Mr. Standfast

J >> John Buchan >> Mr. Standfast

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His voice was almost wistful, and I liked him enormously.

'Blenkiron will see to that,' I said. 'We're going to break you to
harness, Wake, and then you'll be a happy man. You keep your
mind on the game and forget about yourself. That's the cure for
jibbers.'

As I journeyed to St Anton I thought a lot about that talk. He
was quite right about Mary, who would never have married him. A
man with such an angular soul couldn't fit into another's. And then
I thought that the chief thing about Mary was just her serene
certainty. Her eyes had that settled happy look that I remembered
to have seen only in one other human face, and that was Peter's ...
But I wondered if Peter's eyes were still the same.

I found the cottage, a little wooden thing which had been left
perched on its knoll when the big hotels grew around it. It had a
fence in front, but behind it was open to the hillside. At the gate
stood a bent old woman with a face like a pippin. My make-up
must have been good, for she accepted me before I introduced myself.

'God be thanked you are come,' she cried. 'The poor lieutenant
needed a man to keep him company. He sleeps now, as he does
always in the afternoon, for his leg wearies him in the night ... But
he is brave, like a soldier ... Come, I will show you the house, for
you two will be alone now.'

Stepping softly she led me indoors, pointing with a warning
finger to the little bedroom where Peter slept. I found a kitchen
with a big stove and a rough floor of planking, on which lay some
badly cured skins. Off it was a sort of pantry with a bed for me.
She showed me the pots and pans for cooking and the stores she
had laid in, and where to find water and fuel. 'I will do the
marketing daily,' she said, 'and if you need me, my dwelling is half
a mile up the road beyond the new church. God be with you,
young man, and be kind to that wounded one.'

When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in
Peter's arm-chair and took stock of the place. It was quiet and
simple and homely, and through the window came the gleam of
snow on the diamond hills. On the table beside the stove were
Peter's cherished belongings - his buck-skin pouch and the pipe
which Jannie Grobelaar had carved for him in St Helena, an
aluminium field match-box I had given him, a cheap large-print
Bible such as padres present to well-disposed privates, and an old
battered _Pilgrim's _Progress with gaudy pictures. The illustration at
which I opened showed Faithful going up to Heaven from the fire
of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that has just been flushed. Everything
in the room was exquisitely neat, and I knew that that was
Peter and not the Widow Summermatter. On a peg behind the
door hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a pocket I
recognized a sheaf of my own letters. In one corner stood something
which I had forgotten about - an invalid chair.

The sight of Peter's plain little oddments made me feel solemn. I
wondered if his eyes would be like Mary's now, for I could not
conceive what life would be for him as a cripple. Very silently I
opened the bedroom door and slipped inside.

He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss
blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep. It was the old
Peter beyond doubt. He had the hunter's gift of breathing evenly
through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his
forehead was what I had always remembered. The only change since I
last saw him was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was grey.

As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through
together flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at
being beside him. Women, bless their hearts! can never know what
long comradeship means to men; it is something not in their lives -
something that belongs only to that wild, undomesticated world
which we forswear when we find our mates. Even Mary understood
only a bit of it. I had just won her love, which was the greatest
thing that ever came my way, but if she had entered at that moment
I would scarcely have turned my head. I was back again in the old
life and was not thinking of the new.

Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.

'Dick,' he said in a whisper, 'Dick, my old friend.'

The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were stretched
out to me. I gripped his hands, and for a little we did not speak.
Then I saw how woefully he had changed. His left leg had shrunk,
and from the knee down was like a pipe stem. His face, when
awake, showed the lines of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by
half a foot. But his eyes were still like Mary's. Indeed they seemed
to be more patient and peaceful than in the days when he sat beside
me on the buck-waggon and peered over the hunting-veld.

I picked him up - he was no heavier than Mary - and carried
him to his chair beside the stove. Then I boiled water and made tea,
as we had so often done together.
'Peter, old man,' I said, 'we're on trek again, and this is a very
snug little _rondavel. We've had many good yarns, but this is going
to be the best. First of all, how about your health?'

'Good, I'm a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow. I
have been lonely sometimes, but that is all by now. Tell me of the
big battles.'

But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case.
He had no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like
Germans. The doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and
had done their best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones
had been so wrecked that they could not mend his leg, and Peter
had all the Boer's dislike of amputation. One doctor had been in
Damaraland and talked to him of those baked sunny places and
made him homesick. But he returned always to his dislike of
Germans. He had seen them herding our soldiers like brute beasts,
and the commandant had a face like Stumm and a chin that stuck
out and wanted hitting. He made an exception for the great airman
Lensch, who had downed him.

'He is a white man, that one,' he said. 'He came to see me in
hospital and told me a lot of things. I think he made them treat me
well. He is a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he
has a round, merry face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who
could put a bullet through a pauw's head at two hundred yards. He
said he was sorry I was lame, for he hoped to have more fights
with me. Some woman that tells fortunes had said that I would be
the end of him, but he reckoned she had got the thing the wrong
way on. I hope he will come through this war, for he is a good
man, though a German ... But the others! They are like the fool in
the Bible, fat and ugly in good fortune and proud and vicious when
their luck goes. They are not a people to be happy with.'

Then he told me that to keep up his spirits he had amused
himself with playing a game. He had prided himself on being a
Boer, and spoken coldly of the British. He had also, I gathered,
imparted many things calculated to deceive. So he left Germany
with good marks, and in Switzerland had held himself aloof from
the other British wounded, on the advice of Blenkiron, who had
met him as soon as he crossed the frontier. I gathered it was
Blenkiron who had had him sent to St Anton, and in his time there,
as a disgruntled Boer, he had mixed a good deal with Germans.
They had pumped him about our air service, and Peter had told
them many ingenious lies and heard curious things in return.

'They are working hard, Dick,' he said. 'Never forget that. The
German is a stout enemy, and when we beat him with a machine he
sweats till he has invented a new one. They have great pilots, but
never so many good ones as we, and I do not think in ordinary
fighting they can ever beat us. But you must watch Lensch, for I
fear him. He has a new machine, I hear, with great engines and a
short wingspread, but the wings so cambered that he can climb fast.
That will be a surprise to spring upon us. You will say that we'll soon
better it. So we shall, but if it was used at a time when we were pushing
hard it might make the little difference that loses battles.'

'You mean,' I said, 'that if we had a great attack ready and had
driven all the Boche planes back from our front, Lensch and his
circus might get over in spite of us and blow the gaff?'

'Yes,' he said solemnly. 'Or if we were attacked, and had a weak
spot, Lensch might show the Germans where to get through. I do
not think we are going to attack for a long time; but I am
pretty sure that Germany is going to fling every man against us. That is
the talk of my friends, and it is not bluff.'

That night I cooked our modest dinner, and we smoked our pipes
with the stove door open and the good smell of woodsmoke in our
nostrils. I told him of all my doings and of the Wild Birds and
Ivery and the job we were engaged on. Blenkiron's instructions were
that we two should live humbly and keep our eyes and ears open,
for we were outside suspicion - the cantankerous lame Boer and his
loutish servant from Arosa. Somewhere in the place was a rendezvous
of our enemies, and thither came Chelius on his dark errands.

Peter nodded his head sagely, 'I think I have guessed the place.
The daughter of the old woman used to pull my chair sometimes
down to the village, and I have sat in cheap inns and talked to
servants. There is a fresh-water pan there, it is all covered with
snow now, and beside it there is a big house that they call the Pink
Chalet. I do not know much about it, except that rich folk live in it,
for I know the other houses and they are harmless. Also the big
hotels, which are too cold and public for strangers to meet in.'

I put Peter to bed, and it was a joy to me to look after him, to
give him his tonic and prepare the hot water bottle that comforted
his neuralgia. His behaviour was like a docile child's, and he never
lapsed from his sunny temper, though I could see how his leg gave
him hell. They had tried massage for it and given it up, and there
was nothing for him but to endure till nature and his tough constitution
deadened the tortured nerves again. I shifted my bed out of
the pantry and slept in the room with him, and when I woke in the
night, as one does the first time in a strange place, I could tell by
his breathing that he was wakeful and suffering.

Next day a bath chair containing a grizzled cripple and pushed
by a limping peasant might have been seen descending the long hill
to the village. It was clear frosty weather which makes the cheeks
tingle, and I felt so full of beans that it was hard to remember my
game leg. The valley was shut in on the east by a great mass of
rocks and glaciers, belonging to a mountain whose top could not
be seen. But on the south, above the snowy fir-woods, there was a
most delicate lace-like peak with a point like a needle. I looked at it
with interest, for beyond it lay the valley which led to the Staub
pass, and beyond that was Italy - and Mary.

The old village of St Anton had one long, narrow street which
bent at right angles to a bridge which spanned the river flowing
from the lake. Thence the road climbed steeply, but at the other
end of the street it ran on the level by the water's edge, lined with
gimcrack boarding-houses, now shuttered to the world, and a few
villas in patches of garden. At the far end, just before it plunged
into a pine-wood, a promontory jutted into the lake, leaving a
broad space between the road and the water. Here were the grounds
of a more considerable dwelling - snow-covered laurels and rhododendrons
with one or two bigger trees - and just on the water-edge
stood the house itself, called the Pink Chalet.

I wheeled Peter past the entrance on the crackling snow of the
highway. Seen through the gaps of the trees the front looked new,
but the back part seemed to be of some age, for I could see high
walls, broken by few windows, hanging over the water. The place
was no more a chalet than a donjon, but I suppose the name was
given in honour of a wooden gallery above the front door. The
whole thing was washed in an ugly pink. There were outhouses -
garage or stables among the trees - and at the entrance there were
fairly recent tracks of an automobile.

On our way back we had some very bad beer in a cafe and made
friends with the woman who kept it. Peter had to tell her his story,
and I trotted out my aunt in Zurich, and in the end we heard her
grievances. She was a true Swiss, angry at all the belligerents who
had spoiled her livelihood, hating Germany most but also fearing
her most. Coffee, tea, fuel, bread, even milk and cheese were hard
to get and cost a ransom. It would take the land years to recover,
and there would be no more tourists, for there was little money left
in the world. I dropped a question about the Pink Chalet, and was
told that it belonged to one Schweigler, a professor of Berne, an
old man who came sometimes for a few days in the summer. It was
often let, but not now. Asked if it was occupied, she remarked
that some friends of the Schweiglers - rich people from Basle - had
been there for the winter. 'They come and go in great cars,' she
said bitterly, 'and they bring their food from the cities. They spend
no money in this poor place.'

Presently Peter and I fell into a routine of life, as if we had always
kept house together. In the morning he went abroad in his chair, in
the afternoon I would hobble about on my own errands. We sank
into the background and took its colour, and a less conspicuous
pair never faced the eye of suspicion. Once a week a young Swiss
officer, whose business it was to look after British wounded, paid
us a hurried visit. I used to get letters from my aunt in Zurich,
Sometimes with the postmark of Arosa, and now and then these
letters would contain curiously worded advice or instructions from
him whom my aunt called 'the kind patron'. Generally I was told to
be patient. Sometimes I had word about the health of 'my little
cousin across the mountains'. Once I was bidden expect a friend of
the patron's, the wise doctor of whom he had often spoken, but
though after that I shadowed the Pink Chalet for two days no
doctor appeared.

My investigations were a barren business. I used to go down to
the village in the afternoon and sit in an out-of-the-way cafe, talking
slow German with peasants and hotel porters, but there was little
to learn. I knew all there was to hear about the Pink Chalet, and
that was nothing. A young man who ski-ed stayed for three nights
and spent his days on the alps above the fir-woods. A party of four,
including two women, was reported to have been there for a night
- all ramifications of the rich family of Basle. I studied the house
from the lake, which should have been nicely swept into ice-rinks,
but from lack of visitors was a heap of blown snow. The high old
walls of the back part were built straight from the water's edge. I
remember I tried a short cut through the grounds to the high-road
and was given 'Good afternoon' by a smiling German manservant.
One way and another I gathered there were a good many serving-
men about the place - too many for the infrequent guests. But
beyond this I discovered nothing.

Not that I was bored, for I had always Peter to turn to. He was
thinking a lot about South Africa, and the thing he liked best was
to go over with me every detail of our old expeditions. They
belonged to a life which he could think about without pain, whereas
the war was too near and bitter for him. He liked to hobble out-of-doors
after the darkness came and look at his old friends, the stars.
He called them by the words they use on the veld, and the first star
of morning he called the _voorlooper - the little boy who inspans the
oxen - a name I had not heard for twenty years. Many a great yarn
we spun in the long evenings, but I always went to bed with a sore
heart. The longing in his eyes was too urgent, longing not for old
days or far countries, but for the health and strength which had
once been his pride.

one night I told him about Mary.
'She will be a happy _mysie,' he said, 'but you will need to be very
clever with her, for women are queer cattle and you and I don't
know their ways. They tell me English women do not cook and
make clothes like our vrouws, so what will she find to do? I doubt
an idle woman will be like a mealie-fed horse.'

It was no good explaining to him the kind of girl Mary was, for
that was a world entirely beyond his ken. But I could see that he
felt lonelier than ever at my news. So I told him of the house I
meant to have in England when the war was over - an old house in
a green hilly country, with fields that would carry four head of
cattle to the Morgan and furrows of clear water, and orchards of
plums and apples. 'And you will stay with us all the time,' I said.
'You will have your own rooms and your own boy to look after
you, and you will help me to farm, and we will catch fish together,
and shoot the wild ducks when they come up from the pans in the
evening. I have found a better countryside than the Houtbosch,
where you and I planned to have a farm. It is a blessed and happy
place, England.'

He shook his head. 'You are a kind man, Dick, but your pretty
_mysie won't want an ugly old fellow like me hobbling about her
house ... I do not think I will go back to Africa, for I should be
sad there in the sun. I will find a little place in England, and some
day I will visit you, old friend.'

That night his stoicism seemed for the first time to fail him. He
was silent for a long time and went early to bed, where I can vouch
for it he did not sleep. But he must have thought a lot in the night
time, for in the morning he had got himself in hand and was as
cheerful as a sandboy.

I watched his philosophy with amazement. It was far beyond
anything I could have compassed myself. He was so frail and so
poor, for he had never had anything in the world but his bodily
fitness, and he had lost that now. And remember, he had lost it
after some months of glittering happiness, for in the air he had
found the element for which he had been born. Sometimes he
dropped a hint of those days when he lived in the clouds and
invented a new kind of battle, and his voice always grew hoarse. I
could see that he ached with longing for their return. And yet he
never had a word of complaint. That was the ritual he had set
himself, his point of honour, and he faced the future with the same
kind of courage as that with which he had tackled a wild beast or
Lensch himself. Only it needed a far bigger brand of fortitude.

Another thing was that he had found religion. I doubt if that is
the right way to put it, for he had always had it. Men who live in
the wilds know they are in the hands of God. But his old kind had
been a tattered thing, more like heathen superstition, though it had
always kept him humble. But now he had taken to reading the
Bible and to thinking in his lonely nights, and he had got a creed of
his own. I dare say it was crude enough, I am sure it was
unorthodox; but if the proof of religion is that it gives a man a prop
in bad days, then Peter's was the real thing. He used to ferret about
in the Bible and the_Pilgrim's _Progress - they were both equally
inspired in his eyes - and find texts which he interpreted in his own
way to meet his case. He took everything quite literally. What
happened three thousand years ago in Palestine might, for all he
minded, have been going on next door. I used to chaff him and tell
him that he was like the Kaiser, very good at fitting the Bible to his
purpose, but his sincerity was so complete that he only smiled. I
remember one night, when he had been thinking about his flying
days, he found a passage in Thessalonians about the dead rising to
meet their Lord in the air, and that cheered him a lot. Peter, I could
see, had the notion that his time here wouldn't be very long, and he
liked to think that when he got his release he would find once more
the old rapture.

Once, when I said something about his patience, he said he had
got to try to live up to Mr Standfast. He had fixed on that character
to follow, though he would have preferred Mr Valiant-for-Truth if
he had thought himself good enough. He used to talk about Mr
Standfast in his queer way as if he were a friend of us both, like
Blenkiron ... I tell you I was humbled out of all my pride by the
Sight of Peter, so uncomplaining and gentle and wise. The Almighty
Himself couldn't have made a prig out of him, and he never would
have thought of preaching. Only once did he give me advice. I had
always a liking for short cuts, and I was getting a bit restive under
the long inaction. One day when I expressed my feelings on the
matter, Peter upped and read from the_Pilgrim's _Progress: 'Some also
have wished that the next way to their Father's house were here,
that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains
to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there is an end.'

All the same when we got into March and nothing happened I
grew pretty anxious. Blenkiron had said we were fighting against
time, and here were the weeks slipping away. His letters came
occasionally, always in the shape of communications from my aunt.
One told me that I would soon be out of a job, for Peter's repatriation
was just about through, and he might get his movement order
any day. Another spoke of my little cousin over the hills, and said
that she hoped soon to be going to a place called Santa Chiara in
the Val Saluzzana. I got out the map in a hurry and measured the
distance from there to St Anton and pored over the two roads
thither - the short one by the Staub Pass and the long one by the
Marjolana. These letters made me think that things were nearing a
climax, but still no instructions came. I had nothing to report in my
own messages, I had discovered nothing in the Pink Chalet but idle
servants, I was not even sure if the Pink Chalet were not a harmless
villa, and I hadn't come within a thousand miles of finding Chelius.
All my desire to imitate Peter's stoicism didn't prevent me from
getting occasionally rattled and despondent.

The one thing I could do was to keep fit, for I had a notion I
might soon want all my bodily strength. I had to keep up my
pretence of lameness in the daytime, so I used to take my exercise at
night. I would sleep in the afternoon, when Peter had his siesta,
and then about ten in the evening, after putting him to bed, I
would slip out-of-doors and go for a four or five hours' tramp.
Wonderful were those midnight wanderings. I pushed up through
the snow-laden pines to the ridges where the snow lay in great
wreaths and scallops, till I stood on a crest with a frozen world at
my feet and above me a host of glittering stars. Once on a night of
full moon I reached the glacier at the valley head, scrambled up the
moraine to where the ice began, and peered fearfully into the
spectral crevasses. At such hours I had the earth to myself, for there
was not a sound except the slipping of a burden of snow from the
trees or the crack and rustle which reminded me that a glacier was a
moving river. The war seemed very far away, and I felt the littleness
of our human struggles, till I thought of Peter turning from side to
side to find ease in the cottage far below me. Then I realized that
the spirit of man was the greatest thing in this spacious world ... I
would get back about three or four, have a bath in the water which
had been warming in my absence, and creep into bed, almost
ashamed of having two sound legs, when a better man a yard away
had but one.

Oddly enough at these hours there seemed more life in the Pink
Chalet than by day. Once, tramping across the lake long after
midnight, I saw lights in the lake-front in windows which for
ordinary were blank and shuttered. Several times I cut across the
grounds, when the moon was dark. On one such occasion a great
car with no lights swept up the drive, and I heard low voices at the
door. Another time a man ran hastily past me, and entered the
house by a little door on the eastern side, which I had not before
noticed ... Slowly the conviction began to grow on me that we
were not wrong in marking down this place, that things went on
within it which it deeply concerned us to discover. But I was
puzzled to think of a way. I might butt inside, but for all I knew it
would be upsetting Blenkiron's plans, for he had given me no
instructions about housebreaking. All this unsettled me worse than
ever. I began to lie awake planning some means of entrance ... I
would be a peasant from the next valley who had twisted his ankle ...
I would go seeking an imaginary cousin among the servants ...
I would start a fire in the place and have the doors flung open to
zealous neighbours ...

And then suddenly I got instructions in a letter from Blenkiron.

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