In Secret Part 59

For ten minutes, perhaps, the two men continued on, then halted before a great ma.s.s of debris, uprooted trees, long dead, the vast, mangled roots and tops of which sprawled in every direction between ma.s.ses of rock, bowlders, and an indescribable confusion of brush and upheaved earth.

Nearer and nearer crept the girl, until, lying flat behind a beech-tree, she rested within earshot--so close, indeed, that she could smell the cigarette which the officer had lighted--smell, even, the rank stench of the sulphur match.

Meanwhile the signaller had laid aside his flags and while the officer looked on he picked up a heavy sapling from among the fallen trees. Using this as a lever he rolled aside a tree-trunk, then another, and finally a bowlder.

"That will do," remarked the officer. "Take your flags and go ahead."

Then Evelyn Erith, rising cautiously to her scarred knees, saw the signaller gather up his flags and step into what apparently was the bed of the bowlder on the edge of the windfall. But it was deeper than that, for he descended to his knees, to his waist, his shoulders; and then his head disappeared into some hole which she could not see.

Now the officer who had remained, calmly smoking his cigarette, flung the remains of it over the cliff, turned, surveyed the forest behind him with minute deliberation, then stepped into the excavation down which the signaller had disappeared.

Some instinct kept the girl motionless after the man's head had vanished; minute after minute pa.s.sed, and Evelyn Erith never stirred. And suddenly the officer's head and shoulders popped up from the hole and he peered back at the forest like an alarmed marmot. And the girl saw his hands resting on the edge of the hole; and the hands grasped two pistols.

Presently, apparently rea.s.sured and convinced that n.o.body was attempting to follow him, he slowly sank out of sight once more.

The girl waited; and while waiting she cut a long white sliver from the beech-tree and carved an arrow pointing toward the heap of debris. Then, with the keen tip of her trench-knife she scratched on the silvery bark:

"An underground way in the windfall. I have followed them.

Yellow-hair."

She crept stealthily out into the suns.h.i.+ne through the vast abatis of the fallen trees and came to the edge of the hole. Looking down fearfully she realised at once that this was the dry, rocky stairs of some subterranean watercourse through which, in springtime, great fields of melting snow poured in torrents down the face of the precipice below.

There were no loose stones to be seen; the rocky escalier had been swept clean unnumbered ages since; but the rocks were fearfully slippery, s.h.i.+ning with a vitreous polish where the torrents of many thousand years had worn them smooth.

And this was what they called the Via Mala!--this unsuspected and secret underground way that led, G.o.d knew how, into the terrific depths below.

There was another Via Mala: she had seen it from Mount Terrible; but it was a mountain path trodden not infrequently. This Via Mala, however, wormed its way downward into shadows. Where it led and by what perilous ways she could only imagine. And were these men perhaps, lying in ambush for her somewhere below--on the chance that they might have been seen and followed?

What would they do to her--shoot her? Push her outward from some rocky shelf into the misty gulf below? Or would they spring on her and take her alive? At the thought she chilled, knowing what a woman might expect from the Hun.

She threw a last look upward where they say G.o.d dwells somewhere behind the veil of blinding blue; then she stepped downward into the shadows.

For a rod or two she could walk upright as long as she could retain her insecure footing on the gla.s.sy, uneven floor of rock; and a vague demi-light reigned there making objects distinct enough for her to see the stalact.i.tes and stalagmites like discoloured teeth in a chevaux-de-frise.

Between these gaping fangs she crept, listening, striving to set her feet on the rocks without making any noise. But that seemed to be impossible and the rocky tunnel echoed under her footsteps, slipping, sliding, hob-nails sc.r.a.ping in desperate efforts not to fall.

Again and again she halted, listening fearfully, one hand crushed against her drumming heart; but she had heard no sound ahead; the men she followed must be some distance in advance; and she stole forward again, afraid, desperately crus.h.i.+ng out the thoughts--that crowded and surged in her brain--the terrible living swarm of fears that clamoured to her of the fate of white women if captured by the things men called Boche and Hun.

And now she was obliged to stoop as the roof of the tunnel dipped lower and she could scarcely see in the increasing darkness, clearly enough to avoid the stalact.i.tes.

However, from far ahead came a glimmer; and even when she was obliged to drop to her knees and creep forward, she could still make out the patch of light, and the Via Mala again became visible with its vitreous polished floor and its stalact.i.tes and water-blunted stalagmites always threatening to trip her and transfix her.

Now, very far ahead, something moved and partly obscured the distant glimmer; and she saw, at a great distance, the two men she followed, moving in silhouette across the light. When they had disappeared she ventured to move on again. And her knees were bleeding when she crept out along a heavy shelf of rock set like a balcony on the sheer face of the cliff.

Tufts of alpine roses grew on it, and slippery lichens, and a few seedlings which next spring's torrent would wash away into the still, misty depths below.

But this shelf of rock was not all. The Via Mala could not end on the chasm's brink.

Cautiously she dragged herself out along the shadow of the cliff, listening, peering among the clefts now all abloom with alpen rosen; and saw nothing--no way forward; no steep path, hewn by man or by nature, along the face of that stupendous battlement of rock.

She lay listening. But if there was a river roaring somewhere through the gorge it was too far below her for her to hear it.

Nothing stirred there; the distant bluish parapets of rock across the ravine lay in full suns.h.i.+ne, but nothing moved there, neither man nor beast nor bird; and the tremendous loneliness of it all began to frighten her anew.

Yet she must go on; they had gone on; there was some hidden way.

Where? Then, all in a moment, what she had noticed before, and had taken for a shadow cast by a slab of projecting rock, took the shape of a cleft in the facade of the precipice itself--an opening that led straight into the cliff.

When she dragged herself up to it she saw it had been made by man.

The ancient scars of drills still marked it. Ma.s.ses of rock had been blasted from it; but that must have been years ago because a deep growth of moss and lichen covered the scars and the tough stems of crag-shrubs masked every crack.

Here, too, bloomed the livid, over-rated edelweiss, dear to the maudlin and sentimental side of an otherwise wolfish race, its rather ghastly flowers starring the rocks.

As at the entrance to a tomb the girl stood straining her frightened eyes to pierce the darkness; then, feeling her way with outstretched pistol-hand, she entered.

The man-fas.h.i.+oned way was smooth. Or Hun or Swiss, whoever had wrought this Via Mala out of the eternal rock, had wrought accurately and well. The grade was not steep; the corridor descended by easy degrees, twisting abruptly to turn again on itself, but always leading downward in thick darkness.

No doubt that those accustomed to travel the Via Mala always carried lights; the air was clean and dry and any lighted torch could have lived in such an atmosphere. But Evelyn Erith carried no lights--had thought of none in the haste of setting out.

Years seemed to her to pa.s.s in the dreadful darkness of that descent as she felt her way downward, guided by the touch of her feet and the contact of her hand along the unseen wall.

Again and again she stopped to rest and to check the rush of sheerest terror that threatened at moments her consciousness.

There was no sound in the Via Mala. The thick darkness was like a fabric clogging her movements, swathing her, brus.h.i.+ng across her so that she seemed actually to feel the horrible obscurity as some concrete thing impeding her and resting upon her with an increasing weight that bent her slender figure.

There was something grey ahead.... There was light--a sickly pin-point. It seemed to spread but grow duller. A pallid patch widened, became lighter again. And from an infinite distance there came a deadened roaring--the hollow menace of water rus.h.i.+ng through depths unseen.

She stood within the shadow zone inside the tunnel and looked out upon the gorge where, level with the huge bowlders all around her, an alpine river raged and dashed against cliff and stone, flinging tons of spray into the air until the whole gorge was a driving sea of mist. Here was the floor of the canon; here was the way they had searched for. Her task was done. And now, on bleeding little feet, she must retrace her steps; the Via Mala must become the Via Dolorosa, and she must turn and ascend that Calvary to the dreadful crest.

She was very weak. Privation had sapped the young virility that had held out so long. She had not eaten for a long while--did not, indeed, crave food any longer. But her thirst raged, and she knelt at a little pool within the cavern walls and bent her bleeding mouth to the icy fillet of water. She drank little, rinsed her mouth and face and dried her lips on her sleeve. And, kneeling so, closed her eyes in utter exhaustion for a moment.

And when she opened them she found herself looking up at two men.

Before she could move one of the men kicked her pistol out of her nerveless hand, caught her by the shoulder and dragged the trench-knife from her convulsive grasp. Then he said in English:

"Get up." And the other, the signalman, struck her across her back with the furled flags so that she lost her balance and fell forward on her face. They got her to her feet and pushed her out among the bowlders, through the storming spray, and across the floor of the ravine into the sunlight of a mossy place all set with trees. And she saw b.u.t.terflies flitting there through green branches flecked with suns.h.i.+ne.

The officer seated himself on a fallen tree and crossed his heavy feet on a carpet of wild flowers. She stood erect, the signaller holding her right arm above the elbow.

After the officer had leisurely lighted a cigarette he asked her who she was. She made no answer.

"You are the Erith woman, are you not?" he demanded.

She was silent.

"You Yankee s.l.u.t," he added, nodding to himself and staring up into her bloodless face.

Her eyes wandered; she looked at, but scarcely saw the lovely wildflowers under foot, the b.u.t.terflies flas.h.i.+ng their burnished wings among the sunbeams.