The Secret Vanguard (12 page)

A man was climbing in; he looked at her impassively, without wariness or anxious calculation; he might have been a tradesman who would presently sell her cheese or soap. She saw wrinkles round his eyes; she saw that he was soaking wet; she realized that she had instinctively seized the only object – the only possible weapon – in the truck. It was a bicycle. And now he had both elbows and one foot in. She swung the absurdly clumsy missile behind her hip and flung it. The bicycle vanished from the truck. The impassive and businesslike man was lying in a heap by the door.

A good shot, thought Sheila – but surely he could be only momentarily laid out. She was wondering how to deal with him further when she saw another man.

The truck was moving at the equivalent of a smart trot; this man was in the act of springing for it as it passed. Again an unexcited person: the nightmarish quality of the thing was chiefly in that. He sprang and was in the doorway – and she had no weapon this time. There was nothing left in the truck to use as a weapon against this man – except the other man. And the other man was up on his hands and knees, dazed and in unstable equilibrium. With one great effort of the will Sheila kept her eyes open. She kept her eyes open and kicked hard at his chin. She heard two cries. She was alone in the truck.

And very sick. But that was not a permissible relaxation yet. She leant out of the door and looked down the line. The truck was moving steadily but scarcely gaining speed. Strung out along the line were several more men: the nearest of them she thought she recognized as her first acquaintance Dousterswivel himself; the others were merely menacing forms descried through the sheeting rain. More men. And that she had much fight left in her she doubted. For women, she said to herself, this sort of thing can only be a tour de force. An idiotic phrase; she tried to grin at it; the attempt produced a spasm of nausea. Sheila clutched at the side of the truck to steady herself – and the side of the truck moved. A door. It was as simple as that. A stout sliding door: she heaved it to and in darkness broken only by narrow ventilating slits felt suddenly secure. She heard a shout or two; sensed presently a quickening pulse in the wheels beneath her. Her life depended on what happened to the gradient which these wheels were now traversing. Nevertheless she felt comparatively safe: comparatively safe but again very sick. She pressed her hands on her belly and felt something hard. It was in her pocket; it was the little pistol. In all these hectic minutes its existence had been completely forgotten. She had used a bicycle and a human body instead. Sheila sat down on the jolting floor of the truck and laughed. She felt much better this time.

In Great Britain the standard rail is now sixty feet long. Sheila considered this upwelling of information from the
Wonder Book of Trains
and decided that it was trustworthy. So every time the wheels gave a quick double clank beneath her she had covered twenty yards – something less than the length of a tennis court. She listened. Clank-clank…clank-clank. She imagined herself driving past a tennis court in a car at that speed. The truck, she concluded, was now moving at a comfortable twenty miles an hour.

The truck was moving; she had contrived to bolt the door and it was as good as an armoured car. But there were various possibilities of being defeated yet. That efficient-looking six-wheeled vehicle might contrive to hug the line until the gradient ceased. Or one or more of the enemy might be clinging like limpets to the outside of the truck now. In which case, thought Sheila – and became aware that something was slowing down in her head.

Clank-clank…clank-clank. The truck was losing speed; it had travelled perhaps a mile and now it was coming to a stop – but gradually, as if it was on a perfectly level track. She decided that she must risk the limpets and open the door to investigate. So she took the pistol in her right hand and with her left drew the bolt and tugged. Nothing happened; it was jammed fast; she had a panic thought that it had been secured from without and that she was a prisoner once more. Then she saw that it was less alarming than that; a long iron crowbar which she had failed to notice had fallen and was causing the obstruction. She pushed it away and tugged again. The door slid back easily. She found herself looking at a mountain torrent a hundred feet below.

A bridge. She crossed to the other side of the truck and opened the corresponding door. The same prospect presented itself: a dizzying plunge to rock and tumbling water. The line ran single and here was carried on some invisible span across a gorge which ran precipitously away on either hand. She looked backwards: the line she had travelled ran level for some hundreds of yards and disappeared round a bend. She looked ahead: immediately beyond the bridge the gradient began again and the track appeared to run gently downwards in a straight line.

For a person armed it was a position of uncommon strength. But the situation would have been better still if the truck had traversed the further dozen or so yards that would take it down the succeeding incline: the gorge was something that neither car nor tractor could negotiate, and a few miles more of rapid movement would give her a commanding lead. Sheila looked at the crowbar, at the narrow strip of projecting bridge at her feet, at the remote and foam-flecked water below. Nothing suicidal was involved; she had a sound head for heights. It was still possible that an enemy was lurking, say, on the roof, but that must be risked. Sheila took the crowbar and climbed cautiously out.

Without the long heavy piece of steel to manipulate it would have been simple enough: a resolute crabwise movement facing the side of the truck. This even though it was raining still. But with the crowbar to carry it was horrid; only the memory of the impassive men on the trail behind got her the interminable length of the truck. But she had made it. And she put the crowbar between rail and wheel and levered as she had seen railwaymen do.

The truck was immovable. Concentrating her powers to overcome its inertia, she took a deep breath – too deep a breath. Her head swam and the skeletal affair that was the bridge jerked in crazy reticulations beneath her, wobbled like an ancient movie. It passed; she levered and the wheel gave; she levered again and no more effort was needed than for jacking up a car. She had levered the truck almost to the end of the bridge when the crowbar, catching in a join of the rails, wrenched itself from her hand and went over. She saw it twist and plunge, drawing the eye down with its own sickening speed like a bomb falling from a plane; she heard it ring on rock. And then she put her shoulder to the truck and pushed and the bridge was behind her. She ran forward just in time to scramble in. A voice – her own, Dick Evans’, someone’s from the remote past – said aloud: ‘Another free trip.’ She lay down gasping.

And it was a marvellous gradient; it went on and on – gently. Sheila remembered winding papier mâché tunnels, through the darkness of which one glided in a little boat past brightly lit tableaux: part of her childhood like the switch back on which she had formed her ideas of the Forth Bridge. She remembered sinister versions of the same thing in Shelley: psychotic wanderings through the entrails of lord knows what. She lay in a semi-darkness on the floor of her truck, aware in snatches of forming and dissolving pictures without. Sunlight – there was sunlight again, shafts and pools of it, washes of sunlight moving among moving cloud-shadows on the braes. And, magnificently, the truck went on and on, never slackening speed, never gathering speed to any point of alarm. Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness: she would not have been surprised to roll quietly into the station of any of these… Sheila heard an engine whistle.

You could not brake these trucks: or only from the line and when they were almost at a standstill. If a train was advancing upon her on this lonely single line it was just bad luck: there seemed nothing whatever to be done. Except jump – in which case she might survive long enough to tell her story: a pretty delirious story it would be taken to be. She might even survive indefinitely in a maimed sort of way. Sheila scrambled to the door and looked out.

The train was on another line, the main line presumably of which this was a branch. It was a passenger train, travelling in the same direction, faster. And although the lines appeared to converge there was no danger of a collision; the train would always be some way ahead. But it was slowing down; it had stopped; and in the same moment the line on which the truck ran curved, and Sheila saw a station ahead. The train stood puffing by a little platform. Her truck was lolloping up to join it or to trundle alongside. A bit of a bump perhaps, but luck unspeakable nevertheless. She was going to contact the outer world.

But the train had lingered only seconds in the station; now it was pulling out again. Incredible that the roving truck had been spotted by neither guard nor driver. Incredible that nothing was going to be done. Sheila took the pistol from her pocket, held it out of the door and pulled the trigger. It jerked in her hand, made a sharp report of sorts – but nothing to the point. The train was beyond her reach.

But there was the little station: a stationmaster perhaps, or people who had got off. And the truck was slowing down again. With luck it would run into a siding. Sheila debated the best way of coping with a severe jolt; she decided to keep away from the sides of the truck, to lie prone and relaxed in the middle.

The jolt when it came was a splintering crash, but she felt no more than unpleasantly shaken. She was out and on the single platform, looking at a single shed. Again it was no more than a little halt, and it appeared wholly deserted. But a well-made road led away from it and at a quarter of a mile’s distance rose the roofs of a tiny hamlet. She had come out of it all not badly – with unbroken bones and with her enemies miles behind on the other side of that precipitous gorge. Sheila looked in the direction whence she had come. She looked – and felt invisible hands close round her heart. For trundling towards her down the gradient was another truck, the second of the two that had stood in the station up the line. She hadn’t thought of that.

If possible she must make the hamlet. But what would a Scottish hamlet be against some half dozen armed men? It was something like Edinburgh Castle she wanted now. Or a platoon of Scots Guards.

Even the hamlet she might not have the chance of gaining. Sheila’s eye went back to her truck and she debated making a stand in it. Surely such trucks – Groping in her pocket, she dropped once more to the line. What she had to do took under a minute; she climbed up again, ran down the platform and round the shed.

She was not quite alone. Somebody had after all got off the train and was sitting damp and steaming in the fitful sunshine. It was a shabby old man in a Glengarry bonnet, with a fiddle across his knees and a little pile of paper-covered books beside him.

And Sheila saw that he was blind.

The old man rose as Sheila ran towards him; he rose and held out the topmost of the pile of books. ‘Poems,’ he cried. ‘The poems of a Moray loon.’ He held the book higher in a trembling hand. ‘A fiddler’s philosophy. One shilling.’

In less than a minute the pursuing truck would be in the station, and the words were fantastic and remote enough. Nevertheless, Sheila stopped as if conjured: it was like a sudden immemorial spell. Employed to halt and coax amid a bustle of trains and travellers, the voice was vibrant with the skill of the minstrel in arresting the mere violent tumult of the hour:
Barons, écoutez-moi, et cessez vos querelles
… The spell lasted a second only, but it drove her to speech. ‘I’m hunted by men coming down the line,’ she said rapidly. ‘They mustn’t get me. How big is the village – will there be help there?’

There was an instant’s silence. The blind fiddler’s head and hands moved irresolutely. It was as if he were feeling his way through some impalpable barrier. He spoke in a new voice. ‘Is it the redcoats?’ he asked. ‘Is it the redcoats that are out and after you, lassie?’

‘It’s Germans, fiddler – German spies.’

His head moved again. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘the redcoats and they of Hanover.’

The man was crazed. Sheila turned to run on, but as she did so his hand closed fiercely on her arm. ‘Redcoats and Hessians,’ he said: ‘they may go beating wi’ their drums and fifes up an’ doon the Royal Mile, but they’ve sma’ skill on the heather. Dinna gang to the clachan, lassie; keep to the braes.’ He swung her round with a strength that added to the impression of something preternatural in his character; his other hand, wavering and still holding the book, went out before him. ‘Or gang lounlie through the wood.’ His face took on a look of simple cunning. ‘Haud to the wood, lassie, and when they come speiring I’ll gie them merryhyne.’

She broke away, only half-comprehending his words. But her glance had followed his extended arm and she saw that to the right of the road the country fell through clumps and skirts of pine trees to pine woods of considerable extent in a shallow valley below. Gang lounlie through the wood. Go softly through. A better course perhaps than to seek shelter with a few old wives in the cottages ahead. And too far ahead – whereas the outskirts of the wood she could gain. Sheila ran out of the station yard and made for the nearest clump of trees. It would have been useful if she could have asked the old man where they were. But at present life was a matter of split seconds. And as she ran she felt that it had been this for a very long time. She was tiring.

But the skirts of the wood received her. She swung round a line of trees and caught a last glimpse of the station. She could see the roof of the second truck, just rattling in; she could see, beyond the shed, the blind fiddler fallen to pacing the platform. Harry McQueen: suddenly she remembered his name. An old man, no older seemingly now than then, fiddling on Kingussie station when she was a child…

The picture vanished; increasingly the silent trees were moving to their stations like a rearguard behind her. She heard a crash and hard upon that a single voice calling orders. And then, bizarre and thrilling even as she ran, there came the sound of the fiddle. A single note, a faltering bar, and then a tune.
Johnny Cope
. Blind Harry was meeting his redcoats boldly indeed.