“Why, yes, surely I know it,” said Mirek.
“My friend said it was lovely walking country there. We like to walk. Do you think we could get rooms at this Riavka hut? Do you think the Students’ Union would try to arrange it for us?”
They were climbing steadily into the little town of Stribro.
“It means silver,” explained Mirek, as they wound their way into the square, and turned sharp right out of it, to uncoil in a long spiral down the mount on which the town was built. “Here there were silver mines.” And to Tossa, without turning his head, he said cheerfully: “Yes, they can arrange it. I shall do it for you. For you I shall do everything you wish.”
And not one of them had questioned this sudden detailed knowledge she had displayed of the region to which they were bound; no one had marvelled, and it was too late to marvel now. She had the whole expedition in her hands. They were going where, for her own inscrutable purpose, Tossa wished to go.
Mirek showed them Prague. Seeing they had tamely submitted to staying only one night in that delectable city, it was amazing how much he did manage to show them. The shopping centre, based firmly upon the great, broad thoroughfare of Wenceslas Square and the two streets forking from its massive foot, was concentrated enough to be viewed quite easily and quickly. But how did he manage to get them to Hradcany, that magical castle-quarter walled like a town within the fortress ramparts high above the Vltava river, and also out to the Mozart Museum in its lost, enchanted garden south of the town? It was impossible in the time, but Mirek did it. He showed them the little monastery of Loretto, long monkless, with its honeyed carillon of bells and its blinding treasury. He showed them the eleventh-century hall deep beneath the castle, austere, imaginatively restored and imperishably beautiful, after which all the loftier and later layers were anticlimax. And late in the evening he showed them a very handsome dinner, and two tiny night-clubs, each with an incomprehensible but apparently sophisticated cabaret.
They fell asleep in the beds Mirek had found for them, with a picture of Prague behind their eyelids, shabby, neutral-tinted, mouldering, gracious, imperial, drab, flamboyant, invulnerably beautiful; so old that it was indifferent to criticism; so assured that it turned a deaf ear to praise. The dirty industrial quarters hanging on its skirts were merely the soiled ruffles of an empress, dulled by one day’s wear. The fall of the tumbling terraced gardens beneath the castle, encrusted with stone statuary and grottoes and galleries, was a cascade of lace on the imperial bosom, heady and fresh as the acacia sweetness that hung on the night air.
And the next day they headed eastward for Slovakia.
They drove down out of the Javornik hills at leisure from their night camp, and into the town of Zilina. Beyond the civic buildings in the town square the crests of farther hills hung in the sky, pointed, shaggy, forested, the cones and pyramids of the Little Fatras. Mirek, moved to ecstasies of local patriotism as soon as he stood on Slovak soil, had whiled away the miles by telling them the story of Janosik, the Slovak outlaw-hero, who took to the hills here with his eleven mountain boys, in revolt against the feudal tyranny that kept his countrymen serfs. Born in the Fatra Hills, he died at last on a gallows at Liptovsky Mikulas, and after him all the mountain boys died tragic deaths. No happy ending for them; the usual comparison with Robin Hood, said Mirek a little didactically, foundered on that rock of martyrdom. There were many songs about Janosik, and Mirek knew them all. It took the waft of coffee from the foyer of the hotel to silence him.
“You’d like the second breakfast here? We’re not in a hurry to-day, and the next stretch is wonderful. You will want to stop and take pictures.”
They agreed that they could do with coffee. Toddy turned the van from the road, and let it run gently into the parking-ground along the hotel frontage.
“Look! An MG!” Christine halted them delightedly to admire a car from home. “No GB. Diplomatic plates! Somebody from the embassy must be here.”
“Idiot!” said Toddy amiably. “It doesn’t have to be an English owner. Probably United Arab Republic, or something. Half the world buys British when it comes to cars, especially semi-sports jobs like this.”
“There’s a suitcase on the back seat, anyhow.” Christine had already caught the Czech habit of walking all round unfamiliar cars and examining them closely, without the least embarrassment or offence. “So he’s not staying here, only halting like us. Maybe he smelled the coffee, too. What’ll you bet I can’t pick him out in the kavarna?” She had adopted the Czech word for cafe, it came more naturally now than the French; and since in English both were borrowed, why not use the native one?
“If you know the code,” said Toddy, “you can tell by the registration letters which embassy it belongs to. Do you know, Mirek?”
“It is someone from the British Embassy,” said Mirek at once.
Tossa’s warm, rose-olive complexion protected her from betrayal by pallor or blushing, and her silences were quite inscrutable. She looked the MG over, and dismissed it from her notice. “Come on,” she said impatiently, “I’m famished for that coffee.” And she led the way in through the cool, dim foyer, shoving the kavarna door open with a heave of her shoulder, and marching across the room to appropriate a table by the window.
“Mostly Czechs,” reported Christine confidently, looking round with interest as she sat down at the marble- topped table, scaled to allow half a dozen people to spread their elbows comfortably.
A white-aproned waiter came bustling to take their order. They left the talking to Mirek. Their only complaint against him was that he made everything too easy; but the time was coming when he would leave them to their own limited resources.
“Got him!” Christine proclaimed with satisfaction. “Don’t look round yet, he’s looking this way. In the corner away to the left, close to the mirror. Wait a moment, I’ll tell you when you can look. But that’s him! He couldn’t be anything but English. Mirek, do
“Hurry up!” protested Toddy. “I’m getting a stiff neck, trying not to turn round. Can I look yet?”
“Not yet. I’ll tell you when.
She was right, of course. There was only one person there who had to be English. You could almost say he had to be an English diplomat. Quite young, about thirty, dressed for the country, but so correctly that he retained a look of the town. Nondescriptly fair, rather lightly-boned among these solid square Czechs and gaunt, rakish Slovaks, withdrawn, gentle, formal. The cut of his sportscoat gave him away, and the Paisley silk scarf knotted in the throat of his open shirt. Even the way he drank his coffee was unmistakably English.
“Funny!” sighed Toddy. “You never notice anything special about people when they’re at home. Man, does it stick out here!” He plumped his chin into a resigned palm, groaning. “I give up! I bet from over there I look just like
