Prelude for War

by Charteris Leslie

3

Simon could not guess exactly how long they flew, but since he knew approximately where they were going the time was of no great importance. He lay awkwardly in the space, behind the two bucket seats in which Bravache and Dumaire were sitting behind the pilot, where they had dumped him with no regard for his comfort, and Lady Valerie was huddled partly beside him and partly on his legs. They seemed to be sprawled all over each other, and it was impossible for them to move. The girl did not try to speak any more, but at intervals he felt the violent shudders that ran through her.

At last the roar of the engine ceased and there was only the soft whirr of their wings gliding through the wind. After a while the engine snarled again in a couple of short bursts; then they hit the ground with a slight bump, settled, and trundled joltingly along with a creaking of undercarriage springs and the throaty drone of the engine turning at low speed. Then even that stopped. They were in France.

Men in a uniform of black riding breeches and shirts of horizon blue swarmed round the machine. Bravache and Dumaire got out; Simon and Lady Valerie were dragged out ungently after them. They felt the cool night air on their faces and had a brief glimpse of stars and a dim line of poplars somewhere in the distance; there was no sign of the lights or buildings of a regular airport. Then bandages were tied over their eyes and hands fumbled with the ropes on their ankles. With their legs freed, they were hustled away and pushed into another waiting car.

The drive that followed lasted about half an hour before the car stopped again. There was the sound of other footsteps round it, a brief mutter of voices. Then the Saint and Lady Valerie were hauled out again. Two men seized the Saint, one of them holding each of his arms. A voice said: "Allez!" Simon was shoved on. He tripped over a step, marched for some distance in devious directions over a stone or tiled floor, then he was halted. There was a pause, and he heard a faint click. They went on.

From the manner in which his guides huddled close to him, and from the dank cold smell of the air, they seemed to pass into a fairly narrow underground passage. Several footsteps rang and reverberated hollowly in the confined space.

The passage led steeply downwards then levelled off. Simon counted his steps. After twenty paces they turned sharply, and the passage seemed to widen. Thirty paces beyond the turn they stopped again, and there was a peculiar knocking and a brief delay while another door was opened. Simon was led through it, marched a few more paces, turned round a number of times and halted once more. The men who were holding his arms released him. He heard the same manoeuvres being repeated after him, and guessed that Valerie's steps were among them. There were other movements, and the almost inaudible swish of a heavy door being silently closed. The air seemed warmer, but there was the same damp tang in it. Then the blindfold was taken off his eyes, and he could look about him.

He seemed to be in a spacious underground cellar. It must have been part of a very old building, for even the warmth of an electric fire built into one wall could not altogether dissipate the damp chill which pervaded it. A large tricolour hung on the wall facing him, above a long table behind which stood three plain wooden chairs, the only furniture there was. There were various doors in all four walls, with nothing about them by which he could identify the one through which he had been brought in. He had been turned round enough while he was blindfolded to lose his bearings completely.

Valerie was beside him, and the four uniformed Sons of France who had formed their escort were drawn up on either side of them and behind them.

Bravache was there also. He emphasized his own importance by stopping to very deliberately draw off his gloves before he strolled across to one of the doors that opened off the room where they were. He knocked, turned the handle, and clicked his heels in the doorway as he raised his arm in salute.

"Les prisonniers, mon commandant."

"Trиs bien," answered a voice from the room beyond; and even in those two words the Saint recognized the harsh strident tones that he had heard on the radio in his car — at least a hundred and fifty years ago.

Bravache turned away from the door and clicked his heels again.

"Garde а vous!" he barked.

The escort sprang to attention, but without taking their hands from the butts of their revolvers.

Out of the room, striding past the stiffly drawn up figure of Bravache, came a tall gray-haired man of about fifty-five. He wore the same uniform as the escort, except that there was a double row of coloured ribbons on his breast and his blue shirt had six gold bars on each shoulder. No Frenchman would have needed any introduction to him. That long narrow face with the low forehead and the black piercing eyes and the chin that stuck out like the toe of a boot had been caricatured by a score of artists who tomorrow might be wishing that their talents had been otherwise employed. It was Colonel Raoul Marteau, prospective dictator of France.

And after him came Kane Luker.

Luker glanced at the prisoners without expression, as if he had never seen them before, while Marteau ceremoniously returned the escort's salute. He followed the commandant as he went on to take one of- the chairs behind the long table; and the Saint's old dauntlessly irreverent smile touched his bruised lips.

"You know," he remarked to Valerie, "if Luker only had a barrel organ he'd still be a bloated capitalist. An ordinary organ-grinder thinks himself lucky if he's just got one monkey."

Marteau glanced at Luker inquiringly. Apparently he did not speak English. Translating for him, Luker looked almost amused. And Simon realized that to try and bait Kane Luker was not even worth the waste of breath. He was that uncommon type of man for whom abuse or insolence simply had no meaning: they were inane puerilities, incapable of making the slightest difference to any material issue, therefore not worth the loss of an atom of composure.

Marteau was different. His eyes burned darker, and he rasped an order through thin tense lips; and the escort on Simon's right turned and struck him brutally in the face, and returned woodenly to attention.

The force of the blow staggered the Saint back a pace before he recovered his balance; and the girl gasped and whimpered: "You bloody swine!" The blood boiled in Simon's veins, and his cords cut into his wrists against the fierce strain that tautened his muscles; but it was not the blow that hurt him so much as the humiliation of knowing that any courage he could show would only whet the sadistic contempt of these shining crusaders who made a fetish of their own courage. Yet he kept his face set in its mask of indomitable derision, while his mind said pitilessly: "Presently it 'll be over, but they'll never be able to say that they made me crawl."

Ignoring him after that swift and callous retaliation, Marteau had turned to Bravache.

"They have been searched?" he was asking in French.

"Oui, mon commandant."

"Did you find the photograph?"

"Only a print, mon commandant."

Marteau nodded and sat back with a rudimentary but sufficient gesture towards Luker; and Luker sat forward.

He clasped his hands on the table in front of him and said quietly, with his eyes fixed passionlessly on the Saint: "Mr Templar, among the papers which you secured from Lady Valerie there was a photograph and the negative of that photograph. Where is the negative?"

There was a short silence.

"Go on," said the Saint encouragingly.

"That is all I want you to tell me."

"But you haven't finished yet. Don't you know the formula? You have to describe all the hideous things that'll happen if I don't tell you, and make my blood run cold. The audience expects the thrill."

Luker's expressionlessness did not change. He answered in the same passionless voice.

"A number of hideous things may happen to you in due course, Mr Templar. But for the present I am not concerned with them. I know quite well that you have a temperament which would probably resist interrogation for a long time; and at the moment time is precious. We shall therefore start with Lady Valerie, whose powers of resistance are certainly less than yours. The Sons of France have an excellent treatment for obstinacy. Unless we are given the information we require, Lady Valerie will be tied up over there" — Luker pointed with one hand — "and flogged until we do get it."

The Saint's eyes travelled in the direction indicated by Luker's hand. In the wall to which Luker was pointing there were two iron rings, a yard apart, cemented into the stone about seven feet from the ground. The wall around them was stained a different colour from the rest; and in spite of his jest the Saint felt as if cold fingers crept up his spine.

Lady Valerie looked in the same direction, and her breath caught in her throat.

"But I don't know," she cried out quiveringly. "I don't know what happened to the negative. Simon, I don't know what you did with it!"

"That's true," said the Saint, in a voice of terrible sincerity. "Leave her out of it. She doesn't know. She couldn't tell you, even if you flogged her to death."

He might as well have appealed to a graven image. Luker was not even interested.

"In that case I hope that your natural chivalry will induce you to spare her any unnecessary suffering," he said. "You will of course be allowed to watch the proceedings, so that your sympathies may be fully aroused. A word from you at any time will save her any further — discomfort." He brought his hands together again with an air of finality. "Since I understand that you were proposing to marry Lady Valerie, your affection for her should not encourage you to hesitate."

Simon looked at the girl. She stared back at him, her eyes wide with terrified entreaty.

"Oh, Simon, must I be flogged?" she said faintly.

Her face was white and terror-stricken; her lips trembled so that the words would hardly come out. And yet in a queer way it was plain that she was only asking him to tell her, whatever he might say.

The Saint felt that everything inside him was cold and stiff, as if the rigour of death had already touched him. somehow he kept all weakness out of his face.

He spoke to Marteau in French.

"Monsieur le Commandant, I ask nothing for myself. But you have ideals, and you would wish to be called a gentleman. Will you be proud to record the torture of a helpless girl as the glorious beginning of the revolution in which you believe?"

Marteau's face flushed, but the arrogant unyielding lines deepened around his mouth.

"The individual, monsieur, is of no more importance than an ant compared with the destiny of France." His dark eyes glowed with a mystic light. "Tomorrow — today — we make history, and France takes her rightful place among the nations of Europe. I can give way to no sentimental reluctance to do anything that may be necessary to safeguard the trust which is in my hands. Those who are not with us are our enemies." The glow faded from his eyes, leaving only the hard lines still shifting about his mouth. "As a man, I confess that I should prefer to spare Mademoiselle; but that responsibility is yours. As a leader, with the destiny of France in my care, my own course cannot falter."

"I see," said the Saint softly. "And if I told you what you want to know, I suppose we should be murdered just the same, only without the trimmings."

Marteau's face grew colder and more distant.

"I should like you to understand, monsieur, that the Sons of France do not commit murder. Although your guilt is perfectly evident, you will receive a fair trial by court-martial; naturally, if you are found guilty, you must expect to suffer the due penalty."

"Exactly." Luker spoke in English and the old ironical gleam was back in his eyes. "You'll get a fair trial by court-martial, and you'll be shot immediately afterwards. The day after tomorrow we shall probably start court-martialling traitors in batches of twenty. I'll try to arrange for you both to be in the first batch. But you must agree that that will be far preferable to the same inevitable result with the preliminary addition of what I think you called the trimmings."

"Of course," said the Saint. "You're so generous that it brings a lump into my throat."

But his smile was very tight and cold.

His shoulders ached with a weary hopelessness. No one except himself, not even Luker, could guess what dregs of defeat he had to taste. Death he could have met carelessly: he had lived with it at his elbow for so long that it was almost a friend. He had fenced and bantered with it, and lightheartedly made rendezvous and broken them, but never without the calm knowledge that the day must come, however distant, when they would have to sit down together and talk business. Death with trimmings, even, would not have made him cringe; he had faced that, too, and other men had gone through it, men many of them forgotten and nameless now, who had endured their brief futile agony that was swept away and obliterated like a ripple in the long river of time. But here he was not alone. He had to sentence the girl in the acceptance of his own fate.

And there was nothing to give it even a plausible ultimate glory. They died, anyway. And if he died, and let the girl die, without speaking under any torture, it achieved no more than just that. It was not a question of keeping the photograph safe for what might be done with it. There would be no one left to do anything with it, after Patricia and the others had been rounded up in the morning. And even if they escaped, there would be nothing to be done. The negative would remain where it was hidden, in his fountain pen, and would probably be destroyed along with his body and the clothes he was wearing; or at the best someone would appropriate it, and the most likely person to appropriate it was one of the Sons of France, and even if he found it it would alter nothing. If the Saint was silent and it was never found, it would only mean that Luker and Marteau would be worried about it for some time, but nothing would happen, and their anxieties would ease with every day that went by, and soon they would be too strong to care. How could he condemn the girl to that extra unspeakable ugliness of death for no better reason than to leave Luker and Marteau with a little unnecessary trepidation, and to give his pride the boast that they had never been able to make him talk?

But the bitterness of surrender fought against letting him speak.

He saw Luker watching him steadily, and knew that the other was following almost every step in his inevitable thoughts. Luker's eyes were hardening with the cold certainty of triumph.

"Perhaps you would like to discuss it with your fiancee, Mr Templar," he said. "I shall arrange for you to be given five minutes alone. I'm sure that that will be sufficient for you to reach the only conclusion that two sensible people can come to."