Frontier Passage Page 12

  “Is he comfortable? Are they well treated?” Rosemary asked, deeply interested.

  “Treated not badly, I think. But comfortable—oh no! He is in a room with a lot of very odd men, and straw to sleep on, and no chairs! Poor Pascual, who always liked so much comfort.”

  “It is wonderful of him not to mind,” said Rosemary, remembering some of the things that even she had heard about the Conde’s manner of life in the past.

  “Is it not? Formerly, everything had to be just as he wished.—his clothes laid out so, his shaving-water at such a temperature! His food—so much exactitude! But it is for Spain,” said the Condesa piously.

  Rosemary was sufficiently acquainted with her Father’s views to have at least a doubt as to whether the White revolution and the Conde’s consequent sufferings really were wholly to Spain’s advantage; and as they strolled along past the House of the Infanta, where the bride of Louis XIV stayed before her marriage, standing up high, pale, elegant and formal among the genial countrified little Basque buildings, she turned the conversation by asking the Condesa if she had news of any of her other relations in Spain. This brought out the Condesa’s anxieties about Juanito. She had asked “Meelcomm” to find out, and there was nothing. “He is so clever, Meelcomm—he can do anything and learn anything. And yet there is no news at all. And in Burgos and Salamanca, also no news! No one knows. It is as if he had vanished. Because when people are dead, in time one hears it,” said the Condesa simply. And because her heart was full, and it is often easier to speak one’s secret thoughts to an acquaintance than to one’s own people, and because this little English girl was so sympathetic and friendly and safe, as they walked back to the Hotel along the Rue Gambetta, past the great church where Louis XIV and his Spanish bride were married, she spoke of her brother, his goodness and his intelligence and his force of character, his daring and his charm, all the things that had made him the delight of those who loved him, and the hope of a whole party in Spain. Rosemary, like Milcom, asked what he was like, and got much the same answer: that he was like the Condesa, only dark, and had the same walk—“his eyes too, are grey; is that not odd, when he is black?” The girl carried away a very vivid impression of the noble splendid creature, a sort of Spanish Sir Philip Sidney, when at last they parted in the hotel, and she went to put her flowers in water before darting away to her Spanish lesson. To her delight, the Condesa invited her to coffee at the Bar Basque at twelve. It had been fascinating, having her all to oneself like that. She was charming, even with that funny remoteness of hers, as if she was talking to you from a mile away—and this morning she had not been remote, when she spoke of her brother; she had been warm and living and near. It would be wonderful if one could really make friends with her; perhaps at coffee she would go on talking about Juanito. He must be a wonderful person.

  But when, punctually at twelve o’clock, Rosemary turned up at the Bar Basque, there was no sign of the Condesa—neither inside, among the brown leather chairs and sofas, nor outside at the orange-coloured little tables. Crumpaun was sitting there in the sun—he hailed Rosemary: “Looking for someone, the Sweetheart?”

  “The Condesa, Mr. Crumpet,” said Rosemary, coming over and sitting down by him. She and Mr. Crumpaun had made great friends—Hever and Crossman and Carrow had all become familiars by now, but Crumpaun was really a confidant—she was fearless and easy with him. It was to “Mr. Crumpet” that she intended, one of these days, to tell that odd story about the photographs, and Daddy’s old Parrot. For some reason she had never done so yet; she had waited to see if anything more would happen, whether something else would turn up. Rosemary was a great one for hoarding up bits of information, arranging them in her mind and puzzling away at them—and if you mentioned them to people, so often something was done or said that made it impossible to find out anything more. She had already learned at school, observant little magpie that she was, to go about with her eyes open and her mouth shut—and when a major scandal (on the school scale) exploded at the end of term, she hugged herself silently to think how much of it she had either known or guessed by the middle. So she had kept silence, and hoped to keep an eye on the Parrot. But the Parrot seemed to have gone to ground lately—she had only seen him once, at the Bar Basque, since that windy evening at Jacques’.

  “Ah—pretty creature. But all Spanishes are unpunctual,” said Mr. Crumpaun. “You better have one with me while you wait. What’s to-day’s?”

  “The usual, Mr. Crumpet,” said Rosemary, smiling at him saucily—it was always a source of remonstrance on his part that she would only drink orangeade.

  “You’re an addict!” said Crumpaun, and shouted for Ladislas.

  “Well, what are you going to see this week?” he asked her, when she sat sipping the yellow drink. Mrs. Oldhead’s conscientious passion for sight-seeing had become a joke between Rosemary and Crumpaun.

  “The Grotte de Sare, I think,” said Rosemary, with a small giggle. “It isn’t very educational, but Pierre Loti had tea there, or something.”

  “Oh—and what do you know about Pierre Loti?” Crumpaun enquired.

  “He was a French writer who wrote a book called Pêcheur d’Islande, which all schoolgirls read, and a book about Basquery which nobody reads, called ‘Gigolo’ or something,” said Rosemary carelessly. “And he wrote one about Japan and one about Turkey, which I’ve forgotten the names of, but I know we weren’t supposed to read then at school. Not that I want to—he’s so fearfully old-fashioned. I like my dirt modern, if at all. Hullo, there she is!” she exclaimed, springing up, as a car drew up at the pavement behind the bay-trees.

  But though the Condesa got out of it, Rosemary was destined to disappointment in the matter of a further talk with her. The Condesa was dreadfully sorry, but she had unexpectedly to go into Biarritz; she was on her way there now. “For business,” she said. She was charmingly contrite and distressed, and said they must meet next day; but she was obviously in a hurry, and sprang back into the car, where the Duquesa also sat, and drove rapidly off. Rosemary, crestfallen, returned to Mr. Crumpaun and her orangeade.

  “Let you down?” said that gentleman.

  “She said she had to go into Biarritz on business,” said Rosemary.

  “Ah—see a woman about a hat, I expect.”

  “I don’t think that, quite—I was wondering what she was going for,” said Rosemary thoughtfully. “I don’t think she’s the sort to let people down for nothing.”

  “If it’s business, it’s probably funny-business,” said Mr. Crumpaun darkly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, buy a black peseta with ten centimes and a hairpin,” said Mr. Crumpaun easily. Rosemary laughed in spite of herself.

  Crossman slouched up and joined them.

  “Was that the Duquesa I saw buzzing off?” he asked, holding up a thumb to Ladislas to indicate his usual drink, rye-whiskey and ginger-beer. “Wonder where she’s going?”

  “Biarritz,” said Crumpaun.

  “Ah—there you are. Wish I knew who’s running that show,” said Crossman, lighting a cigarette.

  The words “What show?” were on the tip of Rosemary’s tongue, but she bit them back, and took a pull at her orangeade through a straw, with an air of great detachment. You heard much more by keeping quiet.

  “Any news?” Crumpaun asked.

  “I think there’s no doubt about the new offensive coming off pretty soon—but I don’t know where, or when.”

  “Ask Ladislas,” Crumpaun suggested.

  Crossman ignored this sally. “Carrow has a story about getting hold of a dirty little tyke who was tight last night in a dive in Biarritz,” he pursued, “and let out that he was in the pay of the boss there. Full of money, he was. And he talked about ‘the lady.’ I don’t think there’s much doubt but that she’s in it, and that Biarritz is the place.”

  “None at all, I should say,” said Crumpaun, losing a little of his genial air of laziness. “Biarritz is the obvious place
. It’s in neutral territory, anyone there can pick up the threads from both halves of Spain and the outside world, and it’s handy for frontier-hopping.” He took a pull at his drink. “And there’s all this story that Hever’s so full of, about Number 17.”

  “Think there’s anything in that?” Crossman asked.

  “He swears it’s copper-bottomed, though he won’t give his source, naturally. Just says there is a White Agent in Red Spain, who gets his stuff out somehow, and he declares he knows his number. It looks like it; there was that leak about the counter-offensive last month.”

  “I wonder how they get their information across—most of the frontier’s pretty tightly bouchée,” Crossman said, “though of course there’s wine-smuggling going on all the time.”

  “Yes, but that sort of thing must come verbally, as a rule,” Crumpaun objected—“and peasants would be too stupid to carry much in their thick heads—especially Aragonese.” He too lit a cigarette. “It isn’t so easy. And it isn’t going to get any easier. The French aren’t so keen on having their territory used as a stamping-ground for spies. I hear the Perpignan authorities closed one passage last week.”

  “Yes, I heard that. And I’m told the lovely Olivia isn’t going to find it so simple in future to get her permits to pop in and out across the Bridge at Irün,” said Crossman, smiling rather sourly. “The Bayonne authorities are getting rather fed up with her—and indeed with the whole refugee racket. How can you control spying when an entire district is flooded with strangers, and murky-looking types at that?”

  Crumpaun laughed. The two men had forgotten Rosemary by now, as she had hoped they would, and talked on rather technically about whether and how much they could “use” any of the information, or hypotheses, which they were discussing.

  “Hullo, here’s Hever,” Crossman said presently. “Morning, Tom.”

  Hooter’s representative, followed by the hovering Ladislas, came and sat down by them. Crumpaun ordered fresh drinks all round.

  “And make it snappy,” Hever said menacingly to the waiter—“Telephoning in this country makes me thirsty.” Ladislas grinned and hastened away, with his titupping waiter’s step.

  “You had something to telephone about? You’re lucky,” said Crumpaun, his geniality returning.

  “Yes—and as I’ve got it safely off, I don’t mind telling you, you slothful old seal,” said Hever, giving him an affectionate prod in the ribs.

  “Well, what is it?” Crossman said, with nervous impatience.

  “Wait till I’ve got my drink—I’m rather sick of screaming news,” said Hever coolly. He was obviously in tremendous spirits. But when Ladislas had brought the drinks, and been shooed away again by Hever—“None of your eavesdropping, you shady potwasher!”—he leaned over towards Crumpaun.

  “Three Bolo planes were burnt out on the ground the night before last near Bourg Madame, about four hours before they were due to start on to Barcelona. And, the same thing happened to two others the week before, in another place; only those were French. Quite close to the border each time, and each time just before the final hop.”

  “Sabotage,” said Crumpaun.

  “Yes—and informed sabotage,” Hever rejoined. “Somebody knows precisely when the stuff arrives and where the stuff arrives, each time.”

  “How did they come, packed or flown?” Crumpaun asked.

  “Flown. And that’s one of the things the French manage to keep pretty quiet, that I do know,” Hever said. “We all know that the French and Russians have been sending in nearly as much stuff as the Boches and the Itis, only they don’t send in technicians as well, and the Reds are too miserably incompetent to fly it, or shoot it off, or assemble it even, as the case may be.” He drank again. “No,” he went on, “the information must come, in my opinion, from the other side, when they’re expected. There have been a lot of accidents lately to material destined for Barcelona, and always near the frontier, and always at the last minute.”

  “You mean that someone—your Number 17, or whoever it is—gets the information, and sends the saboteurs across to cope?” Crossman asked, much interested.

  “No, I don’t. I think the saboteurs are out here in France, sticking around with suitcases full of dynamite in the back of their Peugeots, and when they get the word to go they buzz off and do their stuff. And I think they get that word from this side, too. You can’t telephone across the frontier, you see; but you can telephone from anywhere in France to anywhere in France.”

  “In fact, our old friend the Hidden Hand in Biarritz runs the sabotage as well as the rest—that the idea?” Crumpaun enquired.

  “Got it in one!”

  Crumpaun turned this over in silence for a moment or two.

  “Wonder where the devil they get across,” he then said, thoughtfully.

  “A smart man might get across anywhere. But my own idea is that someone very smart indeed comes right out each time, with the news in a false tooth, and gets it to the organisation here at Biarritz. And for that reason, I fancy he crosses towards this end.”

  “Why?” Crossman asked.

  “Because it’s obviously much easier to ‘circulate’ in Spain than in France,” Hever said, banging his glass on the table as a signal to Ladislas. “The line between Red and White Spain is pretty vague and fluid, and they’re all Spaniards anyhow—it would be far simpler to get the information across from South to North inside Spain.”

  “And then let the frontier-hopper hop, straight to Biarritz—yes, I get the idea,” Crumpaun said.

  “Exactly. And the instructions go out by telephone, and the thugs start up the Peugeots,” said Hever, with his wide Cambridge grin.

  “All this is hypothesis, though,” Crossman objected—“I don’t see how you can use it.”

  “Four-fifths of all your stuff is hypothesis anyway, with an occasional fact, like the currant in a school bun,” said Hever cheerfully. “I’ve got my currant, and the rest is intelligent anticipation. Anyhow one can never do more with spies and saboteurs than deduce them from their results—they don’t go about in a special-coloured shirt, like a bloody S.S. man, singing their own theme-tune. Don’t be foolish, Crossey.”

  The others laughed. Poor Rosemary glanced at her watch, conscientiously. Oh damn—ten past one already. Really Daddy was a menace! Fancy having to leave now. To avoid any temptation to linger, she sprang up out of her chair with her usual suddenness.

  “Mr. Crumpet dear, I must fly. Thank you for my wholesome beverage.”

  “Hey, nonsense—what’s the time?” Crumpaun said, tugging away at the gold and platinum chain of the slim watch which in spite of its slimness, would not readily leave his pocket while he was sitting down.

  “High time I was gone!” said Rosemary, blowing him a kiss, and fled.

  She was very quiet at lunch, and Ethel Oldhead, always afraid that the child would be bored alone with her parents, suggested that they should go to the cinema that evening. “I see there’s a new film on to-day,” she said, indicating the poster stuck on the railings of the old Casino, just opposite the window—“The Goldwyn Follies. But I don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Oh, there’s that dancer in it—she’s lovely, only she’s gone all plastic since she went to Hollywood, and she’s forgetting how to dance,” said Rosemary, producing her usual wealth of inside knowledge about all cinema productions. “But there’s the blue-and-white ballet, which is lovely. Yes, let’s go after dinner—or to-morrow.”

  “I thought we might have gone to the early house,” said Mrs. Oldhead, who had none of her little parties that afternoon, and was at a loose end.

  “No, Mummie—not early.”

  “Why not?” asked Mr. Oldhead.

  “I think I ought to work—and I hate doing it at night,” said Rosemary, wishing that parents weren’t so tactless, and didn’t force one into the sort of fibs that would shut them up. Her silence was not in the least due to boredom, but to intense thought. She had practically decide
d already, as a result of the journalists’ conversation that morning, that the time had come to tell Mr. Crumpaun about the photos and the Old Parrot; but there were one or two things that she had to think out first, and she had got to work up some plan by which she could get the Crumpet to herself. She would anyhow want the afternoon and early evening free for that, if she finally decided to do it. But one couldn’t think properly in that boiling-hot dining-room, with the Archdeacon gnashing his false teeth, and the Spaniard whom she and her mother called The Executioner smiling his sadistic smile at the fat head-waiter and talking about the food, and the exhausted-looking underwaiter trundling the hors d’œuvres trolley about and bumping the back of one’s chair, and above all with the Non-Interveners yelling heartily at one another at their huge table in the middle of the’ room. She fidgeted restlessly through the end of the meal, and the moment her parents rose, refusing coffee in the hot and stuffy lounge, she hurried away to her own room.

  Here it was cool enough—the management of the Grande Bretagne economised on bedroom chauffage in the day-time, and the French windows giving onto, the narrow balcony stood wide open; the sea wind blew in, fluttering one of her jumpers and some stockings which her mother had washed for her, which hung from two chairs just inside the window. She pushed them impatiently aside, shoved the one arm-chair, a high-backed Victorian affair, padded within a carved mahogany frame, up into the window, and sat looking out. She saw, without seeing, the delicate steel-blue tracery of the tiny slates, so cunningly arranged on the small hexagonal dome of the old Casino just across the street, its graceful bulk cutting into the further view of the sea and the villa-strewn shores of the bay out towards the little pharos. When she remembered her decision afterwards, she remembered these things, which her eyes had etched on her brain while she thought—at the time she was unaware of them.