Airs Above The Ground Part 23

He put a hand up to his ear, and then with a sort of maddening deliberation turned to lay aside his broom before he approached the car.

Torn between the desire to drive straight away and waste no more time, and the desire to get to the first available telephone as quickly as possible, I shoved open the car door, jumped out, and ran in through the station gate to meet him.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?"

I think he said no, and I think, too, that undaunted he started on a flood of totally unintelligible German, but I was no longer listening.

There were two sidings in the tiny station. In one of them stood the train, with its little down-tilted engine ready to push the three carriages up the long mountain track; the other siding was empty. From it, a long s.h.i.+ning section of track led up into the pine woods and vanished. And away up in the same direction beyond the first tree-clad foothill, I saw that towering column of thick black smoke that I had taken to be the smoke from some factory chimney; and I remembered two things. I remembered the column of smoke that Josef had called the "fire engine," or "Fiery Elijah"; and I remembered the engine's whistle I had heard three minutes ago.

I whirled on the little man and pointed up the track.

"There! That! A train? A train?" He was elderly, with a drooping moustache, and watery blue eyes which would normally be rayed with laughter lines, but which now were puckered and puzzled and a little rheumy with the early morning. He stared at me with complete non-comprehension. I waved again frantically at the standing train, at the smoke above the trees, at the track, in a sort of desperate pantomime; and then pointed to my wrist.

"The train . . . the first train . . . seven o'clock . . . sieben Uhr . . . train . . . gone?"

He gestured towards the wall behind him where I now saw a station clock marked half past five, and then, pointing like me up towards the smoke on the mountain, he poured out another flood of German.

But it wasn't necessary. I had seen that the black smoke was indeed marching slowly but steadily, inexorably up through the trees, and now, clear above them, over a lovely rounded slope of sunny green, I saw the engine moving, an engine exactly like the one standing here in the station, butpus.h.i.+ng only one carriage. Not even a carriage, something that looked like a truck. . . .

Beside me, the old man said: "Gasthaus . . . cafe," and then proceeded with some pantomime involving the train standing at the platform. If he had been speaking in purest English it couldn't have been more clear. I understood quite well now. The timetable that I had studied had of course only put down the trains scheduled for the tourists, and the first one did indeed run at seven o'clock. No one had seen fit to mention that an engine took supplies up for the restaurant at half past five.

German or no German, the telephone was not a blind bit of use in this. The old man was still talking, volubly, kindly, and rather pleased to have an audience at this unG.o.dly hour of the day. I believe I said, "Thank you," as I turned and left him still talking to the empty air.

By the mercy of heaven there was room to turn. The Mercedes swept round like a boomerang, and I put her at that ghastly little road again with something of the fine careless rapture that I might have indulged in on the Strada del Sol.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

The best of all our actions tend To the preposterousest end.

samuel butler: Satire upon the Weakness and Misery of Man

At least going up was a little easier than coming down.

I had been too preoccupied during my recent descent to notice much more than the surface of the road, and of course on our way up in the early hours it had been dark and I had been wrestling with the flashlight and the map. Now, as I drove the big car like a bomb up that horrible little road, I was trying desperately to recall the relations.h.i.+p between road and railway.

As far as I could remember, there were only two places where they conjoined. A few bends above the station the road met the track and ran along with it for perhaps a hundred yards before a rough escarpment carried the train away to the left along the edge of the mountain, while the road doubled back to the right on the long sweep below the edge of the forest proper. The second place was at the quarry-the end of the road. And that would be my last chance to catch him.

In cold blood, I doubt if I could have hoped to do it in the time, but I was past thinking, past reckoning what might happen if I miscalculated with this heavy car on these violent hairpin bends. She was so heavy and the road was so bad that I could hardly spare a hand for the gears, so I kept her in second and hauled her round the corners with no regard at all for either tires or paintwork. Afterwards we found a dented hubcap and a long sc.r.a.pe in the enamel on the off side, but I have no recollection of how they happened. I just drove the big car on and up as fast as I dared, and tried to remember how soon it was that we came to the railway.

The fifth or sixth bend, slightly easier than the others, brought us round facing a long straightish sweep between trees through which the sunlight blazed, strong now, barring the rutted road across and across, like a railway track barred with sleepers. Away at the end of this a cloud of black smoke hung, puffed, trundled deliberately by.

I put my foot down. The bars of shadow accelerated across us in one long flickering blur. And then suddenly the s.h.i.+ning rails swooped in from the left to join the road.

For perhaps a hundred and thirty yards track and road ran side by side. The stretch of rail track was empty, but there was black smoke still hanging in the boughs of the trees. I steadied the car on the narrow road and leaned as far out of my window as I could, straining to see forward up the railway before it curved away into the darkness of the forest, where the cliffs hid it from the sun.

It was there. I saw the square black tail of the little engine with its hanging lamp, lit for the morning mists, swinging a small vanis.h.i.+ng red eye into the tunnel of trees. Above it the appalling black cloud of smoke puffed furiously.

It was going slowly, the gradient so steep there that I could see the roof of the truck beyond the engine, and beyond that again the fretted curve of the rack up which it was hauling itself, cog by cog and puff by puff. There were two men in the cabin, one leaning out to look forward up the track, the other absorbed in up-tilting what looked like a bottle of beer. I shoved my hand down on the horn and held it there.

I'll say this for the Mercedes: she had a horn like the crack of doom. Fiery Elijah must have been making a fair amount of noise, but the horn positively tore the forest apart.

Both men looked round, startled. I leaned out of my window and waved frantically, shouting-futile though it was- the most appropriate German word I could think of: "Achtung! Achtung!" After a couple of seconds' agonizing pause I saw one of them-the driver-reach out a hand as if for the brake.

Another few yards and my road would bear me away from the railway again. I trod on my own brake and hung out, waving more frantically than ever.

The driver found what he had been reaching for, and pulled. It was the steam whistle. The engine gave a long, friendly toot-toot. The other man lifted his beer bottle in a happy wave. The engine gave a third and last toot, then the forest closed in behind it and it was gone.

Why I didn't run the Mercedes off the track I shall never know. I just managed to wrench her nose round in time, as the road bore away from the railway, and along under the skirts of the forest. I still had the one chance, and through my exasperated fury I realized that it was a fairly strong one. Even with the extra distance she had to travel, the Mercedes would surely be more than capable of reaching the railwaymen's hut in time for me to stop the train. . . .

She had certainly better be. All that this last little effort had done was to make the train announce its coming to Timothy, and, however the boy had felt before, he would certainly be sweating it out now, trapped up there with the approaching engine mounting the hill puff by puff towards him.

Mercifully with every yard, with every curve, I was more used to the car, and with every curve the gradient eased and the bends grew wider. I have no idea at what speed we took the last six or seven stretches of that road, but it seemed to me as if the whole hillside was reeling past me and down in a long flickering blur of sun and shadow, and then suddenly we were up round the last bend, and in front of us was the s.p.a.ce with the railwaymen's hut, and the s.h.i.+ning stretch of track beside it.

I couldn't see the train.

The Mercedes zoomed along the last straight stretch like a homing bee and fetched up with shrieking tires and rocking springs within a yard of the railwaymen's hut. I jumped out of her and ran forward on to the line.

I had done it. Below where I stood I saw the smoke, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, where the engine chugged its stolid, unexcited way up the rack. They could not, of course, yet see me; would not see me until the engine broke from the cover of the trees some fifty yards away. I hoped they would, even at that early hour, keep a sharp lookout forward. If I sounded the horn again, perhaps, or waved something . . .

if I had had anything red . . .

But I had seen how they reacted to that horn before. And to my waving. In my mind's eye I saw it all again, repeated here with horrible finality: the horn, my waving, the cheerful responsive waves of the two men, and then the engine going past me and the red swinging lamp disappearing round the far curve. . . .

The red rear lamp. There was at least the Mercedes.

I ran back to the car. As I jumped in and slammed the door, the cloud of black smoke burst above the trees to my left and I saw the blunt nose of the truck. I switched the car's lights full on, shoved here into gear, and drove her as hard as I could for the railway lines.

As her front wheel hit the rail, I thought at first she was going to be deflected, but the tire bit, clung, climbed, and then lurched over, the rear tire after it, and the Mercedes stopped once more, her two near wheels over the offside track, her rear lights, brake lights and all blazing what message they could towards the approaching train. For good measure I jammed my hand down hard over the horn as well, while I leaned across and with my free hand shoved open the offside door. I would give them till twenty-five yards, and then I would be out of the car like a bolting rabbit. If they didn't see the car I could do nothing to save her, but I didn't imagine that the train could come to very much harm; locked on its cogs, it would probably weather the collision.

Why had I thought the engine slow? It seemed to be roaring up the hill all of a sudden with the speed of a crack express train. The black smoke burst and spread. I could hear the heavy panting of the little engine, great beats of it, above the blare of my horn. Thirty-five yards. Thirty. And I thought I heard a shout. I let go the horn and started my dive towards the open door. There was the clang of a bell, and a shrill furious whistle from the engine. I flung myself out of the door and ran clear.

With a horrible shriek of brakes, another toot, and a flurry of angry shouts, Fiery Elijah came to a standstill about seven yards behind the Mercedes.

The two men leapt down out of the cabin and advanced on me. A third-there had been a guard after all-swung down from the truck. The co-driver was still holding the beer bottle, but this time as if it were a lethal weapon which, from his face, he looked fully prepared to use. They both started to talk at once, or rather to shout, in furious German- and I can think of no better language to be furious in. For a full half minute, even had I been Austrian myself, I couldn't have got a word in edgeways, but stood there helpless before the storm, my hands out in front of me almost as if to ward off a blow from the beer bottle.

At last there was a pause, on a fusillade of shouted questions, not one word of which I understood, but of which the gist was naturally very plain.

I said desperately: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I had to do it. There's a boy on the line, on the line higher up, farther along, a boy, a young man . . . A-a Junge, on the Eisenbahn. I had to stop you. He's hurt.

Please, I'm sorry."

The man with the beer bottle turned to the one beside him. This was a big man in dark grey s.h.i.+rt, old grey trousers, and a soft peaked cap; the driver. "Was meint Sie?"

The driver snapped a couple of sentences back at him and then said to me, in a ghastly guttural, which at that moment I wouldn't have exchanged even for a Gielgud rendering of Shakespeare: "Is that you crazy are? There is no young on the line. There is on the line an auto. And why? I ask why?"

"Oh, you speak Englis.h.!.+ Thank G.o.d! Listen, mein Herr, I'm sorry, I regret I had to do this, but I had to stop the train-"

"Ach, yes, you have the train stopped, but this is a danger. This is what I will to the police tell. My brother, he is the police, he will of this to you speak. For this you must pay. The Herr Direktor-"

"Yes ... yes ... I know. Of course I'll pay. But listen, please, listen. It's important, I need help."

All of a sudden he was with me. The first reaction of his own shock and anger had ebbed momentarily and let him see what must be showing clearly in my face, not only the swollen bruises, but the strain of the night and my terror for Timothy. Suddenly, in place of an angry beefy bully, I found myself confronted by a large man with kindly blue eyes who regarded me straightly and then said: "There is trouble, yes? What trouble? Why do you my train stop? Say."

"There is a young man, my friend, he fell on the line up there. His leg is hurt." I pantomimed it as best I could. "He is on the railway line. He can't move. I was afraid. I had to stop you. Do you understand?

Please say you understand!"

"Yes, I understand. This young man, is he wide?"

"Not very. As a matter of fact, he's quite thin." I caught at myself. "Is he what?"

"Wide." He waved towards the upper track. "This is not right, no? In German, weit. Is he wide from here?"

"Oh, far ... Is he far. Not very, only a little farther-more far-beyond the tunnel, the first tunnel." How the devil did one pantomime a tunnel? Frantically I tried, and somehow he seemed to understand even this, or else perhaps he by-pa.s.sed the explanation and was content to act on what he certainly had understood.

"You will show us. We shall now the auto off bring."

It didn't seem to take those three burly men long to s.h.i.+ft the Mercedes. I made no attempt to help them.

Reaction was. .h.i.tting me, and I simply sat down on a pile of sleepers and watched without seeing them as they strained and rocked at Lewis's poor car until at last she came clear and was shoved away from the rails. Then between them, almost as if I were a parcel, they heaved me up into the cab of the engine, and with a positively horrifying eruption of vile black smoke and a straining shriek of cogwheels Fiery Elijah resumed his slow ascent.

I suppose there is something in every one of us, boy or girl, which at some level, or at some age, makes us want to drive an engine. Now that my apprehension had lifted, I almost enjoyed the ride, and indeed of all the engines that I have ever seen, this one, though certainly not the most exciting, was the most entertaining, being a nineteenth-century relic and possessing all the almost forgotten charm of the nursery trains of childhood. Its steep tilt, so absurd and pathetic on the flat, meant that on the upward climb the floor of the cabin was level. The tank was squat and black, the smokestack enormous and funnel-shaped, and every available inch of the engine, it seemed, was festooned with tubes, wires, and gadgets of unimaginable uses. The paint was black, the wheels scarlet, and the whole thing was smelly, dirty, diabolically noisy, and entirely charming. If the baroque age had produced a railway engine, this would certainly have been it.

We were soon clear of the trees, and ahead of us in the morning sunlight the line lay like a deeply clawed triple scratch through the white limestone. We threaded our way along a naked curve of hill clothed with the tufted turf thick with gentians, and then the line ran into a cutting, and rough perpendicular walls of rock crowded us from either side to a height well above the roof of the truck; so closely indeed that I shrank back into the cabin, but not before I had seen, some hundred yards ahead of us, the black mouth of the first tunnel.

I shouted as much, quite unnecessarily, to the driver, who grinned and nodded and made signs that I should keep back in the cabin and under the cover of the roof. He could have spared himself the pains. I had ducked already. The tunnel looked singularly uninviting and not nearly big enough, but through it we went, with what I'll swear was not more than a foot to spare.

It was quite a long tunnel, and if I had been digging it myself I would certainly not have dug it any bigger than need be, but going through it was like being threaded like cotton through a narrow bead. In the tight, heavy blackness the din was horrifying. The enormous beating bursts of smoke from the engine, magnified a thousand times, volleyed and echoed back from the sides of the rocky tube. And there was the steam. Within twenty seconds of our entering the tunnel the place was like a steam bath, and a dirty one at that. It was enough to beat the wits out of anybody, and when the driver put his hand on the throttle and reduced speed I could-Tim or no Tim-almost have screamed at him to go on as fast as he could out of this inferno of heat and blackness and shattering noise. I am certain that no guard-even if his eyes would have adjusted to the sudden light after this utter blackness-could have kept a lookout forward and been in time to see Timothy on the line.

Light was running now through the filthy clouds of smoke that lined the tunnel. One could see the fissures and bulges of the rock. It grew stronger. The air cleared. As I pulled myself up to look, sunlight struck suddenly straight ahead of us, and then our front, the nose of the truck, was out in it, and the sharp edge of black shadow was sliding back over the s.h.i.+ning roof towards the engine.

A bell clanged, sharply. Again I heard the sliding screech of brakes and the scream of steel on steel. The train stopped with a great puffing sigh, then a long hiss of escaping steam which shut off sharply, leaving the engine simmering gently in the still mountain air like a steam kettle.

I put a hand to the rail and vaulted down to the gravel.

"Tim, Tim, it's me! Are you all right?"

He was still there, his foot still wedged under the rack. When I ran up to him he was slowly uncurling himself from what looked like some desperately cramped position, and I realized that, hearing the train, he had tried to cram his long body down between the rack and the rail, hoping that if the worst happened and the train ran over him unseeing he might escape one or other of the wheels. That he could not have done so was quite obvious, and this he must have known. If he had been white before, he now looked like death itself, but he pulled himself back into a sitting position and even managed, lit by relief as he was, some sort of a smile.

I knelt beside him. "I'm sorry, you must have heard it coming for miles. It was the best I could do."

"A bit... overdramatic, I'd say." He was making a magnificent effort to take it undramatically, but his voice was very shaky indeed. "I felt like Pearl White or somebody. I'll never laugh at a thriller again." He straightened up. "Actually, I'd say it was a pretty good best. Transport and reinforcements for Lewis, all at one go. Did they let you drive?"

"I never thought to ask. Maybe they'll let you, on the way down."

I put an arm round him and helped to prop him up. The men had run up the track with me, and, though I could see Timothy was trying to pull himself together still more and dig out his fund of German for explanations, there was no need. The driver and guard lost no time in starting efficient work on his shoe, and in a matter of seconds had the laces cut from the now badly swollen foot and were beginning, very gingerly and gently, to cut the leather of the shoe. The co-driver was also a man with a fine grasp of situation. As the others started work he vanished back in the direction of the truck and now appeared with a flat green bottle which he uncorked and presented to Timothy with a phrase in German.

"The flask, she was for the Gasthaus," explained the driver, "but Johann Becker he will not speak no."

"I'm dead sure he won't," said Tim. "What is it?"

I said: "Brandy. Go on, it's what you need, and for pity's sake don't drink it all. I could do with half a pint myself."

And presently, as the brandy went round-the railwaymen had evidently felt the strain of the recent excitement quite as much as Timothy or I-Tim's foot was drawn gently out of the wreck of his shoe and willing hands were half carrying, half supporting him back towards the waiting train.

The truck, where they deposited us, was stacked high with stores, but there was just room to sit on the floor, and the doors (I noticed) could be locked.

"We will now," said the driver to Timothy, "take you straight up to the Gasthaus. No doubt Frau Becker will attend to your foot, and Johann Becker will give you breakfast."

"If you have the money," said the guard sourly.

"That is no matter, I shall pay," said the driver.

"What are they saying?" I asked, and Tim told me.

"Well, I wouldn't guarantee the breakfast," I said, "but actually, we could hardly do better than go straight up with them. I can't think of a better way to bring those thugs down to the village than in this truck. And we've even provided the escort of solid citizens Lewis asked for-the driver's the policeman's brother, and they're none of them great friends of Becker's, from the sound of it. Do you suppose you could explain to them, before we start, that when we get up there they're going to find my husband with the Beckers and another man at the other end of an automatic pistol, and that they, as solid citizens, must render him every a.s.sistance and take the whole boiling down and hang on to them till the police come?"

"Well, I could try. Now?"

"If you don't tell them before we start you'll never make yourself heard. Fiery Elijah rather makes his presence felt. Go on, have a bash-that is, if you've got the German to tell them with?"

"Okay, I can but try. I wish I knew the German for cocaine. . . . What's the matter?"

"The cocaine," I said blankly. "I'd forgotten all about it. I left it in my pockets in the back of the car."

"You what? Well, if the car's locked-"

"It isn't. In fact, the key's still in it," I said.

We stared at one another for a long moment of horror, then suddenly and with one consent began to laugh, a weak, silly sort of laughter that turned to helpless giggles, while our three friends stood over us looking sympathetic and filling in time on the bottle of brandy.

"Well, I only hope," said Timothy at length, dabbing his eyes, "that you've got the English to explain to Lewis in."