Mr. Standfast

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At that moment someone slipped into the vacant seat on my
right hand. I turned and saw the V.A.D. girl who had brought tea
to Blaikie that afternoon at the hospital.

'He was exempted by his Department,' the lady went on, 'for
he's a Civil Servant, and so he never had a chance of testifying in
court, but no one has done better work for our cause. He is on the
committee of the L.D.A., and questions have been asked about him
in Parliament.'

The man was not quite comfortable at this biography. He glanced
nervously at me and was going to begin some kind of explanation,
when Miss Doria cut him short. 'Remember our rule, Launcelot.
No turgid war controversy within these walls.'

I agreed with her. The war had seemed closely knit to the
Summer landscape for all its peace, and to the noble old chambers
of the Manor. But in that demented modish dining-room it was
shriekingly incongruous.

Then they spoke of other things. Mostly of pictures or common
friends, and a little of books. They paid no heed to me, which was
fortunate, for I know nothing about these matters and didn't
understand half the language. But once Miss Doria tried to bring me in.
They were talking about some Russian novel - a name like Leprous
Souls - and she asked me if I had read it. By a curious chance I had.
It had drifted somehow into our dug-out on the Scarpe, and after
we had all stuck in the second chapter it had disappeared in the
mud to which it naturally belonged. The lady praised its 'poignancy'
and 'grave beauty'. I assented and congratulated myself on my
second escape - for if the question had been put to me I should
have described it as God-forgotten twaddle.

I turned to the girl, who welcomed me with a smile. I had
thought her pretty in her V.A.D. dress, but now, in a filmy black
gown and with her hair no longer hidden by a cap, she was the
most ravishing thing you ever saw. And I observed something else.
There was more than good looks in her young face. Her broad, low
brow and her laughing eyes were amazingly intelligent. She had an
uncanny power of making her eyes go suddenly grave and deep,
like a glittering river narrowing into a pool.

'We shall never be introduced,' she said, 'so let me reveal myself.
I'm Mary Lamington and these are my aunts ... Did you really like
Leprous Souls?'

it was easy enough to talk to her. And oddly enough her mere
presence took away the oppression I had felt in that room. For she
belonged to the out-of-doors and to the old house and to the world
at large. She belonged to the war, and to that happier world
beyond it - a world which must be won by going through the
struggle and not by shirking it, like those two silly ladies.

I could see Wake's eyes often on the girl, while he boomed and
oraculated and the Misses Wymondham prattled. Presently the
conversation seemed to leave the flowery paths of art and to verge
perilously near forbidden topics. He began to abuse our generals in
the field. I could not choose but listen. Miss Lamington's brows
were slightly bent, as if in disapproval, and my own temper began
to rise.

He had every kind of idiotic criticism - incompetence, faint-
heartedness, corruption. Where he got the stuff I can't imagine,
for the most grousing Tommy, with his leave stopped, never put
together such balderdash. Worst of all he asked me to agree with him.

It took all my sense of discipline. 'I don't know much about the
subject,' I said, 'but out in South Africa I did hear that the British
leading was the weak point. I expect there's a good deal in what
you say.'

It may have been fancy, but the girl at my side seemed to
whisper 'Well done!'

Wake and I did not remain long behind before joining the ladies;
I purposely cut it short, for I was in mortal fear lest I should lose
my temper and spoil everything. I stood up with my back against
the mantelpiece for as long as a man may smoke a cigarette, and I
let him yarn to me, while I looked steadily at his face. By this time I
was very clear that Wake was not the fellow to give me my instructions.
He wasn't playing a game. He was a perfectly honest crank, but
not a fanatic, for he wasn't sure of himself. He had somehow
lost his self-respect and was trying to argue himself back into it. He
had considerable brains, for the reasons he gave for differing from
most of his countrymen were good so far as they went. I shouldn't
have cared to take him on in public argument. If you had told me
about such a fellow a week before I should have been sick at the
thought of him. But now I didn't dislike him. I was bored by him
and I was also tremendously sorry for him. You could see he was as
restless as a hen.

When we went back to the hall he announced that he must get
on the road, and commandeered Miss Lamington to help him find
his bicycle. It appeared he was staying at an inn a dozen miles off
for a couple of days' fishing, and the news somehow made me like
him better. Presently the ladies of the house departed to bed for
their beauty sleep and I was left to my own devices.

For some time I sat smoking in the hall wondering when the
messenger would arrive. It was getting late and there seemed to be
no preparation in the house to receive anybody. The butler came in
with a tray of drinks and I asked him if he expected another guest
that night.

'I 'adn't 'eard of it, sir,' was his answer. 'There 'asn't
been a telegram that I know of, and I 'ave received no instructions.'

I lit my pipe and sat for twenty minutes reading a weekly paper.
Then I got up and looked at the family portraits. The moon
coming through the lattice invited me out-of-doors as a cure for my
anxiety. It was after eleven o'clock, and I was still without any
knowledge of my next step. It is a maddening business to be
screwed up for an unpleasant job and to have the wheels of the
confounded thing tarry.

Outside the house beyond a flagged terrace the lawn fell away,
white in the moonshine, to the edge of the stream, which here had
expanded into a miniature lake. By the water's edge was a little
formal garden with grey stone parapets which now gleamed like
dusky marble. Great wafts of scent rose from it, for the lilacs were
scarcely over and the may was in full blossom. Out from the shade
of it came suddenly a voice like a nightingale.

It was singing the old song 'Cherry Ripe', a common enough
thing which I had chiefly known from barrel-organs. But heard in
the scented moonlight it seemed to hold all the lingering magic of
an elder England and of this hallowed countryside. I stepped inside
the garden bounds and saw the head of the girl Mary.

She was conscious of my presence, for she turned towards me.

'I was coming to look for you,' she said, 'now that the house is
quiet. I have something to say to you, General Hannay.'

She knew my name and must be somehow in the business. The
thought entranced me.
'Thank God I can speak to you freely,' I cried. 'Who and what
are you - living in that house in that kind of company?'

'My good aunts!' She laughed softly. 'They talk a great deal
about their souls, but they really mean their nerves. Why, they are
what you call my camouflage, and a very good one too.'

'And that cadaverous young prig?'

'Poor Launcelot! Yes - camouflage too - perhaps something a
little more. You must not judge him too harshly.'

'But ... but -' I did not know how to put it, and stammered in
my eagerness. 'How can I tell that you are the right person for me
to speak to? You see I am under orders, and I have got none
about you.'

'I will give You Proof,' she said. 'Three days ago Sir Walter
Bullivant and Mr Macgillivray told you to come here tonight and
to wait here for further instructions. You met them in the little
smoking-room at the back of the Rota Club. You were bidden take
the name of Cornelius Brand, and turn yourself from a successful
general into a pacifist South African engineer. Is that correct?'

'Perfectly.'

'You have been restless all evening looking for the messenger to
give you these instructions. Set your mind at ease. No messenger is
coming. You will get your orders from me.'

'I could not take them from a more welcome source,' I said.

'Very prettily put. If you want further credentials I can tell you
much about your own doings in the past three years. I can explain
to you who don't need the explanation, every step in the business
of the Black Stone. I think I could draw a pretty accurate map of
your journey to Erzerum. You have a letter from Peter Pienaar in
your pocket - I can tell you its contents. Are you willing to trust
me?'

'With all my heart,' I said.

'Good. Then my first order will try you pretty hard. For I have
no orders to give you except to bid you go and steep yourself in a
particular kind of life. Your first duty is to get "atmosphere", as
your friend Peter used to say. Oh, I will tell you where to go and
how to behave. But I can't bid you do anything, only live idly with
open eyes and ears till you have got the "feel" of the situation.'

She stopped and laid a hand on my arm.

'It won't be easy. It would madden me, and it will be a far
heavier burden for a man like you. You have got to sink down
deep into the life of the half-baked, the people whom this war
hasn't touched or has touched in the wrong way, the people who
split hairs all day and are engrossed in what you and I would call
selfish little fads. Yes. People like my aunts and Launcelot, only for
the most part in a different social grade. You won't live in an old
manor like this, but among gimcrack little "arty" houses. You will
hear everything you regard as sacred laughed at and condemned,
and every kind of nauseous folly acclaimed, and you must hold
your tongue and pretend to agree. You will have nothing in the
world to do except to let the life soak into you, and, as I have said,
keep your eyes and ears open.'

'But you must give me some clue as to what I should be looking for?'

'My orders are to give you none. Our chiefs - yours and mine -
want you to go where you are going without any kind of _parti _pris.
Remember we are still in the intelligence stage of the affair. The
time hasn't yet come for a plan of campaign, and still less for action.'

'Tell me one thing,' I said. 'Is it a really big thing we're after?'

'A - really - big - thing,' she said slowly and very gravely. 'You
and I and some hundred others are hunting the most dangerous
man in all the world. Till we succeed everything that Britain does is
crippled. If we fail or succeed too late the Allies may never win the
victory which is their right. I will tell you one thing to cheer you.
It is in some sort a race against time, so your purgatory won't
endure too long.'

I was bound to obey, and she knew it, for she took my willingness
for granted.

From a little gold satchel she selected a tiny box, and opening it
extracted a thing like a purple wafer with a white St Andrew's
Cross on it.

'What kind of watch have you? Ah, a hunter. Paste that inside
the lid. Some day you may be called on to show it ... One other
thing. Buy tomorrow a copy of the _Pilgrim's _Progress and get it by
heart. You will receive letters and messages some day and the style
of our friends is apt to be reminiscent of John Bunyan ... The car
will be at the door tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give
you the address of the rooms that have been taken for you ...
Beyond that I have nothing to say, except to beg you to play the
part well and keep your temper. You behaved very nicely at dinner.'

I asked one last question as we said good night in the hall. 'Shall
I see you again?'

'Soon, and often,' was the answer. 'Remember we are colleagues.'

I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly
beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured
with the thought of the girl who had sung 'Cherry Ripe' in the
garden. I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in
the choice of his intermediary, for I'm hanged if I would have
taken such orders from anyone else.

CHAPTER TWO
'The Village Named Morality'

UP on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked
by muddy trickles - the most stagnant kind of watercourse you
would look for in a day's journey. But presently they reach the
edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble
ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea.
So with the story I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as
a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a
torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I
could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less
than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a
South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a
pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred jimson.

The house - or 'home' as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick
- was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant
Midland common. It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed
was too short, the windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut;
but it was as clean as soap and water and scrubbing could make it.
The three-quarters of an acre of garden were mainly devoted to the
culture of potatoes, though under the parlour window Mrs jimson
had a plot of sweet-smelling herbs, and lines of lank sunflowers
fringed the path that led to the front door. It was Mrs jimson who
received me as I descended from the station fly - a large red
woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in
a gown which, both in shape and material, seemed to have been
modelled on a chintz curtain. She was a good kindly soul, and as
proud as Punch of her house.

'We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,' she said. 'You
must take us as you find us.'

I assured her that I asked for nothing better, and as I
unpacked in my fresh little bedroom with a west wind blowing in at
the window I considered that I had seen worse quarters.

I had bought in London a considerable number of books, for I
thought that, as I would have time on my hands, I might as well do
something about my education. They were mostly English classics,
whose names I knew but which I had never read, and they were all
in a little flat-backed series at a shilling apiece. I arranged them on
top of a chest of drawers, but I kept the _Pilgrim's _Progress beside my
bed, for that was one of my working tools and I had got to get it
by heart.

Mrs jimson, who came in while I was unpacking to see if
the room was to my liking, approved my taste. At our midday
dinner she wanted to discuss books with me, and was so full of her
own knowledge that I was able to conceal my ignorance.

'We are all labouring to express our personalities,' she
informed me. 'Have you found your medium, Mr Brand? is it to be
the pen or the pencil? Or perhaps it is music? You have the brow of
an artist, the frontal "bar of Michelangelo", you remember!'

I told her that I concluded I would try literature, but before
writing anything I would read a bit more.

It was a Saturday, so jimson came back from town in the early
afternoon. He was a managing clerk in some shipping office, but
you wouldn't have guessed it from his appearance. His city clothes
were loose dark-grey flannels, a soft collar, an orange tie, and a
soft black hat. His wife went down the road to meet him, and
they returned hand-in-hand, swinging their arms like a couple of
schoolchildren. He had a skimpy red beard streaked with grey, and mild
blue eyes behind strong glasses. He was the most friendly creature
in the world, full of rapid questions, and eager to make me feel one
of the family. Presently he got into a tweed Norfolk jacket, and
started to cultivate his garden. I took off my coat and lent him a
hand, and when he stopped to rest from his labours - which was
every five minutes, for he had no kind of physique - he would mop
his brow and rub his spectacles and declaim about the good smell
of the earth and the joy of getting close to Nature.

Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with
a kind of wistfulness. 'You are one of the doers, Mr Brand,' he said,
'and I could find it in my heart to envy you. You have seen Nature
in wild forms in far countries. Some day I hope you will tell us
about your life. I must be content with my little corner, but happily
there are no territorial limits for the mind. This modest dwelling is
a watch-tower from which I look over all the world.'

After that he took me for a walk. We met parties of returning
tennis-players and here and there a golfer. There seemed to be an
abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with
one or two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The
names of some of them jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome
youth was Aronson, the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling
fellow with a fierce moustache was Letchford, the celebrated
leader-writer of the Critic. Several were pointed out to me as artists
who had gone one better than anybody else, and a vast billowy
creature was described as the leader of the new Orientalism in
England. I noticed that these people, according to jimson, were all
'great', and that they all dabbled in something 'new'. There were
quantities of young women, too, most of them rather badly dressed
and inclining to untidy hair. And there were several decent couples
taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the world Over.
Most of these last were jimson's friends, to whom he introduced
me. They were his own class - modest folk, who sought for a
coloured background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this
odd settlement.

At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick.

'It is one great laboratory of thought,' said Mrs jimson. 'It is
glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people
who are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the
intellectual history of England is being made in our studies and
gardens. The war to us seems a remote and secondary affair. As
someone has said, the great fights of the world are all fought in the
mind.'

A spasm of pain crossed her husband's face. 'I wish I could feel
it far away. After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that
gives people like us leisure and peace to think. Our duty is to do
the best which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing
compared with what our young soldiers are giving! I may be quite
wrong about the war ... I know I can't argue with Letchford. But
I will not pretend to a superiority I do not feel.'

I went to bed feeling that in jimson I had struck a pretty sound
fellow. As I lit the candles on my dressing-table I observed that the
stack of silver which I had taken out of my pockets when I washed
before supper was top-heavy. It had two big coins at the top and
sixpences and shillings beneath. Now it is one of my oddities that
ever since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins
symmetrically, with the smallest uppermost. That made me observant
and led me to notice a second point. The English classics on the
top of the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them.
Izaak Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the
poet Burns was wedged disconsolately between two volumes of
Hazlitt. Moreover a receipted bill which I had stuck in the _Pilgrim's
_Progress to mark my place had been moved. Someone had been
going through my belongings.

A moment's reflection convinced me that it couldn't have been
Mrs jimson. She had no servant and did the housework herself, but
my things had been untouched when I left the room before supper,
for she had come to tidy up before I had gone downstairs. Someone
had been here while we were at supper, and had examined
elaborately everything I possessed. Happily I had little luggage,
and no papers save the new books and a bill or two in the name of
Cornelius Brand- The inquisitor, whoever he was, had found
nothing ... The incident gave me a good deal of comfort. It had
been hard to believe that any mystery could exist in this public
place, where people lived brazenly in the open, and wore their
hearts on their sleeves and proclaimed their opinions from the
rooftops. Yet mystery there must be, or an inoffensive stranger
with a kit-bag would not have received these strange attentions. I
made a practice after that of sleeping with my watch below my
pillow, for inside the case was Mary Lamington's label. Now began
a period of pleasant idle receptiveness. Once a week it was my
custom to go up to London for the day to receive letters and
instructions, if any should come. I had moved from my chambers
in Park Lane, which I leased under my proper name, to a small flat
in Westminster taken in the name of Cornelius Brand. The letters
addressed to Park Lane were forwarded to Sir Walter, who sent
them round under cover to my new address. For the rest I used to
spend my mornings reading in the garden, and I discovered for the
first time what a pleasure was to be got from old books. They
recalled and amplified that vision I had seen from the Cotswold
ridge, the revelation of the priceless heritage which is England. I
imbibed a mighty quantity of history, but especially I liked the
writers, like Walton, who got at the very heart of the English
countryside. Soon, too, I found the _Pilgrim's _Progress not a duty but
a delight. I discovered new jewels daily in the honest old story, and
my letters to Peter began to be as full of it as Peter's own epistles. I
loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of
the girl who had sung to me in the June night.

In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the
good dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick
into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon.
The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and
ancient church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught
of cool nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place
which sold nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the
dusk, I was so much in love with the land that I could have sung
with the pure joy of it. And in the evening, after a bath, there
would be supper, when a rather fagged jimson struggled between
sleep and hunger, and the lady, with an artistic mutch on her untidy
head, talked ruthlessly of culture.

Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a
great help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance
with most of the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious
aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their
friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had
any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of
Biggleswick. About half were respectable citizens who came there
for country air and low rates, but even these had a touch of
queerness and had picked up the jargon of the place. The younger
men were mostly Government clerks or writers or artists. There
were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the outskirts
were several bigger houses - mostly houses which had been there
before the garden city was planted. One of them was brand-new, a
staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck on the top of a hill
among raw gardens. It belonged to a man called Moxon Ivery, who
was a kind of academic pacificist and a great god in the place.
Another, a quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a London
publisher, an ardent Liberal whose particular branch of business
compelled him to keep in touch with the new movements. I used to
see him hurrying to the station swinging a little black bag and
returning at night with the fish for dinner.

I soon got to know a surprising lot of people, and they were the
rummiest birds you can imagine. For example, there were the
Weekeses, three girls who lived with their mother in a house so
artistic that you broke your head whichever way you turned in it.
The son of the family was a conscientious objector who had refused
to do any sort of work whatever, and had got quodded for his
pains. They were immensely proud of him and used to relate his
sufferings in Dartmoor with a gusto which I thought rather heartless.
Art was their great subject, and I am afraid they found me
pretty heavy going. It was their fashion never to admire anything
that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty woman, but
to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought hideous.
Also they talked a language that was beyond me. This kind of
conversation used to happen. - miss WEEKES: 'Don't you admire
Ursula jimson?' SELF: 'Rather!' miss w.: 'She is so John-esque in
her lines.' SELF: 'Exactly!' miss w.: 'And Tancred, too - he is so
full of nuances.' SELF: 'Rather!' miss w.: 'He suggests one of
Degousse's countrymen.' SELF: 'Exactly!'

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