White Eagles Over Serbia (12 page)

There was nothing to be seen, and after a further long silence Methuen set aside the branches as quietly as he could and crawled out on to the rock where the great tree cast its black cricle of shadow. The hillside was still sleeping innocently under a sky of the palest lavender. He looked anxiously about him but could find nothing which might give him a clue as to the nature of his visitor—if such he was. From somewhere over the hill a cock crowed and its clarion was answered hoarsely from the direction of the monastery. A faint distant rumble proclaimed a train. But all around him the forest scrub and river was utterly silent.

He shivered with a sudden dawn-chill and retraced his steps to the cave where he lit the fire and put some water on to boil, glad of the warmth of the crackling twigs. The noise had probably come from some prowling wolf, he thought, remembering the incident of the night before; nevertheless he must be careful. And his thoughts turned involuntarily to the corpse of the monk lying there by the river behind the next shoulder of hill. It would be unlucky if the old man's murder attracted unwelcome attention to this part of the country and compromised his headquarters. “I suppose to be really sure I should move,” said Methuen aloud, yet he knew himself loth to leave so splendid a hideout.

He busied himself with setting his temporary home to rights, burying the scraps left over from his meal in the soft earth outside and scouring the utensils he had dirtied the night before. By the time he had done this his water was boiling and he made himself a mug of tea, standing outside to drink it, watching the pale tones of the dawn light creep up from the east. To-day was to be devoted to a patrol of the railway to north and south of the valley, and with this in mind he set off in full fancy dress well before sunrise, crossing the river at the nearest point, and walking swiftly into the forest-clad depression which lay opposite him. He skirted the monastery this time and gazed for a while at the old sawmill by the café where he had once sat and played chess against all comers. It seemed iust the same. There was a light burning in one of the windows of the tavern and he could imagine a party of lumbermen downing their plum brandies before setting forth on the day's work.

It took him an hour to reach the point where the main valley intersected that formed by the Studenitsa and here he paused to eat some plums and blackberries which he found in a deserted orchard and to wash his face in a pool. Then he set off in the deep woods which crowned the summit, keeping the valley to his left and pausing from time to time to sweep the river and railway with his glasses. There was no untoward sign of movement save for a couple of lorries full of blue-coated policemen reinforced by a sprinkling of leather-men. They were travelling north at some speed and he judged that they were bound for some collective farm where trouble had broken out, and where they would administer summary socialist justice with their truncheons and handcuffs.

The air on this mountain was light and pure, and though he walked fast he felt full of energy; in fact it was all he could do to keep himself from singing as he walked. He examined the fortress he had seen the day before and calculated that not more than a company of soldiers were based there; the tunnels of the railway, however, which lay some three hundred feet below the eagle's nest, were all heavily guarded and he was careful to use his cover skilfully lest he should be picked up from the opposite canyon by someone using glasses as powerful as his own.

But the farther he walked the more astonishingly peaceful became the landscape. Here and there were men ploughing, and once he saw a caravan of mules setting off down the mountain, but in general there was nothing to indicate the presence of alarms or dangers. Once he ran into an old woman gathering firewood and passed the time of day with her, stopping only to ask her if she had any milk for sale; but her hopeless gesture—raising both hands to the sky—told him more eloquently than words could do how impoverished the peasantry in these parts was. He asked her a few questions which, while they were useful to him, were the kind that any passer-by might ask; and told her that he was walking to Rashka to see his family. “Why don't you walk on the road?” she asked. “It is easier.” Methuen gave her a knowing wink and said: “Mother, the road is full of official cars and very dusty.”

By midday he had covered several miles without seeing anything to arouse his interest and he lay up for a rest in a patch of maize. He had managed to locate the point where he had jumped out of the car yesterday and also the tree which overhung the road, and out of which he was to toss his report to Porson—unless he chose to wait by the milestone and get a lift back to Belgrade. He calculated that the rendezvous was exactly an hour's walking distance from the cave he had chosen as his hideout.

He set off back to the cave in the late afternoon, but this time he gathered some corn-cobs for his evening meal and almost entirely filled one of his large poacher's pockets with stolen almonds and dwarf-pears. Made bolder by the general peacefulness of the scene he several times left cover to take a promising footpath through those scented fields, and it was while he was crossing a stream by a little wooden footbridge that he came upon a man leading a mule laden with small sacks. Methuen stood aside to let him pass and saluted him gruffly and the man replied in a surly tone. He was a huge ugly brute, dressed in patched and greasy clothes and canvas leggings. A torn straw hat was on his head. Having negotiated the stream he turned to face Methuen and said: “Who are you? You don't belong to us!”

Methuen repeated his story only instead of mentioning Rashka, which lay in the direction from which he had already come, he named another village higher up the mountain. The man's eyes narrowed and he looked furtively about him. “Are you alone?” he said and seemed reassured when Methuen said that he was.

“I have some tobacco for sale,” he said in an ingratiating whine.

“Good?”

“The best.”

“I have no money.”

“What have you?”

“A needle and thread.”

The man's eyes widened and a smile came over his face. “A needle!” he repeated and laughed with surprise. “From America,” said Methuen sticking to the brief Boris had given him. “I get a parcel every month.” The man undid his donkey and from a sack took a great twist—several pounds of contraband tobacco—and pressed it on Methuen saying: “In our whole village there is only one needle, passed from house to house.”

This incident seemed to thaw him out and he was disposed to stop and chatter but Methuen was anxious to be on his way. As they parted he called after Methuen: “Be careful up there! There are bad people!” and then he winked and gave a horrid leer. “Is it possible”, asked Methuen of himself, “that he takes me for a White Eagle?”

He cut across an orchard and down the slope behind the monastery; altogether he had travelled about seven miles, along the four sides of a square. The body of the old monk still lay under the tree by the river and for a moment Methuen felt a pang of conscience: he should, he supposed, dig a grave for it. But there was no time and no energy over, and a diversion from his central plan might prove fatal. He retired into the cave, where the snake once more sat on duty, and shedding his boots, lit a candle and commenced his brief report for Dombey.

CHAPTER TEN

Footsteps in the Night

H
is excursion had given him much more confidence and that evening he permitted himself a rapturous hour of fishing in the dusk before returning to the cave. The trout showed little interest in a Pale Olive Dun but rose nicely to a Winged Standard, though once hooked they showed little disposition to fight so that in half an hour he had caught enough to feed a dinner-party of eight. He tried two of the flies which the Ambassador had tied himself, but without conspicuous success, and he abandoned them regretfully as possibly too highly coloured for their purpose.

The snake too showed the first signs of domestication, for it no longer hissed when he appeared in the cave-mouth, and he was able to walk about with more confidence though he did not dare to shed his boots unless he was actually sitting up beyond its reach on the stone bed he had chosen. His dinner that night was more ambitious, consisting of a grilled trout, two corn-cobs, and some nuts and blackberries: and he ate it beside a roaring fire which lit up the cave with a rosy glare and dispelled the evening damps rising from the river.

It did not take him long to write a brief description of the day's exploration, and to add that he intended to stay on—he did not add for how long. With his report he added a note for transmission to Dombey saying that he was well and that the fishing was excellent. Then, turning aside from these tedious chores, he cleaned his pistol, and after tidying his equipment treated himself to half an hour of
Walden,
revelling in the smooth oracular prose which never wearied him, and which seemed to contain a message which tantalized him without ever satisfying.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

He would have been at a loss to explain why phrases like that haunted him, yet they did, carrying magical undertones which made him repeat them to himself under his breath. And it was particularly when he found himself in a place like this, far from the habitations of men, that he found in this little book a richness and resonance which made him feel at one with the lone American in his log cabin, watching the leaves fall on Walden pond.

He blew out the candle and crawled into his sleeping-bag, repeating another of those oracular phrases like a talisman. “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous!” Methuen murmured the word “fabulous” twice and wondering what his author could mean slid smoothly into a deep sleep.

Once again he was woken that night by what seemed to him the sound of stealthy footsteps near the cave. The fire had burned down to a bed of soft ash, and his watch marked the hour of three. This time, however, he decided to be more ambitious, and crawling swiftly and smoothly from the cave he slipped down the slope to the water's edge and waited there silently for half a minute before fording the stream and crawling up the hillock opposite. From here he could examine the cave-mouth and the hillside around it with his powerful night-glasses, but the visibility was poor and despite a long watch he could see nothing which might account for the noise. He returned to his bed and spent the rest of the night anxiously dozing and starting up at every sound.

The day dawned cloudy with a touch of damp which heralded a rain-storm, and he occupied himself by examining the country to the north of the cave with the same methodical intentness as he had devoted to the railway the day before. The country hereabouts was knotted up into a chain of rolling hills crested with great forests of beech and here not a living soul met his gaze. The wind rattled and roared on these uplands, filling the melancholy emptiness with the sound of shaken foliage and creaking branches. Once on a neighbouring hillside he saw a line of five men riding on horses with high wooden saddles. They were armed and through his glasses he could distinguish the grey tunics of soldiers and even detect the red star which each bore in his cap. He watched the column move slowly out of sight along the eastern flanks of the mountain opposite. Their movements suggested those of a leisurely patrol which has no determined end in view and Methuen noticed that the leader of the file did not even have his carbine at the ready, but wore it loosely slung over his back. They did not seem to fear an ambush on these empty mountains.

The scenery now became more beautiful than ever, though profoundly lonely, save here and there for a beautiful black squirrel leaping from branch to branch, or a huge brown vulture floating through the azure overhead. The steep slopes over which he now made his way were covered with forest land more varied in its composition. The beech predominated, it is true, but everwhere now his eye picked out oaks and thoms, glaucous ashes, and the bursting fountain-like clumps of birch which grouped themselves along the skyline as if inviting him further into those lawny glades. The dull haze began to lift under the stimulus of an east wind from the plains as he reached the highest part of that green plateau and from here he was able to command an immense view—a stretch of blue contoured mountains stretching away towards Macedonia with here and there a silver scribble of river to break up the monotony of the mass. He studied this landscape carefully and patiently through his glasses though without uncovering anything more exciting than a few dust clouds on a strip of road, and a team of mules skirting the side of what looked like a deserted quarry.

Here he spent some hours resting in the sweet-scented bracken before turning back to his hideout. It was puzzling that this plateau should yield no sign of life beyond that single patrol. He had with him a silk handkerchief printed with a commando map of the area and he worked out his references as well as he could, marking the silk lightly with a pencil. He calculated that in these two days he had explored an area of roughly five square miles around the cave without finding anything suspicious. Could it be that all Dombey's reports were false? Troops of course would move along the valleys where road communications made for speed; but bandits of any kind would certainly operate on the hills where the cover was so good. Why was there no sign of them?

He arrived back at the final spur beyond the monastery by three and was making his way back to the cave by a series of by now familiar coverts when it occurred to him to see if the body of the old monk was still lying where he had left it; he accordingly climbed the next hill from the back, making his way up a dry river-bed, and appeared in the clump of bushes behind the tree against which the unfortunate fisherman had been sitting. His nerves gave a jump of surprise when he saw no sign of the monk's body under the tree. After carefully looking about him he rose from cover and raced down the bank to the river. The body had vanished, and though he searched carefully in the grass he could see no trace of footprints. Perhaps the people of the village had come out and fetched the old man in—but if so where were their footprints? He was about to give up his search and return to the river when a speck of black on the water, a hundred yards downstream, caught his eye. He drew in his breath and hastily focused his glasses on the spot. The monk's body lay wedged between two rocks at a shallow place in the river, bobbing and shivering grotesquely in the swift current. Someone had thrown it in—but who?