Between these gaping fangs she crept, listening, striving to set her feet on the rocks without making any noise. But that seemed to be impossible and the rocky tunnel echoed under her footsteps, slipping, sliding, hob-nails scraping in desperate efforts not to fall.
Again and again she halted, listening fearfully, one hand crushed against her drumming heart; but she had heard no sound ahead; the men she followed must be some distance in advance; and she stole forward again, afraid, desperately crushing out the thoughts — that crowded and surged in her brain — the terrible living swarm of fears that clamoured to her of the fate of white women if captured by the things men called Boche and Hun.
And now she was obliged to stoop as the roof of the tunnel dipped lower and she could scarcely see in the increasing darkness, clearly enough to avoid the stalactites.
However, from far ahead came a glimmer; and even when she was obliged to drop to her knees and creep forward, she could still make out the patch of light, and the Via Mala again became visible with its vitreous polished floor and its stalactites and water-blunted stalagmites always threatening to trip her and transfix her.
Now, very far ahead, something moved and partly obscured the distant glimmer; and she saw, at a great distance, the two men she followed, moving in silhouette across the light. When they had disappeared she ventured to move on again. And her knees were bleeding when she crept out along a heavy shelf of rock set like a balcony on the sheer face of the cliff.
Tufts of alpine roses grew on it, and slippery lichens, and a few seedlings which next spring’s torrent would wash away into the still, misty depths below.
But this shelf of rock was not all. The Via Mala could not end on the chasm’s brink.
Cautiously she dragged herself out along the shadow of the cliff, listening, peering among the clefts now all abloom with alpen rosen; and saw nothing — no way forward; no steep path, hewn by man or by nature, along the face of that stupendous battlement of rock.
She lay listening. But if there was a river roaring somewhere through the gorge it was too far below her for her to hear it.
Nothing stirred there; the distant bluish parapets of rock across the ravine lay in full sunshine, but nothing moved there, neither man nor beast nor bird; and the tremendous loneliness of it all began to frighten her anew.
Yet she must go on; they had gone on; there was some hidden way. Where? Then, all in a moment, what she had noticed before, and had taken for a shadow cast by a slab of projecting rock, took the shape of a cleft in the facade of the precipice itself — an opening that led straight into the cliff.
When she dragged herself up to it she saw it had been made by man. The ancient scars of drills still marked it. Masses of rock had been blasted from it; but that must have been years ago because a deep growth of moss and lichen covered the scars and the tough stems of crag-shrubs masked every crack.
Here, too, bloomed the livid, over-rated edelweiss, dear to the maudlin and sentimental side of an otherwise wolfish race, its rather ghastly flowers starring the rocks.
As at the entrance to a tomb the girl stood straining her frightened eyes to pierce the darkness; then, feeling her way with outstretched pistol-hand, she entered.
The man-fashioned way was smooth. Or Hun or Swiss, whoever had wrought this Via Mala out of the eternal rock, had wrought accurately and well. The grade was not steep; the corridor descended by easy degrees, twisting abruptly to turn again on itself, but always leading downward in thick darkness.
No doubt that those accustomed to travel the Via Mala always carried lights; the air was clean and dry and any lighted torch could have lived in such an atmosphere. But Evelyn Erith carried no lights — had thought of none in the haste of setting out.
Years seemed to her to pass in the dreadful darkness of that descent as she felt her way downward, guided by the touch of her feet and the contact of her hand along the unseen wall.
Again and again she stopped to rest and to check the rush of sheerest terror that threatened at moments her consciousness.
There was no sound in the Via Mala. The thick darkness was like a fabric clogging her movements, swathing her, brushing across her so that she seemed actually to feel the horrible obscurity as some concrete thing impeding her and resting upon her with an increasing weight that bent her slender figure.
There was something grey ahead…. There was light — a sickly pin-point. It seemed to spread but grow duller. A pallid patch widened, became lighter again. And from an infinite distance there came a deadened roaring — the hollow menace of water rushing through depths unseen.
She stood within the shadow zone inside the tunnel and looked out upon the gorge where, level with the huge bowlders all around her, an alpine river raged and dashed against cliff and stone, flinging tons of spray into the air until the whole gorge was a driving sea of mist. Here was the floor of the canon; here was the way they had searched for. Her task was done. And now, on bleeding little feet, she must retrace her steps; the Via Mala must become the Via Dolorosa, and she must turn and ascend that Calvary to the dreadful crest.
She was very weak. Privation had sapped the young virility that had held out so long. She had not eaten for a long while — did not, indeed, crave food any longer. But her thirst raged, and she knelt at a little pool within the cavern walls and bent her bleeding mouth to the icy fillet of water. She drank little, rinsed her mouth and face and dried her lips on her sleeve. And, kneeling so, closed her eyes in utter exhaustion for a moment.
And when she opened them she found herself looking up at two men.
Before she could move one of the men kicked her pistol out of her nerveless hand, caught her by the shoulder and dragged the trench-knife from her convulsive grasp. Then he said in English:
“Get up.” And the other, the signalman, struck her across her back with the furled flags so that she lost her balance and fell forward on her face. They got her to her feet and pushed her out among the bowlders, through the storming spray, and across the floor of the ravine into the sunlight of a mossy place all set with trees. And she saw butterflies flitting there through green branches flecked with sunshine.
The officer seated himself on a fallen tree and crossed his heavy feet on a carpet of wild flowers. She stood erect, the signaller holding her right arm above the elbow.
After the officer had leisurely lighted a cigarette he asked her who she was. She made no answer.
“You are the Erith woman, are you not?” he demanded.
She was silent.
“You Yankee slut,” he added, nodding to himself and staring up into her bloodless face.
Her eyes wandered; she looked at, but scarcely saw the lovely wildflowers under foot, the butterflies flashing their burnished wings among the sunbeams.
“Drop her arm.” The signaller let go and stood at attention.
“Take her knife and pistol and your flags and go across the stream to the hut.”
The signaller saluted, gathered the articles mentioned, and went away in that clumping, rocking gait of the land peasant of Hundom.
“Now,” said the officer, “strip off your coat!”
She turned scarlet, but he sprang to his feet and tore her coat from her. She fought off every touch; several times he struck her — once so sharply that the blood gushed from her mouth and nose; but still she fought him; and when he had completed his search of her person, he was furious, streaked with sweat and all smeared with her blood.
“Damned cat of a Yankee!” he panted, “stand there where you are or
I’ll blow your face off!”
But as he emptied the pockets of her coat she seized it and put it on, sobbing out her wrath and contempt of him and his threats as she covered her nearly naked body with the belted jacket and buttoned it to her throat.
He glanced at the papers she had carried, at the few poor articles that had fallen from her pockets, tossed them on the ground beside the log and resumed his seat and cigarette.
“W
here’s McKay?”
No answer.
“So you tricked us, eh?” he sneered. “You didn’t get your rat-poison at the spring after all. The Yankees are foxes after all!” He laughed his loud, nasal, nickering laugh— “Foxes are foxes but men are men. Do you understand that, you damned vixen?”
“Will you let me kill myself?” she asked in a low but steady voice.
He seemed surprised, then realising why she had asked that mercy, showed all his teeth and smirked at her out of narrow-slitted eyes.
“Where is McKay?” he repeated.
She remained mute.
“Will you tell me where he is to be found?”
“No!”
“Will you tell me if I let you go?”
“No.”
“Will you tell me if I give you back your trench-knife?”
The white agony in her face interested and amused him and he waited her reply with curiosity.
“No!” she whispered.
“Will you tell me where McKay is to be found if I promise to shoot you before—”
“No!” she burst out with a strangling sob.
He lighted another cigarette and, for a while, considered her musingly as he sat smoking. After a while he said: “You are rather dirty — all over blood. But you ought to be pretty after you’re washed.” Then he laughed.
The girl swayed where she stood, fighting to retain consciousness.
“How did you discover the Via Mala?” he inquired with blunt curiosity.
“You showed it to me!”
“You slut!” he said between his teeth. Then, still brutishly curious: “How did you know that spring had been poisoned? By those dead birds and animals, I suppose…. And that’s what I told everybody, too. The wild things are bound to come and drink. But you and your running-mate are foxes. You made us believe you had gone over the cliff. Yes, even I believed it. It was well done — a true Yankee trick. All the same, foxes are only foxes after all. And here you are.”
He got up; she shrank back, and he began to laugh at her.
“Foxes are only foxes, my pretty, dirty one! — but men are men, and a
Prussian is a super-man. You had forgotten that, hadn’t you, little
Yankee?”
He came nearer. She sprang aside and past him and ran for the river; but he caught her at the edge of a black pool that whirled and flung sticky chunks of foam over the bowlders. For a while they fought there in silence, then he said, breathing heavily, “A fox can’t drown. Didn’t you know that, little fool?”
Her strength was ebbing. He forced her back to the glade and stood there holding her, his inflamed face a sneering, leering mask for the hot hell that her nearness and resistance had awakened in him. Suddenly, still holding her, he jerked his head aside and stared behind him. Then he pushed her violently from him, clutched at his holster, and started to run. And a pistol cracked and he pitched forward across the log upon which he had sat, and lay so, dripping dark blood, and fouling the wild-flowers with the flow.
“Kay!” she said in a weak voice.
McKay, his pack strapped to his back, his blood-shot eyes brilliant in his haggard visage, ran forward and bent over the thing. Then he shot him again, behind the ear.
The rage of the river drowned the sound of the shots; the man in the hut across the stream did not come to the door. But McKay caught sight of the shack; his fierce eyes questioned the girl, and she nodded.
He crossed the stream, leaping from bowlder to bowlder, and she saw him run up to the door of the hut, level his weapon, then enter. She could not hear the shots; she waited, half-dead, until he came out again, reloading his pistol.
She struggled desperately to retain her senses — to fight off the deadly faintness that assailed her. She could scarcely see him as he came swiftly toward her — she put out her arms blindly, felt his fierce clasp envelop her, passed so into blessed unconsciousness.
A drop or two of almost scalding broth aroused her. He held her in his arms and fed her — not much — and then let her stretch out on the sun-hot moss again.
Before sunset he awakened her again, and he fed her — more this time.
Afterward she lay on the moss with her golden-brown eyes partly open. And he had constructed a sponge of clean, velvety moss, and with this he washed her swollen mouth and bruised cheek, and her eyes and throat and hands and feet.
After the sun went down she slept again: and he stretched out beside her, one arm under her head and about her neck.
Moonlight pierced the foliage, silvering everything and inlaying the earth with the delicate tracery of branch and leaf.
Moonlight still silvered her face when she awoke. After a while the shadow slipped from his face, too.
“Kay?” she whispered.
“Yes, Yellow-hair.”
And, after a little while she turned her face to his and her lips rested on his.
Lying so, unstirring, she fell asleep once more.
CHAPTER XII
THE GREAT SECRET
All that morning American infantry had been passing through Delle over the Belfort road. The sun of noon saw no end to them.
The endless column of shadows, keeping pace with them, lengthened with the afternoon along their lengthening line.
Now and then John Recklow opened the heavy wooden door in his garden wall and watched them until duty called him to his telephone or to his room where maps and papers littered the long table. But he always returned to the door in the garden wall when duty permitted and leaned at ease there, smoking his pipe, keen-eyed, impassive, gazing on the unbroken line of young men — men of his own race, sun-scorched, dusty, swinging along the Belfort road, their right elbows brushing Switzerland, their high sun-reddened pillar of dust drifting almost into Germany, and their heavy tread thundering through that artery of France like the prophetic pulse of victory.
A rich September sunset light streamed over them; like a moving shaft of divine fire the ruddy dust marched with them upon their right hand; legions of avenging shadows led them forward where, for nearly half a century beyond the barriers of purple hills, naked and shackled, the martyr-daughters of the Motherland stood waiting — Alsace and Lorraine.
“We are on our way!” laughed the Yankee bugles.
The Fortress of Metz growled “Nein!”
Recklow went back to his telephone. For a long while he remained there very busy with Belfort and Verdun. When again he returned to the green door in his garden wall, the Yankee infantry had passed; and of their passing there remained no trace save for the smouldering pillar of fire towering now higher than the eastern horizon and leagthened to a wall that ran away into the north as far as the eye could see.
His cats had come out into the garden for “the cats’ hour” — that mysterious compromise between day and evening when all things feline awake and stretch and wander or sit motionless, alert, listening to occult things. And in the enchantment of that lovely liaison which links day and night — when the gold and rose soften to mauve as the first star is born — John Recklow raised his quiet eyes and saw two dead souls come into his garden by the little door in the wall.
“Is it you, Kay McKay?” he said at last.
But the shock of the encounter still fettered him so that he walked very slowly to the woman who was now moving toward him across the grass.
“Evelyn Erith,” he said, taking her thin hands in his own, which were trembling now.
“It’s a year,” he complained unsteadily.
“More than a year,” said McKay in his dead voice.
With his left hand, then, John Recklow took McKay’s gaunt hand, and stood so, mute, looking at him and at the girl beside him.
“God!” he said blankly. Then, with no emphasis: “It’s rather more than a year!… They sent me two fire-charred skulls — the head of a man and the head of a woman…. That was a year ago…. After your pigeon arrived… I found the scorched skulls wrapped in a Swiss newspaper-lying inside the garden wall
— over there on the grass!… And the swine had written your names on the skulls….”
Into Evelyn Erith’s eyes there came a vague light — the spectre of a smile. And as Recklow looked at her he remembered the living glory she had once been; and wrath blazed wildly within him. “What have they done to you?” he asked in an unsteady voice. But McKay laid his hand on Recklow’s arm:
“Nothing. It is what they have not done — fed her. That’s all she needs — and sleep.”
Recklow gazed heavily upon her. But if the young fail rapidly, they also respond quickly.
“Come into the house,”
Perhaps it was the hot broth with wine in it that brought a slight colour back into her ghastly face — the face once so youthfully lovely but now as delicate as the mask of death itself.
Candles twinkled on the little table where the girl now lay back listlessly in the depths of an armchair, her chin sunk on her breast.
Recklow sat opposite her, writing on a pad in shorthand. McKay, resting his ragged elbows on the cloth, his haggard face between both hands, went on talking in a colourless, mechanical voice which an iron will alone flogged into speech:
“Killed two of them and took their clothes and papers,” he continued
monotonously; “that was last August — near the end of the month….
The Boche had tens of thousands working there. AND EVERY ONE OF THEM
WAS INSANE.”
“What!”
“Yes, that is the way they were operating — the only way they dared operate. I think all that enormous work has been done by the insane during the last forty years. You see, the Boche have nothing to dread from the insane. Anyway the majority of them died in harness. Those who became useless — intractable or crippled — were merely returned to the asylums from which they had been drafted. And the Hun government saw to it that nobody should have access to them.
“Besides, who would believe a crazy man or woman if they babbled about the Great Secret?”
He covered his visage with his bony hands and rested so for a few moments, then, forcing himself again:
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