Codeword Golden Fleece (15 page)

Mack did his utmost to annoy them by shouting curses and indulging in long, abusive monlogues, until Rex stuffed a handkerchief between his teeth and left him to sit in acute discomfort for the best part of three hours. When the gag was removed he seemed to have learnt his lesson, so they undid his bonds but kept him hobbled with a chain and paddlock that the Duke had discovered among the miscellaneous gear brought from the car; and this relieved them of the necessity of either keeping him tightly bound or under constant watch.

In the evening they divided two-thirds of Rex’s chocolate amongst the four of them and, as darkness fell, relinquished any lingering hopes they had had that Richard, Simon and Lucretia might reach them that night.

Having dozed a lot during the day they slept ill and were up with the dawn. All of them hoped that the Warsaw party had spent the night in their car somewhere on the edge of the forest, and would find them in the course of the next few hours; but, as a precaution against Marie Lou being disappointed, de Richleau remarked that if their friends once lost their bearings in these almost trackless woods it might easily take half a day to pick them up again. So they breakfasted as cheerfully as they could off the remainder of Rex’s chocolate and settled down to wait with the best patience they could muster.

During the morning they endeavoured to occupy their thoughts with word games, but as midday approached they became openly restless and nervy. All of them thought hungrily of lunch, but none of them mentioned it. By early afternoon they had fallen silent and were listening with strained ears for the least sound that might herald the approach of their friends.

About half past two the Duke opened one of the suitcases and produced a box of his famous Hoyo de Monterrey cigars. Offering them to Rex, he remarked laconically: ‘He who smokes dines.’

‘I’ve been smoking all morning,’ Rex answered with a wry grin, ‘and I feel empty as a drum, but I guess I’d forgo most meals for one of those beauties.’

‘Will you have one, Princess?’ asked the Duke. ‘I’ve known you smoke a cigar for fun before now.’

‘No, thank you, Greyeyes,’ she smiled. ‘I’d almost sooner rob Fleur of her sweets than deprive you of one of your cigars.’

‘Almost?’ he quizzed her.

‘Yes, almost, but not quite,’ she laughed.

The episode lightened the tension for a time, and they sat there quietly while the blue aromatic smoke from the cigars filled the air and soothed the nerves of the two men; but, as the afternoon advanced, the anxiety they were all feeling began to manifest itself acutely again.

Marie Lou left the others to walk a little way in the direction from which she hoped that her beloved Richard would appear. De Richleau became irritable and moody from the oppressive thought that, if his friends were now in prison, it would be through his own carelessness; and the sanguine, happy-go-lucky Rex sought to comfort him in vain.

Afternoon merged with evening, and the shadows of the tall trees lengthened across the clearing, but still no distant snapping of twigs came to announce the approach of friends or enemies. At length dusk had fallen, and it was no longer possible to see more than a hundred yards through the scattered trees that fringed the west side of the enclosure.

‘We shan’t see them tonight,’ announced Marie Lou suddenly. ‘Even if they are within a mile of us, it would be too dark for them to find their way here now.’

‘Sure,’ Rex agreed, with a cheerfulness he did not feel. ‘But that’s about the size of it. They’ve probably been all afternoon in the woods looking for this Ritz-Carlton of ours and failed to locate it. They’ll have dossed down somewhere by now; but you can trust old Richard to find his way here somehow when they make a fresh start in the morning.’

As they had no light other than their torches, it seemed that there was nothing for it but to doss down themselves. Their worry about their friends had caused them temporarily to forget their hunger, until Mack reminded them of it by a querulous enquiry about whether it was part of their precious plan to starve him to death.

He had seemed to accept his captivity with apparent resignation had spoken little during the day; but now, having overheard enough of their conversation to appreciate the cause of their anxiety, he suddenly displayed a malicious delight in aggravating their forebodings.

On being told politely but firmly for the tenth time that, as
they had no food themselves, they could give him none, he gave a cynical little snigger and replied:

‘Ah well, I’m not much worse off than those friends of yours. By this time they will be on a diet of bread and skilly in a Polish prison. I find your attempt to persuade yourselves that they are somewhere here in the woods looking for you rather pathetic. Once Count Ignac had told the police about you all and a general order to watch for them was sent out, no two foreigners who could not speak Polish would have stood the faintest chance of covering more than a hundred miles in their car without being questioned.’

‘Can it!’ snapped Rex, but their prisoner’s voice continued to mock them through the semi-darkness.

‘As a matter of fact, we rather pride ourselves on our police in Poland. Their organisation is good, and most of them are excellent shots. Perhaps your friends are not in prison after all. They seem of have been much the same type of audacious brigands as yourselves, so they probably refused to stop when challenged. In that case, of course, it is quite likely that one or both of them is dead.’

‘You’ll be dead yourself in another few minutes unless you stop talking!’ de Richleau snarled with sudden fury.

For a moment Mack was silent, but he could not resist a final turn of the screw. ‘When you yourselves are arrested, as you undoubtedly will be, the police will take you to the mortuary to identify your friends’ bodies.’

‘Oh, stop him!’ wailed Marie Lou. ‘For God’s sake, stop him!’ She suddenly burst into a flood of tears.

Rex had jumped to his feet. Bursting into the inner room, he seized the squatting prisoner by the neck and banged his head violently against the wooden side of the shack until he went limp, then threw him down in his corner.

But they could not forget his words. Every one of them had been charged with such horrible plausibility that they seemed to be the actual truth, and shattered at a blow the frail illusions, built on wishful thinking, with which Marie Lou and her friends had been striving to comfort themselves through the long hours of the day.

In a few moments these brutal sentences had done what the long hours had failed to do. Marie Lou’s friends knew well the courageous heart that beat in her beautiful little body; but now she was utterly undone, and she wept unrestrainedly, until, at
last, with her head on the Duke’s chest, she sobbed herself to sleep, while he and Rex still lay staring grimly into the darkness.

Having gone to rest early, they woke next morning with the dawn, again ill refreshed and still dejected. For an hour or so they stood about, clinging desperately to the hope that had braced them the previous day—that their friends had reached the woods, but had become lost in them, and would yet find their way to the rendezvous.

But as they paced restlessly up and down, even their anxiety was no longer enough to starve off their pangs of hunger. Their last square meal had been dinner at Lubieszow on Tuesday, the 29th of August, and it was now Friday, the 1st of September. Since, they had had nothing to eat at all, apart from a few ounces apiece of the mess of pastries which Marie Lou had brought with her and Rex’s slab of chocolate. The forest was mainly larch and pine; there were no nut trees, the blackberries were still unripe, and they could find no edible roots that they might have cooked over a fire.

Mack added to their pangs by not allowing them to forget their empty stomachs for more than a few moments. A devil seemed to have entered into the man, and he now kept up an almost constant stream of shouted abuse, mingled with such tormenting questions as:

‘How would you like a mushroom omelette now? Or what about some ham fried with eggs? But as we had no lunch yesterday, or dinner either, why confine ourselves to breakfast dishes? Do you prefer sole done with lobster or fresh broiled trout? Personally, I rather favour grilled salmon; it’s more satisfying. Then a saddle of lamb with green peas and mint sauce, to be followed by a duck with
salade Japonaise
. Or better still, perhaps a roast goose! Could you still manage a
soufflé Grand Meunier
after that, and a
Poire Hélène?
I think you could. But perhaps you’re not hungry?’

From such patrician dishes he passed to more homely but not less tempting fare, fried bread and bacon, boiled new-laid eggs, hot toast and butter, dripping scones, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, a big juicy steak with
saut
é potatoes and fried onions.

In vain, Rex bellowed at him to hold his tongue, and even renewed banging of his head against the wooden wall silenced him for only a few moments, so, eventually, to stop his maddening flow of suggestions, they were forced to gag him again with his handkerchief.

By ten o’clock they were so ravenous that the Duke proposed that, whatever, the risk he should go in search of supplies. As far as he remembered from his rides, the nearest farm was almost two miles distant. It was a lonely place, and if the people there proved hostile, through having been warned to keep a lookout for them, he felt confident that he would be able to secure all he wanted at the point of his pistol. The probability that, even if they proved friendly, they would speak of his visit locally and thus cause the woods to be beaten for the fugitives was a danger which he felt must be accepted in such pressing circumstances.

Since the others agreed with him, he set off at once, having, promised to be back by one o’clock or sooner if possible. When he had gone Rex endeavoured to distract Marie Lou’s attention from her worries by a description of his holiday at Biarritz, and she gradually responded by giving him a more detailed account of all that had happened at Lubieszow before his arrival, adding as much as she knew of Jan and Lucretia’s love affair. But the morning seemed interminable, and they now had the additional anxiety of whether the Duke would accomplish his mission safely or have the ill-fortune to fall in with some armed party which might already be searching for them.

Shortly before one, however, they heard a distant rustling of leaves underfoot and speedily concealed themselves in the hut, where they waited with beating hearts to see if it were a search party, their friends from Warsaw, or the Duke.

The Duke it proved to be, with a fine heavy sack slung over his shoulder, but, even as he set it down, he distracted their attention from it by his first words.

‘Hitler has annexed Danzig, and the German Armies invaded Poland at dawn this morning.’

‘So—so it’s come then!’ gasped Marie Lou. Somehow, in spite of all the bellicose pronouncements of the Nazis and the pessimism of her friends, she had never really believed that Europe’s statesmen, all of whom had witnessed the world-shaking catastrophe of 1914-18, would fail to find some way to avert a second period of perhaps even more appalling suffering for the millions of helpless and innocent people for whose well-being they were responsible.

‘Any details?’ asked Rex.

De Richleau shook his head. ‘No, just the bare announcement issued over the wireless about nine o’clock this morning. The
Poles are resisting, of course, and have called on their allies to assist them in their fight against unprovoked aggression, which they have pledged themselves to continue, even alone if need be, as long as one German remains on Polish soil.’

‘Good for them! I take it there’s no doubt about Britain coming in?’

‘None at all, I think. Chamberlain will almost certainly attempt to bring about a last-minute reconciliation before the real bloodletting starts. But now the German Army has the bit between its teeth I doubt if even Hitler could call it off; and nothing less than a complete withdrawal would satisfy the Poles. If the Chamberlain Government attempts to evade its obligations now it will fall. Nine tenths of the British people would have gone to war last year for the Czechs if the choice had lain with them. They know little of how ill-prepared we still are, and, even if they did, I doubt if they would stand for any more appeasement.’

‘How about France?’

‘God knows! Every Frenchman is aware that we used them as a buffer last time and that France was compelled to bleed herself white while Britain mustered the resources of her Empire and trained her citizen armies. Any nation might hesitate before committing itself to the same appalling sacrifice of its depleted manpower a second time. Yet, what is the alternative? If she does not come in with us, Hitler will simply find an excuse to attack her whenever it suits him best, and within a few months she will be overrun.’

‘They have their Maginot Line,’ hazarded Marie Lou.

‘Its invulnerability has yet to be proved, Princess, and Hitler may elect to outflank it by way of the Low Countries or Switzerland. In any case, no war was ever won by sitting behind fixed defences. How do you think the United States will react, Rex?’

The big American gave a gloomy shrug. ‘The best of us will be in this thing heart and soul with you from the very beginning—just as happened last time. But that doesn’t go for the bulk of the people in the States. They don’t see why they should be lugged into these European muddles, and, after all, Poland’s as far from the Middle West as Manchukuo is from Britain. If Britain and France can stick it for a year or two, Uncle Sam will come in—just as he did before. But the folk back home have got to be educated. They’ll be belligerent enough and fight like hell once they’re gotten to know what it’s all about; but that takes time, and I
reckon the European democracies will have to stand the racket on their own for quite a bit before Uncle Sam gets out his big stick.’

‘Yes, that’s my view, too,’ agreed the Duke. ‘Well, there is nothing we can do about it at present, and you must both be dying for a meal.’

‘How did you hit it off with the folk at the farm?’ enquired Rex, as they emptied out the contents of the sack—bacon, eggs, butter, a loaf of rye bread, two bottles of home-made cider and a score or so of fine ripe plums.