Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

by Dorothy Gilman

  “Don’t panic, it could be someone signaling for help from the main building. For God’s sake jump on and let’s go.”

  Mrs. Pollifax unfroze. She heard herself say calmly, “No, I will not mount one of these dreadful beasts again, I refuse. I believe the path or whatever it is lies to our right so we mustn’t go that way and how could I ever make the Genie understand this? He must climb on, I’ll do the leading. We have to find the edge of the cliff and follow it—it’s our only hope.” She was already tugging at the ropes and telling the Genie in frenzied sign language that he was to take her place. He climbed on at last, and with the two lead ropes in her hand Mrs. Pollifax set out to find the cliff and orient herself. There was now very little time left them—she could already hear shouts being exchanged behind them. The donkeys moved with maddening slowness. Without a flashlight Mrs. Pollifax could distinguish only the larger boulders, and her feet kept stumbling over those half buried in the earth. There was no moon; the stars covering the sky did no more than give her the ability to distinguish between rock and a tree. Mrs. Pollifax was painfully aware of this, and of the fact that behind them a chase was being efficiently organized. The precipice, which they certainly ought to have reached by now, failed to materialize, and the rocks proved so abortive, so inconveniently placed, that Mrs. Pollifax soon wondered if in skirting the large boulders she might have begun circling back toward their starting point. It was not a happy thought.

  No one spoke. At best they were only a few thousand yards from the main building and recklessly moving at right angles to it instead of away from it. “Where was that damn edge,” thought Mrs. Pollifax, and was appalled at her choice of language. She tugged mercilessly on the donkeys’ halters and quickened her step. It proved an ill-timed moment to increase her speed. Mrs. Pollifax’s right foot moved out into space, sought reassurance, came down in anticipation of solid earth or rock and found neither. With a startled gasp Mrs. Pollifax pitched forward, guide ropes still in her hand, and meeting no resistance that would save her she catapulted into space, the men and donkeys dragged with her.

  It was not a long fall. Just as she assumed that the end had come, her jacket was seized by something knifelike, her fall suddenly broken and Mrs. Pollifax discovered that she was ignominiously straddling a creaking, groaning tree branch that threatened to break at any moment. Mrs. Pollifax had found her cliff and walked over it. Mercifully she had also found a stunted tree branch that had grown perpendicular to the sides of the precipice. But where she was to go from here, and where Farrell, the Genie and the donkeys had gone, she had no idea.

  “Well!” exclaimed a voice nearby.

  “F-F-Farrell?” gasped Mrs. Pollifax in astonishment.

  “Good God, you’re here too?”

  At the same moment she heard both the melodious voice of the Genie, a trifle reproachful, and the faint, anguished bray of a donkey. “But where are we?” cried Mrs. Pollifax.

  “I don’t think we should try to find out,” Farrell told her fervently. “And I think the first thing you’d better do is join us. There’s rock under me but what’s under you?”

  Mrs. Pollifax said nervously, “A tree branch and—and really I don’t think there’s anything else. Only air.”

  “Keep talking. Let me find you—this damn darkness—and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Mrs. Pollifax began reciting poetry, first Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and then “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” and tried not to consider her predicament if the branch broke or Farrell could not rescue her. When she felt a hand clutch her ankle a little sob of relief escaped her.

  “You’re lying straight out on a branch,” he told her, as if she didn’t already know this. “I want you to very carefully, very gingerly, start shinnying in the direction of my voice. Don’t try to sit up and don’t move hastily. I’m going to keep my hands on your ankles and very gently pull. If the branch starts to go I think I can still hang on to you.”

  “Think?” repeated Mrs. Pollifax, and felt like laughing hysterically because, of course, if the branch went, taking her with it, her brains would be dashed against the rock below no matter how tightly her ankles were held. But she obeyed, and thereby learned how subtly and sinuously a person could lift and move his hips if life depended upon it. After what seemed like hours her toes met the solid rock platform on which Farrell was kneeling. When at last she knelt beside him she allowed herself the luxury of feeling faint.

  “It seems to be a small ledge we fell onto,” Farrell explained.

  “You didn’t hurt your leg again?” she dared ask.

  “I fell on one of the donkeys. The Genie wasn’t so lucky, he fell on the first donkey and then the second donkey fell on him, but he’s all right. Crazy. But from the feel of our fall I’d say we fell only about twenty feet or so.”

  “Only that,” marveled Mrs. Pollifax, and then stiffened as she heard voices above.

  “Back,” whispered Farrell urgently. “There’s a shallow overhang, and a hollow in the cliff. Find one of the donkeys and hold his mouth together, or whatever donkeys bray with. I’ll take the other.”

  “The Genie?”

  “Blast him, he doesn’t understand English so he can’t help. If we could see him I’m sure we’d find him bowing and scraping again.”

  Mrs. Pollifax found a donkey and by the touch system managed also to find its lips and encircle them with both hands. The two donkeys had crawled into the shallow indentation of rock, leaving no room for humans; Mrs. Pollifax did all but climb on top of them for shelter as she heard the general’s voice querulously shouting orders. So Perdido was still alive—Farrell had been right about that. A powerful searchlight was turned on from above and directed downward, and Mrs. Pollifax closed her eyes, hoping this would make her even smaller as she pressed against the donkeys. Then the light moved farther along the cliff’s edge and the voices of the men diminished as they moved away. Mrs. Pollifax relaxed, and presently fell sound asleep.

  It was the Genie who awakened her with a tap on the shoulder. Her head had been pillowed on the abdomen of a donkey, and when she lifted it she was startled to discover that she had slept through the whole night—the sky was perceptibly lightening in the east. In this first light of dawn she could see the appalling smallness of the ledge upon which they had fallen: it was no more than a lip on the side of the precipice, extending a bare seven feet from side to side. Below her, virtually at the edge of her shoes, lay a drop into the valley that turned her blood cold. Even the tree branch that had caught her looked no sturdier than an arm, and Farrell, noting her face, grinned. “The gods were with us, eh?”

  Mrs. Pollifax replied with a shudder.

  “The Genie donated his sleeves to tie up the donkeys’ mouths,” he pointed out. “Voices were heard now and then until about an hour ago. They’re probably wirelessing the news of our escape all over Albania now. We’d better move in a hurry, before it gets light and the search begins again.”

  “Move!” repeated Mrs. Pollifax incredulously. “Move? Move where?”

  He said mockingly, “Well, we absolutely can’t move up. Did you really plan to spend the rest of your life here? Besides, I’m getting hungry.”

  “Hungry?” Mrs. Pollifax automatically groped for her purse, but stopped when she saw Farrell shaking his head.

  “Your purse wasn’t so lucky,” he told her. “I’ve already looked, it’s gone. Down there, presumably.”

  “I wish I could brush my teeth,” Mrs. Pollifax said suddenly and fretfully, thereby expressing her complete dissatisfaction with the situation. She leaned forward just a trifle—heights always made her dizzy—and looked down into the valley. Her first thought was that Farrell was feeling suicidal to believe they could ever negotiate such a cliff, but her resistance to the idea was inevitably overcome by curiosity and then interest. The cliff did not drop to the valley like a plumb line; it slanted almost imperceptibly, with avalanchelike beds of gravel and rock, then short drops, then more bed
s of stone gravel until it reached a green terrace below, the same pasture where on her walks she had seen goats grazing. “But you couldn’t make it with your leg,” she protested. “Absolutely not.”

  Farrell smiled. “Look, you’ve forgotten something. Walking’s hard for me, but nobody walks down a cliff. One slides down backward, using arms and hands, not legs. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Oh, these happy morning people,” thought Mrs. Pollifax, and then she realized that it was not simply a matter of temperament but of age; Farrell was younger and more flexible; Mrs. Pollifax at this moment felt unutterably weary and ancient. To be shot by a firing squad appeared absolute luxury compared to crawling down a precipice, even if it did slant. She had left a cell which from this distance appeared a haven of safety, had stumbled into space from the top of a cliff, been mercifully caught by good luck and a slender tree branch, and had endured the suspense of creeping inch by inch to this cliff ledge. What she wanted now was a great deal of reassurance, a hot bath, clean clothes and sleep. What Farrell wanted of her was more.

  Very coldly she said, “All right, who leads the way, you or the Genie?”

  Farrell said casually, “Neither, which brings up another subject. I don’t trust the Genie.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  Farrell shook his head. “He jolly well may have come along as a spy, and I won’t have you trusting him, either. I don’t speak his language, I don’t know what he said to General Perdido back there in the guardroom, I don’t know anything about him. All I know is, he’s here and we’re stuck with him. You go first, then the Genie, and I’ll go last because I still have the gun.”

  Preposterous, absurd, decided Mrs. Pollifax furiously. Gritting her teeth she inched her body forward and dangled her feet over the edge of the cliff.

  “Not that way, backward,” Farrell told her just as coldly. “Hang from the tree branch with your face to the cliff and reach with your feet for a toehold on the jut below.”

  She said bitterly, “Great—I can join the circus when I get home.”

  “If you get home,” Farrell pointed out curtly, and this had a galvanizing effect. She told herself that scarcely anyone died as dramatically as they wished and that her being shot by a firing squad had been no more than a wistful dream after all. Her anger gave her the recklessness to place both hands around the tree branch and to anxiously let her body swing in space—and there was a great deal of space. There she hung for a sickening moment, with Farrell hissing directions to her from the ledge. “There—now you’ve got it,” he said.

  What she had gotten, as Farrell put it, was one foot on an outcropping of rock below her, but she could not share his jubilance over this. She glanced under her at the rock, then below to the valley, thought of depending upon that rock for her life and clung harder to the tree branch. “No, no, you’ve got to let go,” he told her.

  “That rock will not support me,” she said furiously.

  “It will if you move your hands to that stubby little root growing out of the rock over there.”

  “I prefer staying with this tree branch, thank you.”

  Farrell said nastily, “For how many years, Duchess?”

  She saw his point; she had to go up or she had to go down, and since either course could bring about her violent demise she might as well try going down. She felt for the root with one hand, the other still grasping the branch, and closed her eyes. “One for the money,” she whispered, “two for the show, three to make ready and four to.…” She dropped her left hand from the branch, stoically endured that ghastly second when her weight was neither here nor there, and then she was clinging with both hands to the root, her feet braced on the rock jut below. Cautiously she opened her eyes to discover that she was still safe. What was more, her position had vastly improved, for instead of hanging from the branch, with nothing below her but ugly space, her body was now pressed tightly against the face of the cliff wall, which was just diagonal enough to give her some reassurance. She was even able to note a small hole in the cliff into which her hands could fit for the next move. Mrs. Pollifax was beginning to understand the mechanics of cliff-scaling.

  In this manner the three of them descended inch by inch toward the valley, their cliff gradually changing in color from the luminous gray of dawn to a tawny gold as the sun discovered them. It was growing embarrassingly light when they reached the last slope, a charming easy hill of pebbles. They stopped here to catch their breath and to take stock of their surroundings.

  This was the rocky pasture, usually alive with goats, that Mrs. Pollifax had seen on her walks along the top of the cliff. It lay just above another pasture, and then another, each terrace tipping a little drunkenly toward the floor of the flat dry valley. There were no goats now, and Mrs. Pollifax’s gaze moved westward, to the right, and she saw what had gone unnoticed before, the home of the man who tended the goats. She recalled from Lulash’s book that in this country a hovel like this was called a han. It was a small, primitive building built of rocks taken from the hillside; there were no windows. Then she drew in her breath sharply, for a woman stood in the doorway of the han watching them, her figure almost lost in the shadows cast by the cliff.

  “What is it?” demanded Farrell.

  Wordlessly Mrs. Pollifax pointed.

  Farrell leaned on his crutch and slipped one hand into his pocket.

  “No,” Mrs. Pollifax said slowly, “you mustn’t shoot her. Anyway, she can’t be alone at this hour, there must be others inside.”

  “She’s seen us,” growled Farrell. “It’s her or us, Duchess.”

  “At least let’s be sure she’s alone,” begged Mrs. Pollifax. “Then we could just tie and gag her if she’s by herself, couldn’t we? A gunshot would be heard for miles.” Her sympathy for the woman staring at them was instinctive and, in these circumstances, irrational. Still she could not help herself.

  Farrell’s hand left his pocket and he sighed. “Woman to woman, eh? Have it your way, Duchess—in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  Nervously Mrs. Pollifax led the way toward the han.

  CHAPTER 18

  The woman looked as ageless and stoic as the rocks around her, nothing but her eyes alive in a watchful, sunburned face. When she was perhaps two feet from the doorway Mrs. Pollifax stopped, smiled wanly and pointed to the top of the precipice. Then she pointed to herself and to Farrell. “Inglese,” she said.

  The woman’s impassive glance moved to the cliff above, returned to Mrs. Pollifax to examine her torn dress and Guatemalan jacket, roamed briefly over Farrell’s crutch and the Genie’s flowing garments. She made a sudden turn back into the han and Mrs. Pollifax’s heart constricted. Then the woman paused, holding back the goatskin at the door, and gestured to them to follow. Again Mrs. Pollifax led the way, aware that Farrell’s hand had slipped back into the pocket that held his pistol. It was like twilight inside, with a small fire burning in the center of the earthen floor. The first object that caught Mrs. Pollifax’s eye was her purse lying on the ground beside the fire, and she realized that their progress down the cliff must have been observed for some time. The woman spoke to the two men squatting near the fire: the younger was a boy of fifteen or so, the elder a tall, well-built man with a fierce-looking moustache and smoldering eyes. The three spoke together for several minutes, not heatedly, but in disjointed sentences interspersed with reflective pauses. Mrs. Pollifax wondered if Farrell and the Genie felt as edgy as she did standing there and being discussed with no knowledge of what was being said. There were no chains holding them here and yet the fact that they had been seen by the woman gave her the power of life or death over them. Were they going to have to kill the woman and her family? “I’m too old and too soft for all this,” she thought.

  Suddenly the man of the han stood up and went to the door, pushed aside the goatskin and went out, causing Mrs. Pollifax and Farrell to exchange alarmed glances. The boy also jumped to his feet and brought stools from the shadows, ges
turing to them to sit. “What do you think?” asked Mrs. Pollifax in a low voice.

  “I don’t know,” Farrell said, and limped to the door and glanced outside.

  The woman had gathered up three wooden bowls and was dishing into them something that resembled lumpy oatmeal drowned in oil. With a polite smile Mrs. Pollifax accepted hers and sat down. Farrell, too, came back and sat down beside the Genie. “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded, spooning up the honeyed grain but scarcely aware of its taste as her mind worried over the man’s disappearance. He had consulted and then left. Where had he gone? What had been decided by these three people? She felt again that her fate was no more than a slender thread loosely held by indifferent strangers, yet there was nothing to do but wait. She sat and waited, having no idea what to expect. It was the woman who made the next move. She walked to a chest in the corner of the room and began pulling from it an assortment of clothes. Astonished, Mrs. Pollifax wondered if possibly these people were going to help them. She turned to Farrell and saw the same look reflected in his face: the confusion of a suspicious and desperate man confronted by hope. The woman had taken out a shabby, cone-shaped felt hat that she now clapped on the Genie’s head; then she held against Farrell the loose-flowing clothes and sash of an Albanian mountain man. To Mrs. Pollifax she handed two petticoats and a voluminous woolen dress with inserts of handmade lace. She gestured toward the blanket hung across one corner of the room.

  “Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Pollifax, beaming at Farrell.

  “Could still be a trap,” Farrell said.

  “I refuse to think so,” she told him loftily, and retired behind the blanket to wrestle with the voluminous skirts.

  A few minutes later they reassembled around the fire, their appearances strikingly changed. Because of his unshaven jaw, Farrell was clearly the most authentic of the three, looking as fierce and dangerous as a bandit. The Genie appeared much the same, small, birdlike, somehow transcending the absurdity of his costume. Mrs. Pollifax had no idea how she looked but she knew she felt very warm indeed under so many layers.