White Eagles Over Serbia

CHAPTER NINE. The Lone Fisherman

Methuen lay against the steep bank, his face pressed to the moist grass for what seemed hours. The noise of the Mercedes died away gradually and was replaced by the roaring of the Ibar in its stony bed. The cloud of dust thinned gradually and began to settle, while out of a neighbouring tree came the clear fluting notes of bird-song. He felt his own heart beating against the moist cool grass. Would the police car never come? He strained his ears for the sound of its engines; his heavy duffle coat was warm. A cricket chirped in the grass beside him. Then, after what seemed an age, he heard the whistle of the Buick’s engine which gradually increased. “They’re taking it pretty easily,” he said to himself. The car swept round the corner and he heard its radio playing a Viennese waltz. Then he was engulfed once more in the impenetrable wall of white dust and taking advantage of it he climbed to his feet, gathered up his bed-roll and galloped for the cover of the trees.

Within a hundred yards of where he had jumped a narrow gorge opened at right-angles to the main river-gorge and here the swift and shallow Studenitsa river rolled and tumbled from a series of rock-balconies, covered with slippery moss, to join the larger river. The air was dense with spray, and the trees leaned out of the sheer cliff at all angles. The cover here was plentiful and good, and avoiding the mule-track, Methuen climbed deliberately up beside the river, slipping and sliding on the loose surface of leaf-mould, and pushing his way through the dense clusters of tree-ferns towards the summit, eight hundred feet above.

The going was hard but in the clear spray-drenched air of the valley he felt his spirits rise. From time to time he paused for a breather, gazing from some small clearing of greenery to where the road below him ran like a white scar beside the black river. At one point he came out on a spur overlooking the mule-track and saw a group of peasants driving two ox-carts loaded with wood down towards the valley. As far as his memory served him, there were only two small hamlets along the Studenitsa river, and the only human activity apart from land cultivation centred about a sawmill which flanked the monastery at the summit. Here he had camped once beside the smooth river and fished away the better part of a summer with a Serbian friend. In the evening they had walked up to the sawmill to drink plum-brandy with the monks and peasants and to share the fishing gossip of the community. Here too they had experimented with different ways of cooking trout, and he remembered clearly the taste of fish baked in the sour cream called kaimak which serves the peasant for butter.

But these memories did not cause him to relax his vigilance and he moved along in the shadow of the fir trees, keeping the river in sight but never venturing out into the open. In half an hour he had reached the summit and here the river broadened with the valley, while the hills opened into deeply indented upland valleys traversed by delicious footpaths which circled the squares of luxuriant maize and the dappled hayfields which lay open to the afternoon sunlight.

Here the oak forests ran down to the water’s edge and he could walk on grass richly studded with flowers. The world seemed empty of human beings. To the east a flock of sheep grazed without a shepherd who was doubtless fishing in the shadowy river below the sawmill. Here too he came upon orchards full of plum trees and hedges riotous with blackberries so large that in spite of himself he stopped to gather some. Away to the left, hidden by a shoulder of hill lay the monastery, and from this direction he could hear the whimper of a saw; but he gave it a wide berth and struck up the valley, guided by his memories of a summer he had believed forgotten. He himself was rather astonished by the accuracy of his memory, for in his enchanted valley nothing seemed to have changed. In the silence the river ran on with its gentle rattle of water stirring pebbles — a pearly shadow of sound against which the songs of the birds rose bright and poignant on the moist air. The hedges were thick with a variety of flowers, and his quick eye detected the presence of old friends, yellow snapdragon, sky-blue flax. Here the hills ran away in a series of verdant undulations to where, softly painted against the sky, the towering mountains of central Serbia rose, lilac and green and red; and in all this lovely country there were no signs of life, no mule-teams raising dust, no bands of armed men watching from the woods. It baffled him to imagine how Anson could have got himself into trouble here, the going was so easy, the points of visibility so many, the cover so good.

The sun was still high enough to be hot and he was still sweating profusely from the steep climb, so he bathed his face in the icy river, and allowed himself a five-minute rest in a copse while he examined the hills around him with his glasses. There was little enough to interest him. Against one remote skyline he caught sight of oxen ploughing, and to the east he picked up a peasant house with pointed gables, but for the rest the world looked newly born: unpopulated. Yet here and there were large areas of maize and barley growing which argued the presence of husbandmen, and the sheep tinkled their way across the pastures to the north of him. High up in the cloudless June sky an eagle hovered. The light skirmishing wind blew puff-balls and bits of straw across the river.

Around one wooded curve of the river he came upon a solitary monk fishing under a tree and was forced to climb the hill from the back in order not to pass him, but even he hardly communicated a sense of life to the landscape in which he sat so motionless, back against a tree, his rod propped between his knees. Perhaps he was sleeping. Methuen watched him for a while from a clump of maize-stalks hoping to see him hook a fish, but in vain. The river ran as smoothly under his line as the grass upon which he sat. From time to time a nut dropped off the tree into the water. “Dry fishing,” said Methuen to himself, “that’s the real ticket,” and scanned the dimpled waters to see what the fish were rising to: but this was the wildest self-indulgence and he pulled himself together.

His objective was a series of fairly large caves in the opposite bank of the river where it entered a ravine of red and yellow conglomerate. Here he had sheltered once from the rain, and here he hoped to find a ready-made headquarters where he might dump his equipment before embarking on a methodical exploration of the range of hills. Accordingly he left the trees and waded across the water at a ford, and struck a narrow overgrown path which led him gradually upwards into the thick scrub which choked the entrance to the gorge.

There were, as far as he could see, no other fishermen about and this was surprising for it was at this point that the Studenitsa river became really fishable. Two great prongs of stone bounded the water, and here for a good way the river itself seemed all but choked by a solid floor of branches which had been washed down from the mountains above, and which had been covered by a dense carpet of green moss. Here too were huge boulders against which the water raised itself in dark pools, thrown up to right and left of its course. Peering down into the inky recesses of these pools Methuen discerned the large shadows of fishes, lounging among the shadows. But he must not indulge himself in this way, he kept telling himself, as he followed the path along the precipitous sides of the ravine; at one point, from a turn in the track, a corner of the orchard where the monk had been fishing came into view. Methuen glanced back and saw the figure still sitting there, motionless.

He turned and was about to address himself to the path when something about the immobility of the distant figure struck him, some preternatural stillness in the pose which had not altered by a hairbreadth this last hour. Overcome by a sudden impulse he threw his pack behind a bush and turned back on his tracks, running with long strides in his heavy boots down the hill, the scrub snatching at his ankles from either side. He emerged once more behind the hillock, and once more stalked the motionless fisherman.

From the shade of a clump of thick bushes he threw a heavy stone into the stream beside him, disappearing from sight as he did so. The stone crashed into the water startling the fish but the figure of the lone fisherman did not move, and seeing this Methuen cocked his pistol in the shoulder-sling and raced down the slope to the water’s edge. He came up beside the figure and knelt down to stare into the dead face with a gradually dawning horror which seemed to communicate itself now to the whole of that silent landscape in which they found themselves, the living man and the dead one.

There was a trickle of blood at his mouth and through the rents of the tattered surplice Methuen could see the cause — the slash of bullet-wounds. He had been shot from directly opposite where the pinewoods came down to the river forming a thick patch of cover. Perhaps he had been asleep, for the body was leaning back against the tree; at all events the sudden death which had come upon him had not disturbed the contemplative serenity of his pose. His rod was propped over a stone and the willow passed beneath his legs as he sat. Round his neck there was a placard on which had been written in clumsy letters: “Traitor”. He had, in fact, been nailed to this tree by bullets for all the world like the body of a jay is nailed to a bam door, as a warning. It was presumed that the passer-by would know to whom he had been a traitor, and who had extracted this extreme price for his treachery.

Methuen was like a man awakening suddenly from a dream; the whole of this radiant pristine hill landscape became suddenly filled with shadows and omens. He put out his hand, falteringly, to touch the shoulder of the corpse — as one might put out one’s hand to touch a ghost, to see if it were really flesh and blood: and to his horror it slowly toppled over. The conical black hat rolled off into the water and was borne away as swiftly as the fishing-rod of willow. He was an old man, well past sixty. He looked horrible lying there in the sunlight in his tattered soutane.

Methuen, after taking a sounding, crossed the river on a shelf of pebbles and once he was on the opposite bank tried to calculate the firing-position of the assassin. The grass was dense enough for footprints, but higher up the stone side of the bank defeated him. But it was not footprints he was looking for. He cast about like a bloodhound gradually worming his way up the steep bank, holding on to the bushes and hoisting himself up with the branches of trees. Every now and again he took a bearing on the fatal tree which faced him across the river, and after a quarter of an hour he judged himself to be approximately in the firing-position from which the old monk had been shot. He circled among the bushes and at last came upon what he sought — a pile of ejected cartridge-cases — lying at the foot of a fir tree. Turning them over in his fingers he recognized them as the type which is used to feed a sub-machine-gun.

He slipped them into his pocket and after a last glance at the fateful tree with the figure sprawled under it, turned back into the bushes and resumed his journey in the direction of the ravine, full of thoughtfulness. Nor did he turn aside to busy himself with speculations about fishing in those tempting pools, for all of a sudden the woods around seemed to have become peopled by an army of invisible eyes which watched his every movement. This brief attack of nerves he withstood with equanimity; he had often experienced it at the outset of a dangerous operation. But he was grateful in a way for the incident of the dead fisherman as it had awoken him from the feeling of false security into which he had been lulled by the landscape.

He retrieved his pack and followed the twisting path above the river for a few hundred yards until he came to a spur shaded by a huge walnut tree which cast an inky shadow over the cliff; somewhere in this shadow was the entrance to a cave, and he quickened his steps to reach it. The entrance lay at an angle to the main cliff-wall, admirably camouflaged by scrub and the shadow of the tree.

Delighted to find his memory still accurate, he was about to enter the cave-mouth, pistol in hand lest it should already be occupied by a man or an animal, when a thin hissing made him recoil. An enormous yellow viper, flattened among its own dusty coils, barred the entrance. Methuen paused, squinting at it along the sights of his revolver, reluctant to start the tenancy of his new headquarters by firing a shot. The viper hissed once again and its forked tongue flickered in its wicked little head. Methuen stood for a whole minute reflecting. In his heavy boots he had little enough to fear from it and from his memories of the cave he knew that there was a high stone platform which could be used as a bed. If he could live and let live: or rather if the viper could live and let live.…

“Now, my beauty,” he said coaxingly, “take it easy,” and edged his way softly past the reptile into the cave. It hissed again, but did not move, perhaps out of drowsiness, or perhaps because it had eaten a heavy meal of mayflies. Once inside he switched on his torch and confirmed his memories of that long-lost week-end when they had sheltered here from a storm. Here was a wide stone platform, ideally suited for a bed; and here at the farther end was a long fault in the rock which made a natural chimney against which a fire could be lighted. “So far,” he said, “so good.”

He set to work to put his house in order with the methodical deftness that only long practice can give, ignoring the snake which stayed sunning itself at the mouth of the cave. First he laid out his kit and then, taking a clasp knife, cut himself some branches of greenery for a mattress. The transport of these caused the snake a good deal of alarm, but it was already showing signs of getting used to him and he ignored it, confident that if it did sting him it would never penetrate the heavy boots he wore. His bed made up for the night, he next gathered himself some firewood from a nearby clearing where some trees had been felled, leaving a litter of chips and bark admirable for the purpose. These basic points of housekeeping once settled, he returned to the snake and poured out a few drops of tea from his little Thermos as a peace-offering, but it was obviously a gesture which awoke no comprehension in the reptile for it squirmed away from him, hissing savagely — yet, he thought, more in sorrow than in anger. “All right. All right,” he said soothingly and left it to its own devices.

Evening was rapidly settling over the mountains now and having shed all his kit except his pistol and glasses he felt very much more at ease. From the shadow of the cave-mouth he explored the whole terrain with great care, methodically sweeping the mauve contours of the hills. There was no sign of movement, save where the wind ruffled the tree-tops on the crest opposite. He sat quietly on a stone and drank in that quietness, punctuated only by the distant whistle of a train in the stone cuttings above the Ibar river, or the shuffle of maize stalks in the fields below him. The babble of the Studenitsa was silenced by the moss-lined pools into which it curled, and here Methuen saw the fish rising languidly to the flies which dotted the surface.

It was more than human nature could stand, this evidence of the evening rise and, hastening back to the cave he unearthed his trout-rod and set off down the slope, solacing his conscience with a lie: “I know it’s too dangerous to fish to-night,” he said, “but it would be a good idea to assemble my rod and hide it in a convenient place by the river, ready for emergencies.” His conscience was not taken in; and indeed when he arrived at the nearest pool he discovered a spot so well hidden from view on every side that he could not resist making what he described to himself as “just a practice cast or two”.

In a matter of moments he had a glittering gasping trout beating its life out in the grass upon which he sat, and he was just stuffing it into the pocket of his duffle coat when a rustle in the bushes behind him, but some way up the hill, startled him. He pushed the rod into the bushes and lay for a while behind a bush, nursing his pistol and waiting for developments. But none came, and after a quarter of an hour he eased his cramped knees by crawling swiftly and quietly back to the great tree, feeling the trout wriggling in his pocket all the way.

The snake had retired to bed, and the yellow beam of his torch revealed no sign of it in the cave. He dumped his trout and returned to the entrance with his glasses, deciding to have one final look round before the rapidly approaching darkness made visibility impossible. Bats had begun to nicker against the sky, and from the north came the plaintive whoop of an owl. He sat drinking in the silence and full of that delightful repose which comes only to the camper who knows that he has food, fuel and shelter against the approaching night.

Here and there now came the nocturnal stirrings of animals preparing for the night. A large grey wolf came down to the water to drink and, having lifted its muzzle to sniff the air, looked once or twice in his direction with a distinct anxiety before it turned back out of sight into the dense shrub. A water-rat plopped, and a late-scampering lizard skidded among the rocks.

Methuen suddenly realized that he was tired, and yawning, made his way back to the cave, drawing a screen of branches across the mouth of it. The main chamber where he was to sleep was at right angles to the entrance so he had no fear that the light of his fire might be observed; while from what he remembered of the rock-chimney, the smoke, which emerged thirty yards higher up the hill where the air-currents were stronger, dispersed at the point of issue.

He had brought a diminutive nest of billies with him which included a small spoked grid upon which he prepared his trout after having let the fire burn up into a heap of soft grey embers; he basted it with some fat scraped from a tin of bully beef and peppered it lightly with some cummin which he had noticed growing near a cottage on his way across the hill. It tasted delicious, and he ate it with his fingers, wiping them on the duffle coat, and having eaten, took a nip at his whisky flask before settling himself finally for the night on the stone pedestal. It was only half-past six, and as yet not completely dark, but as he had work to do tomorrow he felt that a good night’s sleep was the best insurance against fatigue. Despite his boasting about being in perfect condition the climb up the mountain had tired him and he took the precaution to open the little carton of talc and empty it liberally into his socks. From long experience he had learned that a blistered heel could be as dangerous to him as anything could be, and he took the precaution of massaging his feet once he had divested them of the boots which Boris had ordered for him. It was an old walker’s trick inherited from the first war, when those unlucky enough to get trench feet were penalized for it.

The bed of soft dark bracken upon which his light sleeping-bag had been unrolled was sweet-smelling and comfortable, though he knew from experience that it must be changed every second day or else it collected fleas — from where he had never managed to discover. He settled himself to doze after having set out his torch and pistol within easy reach of his hand. The massive walls of the cave blotted out all the sounds of the outer world and in the silence he felt his mind slowly clearing as it returned to the incidents of the past few days — so perplexingly rich in the promise of solutions which fate had withheld.

The torturing thought of Vida’s death returned once more to worry him; and then — those strange oracular messages which were being passed over the radio every few days to the little groups of émigré royalists in Paris and London — what did they mean? He had brought a carbon copy of the messages with him and pondering thus he was tempted to light the single candle in his kit and read them once more before he fell asleep; but he desisted and allowed himself to float downwards along the shallow river of memory to where sleep lay waiting for him like some shadowed pool.

The dial of his watch showed him that it was a quarter to four when next he woke, and he sat up with a start. Some half-irrational prompting seemed to tell him that it was the noise of footsteps which had shaken him into wakefulness. He grabbed his pistol, comforted by the cool feel of the butt, and waited. Nothing. The deep silence filled every corner of the cave, save where a single mosquito droned in the darkness. He was about to lie back again when he heard it — the clumsy scratch of boots on the bank below the cave. It was as if someone had slipped and fallen. He waited now with every muscle tense but nothing further followed so after a pause he slipped on his boots, and taking his torch in his hand went softly to the entrance where he peered through the screen of branches at a fragment of night-sky still full of fading stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good?”

“The best.”

“I have no money.”

“What have you?”

“A needle and thread.”

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

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

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