HAVE NOTHING TO TELL YOU. I SHALL NOT SPEAK' 2

atya See let est I
Third instalment of a novel by a leader of I the French Resistance
Colonel Remy, D.S.O.
(Adapted from the translation by Viola Gerrard Garvin) Gerard, a young priest, at the summons of his Bishop, is travelling incognito on a mission behind the Iron Curtain. On a dangerous frontier he has courageously gone to administer the Last Sacraments to
dying peasant. Unaware that he has been seen leaving the house, he goes by rail to his next stopping place. But an agent of the police is not far behind. Now read on— DRONE upon his bed and I fully dressed, the priest lay sleeping. In his slumber his hand gripped the buckle that fastened his knapsack. A ring of the doorbell echoed through the silent flat. Girard didn't get up at once. He was covered in a cold sweat.
"If they had got in," he thought. "I would have been caught, and I feel so weak that they could have carried me out by the head and the feet. . . ."
The mirror over the dressing-table showed his face as white as chalk. Tip-toeing in his socks. he softly opened the door of his room and listened : no sound came from the Ilistairease, but perhaps that was a trick. Suddenly his eye fell on a letter slipped under the door and lying on the parquet floor. He clasped his hands on his breast, upbraiding himself:
"And a mere letter is enough to scare you . . ."
Overcome with grief and disgust he pulled his knapsack towards him. He opened it and took out the black box, which he contemplated while making no move to open it.
"You have pretended to accept with a cheerful heart the possibility of martyrdom, although the very idea of it revolts you and makes you tremble. fear. . . . You have deceivedyour masters, who have put their trust in you; you have deceived your friends who went out at the same time as you and whose equal, in your heart, you supposed you were. And God, what abont God in all this? God, who has made you His priest and in so doing has put Himself into your hands. What are you doing with Him? Why did you not have the honesty to cry out to Him: 'Lord, I am not worthy!'" Unnoticed, the tears streamed from his eyes. He stood up and, keeping the black box clasped to his breast, he fell on his knees in front of the ivory crucifix which watched over the head of the bed and murmured haltingly:
"My God, my God, why hart thou forsaken me?"
A KEY turned in the lock I-I and an old lady came in. She picked up the letter and studied the envelope; she recognised the writing. She was on the point of opening it when she noticed the priest.
"What! You're awake already?" she exclaimed.
"Someone rang three times running," interrupted Girard.
"That's nothing. Unfortunately there's something much More serious; the house is being watched. I don't know if it's anything to do with you, but I'm afraid you may have been followed."
"Then that's what it was," said the priest quietly.
"What, then?"
"Nothing. A feeling of distress got hold of me suddenly. It's gone."
"I've warned my friends," said the old lady. "This is what has been decided on. First, you will change your clothes, because the man who is on guard in the street is sum to have a description of you. Luckily, I've kept my brother's things. Our friends will provide you with false papers. Oh, yes! they asked me whether you had a passport photograph. Good! That makes things simpler."
The old lady caught sight of the envelope that she had put down on a table, and she opened it. "Poor Elisabeth!" she murmured, shaking her head. "Dear, dear!"
"It's from my best friend," she explained a little later. "Three of her sons were killed on the Russian front during the war. She had her husband left, and the last of her sons.... The militia men have come and carried them off to the country. That means they've been put into concentration camps and separated from one another. My friend has been expelled from her house. She is as old as I am, she is ill, she is dying of hunger and grief.
"Do you know, Father, what I ask of God, in my prayers? I beg him to bring us war! And I declare, I'm not the only one. . . Of course we know that, with all these new weapons which the newspapers talk about, it will be terrible. and that hundreds of thousands of innocent people will be massacred. But we have no hope, other than that, of regaining our liberty."
SHE fell silent, then asked Li diffidently: "Can you tell me what preparations they are making on the other side to liberate us?"
The priest smiled again, but this time with great tenderness and pity.
"I'm not a man of war, madame, and I hope with all my heart that the liberty you long for will be restored by some other means than that frightful thing, which can only bring evil in its train. I am only a humble priest, and if God has sent me here, it is to tell you in His name : 'I leave you My peace, I grant you My peace.' The peace of man is merely a passing from one war to the next. a disastrous state, teeming with the germs of new conflict . . . the peace which our Lord Jesus Christ offers us is quite different."
"Forgive me, Father." said the old lady, blushingly. "Of course, I knew that I was wrong. But it is so hard, so hard....If we could see the tiniest light at the end of this tunnel, that day by day grows darker and more impenetrable ..."
She wiped her eyes. then went on vigorously: "But its a question of you—you! who have come from so far to engulf yourself in this hell. My friends admire you; they'll do all in their power to help you."
Looking the priest over with a critical eye, she decided that his new clothing could pass.
"May I inquire what you have in your sack?" she requested.
The priest opened his knapsack: "Look," he said, simply.
He showed her the scanty linen with which he was provided and opened the black box. Deeply moved, his hostess silently gazed at the stole, the altar-stone, the chalice, the pyx, the paten, the corporal which he displayed upon the table, together with the flask containing the holy oils.
"And it is because you bring all this, which allows us to behold our God again, that they are hunting you? These men know nothing . . ."
She stood up.
"You must not take that sack with you; it will be in their description of you, if you have been followed. I will look after your linen and you shall take this precious box, which I'm going to wrap in paper."
As she did so, she added: "I'll leave the house first and you will follow about twenty paces behind me. We've a fair way to go."
"T WAS in prison here, at IVeszprern, at the same time as our Bishop, in December, 1944," Mathias told Girard.
The old lady had gone away again during the night. Gerard was left alone with the man who was going to act as his guide.
"It was the seventh, the day of St. Ambrose. They made us all come out of our cell, where there were sixteen of us. In an underground room of the prison we .joined some fifteen others, laymen, like ourselves. Upon a table there were a candle, a surplice and a stole. The militia men who were guarding us had loaded their tommyguns. Our Bishop entered, accompanied by his warder, who was also armed. Behind him came ten priests and ten others who were to be ordained. Every man among them had his gaoler with him. After the ceremony we were conducted back to our cells."
"What has become of these new priests?" Gerard inquired.
"I don't know. Any more than I know why they liberated me."
"And your Bishop?"
"Our Bishop has become Cardinal Mindszenty, since then," replied Mathias curtly. A long silence fell.
Mathias got up and, going to the window, parted the curtains.
"Snow has begun to fan again," he said, and came back to sit down. Then he went on: "The Communists were afraid of him : they did all they could to prompt him to escape, using tricks as well as threats. Do you know what he said, some minutes before they took him off. to prison? He said.
" 'I mount guard for God. for the Church and for the country. because historic service to my people, perhaps the most totally deserted in the world, asks that duty from me. When I see the sufferings of my people, I hold my own fate cheap.' "
MEANWHILE the old v lady, o u t of breath with her long walk, had come to a stop on the landing outside her flat. She opened her handbag and turned the key in the lock. Before she could put on the light a hand was clasped over her mouth. The door was closed behind her, then someone switched on the electric light. One of the policemen snatched her handbag away and emptied its contents on to the table. "Where is he? Where have you taken him?" demanded the chief of police.
"Who are you talking about?"
At a sign from the man, the clothes the priest had been wearing were placed with his knapsack on the table.
"Are you going to tell us where he is?" shouted the chief of police.
The old lady looked him straight in the eye and did not answer. He slapped her face so furiously that her arms flailed the air before she collapsed and fell to the floor.
"Will you speak?" the man roared, quite beyond himself.
The little man in the fur cap signed to him to be quiet, and gallantly held out a hand to his victim.
"Come, Madame," he said. "get up. No one has any intention of hurting you.... But it is in your interest to understand that we need a little information about this person who has abused your hospitality. Do you
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realise he is a spy who is working against your country?"
"A spy. He?" exclaimed the old lady, biting her tongue with the very words.
"You see. then you do know him!"
"I have nothing to tell you. and I shall not speak."
The little man contemplated her with amusement for a moment and opened his cigarette case.
"I have the impression that we are losing time," remarked the little man casually, after ejecting the first puff of smoke through his nostrils. Then it was that the occupants of the building, who had not dared to stir since the visit of the police. 'heard a long moan which came from the third floor.
(To be continued) "God's Secret Agent" will be published in lune by Arthur Barker Ltd., under the title of "The Messenger."