The Saint in Europe

Introduction

There are just a few stories which I genuinely regret losing, which were lost by force of circumstance and which I can do nothing about. They were all original Saint stories too, and I was thinking of them while working on a new collection of shorter pieces which I am now trying to finish up.

One of them, called “The Golden Journey,” was an open-air story about hiking in Germany in 1931, which was published in Harper’s in 1934. In 1931, if you remember, the French had only just moved out of the Rhineland, and Hitler was nothing but a beer-hall politician, and there was a new spirit among the youth of Germany — a spirit which at that time I think might have developed into something very fine if Nazism hadn’t taken it over and channeled it in the way we know. In those days they spent all their spare time rucksacking through the countryside on bicycles or on foot, singing along the roads and singing at night in the inns; it was, I thought at the time, a lot better than crashing around in hot rods and jitterbugging, although we know what it came to. It was a great background for a happy story then, and yet it is a story which I think it may never be possible to revive. Too many ugly things stand between that memory and the present and they cannot be forgotten even in a period of peace. But the story depends on that background entirely and can’t be translated to any other time nor place. So, let it die, along with many other pleasant things that will never come back.

— Leslie Charteris (1947)

(Editorial note: Needless to say, it was revived...)

1

Probably if Belinda Deane hadn’t been born with such liquid brown eyes, such a small straight nose, such a delightful chin, she would never have been spoiled. And if she hadn’t been spoiled, Simon Templar would never have felt called upon to interfere. And if he hadn’t interfered... But the course of far more important histories has been changed by the curve of an eyebrow before now.

Belinda Deane knocked on the door of his hotel bedroom in Munich at half past twelve, which was less than an hour after his breakfast, and he put down his razor and went cheerfully to let her in.

“I... I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw him.

“Why?” Simon asked. “Don’t you approve of this dressing gown?”

He returned to the mirror and calmly resumed the scraping of his face. The girl stood with her back to the door, twisting a scrap of handkerchief in her fingers.

“Mr Templar,” she said, “my bag’s been stolen.”

“How did that happen?”

“It was in my room. I... I left it for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone!”

“Too bad,” murmured the Saint gravely.

He turned the angle of his jawbone with care, stretching his head sideways. His unruffled accents held a sublime and seraphic saintliness of innocence which in itself was a volume of explanation for his nickname. It took the girl’s breath away for a moment, and then she froze over.

“Too bad,” she said coldly, “is putting it mildly. It had all my money in it, and my letter of credit, and my passport — everything. I’ve never been in such a mess in my life. What am I going to do?”

“Have you told the hotel about it?”

“Of course. I’ve had managers and clerks and detectives prowling about my room for the last half-hour.”

Simon shrugged.

“It seems a pity you didn’t go on to Garmisch yesterday with Jack.”

She gazed at him glacially, but his back was turned to her and he was imperturbably intent on his shave. A glacial gaze inevitably loses much of its effect when it has to be reflected by a mirror and the recipient is merely paying the polite minimum of attention anyhow. The disadvantage made her furious, and she controlled herself with an effort. Simon’s amused blue eyes decided that Jack Easton had certainly picked a Tartar, but he admitted that wrath and hauteur sat very well on her small imperious face.

“If you remember,” she said with unnatural restraint, “I told my fiancé that tramping about with him over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in filthy village inns without any sanitation was not included in the terms of our engagement, and just wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m a civilized woman, not a farm hand. Also that happens to be my own business. Why don’t you try to suggest something helpful?”

“You haven’t any friends here?”

“None at all.”

The Saint raised one eyebrow.

“In that case, you’re only left with your bank’s correspondents here, or the American consulate. Failing those two,” he added flippantly, “you could lie down on the tram-lines outside and wait with resignation for the next tram—”

The door banged violently behind her, and Simon glanced at it and chuckled.

He ran cold water into the basin, submerged his head to remove the last traces of lather, and dried it off with a rough towel. Then he brushed his hair and sat down at the small desk where the telephone stood. He fished the directory out of a drawer, and with it the girl’s expensive bag. From it he took her letter of credit, discovered the Munich correspondent’s name there, and called the number.

“This is the American consulate,” he said, when he was connected with the necessary Personage. “We have information of a trick that’s being played on the banks around here by an American girl. She comes in with the story that her letter of credit has been stolen, and tries to get an advance without it. There is no accurate description of her at the moment, except that she is dark and about one meter sixty centimeters tall. Anything else we learn will be communicated to the police, but in the meanwhile we’re taking the responsibility of warning the principal banks. Your safest course will be to make no advance in those circumstances. Tell the girl you will have to get in touch with New York or wherever it is, and ask her to call back in three or four days. By that time you’ll have a full description from the police.”

A couple of minutes later he was speaking to the American consul.

“I say!” he bleated, in the plaintive tones of Oxford. “D’you happen to know a young thing by the name of Deane — Miss Deane?”

“No,” said the consul blankly. “What about her?”

“Well, I met her in a beer garden last night. She’s an American girl — at least, she said she was. Dashed pretty, too. She told me her bag and things had been stolen, and I lent her five pounds to wire home for money. Well, I’ve just been sniffing a cocktail with another chap and we were comparing notes, and it turns out he met the same girl in another beer garden last Tuesday and lent her ten dollars on the same story. So we toddled round to the hotel she said she was staying at to make inquiries, and they hadn’t heard of her at all. So we decided she must be a crook, and we thought we’d better tell you to warn your other citizens about her, old boy!”

“I’m very much obliged. Can you tell me what she looks like?”

“Like a wicked man’s dream, old fruit! About five foot three, with the most luscious brown eyes...”

His last call was to the hotel manager. Simon Templar spoke German, as he spoke other languages, like a native, and he put on his stiffest and most official staccato for the occasion.

“This is the Central Police Office. We have information received that a new swindle is by an American girl worked. She tells you that her money from her room in your hotel stolen is. Then will she a few days more to stay attempt, or money to borrow... So! That has already yourself befallen... No, unfortunately is there nothing to do. It is impossible the untruthfulness of her story to prove. You must however no compensation pay, and if you her room engaged announce, will you sorely less money lose.”

Simon finished his dressing in an aura of silent laughter, and went out to lunch.

He was scanning a magazine in his room about four o’clock when another knock came on his door and the girl walked in. She looked pale and tired, but the Saint hardened his heart. Even the spectacle of his attire could only rouse her to a faint spark of sarcasm.

“Have you joined the boy scouts or something?” she asked.

Simon turned his eyes down to his brown knees unabashed.

“I’m going down to Innsbruck and up over the Brenner Pass into Italy. Tramping about over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in ditches — all that sort of thing. It’s one of the most beautiful trips in the whole world, and the only way you can get the best out of it is on foot. I’m catching a train to Lenggries at five, and starting from there early tomorrow morning — that cuts out the only dull part. What luck have you had?”

“None at all.” The girl flung herself into a chair. “I’d never have believed anything could have been so hopeless. My God, the way I’ve been looked at today, you might think I was some kind of crook! I went to the bank. Yes, they’d be delighted to get in touch with my bank in Boston, but they couldn’t do anything till they had a reply. How long would it take? Four days at least. And what was I going to do till then? The manager didn’t know, but he shrugged his shoulders as if he thought I’d be lucky to stay out of jail that long. Then I went to the consulate. The consul’s eyes were popping out of his head almost as soon as I’d begun to tell him the trouble. If the bank was willing to cable Boston for me, what was the trouble? I told him I couldn’t go without eating for four days. He said he was only authorized to allow me fifty cents a day and send me home. I asked him what he thought I could eat for fifty cents, and he bawled me out! He said I was a disgrace to the country, and an American citizen had no business to be abroad without any means of support, and if he shipped me home I’d go straight to jail when I landed. And then he showed me the door. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life! If I don’t get that consul fired out of the service—”

“But surely you can stay on here till some money arrives?” suggested the Saint ingenuously.

“Not a chance. I’ve just seen the manager. He said as much as he could without insulting me openly — told me he would require my room by seven o’clock if I couldn’t pay him up to date by that time.”

“Distinctly awkward,” remarked Simon judicially.

The girl bit her lip.

“I...I’ve got to do something,” she stammered. “I don’t know how to say it — I hate asking you, after all this — but I’ve got to have something to see me through till the bank gets a reply from Boston, and they can’t do that till after the week-end. Or when Jack gets to Innsbruck about Tuesday — I can send a wire to him there. I... I know I’m practically a stranger, but if you could lend me just enough—”

“My dear,” said the Saint blandly, “I should be delighted. But I haven’t got it to lend.”

Her eyes opened wide.

“You haven’t got it?”

She spread out a brown hand.

“Take a look. My luggage went off in advance this afternoon. All I’m going to need — toothbrush and towel and blankets — is in my rucksack. My bill here is paid, and I’ve got about forty marks in my belt — enough to buy food and beer. I can’t get any more till I get to Bolzano. I couldn’t even send you on to Innsbruck — the third-class fare for one is about fifteen marks, and the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t feed me.”

She stared at him aghast. Her pretty mouth quivered. There was a moistness very close to the tears of sheer hysterical fright in her eyes.

“But what on earth am I going to do?” she wailed.

Simon lighted a cigarette, and allowed his gaze to return to her face.

“You’ll just have to walk to Innsbruck with me,” he said.

2

Simon Templar had been cordially disliked by many different people in his time, but rarely with such a wholehearted simplicity as that which Belinda Deane lavished on him the next morning. On the other hand, unpopularity had never lowered his spirits: he strode along carolling to the skies, and meditating on the infinite variety of the accidents of travel.

He had met Belinda Deane and Jack Boston on the train from Stuttgart a week before. There had been some complication about their tickets, and their knowledge of German was infinitesimal. The Saint, to whom human companionship was the breath of life, and who would seize any excuse to beguile a journey by making the acquaintance of his fellow-travellers, had stepped in as an interpreter. Thereafter they had gone around Munich together, until Easton had separated to join an old friend — “a great-open-space friend,” he described him — on a short walking trip from Garmisch to Innsbruck by way of Oberammergau. This decision had been the subject of a distressing scene at which Simon had been coerced into the position of umpire.

It was not by any means the first he had witnessed. One glance had been sufficient to tell him that Belinda had been blessed with a face and figure that would make even hard-boiled waiters scramble for the privilege of serving her, but one hour in her company had been enough to show him that they must have been doing it ever since she left her cradle, with the inevitable results. Everything that New England and Paris had to give had been endowed upon her — background, breed, education, poise. She could have been taken for the flower of American sophistication at its most perfect. Intelligence, knowledge, charm — she had them all. She knew exactly the right thing to say and do in any circumstances, entirely because she had been trained to circumstances where the same things were always being said and done. Jack Easton, a youngster of less ancient lineage, confessed that there were times when she scared him.

“Sometimes she ought to be spanked,” he said once, when he and Simon were alone together after that last scene.

He was annoyed, because the quarrel had consisted of a healthily stubborn bluntness piling up in competition with an increasingly chilly self-possession, and there was something about the Saint which always drew out confidences.

“What she really needs,” said Easton, “is for somebody to club her and drag her off to a desert island and make her wash dishes and dig up her own potatoes.”

“Why don’t you do it?” murmured the Saint.

“Because I know she’d never forgive me as long as she lived. Besides,” said Easton, morosely practical, “I don’t know any desert islands.”

Simon smoked for a time before he replied. The idea had come to him on the spur of the moment, and the more he thought of it the more it made him smile. The troubles of young love had always seemed more worthwhile to him than most things.

“It wouldn’t matter so much if she never forgave me,” he said. “And it could be done without desert islands.”

Belinda trotted beside him and hated him. The leisurely swing of his long legs was measured to a pace that made her work to keep up with him. His pack rode like a feather on his broad shoulders, and the possibility of fatigue didn’t seem to enter his head. She glanced sidelong at his strong brown profile, down over his check cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his broad leather belt, leather shorts, and bare legs, and hated him still more for the ease of his untrammeled masculinity. She had been moved to sarcasm at the expense of his costume in the hotel, but now she tried not to admit that the curious glances of the few people they passed were centered on her. Her light tweed skirt came from Paris, her green suede golfing jacket was the latest thing from Fifth Avenue: from the rudimentary crown of her jaunty little hat to the welts of her green and white buckskin shoes she was as smart and pretty as a picture, and she knew it. It was unjust that smartness should give her no advantage.

The Saint sang.

Belinda gritted her small white teeth. She had never done much walking, and after the first few miles she was feeling tired. The fact that the man at her side should have been able to allot the major ration of his breath to singing was like a deliberate affront. She began to wonder for the first time why she should ever have considered his fantastic proposition, but it had seemed like the only practical solution. Even now, she could think of nothing else that she could have done. And from the moment when she had wearily accepted, he had taken charge — registered her luggage to Innsbruck, paid the carriage fees, rushed her to the station, almost abducted her while her mind was still numbed by the shock of inconceivable circumstances... The morning grew hotter, and she struggled out of her jacket.

“Could you find room for this somewhere?” she asked, like a queen conferring a favor.

The Saint cocked a clear blue eye at her.

“Lady,” he said, “this pack weighs twenty-five pounds. Are you sure you can’t manage twelve ounces?”

She walked on speechlessly.

The scenery meant nothing to her. Roads were merely the links in an endless trail, which ended tantalizingly at every bend and the crest of every rise, only to lead on again immediately. When he called the first halt, at the end of nearly four hours’ marching, she fell on the dirty grass by the roadside and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.

“My stockings have got holes in them,” she said.

He nodded.

“There’s nothing like plenty of ventilation to keep your feet in condition.”

She tore her stockings off without a word and threw them away, but her hands trembled. Simon, unmoved, opened his pack and produced food — coarse black bread and butter, cheese, and liver sausage.

“How about some lunch?”

She looked at the bread down her nose.

“What’s that stuff?”

“The most wholesome bread in the world. All the vitamins, minerals, and roughage that any dietitian could desire. Preserves the teeth and massages the intestines.”

“I don’t care for it, thank you.” As a matter of fact, she was at the stage where her stomach felt too tired for food. “All I want is a drink.”

“We’ll stop at the next village and get some beer.”

“I don’t drink beer.”

The Saint ploughed appreciatively on into his massive hunk of bread.

“The water should be all right in that stream over there,” he said, indicating it with a movement of his hand.

“Are you suggesting,” she inquired icily, “that I should go down on all fours and lap it up like a cow?”

Simon chewed.

“Like a gazelle,” he said, “would be more poetic.”

She closed her eyes and lay there motionlessly, and if he sensed the simmering of the volcano he gave no sign of it. He ate his fill and smoked a cigarette, then he walked over to the stream, drank frugally, and bathed his face. When he came back she was sitting up. He strapped his pack and hoisted it deftly.

“Ready?”

Somehow she picked herself up. Her muscles had stiffened during the rest, and it was agony to squeeze her feet back into her shoes, which were cut for appearance rather than comfort. Only a strained and crackling obstinacy drew the effort out of her: the mockery of his cool blue gaze told her only too frankly that he was waiting for her to break down, and she wondered how long she would be able to cheat him of that satisfaction.

He drove her on relentlessly. Hills rose and fell away. Scattered cottages, tilled fields, pastures, woods, blurred by in a crawling panorama. They marched through a deep forest of mighty trees where woodcutters were working, along a road lined with stacks of brown logs. The sweet-smelling air held the music of whining saws and the clunk and ring of axes, but it meant nothing to her but an interval of blessed relief from the heat of the sun. Even then, the shadowy vastness of it was a little terrifying. She had never been so close to the rich mightiness of the earth: to her, “country” had only been something rather cute and amusing, a drawing-room picture brought into three dimensions, to be visited as a stunt in the company of sleek automobiles whose purring mechanism drowned the silences with their reassurance of civilized man’s conquest of nature. Without that comfort she was like a child left in the dark. On the rare occasions when a car passed them she watched it yearningly, and then licked the dust from her lips and felt lonelier when it had gone. Once a cart kept them company for a quarter of an hour, while Simon and the driver exchanged shouted witticisms.

Presently their path led beside a small river, with a tall ledge of rock rising on their left. The going was worse there, strewn with loose stones which seemed to slip backwards with her as fast as she went forward. The crunch of them under her plodding footsteps resolved itself into a maddening rhythm of hate. “Beast — bully — swine — beast — bully — swine!” they drummed out, bruising her feet at every step. Then she slipped on one. There was a tearing sound, and she stopped and leaned against the rocky wall.

“My heel’s come off.”

“What’s holding your toes on?” asked the Saint interestedly.

Suddenly all her pent-up bitterness boiled over, so that for a moment she forgot her weariness. Her eyes blazed, and his tanned features swam in her vision. Before she knew what she was doing she had smacked his face.

When her sight cleared again he had not moved.

“Belinda,” he said quietly, “there’s another lesson you obviously haven’t learned. When a girl strikes a man she’s trading on a false idea of chivalry. If you do that again I shall put you across my knee.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she panted, but for the first time in her life she was afraid.

He made no attempt to argue with her. Lowering his pack, he opened it and took out a pair of plain leather sandals.

“I thought something like that would happen. These are your size, and you’ll find them much more comfortable.”

He waited while she took off her shoes and threw them into the river, where they floated forlornly like derelict emblems of respectability. Looking down at her feet, she felt the incongruity of her attire and jerked off the jaunty little hat. Shortly afterwards she lost patience with carrying it and let it fall by the wayside — another relic of herself to be marked up in the score of hatred which was etched on her soul in burning acid.

Evening found their path widening out into a bowl of open land, flat and stony, where the river diverged into a network of rambling channels winding and intersecting across an area of hard barren ground broken by a few stunted trees and clumps of parched grass. Simon pointed to a house that was visible on a slight rise in the midst of it.

“That’s an inn,” he said, “and there will be beer.”

She saw it as a prospect of rest, a thousand leagues distant. She was so tired that each individual step called for a separate effort, and she had to keep her eyes fixed on the objective to force herself to complete the distance. The guest-room inside was unlighted and gloomy: she expected it was filthy as well, but she was past caring. She sank on to a wooden bench, put her elbows on the stained bare table, and buried her face in her hands.

By that time there was a gnawing void of hunger below her ribs, and when the serving-girl came she ordered chocolate. Simon called for beer, with an extra tankard for the gamekeeper who sat puffing his pipe in the far corner.

The gamekeeper was a big slow-spoken man with a lined weather-beaten face like a walnut. He wore the costume of the country — small green felt hat with a brush at the back, leather shorts hung on embroidered leather suspenders, striped woolen gaiters which left his ankles bare. Simon steered him on to the subject of camping. The gamekeeper said it was forbidden in the woods on the east, through which a footpath would take them across the frontier into Austria. It was a great pity, said the gamekeeper, because he knew what would have been an ideal spot only a few hundred meters away, and he winked prodigiously, and roared with laughter. Simon bought him another tankard of beer, and they brought the serving-girl into the conversation. The low-ceilinged room rang with the ebb and flow of their carefree voices.

Belinda drank her hot syrupy chocolate, and thought, “He’s vulgar, he’s common, he only wants to humiliate me. How could he have anything to talk about with people like that? He can come in here and flirt with a little servant girl like a tough in a saloon. That man must despise him. It’s horrible! Oh, my God, why didn’t I know what he was like before?” She couldn’t understand a word, and nobody paid any attention to her. She had never been ignored before. “They’re all cheap, all of them,” she thought. “They don’t talk to me because they know I belong to a different class.” She raised her chin and tried to express this superiority in her attitude, but it was cold comfort. When Simon returned to her it was almost a relief.

“I’d like to have something to eat and go straight to bed,” she said.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“You can have some food as soon as we’re settled in, but we aren’t settling in here.”

“I tell you I can’t walk another yard,” she said haggardly. “Can’t you see I’m half dead?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk another three hundred yards or so.”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

He gestured with his tankard.

“We’re sleeping in the woods.”

She stared at him incredulously.

“I don’t understand you.”

“In the woods,” explained the Saint. “Im wold. Dans les bois. Unter den Linden.”

“You must be crazy.”

“Not at all. The partridges do it, and suffer no grievous harm. I’ve done it often enough myself, and very rarely died of it. You don’t seem to understand the situation. Ambling along as we are, it’ll take us about a week to get to Innsbruck. At the moment, we are the proud possessors of some thirty-five marks. You pay four marks for a bed in a gasthaus, and we’ve still got to eat.”

She realized that the man in the corner was watching her curiously. It came to her that at all costs her dignity must leave that room untouched. The inexorable mathematics of Simon’s argument scarcely made any impression on her; she was in the grip of circumstances that were crushing her till she could have screamed, but she could not make a scene and bring herself down to the level she had just despised.

She stood up and went out without speaking, Simon following her. It had grown darker, and the twitter and chirp and rustle of night creatures was all around them as they entered the wood. Simon took the lead, humming. The spot the gamekeeper had described was near a tributary of the river they had recently quitted, a grassy hollow away from the footpath and a few feet above the stream. Simon’s expert eye appraised it and found no fault. He lowered his pack to the ground and began to unfasten it.

“Will you get some water while I make the fire?” he said.

He put the billy-can down beside her and went off to gather dry logs. In a very short time he had kindled a cheerful blaze, and she huddled gratefully up to it, for it had turned colder after the sun went down. Simon took bread, eggs, and butter from his rucksack, and picked up the billy. It was empty.

“I asked you to get some water,” he said.

She raised her sullen eyes to him over the fire.

“I’m not a servant,” she said.

“Neither am I,” said the Saint quietly. “You’ll do your share or go hungry — whichever you prefer.”

The girl struggled to her feet.

“Oh, I could kill you!” she cried passionately, and went groping down to the stream.

3

Belinda fell asleep at first out of pure exhaustion, but it was still dark when she woke up again. The fire had died down to a cone of red embers, and there was a chill in the air that made her shiver. She pulled the spare width of her groundsheet over her, as Simon had shown her how to do if it began to rain, but it was too thin to give any warmth. Even a summer night turns cool out of doors towards two and three o’clock: unsuspected little breezes stir the air and strike through the thickest blankets. The body’s warmth, unguarded by the moderating vigilance of walls and ceilings, drifts away like smoke in the limitless vastness of space.

The grass, which had looked so flat and felt so soft, developed innumerable bumps and hardnesses which bruised her bones. A tenuous dampness rose from it and when she moved her head on the unsympathetic pillow of her sandals rolled up in a towel it felt wet and cold. The star-sprinkled sky, lofting billions of empty miles over her head, panicked her with its aloofness from her own microscopic insignificance. Oh, blessed civilization and the flattering barricades of pigmy architecture, which has made us afraid of the supernal majesty of our first home!.. The woods around her were full of moving shadows and the whisper of tiny scuttering feet, the flutter of a miniature cosmos hunting and fighting and dying and marching on. The throbbing wings of an owl passing overhead made her heart leap into her mouth... She lay there aching and fearful, waiting and praying for the sky to pale with the dawn, hating and yet glad of the company of the man who slept peacefully on the other side of the fire. She dozed and woke again, stiff and cold and miserable. Untold ages passed before the roof of the world lightened; other countless æons went by before the first beams of the sun gilded the topmost leaves of the trees. When the rays reached her they might give her a little warmth, and she would be able to sleep again. A flock of birds whirred cheeping across the faded stars. The golden radiance on the tree-tops crept down with maddening slowness...

When her eyes opened again it was broad daylight. The fire had been coaxed to life again. It crackled and hissed cheerily, while Simon Templar bent over it on one knee and juggled with the billy and a sizzling frying-pan.

“Eight o’clock and a lovely morning, Belinda,” he said. The fragrance of boiling coffee came to her nostrils, and she felt half sick with hunger and sleeplessness. She pulled herself up, instinctively searching for comb and mirror, and what she saw in the glass horrified her. “I must get a wash,” she said.

He passed her a cake of soap.

“The bath’s right on the doorstep, and breakfast will be ready in five minutes.”

The cold water nipped her face and hands, but it freshened her. Afterwards she dealt ravenously with scrambled eggs and two slices of the coarse black bread, and smoked a cigarette with her coffee. When it was done, the Saint climbed to his feet and stretched himself.

“I’ll make the beds,” he said. “It’s your turn to wash up.”

She looked resentfully at the pan, slimy with the congealed yellowness of egg, and shuddered.

“How do you expect me to do that?” she asked dangerously.

“It’s easy enough. I’ll show you.”

He led the way down the bank to the edge of the stream. He scooped a handful of earth into the pan, plucked up a tuft of grass by the roots, and held the two things out to her.

“Scrub the earth around with the grass, and repeat until clean. Rinse and dry.”

All her hatred and disgust was seething up again, but she tried to keep her balance. To lose her temper was the worst way to go about undermining his insolent assurance.

“There are limits,” she said, as evenly as she could, “and I think you’ve reached them.”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you that dishes have to be washed?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that a man could ask me to put my hands into a foul mess like that. But perhaps I still thought you might have some of the more elementary instincts of a gentleman. It was rather an absurd mistake to make, wasn’t it?”

“Very,” said the Saint carefully. “Especially after last night. As I explained to you — camp chores are split two ways. Can you make a fire?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“Then it’s safe to assume you can’t. Can you cook?”

“Unfortunately I wasn’t brought up in a kitchen.”

“In that case you can only make yourself useful by fetching water and washing up. If you like eating scrambled eggs, you can help by cleaning up after them. If you don’t like that, you can live on bread and water, which involves no washing. The diet is dull, but you won’t starve on it. Let’s have it quite clear. You chose to travel this way—”

“I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.”

“You might have regretted being locked up in a German prison still more. I’m not running a conducted tour with a team of cooks and bottle-washers trailing behind. This is a simple matter of the fair division of labor. There are six more days of it coming, and you may as well try to get through them decently.”

“What do you think I am?” she flared. “A working slut like that girl at the inn?”

His eyes met hers steadily.

“I think you’re an idle loafer who ought to learn a little about honest work. I think you’ve lain so soft all your life that you need some hardship and crude discomfort to catch your spine before it dissolves altogether. Both those things are going to happen to you before we get to Innsbruck. You’ve ceased to be ornamental, so now you’re going to turn into a useful working squaw — and like it!”

“Am I?” she said, and then her open hand struck him across the face.

It was done before she knew what she was doing, an instant after she had knocked the pan spinning out of his light grasp into mid-stream, her thin and ragged self-control bursting like tissue before the intolerable flame of her resentment. The torrent of words came afterwards: she saw his smile quietly, and lashed out in sudden fear at the good-humored white flash of his teeth, but her clenched fist met empty air.

He bent her over his knee and did exactly what he had promised to do, with an impersonal efficiency quite devoid of heat. When he released her she was sobbing with impotent rage and real stinging pain. She turned and ran blindly up the bank: if she had had a knife she would have driven it into his throat, but without it her one idea was to get away. Half unconsciously she found the path which he had pointed out as the one that ran into Austria. There must be a road somewhere further on: there would be cars, someone would give her a lift. Her eyes were hot and swimming with shame and anger.

Then she looked back and saw him following her. She glimpsed his tall figure through the trees, rucksack on back, swinging lithely along without making any effort to overtake her. She plunged on till her lungs were bursting and the agony of her stiffened joints made every step a torture, but he was always the same distance behind, unhurried and inescapable as doom. She had to rest or fall down.

“Go away! Go away!” she cried, and struggled on with her heart pounding.

The trees thinned out, and she saw telegraph poles on the other side of a field. She ran out into the road. A truck was coming towards her, headed south: she stood in the middle of the road and waved to it till it stopped.

“Take me wherever you’re going!” she babbled. “Take me to Innsbruck! I’ll pay you anything you ask!”

The driver looked down at her uncomprehendingly.

“Innsbruck?” He pointed down the road. “Dorthin. Aber es ist sehr weit zu laufen—”

She pantomimed frantically, trying to make him understand. Why couldn’t she speak German?... And then the Saint’s clear voice spoke coolly from the side of the road, in the driver’s own idiom.

“Permit me to introduce my wife. A little family argument. Please don’t bother. She’ll get over it.”

The driver’s mouth and eyes opened in an elaborate “Ach, so!” of intelligence, the bottomless sympathy of one woman-ridden male to another. He chuckled, and engaged his gears.

“Verzehen Sie, mein Herr! Ich habe auch eine Frau!” he flung backwards as he drove on.

Belinda’s strength drained out of her. She threw herself down at the side of the road and wept, with her face hidden in her arms. The Saint’s quiet voice spoke from above her head like the voice of destiny.

“It’s no good, Belinda. You can’t run away. Life has caught up with you.”

Days followed through which she moved in a kind of fog — days of physical exhaustion, dark rooms in inns, meals tastelessly yet ravenously devoured, washing of dishes and ruin of manicured hands, lumpy beds on the bare ground, scorching sun, dust, sweat, rain, and cold. Once, after a day of ceaseless drizzle, when she had to sleep in her sodden clothes on earth that squelched under the flimsy groundsheet, she was certain she must catch pneumonia and die, and felt cruelly injured when the fresh air and healthy life refused even to let her catch a cold in the nose. She had those moods of self-pity when any added affliction would have been welcome, so that she could have looked up to Heaven like Job and protested that no one had ever suffered so much.

Self-pity alternated with the hours when her mind was filled with nothing but murderous hatred of the man who was always beside her, calm and unchanging as a mountain, blithely unruffled in good weather and bad. She carried out the tasks he set her because she had no choice, but she swore she would die before he could say he had broken her spirit. At first she washed the frying-pan perfunctorily, and brought it back with scraps of earth still clinging to the stubborn traces of egg. He said nothing about it, but that night he scrambled only two eggs and gave them to her, gray and gritty with the remains of mud she had left.

“That’s your ration,” he said remorselessly. “If you don’t like it, have the pan clean next time.”

Next time she finished her scouring with the towel, and when she wanted to wash she tried to take his. He stopped her.

“Egg is grand for the complexion,” he said. “But if you object to drying your face on a dishcloth, the usual remedy applies — plus washing the towel.”

Sometimes she thought she would steal his knife while he slept and cut his throat: the impulse was there, but she knew she would have been lost without him. Even when the rain had poured all day and everything was drenched, he conjured dry wood out of empty air and had a fire going in no time; he introduced unexpected variety into their simple fare, and robbed orchards for apples with abandoned enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He was never bad-tempered or at a loss: he smoothed difficulties away without appearing to notice them. For thirty-six hours after her spanking she sulked furiously, but it made no mark on his tranquility. The tension of labored silence slipped perforce into a minimum of essential conversation — strained and hostile on her part, unfailingly natural and good-humored on his. Three days passed before she discovered that his eyes were soundlessly laughing at her.

Nothing is more difficult than for two people to be together every hour of the day and punctiliously ignore each other’s existence. Nothing, she found out miserably, can grow more irksome than keeping alive a grudge against someone who is utterly untroubled by rancor. Sometimes the loneliness of her self-imposed silence welled up on her so that she could have shrieked aloud for relief. Imperceptibly, the minimum of essential remarks seemed to increase. Every detail of their daily life became an excuse for some trivial speech which it was torment to resist. She found herself chattering for a quarter of an hour about the pros and cons of boiled and fried onions.

And then came the incredible night when she slept straight through until morning, and woke up contented. For a while the feeling baffled her, and she lay on her back and puzzled about it.

And then it dawned on her in a surprising flash. She was no longer tired! They had covered twenty miles the previous day, by the Saint’s reckoning, and yet her limbs felt supple and relaxed, and her feet were not sore. Had they chosen an exceptionally soft piece of ground on which to camp, or had her body learned to adapt itself to the unyielding couch as well as to the abrupt changes from heat to cold? She could not understand it, but the night lay behind her as an interval of unbroken rest, blissful as a child’s or a wild animal’s. The consciousness of her surroundings came to her with a sense of shock. They had rolled into their blankets high up on a wooded slope on the southern shores of the Achensee: from where she lay she could see fragments of the placid waters of the lake gleaming like splinters of pale blue grass between the trees. On her left, the woods curved up and away in a rich green rolling train to the mighty shoulders of a white-capped peak that took the morning light to its brow in glistening magnificence. When she looked directly upwards, nothing came between her gaze and the arching tent of the sky where three fluffy white clouds floated slowly eastwards with the red glow of the recent sunrise catching them like the reflection of a fire. She had never really seen a sky before, or the glory of trees and rolling hills.

Belinda drank in a picture of unimagined beauty whose very strangeness made it unforgettable. In truth it was nothing scenically startling, not in any way the kind of view to which tourist excursions are run: it was only an odd corner of the natural splendor of the world, all of which is beautiful. But it was the first corner of the world to which the eyes had ever been opened with emotion, a starting point of undreamed-of experience which must be for ever as unique as all beginnings. Dazed with it as if she had awakened on a different planet, she climbed out of her blankets at last and searched mechanically for comb and mirror. The reflection that met her eyes seemed like the portrait of a stranger. Wind and sun had tinted a delicate gold into her skin, and there was a soft flush in her cheeks that had never been there before unless she dabbed it on. Her lips were riper, her eyes clearer and brighter than she had ever thought Nature could make them. She was entranced with herself.

She put her bare feet on the grass, and the sweet touch of the dew on them made the rest of her body aware of being soiled and sticky. Reluctant to separate her toes from the green coolness, and yet eager to perfect that physical joyousness in every way, she strapped on her sandals. In the days before that, she realized with amazement, she had been too weary, too numb with self-pity, to care about anything but superficial cleanliness.

She dug out the soap and went down to the lake shore carrying her towel. What a perfume there was in the chill of the air, what a friendly peace in the stillness of earth and sky! She stood on the road by the shore and looked to her left towards the sleeping white houses of Pertisau, the specks of gaudily striped cafe parasols on the lakeside terraces, and it was like looking at the vanguard of an invasion, and she was a savage come down from the clean hills to gaze in wonder at this outpost of civilization.

She stripped off her clothes and washed, and swam out a little way into the crystal water. It was very cold, but when she had dried herself she was tingling. She went up the hill again slowly, filled with an extraordinary happiness. She had no more envy of those people who were sleeping in soft beds half a mile away, who would presently rise and straggle down to eat their breakfasts in stuffy dining-rooms. How much they were missing — how much she had missed!

Breakfast... She was hungry, in a clear, keen way that matched the air. She delved into the Saint’s pack for food, picked up the frying pan and inspected it. The fire was out, and when she turned over the heap of fuel beside it the wood was damp. How did one kindle a fire?

Simon Templar rolled over and opened his eyes. He hitched himself up on one elbow.

“Hullo — am I late?” he said, and glanced at his watch. It was half past six.

Belinda saw him with a start. She had forgotten... she hated him, didn’t she? She remembered that she was still holding the frying-pan, and dropped it guiltily.

“It’s about breakfast-time,” she said. Her mouth felt clumsy. Odd, how hard it had become to make every word as impersonal and distant as she had trained herself to do — to convey with every sentence that she only spoke to him because she had to.

He threw off his blankets, and dived back into them again to return with two handfuls of twigs.

“Always sleep with some firewood and keep it dry,” he explained.

In a few seconds flames were licking up among the dead ashes, steaming the moisture from the other wood as he built it up around his tinder in a neat cone. He gathered the eggs together, and one of them escaped from his corral and went rolling down the hill. He ran after it, grabbed for it, and caught his toe on the projecting root of a tree; the chase ended in a headlong plunge and a complete somersault which brought him up with his back to the bole of a young sapling. There was something so comical about him as he sat there, with the rescued ovum triumphantly clutched in one hand, that Belinda felt a smile tugging at her lips. She fought against it; her chest ached, and the laughter tore at her throat; she gave way because she had to laugh or suffocate, and bowed before the gale. Simon was laughing too. The wall, the precious barrier that she had built up, was crumbling like sand in that tempest of mirth, and she could do nothing to hold it together...

Presently she was saying, “Why don’t you show me how you do those eggs, then I could take a turn with them?”

“It’s easy enough when you know how. Like everything else, there’s a trick in it. You’ve got to remember that a scrambled egg goes on cooking itself after you take it off the fire, so if you try to finish them in the pan they’re hard and crumby when you serve them. Take them off while they still look half raw, and they end up just fine and juicy.”

She had never enjoyed a meal more in her life, and when it was finished she could not bear to think that they must leave that place almost at once. It was like a reprieve when he announced that his shirt was unspeakable, and they must pause for a washing day. They scrubbed their clothes in pools formed by the tiny waterfall that cascaded close by their camping-ground, and spread them in the sun to dry. It was mid-afternoon before she had to tear herself away: she went down with him to the road feeling newly refreshed and fit for a hundred miles before sundown, yet with the knowledge that she left part of her heart behind up there with the trees and sky.

As they reached the road a band of twenty young people were coming towards them, singing as they came. The men wore leather shorts and white linen shirts; some of the girls wore the same, others wore brief leather skirts. All of them carried packs, and many of the packs were heavy. Belinda saw one man laden with an enormous iron pot and a collection of smoke-blackened pans: he looked like a huge metalized snail.

“Grüss Gott!” cried the leader, breaking the song as he came up with them, in the universal greeting of Tirolese wayfarers, and Simon smiled and answered, “Grüss Gott!” The others of the party joined in. A couple from the middle fell out and stopped.

“Wohin gehen Sie?” asked the boy — he was little more.

Simon told him they were on their way to Jenbach and thence to Innsbruck.

“We go also to Jenbach,” said the boy. “Kommen Sie mit!”

The group re-formed around them, and they went on together, past Seespitz and down the long hill that leads to the Inn valley. Belinda was happy. She was proud to be able to keep up with them tirelessly, and their singing made light of the miles. She was seeing everything as if she had been blind from her birth until that day. At one place a gang of men were working on the road; once she would have passed by without looking at them — they would have been merely common workmen, dirty but necessary cattle to serve the needs of those whose cars used the road. Now she saw them. They were stripped to the waist, bodies muscled like statues and polished with sweat like oil, harmonies of brown skin and blue cotton trousers. One party called “Grüss Gott!” to the other, smiling, fellow freemen of the air.

“What does that mean — Grüss Gott?” she asked the Saint.

“Greet God,” he answered, and looked at her. “Isn’t that only gratitude?”

The boy on her other side spoke a little English. She asked him where they came from and what they were doing.

“We are Wandervogel. We are tired of the cities, and we make ourselves gypsies. We sing for money, and work in the fields when we can, and make things to sell. Your sandals — they are a pattern made by the Wandervogel. We live now, and some day perhaps we die.”

“Are you happy?” she asked, and he looked at her in simple wonder.

“Why not? We do not want to be rich. We have all the world to live in, and we are free like the birds.”

They came to Jenbach in the cool of the evening, and again there was an inn. But this time it was different.

“We do not go with you anymore,” said the boy. “We go to Salzburg. But first we drink to our friendship.”

Belinda sat on a wooden bench and recalled the first time she had entered an inn. Then she had been too sick at heart to care whether it was dirty; now she would not have cared for a different reason, though she had learned that the inns were as clean as any room in her own home. Again there was a sunburned laborer sitting in the corner she chose, and the Saint talked with him, and when the serving-girl had distributed a tray-load of tankards she joined them and was chaffed and flirted with. It was the first gasthof over again; the difference was in Belinda herself. Now she sat alert, eyes sparkling and shifting from one face to another in an attempt to follow the weaving shuttle of their voices, and when they laughed she laughed, pretending she understood. And the background of it all she did understand, without knowing how. There was a community of happiness and contentment, a fellowship and a freemasonry of people whose feet were rooted in the same good earth, a shared and implicit enjoyment of the food and drink and challenging seasons, a spontaneous hospitality without self-consciousness, a unity of pagans who had greeted God. Man spoke to man, laughed, jested, holding back none of himself, untroubled by fears and jealousies: having no reason to do otherwise, each took the other immediately for a passing friend. Why not? The world they knew was large enough for them all. Why should not nation and nation meet in the same humanity? And Belinda found she was thinking too much, and she was glad when one man who had carried a mandolin slung across his back took it down and strummed a chord on the wires, and the voices round him rose in unison:

—with the others chiming in, beating the tables with their tankards, till they were all singing—

Belinda listened, and Hilaire Belloc’s lines, memorised parrot-fashion at school, went through her mind with a new haunting meaning: “Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn?”... That was an inn which she would always remember, and she felt strangely humble when the last strong hand had been shaken and she stood outside alone with Simon Templar under the darkening sky.

“How far is it from here to Innsbruck?” she asked as they walked away from the valley in search of a place to sleep.

“We could do it in one long day by the road, which is rather dull and dusty. Or if we struck out the way we’re going, making a detour, it’d be two easy days.”

They were following a lonely cart-track, and every scuff of their footsteps sounded as clearly as if they had been alone in the world. A wagon laden with cordwood creaked out of the blue haze, drawn by a horse and a bullock in double harness; the wagoner cracked his whip and bade them good-evening as he went by. Was that a symbol of something?...

Belinda said, “Those Wandervogel must be very happy.”

“They belong to a new generation,” said the Saint quietly. “There are many people like them here, under different names. It’s an attempt to find a way out of the mess this world is in. The cities have failed them, and they’re looking back to the ancient wisdom of contentment with simple things. At least it’s better than idle hopelessness. And who’s to say? Maybe they’ve got something.” He looked around him. “Here’s grass and a stream and wood to make a fire — shall we make this our camp?”

4

They cooked their food and ate in silence, but it was not the same silence as others that there had been. Belinda was oddly subdued, and Simon knew that his work was done. Afterwards, when it was finished and they sat on over cigarettes and enamel mugs of coffee, they were still quiet. Simon was thinking of other evenings of great peace in his life, as a man does in times of perfect contentment for the joy of comparing the incomparable, and he thought also of another more perilous adventure which had once taken him over the trail they had retraced.

Belinda hugged her knees and gazed into the dancing flames. Why had she never noticed the sweet smell of wood-smoke before?... A log rolled over, scattering a small Vesuvius of sparks, and she said, “What are things like where you’re going after Innsbruck?”

Simon kicked the log back.

“They’re better than anything you’ve seen yet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful in the world. It’s a little bit like what we saw yesterday and today, only a hundred times more magnificent. Mountains and valleys and woods and streams. You take a trail that runs half-way up the wall of the world. On one side you can look up through the pines to the snow; on the other side you look down into a green valley with cattle grazing and a torrent racing at the bottom. The air’s full of the scent of wild flowers and the tinkle of cow-bells. When you first come to it you feel you must just sit and look at it all day, taking it into your soul.”

Belinda listened to the murmur of insects in the grass, and everything she had seen that day passed before her in a pageant. At the end she saw the picture that Simon had painted for her. Young men and girls, sun-bronzed and care-free, swung along that trail half-way up the wall of the world, singing. They ate and slept and were happy around camp-fires like this. “What a lot of useless desires we clutter up our lives with,” she thought, “and never know how unimportant they were until they have been almost forgotten! What a mess of stupid formulas and trivialities!” She lay on her back and stared up into the overarching fretwork of leaves. There was still something else to be said: it hurt her, but a new pride demanded it.

“I’m sorry I slapped you and wasted so many days,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to have them over again.”

He smiled in the firelight.

“I’ll apologize for saying you’d ceased to be ornamental. It wasn’t true, of course, but I wanted to make you mad. There was only a week, and we had to get the quarreling over and done with. As a matter of fact, you’re more decorative than you ever were before.”

He was so calm, so natural, that the effort of self-abasement which might have been a wound in her new peace of mind became nothing at all in retrospect. For that moment his unimpassioned understanding and wisdom seemed so godlike that she felt small — not uncomfortably and shamefacedly, but like a child.

“You’ve done so much for me,” she said, “and yet I know nothing about you.”

He laughed.

“I’m just a rogue and a vagabond. Sometimes I’m enjoying a rest like this, sometimes I’m in much worse trouble. You’d only know me from my unlawful exploits, if you read about things like that. I throw my weight about and have no end of fun. Sometimes I steal.” He turned his blue eyes on her, and they danced. “I stole your bag in Munich.”

She was too astounded even to gasp. “You stole my bag?”

“Money and passport and letter of credit and everything. They’re at the bottom of my pack now. And I spread some gorgeous rumors about you to the bank and the hotel and the consulate so that you wouldn’t be able to get any help — which explains why they were so nasty and suspicious. It was the only way I could get you in such a jam that you’d simply have to make this trip with me.”

She made no reply for a while, and then she said, “Why should you take so much trouble over anyone like I was?”

“It was hardly any trouble to me,” he said, “and I thought you were worth it. The way you were going, you were all set to make Jack thoroughly unhappy and break up both your lives. Jack said you’d never forgive him if he tried to get tough with you, but I figured it wouldn’t do either of you so much harm if you never forgave me. All the same, I’m rather glad you have.”

Belinda bit her lip.

She was quiet again, very quiet, until they rolled into their blankets and went to sleep, and Simon let her be. Two more days, she told herself when she awoke, but the time went flying. One more night and a day — a day — three hours — two!.. Everything she saw planted itself on her mind with the feeling that she was leaving it for ever. A boy driving a herd of cattle, slim, blond-haired, with transparent blue eyes and a merry smile. A castle built on a steep hill, hanging aloft in a solid curtain of pines like a picture nailed to a wall. The crucified Christs set up by every path and roadside and in many fields, with bunches of wild flowers stuck in the crevices of the carving — “They’re thank-offerings,” said the Saint. “People going by put the flowers on them for luck.” Belinda picked a handful of narcissi and arranged them behind the outstretched arms of one figure; it seemed a pleasant thing to do. She would never pass that way again, and she must remember everything before she was outlawed from her strange paradise — and then the last hour, and the inn at Hall, where Simon left her on some pretext, and telephoned a message to the address in Innsbruck which Jack Easton had given him. Goodbye, goodbye! And she saw Innsbruck and the end of the journey with a pang. It was so short, like a little life which had to be laid down at its peak.

And then, somehow, relentlessly jarred out of the dream into a cold light of commonplace, she was sitting in a beer garden in Innsbruck with Jack Easton patting her hand. “I was wrong too, Belinda,” he was saying. “This great-open-space stuff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. One day we were being broiled alive, and the next it was pouring with rain and we were soaked. God, and those country inns! Always the same food, and sanitary arrangements straight out of the Stone Age...”

She scarcely heard him at first. It was as if he spoke a foreign language. She was looking up at the mountains that girdle the town, which can be seen from every corner, looming above the house-tops like the bastions of a gigantic fortress, the gates of the trail that ran half-way up the wall of the world.

“Jack, I was the only one who was wrong. But we’re going on with Simon just like this, over the Alps into Italy.”

Easton shook his head.

“Nothing doing,” he stated firmly. “I’ve had my share, and I could do with some hot baths and civilized meals for a change. We’ll rent an automobile and drive over if you like.”

Unbelieving, she stared at him. She had never seen him before. Clean, carefully and inconspicuously dressed, smoothly pink-faced, the embryo of a stolid pillar of the civilized state. She looked down at herself, travel-stained and not caring. At the people around — townspeople mostly, sprinkled with tourists. They were like utter strangers; she looked at them with a queer pride, a pride in the dust and stains of the road that had become part of her, in which they had no part. She looked at Simon Templar, brown and dusty and strong like herself, sitting there with an amazed and motionless foreboding in his eyes. He was real. He belonged. Belonged back there under the wide reaches of the sky that she had once thought so terrible and comfortless, which now was the only ceiling of peace.

“Darling, your nose is peeling,” said Jack Easton jovially, and something that had been in her, which had grown dim and vague in the passing of seven days, was suddenly lifeless, dying without pain.

“No, no, no!” she cried, with her heart aching and awake. “Simon, I can’t go back. I can never go back!”