Every morning, an hour or so before the dawn, Otto drew from the well, now in scoured pails from the house, the water-supply for the day. And every morning, the water drawn, he would leave the pails to stand while he made a quick scouting detour which covered a radius of perhaps a mile.
For seven mornings he did this—and never varied by more than a minute the time he took between leaving the cellar and returning to it. But upon the eighth morning it was different: he was gone upon his scouting tour for an hour and more.
For this was to be their last morning in this place, and to-morrow was the tenth and last day of the time-limit he had given Altinger; the day when he had warned that he would be in Washington.
And he was afraid. Though the Machine, for all that he had seen of it, might have been non-existent, he seemed to sense its existence all the time! He knew it, and he knew how it worked. He could feel the net which he could not see. He kept remembering the man called Bruckhaus who had deserted from the Altinger unit, not to give information to the enemy but because he had fallen out with Altinger and was afraid of him. All that was left of Leo Bruckhaus now was a picture in the files of a New Jersey paper, taken before the police had pulled his charred body from the car which had crashed over a sixty-foot embankment and burst into flames and given grounds for another coroner’s lecture upon the evils of speedy and alcoholic driving. . . .
That had been in his early days with Altinger; but he had seen and heard enough of the organization of the hunt to know how the Machine worked—with infinite care and speed and expense and inexorability. It had cost a lot of money to catch Bruckhaus, and the energies of very many men, quite a number of whom had not even known exactly who had been paying them. Bruckhaus had travelled across the continent, zig-zagging with care and intelligence—but it had only taken them a few days to catch him. And Bruckhaus had not been a source of possible danger to the Machine, but merely a rebel who must, pour encourager les autres, be disciplined. . . .
He came back at last, having seen nothing untoward. He went back to the well and picked up the pails and went into the house by the side door they had opened and was presently in the cellar.
He set down the pails and went back up the steps and leaned out through the door and pulled back into place the heavy chair he had set there to hide the entrance and bolted the door itself.
Clare was still sleeping. She lay upon her side, with her cheek pillowed upon her hand. He stood and looked down at her and his heart seemed to swell inside his body until it became impossible to breathe and he found, incredibly, that there were tears in his eyes.
He moved softly away and began upon the business of preparing coffee. He looked around the bare, subterranean place and did not feel it now as potential trap but as a lovely and private safe which housed, beyond all possibility of theft by god or man, a personal ecstatic happiness which exceeded belief.
They breakfasted—at the table and on the chairs which Otto had brought down here upon the second day. It was the last breakfast and they turned it into a feast, and after they had eaten Clare made more coffee and they sat over this for a long time and talked.
Clare said: “You’re worried, Nils. I mean more worried. Tell me.”
Otto stared at her blankly—and then laughed. He said:
“It is frightening to love a . . . a sorceress. But I do not mind.” He gave her a cigarette and then a light for it.
“Tell me,” she said, and did not smile.
He said: “I cannot hide anything. So I will not try. . . . I am worried because of danger—mostly for you, but a great deal for me. You know, before I had you, I used not to care much about danger for myself. But now I do—very much indeed: now, if I am killed, I do not have you any more. And if you . . . if anything happens to you, I do not have me any more. . . .”
She said: “Darling! I love you. Tell me.”
He drank more coffee and lit a cigarette and made up his mind. He said:
“I have thought about it, and thought. They have not found us here because we were away from them before they were ready and we did not move about but stayed in one hidden place. But this does not mean that they will not find us when we go from here—when we try to go, to Washington—when . . .”
He checked himself and she looked at him and said:
“To-night, you mean?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I mean that. I mean that wherever in this country we start from to try to reach Washington, there they will be to attempt to stop us. On the roads and on the railway stations and the wharfs and at the airports and . . .”
She laughed at him. “All right,” she said. “You mean everywhere. Very well, sir, you’ve warned me. Anything else?”
He had to smile at her. He said:
“Repeat the Plan of Operations. That is an older.”
She said, staccato: “Leave here eight p.m. On the road, split up but keep in sight Take eight-forty-five Oakland bus from Monterey. In Oakland keep split and I follow you roundabout way toward airport. When I get sign from you, we confer. If everything’s all right so far proceed separately into airport, mingling as much as possible with other passengers. Buy separate tickets to Washington. I must watch you constantly for signs.”
Otto put his arms about her and drew her close and kissed her. The apprehension was upon him again, lying across his lungs like a heavy weight.
The hours dragged, but they killed them. With the razor he had bought on his last trip to the shops, Otto shaved off the nine-day stubbly beard. It had not grown fast enough to do other than make him untidily conspicuous in such company as that of aeroplane passengers, and this must not be. As it was, he must trust to the polo coat and a clean, new, dollar-fifty yachting-cap to make him a reasonable figure. The cap would cover his hair and the big coat his body and he would change his gait: he would stoop a little and exaggerate his limp and perhaps . . .
A thought struck him and he called softly to Clare. He said:
“The little women’s store where you bought the blouse? Does it sell coats—big coats—overcoats?”
They were not in the cellar; they were in the house above and Otto was using the spotted, peeling mirror in the bathroom. Clare stood in the doorway now. She said:
“I’m not sure. . . . Let me think. . . . Yes, they do. I saw two atrocious things hanging up there behind the counter. Why?”
Otto grunted. The blade in the razor was pulling abominably. He said:
“Describe to me the less atrocious. I must go there and buy it for you. It will be good.”
He watched her smile at him in the mirror, and his heart turned over as it always did at this smile. She said:
“We should’ve thought of that before. But I will go, blockhead! You’ve been to the village three times—I’ve only been once. And there’s no danger there—and you’re always giving lectures about not doing anything conspicuous! How unremarkable d’you think you’d be buying a coat for a girl in a little place like that!” She came away from the door and stood on tiptoe close to him and dropped a kiss upon his neck.
They couldn’t stay still. They tried to keep in the cellar as they had upon other mornings, but they couldn’t: they had to keep moving about.
They were in what must have been the dining-room now. Otto sat upon the table and whittled with his knife at a piece of wood which was taking on the rough outline of an aeroplane. Clare was on her knees by the shuttered window: she was looking at the carving upon the heavy chest which stood beneath it.