“It is nice to think,” remarked Pagan as they stood in the small walled rectangle between the two gate towers, “that if Baron’s disreputable ancestors came down from the hills for a bit of sport and plunder in this village, they were unlikely to get away with it.”
The outer or valley side of the lofty dolder was of plain red sandstone blocks pierced only by two long arrow slits and a large clock dial, placed there evidently for the benefit of the workers in the vineyards beyond the walls; but this frowning severity was relieved on the inner or village side by four wood and plaster storeys, black and white magpie pattern, each storey projecting a little beyond the one below it and the whole forming a kind of long panel let into the rough red sandstone wall of the tower. Immediately they passed beneath this arch they were in the main street of the little town.
“This is where I take over,” said Pagan as they walked down the sloping cobbled roadway between old steep gabled houses whose chimneys were fitted with the inevitable stork’s nest contraptions.
“Good!” said Baron. And then he added in a low voice to Clare. “Old Charles has got his work cut out. There does not seem to be anything in the way of a restaurant here.”
Pagan strode along confidently, and presently he halted before an ancient lime-washed house which had before it a little cobbled terrace raised a few feet above the level of the sloping street. Low, white, blistered palings bordered the tiny terrace, which was furnished with a green bench and a table. One of the lower windows of the cottage displayed a few apples and some bottles of mineral waters.
Pagan mounted the worn steps and waved a hand towards the wooden bench. “Asseyez-vous and make your miserable lives happy,” he said, “while I find the head waiter.”
The place seemed unpromising enough, but Pagan’s voice, which came to them through the open window as he chatted with Madame in that inimitable way of his that always worked miracles with the peasant women of France, sounded satisfied; and Baron assured Clare that in the matter of nourishment he was content to trust Pagan to the end of time.
The trust was not misplaced. A child of less than twelve years of age, dressed in a pink pinafore, spread a much darned but spotless white cloth upon the old, sun-bleached table. Madame herself followed with a large steaming bowl of appetizing soup, and there in the shade of the old gable house while the sunlight danced on the brimming surface of the ancient stone fountain opposite they ate what was unanimously voted to be an excellent meal. They even had the gratification of watching the purchase of one course of it by a smaller child in a smaller pink pinafore at the little butcher’s shop across the street; and the butcher himself, knife in hand, came to the window and inspected them over his glasses before making the decisive cut.
“One, two—three nests!” counted Clare as her eyes roved over the alp-like skyline of ancient shingled gables above which the big black busby-like shapes of storks’ nests showed against the sky. “What a lovely lot!”
Pagan eyed one of the macross the top of his iced drink. “The place is so stiff with them,” he declared, “that I should not be surprised any morning to wake up and find twins on my pillow.”
Clare laughed. “But that would be too terribly embarrassing,” she said. “They would be almost as difficult to dispose of as the ‘body’. ”
“I know,” agreed Pagan gloomily. “I suppose I would have to shin up one of these pepper-box roofs and shove ’em back in the nest when nobody was looking.”
“Anyway, that fellow seems to recognize you, Charles,” grinned Baron nodding towards the absurd angular shape of a stork that was now silhouetted against the sky above one of the nests. The curious clacking of its long beak sounded clearly above the clucking of several hens in the roadway.
“What an eerie sound that is!” exclaimed Clare.
Baron dropped a neat spiral of apple peel upon his plate. “Something of that sort is probably the secret of our haunted battlefield,” he remarked. “Anyway, storks are lucky; though I don’t know whether haunted battlefields are. What do you say, Madame?”
Clare translated the conversation into French to Madame who was removing the debris of the feast. Madame shook her head emphatically. No, it was not lucky to see a spectre.
“Well, we haven’t actually seen the spectre,” laughed Baron. “We were up there yesterday in daylight—though Pagan here saw a—a thing—one always calls it a ‘thing,’ it sounds so much more ghostly—anyway whatever it was, it hadn’t a face or was deficient in some important point according to him.”
Madame’s face had grown grave. “The apparition has appeared to M’sieu?” she questioned seriously. “On the old battlefield?”
“Well it wasn’t actually on the old battlefield,” corrected Pagan, “but it was pretty near it—the night before last.”
Baron smiled at her solemn face. “Don’t tell me,” he cried in mock alarm, “that it’s unlucky!”
“M’sieu has seen it once only?” she queried.
“Why what happens if he sees it more than once?” chaffed Baron.
“It is an omen of death,” answered Madame seriously. “But M’sieu has seen it once only, is it not so? But yes, that is not so bad,” she added more cheerfully. “It is when it appears the third time that it is serious. Then one dies within the week.”
“Nice, cheery old dame!” commented Pagan when she had gone. But his face was thoughtful.
“It is all rot,” asserted Baron. “And this proves it. She has got it all wrong. Her apparition violates all the laws of … well conducted ghosts. I have heard of apparitions haunting particular places and therefore appearing to anyone who happened to visit those places; and I have heard of apparitions—private spooks mostly—whose appearance foretells disaster or death to members of a particular family. The one is a sort of robot ghost, tied to a particular spot, that does his two performances nightly or whatever it is, and if you visit that spot at the proper time you see him, and if you don’t, you don’t; whereas the other is a much more intelligent cove who appears only at intervals for a particular purpose to particular people. Distance doesn’t worry him: if he has something unpleasant to tell you, he will turn up all right whether you happen to be in Timbuctoo or Tooting. Now this vision of the Vosges does a bit of both, which is absurd—and against trade union rules. He warns people of their impending death and yet is tied down to one place, and a place, mark you, where visitors average about two per year. He has got to work in his three appearances and yet he can’t leave his pitch! Of course it simply can’t be done. And all the authority Madame can give us for this is a rambling yarn about an old fellow who used to pinch firewood from the battlefield, saw the ghost—and after the third appearance fell down his staircase one dark night and broke his neck. I ask you!”
Pagan’s face, however, was still serious and thoughtful, and Clare added her word of encouragement to Baron’s. “I agree with you, Dicky,” she said. “I really do not think that Mr. Pagan need make his will on account of such an inconsistent apparition.”
“For this relief much thanks,” laughed Pagan. “If Baron’s ghost lore is sound, all I have to do is to keep away from that battlefield. But as a matter of fact I have every intention of visiting Bertha’s pub again if I get the chance—and the battlefield. It interests me.”
CHAPTER SIX
I
CLARE and Cecil departed the next morning in their car for Munster, and Pagan and Baron moved down to Colmar. They made a tour of inspection of the ancient town, called for their suitcases, which had been forwarded from Strasbourg, dined to music at the open restaurant in the Champs-de-Mars, and finished up at the theatre. The next morning, however, when the question of staying longer in Colmar was raised, they both voted against doing so.
“These old towns are delightful for a couple of days,” said Baron, “but we came here to tramp the highways and hedges of the Vosges, and the sooner we get back to them the better, I say.”
“O Baron, you have put into the poetry of wor
ds the secret thoughts of my heart,” agreed Pagan. “But where shall we go? That is the question as laddie Hamlet said. High or low?”
“High,” decided Baron.
Pagan lugged a map from his pocket. “Good. Your lightest wish is my command. High it shall be; silent upon a peak in Darien you shall sit.” He studied the map. “We will go right up to the high ridge that forms the backbone of these blithering hills. There is a pass almost due west of us—the Honneck; that’s where we will go.”
“How far? How long?” asked Baron.
“A longish way on foot,” answered Pagan, “but we can train part of the way—the uninteresting bit—as far as Munster; stay there the night and tramp over the ridge to-morrow.”
Baron shot a shrewd look at Pagan. “Why Munster?” he enquired.
“Because, my dear old question mark,” retorted Pagan, “we can’t get to where we want to go without going through it. We can’t tramp the Honneck in one day; therefore we must stop the night somewhere. And so it sticks out a mile that the thing to do is to train to Munster and tramp on to-morrow. You see, it lies bang in the middle of the hills where two valleys meet, and the main road up to the Honneck over the Schlucht Pass goes through it and up the northern valley.”
Baron nodded agreement, but there was a sceptical twinkle in his eye. “All right, Charles. Your logic is almost too good to be true.”
“And I don’t know whether you realize it,” added Pagan. “But the ridge immediately to the north is the one on which Bertha’s pub stands; in fact they must have been the lights of Munster that we saw far below when we climbed out of that window.”
Baron smiled at Pagan’s earnestness. “And at what hour departs the train?” he asked.
“We pack kits and entrain forthwith,” answered Pagan.
As the little train drew clear of the town they had a fine view westwards of the Vosges stretching in a purple barrier from north to south as far as the eye could see. The lower slopes, trenched with green valleys, encroached upon the fertile plain in humped wooded bastions, crowned with the brown crumbling walls of ancient castles; and in the valley mouths lay the old fortified villages, their walls and watch towers and high peaked roofs all golden in the morning sunlight.
Meandering inconsequently, it seemed, through sunny vineyards, the little train rounded the foot of a vine-terraced hill and bumped to rest at a tiny tree-shaded platform. Beyond it the sun-bleached walls and projecting angle towers of a small village nestled at the foot of a wooded slope. Gay wild flowers grew between the stones; moss and lichens patterned the mellow tiles on the peaked roofs of the towers, and a dry moat, carpeted with grass and gay with flower beds, encircled the walls. A shady avenue, crossing the moat by a balustraded causeway, led from the tiny station to the old portcullised gate tower, which was crowned by the inevitable stork’s nest.
“Mon cher, Seigneur,” chanted Pagan in his best French. “Voilà un nid!”
“C’est vrai, mon cher Mécréant,” answered Baron; “mais il n’y a pas des oiseaux.”
But as the engine began to move again and float little balloons of smoke into the clear bright air, the two birds whirred overhead with a slow, strong beating of wings, turned into the wind like homing aeroplanes, and glided down to the nest.
The little train puffed its way laboriously up the valley. The hills closed in upon it and the vine-terraced slopes gave place to thick green woods. The hills grew higher and steeper, and up tributary valleys they caught glimpses of the bold, bare summits of the higher peaks beyond.
They reached Munster a little after midday. It lay in a natural amphitheatre where four valleys met. High wooded hills surrounded it, and behind them towered the bare, grassy ballons. Baron nodded upwards towards the great rampart of hills facing them as they walked slowly up the broad shady boulevard from the station. “There’s our old friend the tree,” he said.
Thick woods covered the lower slopes of the steep mountain wall that rose close beyond the outskirts of the little town, but the upper flanks were bare and grass-grown, and at one point where a huge grassy shoulder raised itself above the general level of the ridge, the familiar outline of a shell-shivered tree showed black against the sky, no bigger than a ragged match.
Pagan nodded. “True, o King. And that must be Bertha’s Pub, two fingers left at eight o’clock,” he added, indicating a brownish blur a little to the left and below the tree.”
“By jove, yes,” agreed Baron. “So on the whole, Charles, it is just as well that rope didn’t break the other night!”
“If it had, we should have done Father Christmas down one of these chimneys all right,” answered Pagan grimly.
Munster itself seemed strangely new and uninteresting till they recalled that it must have been almost entirely rebuilt, and that where they walked so calmly in the broad light of day by the clean new church, men had passed in terror of their lives, hurrying by the roofless walls only at night when the artillery observers far up there by the ragged tree were blindfolded by the darkness.
Superficially this town of clean new houses, tidy, evenly paved streets and unstained roofs was bright and prosperous; but it seemed characterless and out of place among those historic, soaring hills. It wore a tragic air of bravado, as though in spite of its bold and youthful front it was not unconscious of its past. But to Pagan and Baron, wandering sympathetically in the meaner street, it revealed the scars of that past: an old wall pock-marked fanwise by shell splinters, the blind walls of a gutted roofless house standing in a tangled garden, and some tell-tale humps in the pavé roadway where ancient shell-holes had been filled with bricks.
In the new main streets of the town the shops wore a very different air. Their windows were filled mainly with picture postcards and those numerous useless objects grouped under the general heading of novelties. Some of the locally made knick-knacks, however, were really beautifully carved, and for a few francs one could buy a stork’s nest complete with father, mother and baby stork, a market woman in the wide Alsatian head-dress, or an Alsatian cottage with chimney, nest and storks on top.
Pagan was disappointed not to find Clare in the hotel. He made discreet enquiries, and learned that she had left that morning for Gerardmer, whither her brother had been called on business, but she was expected back within two days.
After dinner that evening he and Baron sauntered down to the little café by the station for coffee. It was a triangular piece of ground fenced off from the road by low wooden palings, and a few tables and chairs were set out under the half-dozen trees which were draped with coloured lights. The patron, a youngish man of military appearance wearing a beret, was an intelligent fellow, and spoke moderately good English, which he had learnt from fellow prisoners of war in a prison camp in Germany. At Pagan’s invitation he joined them in a tall glass of the strong hot coffee.
All three had taken part in the Somme battles of 1916, and for a time the conversation centred around this topic. Then Baron enquired about the political sentiments of Alsace, and received confirmation of his opinion that there was considerable unrest among a minority of the population, who, it appeared, made up by their violence and the extremity of their opinions for their lack of numbers. The patron thought that an open outbreak was possible but unlikely; but were such an outbreak to occur, it might become very serious if not checked immediately, on account of its far-reaching political and international consequences.
Baron then brought up the subject of the haunted battlefield and expounded his theory that secret political meetings would account for the apparitions. But the man shook his head. There was more in it than that he thought. Had they heard what form the apparition took? Baron admitted that their ideas on that point were distinctly hazy.
The man glanced around at his customers at the other tables and drew his chair closer. He lowered his voice. “I will tell you about it,” he said. “Many people have seen this apparition, Messieurs.” He held up his two hands with the fingers outspread. “Five … ten �
�� perhaps a dozen in all. The accounts of it vary widely, as such accounts always do, but there is an agreement, very impressive, on certain points. It walks only by night. It has the body of a man and it walks upright like a human being, but there the resemblance ends. The face … well, the face is not human. Whether beast or devil”—he made an expressive movement with his hands—“opinions differ, but all are agreed that it is not human.”
Pagan glanced at Baron, who, however, avoided his eyes. He took a gulp from his glass. “You really believe in this ghost then?”
The man laughed and waved his open palms before his face. “But, no! I do not believe in ghosts and spirits, I.” And he laughed again.
Pagan stirred his glass thoughtfully. “Then you think it is all just nonsense … sottise?”
Again the man shook his head. He glanced round and drew his chair a fraction of an inch closer.
“I, I am from Bordeaux. I tell you, Messieurs, the Vosges are not like the rest of France. Strange rites were performed among these hills in days gone by—and still are, it is said. This country teems with folk lore; every valley has its own. Strange tales of goblins, demons … half-men. Foolish, maybe, but there are so many of these stories and they have persisted so long that … well, where one finds so … so … .”
Pagan nodded. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, eh?” he suggested.
“But you said just now …” began Baron.
Pagan silenced him with a look. “And so you think, M’sieu,” prompted Pagan, “that this … er strange apparition is … is …?”
The patron drained his glass. “What happened to that race of sub-men that inhabited Europe before our ancestors drove them out?” he demanded suddenly.
“Knocked on the head by our amiable ancestor, I suppose,” grinned Baron. And then he added, “Good lord, Charles, he means what-you-may-call-um man—Cro-Magnon, isn’t it!”
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