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- Herausgeber: Muswell Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
Mark Chalmers, is 36, dark haired, athletic, keen on skiing and winter sports, speaks fluent French and German and has a taste for wine, food and women. It is 1938 and Chalmers, a master at Eton, is recruited by an old friend at the Foreign Office and introduced to his boss 'B'. Reluctantly he agrees to take on a covert mission for British Intelligence – to parachute into Nazi-occupied Austria and pass on vital information to a British agent. Chalmers has no intention of committing himself beyond this one job but once he reaches his destination, he finds himself sucked into the cause - fighting fascism with the Underground. First published in 1946, seven years before Bond's debut in Casino Royale, Bottome's hero shares many similarities with Ian Fleming's Bond in fact, It seems that Bond may not have existed without Bottome. It was at the school she ran in Austria with her ex-spy husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis, that she taught Ian Flemming, to write. 'A gifted and entertaining novelist' TLS.
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THE LIFELINE
Phyllis Bottome
v
To LOUISCHEN of North Tyrol
vi
Contents
Introduction
In 2016 we made a programme for BBC Radio 4 entitled “The Woman who invented James Bond?”[1] In it we explored a controversial claim, first made by the espionage writer Nigel West in the Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming’s World of Intelligence (2009), that James Bond, one of the most famous fictional characters of the 20th century, was stolen from another writer, Phyllis Bottome, and was based wholesale on Mark Chalmers, the hero of her 1946 novel The Lifeline.
Chalmers, the hero of Bottome’s novel, is a 36-year-old, dark-haired master at Eton, signed up to work for British intelligence by Reggie, a friend who works at the Foreign Office.
After a meeting with “B”, the head of British Intelligence, Chalmers is despatched to the continent with a mission to communicate with a British sleeper agent, and a suicide pill in case it all goes wrong.
Chalmers is a keen aficionado of mountain sports, enthusiastic about fine food and wine, with an eye for a pretty girl. He also speaks fluent French and German.
Seven years after the publication of Bottome’s novel, the world would be introduced to a character named James Bond.
He’s in his late thirties. He is sent to the continent after a meeting with “M”, the head of British intelligence. viii
He is a keen aficionado of mountain sports, enthusiastic about fine food and wine with an eye for a pretty girl. He also speaks fluent French and German.
The apparent similarities between Chalmers and Bond are so great that Nigel West describes the relationship between the two novelists as “thief and victim.”
What you make of that thesis will determine whether you currently hold in your hands a neglected novel or a smoking gun. (Presumably the very flat Beretta .25 automatic with the skeleton grip James Bond carries in Casino Royale.)
The similarities between Mark Chalmers and James Bond would be intriguing if Fleming and Phyllis Bottome had never met. But the two knew each other. In 1927 after a troubled career at Eton and Sandhurst the young Ian Fleming was sent to the Tennerhof a small private school in the Austrian Alps run by Major Ernan Forbes Dennis and his wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome.
The school followed an eclectic curriculum based on study of the German language, rigorous physical exercise and winter sports, and the psychological principles of Dr Alfred Adler, of whom the Forbes Dennises were admirers. (Phyllis would go on to become Adler’s official biographer.)
The teenage Ian Fleming who arrived at this curious Alpine reformatory needed help. Restless, rebellious, recklessly preoccupied by women and fast cars, Ernan Forbes Dennis wrote, “He was like a weathercock as one mood chased another … By the time he came to us, all he could really do successfully was to make a nuisance of himself.” Applying Adler’s theories, the Forbes Dennises diagnosed Ian Fleming as trapped in a cycle of neurotic competition with his brother Peter, who though only a year older was already successful and composed and would go on to become a successful travel writer.
But aside from the psychological theories two other iximportant factors at the Tenerhoff influenced Ian Fleming. The first was that Phyllis Bottome encouraged the boys to write. Fleming’s first short story “Death, on Two Occasions,” written when he was nineteen, was written with Bottome’s encouragement, and critiqued by her.
The second was that Ernan Forbes Dennis had been a spy, and had worked for British Secret Intelligence in Marseilles and Vienna.
Pam Hirsch, the biographer of Phyllis Bottome, says the Forbes Dennises were vitally important figures for the young Fleming.
“Phyllis and her husband Ernan were a lifeline for a deeply troubled young man who might not have actually survived if he hadn’t had all their care, their love, and their writerly attention as well.”
After leaving the Tenerhoff, Fleming and the Forbes Dennises remained on friendly, if not particularly close terms. In 1937 Phyllis roped Fleming into arranging a lecture tour for Alfred Adler (a tour which would finish poor Adler off: in May that year he died of a heart attack on the steps of the Aberdeen Music Hall, surely a first for a member of the Vienna Circle.)
In 1947, the summer after The Lifeline was published, Bottome and Ernan holidayed in Jamaica and visited Fleming in his villa, Goldeneye. As was her tradition, she gifted him her latest novel.
In January 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at Goldeneye at his twenty-year-old Imperial portable typewriter, inserted the first page of the folio typing paper he had bought at a shop on New York’s Madison Avenue ten days before and started to type.
John Pearson, Ian Fleming’s biographer, described Fleming’s method; “… he had no notes, had made no preparations. He simply began to type in his cool, big, shaded room and for the next seven weeks he kept at it steadily.”[2] x
Casino Royale, the book he had finished by March 18th, would introduce the world to James Bond.
Fleming’s literary technique was to populate his novels with observations, obsessions, and personalities drawn from his own experiences. What use did he make of Phyllis Bottome?
Read back to back, it is clear that Casino Royale and The Lifeline have similarities – especially their central characters. Chalmers’ age, height and looks square with those of Bond. We learn on page six that “Emotion always made him feel wary,” a sentiment that could certainly be applied to Bond.
But there are differences. Chalmers is not a professional secret agent. His background as a master at Eton makes him closer to one of John Buchan’s amateur spies, stumbling on a complex geopolitical conspiracy. “It was as if, from his static, intelligent twentieth-century life, he had fallen into a dark, fantastic, swiftly moving medieval stream.” Bottome’s novel is set in 1938, in a world teetering on the brink of chaos, but by the time it was published in 1946, the “new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science” Churchill had warned of in 1940 had been averted. Casino Royale looks forward – to a future in which British power can no longer be relied upon, and needs to be constantly asserted.
There is though one point at which the novels feel so close that they almost overlap.
Both The Lifeline and Casino Royale contain sections in which their heroes are brutally tortured, hover between life and death, and then re-enter the world aided by female characters whom they disliked at first before falling for. The language of these sections is so close that you could rip a few pages from The Lifeline, sew them inside the dust jacket of Casino Royale, and the narrative trajectory of the two books would continue unchanged. xi
Mark woke in a room full of light. Since there was light, he could not be blind, though his eyes were bandaged. He could still feel their savage thrusts against his lids. A long shudder shook him, but pain warned him not to let himself shudder again. He could not move his head or his legs. Fever and thirst filled his consciousness. All his body was in a dull bruised state of massive pain. He could hear Ida’s voice a long way off, saying over and over again, ‘Drink this! Drink this!’ but he could not tell what she meant until at last his throat swallowed, and his thirst slackened. He felt the touch of her hands, and heard her say, ‘It is all right now, Mark! It is quite all right!’ But afterwards nightmares, restless, endless nightmares came and went.
The Lifeline, Phyllis Bottome, 1946
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
During the next two days James Bond was permanently in this state without regaining consciousness. He watched the procession of his dreams go by without any effort to disturb their sequence, though many of them were terrifying and all were painful. He knew that he was in bed and that he was lying on his back and could not move and in one of his twilight moments he thought there were people round him, but he made no effort to open his eyes and re-enter the world …
… A woman’s voice was speaking and the words gradually penetrated to him. It seemed to be a kind voice and it slowly came to him that he was being comforted and that this was a friend and not an enemy.
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming 1953
Then Mark Chalmers and James Bond have a very similar bedside conversation with a local contact, Father Martin xiiand Rene Mathis respectively, in which they reflect not only on their own status, but on the nature of good and evil.
It is too curious to be a coincidence. We think it highly likely that Ian Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale with a copy of Phyllis Bottome’s The Lifeline on his bookshelf in Goldeneye, and that, whether consciously or not, drew the structure of the final section of his first novel from Bottome’s.
If Phyllis Bottome ever felt that the end of Casino Royale, or indeed the character of James Bond, was a little too familiar for comfort, she never said so. For Ian Fleming’s part, he was always extremely grateful to Phyllis and Ernan Forbes Dennis. In 1960 when she wrote to him about his books he wrote to thank her and added “My life with you both is one of my most cherished memories, and heaven knows where I should be today without Ernan.”
More intriguing still, Fleming seems to have scattered a few breadcrumbs for those interested in pursuing his connection with Phyllis Bottome.
In 1962 Fleming wrote his new novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In its final scenes Fleming’s thoughts seem to turn again to Kitzbuhel. In the novel Bond marries and takes his new bride Tracy off on honeymoon, but she is brutally murdered by Blofeld. The young honeymooners are on route for a still obscure Austrian ski resort called Kitzbuhel.
So what do you think? Do you hold a novel in your hands, or a smoking gun?
At the very least, you might be about to discover that James Bond 007 had an, until recently, unacknowledged progenitor. You are certainly about to experience a thriller of a highly diverting and original kind, long overdue a new lease of life.
Miles Jupp and David Stenhouse Monte Carlo, January
Chapter 1
Mark Chalmers was, as far as he knew, exactly the kind of man he wanted to be. He earned enough money for his tasks; he had done nothing discreditable; women admired him; boys obeyed him; and men of his own age definitely disliked him, unless they had been more successful still; and then they thought that he was a very nice fellow and might go far. But he would not go too far because he was already thirty-six.
The kind of job Mark was on was not greatly to his taste; but his friend Reggie at the Foreign Office was urgent about it, and had offered to pay his holiday expenses if he would undertake it. After all, it was only to take a message quite quietly and unobtrusively, to a man who lived in Innsbruck and then – the message given – Mark would be free to go on with his usual summer climbing in the Dolomites. Still if Mark had not decided to take the message he would not have gone to Austria at all, in the summer of 1938; because nothing outside his own personal life had ever so upset him as the occupation by Germany of his favourite country, stamping out, as far as spiritual values can be stamped out, its charm, its culture and its kindness.
Now there was only Switzerland left, for his favourite 2summer pastime, and Mark had never liked the Swiss as he liked the Austrians.
The Tiroler Hof, where he was of course staying, was a good hotel, but only Germans and Italians, with an occasional British tourist like himself, now stayed there – no Austrians. The waiters too, were either German or Italian – a curiously helpful, conversational staff, full of praise for the new Nazi regime.
Mark stayed there a week before attempting to give his message. He had his head screwed on the right way, or Reggie would never have hit on him as a messenger; and he wanted to get the pleasant hotel staff quite used to his harmless habits before he paid his visit; then he would feel certain that no footsteps behind him were intentional.
So for a week Mark was up at eight o’clock, and out all day long, with his food in a rucksack swung on his back, looking what he was, the usual British upper-class type – expensive, arrogant, active and harmless. His clothes, his papers, everything he possessed were no doubt duly examined in his absence but betrayed no interesting features.
Nor was it astonishing, though no doubt a pity, that he refused point blank the pleasant company of a fellow mountaineer – a German – who offered to join him on his excursions.
‘Sorry,’ Mark said with his clipped Hanover accent, ‘but I prefer climbing by myself.’ Saying ‘No’ politely but firmly was no difficulty to Mark. He was accustomed to saying it to eager boys at intervals, all day long; and he almost always said it pleasantly and without explanations. But the boys saw that he meant it – and so did the German mountaineer.
Mark chose Sunday night at dusk, on his return from a day’s climb, to go to the address Reggie had given him.
He slouched along the empty streets, a little hungry and 3thirsty, dusty and tired, looking like any other Tiroler on his way home from a day’s hard exertion. The house he wanted was in a narrow street of high old houses, behind the Goldene Dächl. The street rambled crookedly backwards like the movements of a crab, towards the river Inn. The ancient houses leaned across it, so that two long arms stretching from opposite windows might almost have met. The number Mark stopped at, had one distinguishing feature – a little statue of St. Florian set across the doorway holding a remarkably large watering-can with which to put out a solid sheet of flame enveloping a toy church.
Mark rang twice and knocked once as he had been directed to do. There was a long silence, and then he saw eyes looking at him through a grille, on a level with his own. ‘Herr Martin, ist er zu Hause?’ Mark demanded. No motion was made to open the door although the street behind him was quite empty. ‘I am a friend from England,’ Mark added in a low voice. The door opened softly inwards.
There was very little light in the hall, but enough to show to Mark’s astonishment that he was in a monastery, and speaking to a black-cassocked monk.
The door he entered by was shut and bolted before the monk spoke again. ‘This way,’ he said briefly. Mark followed him into the usual visiting parlour of a monastery. No room in the world, except the visiting room of a prison, looks less lived in.
The four square walls contained a few stiff chairs, a dusty desk, and a crucifix. The silence after the monk went out, closing the door behind him, was absolute.
For a moment Mark had the wish – almost the intention – of getting up and rushing out before anyone came back. He did not like professionally religious people, and it seemed to make nonsense of his message to have to give it 4to one. But the silence itself hemmed him in. The whole house was without the flicker of a sound, as if whoever was in it, had no need to be noticed – even by himself. It made Mark feel strangely aggressive and uncontrolled – two qualities which were highly unnatural and indeed antipathetic to him.
The door opened as noiselessly as it had shut; a tall vigorous figure of a man stood in front of him. A very virile figure for a habit, Mark thought to himself. The tall young monk had a handsome, innocent boy’s face, but with a quality of absolute remoteness unknown to Mark’s experience of men. Every boy Mark had known had something or other in common with every other boy; but this young man’s clear, colourless face looked withdrawn from the common circulation of mankind.
Yet even Mark, who hated priests and thought them generally frustrated, timid or tyrannical, had to admit to himself that this man on coming into the room brought something extra with him. ‘I am Father Martin,’ the priest said, holding out his hand to Mark, and giving his a quick warm clasp. ‘Do sit down, you look tired.’
‘I am not tired,’ Mark said, ‘but I am just off the Habig.’
‘Then you must surely have something to eat and drink before we begin to talk,’ Father Martin said, turning swiftly towards the door. ‘I will bring you something in a moment!’ Almost immediately he returned, carrying a tray with a tall slender bottle of Vöslauer and a plate of bread and cheese. Father Martin made no apology to Mark for the simplicity of the meal, but waited on him with an eager deftness. ‘Our own vineyards,’ he said with a pleased air. ‘We have a house in the wine district. We are Jesuits. Perhaps you are a Catholic as your friend Mr. Wintringham is?’
‘No,’ Mark told him, ‘I’m afraid I’m not even a 5Protestant – I’m nothing. You are the first Jesuit – in fact the first monk – whom I have ever met.’ Father Martin had greeted Mark with the gravity of a strange child. Now as he smiled for the first time, his face shone as if a lantern had been suddenly lit behind his dark wide-open eyes.
‘We have a bad reputation with those who do not know us,’ he murmured, ‘but eat! but eat! I have been up the Habig myself! He is a deceptive fellow and takes all one’s strength. We shall soon know each other better – for your friends are ours. We have the same aim.’
Mark frowned slightly. He had no wish to be rushed into any fellowship with a bunch of strange fanatics; nor did he think of himself as a person with any particular aim; he was only a person with a message.
The monk sat down opposite him, with his hands clasped loosely in front of him, long firm artist’s hands, Mark thought to himself, and he was pleased to notice that they were clean and well cared-for.
‘The same aim?’ he questioned, meeting the monk’s friendly but speculative eyes. ‘Well yes – haven’t we?’ Father Martin answered. ‘We know evil when we see it and we both see it in the Nazis. That is why you have come to us, is it not – so that together, we may do something to stop it?’
‘Politically,’ Mark said cautiously, because he thought that, politics limited him to the safe field of inaction, ‘I do think the Nazi system bad, but this question of being prepared to stop it – well, that’s rather a different and much more serious thing, isn’t it? My friend Reggie Wintringham simply wanted me to tell you that our Government is anxious – extremely anxious – about the way Hitler’s policy seems expanding, and that if you should know of any way in which one of our agents could be more or less securely assisted to remain in this country, so as to study the situation 6at first hand – well we should be much obliged for any help you could give us!’ Father Martin went on looking at him, with eyes that had ceased to smile. ‘Reggie told me he knew you very well,’ Mark went on after a pause, ‘and that I was to tell you he could send you someone you could use and trust as an agent. He would know the language like his own, and if he could be fitted into the situation before Hitler declared war against us – if he really means to have a war, or forces us to by further aggressions – he could remain here during the war, and perhaps send us out messages from time to time. Reggie simply wishes to be – well, rather beforehand with the situation; and I am only his messenger – to bring back any suggestions as to the placing of this person – when and where and how – that you have to offer. Reggie did not want to put anything in writing, and as I have often been here for my holidays, he thought I should be a suitable and unsuspected medium.’
‘You have often been here?’ Father Martin said slowly, after rather a long pause. ‘It means something to you then – Austria?’
‘Well yes,’ Mark admitted a little warily, because emotion always made him feel wary, and he really felt the loss of Austria deeply. ‘I am bound to say I am attached to this country. This sudden occupation of Hitler’s is like seeing a friend strangled by some ghastly thug! Yes, I do dislike the Nazis very much – I think – I may as well say – that we as a people think this whole absurd set-up here, or in Italy, an atrocious nuisance.’
‘They are very well trained,’ Father Martin observed, letting his eyes drop towards the floor. ‘You have taken account of that – perhaps in your country, besides disliking them?’
Mark pushed away his plate. He suddenly felt less hungry. ‘Yes,’ he said uneasily, ‘yes, of course we realize that! But 7in a sense, it’s easier to train any set of people in a Dictator rather than in a Democratic country.’
‘It is not easy to train any people under any system,’ the monk said gently, ‘but by force it is quicker.’
‘It’s strange,’ Mark said after a pause which Father Martin left unbroken, ‘how this chap Hitler got his power over a whole nation, and he’s not even a German!’
‘In spirit he is a German,’ Father Martin said gently, ‘and it is not strange that he has got this power over the German people. You see, he has had a vision, and it is a vision that they are anxious to share. The Germans are a mystical timid people – what they want is to know that there is something Invincible upon their side. They have never had – for many centuries – the one invincible Power they might have had – God. Now Hitler offers them an army, that is invincible – an army against God. This is a very powerful thing to have to fight, Herr Chalmers – unless you have God upon your own side!’ The silence deepened in the hot little room. It seemed almost to jostle Mark, sitting upon his small cane chair, as if there was no room for him and his unprotected civilized certainties. ‘When there is no very strong conviction,’ Father Martin added quietly after a pause, ‘there is not the strength or even in some cases, the desire to be trained. The Nazis will overrun the whole world – unless there are enough people left who have an opposite conviction! To fight passion you must have as strong – even a stronger passion.’
Mark said nothing. He did not like talking about passion. It seemed to him an indecent word, and as applied to English activities an indecent subject. Naturally he disliked the Nazis – he specially disliked Hitler – they were a nuisance upsetting Europe – threatening an unwanted war upon more or less comfortably seated victors. 8
Something had to be done about it – but what – and by whom? The speculative eyes fastened upon his own had a strange uncanny power of suggestion; without any words at all, they seemed to prompt in Mark a sudden, absurd flurrying idea – an idea that he might have to do something about it himself. Something more active and personally involving than just carrying a message from Reggie about another man’s job. He put this idea hastily behind him. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said hesitatingly, almost defensively, ‘that – er – religious people got mixed up in these things.’
‘We take no part in politics,’ Father Martin answered gravely, ‘so long as those who govern the land we live in do not interfere with the laws of God. The Nazis are interfering with the laws of God – so they have, you see, become automatically our concern. We are the soldiers of God and so they have become our enemies. As to stopping them – well, naturally since they are against the laws of God, we believe they will be stopped. But we have a certain responsibility ourselves as instruments. We too, like the Nazis, must be trained to serve what we believe.’
Mark dismissed the idea of any Divine interposition as childish; the idea of training was more sensible; but he believed himself to be already trained. He was an Eton master, and the Public School code was one he believed in, and had always practised. Father Martin was like a child, Mark thought, in his unexpected, rather drastic way of looking at things. He took a starting point that would be unobtainable to grown-up persons, as if his eyes were raw to objective fact; stripped clean of any personal pretensions. It was as if convention, good form, and above all the opinions and safeguards of interested persons, had not sullied the crystal clarity of his imagination. His consciousness of a fact – and the fact itself – stood alone, in the cleared space 9of his intelligence. ‘I suppose you think that the Nazis mean to attack England,’ Mark said crisply, with the intention of coming back into a world of maturity – that was at least his own, ‘and if they do, there are things that it would vitally concern us to know. I do not know what Reggie told you about me. I am a schoolmaster by profession – and of course I have never acted as a spy; and would not be in the least fitted for any such activities.’
‘One of God’s spies perhaps,’ Father Martin said, smiling his slow enchanting smile. ‘Children too need finding out! We must see what their opinion of themselves is – in case it is a wrong one, and needs changing. But perhaps children discover more in us than we ever succeed in discovering in them; and perhaps too, sometimes there is more in us that needs changing! I too am untrained in this particular field of political spying – but I have friends, who are wiser than I – and with two of them I propose to put you in touch. The placing of agents – and I may say the choice of such agents is a vital one – it cannot be decided on the spur of the moment, between ourselves as it were. Nor do I think your friend Reggie expected us to make any quick decision – he said, “You will find Mark Chalmers an excellent person with whom to consult about our plans!”’ His eyes rested on Mark with a new watchfulness. He was not trying to find out anything against him; only to make sure that Mark had something in himself that he would need.
To his dismay Mark found himself blushing, slowly and painfully. He could not remember having blushed since he was a small boy, and had lied to his father, who had – most disconcertingly – believed him. He had now the same unbearable consciousness of shame, as if he had lied favourably – about himself to Father Martin, who would also believe him – and Mark suddenly knew that the favourable 10version of himself was not true; and that he did not wish to deceive Father Martin into believing it.
Father Martin continued to observe him without comment. ‘The Nazis will not strike again yet,’ Father Martin said at last quietly, ‘you will have some time – perhaps even a year, to make ready. It depends of course upon how your country treats the Czechs. If you have decided not to stand by them any more than you have stood by us, you will have a few months longer. But you will also lose the Skoda works – the Rumanian oilfields – the route to Baghdad, and of course the finest small army and air force in Europe.’
‘But Hitler won’t try to take Czechoslovakia too, will he?’ Mark demanded incredulously. ‘The Czechs aren’t Germans – he has no excuse!’ ‘He will need no excuse. Nor are Austrians Germans, though they belong to the oldest and most cultured part of the Germanic race,’ Father Martin said quietly but with firmness. ‘They are Austrians – but this country is also the threshold of Czechoslovakia. The Nazis stand in the doorway now – the German army on the borders is prepared, and nearly ready to strike. And you think they will not strike? If a girl puts on her ball dress – is it not to go to a ball? Nevertheless you, presumably, Herr Chalmers, can take your holiday in peace. You will be safe – until war is declared. But you will remember – will you not – that no Austrian will ever be safe again, until Germany has been pushed back into her own borders? Our people are now slaves and without any security whatever. Neither of person, nor property, nor what Calderon calls “the patrimony of a man’s soul; for the soul belongs to God”. It is this that the Nazis dispute with us!’
‘A man must keep his honour by his courage,’ Mark said firmly, although as he said it he began to wonder how. Had his own honour been infringed by what the Nazis were 11doing to Austria, for instance? – or would that only occur if they started the same plan with his own small island; and in any case how was he going to use his courage to defend it?
‘Something quite new is happening,’ Father Martin said slowly, looking away from Martin, out of the dusty window, into the darkening summer air. ‘There used to be that way of keeping honour by courage. But courage has ceased now, to be by itself, a virtue. It has to be connected up with other qualities to-day! You do not – if I may say so – have to pay alone. You have to pay collectively – universally – for others, as well as for yourself. You see, it is not you alone – it is your nearest and dearest – or it is innocent unknown people, perhaps by the hundred, whom the Nazis will torture and kill – for one man’s act of courage. You will have to remember that it might be dangerous for these others, for you to be a hero. Courage is still courage – one has only to interpret it differently. It is, you see, what we use it for, that matters now! If it is better for the good of our cause that you should seem a coward, then you must seem a coward – and only if courage is required of you, for the sake of our cause can you afford to be a hero. It is required of us now to readjust the armour of our virtues, and sometimes even to fight without any armour at all.’
Far off in the distant body of the house, the silence broke under the harsh jangle of a bell.
Father Martin rose to his feet. ‘To-morrow,’ he said, ‘we will meet again. I will telephone my friends this evening so that they will join us. Please take a train at the Mittenwald Bahn to Seefeld. You will find me at the village post office. But do not greet me – only when I move, follow me. It is enough that you keep me in sight, until we reach some place where I can safely stop for you to catch up with me. Do not expect either to see me in a habit! 12
‘We will go out now – another way if you will follow me. If you have friends here – as I believe you have – remember what I have told you – no Austrians are safe! See them as carefully, as seldom and as secretly as possible. Never use any but public telephone boxes and do not mention names or addresses. We have no army but we are a people at war nevertheless!’
At the end of a long passage, Mark saw a procession of black habited figures passing two by two, into an open doorway. He caught a glimpse of a dim chapel, with red lamps lit before a faintly gleaming altar. Father Martin took him swiftly past the chapel door, but though they passed close to the silent procession, none of the monks looked back at them. They turned down a second, and then a third passage, before Father Martin opened a door that led directly into the street. Mark found himself standing alone close by the river. He felt strangely perturbed and irritated by this interview. He had thought that once he had given his message, he would be free and need trouble no more about the matter. But Reggie seemed to have involved him further than he had intended. It was as if, from his static, intelligent twentieth-century life, he had fallen into a dark, fantastic, swiftly moving medieval stream.
Were the Nazis really going to go on body-snatching small countries all over Europe, or were the Jesuits for purposes of their own exaggerating and cooking up the whole tiresome business? Of course, war was probable, or Reggie wouldn’t have sent him on any such errand. But this secret business – this curious sense of a suffocating masked horror about to spring again – was it actual? Had he got to take the priest’s word for it? And if it were true – then what part had he – Mark – to play in it? His holiday seemed to have shrunk away from him, into a child’s toy. He couldn’t just 13purposelessly climb, in the clean mountain air – for the fun of the thing – with the whole of Europe rocking beneath him – and if Europe, then sooner or later, that small island off it for which he was as its citizen – personally responsible – ‘the envy of less happier lands’. Mark was tired now, more tired than he had admitted, and with a deeper, spiritual fatigue. The Habig he told himself impatiently, had taken all he had; but something, not the Habig, had also robbed him. It was late. To-morrow everything would look differently. Suddenly he heard a shrill ghastly cry – and then another – and another – the road he was on seemed to palpitate and shake with the cruel sound. Mark had barely time to flatten himself against the wall of a house, before a large armoured car shot past him. The blaze of the car’s lights showed him a row of machine-guns, and beyond them, the stiff faces of a party of young Nazis – between them they held a stout little man, very neatly dressed, who wore spectacles. Mark caught the gleam on them from the reflected lights. Someone slugged the fat little man and he stopped screaming. The car vanished, and the dust blew back blinding and suffocating, against Mark’s face. The exhaust barked itself out, and there was no other sound but the swift flowing little river chuckling at his feet. He turned left sharply, into the lit town. The streets were very quiet, very empty. But there was a tension in the peaceful summer evening. Nobody strolled by, as if they were relaxed or aimless. Each passer-by moved quickly, and with the evident intention of getting home as soon as possible.
The hall porter at the Tiroler Hof was full of kindly concern for Mark. They had begun to be anxious. The manager had inquired. Mountaineers usually got back well before dark. His dinner too, where had the Gnädiger Herr had his dinner? A poor one no doubt! Would he like anything 14more? Had he seen the evening papers. Such a catastrophe, the sinking of a new French submarine. The loss of life too – terrible! Mark had not seen the evening paper.
He thanked the German porter, refused food, gave no information as to his own movements, and took the paper up to his room to read. A French submarine lost on its trial trip. With a sudden sense of cold actuality Mark saw Father Martin’s intent, unsmiling eyes again fixed upon his own. ‘Something quite new is happening.’ Again he heard the deep quiet voice saying: ‘It is required of each one of us now to readjust the armour of his virtues, and sometimes even to fight without any armour at all.’
A little man in spectacles screaming on his way to death. A French submarine sunk. A message which had been delivered but which seemed still to be going on inside his own unquiet mind! What was the link between them? ‘Oh Lord!’ Mark said impatiently, ‘oh Lord!’ It was not a prayer – it was an expletive, and not even a very satisfactory expletive. Nor was it with any feeling of satisfaction that the self-contained, and usually self-complacent, young schoolmaster sank at last into a troubled sleep.
Chapter 2
The day was drenched in light; the near and distant mountains shone like walls of amethyst and rose; but Mark, gazing out into the clear June day, felt a deep inner discomfort.
A man who has early in life adapted his powers with pleasure and success, to a certain fixed code which shows him to great personal advantage, seldom feels any sense of inner distraction. Obstacles in living, Mark had no hesitation in tackling – but to be himself an obstacle to his own living shocked as well as surprised him.
‘Am I going to be ill?’ he asked himself anxiously. Only once before, when he had fallen wildly, hopelessly in love, and for a very short time, could he remember having this shaken feeling of uncontrollable dismay. It was as if the goal ahead of him, though overwhelmingly desirable, was not within his powers.
There was, however, no special goal before him now and nothing in his life about which he need feel personally unhappy. He had not overdrawn his banking account. His holiday was beginning, not ending. Nobody that he disliked was determined to be with him.
On the contrary it was a fine day; he had already executed 16his mission, and part of the day at least, he expected to spend in no worse company than his own. His dejection however still clung to him, even after he had eaten a light breakfast and caught the little mountain train that was to take him up to Seefeld.
The second crop of hay was near its cutting. The long grass was brilliant with the last flowers; sheets of pink ragged robin, interspersed with dark columbines and gold and purple heartsease, filled the meadows to the brim. As the train climbed higher, sulphur-coloured anemones waved gracefully above the smaller flowers, while here and there an orchid stood erect and separate; sometimes a delicately carved spray of pure white blossoms with a fragrant scent; sometimes a wickedly natural bee or fly on a short vivid green stem. Vetches – yellow, purple, pink, orange and blood-red – tangled their way through the tall grasses. Marguerites, their gold and white heads clustered together like children planning a game, stood in groups about the meadows, and in the cuttings, in the cool shadow of a wet rock, a clump of lilies bloomed against a background of blue air.
Mark’s eyes moved upwards in restless longing, over the slopes of the mountains. He was going to waste a perfect climbing day he told himself – that must be the source of his discomfort. Here was Martin’s Wand, and there across the valley stood Hoch Eder, the highest peak of the group. Mark had climbed this mountain once in a thunderstorm. Never had he felt so small and vulnerable, as on that stark height, where the rain dislodged great stones, and sent them bowling down the mountainside at him. Just beneath Eder, was a curious small nameless pyramid, beneath which he had found shelter.
To the left of the valley, if he leaned far enough out of 17the train window, Mark could just catch a glimpse of that round bare-backed peak, the Hohe Mund. Mark had always liked the great shaggy Solitary, standing in lonely grandeur, with a long row of Seven Sisters streaming away from him down into the valley, at a respectful distance – rather like the kneeling daughters of a sculptured knight – well to the left of their spectacular brother. There was nothing between the Hohe Mund’s round head – touched with a light scattering of new fallen snow – and the deep blueness of the sky. It was still early in the morning; but the light had already had long hours to soak into every shape and colour of the summer day.
Station by small station, the peasants dropped in about their daily business from the fields below, or returned from having sold their animals in the market town of Telfs. These were Austrians at last – the same, unstressed, simple people Mark had always loved. They said ‘Grüss Gott!’ to him; and to each other; but not quite as they used to say it. Their eyes seemed to weigh Mark before they received his answer.
These were men and women who were used to dealing with major misfortunes. Storms; floods; houses struck by lightning; crop failures that meant half-starved winters. They could endure the Nazis, but they did not believe in them, except as misfortunes to endure.
What they believed in was their own plain lives and hearts; and the little church which was the centre of their village. They had no weapons nor were they trained to fight. They could do nothing to prevent the armed might of Hitler; but their slow hearts burned against him.
Their eyes meeting Mark’s, instantly divined that here was an Englishman – a potential enemy of the Nazis, and the old subtle friendliness Mark had always felt between himself and the peasants of North Tirol, deepened. The 18eyes of the women smiled at him; they let their children rest against his shoulder. The men smoked tranquilly in his presence.
Mark suddenly knew why he had come with Reggie’s message, he couldn’t have stayed away, and this discomfort that lingered about his heart, he knew too now, what that was – he could not be in this beloved country, and not share its silent pain.
Up through the short dark tunnel out into the golden day, from waterfall to waterfall the mountain train zigzagged and jerked its unhurried way. The little stations flickered past, each with a loved familiar name – Zirl – Hoch Zirl – Drei Heiligen – at last Seefeld, a morose flat little station, with its nearest beauty half a mile away.
Mark remembered the little slope with the larches crowning it, on the way to the village. The grassy slopes were a mass of pale pink crocus, their frail petals lifted to the day, as if to draw the strong golden light down into the depths of their living cups. The larches wore their first bright plumage; they looked so lightly tethered to the earth that they might at any moment have taken flight into the sunny air.
‘They are going to cut our larches down,’ an expressionless voice said close to him. Mark glanced quickly at the speaker, a heavily built farmer who had got out of the train with him. ‘Why?’ Mark asked. ‘Surely the woods are full of larches that would not be noticed – if they must cut larches down!’ The farmer shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do they care whether we notice our trees or not?’ he growled. ‘They are out to destroy whatever other men notice! And I tell you, Brother, that what they themselves notice, is really worth destroying!’ His heart spat out the words before his lips could stop them. He gave Mark a sudden suspicious glance and lurched away from him down the platform. 19
‘Of course I can’t do anything about it!’ Mark told himself savagely, as he turned down the road towards the post office. ‘I’m not even a soldier!’
There seemed at first no sign of Father Martin when Mark reached the centre of the village, so he sat down in front of the Café Lamm and drank a coffee. The post office was just opposite, and after a time, he saw a youth separate himself casually from a group that stood about its doors, and stroll off towards the mountains.
Mark finished his coffee, and started off down a parallel road, to join him. When he came out on the slopes, the figure of the village youth was just visible, some way ahead. At last on the verge of being swallowed up by the trees, the figure stopped, and Mark caught up with him. It seemed to Mark as if besides the disguise of his peasant clothes, Father Martin had made his very face look expressionless and solid. His erect disciplined figure slouched easily, like that of a man who has learned the path of least resistance to physical effort.
‘I wasn’t sure it was you,’ Mark told him.
‘It would have been dangerous to be too sure,’ Father Martin said with a smile, ‘but now we are safe. The pine trees will cover us as far as we go. No one from the village visits scenery unless his business takes him into it. We shall have to do a little climbing, but the slopes of the Wetterstein are easy going after the Habig.’ Puffs of sun-backed resin floated through the trees, the path wound too steeply up the mountainside for speech. They climbed for some time through the warm, scented silence, until the pines abruptly stopped, as if they had been cut off by a knife; and they found themselves standing in the blazing light of the high meadows.
There was no sign of human life, except an empty hut, 20set in a tapestry of flowers. Leaning against it, they could look down two thousand feet below them into the little motionless valley.
‘Here we can talk easily,’ Father Martin explained, ‘for there is no one to listen to us but an eagle, or a mountain hare; and they have no links with the Gestapo. Our friends will join us soon. One comes over the mountains from Larchenfeld – and one by train from Mittenwald.’ Father Martin sank into silence. He sat very still, looking at the great motionless shapes of the high mountains. Every small shining flower among the rocks beside him – stonecrop, or mountain buttercup, or the slim trembling harebells – fixed his fascinated gaze in turn. If a bird plunged or darted into the woods, it was as if his heart flew with them. The spiders’ webs alive and sparkling with dew on a bramble, found a fellow pattern shining in the monk’s heart. When Mark spoke to him, he brought his eyes back reluctantly from the beauty of the earth, with human friendliness, but with a less vivid attention than he had to spare for a squirrel or a butterfly.
‘Do you think,’ Mark asked abruptly, ‘that we belong to the earth?’ ‘But certainly,’ Father Martin said smiling, ‘do not you?’ ‘Not quite in the same way,’ Mark explained. ‘I belong – or feel as if I belonged – more to myself – or to mankind. However I am bound to admit that just at the moment I find myself preferring the earth – to the men on it!’ ‘Well, there you are,’ agreed the monk. ‘It is more obedient! I can imagine your feeling like that. Sometimes it is true one comes on something ramshackle. There is decay and destruction after a storm, for instance, but these get cleared away in time. About the earth one is always more or less sure that it will do its business. It is better trained than we are. A little extravagant here and there perhaps – or 21shall we say lavish! But almost every growing thing faces its difficulties with great ingenuity and courage. See how high these trees climb against the forces of wind and snow, and how clever they are to spread low, where they are most exposed, and as unconflictingly as they can against its terrible power. These small plants too about us – they have very little water and almost no soil to grow on – but look how they manage with snow and rock for their dwelling-place. Their beauty and their brightness one might fancy are the more brilliant because of their discipline.’
‘They grow in clearer air – and nearer the sun,’ Mark objected. ‘Those are also good reasons,’ Father Martin agreed cheerfully, ‘and yet I can believe also that struggle adds to glory in men or flowers. We have before us, I think, in Europe a time of very great hardship, and exposure to cruel forces. When I see part of creation performing with grace and endurance, I am reassured as to what man too may find within his powers.’
‘You can have too many difficulties and dangers,’ Mark said sombrely. ‘As we climbed up through the woods, I was thinking about Austria – what men must feel like under the harrow of absolute power – controlled by brutes like these Nazis – it must be a pretty horrible sensation – for these Tirolers are men!’
Father Martin said nothing for a moment, the light did not leave his happy eyes, but his jaw set resolutely.
‘What you say about the misery of our people is very true,’ he said quietly, ‘and it will become true I believe soon – for all Europe – perhaps for all the world. Yet this is also true, though one seldom has a chance to remember it – this beauty that we see, this inner rapture – the Life that is behind and breaks through the outer covering for the world – is a creative power. There is no end to it; and 22it is our mother. The Forces that make the world are at our disposal. You may say “Are they not also at the disposal of the Nazis?” but I do not think they are. Love is the only creative power there is. Hate is what the Nazis use, and I think – though hate is very powerful when it is used consistently and with modern equipment – that it is less strong than love. I can believe there will be in the coming years – for all their darkness – uprushes and breaks through, of just such stubborn beauty as nature gives us. There will be in the loneliness of strong hearts in danger, a passion for truth, a pure and single-hearted freedom! These forces in men have long been overlaid or hidden away from us, by selfish love of comfort – a Lie has plastered our moral standards into empty advertisements on public hoardings. We have not shared our love, or our comforts, with our poorer brothers, nor have we cared that they should be shared – or that they should be poor. Now we shall have to fight for virtue with our lives, sharing all we have as we go, and we shall see – when virtue is fought for – as much splendour in the heart of man, as in this summer day.’
Mark was silent. He had an uncomfortable feeling as if the virtue of being gloomy about the trials of his friends was perhaps not quite enough. Father Martin’s joy had about it a dual quality. It did not seem to release him from implicating himself in dangerous and disagreeable things, and yet kept him cheerful while he did them. It was as if his pleasure was no more irresponsible than his pity. When Mark was happy he forgot there were such things as duties; but he was not often happy. He was simply as he suddenly told himself, ready to do what he thought right when he knew what it was; if it did not go beyond what he thought sensible, and was his own concern. He was just about to explain what he felt about his duty and how it should – if it were to be 23done properly and in order, begin and end at home – when he saw that Father Martin’s attention had become fixed on the wood. ‘That must be Oskar Pirschl,’ he explained, ‘and I have as yet told you nothing about him – he is Pirschl the painter – you have heard of him perhaps – many countries have – he is a great artist.’
Mark nodded. He had heard of Pirschl. He had even been to an exhibition in Paris and seen some of his pictures. He looked with interest at the figure emerging from the pines. Just, Mark said to himself, what one might expect from his odd, savage, unkempt pictures. He didn’t know how to take a steep slope. He was an untidy sloppy fellow – just clean apparently, but as far as he himself was concerned, he might have been just dirty. His clothes were worn, and unmended. His boots had not been cleaned before the fresh dust of the day had coated them. Only one thing about him was trained, and that was his astonishing huge myopic eyes, looking at the world as though to devour it alive. The eyes that raked Mark had a fearful power. ‘Mein Gott!’ Pirschl exclaimed, as he flung himself panting down beside them, ‘you expect a man to have wings, Father, before he reaches Paradise. This is the third time you have brought me to the height of the Angels – and what merit do I acquire from it? None! My sins remain the same, my stomach kicks against my back, and I hate bird’s-eye views.
‘I knew it didn’t matter really how late I was,’ Pirschl went on in a tone of grim complacency. ‘I shouldn’t be the last anyhow.’
‘You are not late,’ Father Martin said gently. ‘Indeed we have the whole day before us, and the June light is long. Nothing need hurry us.’
Pirschl drew out a pipe and a tattered pouch from which he pulled a scanty chunk of ragged tobacco. He looked 24longingly at Mark. ‘Matches,’ he murmured. ‘War or no war! Nazis or no Nazis! I foretell the English will be the last in Europe to have matches! A thousand thanks. I am to keep the box? I suppose you have grasped that we are going to shed one by one – all our little conveniences – decencies and privacies? To save time I have shed mine already. Father Martin gave up his long ago, and the third of our friends who is about to drop down on us from the gap, never had any. But I rather wonder what you – and that neat little island of yours, are going to do – when the Nazis overrun the earth, and you have to give up all your comfortable ways!’
Mark stared at him – did he really suppose that there was any danger to Great Britain and the French Empire, from these deluded and obstreperous Nazi maniacs? Probably he knew nothing about politics, this artist – and had never even heard of the Maginot Line.
‘We are a small island,’ Mark gracefully admitted, ‘no matter what we own. But we are fortunate in this – that our next-door neighbour is our friend – whereas you had two next-door neighbours who were both your enemies.’
‘Ach!’ said Pirschl, puffing slowly and contentedly at his pipe, ‘so you see it! But better perhaps to have two enemies – than one friend, who isn’t one at heart!’
‘You think France isn’t our friend?’ Mark questioned a little superciliously. He did not himself care much for the French, but it had not occurred to him that the French had no particular affection for the English either. Besides, were not their mutual interests enough?
‘France hates you,’ Pirschl said, ‘perhaps just less than she hates Germany. That is no doubt what you are relying upon. But why should France not hate you? If there is a war – all her men have to fight! A nation of thirty-five 25million against a nation of sixty-five million – all armed; and you her Ally offer her your own security from invasion – and a blockade that only acts as an indirect weapon against a ruffian half over her threshold! You will send her your handful of amateur soldiers no doubt – not fighting on their own soil, and not fighting under her command. France gets too little out of it! All her country has to be overrun! What percentage of your men will fight, or know how to? and how much of your land and how many of your houses will be devastated compared to hers? The French are logical and accurate, they count up everything for – and everything against. I grant you, air warfare will lessen some of your securities. But you need some place in which to build armaments. The Skoda Works, for instance, of which you have just made so handsome a present to Hitler! These might have helped to arm you!
‘Then there is also Italy to consider – and be very sure Laval considers it! You are not even helping to maintain Republican Spain – which is the best Ally you could have had, and which when destroyed will expose the Flank of France. Why Hitler – he has nothing to do, but wait for his good friends, Mr. Chamberlain and M. Daladier, to finish his work for him! You have heard that the Nazis boast a secret weapon? I can tell you all about it. Hitler has found out how to make his enemies destroy their own friends! That is the secret weapon of the Nazis. Once I made a portrait of Hitler. It was very amusing. He sat well – thinking his own thoughts – and I saw them. One by one in his face – all lies! and he with the art of making them his slaves! Truth is no man’s slave – but lies – what magnificent servants they make, and how well they can be used, to carry out a man’s Wish Dreams! I saw all these serviceable lies in Hitler’s face – and the glow of the pleasure they gave him – and I 26
