Airs Above the Ground (33 page)

But at least it was daylight. Already the sun was brilliant, laying great palisades of light between the pines all the way along the road. I wound my window down and let in the sharp sweet air. Birds were singing wildly, almost as if it were spring. I thought I heard a cock crow not far off, and somewhere, nearer still, a train whistled. In spite of myself, my spirits lifted. It was morning, the sun was up, and soon now all this would be over.

The road rounded a thick knot of pines, and below me, now, were the green rolling foothills, with beyond them the glitter of a spire and the glint of the lake. Smoke was rising from a farm chimney, and a little beyond that, behind a thick belt of pines, another column of smoke, black this time, spoke of some factory or other already at work. Seen in the morning light this peaceful pastoral scene couldn’t possibly hold any terrors. All I had to do was to go down into the pretty village and go to the hotel. They would be awake there, and moving, and they would speak English, and there was a telephone . . .

I drove carefully round the last bend and headed the Mercedes down the straight slope, past the railway
station and towards the village. I remember that the only thing which made me brake and pause as I passed the station was that the gate was open and a man in blue dungarees was sweeping the little stretch of platform between the miniature ticket office and the siding where the train stood with its curious little tilted engine and its three carriages waiting for the day. There would certainly be a telephone here.

He had seen me. He paused in his sweeping and looked up. I stopped the car, and hung out of the window.

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

He put a hand up to his ear, and then with a sort of maddening deliberation, turned to lay aside his broom before he approached the car.

Torn between the desire to drive straight away and waste no more time, and the desire to get to the first available telephone as quickly as possible, I shoved open the car door, jumped out, and ran in through the station gate to meet him.

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

I think he said no, and I think, too, that undaunted he started on a flood of totally unintelligible German, but I was no longer listening.

There were two sidings in the tiny station. In one of them stood the train, with its little down-tilted engine ready to push the three carriages up the long mountain track; the other siding was empty. From it, a long shining section of track led up into the pine woods and vanished. And away up in the same direction beyond the first tree-clad foothill, I saw that towering column
of thick black smoke that I had taken to be the smoke from some factory chimney; and I remembered two things. I remembered the column of smoke that Josef had called the ‘fire-engine’, or ‘Fiery Elijah’; and I remembered the engine’s whistle I had heard three minutes ago.

I whirled on the man, and pointed up the track.

‘There! That! A train? A train?’ He was elderly, with a drooping moustache, and watery blue eyes which would normally be rayed with laughter lines, but which now were puckered and puzzled and a little rheumy with the early morning. He stared at me with complete non-comprehension. I waved again frantically at the standing train, at the smoke above the trees, at the track, in a sort of desperate pantomime; and then pointed to my wrist.

‘The time . . . the first train . . . seven o’clock . . .
Sieben Uhr
. . . train . . . gone?’

He gestured towards the wall behind him where I now saw a station clock marked half-past five, and then, pointing like me up towards the smoke on the mountain, he poured out another flood of German.

But it wasn’t necessary. I had seen that the black smoke was indeed marching slowly, but steadily, inexorably, up through the trees, and now, clear above them, over a lovely rounded slope of sunny green, I saw the engine moving, an engine exactly like the one standing here in the station, but pushing only one carriage. Not even a carriage, something that looked like a truck . . .

Beside me, the old man said: ‘Gasthaus . . . Café,’
and then proceeded with some pantomime involving the train standing at the platform. If he had been speaking in purest English it couldn’t have been more clear. I understood quite well now. The time-table that I had studied had of course only put down the trains scheduled for the tourists, and the first one did indeed run at seven o’clock. No one had seen fit to mention that an engine took supplies up for the restaurant at half-past five.

German or no German, the telephone was not a blind bit of use in this. The old man was still talking, volubly, kindly, and rather pleased to have an audience at this ungodly hour of the day. I believe I said ‘Thank you’, as I turned and left him still talking to the empty air.

By the mercy of heaven there was room to turn. The Mercedes swept round like a boomerang, and I put her at that ghastly little road again with something of the fine careless rapture that I might have indulged in on the Strada Del Sol.

The best of all our actions tend
To the preposterousest end
.

Samuel Butler:
Satire upon
the Weakness and Misery of Man

At least going up was a little easier than coming down.

I had been too preoccupied during my recent descent to notice much more than the surface of the road, and of course on our way up in the early hours it had been dark and I had been wrestling with the flashlight and the map. Now as I drove the big car like a bomb up that horrible little road I was trying desperately to recall the relationship between road and railway.

As far as I could remember, there were only two places where they conjoined. A few bends above the station the road met the track, and ran along with it for perhaps a hundred yards before a rough escarpment carried the train away to the left along the edge of the mountain, while the road doubled back to the right on the long sweep below the edge of the forest proper. The second place was at the quarry – the end of the road. And that would be my last chance to catch him.

In cold blood, I doubt if I could have hoped to do it
in the time, but I was past thinking, past reckoning what might happen if I miscalculated with this heavy car on these violent hairpin bends. She was so heavy and the road was so bad that I could hardly spare a hand for the gears, so I kept her in second and hauled her round the corners with no regard at all for either tyres or paintwork. Afterwards we found a dented hub cap, and a long scrape in the enamel on the offside, but I have no recollection of how they happened. I just drove the big car on and up as fast as I dared, and tried to remember how soon it was that we came to the railway.

The fifth or sixth bend, slightly easier than the others, brought us round facing a long straightish sweep between trees through which the sunlight blazed, strong now, barring the rutted road across and across, like a railway track barred with sleepers. Away at the end of this a cloud of black smoke hung, puffed, trundled deliberately by.

I put my foot down. The bars of shadow accelerated across us in one long flickering blur. And then suddenly the shining rails swooped in from our left to join the road.

For perhaps a hundred and thirty yards track and road ran side by side. The stretch of rail-track was empty, but there was black smoke still hanging in the boughs of the trees. I steadied the car on the narrow road and leaned as far out of my window as I could, straining to see forward up the railway before it curved away into the darkness of the forest, where the cliffs hid it from the sun.

It was there. I saw the square black tail of the little engine with its hanging lamp, lit for the mountain mists, swinging a small vanishing red eye into the tunnel of trees. Above it the appalling black cloud of smoke puffed furiously.

It was going slowly, the gradient so steep there that I could see the roof of the truck beyond the engine, and beyond that again the fretted curve of the rack up which it was hauling itself, cog by cog and puff by puff. There were two men in the cabin, one leaning out to look forward up the track, the other absorbed in up-tilting what looked like a bottle of beer. I shoved my hand down on the horn and held it there.

I’ll say this for the Mercedes; she had a horn like the crack of doom. Fiery Elijah must have been making a fair amount of noise, but the horn positively tore the forest apart.

Both men looked round, startled. I leaned out of my window and waved frantically, shouting – futile though it was – the most appropriate German word I could think of: ‘
Achtung! Achtung!
’ After a couple of seconds’ agonising pause I saw one of them – the driver – reach out a hand as if for the brake.

Another few yards and my road would bear me away from the railway again. I trod on my own brake and hung out, waving more frantically than ever.

The driver found what he had been reaching for, and pulled. It was the steam whistle. The engine gave a long, friendly
toot-toot
. The other man lifted his beer bottle in a happy wave. The engine gave a third and last toot, then the forest closed in behind it and it was gone.

Why I didn’t run the Mercedes off the track I shall never know. I just managed to wrench her nose round in time, as the road bore away from the railway, and along under the skirts of the forest. I still had the one chance, and through my exasperated fury I realised that it was a fairly strong one. Even with the extra distance she had to travel the Mercedes would surely be more than capable of reaching the railwaymen’s hut in time for me to stop the train . . .

She had certainly better be. All that this last little effort had done was to make the train announce its coming to Timothy, and, however the boy had felt before, he would certainly be sweating it out now, trapped up there with the approaching engine mounting the hill puff by puff towards him.

Mercifully with every yard, with every curve, I was more used to the car, and with every curve the gradient eased and the bends grew wider. I have no idea at what speed we took the last six or seven stretches of that road, but it seemed to me as if the whole hillside was reeling past me and down in a long flickering blur of sun and shadow, and then suddenly we were up round the last bend, and in front of us was the space with the railwaymen’s hut, and the shining stretch of track beside it.

I couldn’t see the train.

The Mercedes zoomed along the last straight stretch like a homing bee, and fetched up with shrieking tyres and rocking springs within a yard of the railwaymen’s hut. I jumped out of her and ran forward on to the line.

I had done it. Below where I stood I saw the smoke,
perhaps a quarter of a mile away, where the engine chugged its stolid, unexcited way up the rack. They could not, of course, yet see me; would not see me until the engine broke from the cover of the trees some fifty yards away. I hoped they would, even at that early hour, keep a sharp look out forward. If I sounded the horn again, perhaps, or waved something . . . if I had had anything red . . .

But I had seen how they had reacted to that horn before. And to my waving. In my mind’s eye I saw it all again, repeated here with horrible finality: the horn, my waving, the cheerful responsive waves of the two men, and then the engine going past me and the red swinging lamp disappearing round the far curve . . .

The red rear lamp. There was at least the Mercedes.

I ran back to the car. As I jumped in and slammed the door, the cloud of black smoke burst above the trees to my left and I saw the blunt nose of the truck. I switched the car’s lights full on, shoved her into gear, and drove her as hard as I could for the railway lines.

As her front wheel hit the rail, I thought at first she was going to be deflected, but the tyre bit, clung, climbed, and then lurched over, the rear tyre after it, and the Mercedes stopped once more, her two near wheels over the offside track, her rear lights, brake lights and all blazing what message they could towards the approaching train. For good measure I jammed my hand down hard over the horn as well, while I leaned across and with my free hand shoved open the offside door. I would give them till twenty-five yards, and then I would be out of the car like a bolting rabbit. If they
didn’t see the car I could do nothing to save her, but I didn’t imagine that the train could come to very much harm; locked on its cogs it would probably weather the collision.

Why had I thought the engine slow? It seemed to be roaring up the hill all of a sudden with the speed of a crack express train. The black smoke burst and spread. I could hear the heavy panting of the little engine, great beats of it, above the blare of my horn. Thirty-five yards. Thirty. And I thought I heard a shout. I let go the horn and started my dive towards the open door. There was the clang of a bell, and a shrill furious whistle from the engine. I flung myself out of the door and ran clear.

With a horrible shriek of brakes, another toot and a flurry of angry shouts, ‘Fiery Elijah’ came to a standstill about seven yards behind the Mercedes.

The two men leaped down out of the cabin, and advanced on me. A third – there had been a guard after all – swung down from the truck. The co-driver was still holding the beer bottle, but this time as if it were a lethal weapon, which, from his face, he looked fully prepared to use. They both started to talk at once, or rather to shout, in furious German – and I can think of no better language to be furious in. For a full half-minute, even had I been Austrian myself, I couldn’t have got a word in edgeways, but stood there helpless before the storm, my hands out in front of me almost as if to ward off a blow from the beer bottle.

At last there was a pause, on a fusillade of shouted
questions, not one word of which I understood, but of which the gist was naturally very plain.

I said desperately: ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I had to do it. There’s a boy on the line, on the line higher up, farther along, a boy, a young man . . . A – a
Junge
, on the
Eisenbahn
. I had to stop you. He’s hurt. Please, I’m sorry.’

The man with the beer bottle turned to the one beside him. This was a big man in dark grey shirt, old grey trousers, and a soft peaked cap; the driver. ‘
Was meint sie?
’