Mr. Standfast

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It struck me as a bright idea, the sort of simple thing that doesn't
occur to clever people, and very rarely to the Boche. I wished I was
not in the middle of a battle, for I would have had a try at
investigating the cipher myself. I wrote a long letter to Macgillivray
putting my case, and then went to sleep. When I awoke I reflected
that it was a pretty thin argument, and would have stopped the
letter, if it hadn't gone off early by a ration party.

After that things began very slowly to happen. The first was
when Hamilton, having gone to Boulogne to fetch some mess-
stores, returned with the startling news that he had seen Gresson.
He had not heard his name, but described him dramatically to me
as the wee red-headed devil that kicked Ecky Brockie's knee yon
time in Glesca, sirr,' I recognized the description.

Gresson, it appeared, was joy-riding. He was with a party of Labour
delegates who had been met by two officers and carried off in
chars-a-bancs. Hamilton reported from inquiries among his friends that
this kind of visitor came weekly. I thought it a very sensible notion
on the Government's part, but I wondered how Gresson had been
selected. I had hoped that Macgillivray had weeks ago made a
long arm and quodded him. Perhaps they had too little evidence to
hang him, but he was the blackest sort of suspect and should have
been interned.

A week later I had occasion to be at G.H.Q. on business connected
with my new division. My friends in the Intelligence allowed
me to use the direct line to London, and I called up Macgillivray.
For ten minutes I had an exciting talk, for I had had no news from
that quarter since I left England. I heard that the Portuguese Jew
had escaped - had vanished from his native heather when they
went to get him. They had identified him as a German professor of
Celtic languages, who had held a chair in a Welsh college - a
dangerous fellow, for he was an upright, high-minded, raging fanatic.
Against Gresson they had no evidence at all, but he was kept
under strict observation. When I asked about his crossing to France,
Macgillivray replied that that was part of their scheme. I inquired if
the visit had given them any clues, but I never got an answer, for
the line had to be cleared at that moment for the War Office.
I hunted up the man who had charge of these Labour visits, and
made friends with him. Gresson, he said, had been a quiet, well-
mannered, and most appreciative guest. He had wept tears on Vimy
Ridge, and - strictly against orders - had made a speech to some
troops he met on the Arras road about how British Labour was
remembering the Army in its prayers and sweating blood to make
guns. On the last day he had had a misadventure, for he got very
sick on the road - some kidney trouble that couldn't stand the
jolting of the car - and had to be left at a village and picked up by
the party on its way back. They found him better, but still shaky. I
cross-examined the particular officer in charge about that halt, and
learned that Gresson had been left alone in a peasant's cottage, for
he said he only needed to lie down. The place was the hamlet of
Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.

For several weeks that name stuck in my head. It had a pleasant,
quaint sound, and I wondered how Gresson had spent his hours
there. I hunted it up on the map, and promised myself to have a
look at it the next time we came out to rest. And then I forgot
about it till I heard the name mentioned again.

On 23rd October I had the bad luck, during a tour of my first-
line trenches, to stop a small shell-fragment with my head. It was
a close, misty day and I had taken off my tin hat to wipe my
brow when the thing happened. I got a long, shallow scalp wound
which meant nothing but bled a lot, and, as we were not in for
any big move, the M.O. sent me back to a clearing station to
have it seen to. I was three days in the place and, being perfectly
well, had leisure to look about me and reflect, so that I recall
that time as a queer, restful interlude in the infernal racket of war.
I remember yet how on my last night there a gale made the
lamps swing and flicker, and turned the grey-green canvas walls
into a mass of mottled shadows. The floor canvas was muddy
from the tramping of many feet bringing in the constant dribble
of casualties from the line. In my tent there was no one very bad at
the time, except a boy with his shoulder half-blown off by a
whizz-bang, who lay in a drugged sleep at the far end. The
majority were influenza, bronchitis, and trench-fever - waiting to be
moved to the base, or convalescent and about to return to their units.

A small group of us dined off tinned chicken, stewed fruit, and
radon cheese round the smoky stove, where two screens manufactured
from packing cases gave some protection against the draughts
which swept like young tornadoes down the tent. One man had
been reading a book called the __Ghost Stories of an _Antiquary, and the
talk turned on the unexplainable things that happen to everybody
once or twice in a lifetime. I contributed a yarn about the men who
went to look for Kruger's treasure in the bushveld and got scared
by a green wildebeeste. It is a good yarn and I'll write it down
some day. A tall Highlander, who kept his slippered feet on the top
of the stove, and whose costume consisted of a kilt, a British warm,
a grey hospital dressing-gown, and four pairs of socks, told the
story of the Camerons at First Ypres, and of the Lowland subaltern
who knew no Gaelic and suddenly found himself encouraging his
men with some ancient Highland rigmarole. The poor chap had a
racking bronchial cough, which suggested that his country might
well use him on some warmer battle-ground than Flanders. He
seemed a bit of a scholar and explained the Cameron business in a
lot of long words.

I remember how the talk meandered on as talk does when men
are idle and thinking about the next day. I didn't pay much attention,
for I was reflecting on a change I meant to make in one of my
battalion commands, when a fresh voice broke in. It belonged to a
Canadian captain from Winnipeg, a very silent fellow who smoked
shag tobacco.

'There's a lot of ghosts in this darned country,' he said.

Then he started to tell about what happened to him when his
division was last back in rest billets. He had a staff job and put up
with the divisional command at an old French chateau. They had
only a little bit of the house; the rest was shut up, but the passages
were so tortuous that it was difficult to keep from wandering into
the unoccupied part. One night, he said, he woke with a mighty
thirst, and, since he wasn't going to get cholera by drinking the
local water in his bedroom, he started out for the room they messed
in to try to pick up a whisky-and-soda. He couldn't find it, though
he knew the road like his own name. He admitted he might have
taken a wrong turning, but he didn't think so. Anyway he landed
in a passage which he had never seen before, and, since he had no
candle, he tried to retrace his steps. Again he went wrong, and
groped on till he saw a faint light which he thought must be the
room of the G.S.O., a good fellow and a friend of his. So he
barged in, and found a big, dim salon with two figures in it and a
lamp burning between them, and a queer, unpleasant smell about.
He took a step forward, and then he saw that the figures had no
faces. That fairly loosened his joints with fear, and he gave a cry.
One of the two ran towards him, the lamp went out, and the sickly
scent caught suddenly at his throat. After that he knew nothing till
he awoke in his own bed next morning with a splitting headache.
He said he got the General's permission and went over all
the unoccupied part of the house, but he couldn't find the room. Dust
lay thick on everything, and there was no sign of recent human presence.

I give the story as he told it in his drawling voice. 'I reckon that
was the genuine article in ghosts. You don't believe me and conclude
I was drunk? I wasn't. There isn't any drink concocted yet
that could lay me out like that. I just struck a crack in the old
universe and pushed my head outside. It may happen to you boys
any day.'

The Highlander began to argue with him, and I lost interest in
the talk. But one phrase brought me to attention. 'I'll give you the
name of the darned place, and next time you're around you can do
a bit of prospecting for yourself. It's called the Chateau of Eaucourt
Sainte-Anne, about seven kilometres from Douvecourt. If I was
purchasing real estate in this country I guess I'd give that
location a miss.'

After that I had a grim month, what with the finish of Third Ypres
and the hustles to Cambrai. By the middle of December we had shaken
down a bit, but the line my division held was not of our choosing, and
we had to keep a wary eye on the Boche doings. It was a weary job, and
I had no time to think of anything but the military kind of intelligence
- fixing the units against us from prisoners' stories, organizing small
raids, and keeping the Royal Flying Corps busy. I was keen about the
last, and I made several trips myself over the lines with Archie
Roylance, who had got his heart's desire and by good luck belonged to
the squadron just behind me. I said as little as possible about this, for
G.H.Q. did not encourage divisional generals to practise such
methods, though there was one famous army commander who made a
hobby of them. It was on one of these trips that an incident occurred
which brought my spell of waiting on the bigger game to an end.

One dull December day, just after luncheon, Archie and I set out
to reconnoitre. You know the way that fogs in Picardy seem
suddenly to reek out of the ground and envelop the slopes like a
shawl. That was our luck this time. We had crossed the lines, flying
very high, and received the usual salute of Hun Archies. After a
mile or two the ground seemed to climb up to us, though we
hadn't descended, and presently we were in the heart of a cold,
clinging mist. We dived for several thousand feet, but the confounded
thing grew thicker and no sort of landmark could be
found anywhere. I thought if we went on at this rate we should hit
a tree or a church steeple and be easy fruit for the enemy.

The same thought must have been in Archie's mind, for he
climbed again. We got into a mortally cold zone, but the air was no
clearer. Thereupon he decided to head for home, and passed me
word to work out a compass course on the map. That was easier
said than done, but I had a rough notion of the rate we had
travelled since we had crossed the lines and I knew our original
direction, so I did the best I could. On we went for a bit, and then
I began to get doubtful. So did Archie. We dropped low down, but
we could hear none of the row that's always going on for a mile on
each side of the lines. The world was very eerie and deadly still, so
still that Archie and I could talk through the speaking-tube.

'We've mislaid this blamed battle,'he shouted.

'I think your rotten old compass has soured on us,' I replied.

We decided that it wouldn't do to change direction, so we held
on the same course. I was getting as nervous as a kitten, chiefly
owing to the silence. It's not what you expect in the middle of a
battle-field ... I looked at the compass carefully and saw that it was
really crocked. Archie must have damaged it on a former flight and
forgotten to have it changed.

He had a very scared face when I pointed this out.

'Great God!' he croaked - for he had a fearsome cold - 'we're
either about Calais or near Paris or miles the wrong side of the
Boche line. What the devil are we to do?'

And then to put the lid on it his engine went wrong. It was the
same performance as on the Yorkshire moors, and seemed to be
a speciality of the Shark-Gladas type. But this time the end
came quick. We dived steeply, and I could see by Archie's grip
on the stick that he was going to have his work cut out to save our
necks. Save them he did, but not by much for we jolted down on
the edge of a ploughed field with a series of bumps that shook the
teeth in my head. It was the same dense, dripping fog, and we
crawled out of the old bus and bolted for cover like two
ferreted rabbits.

Our refuge was the lee of a small copse.

'It's my opinion,' said Archie solemnly, 'that we're somewhere
about La Cateau. Tim Wilbraham got left there in the Retreat, and
it took him nine months to make the Dutch frontier. It's a giddy
prospect, sir.'

I sallied out to reconnoitre. At the other side of the wood was a
highway, and the fog so blanketed sound that I could not hear a
man on it till I saw his face. The first one I saw made me lie flat in
the covert ... For he was a German soldier, field-grey, forage cap,
red band and all, and he had a pick on his shoulder.

A second's reflection showed me that this was not final proof.
He might be one of our prisoners. But it was no place to take
chances. I went back to Archie, and the pair of us crossed the
ploughed field and struck the road farther on. There we saw a
farmer's cart with a woman and child in it. They looked French,
but melancholy, just what you would expect from the inhabitants
of a countryside in enemy occupation.

Then we came to the park wall of a great house, and saw dimly
the outlines of a cottage. Here sooner or later we would get proof
of our whereabouts, so we lay and shivered among the poplars of
the roadside. No one seemed abroad that afternoon. For a quarter
of an hour it was as quiet as the grave. Then came a sound of
whistling, and muffled steps.

'That's an Englishman,' said Archie joyfully. 'No Boche could
make such a beastly noise.'

He was right. The form of an Army Service Corps private
emerged from the mist, his cap on the back of his head, his hands
in his pockets, and his walk the walk of a free man. I never saw a
welcomer sight than that jam-merchant.

We stood up and greeted him. 'What's this place?' I shouted.

He raised a grubby hand to his forelock.
'Ockott Saint Anny, sir,' he said. 'Beg pardon, sir, but you ain't
hurt, sir?'

Ten minutes later I was having tea in the mess of an M.T.
workshop while Archie had gone to the nearest Signals to telephone
for a car and give instructions about his precious bus. It was almost
dark, but I gulped my tea and hastened out into the thick dusk. For
I wanted to have a look at the Chateau.

I found a big entrance with high stone pillars, but the iron gates
were locked and looked as if they had not been opened in the
memory of man. Knowing the way of such places, I hunted for the
side entrance and found a muddy road which led to the back of the
house. The front was evidently towards a kind of park; at the back
was a nest of outbuildings and a section of moat which looked very
deep and black in the winter twilight. This was crossed by a stone
bridge with a door at the end of it.

Clearly the Chateau was not being used for billets. There was no
sign of the British soldier; there was no sign of anything human. I
crept through the fog as noiselessly as if I trod on velvet, and I
hadn't even the company of my own footsteps. I remembered the
Canadian's ghost story, and concluded I would be imagining the
same sort of thing if I lived in such a place.

The door was bolted and padlocked. I turned along the side of
the moat, hoping to reach the house front, which was probably
modern and boasted a civilized entrance. There must be somebody
in the place, for one chimney was smoking. Presently the moat
petered out, and gave place to a cobbled causeway, but a wall,
running at right angles with the house, blocked my way. I had half
a mind to go back and hammer at the door, but I reflected that
major-generals don't pay visits to deserted chateaux at night without
a reasonable errand. I should look a fool in the eyes of some old
concierge. The daylight was almost gone, and I didn't wish to go
groping about the house with a candle.

But I wanted to see what was beyond the wall - one of those
whims that beset the soberest men. I rolled a dissolute water-butt
to the foot of it, and gingerly balanced myself on its rotten staves.
This gave me a grip on the flat brick top, and I pulled myself up.

I looked down on a little courtyard with another wall beyond it,
which shut off any view of the park. On the right was the Chateau,
on the left more outbuildings; the whole place was not more than
twenty yards each way. I was just about to retire by the road I had
come, for in spite of my fur coat it was uncommon chilly on that
perch, when I heard a key turn in the door in the Chateau wall
beneath me.

A lantern made a blur of light in the misty darkness. I saw that
the bearer was a woman, an oldish woman, round-shouldered like
most French peasants. In one hand she carried a leather bag, and
she moved so silently that she must have worn rubber boots. The
light was held level with her head and illumined her face. It was the
evillest thing I have ever beheld, for a horrible scar had puckered
the skin of the forehead and drawn up the eyebrows so that it
looked like some diabolical Chinese mask.

Slowly she padded across the yard, carrying the bag as gingerly
as if it had been an infant. She stopped at the door of one of the
outhouses and set down the lantern and her burden on the ground.
From her apron she drew something which looked like a gas-mask,
and put it over her head. She also put on a pair of long gauntlets.
Then she unlocked the door, picked up the lantern and went in. I
heard the key turn behind her.

Crouching on that wall, I felt a very ugly tremor run down my
spine. I had a glimpse of what the Canadian's ghost might have
been. That hag, hooded like some venomous snake, was too much
for my stomach. I dropped off the wall and ran - yes, ran till I
reached the highroad and saw the cheery headlights of a transport
wagon, and heard the honest speech of the British soldier. That
restored me to my senses, and made me feel every kind of a fool.

As I drove back to the line with Archie, I was black ashamed of
my funk. I told myself that I had seen only an old countrywoman
going to feed her hens. I convinced my reason, but I did not
convince the whole of me. An insensate dread of the place hung
around me, and I could only retrieve my self-respect by resolving
to return and explore every nook of it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Adventure of the Picardy Chateau

I looked up Eaucourt Sainte-Anne on the map, and the more I
studied its position the less I liked it. It was the knot from which
sprang all the main routes to our Picardy front. If the Boche ever
broke us, it was the place for which old Hindenburg would make.
At all hours troops and transport trains were moving through that
insignificant hamlet. Eminent generals and their staffs passed daily
within sight of the Chateau. It was a convenient halting-place for
battalions coming back to rest. Supposing, I argued, our enemies
wanted a key-spot for some assault upon the morale or the discipline
or health of the British Army, they couldn't find a better than
Eaucourt Sainte-Anne. It was the ideal centre of espionage. But
when I guardedly sounded my friends of the Intelligence they
didn't seem to be worrying about it.
From them I got a chit to the local French authorities, and, as
soon as we came out of the line, towards the end of December, I
made straight for the country town of Douvecourt. By a bit of luck
our divisional quarters were almost next door. I interviewed a
tremendous swell in a black uniform and black kid gloves, who
received me affably and put his archives and registers at my disposal.
By this time I talked French fairly well, having a natural turn for
languages, but half the rapid speech of the sous-prifet was lost on
me. By and by he left me with the papers and a clerk, and I
proceeded to grub up the history of the Chateau.

It had belonged since long before Agincourt to the noble house
of the D'Eaucourts, now represented by an ancient Marquise who
dwelt at Biarritz. She had never lived in the place, which a dozen
years before had been falling to ruins, when a rich American leased
it and partially restored it. He had soon got sick of it - his daughter
had married a blackguard French cavalry officer with whom he
quarrelled, said the clerk - and since then there had been several
tenants. I wondered why a house so unattractive should have
let so readily, but the clerk explained that the cause was the
partridge-shooting. It was about the best in France, and in 1912
had shown the record bag.

The list of the tenants was before me. There was a second
American, an Englishman called Halford, a Paris Jew-banker, and
an Egyptian prince. But the space for 1913 was blank, and I asked
the clerk about it. He told me that it had been taken by a woollen
manufacturer from Lille, but he had never shot the partridges,
though he had spent occasional nights in the house. He had a five
years' lease, and was still paying rent to the Marquise. I asked the
name, but the clerk had forgotten. 'It will be written there,' he said.

'But, no,' I said. 'Somebody must have been asleep over this
register. There's nothing after 1912.'

He examined the page and blinked his eyes. 'Someone indeed
must have slept. No doubt it was young Louis who is now with the
guns in Champagne. But the name will be on the Commissary's list.
It is, as I remember, a sort of Flemish.'

He hobbled off and returned in five minutes.

'Bommaerts,' he said, 'Jacques Bommaerts. A young man with
no wife but with money - Dieu de Dieu, what oceans of it!'

That clerk got twenty-five francs, and he was cheap at the price.
I went back to my division with a sense of awe on me. It was a
marvellous fate that had brought me by odd routes to this out-of-the-way
corner. First, the accident of Hamilton's seeing Gresson;
then the night in the Clearing Station; last the mishap of Archie's
plane getting lost in the fog. I had three grounds of suspicion -
Gresson's sudden illness, the Canadian's ghost, and that horrid old
woman in the dusk. And now I had one tremendous fact. The place
was leased by a man called Bommaerts, and that was one of the two
names I had heard whispered in that far-away cleft in the Coolin by
the stranger from the sea.

A sensible man would have gone off to the contre-espionage people
and told them his story. I couldn't do this; I felt that it was my own
private find and I was going to do the prospecting myself. Every
moment of leisure I had I was puzzling over the thing. I rode
round by the Chateau one frosty morning and examined all the
entrances. The main one was the grand avenue with the locked
gates. That led straight to the front of the house where the terrace
was - or you might call it the back, for the main door was on the
other side. Anyhow the drive came up to the edge of the terrace
and then split into two, one branch going to the stables by way of
the outbuildings where I had seen the old woman, the other circling
round the house, skirting the moat, and joining the back road just
before the bridge. If I had gone to the right instead of the left that
first evening with Archie, I should have circumnavigated the place
without any trouble.

Seen in the fresh morning light the house looked commonplace
enough. Part of it was as old as Noah, but most was newish and
jerry-built, the kind of flat-chested, thin French Chateau, all front
and no depth, and full of draughts and smoky chimneys. I might
have gone in and ransacked the place, but I knew I should find
nothing. It was borne in on me that it was only when evening fell
that that house was interesting and that I must come, like Nicodemus,
by night. Besides I had a private account to settle with my
conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy twilight, and it does
not do to let a matter like that slide. A man's courage is like a horse
that refuses a fence; you have got to take him by the head and cram him
at it again. If you don't, he will funk worse next time. I hadn't enough
courage to be able to take chances with it, though I was afraid of
many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid.

I did not get a chance till Christmas Eve. The day before there
had been a fall of snow, but the frost set in and the afternoon ended
in a green sunset with the earth crisp and crackling like a shark's
skin. I dined early, and took with me Geordie Hamilton, who
added to his many accomplishments that of driving a car. He was
the only man in the B.E.F. who guessed anything of the game I
was after, and I knew that he was as discreet as a tombstone. I put
on my oldest trench cap, slacks, and a pair of scaife-soled boots,
that I used to change into in the evening. I had a useful little
electric torch, which lived in my pocket, and from which a cord led
to a small bulb of light that worked with a switch and could be
hung on my belt. That left my arms free in case of emergencies.
Likewise I strapped on my pistol.

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