk heaped with files and papers under the window; a nouveau-art sofa and armchairs, covered with a pattern which suggested an electrical discharge, were grouped round a nouveau-art fireplace. Julia was enthralled by this fresh version of a Swiss interior—one in which, moreover, thousands of pounds worth of business was conducted annually.
‘My husband is away,’ the woman said then; ‘he had to leave suddenly, for Lugano. I expect you know that his business is really wholesale? What firm do you represent?’
At this point piercing screams in a child’s voice were heard from somewhere upstairs. ‘Warte ein Augenblick, Franzi’, the woman called. But Franzi would not wait; he renewed his screaming. With a snort of exasperation and a hasty ‘Entschuldigen Sie, bitte’ the woman left the room and could be heard stumping up the small narrow staircase, and speaking to a child in the room above.
Julia, without the smallest scruple, instantly went over to the outsize desk and began to examine the papers left strewn on it, clear evidence of the owner’s hasty departure. There were some invoices, clipped together; several letters with the ‘Corsette-Air’ letter-head from the firm in Yorkshire, all in English—nothing to help her there. But tucked in under the blotting-pad, only one corner peeping out, she came, with her inveterate curiosity, on an open envelope; she drew out the letter and read it. It was in German, from a chemist in Berne, and read: ‘Our client Herr B. left his recent address today. He may shortly be calling on you in person to deposit a valuable consignment of goods.’ Julia looked quickly at the date—yesterday! H’m—her ‘Herr B.’ had undoubtedly changed his address yesterday! Could the Borovali outfit be one of the agences, or agents, for whom Herr Kaufmann had recently been asked to act as an intermediary, to receive and pass on ‘informations’? ‘Goods’ might perfectly well mean blueprints—this letter could possibly mean something. Hastily she scribbled down the chemist’s name and address in her diary; she just had time to put the envelope back under the blotter and sit down on one of the hideous chairs before Frau Kaufmann reappeared, with apologies. The little boy was ill, she said; he had measles, and the fever made him fretful. But now, about the Fraülein’s firm?