Mr. Standfast

J >> John Buchan >> Mr. Standfast

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

'Well, but a treatise on English life in time of war won't do
much good to the Boche.'

Sir Walter shook his head. 'Don't you realize the explosive stuff
that is lying about? Ivery knows enough to make the next German
peace offensive really deadly - not the blundering thing which it
has been up to now, but something which gets our weak spots on
the raw. He knows enough to wreck our campaign in the field.
And the awful thing is that we don't know just what he knows or
what he is aiming for. This war's a packet of surprises. Both sides
are struggling for the margin, the little fraction of advantage, and
between evenly matched enemies it's just the extra atom of
foreknowledge that tells.'
'Then we've got to push off and get after him,' I said cheerfully.

'But what are you going to do?' asked Macgillivray. 'If it were
merely a question of destroying an organization it might be
managed, for an organization presents a big front. But it's a question
of destroying this one man, and his front is a razor edge. How are
you going to find him? It's like looking for a needle in a haystack,
and such a needle! A needle which can become a piece of straw or a
tin-tack when it chooses!'

'All the same we've got to do it,' I said, remembering old Peter's
lesson on fortitude, though I can't say I was feeling very stout-hearted.

Sir Walter flung himself wearily into an arm-chair. 'I wish I
could be an optimist,' he said, 'but it looks as if we must own
defeat. I've been at this work for twenty years, and, though I've
been often beaten, I've always held certain cards in the game. Now
I'm hanged if I've any. It looks like a knock-out, Hannay. It's no
good deluding ourselves. We're men enough to look facts in the
face and tell ourselves the truth. I don't see any ray of light in the
business. We've missed our shot by a hairsbreadth and that's the
same as missing by miles.'

I remember he looked at Mary as if for confirmation, but she did
not smile or nod. Her face was very grave and her eyes looked
steadily at him. Then they moved and met mine, and they seemed
to give me my marching orders.

'Sir Walter,' I said, 'three years ago you and I sat in this very
room. We thought we were done to the world, as we think now.
We had just that one miserable little clue to hang on to - a dozen
words scribbled in a notebook by a dead man. You thought I was
mad when I asked for Scudder's book, but we put our backs into
the job and in twenty-four hours we had won out. Remember that
then we were fighting against time. Now we have a reasonable
amount of leisure. Then we had nothing but a sentence of gibberish.
Now we have a great body of knowledge, for Blenkiron has been
brooding over Ivery like an old hen, and he knows his ways of
working and his breed of confederate. You've got something to
work on now. Do you mean to tell me that, when the stakes are so
big, you're going to chuck in your hand?'

Macgillivray raised his head. 'We know a good deal about Ivery,
but Ivery's dead. We know nothing of the man who was gloriously
resurrected this evening in Normandy.'

'Oh, yes we do. There are many faces to the man, but only one
mind, and you know plenty about that mind.'

'I wonder,' said Sir Walter. 'How can you know a mind which
has no characteristics except that it is wholly and supremely competent?
Mere mental powers won't give us a clue. We want to know
the character which is behind all the personalities. Above all we
want to know its foibles. If we had only a hint of some weakness
we might make a plan.'

'Well, let's set down all we know,' I cried, for the more I argued
the keener I grew. I told them in some detail the story of the night
in the Coolin and what I had heard there.

'There's the two names Chelius and Bommaerts. The man spoke
them in the same breath as Effenbein, so they must be associated
with Ivery's gang. You've got to get the whole Secret Service of
the Allies busy to fit a meaning to these two words. Surely to
goodness you'll find something! Remember those names don't
belong to the Ivery part, but to the big game behind all the different
disguises ... Then there's the talk about the Wild Birds and the
Cage Birds. I haven't a guess at what it means. But it refers to some
infernal gang, and among your piles of records there must be some
clue. You set the intelligence of two hemispheres busy on the job.
You've got all the machinery, and it's my experience that if even
one solitary man keeps chewing on at a problem he discovers something.'

My enthusiasm was beginning to strike sparks from Macgillivray.
He was looking thoughtful now, instead of despondent.

'There might be something in that,' he said, 'but it's a far-out
chance.'

'Of course it's a far-out chance, and that's all we're ever going to
get from Ivery. But we've taken a bad chance before and won ...
Then you've all that you know about Ivery here. Go through his
_dossier with a small-tooth comb and I'll bet you find something to
work on. Blenkiron, you're a man with a cool head. You admit
we've a sporting chance.'

'Sure, Dick. He's fixed things so that the lines are across the
track, but we'll clear somehow. So far as John S. Blenkiron is
concerned he's got just one thing to do in this world, and that's to
follow the yellow dog and have him neatly and cleanly tidied up.
I've got a stack of personal affronts to settle. I was easy fruit and he
hasn't been very respectful. You can count me in, Dick.'

'Then we're agreed,' I cried. 'Well, gentlemen, it's up to you to
arrange the first stage. You've some pretty solid staff work to put
in before you get on the trail.'

'And you?' Sir Walter asked.

'I'm going back to my brigade. I want a rest and a change.
Besides, the first stage is office work, and I'm no use for that. But
I'll be waiting to be summoned, and I'll come like a shot as soon as
you hoick me out. I've got a presentiment about this thing. I know
there'll be a finish and that I'll be in at it, and I think it will be a
desperate, bloody business too.'

I found Mary's eyes fixed upon me, and in them I read the same
thought. She had not spoken a word, but had sat on the edge of a
chair, swinging a foot idly, one hand playing with an ivory fan. She
had given me my old orders and I looked to her for confirmation
of the new.

'Miss Lamington, you are the wisest of the lot of us. What do
you say?'

She smiled - that shy, companionable smile which I had been
picturing to myself through all the wanderings of the past month.

'I think you are right. We've a long way to go yet, for the Valley
of Humiliation comes only half-way in the_Pilgrim's _Progress. The
next stage was Vanity Fair. I might be of some use there, don't
you think?'

I remember the way she laughed and flung back her head like a
gallant boy.

'The mistake we've all been making,' she said, 'is that our
methods are too terre-a-terre. We've a poet to deal with, a great
poet, and we must fling our imaginations forward to catch up with
him. His strength is his unexpectedness, you know, and we won't
beat him by plodding only. I believe the wildest course is the
wisest, for it's the most likely to intersect his ... Who's the poet
among us?'

'Peter,' I said. 'But he's pinned down with a game leg in Germany.
All the same we must rope him in.'

By this time we had all cheered up, for it is wonderful what a
tonic there is in a prospect of action. The butler brought in tea,
which it was Bullivant's habit to drink after dinner. To me it
seemed fantastic to watch a slip of a girl pouring it out for two
grizzled and distinguished servants of the State and one battered
soldier - as decorous a family party as you would ask to see - and
to reflect that all four were engaged in an enterprise where men's
lives must be reckoned at less than thistledown.

After that we went upstairs to a noble Georgian drawing-room
and Mary played to us. I don't care two straws for music from an
instrument - unless it be the pipes or a regimental band - but I
dearly love the human voice. But she would not sing, for singing to
her, I fancy, was something that did not come at will, but flowed
only like a bird's note when the mood favoured. I did not want it
either. I was content to let 'Cherry Ripe' be the one song linked
with her in my memory.

It was Macgillivray who brought us back to business.

'I wish to Heaven there was one habit of mind we could definitely
attach to him and to no one else.' (At this moment 'He' had only
one meaning for us.)

'You can't do nothing with his mind,' Blenkiron drawled. 'You
can't loose the bands of Orion, as the Bible says, or hold Leviathan
with a hook. I reckoned I could and made a mighty close study of
his de-vices. But the darned cuss wouldn't stay put. I thought I had
tied him down to the double bluff, and he went and played the
triple bluff on me. There's nothing doing that line.'

A memory of Peter recurred to me.

'What about the "blind spot"?' I asked, and I told them old
Peter's pet theory. 'Every man that God made has his weak spot
somewhere, some flaw in his character which leaves a dull patch
in his brain. We've got to find that out, and I think I've made a
beginning.'
Macgillivray in a sharp voice asked my meaning.

'He's in a funk ... of something. Oh, I don't mean he's a
coward. A man in his trade wants the nerve of a buffalo. He could
give us all points in courage. What I mean is that he's not clean
white all through. There are yellow streaks somewhere in him ...
I've given a good deal of thought to this courage business, for I
haven't got a great deal of it myself. Not like Peter, I mean. I've
got heaps of soft places in me. I'm afraid of being drowned for one
thing, or of getting my eyes shot out. Ivery's afraid of bombs - at
any rate he's afraid of bombs in a big city. I once read a book
which talked about a thing called agoraphobia. Perhaps it's that ...
Now if we know that weak spot it helps us in our work. There are
some places he won't go to, and there are some things he can't do -
not well, anyway. I reckon that's useful.'

'Ye-es,' said Macgillivray. 'Perhaps it's not what you'd call a
burning and a shining light.'

'There's another chink in his armour,' I went on. 'There's one
person in the world he can never practise his transformations on,
and that's me. I shall always know him again, though he appeared
as Sir Douglas Haig. I can't explain why, but I've got a feel in my
bones about it. I didn't recognize him before, for I thought he was
dead, and the nerve in my brain which should have been looking
for him wasn't working. But I'm on my guard now, and that
nerve's functioning at full power. Whenever and wherever and
howsoever we meet again on the face of the earth, it will be "Dr
Livingstone, I presume" between him and me.'

'That is better,' said Macgillivray. 'If we have any luck, Hannay,
it won't be long till we pull you out of His Majesty's Forces.'

Mary got up from the piano and resumed her old perch on the
arm of Sir Walter's chair.

'There's another blind spot which you haven't mentioned.' It
was a cool evening, but I noticed that her cheeks had suddenly flushed.

'Last week Mr Ivery asked me to marry him,' she said.

PART II

CHAPTER TWELVE
I Become a Combatant Once More

I returned to France on 13 September, and took over my old
brigade on the 19th of the same month. We were shoved in at the
Polygon Wood on the 26th, and after four days got so badly
mauled that we were brought out to refit. On 7 October, very
much to my surprise, I was given command of a division and was
on the fringes of the Ypres fighting during the first days of November.
From that front we were hurried down to Cambrai in
support, but came in only for the last backwash of that singular
battle. We held a bit of the St Quentin sector till just before
Christmas, when we had a spell of rest in billets, which endured, so
far as I was concerned, till the beginning of January, when I was
sent off on the errand which I shall presently relate.

That is a brief summary of my military record in the latter part
Of 1917. I am not going to enlarge on the fighting. Except for the
days of the Polygon Wood it was neither very severe nor very
distinguished, and you will find it in the history books. What I
have to tell of here is my own personal quest, for all the time I was
living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses of the
Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the
tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I
kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie
awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and
many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on
a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues
into such a pulp as I did during those bleak months in Flanders
and Picardy.

For I had an instinct that the thing was desperately grave, graver
even than the battle before me. Russia had gone headlong to the
devil, Italy had taken it between the eyes and was still dizzy, and
our own prospects were none too bright. The Boche was getting
uppish and with some cause, and I foresaw a rocky time ahead till
America could line up with us in the field. It was the chance for the
Wild Birds, and I used to wake in a sweat to think what devilry
Ivery might be engineering. I believe I did my proper job reasonably
well, but I put in my most savage thinking over the other. I
remember how I used to go over every hour of every day from that
June night in the Cotswolds till my last meeting with Bullivant in
London, trying to find a new bearing. I should probably have got
brain-fever, if I hadn't had to spend most of my days and nights
fighting a stiffish battle with a very watchful Hun. That kept my
mind balanced, and I dare say it gave an edge to it; for during those
months I was lucky enough to hit on a better scent than Bullivant
and Macgillivray and Blenkiron, pulling a thousand wires in their
London offices.

I will set down in order of time the various incidents in this
private quest of mine. The first was my meeting with Geordie
Hamilton. It happened just after I rejoined the brigade, when I
went down to have a look at our Scots Fusilier battalion. The old
brigade had been roughly handled on 31st July, and had had to get
heavy drafts to come anywhere near strength. The Fusiliers
especially were almost a new lot, formed by joining our remnants
to the remains of a battalion in another division and bringing about
a dozen officers from the training unit at home.
I inspected the men and my eyes caught sight of a familiar face. I
asked his name and the colonel got it from the sergeant-major. It
was Lance-Corporal George Hamilton.

Now I wanted a new batman, and I resolved then and there to
have my old antagonist. That afternoon he reported to me at
brigade headquarters. As I looked at that solid bandy-legged figure,
standing as stiff to attention as a tobacconist's sign, his ugly face
hewn out of brown oak, his honest, sullen mouth, and his blue eyes
staring into vacancy, I knew I had got the man I wanted.

'Hamilton,' I said, 'you and I have met before.'

'Sirr?' came the mystified answer.

'Look at me, man, and tell me if you don't recognize me.'

He moved his eyes a fraction, in a respectful glance.

'Sirr, I don't mind of you.'

'Well, I'll refresh your memory. Do you remember the hall in
Newmilns Street and the meeting there? You had a fight with a
man outside, and got knocked down.'

He made no answer, but his colour deepened.

'And a fortnight later in a public-house in Muirtown you saw the
same man, and gave him the chase of his life.'

I could see his mouth set, for visions of the penalties laid down
by the King's Regulations for striking an officer must have crossed
his mind. But he never budged.

'Look me in the face, man,' I said. 'Do you remember me now?'

He did as he was bid.

'Sirr, I mind of you.'
'Have you nothing more to say?'

He cleared his throat. 'Sirr, I did not ken I was hittin' an officer.'
'Of course you didn't. You did perfectly right, and if the war
was over and we were both free men, I would give you a chance of
knocking me down here and now. That's got to wait. When you
saw me last I was serving my country, though you didn't know it.
We're serving together now, and you must get your revenge out of
the Boche. I'm going to make you my servant, for you and I have a
pretty close bond between us. What do you say to that?'

This time he looked me full in the face. His troubled eye appraised
me and was satisfied. 'I'm proud to be servant to ye, sirr,' he said.
Then out of his chest came a strangled chuckle, and he forgot his
discipline. 'Losh, but ye're the great lad!' He recovered himself
promptly, saluted, and marched off.

The second episode befell during our brief rest after the Polygon
Wood, when I had ridden down the line one afternoon to see a
friend in the Heavy Artillery. I was returning in the drizzle of
evening, clanking along the greasy path between the sad poplars,
when I struck a Labour company repairing the ravages of a Boche
strafe that morning. I wasn't very certain of my road and asked one
of the workers. He straightened himself and saluted, and I saw
beneath a disreputable cap the features of the man who had been
with me in the Coolin crevice.

I spoke a word to his sergeant, who fell him out, and he walked
a bit of the way with me.

'Great Scot, Wake, what brought you here?' I asked.

'Same thing as brought you. This rotten war.'

I had dismounted and was walking beside him, and I noticed that
his lean face had lost its pallor and that his eyes were less hot than
they used to be.

'You seem to thrive on it,' I said, for I did not know what to
say. A sudden shyness possessed me. Wake must have gone through
some violent cyclones of feeling before it came to this. He saw
what I was thinking and laughed in his sharp, ironical way.

'Don't flatter yourself you've made a convert. I think as I always
thought. But I came to the conclusion that since the fates had made
me a Government servant I might as well do my work somewhere
less cushioned than a chair in the Home Office ... Oh, no, it
wasn't a matter of principle. One kind of work's as good as another,
and I'm a better clerk than a navvy. With me it was self-indulgence:
I wanted fresh air and exercise.'

I looked at him - mud to the waist, and his hands all blistered
and cut with unaccustomed labour. I could realize what his associates
must mean to him, and how he would relish the rough
tonguing of non-coms.

'You're a confounded humbug,' I said. 'Why on earth didn't you
go into an O.T.C. and come out with a commission? They're easy
enough to get.'

'You mistake my case,' he said bitterly. 'I experienced no sudden
conviction about the justice of the war. I stand where I always
stood. I'm a non-combatant, and I wanted a change of civilian
work ... No, it wasn't any idiotic tribunal sent me here. I came of
my own free will, and I'm really rather enjoying myself.'

'It's a rough job for a man like you,' I said.
'Not so rough as the fellows get in the trenches. I watched a
battalion marching back today and they looked like ghosts who had
been years in muddy graves. White faces and dazed eyes and leaden
feet. Mine's a cushy job. I like it best when the weather's foul. It
cheats me into thinking I'm doing my duty.'

I nodded towards a recent shell-hole. 'Much of that sort of
thing?'

'Now and then. We had a good dusting this morning. I can't say
I liked it at the time, but I like to look back on it. A sort of
moral anodyne.'

'I wonder what on earth the rest of your lot make of you?'

'They don't make anything. I'm not remarkable for my _bonhomie.
They think I'm a prig - which I am. It doesn't amuse me to talk
about beer and women or listen to a gramophone or grouse about
my last meal. But I'm quite content, thank you. Sometimes I get a
seat in a corner of a Y.M.C.A. hut, and I've a book or two. My
chief affliction is the padre. He was up at Keble in my time, and, as
one of my colleagues puts it, wants to be "too bloody helpful". ...
What are you doing, Hannay? I see you're some kind of general.
They're pretty thick on the ground here.'

'I'm a sort of general. Soldiering in the Salient isn't the softest of
jobs, but I don't believe it's as tough as yours is for you. D'you
know, Wake, I wish I had you in my brigade. Trained or untrained,
you're a dashed stout-hearted fellow.'

He laughed with a trifle less acidity than usual. 'Almost thou
persuadest me to be combatant. No, thank you. I haven't the
courage, and besides there's my jolly old principles. All the same
I'd like to be near you. You're a good chap, and I've had the
honour to assist in your education ... I must be getting back, or
the sergeant will think I've bolted.'

We shook hands, and the last I saw of him was a figure saluting
stiffly in the wet twilight.

The third incident was trivial enough, though momentous in its
results. just before I got the division I had a bout of malaria. We
were in support in the Salient, in very uncomfortable trenches
behind Wieltje, and I spent three days on my back in a dug-out.
Outside was a blizzard of rain, and the water now and then came
down the stairs through the gas curtain and stood in pools at my
bed foot. It wasn't the merriest place to convalesce in, but I was as
hard as nails at the time and by the third day I was beginning to sit
up and be bored.

I read all my English papers twice and a big stack of German
ones which I used to have sent up by a friend in the G.H.Q.
Intelligence, who knew I liked to follow what the Boche was
saying. As I dozed and ruminated in the way a man does after
fever, I was struck by the tremendous display of one advertisement
in the English press. It was a thing called 'Gussiter's Deep-breathing
System,' which, according to its promoter, was a cure for every ill,
mental, moral, or physical, that man can suffer. Politicians, generals,
admirals, and music-hall artists all testified to the new life it had
opened up for them. I remember wondering what these sportsmen
got for their testimonies, and thinking I would write a spoof letter
myself to old Gussiter.

Then I picked up the German papers, and suddenly my eye
caught an advertisement of the same kind in the _Frankfurter _Zeitung.
It was not Gussiter this time, but one Weissmann, but his game
was identical - 'deep breathing'. The Hun style was different from
the English - all about the Goddess of Health, and the Nymphs of
the Mountains, and two quotations from Schiller. But the principle
was the same.

That made me ponder a little, and I went carefully through the
whole batch. I found the advertisement in the _Frankfurter and in
one or two rather obscure _Volkstimmes and _Volkszeitungs. I found it
too in _Der _Grosse _Krieg, the official German propagandist picture-
paper. They were the same all but one, and that one had a bold
variation, for it contained four of the sentences used in the ordinary
English advertisement.

This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to
Macgillivray pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the
enemy, and advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter's financial
backing. I thought he might find a Hun syndicate behind him. And
then I had another notion, which made me rewrite my letter.

I went through the papers again. The English ones which contained
the advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the
kind of thing no censorship would object to leaving the country. I
had before me a small sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not
the advertisement. That might be for reasons of circulation, or it
might not. The German papers were either Radical or Socialist publications,
just the opposite of the English lot, except the _Grosse _Krieg. Now
we have a free press, and Germany has, strictly speaking, none. All
her journalistic indiscretions are calculated. Therefore the Boche
has no objection to his rags getting to enemy countries. He wants
it. He likes to see them quoted in columns headed 'Through German
Glasses', and made the text of articles showing what a good
democrat he is becoming.

As I puzzled over the subject, certain conclusions began to form
in my mind. The four identical sentences seemed to hint that 'Deep
Breathing' had Boche affiliations. Here was a chance of communicating
with the enemy which would defy the argus-eyed gentlemen
who examine the mails. What was to hinder Mr A at one end
writing an advertisement with a good cipher in it, and the paper
containing it getting into Germany by Holland in three days? Herr
B at the other end replied in the _Frankfurter, and a few days later
shrewd editors and acute Intelligence officers - and Mr A - were
reading it in London, though only Mr A knew what it really meant.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28