Mr. Standfast

J >> John Buchan >> Mr. Standfast

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It came inside a parcel of warm socks that arrived from my kind
aunt. But the letter for me was not from her. It was in Blenkiron's
large sprawling hand and the style of it was all his own. He told me
that he had about finished his job. He had got his line on Chelius,
who was the bird he expected, and that bird would soon wing its
way southward across the mountains for the reason I knew of.

'We've got an almighty move on,' he wrote, 'and please God
you're going to hustle some in the next week. It's going better than
I ever hoped.' But something was still to be done. He had struck a
countryman, one Clarence Donne, a journalist of Kansas City,
whom he had taken into the business. Him he described as a
'crackerjack' and commended to my esteem. He was coming to St
Anton, for there was a game afoot at the Pink Chalet, which he
would give me news of. I was to meet him next evening at nine-
fifteen at the little door in the east end of the house. 'For the love
of Mike, Dick,' he concluded, 'be on time and do everything
Clarence tells you as if he was me. It's a mighty complex affair, but
you and he have sand enough to pull through. Don't worry about
your little cousin. She's safe and out of the job now.'

My first feeling was one of immense relief, especially at the last
words. I read the letter a dozen times to make sure I had its
meaning. A flash of suspicion crossed my mind that it might be a
fake, principally because there was no mention of Peter, who had
figured large in the other missives. But why should Peter be mentioned
when he wasn't on in this piece? The signature convinced
me. Ordinarily Blenkiron signed himself in full with a fine
commercial flourish. But when I was at the Front he had got into the
habit of making a kind of hieroglyphic of his surname to me and
sticking J.S. after it in a bracket. That was how this letter was
signed, and it was sure proof it was all right.
I spent that day and the next in wild spirits. Peter spotted what
was on, though I did not tell him for fear of making him envious. I
had to be extra kind to him, for I could see that he ached to have a
hand in the business. Indeed he asked shyly if I couldn't fit him in,
and I had to lie about it and say it was only another of my aimless
circumnavigations of the Pink Chalet.

'Try and find something where I can help,' he pleaded. 'I'm
pretty strong still, though I'm lame, and I can shoot a bit.'

I declared that he would be used in time, that Blenkiron had
promised he would be used, but for the life of me I couldn't see how.

At nine o'clock on the evening appointed I was on the lake
opposite the house, close in under the shore, making my way to the
rendezvous. It was a coal-black night, for though the air was clear
the stars were shining with little light, and the moon had not yet
risen. With a premonition that I might be long away from food, I
had brought some slabs of chocolate, and my pistol and torch were
in my pocket. It was bitter cold, but I had ceased to mind weather,
and I wore my one suit and no overcoat.

The house was like a tomb for silence. There was no crack of
light anywhere, and none of those smells of smoke and food which
proclaim habitation. It was an eerie job scrambling up the steep
bank east of the place, to where the flat of the garden started, in a
darkness so great that I had to grope my way like a blind man.

I found the little door by feeling along the edge of the building.
Then I stepped into an adjacent clump of laurels to wait on my
companion. He was there before me.

'Say,' I heard a rich Middle West voice whisper, 'are you Joseph
Zimmer? I'm not shouting any names, but I guess you are the guy
I was told to meet here.'

'Mr Donne?' I whispered back.

'The same,'he replied. 'Shake.'

I gripped a gloved and mittened hand which drew me towards the door.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I Lie on a Hard Bed

The journalist from Kansas City was a man of action. He wasted no
words in introducing himself or unfolding his plan of campaign.
'You've got to follow me, mister, and not deviate one inch from
my tracks. The explaining part will come later. There's big business
in this shack tonight.' He unlocked the little door with scarcely a
sound, slid the crust of snow from his boots, and preceded me into
a passage as black as a cellar. The door swung smoothly behind us,
and after the sharp out-of-doors the air smelt stuffy as the inside of
a safe.

A hand reached back to make sure that I followed. We appeared
to be in a flagged passage under the main level of the house. My
hobnailed boots slipped on the floor, and I steadied myself on the
wall, which seemed to be of undressed stone. Mr Donne moved
softly and assuredly, for he was better shod for the job than me,
and his guiding hand came back constantly to make sure of my whereabouts.

I remember that I felt just as I had felt when on that August
night I had explored the crevice of the Coolin - the same sense that
something queer was going to happen, the same recklessness and
contentment. Moving a foot at a time with immense care, we came
to a right-hand turning. Two shallow steps led us to another passage,
and then my groping hands struck a blind wall. The American
was beside me, and his mouth was close to my ear.

'Got to crawl now,' he whispered. 'You lead, mister, while I
shed this coat of mine. Eight feet on your stomach and then
upright.'

I wriggled through a low tunnel, broad enough to take three
men abreast, but not two feet high. Half-way through I felt suffocated,
for I never liked holes, and I had a momentary anxiety as to
what we were after in this cellar pilgrimage. Presently I smelt free
air and got on to my knees.

'Right, mister?' came a whisper from behind. My companion
seemed to be waiting till I was through before he followed.

'Right,' I answered, and very carefully rose to my feet.

Then something happened behind me. There was a jar and a
bump as if the roof of the tunnel had subsided. I turned sharply and
groped at the mouth. I stuck my leg down and found a block.

'Donne,' I said, as loud as I dared, 'are you hurt? Where are you?'

But no answer came.

Even then I thought only of an accident. Something had miscarried,
and I was cut off in the cellars of an unfriendly house away
from the man who knew the road and had a plan in his head. I was
not so much frightened as exasperated. I turned from the tunnel-
mouth and groped into the darkness before me. I might as well
prospect the kind of prison into which I had blundered.

I took three steps - no more. My feet seemed suddenly to go
from me and fly upward. So sudden was it that I fell heavy and
dead like a log, and my head struck the floor with a crash that for a
moment knocked me senseless. I was conscious of something falling
on me and of an intolerable pressure on my chest. I struggled for
breath, and found my arms and legs pinned and my whole body in
a kind of wooden vice. I was sick with concussion, and could do
nothing but gasp and choke down my nausea. The cut in the back
of my head was bleeding freely and that helped to clear my wits,
but I lay for a minute or two incapable of thought. I shut my eyes
tight, as a man does when he is fighting with a swoon.

When I opened them there was light. It came from the left side
of the room, the broad glare of a strong electric torch. I watched it
stupidly, but it gave me the fillip needed to pick up the threads. I
remembered the tunnel now and the Kansas journalist. Then behind
the light I saw a face which pulled my flickering senses out of the mire.

I saw the heavy ulster and the cap, which I had realized, though
I had not seen, outside in the dark laurels. They belonged to the
journalist, Clarence Donne, the trusted emissary of Blenkiron. But I
saw his face now, and it was that face which I had boasted to
Bullivant I could never mistake again upon earth. I did not mistake
it now, and I remember I had a faint satisfaction that I had made
good my word. I had not mistaken it, for I had not had the chance
to look at it till this moment. I saw with acid clearness the common
denominator of all its disguises - the young man who lisped in the
seaside villa, the stout philanthropist of Biggleswick, the pulpy
panic-stricken creature of the Tube station, the trim French staff
officer of the Picardy chateau ... I saw more, for I saw it beyond
the need of disguise. I was looking at von Schwabing, the exile,
who had done more for Germany than any army commander ...
Mary's words came back to me - 'the most dangerous man in the
world' ... I was not afraid, or broken-hearted at failure, or angry -
not yet, for I was too dazed and awestruck. I looked at him as one
might look at some cataclysm of nature which had destroyed a continent.

The face was smiling.

'I am happy to offer you hospitality at last,' it said.

I pulled my wits farther out of the mud to attend to him. The
cross-bar on my chest pressed less hard and I breathed better. But
when I tried to speak, the words would not come.

'We are old friends,' he went on. 'We have known each other
quite intimately for four years, which is a long time in war. I have
been interested in you, for you have a kind of crude intelligence,
and you have compelled me to take you seriously. If you were
cleverer you would appreciate the compliment. But you were fool
enough to think you could beat me, and for that you must be
punished. Oh no, don't flatter yourself you were ever dangerous.
You were only troublesome and presumptuous like a mosquito one
flicks off one's sleeve.'

He was leaning against the side of a heavy closed door. He lit a
cigar from a little gold tinder box and regarded me with amused eyes.

'You will have time for reflection, so I propose to enlighten you
a little. You are an observer of little things. So? Did you ever see a
cat with a mouse? The mouse runs about and hides and manoeuvres
and thinks it is playing its own game. But at any moment the cat
can stretch out its paw and put an end to it. You are the mouse, my
poor General - for I believe you are one of those funny amateurs
that the English call Generals. At any moment during the last nine
months I could have put an end to you with a nod.'

My nausea had stopped and I could understand what he said,
though I had still no power to reply.

'Let me explain,' he went on. 'I watched with amusement your
gambols at Biggleswick. My eyes followed you when you went to the Clyde
and in your stupid twistings in Scotland. I gave you rope, because you
were futile, and I had graver things to attend to. I allowed you to
amuse yourself at your British Front with childish investigations and to
play the fool in Paris. I have followed every step of your course in
Switzerland, and I have helped your idiotic Yankee friend to plot against
myself. While you thought you were drawing your net around me, I was
drawing mine around you. I assure you, it has been a charming relaxation
from serious business.'

I knew the man was lying. Some part was true, for he had clearly
fooled Blenkiron; but I remembered the hurried flight from
Biggleswick and Eaucourt Sainte-Anne when the game was certainly
against him. He had me at his mercy, and was wreaking his vanity
on me. That made him smaller in my eyes, and my first awe began to pass.

'I never cherish rancour, you know,' he said. 'In my business it is
silly to be angry, for it wastes energy. But I do not tolerate insolence,
my dear General. And my country has the habit of doing
justice on her enemies. It may interest you to know that the end is
not far off. Germany has faced a jealous world in arms and she is
about to be justified of her great courage. She has broken up bit by
bit the clumsy organization of her opponents. Where is Russia
today, the steam-roller that was to crush us? Where is the poor
dupe Rumania? Where is the strength of Italy, who was once to do
wonders for what she called Liberty? Broken, all of them. I have
played my part in that work and now the need is past. My country
with free hands is about to turn upon your armed rabble in the
West and drive it into the Atlantic. Then we shall deal with the
ragged remains of France and the handful of noisy Americans. By
midsummer there will be peace dictated by triumphant Germany.'
'By God, there won't!' I had found my voice at last.

'By God, there will,' he said pleasantly. 'It is what you call a
mathematical certainty. You will no doubt die bravely, like the
savage tribes that your Empire used to conquer. But we have the
greater discipline and the stronger spirit and the bigger brain.
Stupidity is always punished in the end, and you are a stupid race.
Do not think that your kinsmen across the Atlantic will save you.
They are a commercial people and by no means sure of themselves.
When they have blustered a little they will see reason and find some
means of saving their faces. Their comic President will make a
speech or two and write us a solemn Note, and we will reply with
the serious rhetoric which he loves, and then we shall kiss and be
friends. You know in your heart that it will be so.'

A great apathy seemed to settle on me. This bragging did not
make me angry, and I had no longer any wish to contradict him. It
may have been the result of the fall, but my mind had stopped working.
I heard his voice as one listens casually to the ticking of a clock.

'I will tell you more,' he was saying. 'This is the evening of the
18th day of March. Your generals in France expect an attack, but
they are not sure where it will come. Some think it may be in
Champagne or on the Aisne, some at Ypres, some at St Quentin.
Well, my dear General, you alone will I take into our confidence.
On the morning of the 21st, three days from now, we attack the
right wing of the British Army. In two days we shall be in Amiens.
On the third we shall have driven a wedge as far as the sea. Then in
a week or so we shall have rolled up your army from the right, and
presently we shall be in Boulogne and Calais. After that Paris falls,
and then Peace.'

I made no answer. The word 'Amiens' recalled Mary, and I was
trying to remember the day in January when she and I had motored
south from that pleasant city.

'Why do I tell you these things? Your intelligence, for you are
not altogether foolish, will have supplied the answer. It is because
your life is over. As your Shakespeare says, the rest is silence ...
No, I am not going to kill you. That would be crude, and I hate
crudities. I am going now on a little journey, and when I return in
twenty-four hours' time you will be my companion. You are going
to visit Germany, my dear General.'

That woke me to attention, and he noticed it, for he went on
with gusto.

'You have heard of the _Untergrundbahn? No? And you boast of
an Intelligence service! Yet your ignorance is shared by the whole
of your General Staff. It is a little organization of my own. By it we
can take unwilling and dangerous people inside our frontier to be
dealt with as we please. Some have gone from England and many
from France. Officially I believe they are recorded as "missing", but
they did not go astray on any battle-field. They have been gathered
from their homes or from hotels or offices or even the busy streets.
I will not conceal from you that the service of our Underground
Railway is a little irregular from England and France. But from
Switzerland it is smooth as a trunk line. There are unwatched spots
on the frontier, and we have our agents among the frontier guards,
and we have no difficulty about passes. It is a pretty device, and
you will soon be privileged to observe its working ... In Germany
I cannot promise you comfort, but I do not think your life will be dull.'

As he spoke these words, his urbane smile changed to a grin of
impish malevolence. Even through my torpor I felt the venom
and I shivered.
'When I return I shall have another companion.' His voice was
honeyed again. 'There is a certain pretty lady who was to be the
bait to entice me into Italy. It was so? Well, I have fallen to the bait.
I have arranged that she shall meet me this very night at a mountain
inn on the Italian side. I have arranged, too, that she shall be alone.
She is an innocent child, and I do not think that she has been more
than a tool in the clumsy hands of your friends. She will come with
me when I ask her, and we shall be a merry party in the
Underground Express.'

My apathy vanished, and every nerve in me was alive at the words.

'You cur!' I cried. 'She loathes the sight of you. She wouldn't
touch you with the end of a barge-pole.'

He flicked the ash from his cigar. 'I think you are mistaken. I am
very persuasive, and I do not like to use compulsion with a woman.
But, willing or not, she will come with me. I have worked hard and I am
entitled to my pleasure, and I have set my heart on that little lady.'

There was something in his tone, gross, leering, assured, half
contemptuous, that made my blood boil. He had fairly got me on
the raw, and the hammer beat violently in my forehead. I could
have wept with sheer rage, and it took all my fortitude to keep my
mouth shut. But I was determined not to add to his triumph.

He looked at his watch. 'Time passes,' he said. 'I must depart to
my charming assignation. I will give your remembrances to the
lady. Forgive me for making no arrangements for your comfort till
I return. Your constitution is so sound that it will not suffer from a
day's fasting. To set your mind at rest I may tell you that escape is
impossible. This mechanism has been proved too often, and if you
did break loose from it my servants would deal with you. But I
must speak a word of caution. If you tamper with it or struggle too
much it will act in a curious way. The floor beneath you covers a
shaft which runs to the lake below. Set a certain spring at work and
you may find yourself shot down into the water far below the ice,
where your body will rot till the spring ... That, of course, is an
alternative open to you, if you do not care to wait for my return.'

He lit a fresh cigar, waved his hand, and vanished through the
doorway. As it shut behind him, the sound of his footsteps instantly
died away. The walls must have been as thick as a prison's.

I suppose I was what people in books call 'stunned'. The illumination
during the past few minutes had been so dazzling that my
brain could not master it. I remember very clearly that I did not
think about the ghastly failure of our scheme, or the German plans
which had been insolently unfolded to me as to one dead to the
world. I saw a single picture - an inn in a snowy valley (I saw it as
a small place like Peter's cottage), a solitary girl, that smiling devil
who had left me, and then the unknown terror of the Underground
Railway. I think my courage went for a bit, and I cried with
feebleness and rage. The hammer in my forehead had stopped for
it only beat when I was angry in action. Now that I lay trapped, the
manhood had slipped out of my joints, and if Ivery had still been in
the doorway, I think I would have whined for mercy. I would have
offered him all the knowledge I had in the world if he had promised
to leave Mary alone.

Happily he wasn't there, and there was no witness of my
cowardice. Happily, too, it is just as difficult to be a coward for long as
to be a hero. It was Blenkiron's phrase about Mary that pulled me
together - 'She can't scare and she can't soil'. No, by heavens, she
couldn't. I could trust my lady far better than I could trust myself. I
was still sick with anxiety, but I was getting a pull on myself. I was
done in, but Ivery would get no triumph out of me. Either I would
go under the ice, or I would find a chance of putting a bullet
through my head before I crossed the frontier. If I could do nothing
else I could perish decently ... And then I laughed, and I knew I
was past the worst. What made me laugh was the thought of Peter.
I had been pitying him an hour ago for having only one leg, but
now he was abroad in the living, breathing world with years before
him, and I lay in the depths, limbless and lifeless, with my number up.

I began to muse on the cold water under the ice where I could
go if I wanted. I did not think that I would take that road, for a
man's chances are not gone till he is stone dead, but I was glad the
way existed ... And then I looked at the wall in front of me, and,
very far up, I saw a small square window.

The stars had been clouded when I entered that accursed house,
but the mist must have cleared. I saw my old friend Orion, the
hunter's star, looking through the bars. And that suddenly made me think.

Peter and I had watched them by night, and I knew the place of
all the chief constellations in relation to the St Anton valley. I
believed that I was in a room on the lake side of the Pink Chalet: I
must be, if Ivery had spoken the truth. But if so, I could not
conceivably see Orion from its window ... There was no other
possible conclusion, I must be in a room on the east side of the
house, and Ivery had been lying. He had already lied in his boasting
of how he had outwitted me in England and at the Front. He might
be lying about Mary ... No, I dismissed that hope. Those words of
his had rung true enough.

I thought for a minute and concluded that he had lied to terrorize
me and keep me quiet; therefore this infernal contraption had
probably its weak point. I reflected, too, that I was pretty strong,
far stronger probably than Ivery imagined, for he had never seen
me stripped. Since the place was pitch dark I could not guess how
the thing worked, but I could feel the cross-bars rigid on my chest
and legs and the side-bars which pinned my arms to my sides ... I
drew a long breath and tried to force my elbows apart. Nothing
moved, nor could I raise the bars on my legs the smallest fraction.

Again I tried, and again. The side-bar on my right seemed to be
less rigid than the others. I managed to get my right hand raised
above the level of my thigh, and then with a struggle I got a grip
with it on the cross-bar, which gave me a small leverage. With a
mighty effort I drove my right elbow and shoulder against the
side-bar. It seemed to give slightly ... I summoned all my strength
and tried again. There was a crack and then a splintering, the
massive bar shuffled limply back, and my right arm was free to
move laterally, though the cross-bar prevented me from raising it.

With some difficulty I got at my coat pocket where reposed my
electric torch and my pistol. With immense labour and no little pain
I pulled the former out and switched it on by drawing the catch
against the cross-bar. Then I saw my prison house.

It was a little square chamber, very high, with on my left the
massive door by which Ivery had departed. The dark baulks of my
rack were plain, and I could roughly make out how the thing had
been managed. Some spring had tilted up the flooring, and dropped
the framework from its place in the right-hand wall. It was clamped,
I observed, by an arrangement in the floor just in front of the door.
If I could get rid of that catch it would be easy to free myself, for
to a man of my strength the weight would not be impossibly heavy.

My fortitude had come back to me, and I was living only in the
moment, choking down any hope of escape. My first job was to
destroy the catch that clamped down the rack, and for that my only
weapon was my pistol. I managed to get the little electric torch
jammed in the corner of the cross-bar, where it lit up the floor
towards the door. Then it was hell's own business extricating the
pistol from my pocket. Wrist and fingers were always cramping,
and I was in terror that I might drop it where I could not retrieve it.

I forced myself to think out calmly the question of the clamp, for
a pistol bullet is a small thing, and I could not afford to miss. I
reasoned it out from my knowledge of mechanics, and came to the
conclusion that the centre of gravity was a certain bright spot of
metal which I could just see under the cross-bars. It was bright and
so must have been recently repaired, and that was another reason
for thinking it important. The question was how to hit it, for I
could not get the pistol in line with my eye. Let anyone try that
kind of shooting, with a bent arm over a bar, when you are lying
flat and looking at the mark from under the bar, and he will
understand its difficulties. I had six shots in my revolver, and I
must fire two or three ranging shots in any case. I must not exhaust
all my cartridges, for I must have a bullet left for any servant who
came to pry, and I wanted one in reserve for myself. But I did not
think shots would be heard outside the room; the walls were too thick.

I held my wrist rigid above the cross-bar and fired. The bullet
was an inch to the right of the piece of bright steel. Moving a
fraction I fired again. I had grazed it on the left. With aching eyes
glued on the mark, I tried a third time. I saw something leap apart,
and suddenly the whole framework under which I lay fell loose and
mobile ... I was very cool and restored the pistol to my pocket and
took the torch in my hand before I moved ... Fortune had been
kind, for I was free. I turned on my face, humped my back, and
without much trouble crawled out from under the contraption.

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