"BEYOND DOVER"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 May 1939, Page 10

"BEYOND DOVER"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

VAL GIELGUD.

(Author of “Death at Broadcasting House,” etc.)

CHAPTER XXIV. (ConUnueO. "Now you’re talking!” he cried. "If she knows, I’ll get it out of the little I "Wait a minute. What a savage'you ■ are, Radko! Do we want the so-call- | ed Arbh-Duke, supposing we can get | him?” : “Do we want him?” Tankosic streti died out his great hairy hands. "Let i me get my hands on his pretty throat, ! and I’ll show you if I want him or ; not. I’ll gut him like a chicken.” Dragutin took no notice of this ti- ! rade. He was gazing out of the win- ; dow. He went on talking, apparently j careless as to whether his companion listened or not. “If we get him, we must kill him. Does the Republic want him dead? I think so, because he is the last of his line, except for his mother who is already almost in her dotage! It clears the decks for them. If I take the blame officially, so that they can square their credit with the Powers, can I count on their playing the game by me on the quiet? I think so. Tankosic and I between us know a little too much of the private records of most of those fine gentlemen in their silk hats and spats! It’s probably worth trying.” He got up and leaned out of the window drawing the chill early morning air down into his lungs. “I want a bath,” he said unexpectedly. “Go ahead with your firing party, Radko. And see, just at the last moment, if you can scare any news of Ottokar Maximilian out of the girl. But no funny tricks remember! Nothing with knotted cords round the forehead, or lighted splinters of wood under the finger nails. The Middle Ages are over, Radko —for good! Understand?”

“Then perhaps you’ll let me get two or three hours’ sleep,” grumbled Tankosic. “I need them, if you don’t.” He put his feet up on the second chair again, tilted his head back so that his face looked directly at the ceiling—a ceiling, frivolously painted with the loves of pagan deities —and almost immediately began to snore. "Swine!” said Dragutin under his breath, and went out.

Shortly after six o’clock in the morning, the sentry on duty at the main gate of the Palace saw a figure moving among the trees in front of him, shouted a challenge, and flung up his rifle. In reply, there emerged a dishevelled, grimy Styrian private with a red flannel armlet sewn to his left sleeve, weaponless, and apparently dropping with fatigue. He staggered, rather than walked, across the road, with his hands raised limply in the air.

The sentry lowered his weapon. “Who are you and where do you come from?” he demanded.

The newcomer stood swaying on his feet. / “Give me a chance, comrade,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve been on my feet all night from Bratza —I only got away by a miracle. That bloody butcher. Auflenburg! Shot us all down as if we had been rabbits! .It was hell I promise you!” “What are you doing here?"

“Reporting for duty; Aren’t I a soldier? Do you think your sergeant will be good for some breakfast comrade, and an hour or two’s sleep?” “I’ve orders to let no one pass,” said the sentry mulishly. Whereupon two things happened simultaneously: the stranger went down in a heap, and Radko Tankosic strode across the courtya/d. The sentry saluted and made his report. Tankosic kicked the sprawled figure with a heavy boot. The man moaned and writhed in the dust. “Ran away from Bratza, did he?” said Tankosic ferociously. “I wonder! Sergeant! Give this example of devotion to duty a cup of coffee with some brandy in it, and attach him to my firing party. We'll see if he can shoot Whites who aren't shooting back at him.”

So Hugo Brandon returned to the home of his ancestors. There was little enough pretence about his condition. He was legweary, exhausted almost to the limit of physical endurance. Towards the end of the journey he had lost his way again and again, imagined pursuers at his very heels, gone stumbling and gasping among trees and loose stones, as though he had been some hunted beast. And now, as he sat limply on a bench and drank weak but blessedly hot coffee surrounded by a dozen of Dragutin’s men, his mind gradually absorbed the true significance of his position. There could only be one reason for a firing party in the circumstances. They were going to kill Sally and Nigel Craven. And ho was going to be given a rifle, and stood up in' the rank' of the killers. It was not a bad joke to play on their would-be rescuer!

Well, at any rate they couldn’t make him shoot. They couldn’t stop him from putting a bullet through his own head, when everything else was over. That much freedom of action remained to him. But his promise to Lutyens . . the aeroplane waiting on the archery field . . was this really the best he could do? He looked up from his drink, and just see a corner of the Balcony from which his father had made his last vain appeal to the Guard Hussars.

A spasm of primitive loathing for the red-armleted soldiers about him rose in his throat. But what could he do? He did not even know whereabouts in the Palace Sally and Nigel were confined; and if he had known he would have been very little better off. He was practically a prisoner himself.

So passed a hundred and twenty minutes; inexorably, drearily, hopelessly. The Courtyard grailuall|y brightened as the sun climbed up the sky. The soldiers who wore to compose the execution squad began to brighten up, indulge in a certain amount of cross talk, and clean their rifles.

“Cheer up, comrade,” observed one of them to Hugo. “Never been on one of these little parties before? There’s nothing to it, I can tell you. Spoils your beauty sleep, that’s all!” Hugo could not trust himself to do more than grunt in reply. “Not that I grudge it this time,” continued the other. “Couple of damned English—-I’ll enjoy seeing ’em Hop over and wiggle. T shan’t bother to

aim straight!” For one ghastly moment Hugo i thought he was bound to be sick. ! "Personally,” said another of the soldiers, “I don’t hold with shooting a woman—English or no English.” "Wicked waste, eh, Georgi?" And there was a generally brutally lecherous guffaw. It was silenced by a harsh word of command from along the passage. The soldiers, Hugo amongst them, scrambled to their feet, hurriedly tightening and buckling their equipment. “Firing squad—fall in!” shouted a sergeant; and they clattered into a single rank out in the sunshine, Hugo on the extreme left. "Firing squad—attention!” Boots clicked together smartly. Rifles rattled. The line of men stood motionless, every face looking straight to its front. There was a moment’s dead silence. Then Hugo, clutching his rifle hard, and looking straight before him like the others, saw Nigel and Sally walk out of the door into the sunshine. They were holding each other’s hands, and their faces were white. They walked steadily, but with the steadiness of automata. Hugo grew desperately afraid that if either missed a pace, both might collapse on the spot. Nigel's expression was hopelessly defiant, self-con-sciously rigid. Sally looked calm, but quite unearthly already, as if she were dreaming, or drugged. Behind them was Radko Tankosic, with revolver and sword at his belt, his cap set at a jaunty angle, his beard combed, his epaulettes gleaming. I’ll get him, swore Hugo to himself, if it’s the last thing I ever do on earth! The little procession stopped in the middle of the Court Yard. “You would perhaps prefer not to face into the sun?” said Tankosic politely. ' “Then I would suggest that wall ”

Hugo saw a trickle of sweat on Nigel’s forehead. “Can’t you get on with it?” jerked out the latter, obviously at the limit of his endurance. “Handkerchiefs for the eyes—no?” Tankosic continued, taking no notice. ' “No thank you,” came Sally’s clear voice. “As you please. There is just one thing I am instructed by Captain Dragutin to make clear to you.” “Well?” “Should either of you be aware of the present whereabouts of the Pretender Ottokar Maximilian,” said Tankosic formerly, “I am able to offer you both your freedom in return for that information, of course properly confirmed.” There was no reply. Suddenly Tankosic stepped forward, gripped Sally by the wrist, and twisted it savagely. She screamed. Nigel flung himself at Tankosic like a madman, his fingers ravening towards his throat. The ex-komitadji let the girl go, so that Nigel had’ to check himself and catch her as she fell. Then Takosic stepped back, grinning, drawing the pistol from his felt. Another minute and it would have been all over. But there came an interruption. ■ A rifle clattered on the stones, and the last grimy addition to the firing squad ran out into the middle of the Court Yard. “What in the name of all the devils ?” demanded Tankosic furiously. Hugo tore off his cap, and held out his hand palm upwards. In it glittered his father’s heavy signet ring. “You promised them freedom in return for the whereabouts of the ArchDuke Ottokar Maximilian,” he said. “I am the Arch-Duke —let them go!” Sally burst into tears. “I can’t stand any more,” she wailed, "I can’t stand it!” “Take her away, Craven,” said Hugo in a low voice, “take her - away quickly for God’s sake! The archery field ” Tankosic thrust his pistol back into its holster. “You are just in time to make it a party of three,” he said. “You promised ” began Hugo, but the words died on his lips. “My prisoners preserved an admirable loyalty, Highness. They said nothing. You chose to give yourself up. It is hardly the same thing.” Hugo flung up his head. Well, he had played his last card, but the trick had been turned against him. It remained to die. Somehow that did not seem so difficult, here against the wall of the Summer Palace, where he had once been happy; where he had learned from the portraits of his line that kings must know how to die. And then he saw a figure on the Balcony: bareheaded, arms folded, brooding napol- : conically over the scene. “I appeal to you, Captain Dragutin!" cried Hugo. “You will release the two English prisoners. Lieutenant Tankosic,” said Dragutin. He made a little bow toward Hugo Brandon, and turned back into the | Long Gallery. “I think,” he said, “properly handled in the cheaper English papers, this gesture should bear interest.” “Captain Dragutin,” said Casimir Konski, who was standing in the shadow of the window curtains, “you are an exceptionally intelligent young man. You will go far.” “I shall do my best to go farther than that.” said Dragutin, as an irregular volley crashed out in the Court yard below

CHAPTER XXV. In the stern of a small coasting steamer Sally sat alone, looking back at the mist-blurred outline of the cliffs of Torcula. and the sea birds wheeling over it. Il was three days since she and Nigel had escaped from the Summer Palace, and she felt as if she had just become convalescent after a long illness. Somewhere farther along the deck Nigel was talking io Basil Lutyens. She could smell the reek of their pipes as it was blown back towards her, and at intervals hear the murmur of their voices. But for her it was if they did not yet begin again to exist. Sally's whole inner consciousnessf, she felt, remained in Styria. It was not that she knew or cared particularly about the subsequent history of the rising. That Karl von AufTenburg and the Commandant of the Air Base had been captured, dismissed from the Army, and sentenced to perpetual exile; that Dragutin had been prl»

vately rewarded and publicly disgraced for his share in the ArchDuke’s murder; that the Republic had been firmly re-established, and the ultimatum delivered by the Danubian Alliance in consequence withdrawn — she cared for none of these things. She had looked quite blankly at Basil Lutyens when he told her that Radko Tankosic had been shot in the back by one of his own men, and that Casimir Konski had disappeared into his own elegant underworld —a piece of news that profoundly disgusted Colonel Boughton, of the Military Intelligence Department of the War Office. Interest in Styria, for Sally, had been buried in Hugo Brandon’s grave outside the wall of the Summer Palace at Bratza. Had her heart been buried there also, she wondered, watching the silver-green of the steamer’s wake, listening to the steady beat of her engines; and all the time seeing so plainly Hugo’s features, elegant and insolent at the Carlton, dreamy and somehow mediaeval on the Torcula balcony; grimy and desperate in the Palace Court Yard. “Well, Sally—dreaming?” Nigel

leaned against the rail beside her, his pipe in his hand, the wind blowing through his fair hair, now unconventionally long. “I was just wondering,” said the girl, “why he did it —why he threw away his life for us like that. You see, Nigel, if —if he’d been in love with me. as I think he was once for a little, I could understand it. It would have been mad, but the sort of madness that isn’t so unusual in smaller ways. But he wasn’t in love with me any more. I knew that on Torcula. That was why I almost began to love him. I knew it was safe; that it didn't matter if .1 did. Does that sound very silly?” Nigel shook nis head. “No, Sally, I don’t think it clods.

Go on.” “I think he started on the adventure ratner like a schoolboy. It was just

the adventure, the excitement, for a bored rather blase young man. And then, as soon as he landed on Torcula he changed. The place gripped him. It was as if the realisation of his nationality made a different person of him. He ceased being just an adventurer and became a king by right, by conviction, by tradition. All those things. And then —he threw everything away for us that awful morning.”

She shivered and looked away over the sea. Torcula was fading astern. The first stars were coming out in a clear greenish sky. “Listen, Sally,” said Nigel Craven. “I know I’m not very intelligent, but I think 1 know the answer to what’s puzzling you. I believe it was this. I don’t think that Brandon got himself killed for us at all." “Nigel!”

“I mean it. It was something finer that that. It’s commonly called doing one’s job. Brandon’s job was to succeed in restoring the monarchy in Styria, or, putting it at its crudest, to die in the attempt. Nothing less would serve. Failure would have made the tradition he represented look ridiculous. His murder by Dragutin has made it once more heroic. I shouldn't be surprised to see a picture of Hugo Brandon’s execution on the wall of the Long Gallery one day. Any man with guts will die for his friends or his lover. But it takes more than Courage, it needs the heroism of Thermopylae, to die for an idea with nothing to support it but. a tradition generally believed to be outworn.” “I see," said Sally.

She felt that her question was answered. Perhaps, too, sne felt the least bit in tire world disappointed. The preservation of a heroic tradition was all very well, but it was a poor thing at which to warm one’s hands. It did not for instance compare with the heir to a throne dying to save one's life. She fastened the bracelet on her left wrist. “Won’t London seem queer?” said Sally. “I shan't bo able to wear this there, shall I?” “We shall have other things to think about,” said Nigel, bending down to her. “Shall we?” said Sally, and put hex

arms round Iris neck. Basil Lutyens knocked out. his pipe and walked forward. HIE END.