by Ann Bridge
The Legation was intact, so far; a Yugoslav woman in brilliant peasant dress stood outside the decorous front door, alternately banging on it and pressing the bell. This caused the Kirklands a faint surprise, even when they saw that beside her on the step stood a huge pewter jar, chased in beautiful and barbaric designs. She nattered at them in Serbian—they could not understand a word, naturally; what she was reiterating was simply—“The horse! My horse has run away. He was frightened by the noise. But I have saved the milk.” Mr. Kirkland took over the knocker, while bombs began to fall nearer and nearer, and produced a thundering tattoo; after a moment or two the door was opened by the Minister himself. Just then another explosion brought down a house up the street. He swept them all in, observing blandly—“You’re out early, Mrs. Kirkland. Any news of the little girl?”
The Minister and his wife had ensconced themselves under the grand piano in the drawing-room; the rest of the staff, he explained, were in the kitchen, under the massive table. The space beneath the piano was rather cramped for five people, but with Nika, the milk-woman, they crept into it. At intervals the Minister wriggled out and went over to the fireplace to poke the codes that he was burning there, and add fresh fuel in the way of documents—then he came back to the piano again. There they remained for what seemed an eternity, while the Luftwaffe went on with the destruction of Belgrade. Crouching under a grand piano is not a very comfortable position at the best of times, and Nika was very bulky, and smelt strongly of garlic, and of other things as well. But nothing hit any of them; and to remain alive at all in such circumstances was a matter for astonishment and thankfulness.
When there had been no sound of bombs for some time the Minister suggested that they should all go and have something to eat, coffee anyhow. Nika insisted on leaving, taking her exotic milk-can, empty, with her; her milk, delivered in such fantastic circumstances, was good with the coffee. Both Mr. Kirkland and the Minister wanted to use the telephone, but for the moment it was dead; no amount of ringing produced any result. The Minister of course wanted to find out what had happened to all his staff; John Kirkland was frantic to get on the telephone to Bill, to the frontier authorities, to anyone who might be able to give news of Hope. As it was, they had no idea of what was going on even in the city, let alone along the frontier. The sense of helplessness and uncertainty was complete—and quite a new experience for any of them.
After a considerable period of this frustration Mrs. Kirkland announced, quite calmly, that they must now go somewhere where they could use the telephone freely. By this time it was working again after a fashion, but an attempt to get through to Budapest was met by a curt—“No calls for outside the country can be accepted.” Journalists began to arrive, frantically demanding help in getting their stories out—one of them, on learning what the position was, said in Mrs. Kirkland’s hearing—“O.K. I’ll go down to Sofia! I know a man that has a good car—or at least he can get hold of it—and what’s more, he’s alive; I saw him in the bar just now. The Majestic is O.K., for a wonder, except for a few doors and windows gone.”
Mrs. Kirkland, always so mild, at these words advanced gently on the journalist—with the gentleness of a python advancing on a rabbit.
“That’s a fine idea,” she said. “We’ll come with you.”
The journalist hedged: he wasn’t sure that his friend, etc. Mrs. Kirkland brushed all that aside. “We’re coming too. John dear, you just go with this gentleman while he picks up the car, and fix up expenses and all that, and then come round to the hotel. I’ll go and pack our grips, and be all ready when you come. Or maybe you’d better go and pack the grips, and I’ll go with Mr.”—she hung on the query, eyeing him.
“Talmey,” said the journalist, hypnotized as the rabbit is hypnotized by the python. “But look, Mrs. Kirkland”—even on that morning there had been the usual thorough American introductions, and John Kirkland’s was a well-known name—“don’t you trouble to come—I’m at the Majestic too, as it happens.”
“Splendid! Then we can all go along together,” said Mrs. Kirkland blandly.
That soft and sometimes dumb-seeming lady had a one-track mind, which endowed her with a quite ruthless determination where something she really cared about was at stake: the same one-track mind and remorselessness which had caused her daughter Hope to leave her parents without a word and force her way back to Budapest twenty-four hours earlier. Mr. Talmey had no sort of chance of escaping from her clutches. Their kind host and hostess thought the whole plan rather crazy, but saw that there was no hope of dissuading her; they said goodbye, the Minister’s wife at the last minute pressing a small American car flag into Mrs. Kirkland’s hand—“It may be useful.” Mrs. Kirkland put it in her bag, and they set out.
On the way to the hotel Mr. Kirkland raised the question of their big luggage, left at the station. “Never mind the big luggage now,” said his wife.
“Glad you don’t mind about it, Mrs. Kirkland, for 1 don’t expect there’s much left of it, if it was at the station,” said Talmey. “There isn’t any station any more—the Boches got that good and proper. Of course it was one of their main targets, naturally.”
Mrs. Kirkland brushed that aside too. “If we find Hopey the luggage won’t matter.” At the hotel she stuck to the unfortunate journalist like a leech, sending her husband up to pack—she wasn’t going to let that car, which Talmey represented, out of her sight. When John remonstrated, adding, “I won’t be much good at packing your things, Alice,” his Alice ignored the remonstrance and merely said—“Oh yes, you can do it quite all right, dear. Put all the bottles in the right way up, and don’t forget the picnic-basket”—and then sat down on a chair in the bar, where Talmey was holding an embarrassed conference with the Yugoslav who was to produce the car. This individual had a girl in tow, whom Mr. Kirkland, when he came down with the luggage, recognized as part of the cabaret show which he had looked in on at intervals the night before—she, it seemed, was coming too. This further disconcerted John Kirkland, who found the whole business sufficiently disconcerting already; only he knew Alice in these moods, rare as they were, and that resistance was useless. However, he advanced on Talmey and asked him if the cabaret girl had papers all right? Talmey after enquiring of his friend was obliged to admit that Tita, the girl, had nothing but an expired Albanian passport, and a rather obviously faked Yugoslav exit permit; the friend’s papers were in order, but whether the Germans would honour Yugoslav papers or not remained to be seen. Mrs. Kirkland, watchfully listening to all this, now spoke—as calmly as before.
“John, we’re just wasting time. The sooner we start the better. We must get along with what papers we have.” She drew the little American flag from her bag. “Let’s get a stick for this, and fasten it to the car, and just rush through.”
The Yugoslav was obviously delighted at the sight of the flag. He ran to the lounge, pulled a bough of some flowering shrub, now faded, out of a vase in a corner, stripped it, and rolled the flag round the thin stick; Tita produced a paper of pins from somewhere about her rather ornate person, and very deftly pinned it in position, while Mr. Kirkland hurriedly made some financial arrangements with the journalist. Holding Tita as it were as a hostage, Mrs. Kirkland allowed the three men to go off together to fetch the car; when it drew up before the door the little pennant was fixed to the bonnet, and they all piled in somehow, together with their luggage—Mrs. Kirkland had the picnic-basket as well as her jewel-case on her knees, her husband a very shabby cardboard suitcase of Tita’s and Hope’s dressing-case on his. It was a great squash, and Tita smelt nearly as strongly of cheap scent as Nika had done of goats and unwashed humanity under the grand piano that morning; this was Europe in the raw, Mrs. Kirkland thought, while she spoke kindly to the girl in German, of which she apparently understood a little.
It was as well that they had Talmey’s friend to drive, for without him they would hardly have got out of the city at all. Street after street was blocked with rubble; over a
nd over again they had to back out of what proved to be a dead end, or wriggle through tiny side streets and alleys; but the Yugoslav knew his capital inside out, and seemed to know half its surviving inhabitants as well—people constantly called out directions to him as he went along, or replied with gesticulations and a flow of information when he called out to them. Once out in the suburbs the going was easier—and there was as yet no regular cordon organized by the invaders, such as had been thrown round Budapest two nights before. At one point, on a stretch leading into the main highway going south to Nish, a group of German soldiers with rifles stood in the road barring the way—“Damnation!” Talmey exclaimed.
“Tell him to step on it,” Mrs. Kirkland said quietly from behind—Talmey did so, the Yugoslav accelerated, and the soldiers fell back as they roared through at seventy miles an hour.
“That was your flag, Mrs. Kirkland,” Talmey gasped—“they’d have fired on us without it.”
The car, whoever it really belonged to, was as Talmey had said, good, a powerful American machine—humming sweetly, it ate up the kilometres on the open road, overtaking all other south-bound cars. Though there was surprisingly little refugee traffic, once they had left the suburbs; the blow that struck the capital that morning had been so sudden and so stunning, and the character of the people was so stolid that there was no such blocking of the roads as France had witnessed the previous year. But after that experience with the Germans the Yugoslav was wary: he nosed down the Nish road a certain distance, now and then slowing down and making enquiries of the peasants he passed; then he took to the byroads, and they twisted and wriggled through the broken Balkan country, beautiful in its spring green, for an hour or more, till at last they emerged again on to the main road.
“He says there was a light advance column of Boches ahead of us,” Talmey announced then, as once more they roared south; “but we’ve passed it now.”
“Then let’s keep on till we have an hour’s start of it, and then stop and have something to eat,” said Mrs. Kirkland. “I’m half famished.”
“Have you something to eat?” the journalist asked.
“Heavens yes—this whole hamper full. But we’ll want some bread,” said Mrs. Kirkland practically. The Yugoslav, when Talmey translated this to him, turned round in his seat and raised his hat to the American lady, frightening John Kirkland nearly out of his wits—however the car didn’t go off the road. But Talmey, hungry as he was, suggested that they had better get over the Bulgarian frontier before they stopped to eat.
“That’s impossible,” Kirkland protested. “It must be all of 250 kilometres to Nish, and the frontier can’t be much less than 150 beyond that. And the road’s not so good, either. Let’s make all the speed we can for another half-hour, I’d say, and then eat quickly, and go on again.”
This was agreed to. After another half-hour’s driving—very fast; the Yugoslav handled the mysterious car with great skill—they drew up in a village where there was a small inn. Here, while Kirkland and the Yugoslav went in to buy bread and wine, the villagers crowded round the car, asking questions—Had they come from Belgrade? What had happened up there? Were the Germans coming? Where was the Army?—our Army? Tita answered these with a wealth of dramatic gestures which drew gasps of horror from the small crowd but Talmey was relieved by the reiterated enquiry as to whether the Germans were coming—it looked as though there was nothing ahead of the light column they had bypassed further back. He reported this to Kirkland and his friend when they returned with two large stone jorums, one of wine and one of the local vermouth, and several long loaves of bread.
“Yes, they were asking that inside,” said Kirkland. “I guess we’ve beaten the bastards to it. Now let’s get on and eat.”
“John, had they any mineral water?” his wife enquired.
“No dear—I asked; I knew you’d want it, but they haven’t any. Let’s go,” he said, getting in, and giving two of the loaves to Tita, who giggled.
All the same, it was Tita who made the suggestion which probably saved their lives, when after racing on for another twenty minutes they reached a pleasant open stretch in the Morava valley, with the river beside them, and Talmey proposed having their picnic there.
“Not here,” she said, in her sketchy German; “not in the open, and on the main road. Let us find a side road, among trees, and eat there. Planes—how do you say?—follow the big roads.”
“Well, that makes sense,” said Kirkland—“though they don’t seem to be worrying about this road. You might as well ask him to go on a bit, Talmey.”
So they went on till they found a small side road leading up towards trees 200 yards distant, and took it. The wood when they reached it was full of smallish twisted oaks, whose fresh pale leaves, golden in the evening light, made the densest of canopies; they got out, thankful to be released from their cramped positions and to stretch their legs on the soft mossy ground—while the three men and Tita took swigs at the dark syrupy fragrant vermouth Mrs. Kirkland unpacked the picnic-basket, and spread out the pâté, the smoked goose-breast, the sliced ham and the other provisions which she had so prudently caused Hope to buy in Budapest only two days before. Tears came into her eyes as she did so—little Hopey, who had done all those last chores so helpfully! Where was she now? Nevertheless she called to the others to come and eat in a cheerful voice, and was pleased at their astonished pleasure in the good things of her providing. It really was a delightful meal in a delightful spot: the whole wood was ringing with nightingales, singing as only Balkan nightingales do sing; the bread, though tough, was fresh, the rough country wine good. Talmey had just raised the bakelite tumbler which he was sharing with Tita to drink Mrs. Kirkland’s health, when the girl held up a beringed and rather dirty hand and said “Achtung!”
“What is it?” Kirkland asked.
The Yugoslav sprang to his feet, and ran towards the edge of the wood. “Geeze! It is a plane,” exclaimed Talmey, also getting up and following him, tumbler in hand. And now, first faintly through the pulsating song of the nightingales, then louder as it drew nearer, came the sound of a plane engine. Kirkland followed the other two men—“Don’t show yourselves, for mercy’s sake,” he called.
From the wood’s edge, screened by a fringe of bushes, they had a clear view of a longish stretch of the road below them, and of the sky above it. The road was empty save for a slow-moving country cart drawn by a single horse, piled high with sacks of meal, with a peasant sitting atop; he was whistling as he went—unlike Tita the Albanian, who knew what war meant, he evidently had no ideas about planes. The whole tranquil picture somehow etched itself, astonishingly clear and detailed in the intense late light on John Kirkland’s consciousness in the few seconds that elapsed before the plane came in sight. It was coming from the north, flying low, glittering in the evening sunshine—a shape of the greatest beauty. “God! I hope he leaves the poor bastard alone,” John Kirkland muttered.
He didn’t, that pilot. When he saw that harmless villager riding his inoffensive cart he swooped lower still—the watchers in the wood saw every stage of the manœuvre plainly—and opened fire with his machine-gun with a stuttering roar that was almost deafening even 200 yards away. The meal-sacks seemed to explode in a cloud of creamy dust; the horse reared and then fell sideways, kicking and struggling on the ground; the peasant toppled off the cart on to the road and lay still, as the plane mounted again and roared on southwards.
“Well, what a son-of-a-bitch!” Talmey exclaimed angrily. John Kirkland began to run down towards the road. “Look out—he may come back,” the journalist said; Kirkland took no notice, but ran on. So did the Yugoslav; he outdistanced the older man—when Kirkland came up he was cocking his revolver; then, quickly, he shot the horse, which had begun to scream, through the head—after a few seconds it too lay still. The peasant was dead. Talmey now joined the other two.
“What’ll we do?” he said. “This outfit is kinda blocking the road.” So it was—sacks, blood, spilt
meal, the bodies of the peasant and the horse, to say nothing of the cart, seemed to be spread all over the grey surface of the highway that is Europe’s main road route to the South-East.
Gently, they lifted the dead man and laid him on the roadside grass; the Yugoslav found his little round pill-box cap, dusted the meal off it, and placed it over his face, first closing the eyes. Then he unharnessed the horse, expertly, and exerting a strength that no one would have expected from his pointed shoes and sharply-waisted lounge suit he began to tug at the carcase; the other two helping, together they dragged it well towards the side of the road. The cart was a comparatively easy matter after that—the Yugoslav simply got between the shafts and pulled it on to the grass verge; two or three of the sacks had fallen off—these he picked up and tossed away like feather pillows. “Goodness, what a Hercules the fellow is!” Kirkland exclaimed, as they walked up to the wood to rejoin the two women.
As they gloomily finished the meal that had begun so cheerfully they discussed what to do next. Tita said that they must wait till the plane came back—“It will return; it was always so in Albania. They go, and then they return.”
“Well, I guess we have Miss Tita to thank for our lives,” said Kirkland; “if we’d been on the road we’d have been for it, like that poor peasant. I’d say we’d better take her advice.”
“Let’s hope the plane comes back soon,” said Mrs. Kirkland, beginning to stow things away in the lunch-basket. “Mr. Talmey, could you explain to your friend that when he has that tumbler emptied I’d like to pack it?” The Yugoslav was making great inroads on the big jar of wine.
Actually the plane returned very soon after she had finished packing up. “Well, now I suppose we can start,” she said.
Talmey was doubtful.
“Mightn’t it be better to wait till dark? It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, about.”
“I see no sense in that,” said Mrs. Kirkland implacably. “We can’t telephone from this wood any better than we could from Belgrade.”