The Sword and the Net

13 PALITOS—HIGHWAY—MONTEREY

He reached the highway crossroads outside the little rural town of Palitos in something over two hours. He drove with a coldly maniac precision of speed—and his self, it seemed to him, was always ahead of the flying wheels.

But he still thought. He did not drive into the village, but turned off before he reached it, along the narrow but well-paved branch road to Hudson. He was not followed: he made sure of that.

He was heading for the entry to Los Robles’ acres which Clare had shown him only a week ago. It was a hidden one—and only she and Waldemar used it. There was no gate, but a section of seemingly immovable fencing which one could lift and swing aside when one knew the trick. There was no track which was visible from the road, but as soon as one had bumped over the slight rise in the rolling pasture-land there was—and it stretched, narrow and winding but in good weather easily navigable, up and down over the waves of the foothills and thus into the oaks and through them to the house.

He swung the fence outward and drove through it and stopped the car again and replaced the fence. He jumped into the car again and started off in second—and heard, somewhere near him but out of his sight, a whinny of surprise and fear from a horse’s throat and the thudding of galloping hoofs.

He reached the top of the rise—and stopped the car. He did not know whether it was at that moment or a few seconds earlier that he first noticed the glow in the sky; the pink, upward-spreading glow which was deepening to led against the silver-tinted blackness of the natural night.

He stared through the spotted windshield at the glow, and he seemed to cease living with everything except his mind. If they had fired Los Robles, it meant only one thing: they already had Clare. . . .

He sat without moving. His hands gripped the wheel and were numb with the force of the grip. His mind was alive to agony—but it would not make thoughts.

He did not know whether to go on or turn back. And his mind would not think. It only felt.

He switched off the engine. Something in his head was saying: ‘Make certain! Make certain!’ He got out of the car after he had switched off the lights and walked a few strides away from it. The long thick grass whispered around his legs.

And then it happened. He was staring towards the black belt of trees and the glow above them when there was a movement near him in the long grass and he jumped back and whipped a hand to his hip-pocket for the Lüger.

A figure rose from the grass and came steadily, too steadily, towards him—a slight, small, trousered figure which was not a boy but Clare.

He could not believe his eyes. He stared through the faint moonlight, his hand still tight around the pistol-butt. He knew—but he dared not know.

She came right up to him. There was an unnatural precision about her walk. Her face showed ash-grey in the silver light. He did not move. She came close to him, very close. She did not speak. She did not make any sound.

He touched her. He put an arm about her shoulders and tried to read her face and saw it only as a mask. He said:

“You are hurt?” and then could not get any more words to come from his mouth.

“No,” she said, and that was all.

“Your father?” He had to force his lips to move.

She said: “He’s dead. They killed him.” Her voice was flat, without any tone-gradation. It was not like her voice. She said:

“There were a lot of men. They came to the house. We were having dinner. I’d cooked it because the servants are out to-night. They wanted to take me away. Father killed one of them. Then they shot him—through the head.” Her voice was still flat and level, without trace of emotion. “I got away—while the commotion was on when they shot father. I dropped out of a closet window and they didn’t see me. I slipped into the stable and took Pedro out. I got on him bareback and went off fast before they could stop me. I went the other way first and then doubled around when I was sure they couldn’t hear me. Your car frightened Pedro and he dumped me and ran off.”

The glow in the sky was high and spreading and growing every moment more shot with orange. Otto did not say anything. He took her by the arm and led her to the car and put her into it. She went stiffly, like an automaton. He climbed in beside her and turned the car and then stopped it and got out to open the fence and very soon was on the Hudson road again and driving, as fast or faster than the twisting narrow road allowed, away from the glare behind them.

They drove the eight miles to the far highway in nine minutes—and nothing followed them. In the back of his mind, Otto was concerned about this: he did not know whether it was matter for relief or added reason for apprehension.

Clare sat stiffly beside him, silent and immobile. She spoke only once, when they were on the last three-mile straight-away which runs downhill to the main road. She said:

“It was such a lovely house.” But her voice was still the same, stiff, stranger’s voice.

Otto did not speak at all. His mind was working—very fast. A new plan must be made—and, moreover, its making would keep his mind from sick dwelling upon the thought of the harm he had brought to her.

He slowed for the highway turning and swung out on to it. His breathing stopped as he saw a car pulled up at the corner with three men standing by it. But as he passed, cutting over to the other side of the wide main road, he saw that there was another man, in light-coloured overalls, who was changing a wheel.

There was very little southward traffic. He took the outer lane and kept his right foot down and hurtled at over eighty miles an hour back towards San Francisco.

For he had decided that the main base of the new plan should be the same as that of the old—he would go in a direction, taking San Francisco as the starting point, directly opposite to that of Washington. And, as in the careful scheme which he had been forced to abandon, he would stay in hiding until nearly the end of the ten-day time-limit and then make one dash for the goal.

But he must not take the car too near to San Francisco. They knew this car and would be watching for it everywhere. He wondered how he had managed to escape pursuit for this length of time, and then reflected that it was a very short length of time: probably they were still near the burning house, searching for Clare.

She spoke again suddenly, still in the dead voice.

“Where are we going?” she said.

He eased the pressure upon the accelerator. He looked carefully into the rear-mirror and saw only one car behind him and let this pass and waited until the speedometer-needle pointed to sixty-five and then spoke. He did not know how he was going to say what he had realized he must say—but he plunged. He said:

“I must go to somewhere—any where—to the other side of San Francisco. I cannot drive in the car much longer. They will be watching for it—but I can stop in the next town and see that you go safely to the police, if that is what you want to do.”

She said: “No. I will stay with you if you can take me.” She did not move her head as she spoke to him: she was straight and stiff and motionless, and the voice was still untinged by any shade of feeling. “If I go to the police, I would have to say too much and that would spoil what you’re doing.”

He let the car slow still further and turned his head towards her.

“That . . . that is . . .” He found himself stammering. “You are sure?” he said shortly. He did not know how to speak to her. He did not know her.

She said: “Since you went, father and I have been talking. I understand everything.”

Her voice did not even pause at the word ‘Father.’ “What you’re trying to do is too important to be spoilt by little, ordinary things.”

She was silent again, sitting in the same rigid posture, looking straight before her, but not, he knew, seeing the road.

A surge of feeling made speech impossible for him—but he did not know what he felt.

They left the car some thirty miles out of San Francisco. Otto turned off the highway on to a dirt road and bumped along it for half a mile and then turned into a field of tares and stopped and they got out. Clare obeyed at once everything he told her. She did not speak.

He left the car facing north. He took out the duffel bag and the rolled coat and three packets of cigarettes from the glove-compartment. He separated the coat from the bag and gave it to Clare: she must carry it, folded, over her arm. He looked at her, and the set, blank pallor of her face frightened him, but he did not want to show the fear. He said:

“We must now go on a bus. We will walk back to the highway for a little while together, but when we get there we are not together. You will go first. Turn to the right on the highway and walk along to the petrol-station which is about a quarter of a mile. It is at the edge of a small town, and the Oakland buses halt there. When the first bus comes get into it and take a seat as far in front as you can find. I will get on the bus too. But I am not with you. You understand?” He had to keep looking at the white face—but it frightened him.

She nodded her head, but she did not speak. He knew that she understood, and he knew that she would do as he told her. He said:

“There are more things you must do,” and gave further orders, slowly and clearly and stiffly. . . .

It was after four when their second bus reached its final destination in Monterey. There were, unusually for this hour, several other passengers. They seemed to be one party, though, and Otto, who had studied them for long hours from behind a newspaper bought in Oakland, had decided that they were what they seemed and nothing more. He should have been delighted and eased in his mind by this certainty—but he was not: there was something unexpectedly and irrationally terrifying in the utter absence of pursuit.

The party dragged itself off the bus, yawning and chattering. Otto himself got off. He did not look behind him, but walked out of the yard to a corner of the white, steep street and paused there and took a long time to find and light a cigarette. At the bottom of the hill the sea gleamed greenish in the greying light. The air was sharp and smelt sharply of salt water. He shivered a little. He heard behind him the footsteps he had been waiting for and turned around for one reassuring glance and saw her. She was twenty yards away. She did not look at him. She was still moving stiffly, like an automatic doll. He could not see her face. She had put the coat over her shoulders in the bus, but now she had folded it again and was carrying it over her arm.

He walked on, up the hill. He did not know where he was going. He was looking for some point where he could speak to Clare; some point where he could see all about him and know, beyond all possibility of error, whether or not they were observed.

He walked up the steep street. On either side it was lined by small white houses. Their outlines were growing sharper all the time as the pre-dawn greyness encroached upon night.

He found a place, just past the first street intersection which crossed his path up the hill. It was a narrow alleyway between two of the white buildings. He turned into it and stopped. In the whole length of the steep street, he had seen before he left it, were no human figures save himself and Clare.

She joined him. It was much lighter now, and he could see her clearly as she came steadily along, between the high white walls, towards him.

She spoke before he could. She said, in the flat, emotionless voice:

“Why have we come here—to Monterey?”

He was still staring at her. She frightened him.

“It was the furthest place which the bus went,” he said. “And it is not a large place, I think. And perhaps we can go quickly away from it and into some wild country and find a place to hide. If we do this for one week. . . .”

She stopped him. She said, as if he were not speaking:

“I know Monterey. Very well. And the country. I think somewhere we could hide very well. If it hasn’t changed.”

He said: “Where is it?” and asked her nothing more.

“It’s about three miles,” she said. She was looking straight into his eyes, and he saw that over her eyes was a sort of polished shield of blankness.

“You follow,” she said—and turned away from him and walked out from between the white walls.

For an hour which seemed like six he followed the steady, stiff little figure as it walked, with unvarying pace and gait, up the hills and out of the white small town. He did not think it strange to be following her thus blindly. Sometimes he was only thirty yards behind it, at others he deemed it wise to be as much as a hundred. But she never turned her head. She walked on. If he had not known this was Clare; if the back which he followed had been pointed out to him as Clare’s back and he had not seen her face, he would have denied that this was Clare. The free, lovely, synchronized swing of the lithe body was gone—as the life and feeling had gone from the soft deep voice. He felt fear again—fear and other, tenderer emotions which clutched him by the throat and frightened him the more.

She led him up and up and away from the white buildings and along barren hillside roads. The greyness paled and became the bright hard light of dawn. They left the yellowing hillsides and were on the plateau behind the peninsula, and there was greenness everywhere about them, as far as a man could see. Green grass and green growing things and the darker, more ominous green of the trees—cypress and spruce, fir and pine. . . .

They came on to a main road, and Otto crossed to the other side of it and increased his distance from the implacable, steadily moving back and covertly scanned each of the few vehicles which passed them and was again satisfied—with an increase of the weird fear that such satisfaction gave him—that no one of them was other than it seemed.

She struck off the main road and climbed a gate and was lost in a forest of tall, dark pines. He hastened, since there was nothing which could see him upon the road, and vaulted the gate himself and plunged into the chill shadow of the trees and saw her, still walking ahead of him with no alteration in pace or stride or carriage, along an aisle between the harsh, straight boles.

He followed—and near the edge of the trees, when he could see beyond them bright sunshine golden upon feather-tipped wild grass, she halted.

She turned to face him, waiting.

He drew level with her and she turned and pointed ahead, off to their right, through the thinning trees.

“Look!” she said. “That’s the place I meant.”

He followed the pointing finger with his eyes and saw a house. It seemed to be in a bay made by the curving outline of the limits of the fir-wood.

It was black and gaunt and sprawling in the hard early light. It had an air of indescribable desolation. Around it wild grass and high weeds flourished in a mess of gold and green and brown which despite the colour was ugly to the eye. It was a clumsy shape—a disproportioned L with a bulging small crosspiece athwart the shorter arm. Its windows were filled with cracked and jaggedly rotting boards. Beyond it, the trees bulged out again. It was a hideous island in a sea of sombre, overshadowing green.

She said: “It’s been here, like that, since I was a child of fourteen. Some old Spanish people had it. Somewhere, there’s someone who owns it—and the land around. But he won’t sell it—or have it touched. People say he’s mad. The Spanish people in Monterey have a name for the whole place—they call it Desalinos—and they won’t come near it. Nobody ever comes near it.”

They got in through a window at the back, in the shade of the first rank of lowering pines. Otto gently pried a rotting shutter from its hinges and climbed through a glassless window and leaned out and lifted Clare in his arms and swung her over the sill to stand beside him. Her body was rigid, with every muscle tense.

He pulled the shutter back into position and wedged it. The porch in which they stood grew dark again, with criss-cross bars of sunlight stabbing through the holes and crevices of the gaping woodwork of the shutter and even the walls. There was a sweet, sick, musty smell of decay which pressed around them. She did not say anything. She was not leading now. She had brought him here, and she was waiting. She stood motionless beside him.

He was going to speak to her, but he changed his mind. He started for the door to the inner body of the house: it had a great splash of yellow sunlight right across its lock. He tried the handle and it came away in his fingers. But the haft stuck out from the wood and he twisted it and the door opened and a bloated spider struck against his cheek and clung there a moment and then scuttled across his neck before he brushed it to the ground and set a heavy foot upon it.

Clare was at his shoulder. They went through the door and into what had been a kitchen and through that again into the rest of the house. It was darker here, with fewer fingers of sunlight creeping in.

Under the dust and rot of years, the place was furnished; completely furnished. Otto stood in the centre hallway and peered about him. Clare was beside him, straight and stiff and silent. He could not speak to her. He was afraid of her.

And then, without warning, she swayed. Her whole body swayed as she stood. Her weight fell against him, and he put quick arms about her. But she straightened her body and thrust the arms violently away. She said:

“I’m all right! I’m all right!” But then she swayed again and this time he picked her up like a child and set her down in a high-backed oaken chair. He said:

“Wait. Wait there. Do not move until I come back! You understand?”

She did not speak, but she closed her eyes and let her arms fall along the arms of the chair and rested her head against its carven back.

He left her. He knew she would not move—and he must find somewhere for her to rest. He went into one of the rooms which must be a bedroom. Cobwebs burst stickily across his face and he brushed them off and strode to the bed in the far corner. Beneath the dust it was completely made, with covers and pillows and what must have been a quilt. He touched it—and a great flaky mass broke away under his hand and a sudden waft of musty throat-catching odour set him coughing.

He went out of the room quickly, a new thought spurring him. He had remembered the cellar door which they had passed—a half-door in the wall, coming no higher than his waist.

He ran to it and pulled it open. It was of oak and unrotted and lay like a flap upon the floor. Through the dark square which gaped at him he could see nothing, but he felt steps and groped his way down them.

The cellar smelt dank and earthy, but nothing worse. It smelt like any cellar anywhere. He lit a match and held it high and saw brick-lined walls and a bare earthen floor and nothing else.

He ran back up the steps again and quickly closed the door-flap to keep out the sick miasma of the house. He remembered the doors of a closet he had noticed in the hallway. He went to them and pulled them open—and was faced by shelves of mouldering wool and linen.

But on the lowest shelf were packed tier upon tier of canvas in its virgin original flat packing. He pulled out three of the bundles—and although their outer folds were mildewed and flaking, the better part of each was strong and sound.

He tumbled them out upon the floor and ripped off the bad parts and took it all in one great armful and carried it, feeling his way carefully, down the cellar steps. He dropped it then and began to fold it piece by piece and threefold. The pieces thus treated were over six feet long and some three feet wide and he set them down, one atop the other, in the farthest corner from the steps. The result was thick and reasonably soft, and he spared the last piece to roll into a sort of bolster which he laid at the head.

He went back to Clare. She was sitting just as he had left her, but her eyes were widely open.

He did not speak to her yet. He picked her out of the chair in one quick movement and carried her along to the cellar doorway and set her on her feet. He said then:

“Go down the steps. I will hold you. Be careful—it is dark!”

She went without a word—and he steered her over to the bed of canvas and made her lie down upon it. He knelt beside her and said:

“You must rest now. I am going to find food for us. Do you know where there is any store nearer than the town—any store which would be open now?”

His eyes were growing used to the darkness and he saw her move and sit up beside him, her hands clasped about her knees. But he could not see whether or not she looked at him as she spoke. She said, in the same dead voice:

“There’s a sort of cross-roads settlement about a mile and a half from here. Not on the road we came by, but the one out in front. Go straight through the trees and you’ll find it. Turn right—and keep on.”

He unbuckled the watch from his wrist. Its figures and hands glowed faintly in the darkness. He said:

“Take the watch. Go to sleep if you are able. But do not move away from down here at all. Unless it is three hours and I am not back. If that happens you go to the police. But that will not happen. I will be back before.”

She said: “I understand,” and quite suddenly relaxed. Quietly, gently, she lay down. She put her head upon the pillow he had made and stretched her body straight and a small sound, hall groan, half gasp, came from her lips.

Still on his knees he peered at her face. He thought that her eyes were closed but could not be sure. Her breathing was deep and regular. He felt about with his hands for his coat, which had still been over her arm when she came down the cellar steps. He found it and shook it out and spread it over her. She did not move.

“Clare!” he said softly. “Clare!” But she did not answer him. She was asleep.

He found the road. He walked along it, keeping to the cover of trees and hedgerows as much as he could, until he came to the cross-roads she had described. There were three petrol stations and a chemist’s and a car park. There were also three small shops—one selling hardware—and an Open-All-Around-The-Clock hamburger and coffee bar.

It was later than he had thought and the tradesmen earlier. All save one of the places were open for business. A long-distance bus had stopped here when he arrived, and three truck-loads of the new citizen soldiery. The hamlet was astir, and Otto quietly drifted in and was inconspicuous. He had the duffel bag with him, empty, and he bought as much as he dared without attracting attention. He did not buy nor even look at a newspaper. He distributed his purchases among the little shops and put everything into the bag and presently drifted away, just as everyone was gathering to watch the soldiers go.

He had seen no one whom he could even consider as a possible enemy. And he knew that, in the general commotion, nobody had taken particular note of him.

He should have been elated. But he was not. He was filled and possessed by uneasiness.

He made slow way back to the fir-wood and the house. He knew that he was not watched by any human eyes. He climbed in through the same window and wedged the shutter again and went very softly down into the cellar.

She lay exactly as he had left her. She was so still that he lit a match and peered at her by its light. She was lying on her side. She breathed easily and deeply and the lines of the mask had been smoothed from her face. She looked like a child.

He let the match flicker out and turned away. Noiselessly, in the corner farthest from where she lay, he unpacked his purchases. There were several tins and two loaves of bread and a small paraffin-stove and a bottle of fuel for it and a dozen candles. There were also two cheap towels and a toothbrush and a cake of soap and a special gift for Clare which was a small mirror in a fibre case.

He lit one of the candles and piled the things neatly and quietly. Apprehension gnawed at him and he knew that he must keep himself occupied. He thought of this hiding-place and made himself consider it strategically and realised with a sudden shock that in its present state it could turn from sanctuary into trap at the first sign of the enemy. If they were to stay in this house for their hiding—and it seemed a better place than he had dared hope to find—they must stay here, down in this clean underground place where they could live and use light without being seen or heard. But they must have another way out of it: there must be a bolt-hole.

He made one. The work took him four hours—but it was good work when he had done it. He took measurements inside and out—and he found at last a place in the outer corner of the cellar itself where the brickwork was loose. He pried out four bricks and saw light filtering greenly through the gap and knew his calculations had been right and went at his task. Of necessity he made, at one time and another, more than a little noise—but never once did the small, sleeping figure so much as stir.

He finished the work outside. There was now a gap three feet square in the bottom of the outer wall, in front of the house, at the tip of the longer arm of the L. A growing bush, covered thick with leaves and some red berry which he did not know, obscured the gap from direct frontal view, but it was a yawning attraction to sight from any other angle.

He set about disguising it—and did a job which would have satisfied the most meticulous Director of Camouflage. He used a fallen shutter, and a great dead log, and many armfuls of wild grass and leases.

And while he was collecting these things he found the well. It was at the back, in a little overgrown clearing among the firs. It had a winch, and no rotting rope but a thick-linked chain stretching weightily down into the blackness of the shaft. The chain was rust-covered, but the rust had not eaten far into the good metal. He did not dare use the winch—in his mind he could hear the tortured, penetrating screaming it would make—and he unwound the chain with gentle care and then pulled it carefully upwards until he saw a bucket dangling at its end and then lowered it again until the bucket struck water with a soft, hollow splash.

He pulled up the first bucketful and found it brackish and foul with the dirt of the pail itself. He scoured the metal with earth and discovered that, miraculously, it did not leak.

And, twenty minutes later, he was in the house again and carefully carrying down into the cellar a supply of water which was cool and clear and tasted, faintly and pleasantly, of the rich earth from which it came.

He set the bucket down without sound and lit a candle and looked at Clare. She still slept. She had not moved. He went back up the steps and fixed a piece of twine to the inner bolt of the door-flap and pulled it shut. He sat himself down by the orderly pile of their provisions and thought that he would smoke a cigarette.

But he did not. Even as he reached for the opened packet in the pocket of his sweater, a great lassitude of utter fatigue wrapped numbing arms about his limbs and body. He lay down upon the hard beaten earth and stretched himself straight and slept.

He was wakened by a sound. He did not know how long he had slept. He concentrated upon the sound. It came at regular and heartbreaking intervals. It was muffled and desolate. It was the sound of weeping.

He crossed to her quickly and sat upon the edge of the canvas beside her and put out a hand and touched her shoulder. The candle, more than half burned through, sent a flickering light from its corner and he could see that she now lay prone, her face buried in her arms.

He sat silent and in agony. He had not believed that anything could hurt him as the sound and feel of this sobbing hurt him. He could not speak, but his hand upon her shoulder moved perpetually in useless, unconscious little movements.

Then she stirred. He had not known whether she knew that he was there until, with a wild quick lifting of her body, she was upon her knees beside him as he sat and her hands were clutching his shoulders with fingers which hurt his flesh and her head was burrowed into his chest and a new storm of weeping, unchecked, was sleeping over her.

Otto sat rigid and unmoving while it ran its violent course. It began to subside—and it died a quicker death than had seemed possible.

She thrust herself gently away from him. The ghost of a sob shook her body—and then, unbelievably, she smiled at him, through the drying tears and the traces of their forerunners. And she spoke. She said:

“Nils!” and her voice quivered a little. But it was her own voice again. She said:

“I’m sorry! I’m all right now. I had to cry. I won’t any more!”

He could not speak. He put out his hand and for a moment closed his fingers over her two hands as they lay in her lap.

Outside and above their refuge dusk deepened into night but there were three candles lighted in the cellar now and their golden flames, flickering faintly in the draught from the shrouded bolt-hole, made soft light and softer shadow.

Clare sat cross-legged upon her bed of canvas, and Otto, at the further side of their warren, neatly piled the dishes from which they had eaten the meal he had cooked. They were incongruously dainty dishes, taken, with the heavy silver knives and forks, from the oaken sideboard in the room above their heads. The sweet, heavy smell of coffee hung in the still air and mingled with the sharper scent of tobacco.

They had not spoken much since Clare, with a courage which somehow gave to Otto perhaps more pain than her weeping, had become herself again. She smoked now, and watched him. She said suddenly:

“You must let me talk to you, Nils. Turn around and look at me!”

He put the last plate upon the pile. He turned slowly and went half-way across the earthen floor towards her and then sat, cross-legged as she was, and faced her. He felt a return of apprehension—and so that she should not see anything of this in his face, pulled out his packet of cigarettes and made a business of choosing one and lighting it. He could feel her eyes upon him, and he could feel the dully aching weight of the sorrow he felt for her and the sense of his guilt in the causing of that sorrow. But above these emotions and surpassing them was the fear that he felt for her; the fear which was behind the sick weight of apprehension. Nothing had happened! They were here in remote and effective hiding—and there was no sign or hint of the Machine! They had not seen or sensed pursuit at any time! There had been no narrow escape from the net; no glimpse even of its meshes! Everything had been too easy; too eerily, uncannily simple! And no matter how much cold fact he presented to his mind in argument; no matter how lucidly he found reasons to suppose that the simplicity might be no more dangerous in fact than it seemed at first glance; no matter how possible and even likely it might be that accident and his tactics could have baffled the Machine—the less comfort did he have and the more did apprehension seep through him.

He shook his head to clear it. His cigarette was lighted. He had to look at her. He did look at her. He said:

“You are sure you wish to talk?” and knew that the words were meaningless, unnecessary.

She said: “Quite sure.” She ground out her cigarette in the saucer which was on the floor beside the canvas pillow. “I want to tell you not to hurt yourself inside like this. Don’t, Nils! Please don’t! You’re not to go on blaming yourself for . . . for father’s death. And for hurting me. You’re not to—because although it all happened through you, it wasn’t by you!” Her voice was soft and deep and cool again, and there was no hint in its tones of tears or even strain. She said:

“I’m trying to make you understand—and I don’t know whether I can. The words don’t seem to come right somehow. But I think I ought to start by saying that this . . . this crusade of yours—is too big to be hampered by the little, personal affairs of yourself or any men and women you may happen to know. Father felt like that about it. I know he did. He told me he did. We talked about you all the time after you’d gone—and I know what he thought. And he was right! He was always right about big things. He said: ‘That boy’s standing for the only hope of the decent men: he represents the decent men!’ . . . That’s what he said. And he was always right about big things!”

The candle that was by her on the floor began to gutter and she pinched out its flame and was half in light now and half in shadow. But Otto could see her eyes. Their gaze was fixed upon his face and they shone.

He thought he would speak, but his throat was stiff and aching and he did not.

She said: “I’m only sorry for myself that . . . that he’s dead. I’m not sorry for him. He died quickly and he was fighting for what he believed in. He . . . he liked dying that way. . . . He was the most wonderful person—and he was always a soldier. . . .” Her voice was very low now; so low that Otto could just only hear the words. She said:

“I used to think that there would never be anyone I could respect as much as I respected him. But now there’s you. . . .”

She broke off speech—and suddenly, amazingly, a little laugh came from her; a tender small ghost of a laugh. She said:

“Do you know the last thing he said about you, Nils? He said: ‘I wish that boy were my son; but he needs that sense of humour developed. Develop it, Clare, for God’s sake, develop it!’ . . . That’s what he said—and I promised him I would and I will! . . .”

She fell silent. She was not looking at Otto any more, but away into some happy distance of her own; happy yet tinted with nostalgic melancholy.

The candle nearest Otto began to gutter. He stretched out a hand and nipped out the flame and then put the hand to his throat and squeezed at it with powerful fingers. He swallowed, but the aching lump persisted. He could hardly see her now—only a shadowy outline. He said, with difficulty:

“Now there is something I must say to you. I must say that I understand what you have said but that I shall always know that it was through my fault that your father was killed and that Los Robles was burned to hide the signs of what had happened and that you yourself were put into this . . . dirtiness and danger!”

She said: “Nils! Nils! Please, you mustn’t!”

He did not heed her. He said: “But there is something else I have to say. I will not say it with the right words to make what I mean—but I will say it as well as I am able. I did not think until now that it was possible to any man to love a person in the same way and . . . and measure that I love you. I did not think that a man could love someone until that person became . . . became . . . everything! I . . .”

But she would not let him go on. She sat upright upon the canvas bed and held her arms out open to him.

“Nils,” she said. “Nils—come here!”