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Title: Mr. Standfast

Author: John Buchan

Release date: June 1, 1996 [eBook #560]
Most recently updated: August 16, 2026

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR.
STANDFAST ***

M r. S t a n d f a s t

by John Buchan

TO THAT MOST GALLANT COMPANY
THE OFFICERS AND MEN
OF THE
SOUTH AFRICAN INFANTRY BRIGADE
on the Western Front

NOTE

The earlier adventures of Richard Hannay, to which occasional reference
is made in this narrative, are recounted in The Thirty-Nine Steps and
Greenmantle.

J.B.

Contents

PART I
CHAPTER I The Wicket-Gate
CHAPTER II “The Village Named Morality”
CHAPTER III The Reflections of a Cured Dyspeptic
CHAPTER IV Andrew Amos
CHAPTER V Various Doings in the West
CHAPTER VI The Skirts of the Coolin
CHAPTER VII I Hear of the Wild Birds
CHAPTER VIII The Adventures of a Bagman
CHAPTER IX I Take the Wings of a Dove
CHAPTER X The Advantages of an Air Raid
CHAPTER XI The Valley of Humiliation

PART II
CHAPTER XII I Become a Combatant Once More
CHAPTER XIII The Adventure of the Picardy Château
CHAPTER XIV Mr Blenkiron Discourses on Love and War
CHAPTER XV St Anton
CHAPTER XVI I Lie on a Hard Bed
CHAPTER XVII The Col of the Swallows
CHAPTER XVIII The Underground Railway
CHAPTER XIX The Cage of the Wild Birds
CHAPTER XX The Storm Breaks in the West
CHAPTER XXI How an Exile Returned to His Own People
CHAPTER XXII The Summons Comes for Mr Standfast

PART I

CHAPTER I
The Wicket-Gate
I spent one-third of my journey looking out of the window of a first-class
carriage, the next in a local motor-car following the course of a trout stream
in a shallow valley, and the last tramping over a ridge of downland through
great beech-woods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an
infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool
twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates
of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite and a quiet mind.
As we slipped up the Thames valley on the smooth Great Western line I
had reflected ruefully on the thorns in the path of duty. For more than a year
I had never been out of khaki, except the months I spent in hospital. They
gave me my battalion before the Somme, and I came out of that weary
battle after the first big September fighting with a crack in my head and a
D.S.O. I had received a C.B. for the Erzerum business, so what with these
and my Matabele and South African medals and the Legion of Honour, I
had a chest like the High Priest’s breastplate. I rejoined in January, and got
a brigade on the eve of Arras. There we had a star turn, and took about as
many prisoners as we put infantry over the top. After that we were hauled
out for a month, and subsequently planted in a bad bit on the Scarpe with a
hint that we would soon be used for a big push. Then suddenly I was
ordered home to report to the War Office, and passed on by them to
Bullivant and his merry men. So here I was sitting in a railway carriage in a
grey tweed suit, with a neat new suitcase on the rack labelled C.B. The
initials stood for Cornelius Brand, for that was my name now. And an old
boy in the corner was asking me questions and wondering audibly why I
wasn’t fighting, while a young blood of a second lieutenant with a wound
stripe was eyeing me with scorn.
The old chap was one of the cross-examining type, and after he had
borrowed my matches he set to work to find out all about me. He was a

tremendous fire-eater, and a bit of a pessimist about our slow progress in
the west. I told him I came from South Africa and was a mining engineer.
“Been fighting with Botha?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not the fighting kind.”
The second lieutenant screwed up his nose.
“Is there no conscription in South Africa?”
“Thank God there isn’t,” I said, and the old fellow begged permission to
tell me a lot of unpalatable things. I knew his kind and didn’t give much for
it. He was the sort who, if he had been under fifty, would have crawled on
his belly to his tribunal to get exempted, but being over age was able to
pose as a patriot. But I didn’t like the second lieutenant’s grin, for he
seemed a good class of lad. I looked steadily out of the window for the rest
of the way, and wasn’t sorry when I got to my station.
I had had the queerest interview with Bullivant and Macgillivray. They
asked me first if I was willing to serve again in the old game, and I said I
was. I felt as bitter as sin, for I had got fixed in the military groove, and had
made good there. Here was I—a brigadier and still under forty, and with
another year of the war there was no saying where I might end. I had started
out without any ambition, only a great wish to see the business finished. But
now I had acquired a professional interest in the thing, I had a nailing good
brigade, and I had got the hang of our new kind of war as well as any fellow
from Sandhurst and Camberley. They were asking me to scrap all I had
learned and start again in a new job. I had to agree, for discipline’s
discipline, but I could have knocked their heads together in my vexation.
What was worse they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me anything about what
they wanted me for. It was the old game of running me in blinkers. They
asked me to take it on trust and put myself unreservedly in their hands. I
would get my instructions later, they said.
I asked if it was important.
Bullivant narrowed his eyes. “If it weren’t, do you suppose we could
have wrung an active brigadier out of the War Office? As it was, it was like
drawing teeth.”
“Is it risky?” was my next question.
“In the long run—damnably,” was the answer.

“And you can’t tell me anything more?”
“Nothing as yet. You’ll get your instructions soon enough. You know
both of us, Hannay, and you know we wouldn’t waste the time of a good
man on folly. We are going to ask you for something which will make a big
call on your patriotism. It will be a difficult and arduous task, and it may be
a very grim one before you get to the end of it, but we believe you can do it,
and that no one else can.... You know us pretty well. Will you let us judge
for you?”
I looked at Bullivant’s shrewd, kind old face and Macgillivray’s steady
eyes. These men were my friends and wouldn’t play with me.
“All right,” I said. “I’m willing. What’s the first step?”
“Get out of uniform and forget you ever were a soldier. Change your
name. Your old one, Cornelis Brandt, will do, but you’d better spell it
‘Brand’ this time. Remember that you are an engineer just back from South
Africa, and that you don’t care a rush about the war. You can’t understand
what all the fools are fighting about, and you think we might have peace at
once by a little friendly business talk. You needn’t be pro-German—if you
like you can be rather severe on the Hun. But you must be in deadly earnest
about a speedy peace.”
I expect the corners of my mouth fell, for Bullivant burst out laughing.
“Hang it all, man, it’s not so difficult. I feel sometimes inclined to argue
that way myself, when my dinner doesn’t agree with me. It’s not so hard as
to wander round the Fatherland abusing Britain, which was your last job.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “But I want to do one errand on my own first. I must
see a fellow in my brigade who is in a shell-shock hospital in the
Cotswolds. Isham’s the name of the place.”
The two men exchanged glances. “This looks like fate,” said Bullivant.
“By all means go to Isham. The place where your work begins is only a
couple of miles off. I want you to spend next Thursday night as the guest of
two maiden ladies called Wymondham at Fosse Manor. You will go down
there as a lone South African visiting a sick friend. They are hospitable
souls and entertain many angels unawares.”
“And I get my orders there?”
“You get your orders, and you are under bond to obey them.” And
Bullivant and Macgillivray smiled at each other.

I was thinking hard about that odd conversation as the small Ford car,
which I had wired for to the inn, carried me away from the suburbs of the
county town into a land of rolling hills and green water-meadows. It was a
gorgeous afternoon and the blossom of early June was on every tree. But I
had no eyes for landscape and the summer, being engaged in reprobating
Bullivant and cursing my fantastic fate. I detested my new part and looked
forward to naked shame. It was bad enough for anyone to have to pose as a
pacifist, but for me, strong as a bull and as sunburnt as a gipsy and not
looking my forty years, it was a black disgrace. To go into Germany as an
anti-British Afrikander was a stoutish adventure, but to lounge about at
home talking rot was a very different-sized job. My stomach rose at the
thought of it, and I had pretty well decided to wire to Bullivant and cry off.
There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man.
When I got to Isham and found poor old Blaikie I didn’t feel happier. He
had been a friend of mine in Rhodesia, and after the German South-West
affair was over had come home to a Fusilier battalion, which was in my
brigade at Arras. He had been buried by a big crump just before we got our
second objective, and was dug out without a scratch on him, but as daft as a
hatter. I had heard he was mending, and had promised his family to look
him up the first chance I got. I found him sitting on a garden seat, staring
steadily before him like a lookout at sea. He knew me all right and cheered
up for a second, but very soon he was back at his staring, and every word he
uttered was like the careful speech of a drunken man. A bird flew out of a
bush, and I could see him holding himself tight to keep from screaming.
The best I could do was to put a hand on his shoulder and stroke him as one
strokes a frightened horse. The sight of the price my old friend had paid
didn’t put me in love with pacificism.
We talked of brother officers and South Africa, for I wanted to keep his
thoughts off the war, but he kept edging round to it.
“How long will the damned thing last?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s practically over,” I lied cheerfully. “No more fighting for you
and precious little for me. The Boche is done in all right.... What you’ve got
to do, my lad, is to sleep fourteen hours in the twenty-four and spend half
the rest catching trout. We’ll have a shot at the grouse-bird together this
autumn and we’ll get some of the old gang to join us.”

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the
very prettiest girl I ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child,
and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore
the neat blue dress and apron of a V.A.D. and her white cap was set on hair
like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I
thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after
her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved
with the free grace of an athletic boy.
“Who on earth’s that?” I asked Blaikie.
“That? Oh, one of the sisters,” he said listlessly. “There are squads of
them. I can’t tell one from another.”
Nothing gave me such an impression of my friend’s sickness as the fact
that he should have no interest in something so fresh and jolly as that girl.
Presently my time was up and I had to go, and as I looked back I saw him
sunk in his chair again, his eyes fixed on vacancy, and his hands gripping
his knees.
The thought of him depressed me horribly. Here was I condemned to
some rotten buffoonery in inglorious safety, while the salt of the earth like
Blaikie was paying the ghastliest price. From him my thoughts flew to old
Peter Pienaar, and I sat down on a roadside wall and read his last letter. It
nearly made me howl. Peter, you must know, had shaved his beard and
joined the Royal Flying Corps the summer before when we got back from
the Greenmantle affair. That was the only kind of reward he wanted, and,
though he was absurdly over age, the authorities allowed it. They were wise
not to stickle about rules, for Peter’s eyesight and nerve were as good as
those of any boy of twenty. I knew he would do well, but I was not prepared
for his immediately blazing success. He got his pilot’s certificate in record
time and went out to France; and presently even we foot-sloggers, busy
shifting ground before the Somme, began to hear rumours of his doings. He
developed a perfect genius for air-fighting. There were plenty better trick-
flyers, and plenty who knew more about the science of the game, but there
was no one with quite Peter’s genius for an actual scrap. He was as full of
dodges a couple of miles up in the sky as he had been among the rocks of
the Berg. He apparently knew how to hide in the empty air as cleverly as in
the long grass of the Lebombo Flats. Amazing yarns began to circulate
among the infantry about this new airman, who could take cover below one

plane of an enemy squadron while all the rest were looking for him. I
remember talking about him with the South Africans when we were out
resting next door to them after the bloody Delville Wood business. The day
before we had seen a good battle in the clouds when the Boche plane had
crashed, and a Transvaal machine-gun officer brought the report that the
British airman had been Pienaar. “Well done, the old takhaar!” he cried,
and started to yarn about Peter’s methods. It appeared that Peter had a
theory that every man has a blind spot, and that he knew just how to find
that blind spot in the world of air. The best cover, he maintained, was not in
cloud or a wisp of fog, but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy. I
recognised that talk for the real thing. It was on a par with Peter’s doctrine
of “atmosphere” and “the double bluff” and all the other principles that his
queer old mind had cogitated out of his rackety life.
By the end of August that year Peter’s was about the best-known figure
in the Flying Corps. If the reports had mentioned names he would have
been a national hero, but he was only “Lieutenant Blank,” and the
newspapers, which expatiated on his deeds, had to praise the Service and
not the man. That was right enough, for half the magic of our Flying Corps
was its freedom from advertisement. But the British Army knew all about
him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as if he were a crack
football-player. There was a very big German airman called Lensch, one of
the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August claimed to have
destroyed thirty-two Allied machines. Peter had then only seventeen planes
to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his score. Lensch was a mighty
man of valour and a good sportsman after his fashion. He was amazingly
quick at manœuvring his machine in the actual fight, but Peter was
supposed to be better at forcing the kind of fight he wanted. Lensch, if you
like, was the tactician and Peter the strategist. Anyhow the two were out to
get each other. There were plenty of fellows who saw the campaign as a
struggle not between Hun and Briton, but between Lensch and Pienaar.
The 15th September came, and I got knocked out and went to hospital.
When I was fit to read the papers again and receive letters, I found to my
consternation that Peter had been downed. It happened at the end of
October when the southwest gales badly handicapped our airwork. When
our bombing or reconnaissance jobs behind the enemy lines were
completed, instead of being able to glide back into safety, we had to fight
our way home slowly against a head-wind exposed to Archies and Hun

planes. Somewhere east of Bapaume on a return journey Peter fell in with
Lensch—at least the German Press gave Lensch the credit. His petrol tank
was shot to bits and he was forced to descend in a wood near Morchies.
“The celebrated British airman, Pinner,” in the words of the German
communiqué, was made prisoner.
I had no letter from him till the beginning of the New Year, when I was
preparing to return to France. It was a very contented letter. He seemed to
have been fairly well treated, though he had always a low standard of what
he expected from the world in the way of comfort. I inferred that his captors
had not identified in the brilliant airman the Dutch miscreant who a year
before had broken out of a German jail. He had discovered the pleasures of
reading and had perfected himself in an art which he had once practised
indifferently. Somehow or other he had got a Pilgrim’s Progress, from
which he seemed to extract enormous pleasure. And then at the end, quite
casually, he mentioned that he had been badly wounded and that his left leg
would never be much use again.
After that I got frequent letters, and I wrote to him every week and sent
him every kind of parcel I could think of. His letters used to make me both
ashamed and happy. I had always banked on old Peter, and here he was
behaving like an early Christian martyr—never a word of complaint, and
just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the high veld and we were
off to ride down springbok. I knew what the loss of a leg must mean to him,
for bodily fitness had always been his pride. The rest of life must have
unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as
if he were on the top of his form and kept commiserating me on the
discomforts of my job. The picture of that patient, gentle old fellow,
hobbling about his compound and puzzling over his Pilgrim’s Progress, a
cripple for life after five months of blazing glory, would have stiffened the
back of a jellyfish.
This last letter was horribly touching, for summer had come and the
smell of the woods behind his prison reminded Peter of a place in the
Woodbush, and one could read in every sentence the ache of exile. I sat on
that stone wall and considered how trifling were the crumpled leaves in my
bed of life compared with the thorns Peter and Blaikie had to lie on. I
thought of Sandy far off in Mesopotamia, and old Blenkiron groaning with
dyspepsia somewhere in America, and I considered that they were the kind

of fellows who did their jobs without complaining. The result was that
when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier temper. I wasn’t going to
shame my friends or pick and choose my duty. I would trust myself to
Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you
gave him a chance.
It was not only Peter’s letter that steadied and calmed me. Isham stood
high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road I was
taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side. I climbed
through great beechwoods, which seemed in the twilight like some green
place far below the sea, and then over a short stretch of hill pasture to the
rim of the vale. All about me were little fields enclosed with walls of grey
stone and full of dim sheep. Below were dusky woods around what I took to
be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman Fosse Way, straight as an arrow,
passed over the hills to the south and skirted its grounds. I could see the
stream slipping among its water-meadows and could hear the plash of the
weir. A tiny village settled in a crook of the hill, and its church-tower
sounded seven with a curiously sweet chime. Otherwise there was no noise
but the twitter of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.
In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had
been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep and holy
and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure
when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It was more; for in
that hour England first took hold of me. Before my country had been South
Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces
of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg. But now I realised that I had a
new home. I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how
old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom
of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I
knew what it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have
made a line of verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop
which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I saw
not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after victory, when I
should inherit something of this English peace and wrap myself in it till the
end of my days.
Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral, I went
down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an old red-brick

façade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot lemons in the June
dusk. The car from the inn had brought on my baggage, and presently I was
dressing in a room which looked out on a water-garden. For the first time
for more than a year I put on a starched shirt and a dinner-jacket, and as I
dressed I could have sung from pure lightheartedness. I was in for some
arduous job, and sometime that evening in that place I should get my
marching orders. Someone would arrive—perhaps Bullivant—and read me
the riddle. But whatever it was, I was ready for it, for my whole being had
found a new purpose. Living in the trenches, you are apt to get your horizon
narrowed down to the front line of enemy barbed wire on one side and the
nearest rest billets on the other. But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a
happy country.
High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad staircase,
voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls and the austere
family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in the hall I thought their
looks still less in keeping with the house. Both ladies were on the wrong
side of forty, but their dress was that of young girls. Miss Doria
Wymondham was tall and thin with a mass of nondescript pale hair
confined by a black velvet fillet. Miss Claire Wymondham was shorter and
plumper and had done her best by ill-applied cosmetics to make herself
look like a foreign demi-mondaine. They greeted me with the friendly
casualness which I had long ago discovered was the right English manner
towards your guests; as if they had just strolled in and billeted themselves,
and you were quite glad to see them but mustn’t be asked to trouble
yourself further. The next second they were cooing like pigeons round a
picture which a young man was holding up in the lamplight.
He was a tallish, lean fellow of round about thirty years, wearing grey
flannels and shoes dusty from the country roads. His thin face was sallow as
if from living indoors, and he had rather more hair on his head than most of
us. In the glow of the lamp his features were very clear, and I examined
them with interest, for, remember, I was expecting a stranger to give me
orders. He had a long, rather strong chin and an obstinate mouth with
peevish lines about its corners. But the remarkable feature was his eyes. I
can best describe them by saying that they looked hot—not fierce or angry,
but so restless that they seemed to ache physically and to want sponging
with cold water.

They finished their talk about the picture—which was couched in a
jargon of which I did not understand one word—and Miss Doria turned to
me and the young man.
“My cousin Launcelot Wake—Mr Brand.”
We nodded stiffly and Mr Wake’s hand went up to smooth his hair in a
self-conscious gesture.
“Has Barnard announced dinner? By the way, where is Mary?”
“She came in five minutes ago and I sent her to change,” said Miss
Claire. “I won’t have her spoiling the evening with that horrid uniform. She
may masquerade as she likes out-of-doors, but this house is for civilised
people.”
The butler appeared and mumbled something. “Come along,” cried Miss
Doria, “for I’m sure you are starving, Mr Brand. And Launcelot has
bicycled ten miles.”
The dining-room was very unlike the hall. The panelling had been
stripped off, and the walls and ceiling were covered with a dead-black
satiny paper on which hung the most monstrous pictures in large dull-gold
frames. I could only see them dimly, but they seemed to be a mere riot of
ugly colour. The young man nodded towards them. “I see you have got the
Dégousses hung at last,” he said.
“How exquisite they are!” cried Miss Claire. “How subtle and candid and
brave! Doria and I warm our souls at their flame.”
Some aromatic wood had been burned in the room, and there was a queer
sickly scent about. Everything in that place was strained and uneasy and
abnormal—the candle shades on the table, the mass of faked china fruit in
the centre dish, the gaudy hangings and the nightmarish walls. But the food
was magnificent. It was the best dinner I had eaten since 1914.
“Tell me, Mr Brand,” said Miss Doria, her long white face propped on a
much-beringed hand. “You are one of us? You are in revolt against this
crazy war?”
“Why, yes,” I said, remembering my part. “I think a little common-sense
would settle it right away.”
“With a little common-sense it would never have started,” said Mr Wake.
“Launcelot’s a C.O., you know,” said Miss Doria.

I did not know, for he did not look any kind of soldier.... I was just about
to ask him what he commanded, when I remembered that the letters stood
also for “Conscientious Objector,” and stopped in time.
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 II
“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 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 Dégousse’s countrymen.” SELF: “Exactly!”
They hadn’t much use for books, except some Russian ones, and I
acquired merit in their eyes for having read Leprous Souls. If you talked to
them about that divine countryside, you found they didn’t give a rap for it
and had never been a mile beyond the village. But they admired greatly the
sombre effect of a train going into Marylebone station on a rainy day.
But it was the men who interested me most. Aronson, the novelist,
proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered himself a
genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he sponged on
his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money. He was
always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were. I should like
to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned full-blooded sinners of
my acquaintance; they would have scared him considerably. He told me that
he sought “reality” and “life” and “truth”, but it was hard to see how he
could know much about them, for he spent half the day in bed smoking
cheap cigarettes, and the rest sunning himself in the admiration of half-
witted girls. The creature was tuberculous in mind and body, and the only
novel of his I read, pretty well turned my stomach. Mr Aronson’s strong
point was jokes about the war. If he heard of any acquaintance who had
joined up or was even doing war work his merriment knew no bounds. My
fingers used to itch to box the little wretch’s ears.
Letchford was a different pair of shoes. He was some kind of a man, to
begin with, and had an excellent brain and the worst manners conceivable.

He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for an argument as
other people look for their dinner. He was a double-engined, high-speed
pacificist, because he was the kind of cantankerous fellow who must always
be in a minority. If Britain had stood out of the war he would have been a
raving militarist, but since she was in it he had got to find reasons why she
was wrong. And jolly good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his
arguments if I had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet. The world was all
crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands. But
the fellow had merits. He had a couple of jolly children whom he adored,
and he would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry about the
beauty and greatness of England. He was forty-five; if he had been thirty
and in my battalion I could have made a soldier out of him.
There were dozens more whose names I have forgotten, but they had one
common characteristic. They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I used
to amuse myself with finding their originals in the Pilgrim’s Progress.
When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter, they fell woefully
short. They shut out the war from their lives, some out of funk, some out of
pure levity of mind, and some because they were really convinced that the
thing was all wrong. I think I grew rather popular in my role of the seeker
after truth, the honest colonial who was against the war by instinct and was
looking for instruction in the matter. They regarded me as a convert from an
alien world of action which they secretly dreaded, though they affected to
despise it. Anyhow they talked to me very freely, and before long I had all
the pacifist arguments by heart. I made out that there were three schools.
One objected to war altogether, and this had few adherents except Aronson
and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in Dartmoor. The second thought that
the Allies’ cause was tainted, and that Britain had contributed as much as
Germany to the catastrophe. This included all the adherents of the L.D.A.—
or League of Democrats against Aggression—a very proud body. The third
and much the largest, which embraced everybody else, held that we had
fought long enough and that the business could now be settled by
negotiation, since Germany had learned her lesson. I was myself a modest
member of the last school, but I was gradually working my way up to the
second, and I hoped with luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances
approved my progress. Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow
nature, and that I would end by waving the red flag.

Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most of
them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in it all. This
vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I had embarked on so
solemnly were not going to be a fiasco. Sometimes they worried me beyond
endurance. When the news of Messines came nobody took the slightest
interest, while I was aching to tooth every detail of the great fight. And
when they talked on military affairs, as Letchford and others did sometimes,
it was difficult to keep from sending them all to the devil, for their amateur
cocksureness would have riled Job. One had got to batten down the
recollection of our fellows out there who were sweating blood to keep these
fools snug. Yet I found it impossible to be angry with them for long, they
were so babyishly innocent. Indeed, I couldn’t help liking them, and finding
a sort of quality in them. I had spent three years among soldiers, and the
British regular, great fellow that he is, has his faults. His discipline makes
him in a funk of red-tape and any kind of superior authority. Now these
people were quite honest and in a perverted way courageous. Letchford
was, at any rate. I could no more have done what he did and got hunted off
platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the streets than I could
have written his leading articles.
All the same I was rather low about my job. Barring the episode of the
ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a clue or a
hint of any mystery. The place and the people were as open and bright as a
Y.M.C.A. hut. But one day I got a solid wad of comfort. In a corner of
Letchford’s paper, the Critic, I found a letter which was one of the steepest
pieces of invective I had ever met with. The writer gave tongue like a
beagle pup about the prostitution, as he called it, of American republicanism
to the vices of European aristocracies. He declared that Senator La Follette
was a much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the
toiling millions who had no other friend. He was mad with President
Wilson, and he prophesied a great awakening when Uncle Sam got up
against John Bull in Europe and found out the kind of standpatter he was.
The letter was signed “John S. Blenkiron” and dated “London, July 3rd”.
The thought that Blenkiron was in England put a new complexion on my
business. I reckoned I would see him soon, for he wasn’t the man to stand
still in his tracks. He had taken up the rôle he had played before he left in
December 1915, and very right too, for not more than half a dozen people
knew of the Erzerum affair, and to the British public he was only the man

who had been fired out of the Savoy for talking treason. I had felt a bit
lonely before, but now somewhere within the four corners of the island the
best companion God ever made was writing nonsense with his tongue in his
old cheek.
There was an institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the
south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building called the
Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout population.
Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already counted twenty-
seven varieties of religious conviction, including three Buddhists, a
Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and about ten varieties of Mystic
whose names I could never remember. The hall had been the gift of the
publisher I have spoken of, and twice a week it was used for lectures and
debates. The place was managed by a committee and was surprisingly
popular, for it gave all the bubbling intellects a chance of airing their views.
When you asked where somebody was and were told he was “at Moot,” the
answer was spoken in the respectful tone in which you would mention a
sacrament.
I went there regularly and got my mind broadened to cracking point. We
had all the stars of the New Movements. We had Doctor Chirk, who
lectured on “God”, which, as far as I could make out, was a new name he
had invented for himself. There was a woman, a terrible woman, who had
come back from Russia with what she called a “message of healing”. And
to my joy, one night there was a great buck nigger who had a lot to say
about “Africa for the Africans”. I had a few words with him in Sesutu
afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. Some of the people were
extraordinarily good, especially one jolly old fellow who talked about
English folk songs and dances, and wanted us to set up a Maypole. In the
debates which generally followed I began to join, very coyly at first, but
presently with some confidence. If my time at Biggleswick did nothing else
it taught me to argue on my feet.
The first big effort I made was on a full-dress occasion, when Launcelot
Wake came down to speak. Mr Ivery was in the chair—the first I had seen
of him—a plump middle-aged man, with a colourless face and nondescript
features. I was not interested in him till he began to talk, and then I sat bolt
upright and took notice. For he was the genuine silver-tongue, the sentences
flowing from his mouth as smooth as butter and as neatly dovetailed as a

parquet floor. He had a sort of man-of-the-world manner, treating his
opponents with condescending geniality, deprecating all passion and
exaggeration and making you feel that his urbane statement must be right,
for if he had wanted he could have put the case so much higher. I watched
him, fascinated, studying his face carefully; and the thing that struck me
was that there was nothing in it—nothing, that is to say, to lay hold on. It
was simply nondescript, so almightily commonplace that that very fact
made it rather remarkable.
Wake was speaking of the revelations of the Sukhomlinov trial in Russia,
which showed that Germany had not been responsible for the war. He was
jolly good at the job, and put as clear an argument as a first-class lawyer. I
had been sweating away at the subject and had all the ordinary case at my
fingers’ ends, so when I got a chance of speaking I gave them a long
harangue, with some good quotations I had cribbed out of the Vossische
Zeitung, which Letchford lent me. I felt it was up to me to be extra violent,
for I wanted to establish my character with Wake, seeing that he was a
friend of Mary and Mary would know that I was playing the game. I got
tremendously applauded, far more than the chief speaker, and after the
meeting Wake came up to me with his hot eyes, and wrung my hand.
“You’re coming on well, Brand,” he said, and then he introduced me to Mr
Ivery. “Here’s a second and a better Smuts,” he said.
Ivery made me walk a bit of the road home with him. “I am struck by
your grip on these difficult problems, Mr Brand,” he told me. “There is
much I can tell you, and you may be of great value to our cause.” He asked
me a lot of questions about my past, which I answered with easy mendacity.
Before we parted he made me promise to come one night to supper.
Next day I got a glimpse of Mary, and to my vexation she cut me dead.
She was walking with a flock of bare-headed girls, all chattering hard, and
though she saw me quite plainly she turned away her eyes. I had been
waiting for my cue, so I did not lift my hat, but passed on as if we were
strangers. I reckoned it was part of the game, but that trifling thing annoyed
me, and I spent a morose evening.
The following day I saw her again, this time talking sedately with Mr
Ivery, and dressed in a very pretty summer gown, and a broad-brimmed
straw hat with flowers in it. This time she stopped with a bright smile and
held out her hand. “Mr Brand, isn’t it?” she asked with a pretty hesitation.

And then, turning to her companion—“This is Mr Brand. He stayed with us
last month in Gloucestershire.”
Mr Ivery announced that he and I were already acquainted. Seen in broad
daylight he was a very personable fellow, somewhere between forty-five
and fifty, with a middle-aged figure and a curiously young face. I noticed
that there were hardly any lines on it, and it was rather that of a very wise
child than that of a man. He had a pleasant smile which made his jaw and
cheeks expand like indiarubber. “You are coming to sup with me, Mr
Brand,” he cried after me. “On Tuesday after Moot. I have already written.”
He whisked Mary away from me, and I had to content myself with
contemplating her figure till it disappeared round a bend of the road.
Next day in London I found a letter from Peter. He had been very solemn
of late, and very reminiscent of old days now that he concluded his active
life was over. But this time he was in a different mood. “I think,” he wrote,
“that you and I will meet again soon, my old friend. Do you remember when
we went after the big black-maned lion in the Rooirand and couldn’t get on
his track, and then one morning we woke up and said we would get him
today?—and we did, but he very near got you first. I’ve had a feel these last
days that we’re both going down into the Valley to meet with Apollyon, and
that the devil will give us a bad time, but anyhow we’ll be together.”
I had the same kind of feel myself, though I didn’t see how Peter and I
were going to meet, unless I went out to the Front again and got put in the
bag and sent to the same Boche prison. But I had an instinct that my time in
Biggleswick was drawing to a close, and that presently I would be in
rougher quarters. I felt quite affectionate towards the place, and took all my
favourite walks, and drank my own health in the brew of the village inns,
with a consciousness of saying goodbye. Also I made haste to finish my
English classics, for I concluded I wouldn’t have much time in the future
for miscellaneous reading.
The Tuesday came, and in the evening I set out rather late for the Moot
Hall, for I had been getting into decent clothes after a long, hot stride. When
I reached the place it was pretty well packed, and I could only find a seat on
the back benches. There on the platform was Ivery, and beside him sat a
figure that thrilled every inch of me with affection and a wild anticipation.
“I have now the privilege,” said the chairman, “of introducing to you the

speaker whom we so warmly welcome, our fearless and indefatigable
American friend, Mr Blenkiron.”
It was the old Blenkiron, but almightily changed. His stoutness had gone,
and he was as lean as Abraham Lincoln. Instead of a puffy face, his cheek-
bones and jaw stood out hard and sharp, and in place of his former pasty
colour his complexion had the clear glow of health. I saw now that he was a
splendid figure of a man, and when he got to his feet every movement had
the suppleness of an athlete in training. In that moment I realised that my
serious business had now begun. My senses suddenly seemed quicker, my
nerves tenser, my brain more active. The big game had started, and he and I
were playing it together.
I watched him with strained attention. It was a funny speech, stuffed with
extravagance and vehemence, not very well argued and terribly discursive.
His main point was that Germany was now in a fine democratic mood and
might well be admitted into a brotherly partnership—that indeed she had
never been in any other mood, but had been forced into violence by the
plots of her enemies. Much of it, I should have thought, was in stark
defiance of the Defence of the Realm Acts, but if any wise Scotland Yard
officer had listened to it he would probably have considered it harmless
because of its contradictions. It was full of a fierce earnestness, and it was
full of humour—long-drawn American metaphors at which that most
critical audience roared with laughter. But it was not the kind of thing that
they were accustomed to, and I could fancy what Wake would have said of
it. The conviction grew upon me that Blenkiron was deliberately trying to
prove himself an honest idiot. If so, it was a huge success. He produced on
one the impression of the type of sentimental revolutionary who ruthlessly
knifes his opponent and then weeps and prays over his tomb.
Just at the end he seemed to pull himself together and to try a little
argument. He made a great point of the Austrian socialists going to
Stockholm, going freely and with their Government’s assent, from a
country which its critics called an autocracy, while the democratic western
peoples held back. “I admit I haven’t any real water-tight proof,” he said,
“but I will bet my bottom dollar that the influence which moved the
Austrian Government to allow this embassy of freedom was the influence
of Germany herself. And that is the land from which the Allied Pharisees
draw in their skirts lest their garments be defiled!”

He sat down amid a good deal of applause, for his audience had not been
bored, though I could see that some of them thought his praise of Germany
a bit steep. It was all right in Biggleswick to prove Britain in the wrong, but
it was a slightly different thing to extol the enemy. I was puzzled about his
last point, for it was not of a piece with the rest of his discourse, and I was
trying to guess at his purpose. The chairman referred to it in his concluding
remarks. “I am in a position,” he said, “to bear out all that the lecturer has
said. I can go further. I can assure him on the best authority that his surmise
is correct, and that Vienna’s decision to send delegates to Stockholm was
largely dictated by representations from Berlin. I am given to understand
that the fact has in the last few days been admitted in the Austrian Press.”
A vote of thanks was carried, and then I found myself shaking hands with
Ivery while Blenkiron stood a yard off, talking to one of the Misses Weekes.
The next moment I was being introduced.
“Mr Brand, very pleased to meet you,” said the voice I knew so well.
“Mr Ivery has been telling me about you, and I guess we’ve got something
to say to each other. We’re both from noo countries, and we’ve got to teach
the old nations a little horse-sense.”
Mr Ivery’s car—the only one left in the neighbourhood—carried us to his
villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-room. It was not
a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an expensive hotel, and the supper
we had was as good as any London restaurant. Gone were the old days of
fish and toast and boiled milk. Blenkiron squared his shoulders and showed
himself a noble trencherman.
“A year ago,” he told our host, “I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic. I
had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my
stomach. Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star surgeons
way out west in White Springs, Nebraska. They were reckoned the neatest
hands in the world at carving up a man and removing devilments from his
intestines. Now, sir, I’ve always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I
considered that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be
reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that time I was feeling
so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet through
my head. ‘There’s no other way,’ I said to myself. ‘Either you forget your
religion and your miserable cowardice and get cut up, or it’s you for the
Golden Shore.’ So I set my teeth and journeyed to White Springs, and the

Brothers had a look at my duodenum. They saw that the darned thing
wouldn’t do, so they sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition
traffic. It was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out
of the side of our First Parent. They’ve got a mighty fine way of charging,
too, for they take five per cent of a man’s income, and it’s all one to them
whether he’s a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week. I can tell you
I took some trouble to be a very rich man last year.”
All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to assimilate
the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his heavenly drawl, and I
was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a ridiculous notion that I had seen
him before, but, delve as I might into my memory, I couldn’t place him. He
was the incarnation of the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class
sentimentalist, who patronised pacificism out of vanity, but was very
careful not to dip his hands too far. He was always damping down
Blenkiron’s volcanic utterances. “Of course, as you know, the other side
have an argument which I find rather hard to meet....” “I can sympathise
with patriotism, and even with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always
come back to this difficulty.” “Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much
as ill-judging,”—these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in. And
he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had with every
sort of person—including members of the Government. I remember that he
expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.
Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it because
Blenkiron seemed to collect his wits and try to argue, just as he had done at
the end of his lecture. He was speaking about a story he had heard from
someone, who had heard it from someone else, that Austria in the last week
of July 1914 had accepted Russia’s proposal to hold her hand and negotiate,
and that the Kaiser had sent a message to the Tsar saying he agreed.
According to his story this telegram had been received in Petrograd, and
had been re-written, like Bismarck’s Ems telegram, before it reached the
Emperor. He expressed his disbelief in the yarn. “I reckon if it had been
true,” he said, “we’d have had the right text out long ago. They’d have kept
a copy in Berlin. All the same I did hear a sort of rumour that some kind of
message of that sort was published in a German paper.”
Mr Ivery looked wise. “You are right,” he said. “I happen to know that it
has been published. You will find it in the Weser Zeitung.”

“You don’t say?” he said admiringly. “I wish I could read the old
tombstone language. But if I could they wouldn’t let me have the papers.”
“Oh yes they would.” Mr Ivery laughed pleasantly. “England has still a
good share of freedom. Any respectable person can get a permit to import
the enemy press. I’m not considered quite respectable, for the authorities
have a narrow definition of patriotism, but happily I have respectable
friends.”

Blenkiron was staying the night, and I took my leave as the clock struck
twelve. They both came into the hall to see me off, and, as I was helping
myself to a drink, and my host was looking for my hat and stick, I suddenly
heard Blenkiron’s whisper in my ear. “London ... the day after tomorrow,”
he said. Then he took a formal farewell. “Mr Brand, it’s been an honour for
me, as an American citizen, to make your acquaintance, sir. I will consider
myself fortunate if we have an early reunion. I am stopping at Claridge’s
Ho-tel, and I hope to be privileged to receive you there.”

CHAPTER III
The Reflections of a Cured Dyspeptic
Thirty-five hours later I found myself in my rooms in Westminster. I
thought there might be a message for me there, for I didn’t propose to go
and call openly on Blenkiron at Claridge’s till I had his instructions. But
there was no message—only a line from Peter, saying he had hopes of being
sent to Switzerland. That made me realise that he must be pretty badly
broken up.
Presently the telephone bell rang. It was Blenkiron who spoke. “Go down
and have a talk with your brokers about the War Loan. Arrive there about
twelve o’clock and don’t go upstairs till you have met a friend. You’d better
have a quick luncheon at your club, and then come to Traill’s bookshop in
the Haymarket at two. You can get back to Biggleswick by the 5.16.”
I did as I was bid, and twenty minutes later, having travelled by
Underground, for I couldn’t raise a taxi, I approached the block of chambers
in Leadenhall Street where dwelt the respected firm who managed my
investments. It was still a few minutes before noon, and as I slowed down a
familiar figure came out of the bank next door.
Ivery beamed recognition. “Up for the day, Mr Brand?” he asked. “I have
to see my brokers,” I said, “read the South African papers in my club, and
get back by the 5.16. Any chance of your company?”
“Why, yes—that’s my train. Au revoir. We meet at the station.” He
bustled off, looking very smart with his neat clothes and a rose in his
button-hole.
I lunched impatiently, and at two was turning over some new books in
Traill’s shop with an eye on the street-door behind me. It seemed a public
place for an assignation. I had begun to dip into a big illustrated book on
flower-gardens when an assistant came up. “The manager’s compliments,
sir, and he thinks there are some old works of travel upstairs that might
interest you.” I followed him obediently to an upper floor lined with every

kind of volume and with tables littered with maps and engravings. “This
way, sir,” he said, and opened a door in the wall concealed by bogus book-
backs. I found myself in a little study, and Blenkiron sitting in an armchair
smoking.
He got up and seized both my hands. “Why, Dick, this is better than good
noos. I’ve heard all about your exploits since we parted a year ago on the
wharf at Liverpool. We’ve both been busy on our own jobs, and there was
no way of keeping you wise about my doings, for after I thought I was
cured I got worse than hell inside, and, as I told you, had to get the doctor-
men to dig into me. After that I was playing a pretty dark game, and had to
get down and out of decent society. But, holy Mike! I’m a new man. I used
to do my work with a sick heart and a taste in my mouth like a graveyard,
and now I can eat and drink what I like and frolic round like a colt. I wake
up every morning whistling and thank the good God that I’m alive. It was a
bad day for Kaiser when I got on the cars for White Springs.”
“This is a rum place to meet,” I said, “and you brought me by a
roundabout road.”
He grinned and offered me a cigar.
“There were reasons. It don’t do for you and me to advertise our
acquaintance in the street. As for the shop, I’ve owned it for five years. I’ve
a taste for good reading, though you wouldn’t think it, and it tickles me to
hand it out across the counter.... First, I want to hear about Biggleswick.”
“There isn’t a great deal to it. A lot of ignorance, a large slice of vanity,
and a pinch or two of wrong-headed honesty—these are the ingredients of
the pie. Not much real harm in it. There’s one or two dirty literary gents
who should be in a navvies’ battalion, but they’re about as dangerous as
yellow Kaffir dogs. I’ve learned a lot and got all the arguments by heart, but
you might plant a Biggleswick in every shire and it wouldn’t help the
Boche. I can see where the danger lies all the same. These fellows talked
academic anarchism, but the genuine article is somewhere about and to find
it you’ve got to look in the big industrial districts. We had faint echoes of it
in Biggleswick. I mean that the really dangerous fellows are those who
want to close up the war at once and so get on with their blessed class war,
which cuts across nationalities. As for being spies and that sort of thing, the
Biggleswick lads are too callow.”

“Yes,” said Blenkiron reflectively. “They haven’t got as much sense as
God gave to geese. You’re sure you didn’t hit against any heavier metal?”
“Yes. There’s a man called Launcelot Wake, who came down to speak
once. I had met him before. He has the makings of a fanatic, and he’s the
more dangerous because you can see his conscience is uneasy. I can fancy
him bombing a Prime Minister merely to quiet his own doubts.”
“So,” he said. “Nobody else?”
I reflected. “There’s Mr Ivery, but you know him better than I. I shouldn’t
put much on him, but I’m not precisely certain, for I never had a chance of
getting to know him.”
“Ivery,” said Blenkiron in surprise. “He has a hobby for half-baked
youth, just as another rich man might fancy orchids or fast trotters. You sure
can place him right enough.”
“I dare say. Only I don’t know enough to be positive.”
He sucked at his cigar for a minute or so. “I guess, Dick, if I told you all
I’ve been doing since I reached these shores you would call me a romancer.
I’ve been way down among the toilers. I did a spell as unskilled dilooted
labour in the Barrow shipyards. I was barman in a hotel on the Portsmouth
Road, and I put in a black month driving a taxicab in the city of London.
For a while I was the accredited correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and
used to go with the rest of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries
of State and War Office generals. They censored my stuff so cruel that the
paper fired me. Then I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a
fortnight in a little farm in Suffolk. By and by I came back to Claridge’s and
this bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.
“I had learned,” he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes on
me, “that the British working-man is about the soundest piece of humanity
on God’s earth. He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit when he thinks the
Government are giving him a crooked deal, but he’s gotten the patience of
Job and the sand of a gamecock. And he’s gotten humour too, that tickles
me to death. There’s not much trouble in that quarter for it’s he and his kind
that’s beating the Hun.... But I picked up a thing or two besides that.”
He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. “I reverence the British
Intelligence Service. Flies don’t settle on it to any considerable extent. It’s
got a mighty fine mesh, but there’s one hole in that mesh, and it’s our job to

mend it. There’s a high-powered brain in the game against us. I struck it a
couple of years ago when I was hunting Dumba and Albert, and I thought it
was in Noo York, but it wasn’t. I struck its working again at home last year
and located its head office in Europe. So I tried Switzerland and Holland,
but only bits of it were there. The centre of the web where the old spider sits
is right here in England, and for six months I’ve been shadowing that
spider. There’s a gang to help, a big gang, and a clever gang, and partly an
innocent gang. But there’s only one brain, and it’s to match that that the
Robson Brothers settled my duodenum.”
I was listening with a quickened pulse, for now at last I was getting to
business.
“What is he—international socialist, or anarchist, or what?” I asked.
“Pure-blooded Boche agent, but the biggest-sized brand in the catalogue
—bigger than Steinmeier or old Bismarck’s Staubier. Thank God I’ve got
him located.... I must put you wise about some things.”
He lay back in his rubbed leather armchair and yarned for twenty
minutes. He told me how at the beginning of the war Scotland Yard had had
a pretty complete register of enemy spies, and without making any fuss had
just tidied them away. After that, the covey having been broken up, it was a
question of picking off stray birds. That had taken some doing. There had
been all kinds of inflammatory stuff around, Red Masons and international
anarchists, and, worst of all, international finance-touts, but they had mostly
been ordinary cranks and rogues, the tools of the Boche agents rather than
agents themselves. However, by the middle of 1915 most of the stragglers
had been gathered in. But there remained loose ends, and towards the close
of last year somebody was very busy combining these ends into a net.
Funny cases cropped up of the leakage of vital information. They began to
be bad about October 1916, when the Hun submarines started on a special
racket. The enemy suddenly appeared possessed of a knowledge which we
thought to be shared only by half a dozen officers. Blenkiron said he was
not surprised at the leakage, for there’s always a lot of people who hear
things they oughtn’t to. What surprised him was that it got so quickly to the
enemy.
Then after last February, when the Hun submarines went in for
frightfulness on a big scale, the thing grew desperate. Leakages occurred
every week, and the business was managed by people who knew their way

about, for they avoided all the traps set for them, and when bogus news was
released on purpose, they never sent it. A convoy which had been kept a
deadly secret would be attacked at the one place where it was helpless. A
carefully prepared defensive plan would be checkmated before it could be
tried. Blenkiron said that there was no evidence that a single brain was
behind it all, for there was no similarity in the cases, but he had a strong
impression all the time that it was the work of one man. We managed to
close some of the bolt-holes, but we couldn’t put our hands near the big
ones. “By this time,” said he, “I reckoned I was about ready to change my
methods. I had been working by what the highbrows call induction, trying
to argue up from the deeds to the doer. Now I tried a new lay, which was to
calculate down from the doer to the deeds. They call it deduction. I opined
that somewhere in this island was a gentleman whom we will call Mr X,
and that, pursuing the line of business he did, he must have certain
characteristics. I considered very carefully just what sort of personage he
must be. I had noticed that his device was apparently the Double Bluff. That
is to say, when he had two courses open to him, A and B, he pretended he
was going to take B, and so got us guessing that he would try A. Then he
took B after all. So I reckoned that his camouflage must correspond to this
little idiosyncrasy. Being a Boche agent, he wouldn’t pretend to be a hearty
patriot, an honest old blood-and-bones Tory. That would be only the Single
Bluff. I considered that he would be a pacifist, cunning enough just to keep
inside the law, but with the eyes of the police on him. He would write books
which would not be allowed to be exported. He would get himself disliked
in the popular papers, but all the mugwumps would admire his moral
courage. I drew a mighty fine picture to myself of just the man I expected to
find. Then I started out to look for him.”
Blenkiron’s face took on the air of a disappointed child. “It was no good.
I kept barking up the wrong tree and wore myself out playing the sleuth on
white-souled innocents.”
“But you’ve found him all right,” I cried, a sudden suspicion leaping into
my brain.
“He’s found,” he said sadly, “but the credit does not belong to John S.
Blenkiron. That child merely muddied the pond. The big fish was left for a
young lady to hook.”
“I know,” I cried excitedly. “Her name is Miss Mary Lamington.”

He shook a disapproving head. “You’ve guessed right, my son, but
you’ve forgotten your manners. This is a rough business and we won’t bring
in the name of a gently reared and pure-minded young girl. If we speak to
her at all we call her by a pet name out of the Pilgrim’s Progress.... Anyhow
she hooked the fish, though he isn’t landed. D’you see any light?”
“Ivery,” I gasped.
“Yes. Ivery. Nothing much to look at, you say. A common, middle-aged,
pie-faced, golf-playing high-brow, that you wouldn’t keep out of a Sunday
school. A touch of the drummer, too, to show he has no dealings with your
effete aristocracy. A languishing silver-tongue that adores the sound of his
own voice. As mild, you’d say, as curds and cream.”
Blenkiron got out of his chair and stood above me. “I tell you, Dick, that
man makes my spine cold. He hasn’t a drop of good red blood in him. The
dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman compared to Moxon Ivery. He’s as
cruel as a snake and as deep as hell. But, by God, he’s got a brain below his
hat. He’s hooked and we’re playing him, but Lord knows if he’ll ever be
landed!”
“Why on earth don’t you put him away?” I asked.
“We haven’t the proof—legal proof, I mean; though there’s buckets of
the other kind. I could put up a morally certain case, but he’d beat me in a
court of law. And half a hundred sheep would get up in Parliament and bleat
about persecution. He has a graft with every collection of cranks in
England, and with all the geese that cackle about the liberty of the
individual when the Boche is ranging about to enslave the world. No, sir,
that’s too dangerous a game! Besides, I’ve a better in hand, Moxon Ivery is
the best-accredited member of this State. His dossier is the completest thing
outside the Recording Angel’s little note-book. We’ve taken up his
references in every corner of the globe and they’re all as right as Morgan’s
balance sheet. From these it appears he’s been a high-toned citizen ever
since he was in short-clothes. He was raised in Norfolk, and there are
people living who remember his father. He was educated at Melton School
and his name’s in the register. He was in business in Valparaiso, and there’s
enough evidence to write three volumes of his innocent life there. Then he
came home with a modest competence two years before the war, and has
been in the public eye ever since. He was Liberal candidate for a London
constitooency and he has decorated the board of every institootion formed

for the amelioration of mankind. He’s got enough alibis to choke a boa
constrictor, and they’re water-tight and copper-bottomed, and they’re
mostly damned lies.... But you can’t beat him at that stunt. The man’s the
superbest actor that ever walked the earth. You can see it in his face. It isn’t
a face, it’s a mask. He could make himself look like Shakespeare or Julius
Caesar or Billy Sunday or Brigadier-General Richard Hannay if he wanted
to. He hasn’t got any personality either—he’s got fifty, and there’s no one
he could call his own. I reckon when the devil gets the handling of him at
last he’ll have to put sand on his claws to keep him from slipping through.”
Blenkiron was settled in his chair again, with one leg hoisted over the
side.
“We’ve closed a fair number of his channels in the last few months. No,
he don’t suspect me. The world knows nothing of its greatest men, and to
him I’m only a Yankee peace-crank, who gives big subscriptions to loony
societies and will travel a hundred miles to let off steam before any kind of
audience. He’s been to see me at Claridge’s and I’ve arranged that he shall
know all my record. A darned bad record it is too, for two years ago I was
violent pro-British before I found salvation and was requested to leave
England. When I was home last I was officially anti-war, when I wasn’t
stretched upon a bed of pain. Mr Moxon Ivery don’t take any stock in John
S. Blenkiron as a serious proposition. And while I’ve been here I’ve been so
low down in the social scale and working in so many devious ways that he
can’t connect me up.... As I was saying, we’ve cut most of his wires, but the
biggest we haven’t got at. He’s still sending stuff out, and mighty
compromising stuff it is. Now listen close, Dick, for we’re coming near
your own business.”
It appeared that Blenkiron had reason to suspect that the channel still
open had something to do with the North. He couldn’t get closer than that,
till he heard from his people that a certain Abel Gresson had turned up in
Glasgow from the States. This Gresson he discovered was the same as one
Wrankester, who as a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World had
been mixed up in some ugly cases of sabotage in Colorado. He kept his
news to himself, for he didn’t want the police to interfere, but he had his
own lot get into touch with Gresson and shadow him closely. The man was
very discreet but very mysterious, and he would disappear for a week at a
time, leaving no trace. For some unknown reason—he couldn’t explain why

—Blenkiron had arrived at the conclusion that Gresson was in touch with
Ivery, so he made experiments to prove it.
“I wanted various cross-bearings to make certain, and I got them the
night before last. My visit to Biggleswick was good business.”
“I don’t know what they meant,” I said, “but I know where they came in.
One was in your speech when you spoke of the Austrian socialists, and
Ivery took you up about them. The other was after supper when he quoted
the Weser Zeitung.”
“You’re no fool, Dick,” he said, with his slow smile. “You’ve hit the
mark first shot. You know me and you could follow my process of thought
in those remarks. Ivery, not knowing me so well, and having his head full of
just that sort of argument, saw nothing unusual. Those bits of noos were
pumped into Gresson that he might pass them on. And he did pass them on
—to Ivery. They completed my chain.”
“But they were commonplace enough things which he might have
guessed for himself.”
“No, they weren’t. They were the nicest tit-bits of political noos which all
the cranks have been reaching after.”
“Anyhow, they were quotations from German papers. He might have had
the papers themselves earlier than you thought.”
“Wrong again. The paragraph never appeared in the Weser Zeitung. But
we faked up a torn bit of that noospaper, and a very pretty bit of forgery it
was, and Gresson, who’s a kind of a scholar, was allowed to have it. He
passed it on. Ivery showed it me two nights ago. Nothing like it ever sullied
the columns of Boche journalism. No, it was a perfectly final proof.... Now,
Dick, it’s up to you to get after Gresson.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m jolly glad I’m to start work again. I’m getting fat
from lack of exercise. I suppose you want me to catch Gresson out in some
piece of blackguardism and have him and Ivery snugly put away.”
“I don’t want anything of the kind,” he said very slowly and distinctly.
“You’ve got to attend very close to your instructions, I cherish these two
beauties as if they were my own white-headed boys. I wouldn’t for the
world interfere with their comfort and liberty. I want them to go on
corresponding with their friends. I want to give them every facility.”
He burst out laughing at my mystified face.

“See here, Dick. How do we want to treat the Boche? Why, to fill him up
with all the cunningest lies and get him to act on them. Now here is Moxon
Ivery, who has always given them good information. They trust him
absolutely, and we would be fools to spoil their confidence. Only, if we can
find out Moxon’s methods, we can arrange to use them ourselves and send
noos in his name which isn’t quite so genooine. Every word he dispatches
goes straight to the Grand High Secret General Staff, and old Hindenburg
and Ludendorff put towels round their heads and cipher it out. We want to
encourage them to go on doing it. We’ll arrange to send true stuff that don’t
matter, so as they’ll continue to trust him, and a few selected falsehoods
that’ll matter like hell. It’s a game you can’t play for ever, but with luck I
propose to play it long enough to confuse Fritz’s little plans.”
His face became serious and wore the air that our corps commander used
to have at the big pow-wow before a push.
“I’m not going to give you instructions, for you’re man enough to make
your own. But I can give you the general hang of the situation. You tell
Ivery you’re going North to inquire into industrial disputes at first hand.
That will seem to him natural and in line with your recent behaviour. He’ll
tell his people that you’re a guileless colonial who feels disgruntled with
Britain, and may come in useful. You’ll go to a man of mine in Glasgow, a
red-hot agitator who chooses that way of doing his bit for his country. It’s a
darned hard way and darned dangerous. Through him you’ll get in touch
with Gresson, and you’ll keep alongside that bright citizen. Find out what
he is doing, and get a chance of following him. He must never suspect you,
and for that purpose you must be very near the edge of the law yourself.
You go up there as an unabashed pacifist and you’ll live with folk that will
turn your stomach. Maybe you’ll have to break some of these two-cent rules
the British Government have invented to defend the realm, and it’s up to
you not to get caught out.... Remember, you’ll get no help from me. You’ve
got to wise up about Gresson with the whole forces of the British State
arrayed officially against you. I guess it’s a steep proposition, but you’re
man enough to make good.”
As we shook hands, he added a last word. “You must take your own time,
but it’s not a case for slouching. Every day that passes Ivery is sending out
the worst kind of poison. The Boche is blowing up for a big campaign in the
field, and a big effort to shake the nerve and confuse the judgement of our

civilians. The whole earth’s war-weary, and we’ve about reached the
danger-point. There’s pretty big stakes hang on you, Dick, for things are
getting mighty delicate.”

I purchased a new novel in the shop and reached St Pancras in time to
have a cup of tea at the buffet. Ivery was at the bookstall buying an evening
paper. When we got into the carriage he seized my Punch and kept laughing
and calling my attention to the pictures. As I looked at him, I thought that
he made a perfect picture of the citizen turned countryman, going back of
an evening to his innocent home. Everything was right—his neat tweeds,
his light spats, his spotted neckcloth, and his aquascutum.
Not that I dared look at him much. What I had learned made me eager to
search his face, but I did not dare show any increased interest. I had always
been a little off-hand with him, for I had never much liked him, so I had to
keep on the same manner. He was as merry as a grig, full of chat and very
friendly and amusing. I remember he picked up the book I had brought off
that morning to read in the train—the second volume of Hazlitt’s Essays,
the last of my English classics—and discoursed so wisely about books that I
wished I had spent more time in his company at Biggleswick.
“Hazlitt was the academic Radical of his day,” he said. “He is always
lashing himself into a state of theoretical fury over abuses he has never
encountered in person. Men who are up against the real thing save their
breath for action.”
That gave me my cue to tell him about my journey to the North. I said I
had learned a lot in Biggleswick, but I wanted to see industrial life at close
quarters. “Otherwise I might become like Hazlitt,” I said.
He was very interested and encouraging. “That’s the right way to set
about it,” he said. “Where were you thinking of going?”
I told him that I had half thought of Barrow, but decided to try Glasgow,
since the Clyde seemed to be a warm corner.
“Right,” he said. “I only wish I was coming with you. It’ll take you a
little while to understand the language. You’ll find a good deal of senseless
bellicosity among the workmen, for they’ve got parrot-cries about the war
as they used to have parrot-cries about their labour politics. But there’s

plenty of shrewd brains and sound hearts too. You must write and tell me
your conclusions.”
It was a warm evening and he dozed the last part of the journey. I looked
at him and wished I could see into the mind at the back of that mask-like
face. I counted for nothing in his eyes, not even enough for him to want to
make me a tool, and I was setting out to try to make a tool of him. It
sounded a forlorn enterprise. And all the while I was puzzled with a
persistent sense of recognition. I told myself it was idiocy, for a man with a
face like that must have hints of resemblance to a thousand people. But the
idea kept nagging at me till we reached our destination.
As we emerged from the station into the golden evening I saw Mary
Lamington again. She was with one of the Weekes girls, and after the
Biggleswick fashion was bareheaded, so that the sun glinted from her hair.
Ivery swept his hat off and made her a pretty speech, while I faced her
steady eyes with the expressionlessness of the stage conspirator.
“A charming child,” he observed as we passed on. “Not without a touch
of seriousness, too, which may yet be touched to noble issues.”
I considered, as I made my way to my final supper with the Jimsons, that
the said child was likely to prove a sufficiently serious business for Mr
Moxon Ivery before the game was out.

CHAPTER IV
Andrew Amos
I took the train three days later from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. I went to
the Pentland Hotel in Princes Street and left there a suit-case containing
some clean linen and a change of clothes. I had been thinking the thing out,
and had come to the conclusion that I must have a base somewhere and a
fresh outfit. Then in well-worn tweeds and with no more luggage than a
small trench kit-bag, I descended upon the city of Glasgow.
I walked from the station to the address which Blenkiron had given me. It
was a hot summer evening, and the streets were filled with bareheaded
women and weary-looking artisans. As I made my way down the
Dumbarton Road I was amazed at the number of able-bodied fellows about,
considering that you couldn’t stir a mile on any British front without
bumping up against a Glasgow battalion. Then I realised that there were
such things as munitions and ships, and I wondered no more.
A stout and dishevelled lady at a close-mouth directed me to Mr Amos’s
dwelling. “Twa stairs up. Andra will be in noo, havin’ his tea. He’s no yin
for overtime. He’s generally hame on the chap of six.” I ascended the stairs
with a sinking heart, for like all South Africans I have a horror of dirt. The
place was pretty filthy, but at each landing there were two doors with well-
polished handles and brass plates. On one I read the name of Andrew Amos.
A man in his shirt-sleeves opened to me, a little man, without a collar,
and with an unbuttoned waistcoat. That was all I saw of him in the dim
light, but he held out a paw like a gorilla’s and drew me in.
The sitting-room, which looked over many chimneys to a pale yellow sky
against which two factory stalks stood out sharply, gave me light enough to
observe him fully. He was about five feet four, broad-shouldered, and with a
great towsy head of grizzled hair. He wore spectacles, and his face was like
some old-fashioned Scots minister’s, for he had heavy eyebrows and
whiskers which joined each other under his jaw, while his chin and

enormous upper lip were clean-shaven. His eyes were steely grey and very
solemn, but full of smouldering energy. His voice was enormous and would
have shaken the walls if he had not had the habit of speaking with half-
closed lips. He had not a sound tooth in his head.
A saucer full of tea and a plate which had once contained ham and eggs
were on the table. He nodded towards them and asked me if I had fed.
“Ye’ll no eat onything? Well, some would offer ye a dram, but this house
is staunch teetotal. I door ye’ll have to try the nearest public if ye’re
thirsty.”
I disclaimed any bodily wants, and produced my pipe, at which he started
to fill an old clay. “Mr Brand’s your name?” he asked in his gusty voice. “I
was expectin’ ye, but Dod! man ye’re late!”
He extricated from his trousers pocket an ancient silver watch, and
regarded it with disfavour. “The dashed thing has stoppit. What do ye make
the time, Mr Brand?”
He proceeded to prise open the lid of his watch with the knife he had
used to cut his tobacco, and, as he examined the works, he turned the back
of the case towards me. On the inside I saw pasted Mary Lamington’s
purple-and-white wafer.
I held my watch so that he could see the same token. His keen eyes,
raised for a second, noted it, and he shut his own with a snap and returned it
to his pocket. His manner lost its wariness and became almost genial.
“Ye’ve come up to see Glasgow, Mr Brand? Well, it’s a steerin’ bit, and
there’s honest folk bides in it, and some not so honest. They tell me ye’re
from South Africa. That’s a long gait away, but I ken something aboot
South Africa, for I had a cousin’s son oot there for his lungs. He was in a
shop in Main Street, Bloomfountain. They called him Peter Dobson. Ye
would maybe mind of him.”
Then he discoursed of the Clyde. He was an incomer, he told me, from
the Borders, his native place being the town of Galashiels, or, as he called
it, “Gawly”. “I began as a powerloom tuner in Stavert’s mill. Then my
father dee’d and I took up his trade of jiner. But it’s no world nowadays for
the sma’ independent business, so I cam to the Clyde and learned a
shipwright’s job. I may say I’ve become a leader in the trade, for though
I’m no an official of the Union, and not likely to be, there’s no man’s word

carries more weight than mine. And the Goavernment kens that, for they’ve
sent me on commissions up and down the land to look at wuds and report
on the nature of the timber. Bribery, they think it is, but Andrew Amos is
not to be bribit. He’ll have his say about any Goavernment on earth, and tell
them to their face what he thinks of them. Ay, and he’ll fight the case of the
workingman against his oppressor, should it be the Goavernment or the
fatted calves they ca’ Labour Members. Ye’ll have heard tell o’ the shop
stewards, Mr Brand?”
I admitted I had, for I had been well coached by Blenkiron in the current
history of industrial disputes.
“Well, I’m a shop steward. We represent the rank and file against office-
bearers that have lost the confidence o’ the workingman. But I’m no
socialist, and I would have ye keep mind of that. I’m yin o’ the old Border
radicals, and I’m not like to change. I’m for individual liberty and equal
rights and chances for all men. I’ll no more bow down before a Dagon of a
Goavernment official than before the Baal of a feckless Tweedside laird.
I’ve to keep my views to mysel’, for thae young lads are all drucken-daft
with their wee books about Cawpital and Collectivism and a wheen long
senseless words I wouldna fyle my tongue with. Them and their socialism!
There’s more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign
trash. But, as I say, I’ve got to keep a quiet sough, for the world is gettin’
socialism now like the measles. It all comes of a defective eddication.”
“And what does a Border radical say about the war?” I asked.
He took off his spectacles and cocked his shaggy brows at me. “I’ll tell
ye, Mr Brand. All that was bad in all that I’ve ever wrestled with since I
cam to years o’ discretion—Tories and lairds and manufacturers and
publicans and the Auld Kirk—all that was bad, I say, for there were orra
bits of decency, ye’ll find in the Germans full measure pressed down and
running over. When the war started, I considered the subject calmly for
three days, and then I said: ‘Andra Amos, ye’ve found the enemy at last.
The ones ye fought before were in a manner o’ speakin’ just misguided
friends. It’s either you or the Kaiser this time, my man!’”
His eyes had lost their gravity and had taken on a sombre ferocity. “Ay,
and I’ve not wavered. I got a word early in the business as to the way I
could serve my country best. It’s not been an easy job, and there’s plenty of
honest folk the day will give me a bad name. They think I’m stirrin’ up the

men at home and desertin’ the cause o’ the lads at the front. Man, I’m
keepin’ them straight. If I didna fight their battles on a sound economic
isshue, they would take the dorts and be at the mercy of the first blagyird
that preached revolution. Me and my like are safety-valves, if ye follow me.
And dinna you make ony mistake, Mr Brand. The men that are agitating for
a rise in wages are not for peace. They’re fighting for the lads overseas as
much as for themselves. There’s not yin in a thousand that wouldna sweat
himself blind to beat the Germans. The Goavernment has made mistakes,
and maun be made to pay for them. If it were not so, the men would feel
like a moose in a trap, for they would have no way to make their grievance
felt. What for should the big man double his profits and the small man be ill
set to get his ham and egg on Sabbath mornin’? That’s the meaning o’
Labour unrest, as they call it, and it’s a good thing, says I, for if Labour
didna get its leg over the traces now and then, the spunk o’ the land would
be dead in it, and Hindenburg could squeeze it like a rotten aipple.”
I asked if he spoke for the bulk of the men.
“For ninety per cent in ony ballot. I don’t say that there’s not plenty of
riff-raff—the pint-and-a-dram gentry and the soft-heads that are aye reading
bits of newspapers, and muddlin’ their wits with foreign whigmaleeries. But
the average man on the Clyde, like the average man in ither places, hates
just three things, and that’s the Germans, the profiteers, as they call them,
and the Irish. But he hates the Germans first.”
“The Irish!” I exclaimed in astonishment.
“Ay, the Irish,” cried the last of the old Border radicals. “Glasgow’s
stinkin’ nowadays with two things, money and Irish. I mind the day when I
followed Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule policy, and used to threep about the
noble, generous, warm-hearted sister nation held in a foreign bondage. My
Goad! I’m not speakin’ about Ulster, which is a dour, ill-natured den, but
our own folk all the same. But the men that will not do a hand’s turn to help
the war and take the chance of our necessities to set up a bawbee rebellion
are hateful to Goad and man. We treated them like pet lambs and that’s the
thanks we get. They’re coming over here in thousands to tak the jobs of the
lads that are doing their duty. I was speakin’ last week to a widow woman
that keeps a wee dairy down the Dalmarnock Road. She has two sons, and
both in the airmy, one in the Cameronians and one a prisoner in Germany.
She was telling me that she could not keep goin’ any more, lacking the help

of the boys, though she had worked her fingers to the bone. ‘Surely it’s a
crool job, Mr Amos,’ she says, ‘that the Goavernment should tak baith my
laddies, and I’ll maybe never see them again, and let the Irish gang free and
tak the bread frae our mouth. At the gasworks across the road they took on a
hundred Irish last week, and every yin o’ them as young and well set up as
you would ask to see. And my wee Davie, him that’s in Germany, had aye a
weak chest, and Jimmy was troubled wi’ a bowel complaint. That’s surely
no justice!’....”
He broke off and lit a match by drawing it across the seat of his trousers.
“It’s time I got the gas lichtit. There’s some men coming here at half-ten.”
As the gas squealed and flickered in the lighting, he sketched for me the
coming guests. “There’s Macnab and Niven, two o’ my colleagues. And
there’s Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, and a lad Wilkie—he’s got
consumption, and writes wee bits in the papers. And there’s a queer chap o’
the name o’ Tombs—they tell me he comes frae Cambridge, and is a kind of
a professor there—anyway he’s more stuffed wi’ havers than an egg wi’
meat. He telled me he was here to get at the heart o’ the workingman, and I
said to him that he would hae to look a bit further than the sleeve o’ the
workin’-man’s jaicket. There’s no muckle in his head, poor soul. Then
there’ll be Tam Norie, him that edits our weekly paper—Justice for All.
Tam’s a humorist and great on Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o’ a
dwinin’ teetotum.... Ye’ll understand, Mr Brand, that I keep my mouth shut
in such company, and don’t express my own views more than is absolutely
necessary. I criticise whiles, and that gives me a name of whunstane
common-sense, but I never let my tongue wag. The feck o’ the lads comin’
the night are not the real workingman—they’re just the froth on the pot, but
it’s the froth that will be useful to you. Remember they’ve heard tell o’ ye
already, and ye’ve some sort o’ reputation to keep up.”
“Will Mr Abel Gresson be here?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. Him and me havena yet got to the point o’ payin’
visits. But the men that come will be Gresson’s friends and they’ll speak of
ye to him. It’s the best kind of introduction ye could seek.”
The knocker sounded, and Mr Amos hastened to admit the first comers.
These were Macnab and Wilkie: the one a decent middle-aged man with a
fresh-washed face and a celluloid collar, the other a round-shouldered
youth, with lank hair and the large eyes and luminous skin which are the

marks of phthisis. “This is Mr Brand boys, from South Africa,” was Amos’s
presentation. Presently came Niven, a bearded giant, and Mr Norie, the
editor, a fat dirty fellow smoking a rank cigar. Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters,
when he arrived, proved to be a pleasant young man in spectacles who
spoke with an educated voice and clearly belonged to a slightly different
social scale. Last came Tombs, the Cambridge professor, a lean youth with
a sour mouth and eyes that reminded me of Launcelot Wake.
“Ye’ll no be a mawgnate, Mr Brand, though ye come from South Africa,”
said Mr Norie with a great guffaw.
“Not me. I’m a working engineer,” I said. “My father was from Scotland,
and this is my first visit to my native country, as my friend Mr Amos was
telling you.”
The consumptive looked at me suspiciously. “We’ve got two—three of
the comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled from the
Transvaal. If ye’re our way of thinking, ye will maybe ken them.”
I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of the
outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand miles further
north.
Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk. Tombs in his sing-song
namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information. He asked
endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really
understood his language. I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent
and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a
demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private academic spite
against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of
lad I would personally conduct to the nearest lamp-post. And all the while
Amos and Macnab and Niven carried on their own conversation about the
affairs of their society, wholly impervious to the tornado raging around
them.
It was Mr Norie, the editor, who brought me into the discussion.
“Our South African friend is very blate,” he said in his boisterous way.
“Andra, if this place of yours wasn’t so damned teetotal and we had a dram
apiece, we might get his tongue loosened. I want to hear what he’s got to
say about the war. You told me this morning he was sound in the faith.”

“I said no such thing,” said Mr Amos. “As ye ken well, Tam Norie, I
don’t judge soundness on that matter as you judge it. I’m for the war
myself, subject to certain conditions that I’ve often stated. I know nothing
of Mr Brand’s opinions, except that he’s a good democrat, which is more
than I can say of some o’ your friends.”
“Hear to Andra,” laughed Mr Norie. “He’s thinkin’ the inspector in the
Socialist State would be a waur kind of awristocrat then the Duke of
Buccleuch. Weel, there’s maybe something in that. But about the war he’s
wrong. Ye ken my views, boys. This war was made by the cawpitalists, and
it has been fought by the workers, and it’s the workers that maun have the
ending of it. That day’s comin’ very near. There are those that want to spin
it out till Labour is that weak it can be pit in chains for the rest o’ time.
That’s the manœuvre we’re out to prevent. We’ve got to beat the Germans,
but it’s the workers that has the right to judge when the enemy’s beaten and
not the cawpitalists. What do you say, Mr Brand?”
Mr Norie had obviously pinned his colours to the fence, but he gave me
the chance I had been looking for. I let them have my views with a
vengeance, and these views were that for the sake of democracy the war
must be ended. I flatter myself I put my case well, for I had got up every
rotten argument and I borrowed largely from Launcelot Wake’s armoury.
But I didn’t put it too well, for I had a very exact notion of the impression I
wanted to produce. I must seem to be honest and in earnest, just a bit of a
fanatic, but principally a hard-headed businessman who knew when the
time had come to make a deal. Tombs kept interrupting me with imbecile
questions, and I had to sit on him. At the end Mr Norie hammered with his
pipe on the table.
“That’ll sort ye, Andra. Ye’re entertain’ an angel unawares. What do ye
say to that, my man?”
Mr Amos shook his head. “I’ll no deny there’s something in it, but I’m
not convinced that the Germans have got enough of a wheepin’.” Macnab
agreed with him; the others were with me. Norie was for getting me to write
an article for his paper, and the consumptive wanted me to address a
meeting.
“Wull ye say a’ that over again the morn’s night down at our hall in
Newmilns Street? We’ve got a lodge meeting o’ the I.W.B., and I’ll make
them pit ye in the programme.” He kept his luminous eyes, like a sick

dog’s, fixed on me, and I saw that I had made one ally. I told him I had
come to Glasgow to learn and not to teach, but I would miss no chance of
testifying to my faith.
“Now, boys, I’m for my bed,” said Amos, shaking the dottle from his
pipe. “Mr Tombs, I’ll conduct ye the morn over the Brigend works, but I’ve
had enough clavers for one evening. I’m a man that wants his eight hours’
sleep.”
The old fellow saw them to the door, and came back to me with the ghost
of a grin in his face.
“A queer crowd, Mr Brand! Macnab didna like what ye said. He had a
laddie killed in Gallypoly, and he’s no lookin’ for peace this side the grave.
He’s my best friend in Glasgow. He’s an elder in the Gaelic kirk in the
Cowcaddens, and I’m what ye call a free-thinker, but we’re wonderful
agreed on the fundamentals. Ye spoke your bit verra well, I must admit.
Gresson will hear tell of ye as a promising recruit.”
“It’s a rotten job,” I said.
“Ay, it’s a rotten job. I often feel like vomiting over it mysel’. But it’s no
for us to complain. There’s waur jobs oot in France for better men.... A
word in your ear, Mr Brand. Could ye not look a bit more sheepish? Ye
stare folk ower straight in the een, like a Hieland sergeant-major up at
Maryhill Barracks.” And he winked slowly and grotesquely with his left
eye.
He marched to a cupboard and produced a black bottle and glass. “I’m
blue-ribbon myself, but ye’ll be the better of something to tak the taste out
of your mouth. There’s Loch Katrine water at the pipe there.... As I was
saying, there’s not much ill in that lot. Tombs is a black offence, but a
dominie’s a dominie all the world over. They may crack about their
Industrial Workers and the braw things they’re going to do, but there’s a
wholesome dampness about the tinder on Clydeside. They should try
Ireland.”
“Supposing,” I said, “there was a really clever man who wanted to help
the enemy. You think he could do little good by stirring up trouble in the
shops here?”
“I’m positive.”
“And if he were a shrewd fellow, he’d soon tumble to that?”

“Ay.”
“Then if he still stayed on here he would be after bigger game—
something really dangerous and damnable?”
Amos drew down his brows and looked me in the face. “I see what ye’re
ettlin’ at. Ay! That would be my conclusion. I came to it weeks syne about
the man ye’ll maybe meet the morn’s night.”
Then from below the bed he pulled a box from which he drew a
handsome flute. “Ye’ll forgive me, Mr Brand, but I aye like a tune before I
go to my bed. Macnab says his prayers, and I have a tune on the flute, and
the principle is just the same.”
So that singular evening closed with music—very sweet and true
renderings of old Border melodies like “My Peggy is a young thing”, and
“When the kye come hame”. I fell asleep with a vision of Amos, his face all
puckered up at the mouth and a wandering sentiment in his eye, recapturing
in his dingy world the emotions of a boy.

The widow-woman from next door, who acted as house-keeper, cook,
and general factotum to the establishment, brought me shaving water next
morning, but I had to go without a bath. When I entered the kitchen I found
no one there, but while I consumed the inevitable ham and egg, Amos
arrived back for breakfast. He brought with him the morning’s paper.
“The Herald says there’s been a big battle at Eepers,” he announced.
I tore open the sheet and read of the great attack of 31 July which was
spoiled by the weather. “My God!” I cried. “They’ve got St Julien and that
dirty Frezenberg ridge ... and Hooge ... and Sanctuary Wood. I know every
inch of the damned place....”
“Mr Brand,” said a warning voice, “that’ll never do. If our friends last
night heard ye talk like that ye might as well tak the train back to London....
They’re speakin’ about ye in the yards this morning. Ye’ll get a good
turnout at your meeting the night, but they’re Sayin’ that the polis will
interfere. That mightna be a bad thing, but I trust ye to show discretion, for
ye’ll not be muckle use to onybody if they jyle ye in Duke Street. I hear
Gresson will be there with a fraternal message from his lunatics in
America.... I’ve arranged that ye go down to Tam Norie this afternoon and
give him a hand with his bit paper. Tam will tell ye the whole clash o’ the

West country, and I look to ye to keep him off the drink. He’s aye arguin’
that writin’ and drinkin’ gang thegither, and quotin’ Robert Burns, but the
creature has a wife and five bairns dependin’ on him.”
I spent a fantastic day. For two hours I sat in Norie’s dirty den, while he
smoked and orated, and, when he remembered his business, took down in
shorthand my impressions of the Labour situation in South Africa for his
rag. They were fine breezy impressions, based on the most whole-hearted
ignorance, and if they ever reached the Rand I wonder what my friends
there made of Cornelius Brand, their author. I stood him dinner in an
indifferent eating-house in a street off the Broomielaw, and thereafter had a
drink with him in a public-house, and was introduced to some of his less
reputable friends.
About tea-time I went back to Amos’s lodgings, and spent an hour or so
writing a long letter to Mr Ivery. I described to him everybody I had met, I
gave highly coloured views of the explosive material on the Clyde, and I
deplored the lack of clearheadedness in the progressive forces. I drew an
elaborate picture of Amos, and deduced from it that the Radicals were likely
to be a bar to true progress. “They have switched their old militancy,” I
wrote, “on to another track, for with them it is a matter of conscience to be
always militant.” I finished up with some very crude remarks on economics
culled from the table-talk of the egregious Tombs. It was the kind of letter
which I hoped would establish my character in his mind as an industrious
innocent.
Seven o’clock found me in Newmilns Street, where I was seized upon by
Wilkie. He had put on a clean collar for the occasion and had partially
washed his thin face. The poor fellow had a cough that shook him like the
walls of a power-house when the dynamos are going.
He was very apologetic about Amos. “Andra belongs to a past worrld,”
he said. “He has a big reputation in his society, and he’s a fine fighter, but
he has no kind of Vision, if ye understand me. He’s an auld Gladstonian,
and that’s done and damned in Scotland. He’s not a Modern, Mr Brand, like
you and me. But tonight ye’ll meet one or two chaps that’ll be worth your
while to ken. Ye’ll maybe no go quite as far as them, but ye’re on the same
road. I’m hoping for the day when we’ll have oor Councils of Workmen and
Soldiers like the Russians all over the land and dictate our terms to the

pawrasites in Pawrliament. They tell me, too, the boys in the trenches are
comin’ round to our side.”
We entered the hall by a back door, and in a little waiting-room I was
introduced to some of the speakers. They were a scratch lot as seen in that
dingy place. The chairman was a shop-steward in one of the Societies, a
fierce little rat of a man, who spoke with a cockney accent and addressed
me as “Comrade”. But one of them roused my liveliest interest. I heard the
name of Gresson, and turned to find a fellow of about thirty-five, rather
sprucely dressed, with a flower in his buttonhole. “Mr Brand,” he said, in a
rich American voice which recalled Blenkiron’s. “Very pleased to meet you,
sir. We have come from remote parts of the globe to be present at this
gathering.” I noticed that he had reddish hair, and small bright eyes, and a
nose with a droop like a Polish Jew’s.
As soon as we reached the platform I saw that there was going to be
trouble. The hall was packed to the door, and in all the front half there was
the kind of audience I expected to see—working-men of the political type
who before the war would have thronged to party meetings. But not all the
crowd at the back had come to listen. Some were scallawags, some looked
like better-class clerks out for a spree, and there was a fair quantity of
khaki. There were also one or two gentlemen not strictly sober.
The chairman began by putting his foot in it. He said we were there
tonight to protest against the continuation of the war and to form a branch
of the new British Council of Workmen and Soldiers. He told them with a
fine mixture of metaphors that we had got to take the reins into our own
hands, for the men who were running the war had their own axes to grind
and were marching to oligarchy through the blood of the workers. He added
that we had no quarrel with Germany half as bad as we had with our own
capitalists. He looked forward to the day when British soldiers would leap
from their trenches and extend the hand of friendship to their German
comrades.
“No me!” said a solemn voice. “I’m not seekin’ a bullet in my wame,”—
at which there was laughter and cat-calls.
Tombs followed and made a worse hash of it. He was determined to
speak, as he would have put it, to democracy in its own language, so he said
“hell” several times, loudly but without conviction. Presently he slipped
into the manner of the lecturer, and the audience grew restless. “I propose to

ask myself a question—” he began, and from the back of the hall came
—“And a damned sully answer ye’ll get.” After that there was no more
Tombs.
I followed with extreme nervousness, and to my surprise got a fair
hearing. I felt as mean as a mangy dog on a cold morning, for I hated to talk
rot before soldiers—especially before a couple of Royal Scots Fusiliers,
who, for all I knew, might have been in my own brigade. My line was the
plain, practical, patriotic man, just come from the colonies, who looked at
things with fresh eyes, and called for a new deal. I was very moderate, but
to justify my appearance there I had to put in a wild patch or two, and I got
these by impassioned attacks on the Ministry of Munitions. I mixed up a
little mild praise of the Germans, whom I said I had known all over the
world for decent fellows. I received little applause, but no marked dissent,
and sat down with deep thankfulness.
The next speaker put the lid on it. I believe he was a noted agitator, who
had already been deported. Towards him there was no lukewarmness, for
one half of the audience cheered wildly when he rose, and the other half
hissed and groaned. He began with whirlwind abuse of the idle rich, then of
the middle-classes (he called them the “rich man’s flunkeys’), and finally of
the Government. All that was fairly well received, for it is the fashion of the
Briton to run down every Government and yet to be very averse to parting
from it. Then he started on the soldiers and slanged the officers (“gentry
pups” was his name for them), and the generals, whom he accused of
idleness, of cowardice, and of habitual intoxication. He told us that our own
kith and kin were sacrificed in every battle by leaders who had not the guts
to share their risks. The Scots Fusiliers looked perturbed, as if they were in
doubt of his meaning. Then he put it more plainly. “Will any soldier deny
that the men are the barrage to keep the officers’ skins whole?”
“That’s a bloody lee,” said one of the Fusilier Jocks.
The man took no notice of the interruption, being carried away by the
torrent of his own rhetoric, but he had not allowed for the persistence of the
interrupter. The jock got slowly to his feet, and announced that he wanted
satisfaction. “If ye open your dirty gab to blagyird honest men, I’ll come up
on the platform and wring your neck.”
At that there was a fine old row, some crying out “Order”, some “Fair
play”, and some applauding. A Canadian at the back of the hall started a

song, and there was an ugly press forward. The hall seemed to be moving
up from the back, and already men were standing in all the passages and
right to the edge of the platform. I did not like the look in the eyes of these
new-comers, and among the crowd I saw several who were obviously plain-
clothes policemen.
The chairman whispered a word to the speaker, who continued when the
noise had temporarily died down. He kept off the army and returned to the
Government, and for a little sluiced out pure anarchism. But he got his foot
in it again, for he pointed to the Sinn Feiners as examples of manly
independence. At that, pandemonium broke loose, and he never had another
look in. There were several fights going on in the hall between the public
and courageous supporters of the orator.
Then Gresson advanced to the edge of the platform in a vain endeavour
to retrieve the day. I must say he did it uncommonly well. He was clearly a
practised speaker, and for a moment his appeal “Now, boys, let’s cool down
a bit and talk sense,” had an effect. But the mischief had been done, and the
crowd was surging round the lonely redoubt where we sat. Besides, I could
see that for all his clever talk the meeting did not like the look of him. He
was as mild as a turtle dove, but they wouldn’t stand for it. A missile hurtled
past my nose, and I saw a rotten cabbage envelop the baldish head of the
ex-deportee. Someone reached out a long arm and grabbed a chair, and with
it took the legs from Gresson. Then the lights suddenly went out, and we
retreated in good order by the platform door with a yelling crowd at our
heels.
It was here that the plain-clothes men came in handy. They held the door
while the ex-deportee was smuggled out by some side entrance. That class
of lad would soon cease to exist but for the protection of the law which he
would abolish. The rest of us, having less to fear, were suffered to leak into
Newmilns Street. I found myself next to Gresson, and took his arm. There
was something hard in his coat pocket.
Unfortunately there was a big lamp at the point where we emerged, and
there for our confusion were the Fusilier Jocks. Both were strung to fighting
pitch, and were determined to have someone’s blood. Of me they took no
notice, but Gresson had spoken after their ire had been roused, and was
marked out as a victim. With a howl of joy they rushed for him.

I felt his hand steal to his side-pocket. “Let that alone, you fool,” I
growled in his ear.
“Sure, mister,” he said, and the next second we were in the thick of it.
It was like so many street fights I have seen—an immense crowd which
surged up around us, and yet left a clear ring. Gresson and I got against the
wall on the side-walk, and faced the furious soldiery. My intention was to
do as little as possible, but the first minute convinced me that my
companion had no idea how to use his fists, and I was mortally afraid that
he would get busy with the gun in his pocket. It was that fear that brought
me into the scrap. The Jocks were sportsmen every bit of them, and only
one advanced to the combat. He hit Gresson a clip on the jaw with his left,
and but for the wall would have laid him out. I saw in the lamplight the
vicious gleam in the American’s eye and the twitch of his hand to his
pocket. That decided me to interfere and I got in front of him.
This brought the second jock into the fray. He was a broad, thickset
fellow, of the adorable bandy-legged stocky type that I had seen go through
the Railway Triangle at Arras as though it were blotting-paper. He had some
notion of fighting, too, and gave me a rough time, for I had to keep edging
the other fellow off Gresson.
“Go home, you fool,” I shouted. “Let this gentleman alone. I don’t want
to hurt you.”
The only answer was a hook-hit which I just managed to guard, followed
by a mighty drive with his right which I dodged so that he barked his
knuckles on the wall. I heard a yell of rage, and observed that Gresson
seemed to have kicked his assailant on the shin. I began to long for the
police.
Then there was that swaying of the crowd which betokens the approach
of the forces of law and order. But they were too late to prevent trouble. In
self-defence I had to take my jock seriously, and got in my blow when he
had overreached himself and lost his balance. I never hit anyone so
unwillingly in my life. He went over like a poled ox, and measured his
length on the causeway.
I found myself explaining things politely to the constables. “These men
objected to this gentleman’s speech at the meeting, and I had to interfere to
protect him. No, no! I don’t want to charge anybody. It was all a

misunderstanding.” I helped the stricken jock to rise and offered him ten
bob for consolation.
He looked at me sullenly and spat on the ground. “Keep your dirty
money,” he said. “I’ll be even with ye yet, my man—you and that red-
headed scab. I’ll mind the looks of ye the next time I see ye.”
Gresson was wiping the blood from his cheek with a silk handkerchief. “I
guess I’m in your debt, Mr Brand,” he said. “You may bet I won’t forget it.”

I returned to an anxious Amos. He heard my story in silence and his only
comment was—“Well done the Fusiliers!”
“It might have been worse, I’ll not deny,” he went on. “Ye’ve established
some kind of a claim upon Gresson, which may come in handy.... Speaking
about Gresson, I’ve news for ye. He’s sailing on Friday as purser in the
Tobermory. The Tobermory’s a boat that wanders every month up the West
Highlands as far as Stornoway. I’ve arranged for ye to take a trip on that
boat, Mr Brand.”
I nodded. “How did you find out that?” I asked.
“It took me some finding,” he said dryly, “but I’ve ways and means. Now
I’ll not trouble ye with advice, for ye ken your job as well as me. But I’m
going north myself the morn to look after some of the Ross-shire wuds, and
I’ll be in the way of getting telegrams at the Kyle. Ye’ll keep that in mind.
Keep in mind, too, that I’m a great reader of the Pilgrim’s Progress and that
I’ve a cousin of the name of Ochterlony.”

CHAPTER V
Various Doings in the West
The Tobermory was no ship for passengers. Its decks were littered with a
hundred oddments, so that a man could barely walk a step without tacking,
and my bunk was simply a shelf in the frowsty little saloon, where the
odour of ham and eggs hung like a fog. I joined her at Greenock and took a
turn on deck with the captain after tea, when he told me the names of the
big blue hills to the north. He had a fine old copper-coloured face and side-
whiskers like an archbishop, and, having spent all his days beating up the
western seas, had as many yarns in his head as Peter himself.
“On this boat,” he announced, “we don’t ken what a day may bring forth.
I may put into Colonsay for twa hours and bide there three days. I get a
telegram at Oban and the next thing I’m awa ayont Barra. Sheep’s the
difficult business. They maun be fetched for the sales, and they’re dooms
slow to lift. So ye see it’s not what ye call a pleasure trip, Maister Brand.”
Indeed it wasn’t, for the confounded tub wallowed like a fat sow as soon
as we rounded a headland and got the weight of the south-western wind.
When asked my purpose, I explained that I was a colonial of Scots
extraction, who was paying his first visit to his fatherland and wanted to
explore the beauties of the West Highlands. I let him gather that I was not
rich in this world’s goods.
“Ye’ll have a passport?” he asked. “They’ll no let ye go north o’ Fort
William without one.”
Amos had said nothing about passports, so I looked blank.
“I could keep ye on board for the whole voyage,” he went on, “but ye
wouldna be permitted to land. If ye’re seekin’ enjoyment, it would be a poor
job sittin’ on this deck and admirin’ the works o’ God and no allowed to
step on the pier-head. Ye should have applied to the military gentlemen in
Glesca. But ye’ve plenty o’ time to make up your mind afore we get to
Oban. We’ve a heap o’ calls to make Mull and Islay way.”

The purser came up to inquire about my ticket, and greeted me with a
grin.
“Ye’re acquaint with Mr Gresson, then?” said the captain. “Weel, we’re a
cheery wee ship’s company, and that’s the great thing on this kind o’ job.”
I made but a poor supper, for the wind had risen to half a gale, and I saw
hours of wretchedness approaching. The trouble with me is that I cannot be
honestly sick and get it over. Queasiness and headache beset me and there is
no refuge but bed. I turned into my bunk, leaving the captain and the mate
smoking shag not six feet from my head, and fell into a restless sleep. When
I woke the place was empty, and smelt vilely of stale tobacco and cheese.
My throbbing brows made sleep impossible, and I tried to ease them by
staggering upon deck. I saw a clear windy sky, with every star as bright as a
live coal, and a heaving waste of dark waters running to ink-black hills.
Then a douche of spray caught me and sent me down the companion to my
bunk again, where I lay for hours trying to make a plan of campaign.
I argued that if Amos had wanted me to have a passport he would have
provided one, so I needn’t bother my head about that. But it was my
business to keep alongside Gresson, and if the boat stayed a week in some
port and he went off ashore, I must follow him. Having no passport I would
have to be always dodging trouble, which would handicap my movements
and in all likelihood make me more conspicuous than I wanted. I guessed
that Amos had denied me the passport for the very reason that he wanted
Gresson to think me harmless. The area of danger would, therefore, be the
passport country, somewhere north of Fort William.
But to follow Gresson I must run risks and enter that country. His
suspicions, if he had any, would be lulled if I left the boat at Oban, but it
was up to me to follow overland to the north and hit the place where the
Tobermory made a long stay. The confounded tub had no plans; she
wandered about the West Highlands looking for sheep and things; and the
captain himself could give me no time-table of her voyage. It was incredible
that Gresson should take all this trouble if he did not know that at some
place—and the right place—he would have time to get a spell ashore. But I
could scarcely ask Gresson for that information, though I determined to cast
a wary fly over him. I knew roughly the Tobermory’s course—through the
Sound of Islay to Colonsay; then up the east side of Mull to Oban; then
through the Sound of Mull to the islands with names like cocktails, Rum

and Eigg and Coll; then to Skye; and then for the Outer Hebrides. I thought
the last would be the place, and it seemed madness to leave the boat, for the
Lord knew how I should get across the Minch. This consideration upset all
my plans again, and I fell into a troubled sleep without coming to any
conclusion.
Morning found us nosing between Jura and Islay, and about midday we
touched at a little port, where we unloaded some cargo and took on a couple
of shepherds who were going to Colonsay. The mellow afternoon and the
good smell of salt and heather got rid of the dregs of my queasiness, and I
spent a profitable hour on the pier-head with a guide-book called Baddely’s
Scotland, and one of Bartholomew’s maps. I was beginning to think that
Amos might be able to tell me something, for a talk with the captain had
suggested that the Tobermory would not dally long in the neighbourhood of
Rum and Eigg. The big droving season was scarcely on yet, and sheep for
the Oban market would be lifted on the return journey. In that case Skye
was the first place to watch, and if I could get wind of any big cargo waiting
there I would be able to make a plan. Amos was somewhere near the Kyle,
and that was across the narrows from Skye. Looking at the map, it seemed
to me that, in spite of being passportless, I might be able somehow to make
my way up through Morvern and Arisaig to the latitude of Skye. The
difficulty would be to get across the strip of sea, but there must be boats to
beg, borrow or steal.
I was poring over Baddely when Gresson sat down beside me. He was in
a good temper, and disposed to talk, and to my surprise his talk was all
about the beauties of the countryside. There was a kind of apple-green light
over everything; the steep heather hills cut into the sky like purple
amethysts, while beyond the straits the western ocean stretched its pale
molten gold to the sunset. Gresson waxed lyrical over the scene. “This just
about puts me right inside, Mr Brand. I’ve got to get away from that little
old town pretty frequent or I begin to moult like a canary. A man feels a
man when he gets to a place that smells as good as this. Why in hell do we
ever get messed up in those stone and lime cages? I reckon some day I’ll
pull my freight for a clean location and settle down there and make little
poems. This place would about content me. And there’s a spot out in
California in the Coast ranges that I’ve been keeping my eye on.” The odd
thing was that I believe he meant it. His ugly face was lit up with a serious
delight.

He told me he had taken this voyage before, so I got out Baddely and
asked for advice. “I can’t spend too much time on holidaying,” I told him,
“and I want to see all the beauty spots. But the best of them seem to be in
the area that this fool British Government won’t let you into without a
passport. I suppose I shall have to leave you at Oban.”
“Too bad,” he said sympathetically. “Well, they tell me there’s some
pretty sights round Oban.” And he thumbed the guide-book and began to
read about Glencoe.
I said that was not my purpose, and pitched him a yarn about Prince
Charlie and how my mother’s great-grandfather had played some kind of
part in that show. I told him I wanted to see the place where the Prince
landed and where he left for France. “So far as I can make out that won’t
take me into the passport country, but I’ll have to do a bit of footslogging.
Well, I’m used to padding the hoof. I must get the captain to put me off in
Morvern, and then I can foot it round the top of Lochiel and get back to
Oban through Appin. How’s that for a holiday trek?”
He gave the scheme his approval. “But if it was me, Mr Brand, I would
have a shot at puzzling your gallant policemen. You and I don’t take much
stock in Governments and their two-cent laws, and it would be a good game
to see just how far you could get into the forbidden land. A man like you
could put up a good bluff on those hayseeds. I don’t mind having a bet....”
“No,” I said. “I’m out for a rest, and not for sport. If there was anything
to be gained I’d undertake to bluff my way to the Orkney Islands. But it’s a
wearing job and I’ve better things to think about.”
“So? Well, enjoy yourself your own way. I’ll be sorry when you leave us,
for I owe you something for that rough-house, and beside there’s darned
little company in the old moss-back captain.”
That evening Gresson and I swopped yarns after supper to the
accompaniment of the “Ma Goad!” and “Is’t possible?” of captain and
mate. I went to bed after a glass or two of weak grog, and made up for the
last night’s vigil by falling sound asleep. I had very little kit with me,
beyond what I stood up in and could carry in my waterproof pockets, but on
Amos’s advice I had brought my little nickel-plated revolver. This lived by
day in my hip pocket, but at night I put it behind my pillow. But when I
woke next morning to find us casting anchor in the bay below rough low
hills, which I knew to be the island of Colonsay, I could find no trace of the

revolver. I searched every inch of the bunk and only shook out feathers
from the mouldy ticking. I remembered perfectly putting the thing behind
my head before I went to sleep, and now it had vanished utterly. Of course I
could not advertise my loss, and I didn’t greatly mind it, for this was not a
job where I could do much shooting. But it made me think a good deal
about Mr Gresson. He simply could not suspect me; if he had bagged my
gun, as I was pretty certain he had, it must be because he wanted it for
himself and not that he might disarm me. Every way I argued it I reached
the same conclusion. In Gresson’s eyes I must seem as harmless as a child.
We spent the better part of a day at Colonsay, and Gresson, so far as his
duties allowed, stuck to me like a limpet. Before I went ashore I wrote out a
telegram for Amos. I devoted a hectic hour to the Pilgrim’s Progress, but I
could not compose any kind of intelligible message with reference to its
text. We had all the same edition—the one in the Golden Treasury series—
so I could have made up a sort of cipher by referring to lines and pages, but
that would have taken up a dozen telegraph forms and seemed to me too
elaborate for the purpose. So I sent this message:

Ochterlony, Post Office, Kyle,
I hope to spend part of holiday near you and to see you if
boat’s programme permits. Are any good cargoes waiting in
your neighbourhood? Reply Post Office, Oban.

It was highly important that Gresson should not see this, but it was the
deuce of a business to shake him off. I went for a walk in the afternoon
along the shore and passed the telegraph office, but the confounded fellow
was with me all the time. My only chance was just before we sailed, when
he had to go on board to check some cargo. As the telegraph office stood
full in view of the ship’s deck I did not go near it. But in the back end of the
clachan I found the schoolmaster, and got him to promise to send the wire. I
also bought off him a couple of well-worn sevenpenny novels.
The result was that I delayed our departure for ten minutes and when I
came on board faced a wrathful Gresson. “Where the hell have you been?”
he asked. “The weather’s blowing up dirty and the old man’s mad to get off.
Didn’t you get your legs stretched enough this afternoon?”
I explained humbly that I had been to the schoolmaster to get something
to read, and produced my dingy red volumes. At that his brow cleared. I

could see that his suspicions were set at rest.
We left Colonsay about six in the evening with the sky behind us banking
for a storm, and the hills of Jura to starboard an angry purple. Colonsay was
too low an island to be any kind of breakwater against a western gale, so the
weather was bad from the start. Our course was north by east, and when we
had passed the butt-end of the island we nosed about in the trough of big
seas, shipping tons of water and rolling like a buffalo. I know as much
about boats as about Egyptian hieroglyphics, but even my landsman’s eyes
could tell that we were in for a rough night. I was determined not to get
queasy again, but when I went below the smell of tripe and onions promised
to be my undoing; so I dined off a slab of chocolate and a cabin biscuit, put
on my waterproof, and resolved to stick it out on deck.
I took up position near the bows, where I was out of reach of the oily
steamer smells. It was as fresh as the top of a mountain, but mighty cold
and wet, for a gusty drizzle had set in, and I got the spindrift of the big
waves. There I balanced myself, as we lurched into the twilight, hanging on
with one hand to a rope which descended from the stumpy mast. I noticed
that there was only an indifferent rail between me and the edge, but that
interested me and helped to keep off sickness. I swung to the movement of
the vessel, and though I was mortally cold it was rather pleasant than
otherwise. My notion was to get the nausea whipped out of me by the
weather, and, when I was properly tired, to go down and turn in.
I stood there till the dark had fallen. By that time I was an automaton, the
way a man gets on sentry-go, and I could have easily hung on till morning.
My thoughts ranged about the earth, beginning with the business I had set
out on, and presently—by way of recollections of Blenkiron and Peter—
reaching the German forest where, in the Christmas of 1915, I had been
nearly done in by fever and old Stumm. I remembered the bitter cold of that
wild race, and the way the snow seemed to burn like fire when I stumbled
and got my face into it. I reflected that sea-sickness was kitten’s play to a
good bout of malaria.
The weather was growing worse, and I was getting more than spindrift
from the seas. I hooked my arm round the rope, for my fingers were
numbing. Then I fell to dreaming again, principally about Fosse Manor and
Mary Lamington. This so ravished me that I was as good as asleep. I was

trying to reconstruct the picture as I had last seen her at Biggleswick
station....
A heavy body collided with me and shook my arm from the rope. I
slithered across the yard of deck, engulfed in a whirl of water. One foot
caught a stanchion of the rail, and it gave with me, so that for an instant I
was more than half overboard. But my fingers clawed wildly and caught in
the links of what must have been the anchor chain. They held, though a
ton’s weight seemed to be tugging at my feet.... Then the old tub rolled
back, the waters slipped off, and I was sprawling on a wet deck with no
breath in me and a gallon of brine in my windpipe.
I heard a voice cry out sharply, and a hand helped me to my feet. It was
Gresson, and he seemed excited.
“God, Mr Brand, that was a close call! I was coming up to find you,
when this damned ship took to lying on her side. I guess I must have
cannoned into you, and I was calling myself bad names when I saw you
rolling into the Atlantic. If I hadn’t got a grip on the rope I would have been
down beside you. Say, you’re not hurt? I reckon you’d better come below
and get a glass of rum under your belt. You’re about as wet as mother’s
dish-clouts.”
There’s one advantage about campaigning. You take your luck when it
comes and don’t worry about what might have been. I didn’t think any more
of the business, except that it had cured me of wanting to be sea-sick. I went
down to the reeking cabin without one qualm in my stomach, and ate a
good meal of welsh-rabbit and bottled Bass, with a tot of rum to follow up
with. Then I shed my wet garments, and slept in my bunk till we anchored
off a village in Mull in a clear blue morning.
It took us four days to crawl up that coast and make Oban, for we seemed
to be a floating general store for every hamlet in those parts. Gresson made
himself very pleasant, as if he wanted to atone for nearly doing me in. We
played some poker, and I read the little books I had got in Colonsay, and
then rigged up a fishing-line, and caught saithe and lythe and an occasional
big haddock. But I found the time pass slowly, and I was glad that about
noon one day we came into a bay blocked with islands and saw a clean little
town sitting on the hills and the smoke of a railway engine.
I went ashore and purchased a better brand of hat in a tweed store. Then I
made a bee-line for the post office, and asked for telegrams. One was given

to me, and as I opened it I saw Gresson at my elbow.
It ran thus:

Brand, Post office, Oban. Page 117, paragraph 3.
Ochterlony.

I passed it to Gresson with a rueful face.
“There’s a piece of foolishness,” I said. “I’ve got a cousin who’s a
Presbyterian minister up in Ross-shire, and before I knew about this
passport humbug I wrote to him and offered to pay him a visit. I told him to
wire me here if it was convenient, and the old idiot has sent me the wrong
telegram. This was likely as not meant for some other brother parson, who’s
got my message instead.”
“What’s the guy’s name?” Gresson asked curiously, peering at the
signature.
“Ochterlony. David Ochterlony. He’s a great swell at writing books, but
he’s no earthly use at handling the telegraph. However, it don’t signify,
seeing I’m not going near him.” I crumpled up the pink form and tossed it
on the floor. Gresson and I walked to the Tobermory together.
That afternoon, when I got a chance, I had out my Pilgrim’s Progress.
Page 117, paragraph 3, read:
“Then I saw in my dream, that a little off the road, over against the
Silver-mine, stood Demas (gentlemanlike) to call to passengers to come and
see: who said to Christian and his fellow, Ho, turn aside hither and I will
show you a thing.
At tea I led the talk to my own past life. I yarned about my experiences as
a mining engineer, and said I could never get out of the trick of looking at
country with the eye of the prospector. “For instance,” I said, “if this had
been Rhodesia, I would have said there was a good chance of copper in
these little kopjes above the town. They’re not unlike the hills round the
Messina mine.” I told the captain that after the war I was thinking of turning
my attention to the West Highlands and looking out for minerals.
“Ye’ll make nothing of it,” said the captain. “The costs are ower big,
even if ye found the minerals, for ye’d have to import a’ your labour. The
West Hielandman is no fond o’ hard work. Ye ken the psalm o’ the crofter?

O that the peats would cut themselves,
The fish chump on the shore,
And that I in my bed might lie
Henceforth for ever more!

“Has it ever been tried?” I asked.
“Often. There’s marble and slate quarries, and there was word o’ coal in
Benbecula. And there’s the iron mines at Ranna.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Up forenent Skye. We call in there, and generally bide a bit. There’s a
heap of cargo for Ranna, and we usually get a good load back. But as I tell
ye, there’s few Hielanders working there. Mostly Irish and lads frae Fife
and Falkirk way.”
I didn’t pursue the subject, for I had found Demas’s silver-mine. If the
Tobermory lay at Ranna for a week, Gresson would have time to do his own
private business. Ranna would not be the spot, for the island was bare to the
world in the middle of a much-frequented channel. But Skye was just across
the way, and when I looked in my map at its big, wandering peninsulas I
concluded that my guess had been right, and that Skye was the place to
make for.
That night I sat on deck with Gresson, and in a wonderful starry silence
we watched the lights die out of the houses in the town, and talked of a
thousand things. I noticed—what I had had a hint of before—that my
companion was no common man. There were moments when he forgot
himself and talked like an educated gentleman: then he would remember,
and relapse into the lingo of Leadville, Colorado. In my character of the
ingenuous inquirer I set him posers about politics and economics, the kind
of thing I might have been supposed to pick up from unintelligent browsing
among little books. Generally he answered with some slangy catchword,
but occasionally he was interested beyond his discretion, and treated me to
a harangue like an equal. I discovered another thing, that he had a craze for
poetry, and a capacious memory for it. I forgot how we drifted into the
subject, but I remember he quoted some queer haunting stuff which he said
was Swinburne, and verses by people I had heard of from Letchford at
Biggleswick. Then he saw by my silence that he had gone too far, and fell
back into the jargon of the West. He wanted to know about my plans, and
we went down into the cabin and had a look at the map. I explained my

route, up Morvern and round the head of Lochiel, and back to Oban by the
east side of Loch Linnhe.
“Got you,” he said. “You’ve a hell of a walk before you. That bug never
bit me, and I guess I’m not envying you any. And after that, Mr Brand?”
“Back to Glasgow to do some work for the cause,” I said lightly.
“Just so,” he said with a grin. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
We steamed out of the bay next morning at dawn, and about nine o’clock
I got on shore at a little place called Lochaline. My kit was all on my
person, and my waterproof’s pockets were stuffed with chocolates and
biscuits I had bought in Oban. The captain was discouraging. “Ye’ll get
your bellyful o’ Hieland hills, Mr Brand, afore ye win round the loch head.
Ye’ll be wishin’ yerself back on the Tobermory.” But Gresson speeded me
joyfully on my way, and said he wished he were coming with me. He even
accompanied me the first hundred yards, and waved his hat after me till I
was round the turn of the road.
The first stage in that journey was pure delight. I was thankful to be rid
of the infernal boat, and the hot summer scents coming down the glen were
comforting after the cold, salt smell of the sea. The road lay up the side of a
small bay, at the top of which a big white house stood among gardens.
Presently I had left the coast and was in a glen where a brown salmon-river
swirled through acres of bog-myrtle. It had its source in a loch, from which
the mountain rose steeply—a place so glassy in that August forenoon that
every scar and wrinkle of the hillside were faithfully reflected. After that I
crossed a low pass to the head of another sea-lock, and, following the map,
struck over the shoulder of a great hill and ate my luncheon far up on its
side, with a wonderful vista of wood and water below me.
All that morning I was very happy, not thinking about Gresson or Ivery,
but getting my mind clear in those wide spaces, and my lungs filled with the
brisk hill air. But I noticed one curious thing. On my last visit to Scotland,
when I covered more moorland miles a day than any man since
Claverhouse, I had been fascinated by the land, and had pleased myself
with plans for settling down in it. But now, after three years of war and
general rocketing, I felt less drawn to that kind of landscape. I wanted
something more green and peaceful and habitable, and it was to the
Cotswolds that my memory turned with longing.

I puzzled over this till I realised that in all my Cotswold pictures a figure
kept going and coming—a young girl with a cloud of gold hair and the
strong, slim grace of a boy, who had sung “Cherry Ripe” in a moonlit
garden. Up on that hillside I understood very clearly that I, who had been as
careless of women as any monk, had fallen wildly in love with a child of
half my age. I was loath to admit it, though for weeks the conclusion had
been forcing itself on me. Not that I didn’t revel in my madness, but that it
seemed too hopeless a business, and I had no use for barren philandering.
But, seated on a rock munching chocolate and biscuits, I faced up to the fact
and resolved to trust my luck. After all we were comrades in a big job, and
it was up to me to be man enough to win her. The thought seemed to brace
any courage that was in me. No task seemed too hard with her approval to
gain and her companionship somewhere at the back of it. I sat for a long
time in a happy dream, remembering all the glimpses I had had of her, and
humming her song to an audience of one black-faced sheep.
On the highroad half a mile below me, I saw a figure on a bicycle
mounting the hill, and then getting off to mop its face at the summit. I
turned my Zeiss glasses on to it, and observed that it was a country
policeman. It caught sight of me, stared for a bit, tucked its machine into the
side of the road, and then very slowly began to climb the hillside. Once it
stopped, waved its hand and shouted something which I could not hear. I sat
finishing my luncheon, till the features were revealed to me of a fat oldish
man, blowing like a grampus, his cap well on the back of a bald head, and
his trousers tied about the shins with string.
There was a spring beside me and I had out my flask to round off my
meal.
“Have a drink,” I said.
His eye brightened, and a smile overran his moist face.
“Thank you, sir. It will be very warrm coming up the brae.”
“You oughtn’t to,” I said. “You really oughtn’t, you know. Scorching up
hills and then doubling up a mountain are not good for your time of life.”
He raised the cap of my flask in solemn salutation. “Your very good
health.” Then he smacked his lips, and had several cupfuls of water from
the spring.

“You will haf come from Achranich way, maybe?” he said in his soft
sing-song, having at last found his breath.
“Just so. Fine weather for the birds, if there was anybody to shoot them.”
“Ah, no. There will be few shots fired today, for there are no gentlemen
left in Morvern. But I wass asking you, if you come from Achranich, if you
haf seen anybody on the road.”
From his pocket he extricated a brown envelope and a bulky telegraph
form. “Will you read it, sir, for I haf forgot my spectacles?”
It contained a description of one Brand, a South African and a suspected
character, whom the police were warned to stop and return to Oban. The
description wasn’t bad, but it lacked any one good distinctive detail. Clearly
the policeman took me for an innocent pedestrian, probably the guest of
some moorland shooting-box, with my brown face and rough tweeds and
hobnailed shoes.
I frowned and puzzled a little. “I did see a fellow about three miles back
on the hillside. There’s a public-house just where the burn comes in, and I
think he was making for it. Maybe that was your man. This wire says
‘South African’; and now I remember the fellow had the look of a colonial.”
The policeman sighed. “No doubt it will be the man. Perhaps he will haf
a pistol and will shoot.”
“Not him,” I laughed. “He looked a mangy sort of chap, and he’ll be
scared out of his senses at the sight of you. But take my advice and get
somebody with you before you tackle him. You’re always the better of a
witness.”
“That is so,” he said, brightening. “Ach, these are the bad times! in old
days there wass nothing to do but watch the doors at the flower-shows and
keep the yachts from poaching the sea-trout. But now it is spies, spies, and
‘Donald, get out of your bed, and go off twenty mile to find a German.’ I
wass wishing the war wass by, and the Germans all dead.”
“Hear, hear!” I cried, and on the strength of it gave him another dram.
I accompanied him to the road, and saw him mount his bicycle and zig-
zag like a snipe down the hill towards Achranich. Then I set off briskly
northward. It was clear that the faster I moved the better.
As I went I paid disgusted tribute to the efficiency of the Scottish police.
I wondered how on earth they had marked me down. Perhaps it was the

Glasgow meeting, or perhaps my association with Ivery at Biggleswick.
Anyhow there was somebody somewhere mighty quick at compiling a
dossier. Unless I wanted to be bundled back to Oban I must make good
speed to the Arisaig coast.
Presently the road fell to a gleaming sea-loch which lay like the blue
blade of a sword among the purple of the hills. At the head there was a tiny
clachan, nestled among birches and rowans, where a tawny burn wound to
the sea. When I entered the place it was about four o’clock in the afternoon,
and peace lay on it like a garment. In the wide, sunny street there was no
sign of life, and no sound except of hens clucking and of bees busy among
the roses. There was a little grey box of a kirk, and close to the bridge a
thatched cottage which bore the sign of a post and telegraph office.
For the past hour I had been considering that I had better prepare for
mishaps. If the police of these parts had been warned they might prove too
much for me, and Gresson would be allowed to make his journey
unmatched. The only thing to do was to send a wire to Amos and leave the
matter in his hands. Whether that was possible or not depended upon this
remote postal authority.
I entered the little shop, and passed from bright sunshine to a twilight
smelling of paraffin and black-striped peppermint balls. An old woman with
a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over
her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind
of old wise face that God loves.
Beside her I noticed a little pile of books, one of which was a Bible.
Open on her lap was a paper, the United Free Church Monthly. I noticed
these details greedily, for I had to make up my mind on the part to play.
“It’s a warm day, mistress,” I said, my voice falling into the broad
Lowland speech, for I had an instinct that she was not of the Highlands.
She laid aside her paper. “It is that, sir. It is grand weather for the hairst,
but here that’s no till the hinner end o’ September, and at the best it’s a bit
scart o’ aits.”
“Ay. It’s a different thing down Annandale way,” I said.
Her face lit up. “Are ye from Dumfries, sir?”
“Not just from Dumfries, but I know the Borders fine.”

“Ye’ll no beat them,” she cried. “Not that this is no a guid place and I’ve
muckle to be thankfu’ for since John Sanderson—that was ma man—
brought me here forty-seeven year syne come Martinmas. But the aulder I
get the mair I think o’ the bit whaur I was born. It was twae miles from
Wamphray on the Lockerbie road, but they tell me the place is noo just a
rickle o’ stanes.”
“I was wondering, mistress, if I could get a cup of tea in the village.”
“Ye’ll hae a cup wi’ me,” she said. “It’s no often we see onybody frae the
Borders hereaways. The kettle’s just on the boil.”
She gave me tea and scones and butter, and black-currant jam, and treacle
biscuits that melted in the mouth. And as we ate we talked of many things—
chiefly of the war and of the wickedness of the world.
“There’s nae lads left here,” she said. “They a’ joined the Camerons, and
the feck o’ them fell at an awfu’ place called Lowse. John and me never had
no boys, jist the one lassie that’s married on Donald Frew, the Strontian
carrier. I used to vex mysel’ about it, but now I thank the Lord that in His
mercy He spared me sorrow. But I wad hae liked to have had one laddie
fechtin’ for his country. I whiles wish I was a Catholic and could pit up
prayers for the sodgers that are deid. It maun be a great consolation.”
I whipped out the Pilgrim’s Progress from my pocket. “That is the grand
book for a time like this.”
“Fine I ken it,” she said. “I got it for a prize in the Sabbath School when I
was a lassie.”
I turned the pages. I read out a passage or two, and then I seemed struck
with a sudden memory.
“This is a telegraph office, mistress. Could I trouble you to send a
telegram? You see I’ve a cousin that’s a minister in Ross-shire at the Kyle,
and him and me are great correspondents. He was writing about something
in the Pilgrim’s Progress and I think I’ll send him a telegram in answer.”
“A letter would be cheaper,” she said.
“Ay, but I’m on holiday and I’ve no time for writing.”
She gave me a form, and I wrote:

Ochterlony. Post Office, Kyle.—Demas will be at his mine
within the week. Strive with him, lest I faint by the way.

“Ye’re unco lavish wi’ the words, sir,” was her only comment.
We parted with regret, and there was nearly a row when I tried to pay for
the tea. I was bidden remember her to one David Tudhole, farmer in Nether
Mirecleuch, the next time I passed by Wamphray.
The village was as quiet when I left it as when I had entered. I took my
way up the hill with an easier mind, for I had got off the telegram, and I
hoped I had covered my tracks. My friend the postmistress would, if
questioned, be unlikely to recognise any South African suspect in the frank
and homely traveller who had spoken with her of Annandale and the
Pilgrim’s Progress.
The soft mulberry gloaming of the west coast was beginning to fall on
the hills. I hoped to put in a dozen miles before dark to the next village on
the map, where I might find quarters. But ere I had gone far I heard the
sound of a motor behind me, and a car slipped past bearing three men. The
driver favoured me with a sharp glance, and clapped on the brakes. I noted
that the two men in the tonneau were carrying sporting rifles.
“Hi, you, sir,” he cried. “Come here.” The two rifle-bearers—solemn
gillies—brought their weapons to attention.
“By God,” he said, “it’s the man. What’s your name? Keep him covered,
Angus.”
The gillies duly covered me, and I did not like the look of their wavering
barrels. They were obviously as surprised as myself.
I had about half a second to make my plans. I advanced with a very stiff
air, and asked him what the devil he meant. No Lowland Scots for me now.
My tone was that of an adjutant of a Guards’ battalion.
My inquisitor was a tall man in an ulster, with a green felt hat on his
small head. He had a lean, well-bred face, and very choleric blue eyes. I set
him down as a soldier, retired, Highland regiment or cavalry, old style.
He produced a telegraph form, like the policeman.
“Middle height—strongly built—grey tweeds—brown hat—speaks with
a colonial accent—much sunburnt. What’s your name, sir?”
I did not reply in a colonial accent, but with the hauteur of the British
officer when stopped by a French sentry. I asked him again what the devil
he had to do with my business. This made him angry and he began to
stammer.

“I’ll teach you what I have to do with it. I’m a deputy-lieutenant of this
county, and I have Admiralty instructions to watch the coast. Damn it, sir,
I’ve a wire here from the Chief Constable describing you. You’re Brand, a
very dangerous fellow, and we want to know what the devil you’re doing
here.”
As I looked at his wrathful eye and lean head, which could not have held
much brains, I saw that I must change my tone. If I irritated him he would
get nasty and refuse to listen and hang me up for hours. So my voice
became respectful.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I’ve not been accustomed to be pulled up
suddenly, and asked for my credentials. My name is Blaikie, Captain Robert
Blaikie, of the Scots Fusiliers. I’m home on three weeks’ leave, to get a
little peace after Hooge. We were only hauled out five days ago.” I hoped
my old friend in the shell-shock hospital at Isham would pardon my
borrowing his identity.
The man looked puzzled. “How the devil am I to be satisfied about that?
Have you any papers to prove it?”
“Why, no. I don’t carry passports about with me on a walking tour. But
you can wire to the depot, or to my London address.”
He pulled at his yellow moustache. “I’m hanged if I know what to do. I
want to get home for dinner. I tell you what, sir, I’ll take you on with me
and put you up for the night. My boy’s at home, convalescing, and if he
says you’re pukka I’ll ask your pardon and give you a dashed good bottle of
port. I’ll trust him and I warn you he’s a keen hand.”
There was nothing to do but consent, and I got in beside him with an
uneasy conscience. Supposing the son knew the real Blaikie! I asked the
name of the boy’s battalion, and was told the 10th Seaforths. That wasn’t
pleasant hearing, for they had been brigaded with us on the Somme. But
Colonel Broadbury—for he told me his name—volunteered another piece
of news which set my mind at rest. The boy was not yet twenty, and had
only been out seven months. At Arras he had got a bit of shrapnel in his
thigh, which had played the deuce with the sciatic nerve, and he was still on
crutches.
We spun over ridges of moorland, always keeping northward, and
brought up at a pleasant white-washed house close to the sea. Colonel
Broadbury ushered me into a hall where a small fire of peats was burning,

and on a couch beside it lay a slim, pale-faced young man. He had dropped
his policeman’s manner, and behaved like a gentleman. “Ted,” he said,
“I’ve brought a friend home for the night. I went out to look for a suspect
and found a British officer. This is Captain Blaikie, of the Scots Fusiliers.”
The boy looked at me pleasantly. “I’m very glad to meet you, sir. You’ll
excuse me not getting up, but I’ve got a game leg.” He was the copy of his
father in features, but dark and sallow where the other was blond. He had
just the same narrow head, and stubborn mouth, and honest, quick-tempered
eyes. It is the type that makes dashing regimental officers, and earns V.C.s,
and gets done in wholesale. I was never that kind. I belonged to the school
of the cunning cowards.
In the half-hour before dinner the last wisp of suspicion fled from my
host’s mind. For Ted Broadbury and I were immediately deep in “shop”. I
had met most of his senior officers, and I knew all about their doings at
Arras, for his brigade had been across the river on my left. We fought the
great fight over again, and yarned about technicalities and slanged the Staff
in the way young officers have, the father throwing in questions that
showed how mighty proud he was of his son. I had a bath before dinner,
and as he led me to the bathroom he apologised very handsomely for his
bad manners. “Your coming’s been a godsend for Ted. He was moping a bit
in this place. And, though I say it that shouldn’t, he’s a dashed good boy.”
I had my promised bottle of port, and after dinner I took on the father at
billiards. Then we settled in the smoking-room, and I laid myself out to
entertain the pair. The result was that they would have me stay a week, but I
spoke of the shortness of my leave, and said I must get on to the railway
and then back to Fort William for my luggage.
So I spent that night between clean sheets, and ate a Christian breakfast,
and was given my host’s car to set me a bit on the road. I dismissed it after
half a dozen miles, and, following the map, struck over the hills to the west.
About midday I topped a ridge, and beheld the Sound of Sleat shining
beneath me. There were other things in the landscape. In the valley on the
right a long goods train was crawling on the Mallaig railway. And across
the strip of sea, like some fortress of the old gods, rose the dark bastions
and turrets of the hills of Skye.

CHAPTER VI
The Skirts of the Coolin
Obviously I must keep away from the railway. If the police were after me
in Morvern, that line would be warned, for it was a barrier I must cross if I
were to go farther north. I observed from the map that it turned up the coast,
and concluded that the place for me to make for was the shore south of that
turn, where Heaven might send me some luck in the boat line. For I was
pretty certain that every porter and station-master on that tin-pot outfit was
anxious to make better acquaintance with my humble self.
I lunched off the sandwiches the Broadburys had given me, and in the
bright afternoon made my way down the hill, crossed at the foot of a small
fresh-water lochan, and pursued the issuing stream through midge-infested
woods of hazels to its junction with the sea. It was rough going, but very
pleasant, and I fell into the same mood of idle contentment that I had
enjoyed the previous morning. I never met a soul. Sometimes a roe deer
broke out of the covert, or an old blackcock startled me with his scolding.
The place was bright with heather, still in its first bloom, and smelt better
than the myrrh of Arabia. It was a blessed glen, and I was as happy as a
king, till I began to feel the coming of hunger, and reflected that the Lord
alone knew when I might get a meal. I had still some chocolate and biscuits,
but I wanted something substantial.
The distance was greater than I thought, and it was already twilight when
I reached the coast. The shore was open and desolate—great banks of
pebbles to which straggled alders and hazels from the hillside scrub. But as
I marched northward and turned a little point of land I saw before me in a
crook of the bay a smoking cottage. And, plodding along by the water’s
edge, was the bent figure of a man, laden with nets and lobster pots. Also,
beached on the shingle was a boat.
I quickened my pace and overtook the fisherman. He was an old man
with a ragged grey beard, and his rig was seaman’s boots and a much-
darned blue jersey. He was deaf, and did not hear me when I hailed him.

When he caught sight of me he never stopped, though he very solemnly
returned my good evening. I fell into step with him, and in his silent
company reached the cottage.
He halted before the door and unslung his burdens. The place was a two-
roomed building with a roof of thatch, and the walls all grown over with a
yellow-flowered creeper. When he had straightened his back, he looked
seaward and at the sky, as if to prospect the weather. Then he turned on me
his gentle, absorbed eyes. “It will haf been a fine day, sir. Wass you seeking
the road to anywhere?”
“I was seeking a night’s lodging,” I said. “I’ve had a long tramp on the
hills, and I’d be glad of a chance of not going farther.”
“We will haf no accommodation for a gentleman,” he said gravely.
“I can sleep on the floor, if you can give me a blanket and a bite of
supper.”
“Indeed you will not,” and he smiled slowly. “But I will ask the wife.
Mary, come here!”
An old woman appeared in answer to his call, a woman whose face was
so old that she seemed like his mother. In highland places one sex ages
quicker than the other.
“This gentleman would like to bide the night. I wass telling him that we
had a poor small house, but he says he will not be minding it.”
She looked at me with the timid politeness that you find only in outland
places.
“We can do our best, indeed, sir. The gentleman can have Colin’s bed in
the loft, but he will haf to be doing with plain food. Supper is ready if you
will come in now.”
I had a scrub with a piece of yellow soap at an adjacent pool in the burn
and then entered a kitchen blue with peat-reek. We had a meal of boiled
fish, oatcakes and skim-milk cheese, with cups of strong tea to wash it
down. The old folk had the manners of princes. They pressed food on me,
and asked me no questions, till for very decency’s sake I had to put up a
story and give some account of myself.
I found they had a son in the Argylls and a young boy in the Navy. But
they seemed disinclined to talk of them or of the war. By a mere accident I
hit on the old man’s absorbing interest. He was passionate about the land.

He had taken part in long-forgotten agitations, and had suffered eviction in
some ancient landlords’ quarrel farther north. Presently he was pouring out
to me all the woes of the crofter—woes that seemed so antediluvian and
forgotten that I listened as one would listen to an old song. “You who come
from a new country will not haf heard of these things,” he kept telling me,
but by that peat fire I made up for my defective education. He told me of
evictions in the year. One somewhere in Sutherland, and of harsh doings in
the Outer Isles. It was far more than a political grievance. It was the lament
of the conservative for vanished days and manners. “Over in Skye wass the
fine land for black cattle, and every man had his bit herd on the hillside. But
the lairds said it wass better for sheep, and then they said it wass not good
for sheep, so they put it under deer, and now there is no black cattle
anywhere in Skye.” I tell you it was like sad music on the bagpipes hearing
that old fellow. The war and all things modern meant nothing to him; he
lived among the tragedies of his youth and his prime.
I’m a Tory myself and a bit of a land-reformer, so we agreed well
enough. So well, that I got what I wanted without asking for it. I told him I
was going to Skye, and he offered to take me over in his boat in the
morning. “It will be no trouble. Indeed no. I will be going that way myself
to the fishing.”
I told him that after the war, every acre of British soil would have to be
used for the men that had earned the right to it. But that did not comfort
him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but about the men who had
been driven from it fifty years before. His desire was not for reform, but for
restitution, and that was past the power of any Government. I went to bed in
the loft in a sad, reflective mood, considering how in speeding our
newfangled plough we must break down a multitude of molehills and how
desirable and unreplaceable was the life of the moles.
In brisk, shining weather, with a wind from the south-east, we put off
next morning. In front was a brown line of low hills, and behind them, a
little to the north, that black toothcomb of mountain range which I had seen
the day before from the Arisaig ridge.
“That is the Coolin,” said the fisherman. “It is a bad place where even the
deer cannot go. But all the rest of Skye wass the fine land for black cattle.”
As we neared the coast, he pointed out many places. “Look there, Sir, in
that glen. I haf seen six cot houses smoking there, and now there is not any

left. There were three men of my own name had crofts on the machars
beyond the point, and if you go there you will only find the marks of their
bit gardens. You will know the place by the gean trees.”
When he put me ashore in a sandy bay between green ridges of bracken,
he was still harping upon the past. I got him to take a pound—for the boat
and not for the night’s hospitality, for he would have beaten me with an oar
if I had suggested that. The last I saw of him, as I turned round at the top of
the hill, he had still his sail down, and was gazing at the lands which had
once been full of human dwellings and now were desolate.
I kept for a while along the ridge, with the Sound of Sleat on my right,
and beyond it the high hills of Knoydart and Kintail. I was watching for the
Tobermory, but saw no sign of her. A steamer put out from Mallaig, and
there were several drifters crawling up the channel and once I saw the white
ensign and a destroyer bustled northward, leaving a cloud of black smoke in
her wake. Then, after consulting the map, I struck across country, still
keeping the higher ground, but, except at odd minutes, being out of sight of
the sea. I concluded that my business was to get to the latitude of Ranna
without wasting time.
So soon as I changed my course I had the Coolin for company.
Mountains have always been a craze of mine, and the blackness and
mystery of those grim peaks went to my head. I forgot all about Fosse
Manor and the Cotswolds. I forgot, too, what had been my chief feeling
since I left Glasgow, a sense of the absurdity of my mission. It had all
seemed too far-fetched and whimsical. I was running apparently no great
personal risk, and I had always the unpleasing fear that Blenkiron might
have been too clever and that the whole thing might be a mare’s nest. But
that dark mountain mass changed my outlook. I began to have a queer
instinct that that was the place, that something might be concealed there,
something pretty damnable. I remember I sat on a top for half an hour
raking the hills with my glasses. I made out ugly precipices, and glens
which lost themselves in primeval blackness. When the sun caught them—
for it was a gleamy day—it brought out no colours, only degrees of shade.
No mountains I had ever seen—not the Drakensberg or the red kopjes of
Damaraland or the cold, white peaks around Erzerum—ever looked so
unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about Ivery. There
seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being, dwelling in villas and
lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of precipices. But I felt there was, for
I had begun to realise the bigness of my opponent. Blenkiron had said that
he spun his web wide. That was intelligible enough among the half-baked
youth of Biggleswick, and the pacifist societies, or even the toughs on the
Clyde. I could fit him in all right to that picture. But that he should be
playing his game among those mysterious black crags seemed to make him
bigger and more desperate, altogether a different kind of proposition. I
didn’t exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to my past weeks had been
that I was out of my proper job, and this was more my line of country. I
always felt that I was a better bandit than a detective. But a sort of awe
mingled with my satisfaction. I began to feel about Ivery as I had felt about
the three devils of the Black Stone who had hunted me before the war, and
as I never felt about any other Hun. The men we fought at the Front and the
men I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even old Stumm himself,
had been human miscreants. They were formidable enough, but you could
gauge and calculate their capacities. But this Ivery was like a poison gas
that hung in the air and got into unexpected crannies and that you couldn’t
fight in an upstanding way. Till then, in spite of Blenkiron’s solemnity, I had
regarded him simply as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and
omnipresent enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on
that sunny hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups calling, I
got a chill in my spine when I thought of him.
I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry. There was
something about the war that made me ravenous, and the less chance of
food the worse I felt. If I had been in London with twenty restaurants open
to me, I should as likely as not have gone off my feed. That was the
cussedness of my stomach. I had still a little chocolate left, and I ate the
fisherman’s buttered scones for luncheon, but long before the evening my
thoughts were dwelling on my empty interior.
I put up that night in a shepherd’s cottage miles from anywhere. The man
was called Macmorran, and he had come from Galloway when sheep were
booming. He was a very good imitation of a savage, a little fellow with red
hair and red eyes, who might have been a Pict. He lived with a daughter
who had once been in service in Glasgow, a fat young woman with a face
entirely covered with freckles and a pout of habitual discontent. No wonder,

for that cottage was a pretty mean place. It was so thick with peat-reek that
throat and eyes were always smarting. It was badly built, and must have
leaked like a sieve in a storm. The father was a surly fellow, whose
conversation was one long growl at the world, the high prices, the difficulty
of moving his sheep, the meanness of his master, and the godforsaken
character of Skye. “Here’s me no seen baker’s bread for a month, and no
company but a wheen ignorant Hielanders that yatter Gawlic. I wish I was
back in the Glenkens. And I’d gang the morn if I could get paid what I’m
awed.”
However, he gave me supper—a braxy ham and oatcake, and I bought
the remnants off him for use next day. I did not trust his blankets, so I slept
the night by the fire in the ruins of an arm-chair, and woke at dawn with a
foul taste in my mouth. A dip in the burn refreshed me, and after a bowl of
porridge I took the road again. For I was anxious to get to some hill-top that
looked over to Ranna.
Before midday I was close under the eastern side of the Coolin, on a road
which was more a rockery than a path. Presently I saw a big house ahead of
me that looked like an inn, so I gave it a miss and struck the highway that
led to it a little farther north. Then I bore off to the east, and was just
beginning to climb a hill which I judged stood between me and the sea,
when I heard wheels on the road and looked back.
It was a farmer’s gig carrying one man. I was about half a mile off, and
something in the cut of his jib seemed familiar. I got my glasses on him and
made out a short, stout figure clad in a mackintosh, with a woollen
comforter round its throat. As I watched, it made a movement as if to rub its
nose on its sleeve. That was the pet trick of one man I knew.
Inconspicuously I slipped through the long heather so as to reach the road
ahead of the gig. When I rose like a wraith from the wayside the horse
started, but not the driver.
“So ye’re there,” said Amos’s voice. “I’ve news for ye. The Tobermory
will be in Ranna by now. She passed Broadford two hours syne. When I
saw her I yoked this beast and came up on the chance of foregathering with
ye.”
“How on earth did you know I would be here?” I asked in some surprise.
“Oh, I saw the way your mind was workin’ from your telegram. And says
I to mysel’—that man Brand, says I, is not the chiel to be easy stoppit. But I

was feared ye might be a day late, so I came up the road to hold the fort.
Man, I’m glad to see ye. Ye’re younger and soopler than me, and yon
Gresson’s a stirrin’ lad.”
“There’s one thing you’ve got to do for me,” I said. “I can’t go into inns
and shops, but I can’t do without food. I see from the map there’s a town
about six miles on. Go there and buy me anything that’s tinned—biscuits
and tongue and sardines, and a couple of bottles of whisky if you can get
them. This may be a long job, so buy plenty.”
“Whaur’ll I put them?” was his only question.
We fixed on a cache, a hundred yards from the highway in a place where
two ridges of hill enclosed the view so that only a short bit of road was
visible.
“I’ll get back to the Kyle,” he told me, “and a’body there kens Andra
Amos, if ye should find a way of sendin’ a message or comin’ yourself. Oh,
and I’ve got a word to ye from a lady that we ken of. She says, the sooner
ye’re back in Vawnity Fair the better she’ll be pleased, always provided
ye’ve got over the Hill Difficulty.”
A smile screwed up his old face and he waved his whip in farewell. I
interpreted Mary’s message as an incitement to speed, but I could not make
the pace. That was Gresson’s business. I think I was a little nettled, till I
cheered myself by another interpretation. She might be anxious for my
safety, she might want to see me again, anyhow the mere sending of the
message showed I was not forgotten. I was in a pleasant muse as I breasted
the hill, keeping discreetly in the cover of the many gullies. At the top I
looked down on Ranna and the sea.
There lay the Tobermory busy unloading. It would be some time, no
doubt, before Gresson could leave. There was no row-boat in the channel
yet, and I might have to wait hours. I settled myself snugly between two
rocks, where I could not be seen, and where I had a clear view of the sea
and shore. But presently I found that I wanted some long heather to make a
couch, and I emerged to get some. I had not raised my head for a second
when I flopped down again. For I had a neighbour on the hill-top.
He was about two hundred yards off, just reaching the crest, and, unlike
me, walking quite openly. His eyes were on Ranna, so he did not notice me,
but from my cover I scanned every line of him. He looked an ordinary
countryman, wearing badly cut, baggy knickerbockers of the kind that

gillies affect. He had a face like a Portuguese Jew, but I had seen that type
before among people with Highland names; they might be Jews or not, but
they could speak Gaelic. Presently he disappeared. He had followed my
example and selected a hiding-place.
It was a clear, hot day, but very pleasant in that airy place. Good scents
came up from the sea, the heather was warm and fragrant, bees droned
about, and stray seagulls swept the ridge with their wings. I took a look now
and then towards my neighbour, but he was deep in his hidey-hole. Most of
the time I kept my glasses on Ranna, and watched the doings of the
Tobermory. She was tied up at the jetty, but seemed in no hurry to unload. I
watched the captain disembark and walk up to a house on the hillside. Then
some idlers sauntered down towards her and stood talking and smoking
close to her side. The captain returned and left again. A man with papers in
his hand appeared, and a woman with what looked like a telegram. The
mate went ashore in his best clothes. Then at last, after midday, Gresson
appeared. He joined the captain at the piermaster’s office, and presently
emerged on the other side of the jetty where some small boats were
beached. A man from the Tobermory came in answer to his call, a boat was
launched, and began to make its way into the channel. Gresson sat in the
stern, placidly eating his luncheon.
I watched every detail of that crossing with some satisfaction that my
forecast was turning out right. About half-way across, Gresson took the
oars, but soon surrendered them to the Tobermory man, and lit a pipe. He
got out a pair of binoculars and raked my hillside. I tried to see if my
neighbour was making any signal, but all was quiet. Presently the boat was
hid from me by the bulge of the hill, and I caught the sound of her scraping
on the beach.
Gresson was not a hill-walker like my neighbour. It took him the best
part of an hour to get to the top, and he reached it at a point not two yards
from my hiding-place. I could hear by his labouring breath that he was very
blown. He walked straight over the crest till he was out of sight of Ranna,
and flung himself on the ground. He was now about fifty yards from me,
and I made shift to lessen the distance. There was a grassy trench skirting
the north side of the hill, deep and thickly overgrown with heather. I wound
my way along it till I was about twelve yards from him, where I stuck,
owing to the trench dying away. When I peered out of the cover I saw that

the other man had joined him and that the idiots were engaged in embracing
each other.
I dared not move an inch nearer, and as they talked in a low voice I could
hear nothing of what they said. Nothing except one phrase, which the
strange man repeated twice, very emphatically. “Tomorrow night,” he said,
and I noticed that his voice had not the Highland inflection which I looked
for. Gresson nodded and glanced at his watch, and then the two began to
move downhill towards the road I had travelled that morning.
I followed as best I could, using a shallow dry watercourse of which
sheep had made a track, and which kept me well below the level of the
moor. It took me down the hill, but some distance from the line the pair
were taking, and I had to reconnoitre frequently to watch their movements.
They were still a quarter of a mile or so from the road, when they stopped
and stared, and I stared with them. On that lonely highway travellers were
about as rare as roadmenders, and what caught their eye was a farmer’s gig
driven by a thick-set elderly man with a woollen comforter round his neck.
I had a bad moment, for I reckoned that if Gresson recognised Amos he
might take fright. Perhaps the driver of the gig thought the same, for he
appeared to be very drunk. He waved his whip, he jiggoted the reins, and he
made an effort to sing. He looked towards the figures on the hillside, and
cried out something. The gig narrowly missed the ditch, and then to my
relief the horse bolted. Swaying like a ship in a gale, the whole outfit
lurched out of sight round the corner of hill where lay my cache. If Amos
could stop the beast and deliver the goods there, he had put up a masterly
bit of buffoonery.
The two men laughed at the performance, and then they parted. Gresson
retraced his steps up the hill. The other man—I called him in my mind the
Portuguese Jew—started off at a great pace due west, across the road, and
over a big patch of bog towards the northern butt of the Coolin. He had
some errand, which Gresson knew about, and he was in a hurry to perform
it. It was clearly my job to get after him.
I had a rotten afternoon. The fellow covered the moorland miles like a
deer, and under the hot August sun I toiled on his trail. I had to keep well
behind, and as much as possible in cover, in case he looked back; and that
meant that when he had passed over a ridge I had to double not to let him
get too far ahead, and when we were in an open place I had to make wide

circuits to keep hidden. We struck a road which crossed a low pass and
skirted the flank of the mountains, and this we followed till we were on the
western side and within sight of the sea. It was gorgeous weather, and out
on the blue water I saw cool sails moving and little breezes ruffling the
calm, while I was glowing like a furnace. Happily I was in fair training, and
I needed it. The Portuguese Jew must have done a steady six miles an hour
over abominable country.
About five o’clock we came to a point where I dared not follow. The road
ran flat by the edge of the sea, so that several miles of it were visible.
Moreover, the man had begun to look round every few minutes. He was
getting near something and wanted to be sure that no one was in his
neighbourhood. I left the road accordingly, and took to the hillside, which to
my undoing was one long cascade of screes and tumbled rocks. I saw him
drop over a rise which seemed to mark the rim of a little bay into which
descended one of the big corries of the mountains. It must have been a good
half-hour later before I, at my greater altitude and with far worse going,
reached the same rim. I looked into the glen and my man had disappeared.
He could not have crossed it, for the place was wider than I had thought.
A ring of black precipices came down to within half a mile of the shore, and
between them was a big stream—long, shallow pools at the sea end and a
chain of waterfalls above. He had gone to earth like a badger somewhere,
and I dared not move in case he might be watching me from behind a
boulder.
But even as I hesitated he appeared again, fording the stream, his face set
on the road we had come. Whatever his errand was he had finished it, and
was posting back to his master. For a moment I thought I should follow
him, but another instinct prevailed. He had not come to this wild place for
the scenery. Somewhere down in the glen there was something or
somebody that held the key of the mystery. It was my business to stay there
till I had unlocked it. Besides, in two hours it would be dark, and I had had
enough walking for one day.
I made my way to the stream side and had a long drink. The corrie behind
me was lit up with the westering sun, and the bald cliffs were flushed with
pink and gold. On each side of the stream was turf like a lawn, perhaps a
hundred yards wide, and then a tangle of long heather and boulders right up
to the edge of the great rocks. I had never seen a more delectable evening,

but I could not enjoy its peace because of my anxiety about the Portuguese
Jew. He had not been there more than half an hour, just about long enough
for a man to travel to the first ridge across the burn and back. Yet he had
found time to do his business. He might have left a letter in some
prearranged place—in which case I would stay there till the man it was
meant for turned up. Or he might have met someone, though I didn’t think
that possible. As I scanned the acres of rough moor and then looked at the
sea lapping delicately on the grey sand I had the feeling that a knotty
problem was before me. It was too dark to try to track his steps. That must
be left for the morning, and I prayed that there would be no rain in the
night.
I ate for supper most of the braxy ham and oatcake I had brought from
Macmorran’s cottage. It took some self-denial, for I was ferociously hungry,
to save a little for breakfast next morning. Then I pulled heather and
bracken and made myself a bed in the shelter of a rock which stood on a
knoll above the stream. My bed-chamber was well hidden, but at the same
time, if anything should appear in the early dawn, it gave me a prospect.
With my waterproof I was perfectly warm, and, after smoking two pipes, I
fell asleep.
My night’s rest was broken. First it was a fox which came and barked at
my ear and woke me to a pitch-black night, with scarcely a star showing.
The next time it was nothing but a wandering hill-wind, but as I sat up and
listened I thought I saw a spark of light near the edge of the sea. It was only
for a second, but it disquieted me. I got out and climbed on the top of the
rock, but all was still save for the gentle lap of the tide and the croak of
some night bird among the crags. The third time I was suddenly quite wide
awake, and without any reason, for I had not been dreaming. Now I have
slept hundreds of times alone beside my horse on the veld, and I never
knew any cause for such awakenings but the one, and that was the presence
near me of some human being. A man who is accustomed to solitude gets
this extra sense which announces like an alarm-clock the approach of one of
his kind.
But I could hear nothing. There was a scraping and rustling on the moor,
but that was only the wind and the little wild things of the hills. A fox,
perhaps, or a blue hare. I convinced my reason, but not my senses, and for

long I lay awake with my ears at full cock and every nerve tense. Then I fell
asleep, and woke to the first flush of dawn.
The sun was behind the Coolin and the hills were black as ink, but far out
in the western seas was a broad band of gold. I got up and went down to the
shore. The mouth of the stream was shallow, but as I moved south I came to
a place where two small capes enclosed an inlet. It must have been a fault in
the volcanic rock, for its depth was portentous. I stripped and dived far into
its cold abysses, but I did not reach the bottom. I came to the surface rather
breathless, and struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and looked at
the great rampart of crag. I saw that the place where I had spent the night
was only a little oasis of green at the base of one of the grimmest corries the
imagination could picture. It was as desert as Damaraland. I noticed, too,
how sharply the cliffs rose from the level. There were chimneys and gullies
by which a man might have made his way to the summit, but no one of
them could have been scaled except by a mountaineer.
I was feeling better now, with all the frowsiness washed out of me, and I
dried myself by racing up and down the heather. Then I noticed something.
There were marks of human feet at the top of the deep-water inlet—not
mine, for they were on the other side. The short sea-turf was bruised and
trampled in several places, and there were broken stems of bracken. I
thought that some fisherman had probably landed there to stretch his legs.
But that set me thinking of the Portuguese Jew. After breakfasting on my
last morsels of food—a knuckle of braxy and a bit of oatcake—I set about
tracking him from the place where he had first entered the glen. To get my
bearings, I went back over the road I had come myself, and after a good
deal of trouble I found his spoor. It was pretty clear as far as the stream, for
he had been walking—or rather running—over ground with many patches
of gravel on it. After that it was difficult, and I lost it entirely in the rough
heather below the crags. All that I could make out for certain was that he
had crossed the stream, and that his business, whatever it was, had been
with the few acres of tumbled wilderness below the precipices.
I spent a busy morning there, but found nothing except the skeleton of a
sheep picked clean by the ravens. It was a thankless job, and I got very
cross over it. I had an ugly feeling that I was on a false scent and wasting
my time. I wished to Heaven I had old Peter with me. He could follow
spoor like a Bushman, and would have riddled the Portuguese Jew’s track

out of any jungle on earth. That was a game I had never learned, for in the
old days I had always left it to my natives. I chucked the attempt, and lay
disconsolately on a warm patch of grass and smoked and thought about
Peter. But my chief reflections were that I had breakfasted at five, that it
was now eleven, that I was intolerably hungry, that there was nothing here
to feed a grasshopper, and that I should starve unless I got supplies.
It was a long road to my cache, but there were no two ways of it. My
only hope was to sit tight in the glen, and it might involve a wait of days. To
wait I must have food, and, though it meant relinquishing guard for a matter
of six hours, the risk had to be taken. I set off at a brisk pace with a very
depressed mind.
From the map it seemed that a short cut lay over a pass in the range. I
resolved to take it, and that short cut, like most of its kind, was unblessed
by Heaven. I will not dwell upon the discomforts of the journey. I found
myself slithering among screes, climbing steep chimneys, and travelling
precariously along razor-backs. The shoes were nearly rent from my feet by
the infernal rocks, which were all pitted as if by some geological small-pox.
When at last I crossed the divide, I had a horrible business getting down
from one level to another in a gruesome corrie, where each step was
composed of smooth boiler-plates. But at last I was among the bogs on the
east side, and came to the place beside the road where I had fixed my cache.
The faithful Amos had not failed me. There were the provisions—a
couple of small loaves, a dozen tins, and a bottle of whisky. I made the best
pack I could of them in my waterproof, swung it on my stick, and started
back, thinking that I must be very like the picture of Christian on the title-
page of Pilgrim’s Progress.
I was liker Christian before I reached my destination—Christian after he
had got up the Hill Difficulty. The morning’s walk had been bad, but the
afternoon’s was worse, for I was in a fever to get back, and, having had
enough of the hills, chose the longer route I had followed the previous day.
I was mortally afraid of being seen, for I cut a queer figure, so I avoided
every stretch of road where I had not a clear view ahead. Many weary
detours I made among moss-hags and screes and the stony channels of
burns. But I got there at last, and it was almost with a sense of comfort that
I flung my pack down beside the stream where I had passed the night.

I ate a good meal, lit my pipe, and fell into the equable mood which
follows upon fatigue ended and hunger satisfied. The sun was westering,
and its light fell upon the rock-wall above the place where I had abandoned
my search for the spoor.
As I gazed at it idly I saw a curious thing.
It seemed to be split in two and a shaft of sunlight came through between.
There could be no doubt about it. I saw the end of the shaft on the moor
beneath, while all the rest lay in shadow. I rubbed my eyes, and got out my
glasses. Then I guessed the explanation. There was a rock tower close
against the face of the main precipice and indistinguishable from it to
anyone looking direct at the face. Only when the sun fell on it obliquely
could it be discovered. And between the tower and the cliff there must be a
substantial hollow.
The discovery brought me to my feet, and set me running towards the
end of the shaft of sunlight. I left the heather, scrambled up some yards of
screes, and had a difficult time on some very smooth slabs, where only the
friction of tweed and rough rock gave me a hold. Slowly I worked my way
towards the speck of sunlight, till I found a handhold, and swung myself
into the crack. On one side was the main wall of the hill, on the other a
tower some ninety feet high, and between them a long crevice varying in
width from three to six feet. Beyond it there showed a small bright patch of
sea.
There was more, for at the point where I entered it there was an overhang
which made a fine cavern, low at the entrance but a dozen feet high inside,
and as dry as tinder. Here, thought I, is the perfect hiding-place. Before
going farther I resolved to return for food. It was not very easy descending,
and I slipped the last twenty feet, landing on my head in a soft patch of
screes. At the burnside I filled my flask from the whisky bottle, and put half
a loaf, a tin of sardines, a tin of tongue, and a packet of chocolate in my
waterproof pockets. Laden as I was, it took me some time to get up again,
but I managed it, and stored my belongings in a corner of the cave. Then I
set out to explore the rest of the crack.
It slanted down and then rose again to a small platform. After that it
dropped in easy steps to the moor beyond the tower. If the Portuguese Jew
had come here, that was the way by which he had reached it, for he would
not have had the time to make my ascent. I went very cautiously, for I felt I

was on the eve of a big discovery. The platform was partly hidden from my
end by a bend in the crack, and it was more or less screened by an outlying
bastion of the tower from the other side. Its surface was covered with fine
powdery dust, as were the steps beyond it. In some excitement I knelt down
and examined it.
Beyond doubt there was spoor here. I knew the Portuguese Jew’s
footmarks by this time, and I made them out clearly, especially in one
corner. But there were other footsteps, quite different. The one showed the
rackets of rough country boots, the others were from un-nailed soles. Again
I longed for Peter to make certain, though I was pretty sure of my
conclusions. The man I had followed had come here, and he had not stayed
long. Someone else had been here, probably later, for the un-nailed shoes
overlaid the rackets. The first man might have left a message for the second.
Perhaps the second was that human presence of which I had been dimly
conscious in the night-time.
I carefully removed all traces of my own footmarks, and went back to my
cave. My head was humming with my discovery. I remembered Gresson’s
word to his friend: “Tomorrow night.” As I read it, the Portuguese Jew had
taken a message from Gresson to someone, and that someone had come
from somewhere and picked it up. The message contained an assignation
for this very night. I had found a point of observation, for no one was likely
to come near my cave, which was reached from the moor by such a
toilsome climb. There I should bivouac and see what the darkness brought
forth. I remember reflecting on the amazing luck which had so far attended
me. As I looked from my refuge at the blue haze of twilight creeping over
the waters, I felt my pulses quicken with a wild anticipation.
Then I heard a sound below me, and craned my neck round the edge of
the tower. A man was climbing up the rock by the way I had come.

CHAPTER VII
I Hear of the Wild Birds
I saw an old green felt hat, and below it lean tweed-clad shoulders. Then
I saw a knapsack with a stick slung through it, as the owner wriggled his
way on to a shelf. Presently he turned his face upward to judge the
remaining distance. It was the face of a young man, a face sallow and
angular, but now a little flushed with the day’s sun and the work of
climbing. It was a face that I had first seen at Fosse Manor.
I felt suddenly sick and heartsore. I don’t know why, but I had never
really associated the intellectuals of Biggleswick with a business like this.
None of them but Ivery, and he was different. They had been silly and
priggish, but no more—I would have taken my oath on it. Yet here was one
of them engaged in black treason against his native land. Something began
to beat in my temples when I remembered that Mary and this man had been
friends, that he had held her hand, and called her by her Christian name. My
first impulse was to wait till he got up and then pitch him down among the
boulders and let his German accomplices puzzle over his broken neck.
With difficulty I kept down that tide of fury. I had my duty to do, and to
keep on terms with this man was part of it. I had to convince him that I was
an accomplice, and that might not be easy. I leaned over the edge, and, as he
got to his feet on the ledge above the boiler-plates, I whistled so that he
turned his face to me.
“Hullo, Wake,” I said.
He started, stared for a second, and recognised me. He did not seem over-
pleased to see me.
“Brand!” he cried. “How did you get here?”
He swung himself up beside me, straightened his back and unbuckled his
knapsack. “I thought this was my own private sanctuary, and that nobody
knew it but me. Have you spotted the cave? It’s the best bedroom in Skye.”
His tone was, as usual, rather acid.

That little hammer was beating in my head. I longed to get my hands on
his throat and choke the smug treason in him. But I kept my mind fixed on
one purpose—to persuade him that I shared his secret and was on his side.
His off-hand self-possession seemed only the clever screen of the surprised
conspirator who was hunting for a plan.
We entered the cave, and he flung his pack into a corner. “Last time I was
here,” he said, “I covered the floor with heather. We must get some more if
we would sleep soft.” In the twilight he was a dim figure, but he seemed a
new man from the one I had last seen in the Moot Hall at Biggleswick.
There was a wiry vigour in his body and a purpose in his face. What a fool I
had been to set him down as no more than a conceited flâneur!
He went out to the shelf again and sniffed the fresh evening. There was a
wonderful red sky in the west, but in the crevice the shades had fallen, and
only the bright patches at either end told of the sunset.
“Wake,” I said, “you and I have to understand each other. I’m a friend of
Ivery and I know the meaning of this place. I discovered it by accident, but
I want you to know that I’m heart and soul with you. You may trust me in
tonight’s job as if I were Ivery himself.”
He swung round and looked at me sharply. His eyes were hot again, as I
remembered them at our first meeting.
“What do you mean? How much do you know?”
The hammer was going hard in my forehead, and I had to pull myself
together to answer.
“I know that at the end of this crack a message was left last night, and
that someone came out of the sea and picked it up. That someone is coming
again when darkness falls, and there will be another message.”
He had turned his head away. “You are talking nonsense. No submarine
could land on this coast.”
I could see that he was trying me.
“This morning,” I said, “I swam in the deep-water inlet below us. It is the
most perfect submarine shelter in Britain.”
He still kept his face from me, looking the way he had come. For a
moment he was silent, and then he spoke in the bitter, drawling voice which
had annoyed me at Fosse Manor.

“How do you reconcile this business with your principles, Mr Brand?
You were always a patriot, I remember, though you didn’t see eye to eye
with the Government.”
It was not quite what I expected and I was unready. I stammered in my
reply. “It’s because I am a patriot that I want peace. I think that.... I
mean....”
“Therefore you are willing to help the enemy to win?”
“They have already won. I want that recognised and the end hurried on.”
I was getting my mind clearer and continued fluently.
“The longer the war lasts, the worse this country is ruined. We must make
the people realise the truth, and—”
But he swung round suddenly, his eyes blazing.
“You blackguard!” he cried, “you damnable blackguard!” And he flung
himself on me like a wild-cat.
I had got my answer. He did not believe me, he knew me for a spy, and
he was determined to do me in. We were beyond finesse now, and back at
the old barbaric game. It was his life or mine. The hammer beat furiously in
my head as we closed, and a fierce satisfaction rose in my heart.
He never had a chance, for though he was in good trim and had the light,
wiry figure of the mountaineer, he hadn’t a quarter of my muscular strength.
Besides, he was wrongly placed, for he had the outside station. Had he been
on the inside he might have toppled me over the edge by his sudden assault.
As it was, I grappled him and forced him to the ground, squeezing the
breath out of his body in the process. I must have hurt him considerably, but
he never gave a cry. With a good deal of trouble I lashed his hands behind
his back with the belt of my waterproof, carried him inside the cave and laid
him in the dark end of it. Then I tied his feet with the strap of his own
knapsack. I would have to gag him, but that could wait.
I had still to contrive a plan of action for the night, for I did not know
what part he had been meant to play in it. He might be the messenger
instead of the Portuguese Jew, in which case he would have papers about
his person. If he knew of the cave, others might have the same knowledge,
and I had better shift him before they came. I looked at my wrist-watch, and
the luminous dial showed that the hour was half past nine.

Then I noticed that the bundle in the corner was sobbing. It was a horrid
sound and it worried me. I had a little pocket electric torch and I flashed it
on Wake’s face. If he was crying, it was with dry eyes.
“What are you going to do with me?” he asked.
“That depends,” I said grimly.
“Well, I’m ready. I may be a poor creature, but I’m damned if I’m afraid
of you, or anything like you.” That was a brave thing to say, for it was a lie;
his teeth were chattering.
“I’m ready for a deal,” I said.
“You won’t get it,” was his answer. “Cut my throat if you mean to, but
for God’s sake don’t insult me.... I choke when I think about you. You come
to us and we welcome you, and receive you in our houses, and tell you our
inmost thoughts, and all the time you’re a bloody traitor. You want to sell us
to Germany. You may win now, but by God! your time will come! That is
my last word to you ... you swine!”
The hammer stopped beating in my head. I saw myself suddenly as a
blind, preposterous fool. I strode over to Wake, and he shut his eyes as if he
expected a blow. Instead I unbuckled the straps which held his legs and
arms.
“Wake, old fellow,” I said, “I’m the worst kind of idiot. I’ll eat all the dirt
you want. I’ll give you leave to knock me black and blue, and I won’t lift a
hand. But not now. Now we’ve another job on hand. Man, we’re on the
same side and I never knew it. It’s too bad a case for apologies, but if it’s
any consolation to you I feel the lowest dog in Europe at this moment.”
He was sitting up rubbing his bruised shoulders. “What do you mean?”
he asked hoarsely.
“I mean that you and I are allies. My name’s not Brand. I’m a soldier—a
general, if you want to know. I went to Biggleswick under orders, and I
came chasing up here on the same job. Ivery’s the biggest German agent in
Britain and I’m after him. I’ve struck his communication lines, and this
very night, please God, we’ll get the last clue to the riddle. Do you hear?
We’re in this business together, and you’ve got to lend a hand.”
I told him briefly the story of Gresson, and how I had tracked his man
here. As I talked we ate our supper, and I wish I could have watched Wake’s
face. He asked questions, for he wasn’t convinced in a hurry. I think it was

my mention of Mary Lamington that did the trick. I don’t know why, but
that seemed to satisfy him. But he wasn’t going to give himself away.
“You may count on me,” he said, “for this is black, blackguardly treason.
But you know my politics, and I don’t change them for this. I’m more
against your accursed war than ever, now that I know what war involves.”
“Right-o,” I said, “I’m a pacifist myself. You won’t get any heroics about
war from me. I’m all for peace, but we’ve got to down those devils first.”
It wasn’t safe for either of us to stick in that cave, so we cleared away the
marks of our occupation, and hid our packs in a deep crevice on the rock.
Wake announced his intention of climbing the tower, while there was still a
faint afterglow of light. “It’s broad on the top, and I can keep a watch out to
sea if any light shows. I’ve been up it before. I found the way two years
ago. No, I won’t fall asleep and tumble off. I slept most of the afternoon on
the top of Sgurr Vhiconnich, and I’m as wakeful as a bat now.”
I watched him shin up the face of the tower, and admired greatly the
speed and neatness with which he climbed. Then I followed the crevice
southward to the hollow just below the platform where I had found the
footmarks. There was a big boulder there, which partly shut off the view of
it from the direction of our cave. The place was perfect for my purpose, for
between the boulder and the wall of the tower was a narrow gap, through
which I could hear all that passed on the platform. I found a stance where I
could rest in comfort and keep an eye through the crack on what happened
beyond.
There was still a faint light on the platform, but soon that disappeared
and black darkness settled down on the hills. It was the dark of the moon,
and, as had happened the night before, a thin wrack blew over the sky,
hiding the stars. The place was very still, though now and then would come
the cry of a bird from the crags that beetled above me, and from the shore
the pipe of a tern or oyster-catcher. An owl hooted from somewhere up on
the tower. That I reckoned was Wake, so I hooted back and was answered. I
unbuckled my wrist-watch and pocketed it, lest its luminous dial should
betray me; and I noticed that the hour was close on eleven. I had already
removed my shoes, and my jacket was buttoned at the collar so as to show
no shirt. I did not think that the coming visitor would trouble to explore the
crevice beyond the platform, but I wanted to be prepared for emergencies.

Then followed an hour of waiting. I felt wonderfully cheered and
exhilarated, for Wake had restored my confidence in human nature. In that
eerie place we were wrapped round with mystery like a fog. Some unknown
figure was coming out of the sea, the emissary of that Power we had been at
grips with for three years. It was as if the war had just made contact with
our own shores, and never, not even when I was alone in the South German
forest, had I felt so much the sport of a whimsical fate. I only wished Peter
could have been with me. And so my thoughts fled to Peter in his prison
camp, and I longed for another sight of my old friend as a girl longs for her
lover.
Then I heard the hoot of an owl, and presently the sound of careful steps
fell on my ear. I could see nothing, but I guessed it was the Portuguese Jew,
for I could hear the grinding of heavily nailed boots on the gritty rock.
The figure was very quiet. It appeared to be sitting down, and then it rose
and fumbled with the wall of the tower just beyond the boulder behind
which I sheltered. It seemed to move a stone and to replace it. After that
came silence, and then once more the hoot of an owl. There were steps on
the rock staircase, the steps of a man who did not know the road well and
stumbled a little. Also they were the steps of one without nails in his boots.
They reached the platform and someone spoke. It was the Portuguese
Jew and he spoke in good German.
“Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,” he said.
The answer came from a clear, authoritative voice.
“Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch.”
Clearly some kind of password, for sane men don’t talk about little birds
in that kind of situation. It sounded to me like indifferent poetry.
Then followed a conversation in low tones, of which I only caught odd
phrases. I heard two names—Chelius and what sounded like a Dutch word,
Bommaerts. Then to my joy I caught Elfenbein, and when uttered it seemed
to be followed by a laugh. I heard too a phrase several times repeated,
which seemed to me to be pure gibberish—Die Stubenvögel verstehn. It
was spoken by the man from the sea. And then the word Wildvögel. The pair
seemed demented about birds.
For a second an electric torch was flashed in the shelter of the rock, and I
could see a tanned, bearded face looking at some papers. The light

disappeared, and again the Portuguese Jew was fumbling with the stones at
the base of the tower. To my joy he was close to my crack, and I could hear
every word. “You cannot come here very often,” he said, “and it may be
hard to arrange a meeting. See, therefore, the place I have made to put the
Vögelfutter. When I get a chance I will come here, and you will come also
when you are able. Often there will be nothing, but sometimes there will be
much.”
My luck was clearly in, and my exultation made me careless. A stone, on
which a foot rested, slipped and though I checked myself at once, the
confounded thing rolled down into the hollow, making a great clatter. I
plastered myself in the embrasure of the rock and waited with a beating
heart. The place was pitch dark, but they had an electric torch, and if they
once flashed it on me I was gone. I heard them leave the platform and climb
down into the hollow. There they stood listening, while I held my breath.
Then I heard “Nix, mein freund,” and the two went back, the naval officer’s
boots slipping on the gravel.
They did not leave the platform together. The man from the sea bade a
short farewell to the Portuguese Jew, listening, I thought, impatiently to his
final message as if eager to be gone. It was a good half-hour before the
latter took himself off, and I heard the sound of his nailed boots die away as
he reached the heather of the moor.
I waited a little longer, and then crawled back to the cave. The owl
hooted, and presently Wake descended lightly beside me; he must have
known every foothold and handhold by heart to do the job in that inky
blackness. I remember that he asked no question of me, but he used
language rare on the lips of conscientious objectors about the men who had
lately been in the crevice. We, who four hours earlier had been at death
grips, now curled up on the hard floor like two tired dogs, and fell sound
asleep.

I woke to find Wake in a thundering bad temper. The thing he
remembered most about the night before was our scrap and the gross way I
had insulted him. I didn’t blame him, for if any man had taken me for a
German spy I would have been out for his blood, and it was no good
explaining that he had given me grounds for suspicion. He was as touchy
about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age. I was feeling

rather extra buckish myself and that didn’t improve matters. His face was
like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to bathe, so I held my tongue.
He was chewing the cud of his wounded pride.
But the salt water cleared out the dregs of his distemper. You couldn’t be
peevish swimming in that jolly, shining sea. We raced each other away
beyond the inlet to the outer water, which a brisk morning breeze was
curling. Then back to a promontory of heather, where the first beams of the
sun coming over the Coolin dried our skins. He sat hunched up staring at
the mountains while I prospected the rocks at the edge. Out in the Minch
two destroyers were hurrying southward, and I wondered where in that
waste of blue was the craft which had come here in the night watches.
I found the spoor of the man from the sea quite fresh on a patch of gravel
above the tide-mark.
“There’s our friend of the night,” I said.
“I believe the whole thing was a whimsy,” said Wake, his eyes on the
chimneys of Sgurr Dearg. “They were only two natives—poachers, perhaps,
or tinkers.”
“They don’t speak German in these parts.”
“It was Gaelic probably.”
“What do you make of this, then?” and I quoted the stuff about birds with
which they had greeted each other.
Wake looked interested. “That’s Uber allen Gipfeln. Have you ever read
Goethe?”
“Never a word. And what do you make of that?” I pointed to a flat rock
below tide-mark covered with a tangle of seaweed. It was of a softer stone
than the hard stuff in the hills and somebody had scraped off half the
seaweed and a slice of the side. “That wasn’t done yesterday morning, for I
had my bath here.”
Wake got up and examined the place. He nosed about in the crannies of
the rocks lining the inlet, and got into the water again to explore better.
When he joined me he was smiling. “I apologise for my scepticism,” he
said. “There’s been some petrol-driven craft here in the night. I can smell it,
for I’ve a nose like a retriever. I daresay you’re on the right track. Anyhow,
though you seem to know a bit about German, you could scarcely invent
immortal poetry.”

We took our belongings to a green crook of the burn, and made a very
good breakfast. Wake had nothing in his pack but plasmon biscuits and
raisins, for that, he said, was his mountaineering provender, but he was not
averse to sampling my tinned stuff. He was a different-sized fellow out in
the hills from the anaemic intellectual of Biggleswick. He had forgotten his
beastly self-consciousness, and spoke of his hobby with a serious passion. It
seemed he had scrambled about everywhere in Europe, from the Caucasus
to the Pyrenees. I could see he must be good at the job, for he didn’t brag of
his exploits. It was the mountains that he loved, not wriggling his body up
hard places. The Coolin, he said, were his favourites, for on some of them
you could get two thousand feet of good rock. We got our glasses on the
face of Sgurr Alasdair, and he sketched out for me various ways of getting
to its grim summit. The Coolin and the Dolomites for him, for he had grown
tired of the Chamonix aiguilles. I remember he described with tremendous
gusto the joys of early dawn in Tyrol, when you ascended through acres of
flowery meadows to a tooth of clean white limestone against a clean blue
sky. He spoke, too, of the little wild hills in the Bavarian
Wettersteingebirge, and of a guide he had picked up there and trained to the
job.
“They called him Sebastian Buchwieser. He was the jolliest boy you ever
saw, and as clever on crags as a chamois. He is probably dead by now, dead
in a filthy jaeger battalion. That’s you and your accursed war.”
“Well, we’ve got to get busy and end it in the right way,” I said. “And
you’ve got to help, my lad.”
He was a good draughtsman, and with his assistance I drew a rough map
of the crevice where we had roosted for the night, giving its bearings
carefully in relation to the burn and the sea. Then I wrote down all the
details about Gresson and the Portuguese Jew, and described the latter in
minute detail. I described, too, most precisely the cache where it had been
arranged that the messages should be placed. That finished my stock of
paper, and I left the record of the oddments overheard of the conversation
for a later time. I put the thing in an old leather cigarette-case I possessed,
and handed it to Wake.
“You’ve got to go straight off to the Kyle and not waste any time on the
way. Nobody suspects you, so you can travel any road you please. When
you get there you ask for Mr Andrew Amos, who has some Government job

in the neighbourhood. Give him that paper from me. He’ll know what to do
with it all right. Tell him I’ll get somehow to the Kyle before midday the
day after tomorrow. I must cover my tracks a bit, so I can’t come with you,
and I want that thing in his hands just as fast as your legs will take you. If
anyone tries to steal it from you, for God’s sake eat it. You can see for
yourself that it’s devilish important.”
“I shall be back in England in three days,” he said. “Any message for
your other friends?”
“Forget all about me. You never saw me here. I’m still Brand, the
amiable colonial studying social movements. If you meet Ivery, say you
heard of me on the Clyde, deep in sedition. But if you see Miss Lamington
you can tell her I’m past the Hill Difficulty. I’m coming back as soon as
God will let me, and I’m going to drop right into the Biggleswick push.
Only this time I’ll be a little more advanced in my views.... You needn’t get
cross. I’m not saying anything against your principles. The main point is
that we both hate dirty treason.”
He put the case in his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll go round Garsbheinn,” he
said, “and over by Camasunary. I’ll be at the Kyle long before evening. I
meant anyhow to sleep at Broadford tonight.... Goodbye, Brand, for I’ve
forgotten your proper name. You’re not a bad fellow, but you’ve landed me
in melodrama for the first time in my sober existence. I have a grudge
against you for mixing up the Coolin with a shilling shocker. You’ve
spoiled their sanctity.”
“You’ve the wrong notion of romance,” I said. “Why, man, last night for
an hour you were in the front line—the place where the enemy forces touch
our own. You were over the top—you were in No-man’s-land.”
He laughed. “That is one way to look at it’; and then he stalked off and I
watched his lean figure till it was round the turn of the hill.
All that morning I smoked peacefully by the burn, and let my thoughts
wander over the whole business. I had got precisely what Blenkiron wanted,
a post office for the enemy. It would need careful handling, but I could see
the juiciest lies passing that way to the Grosses Hauptquartier. Yet I had an
ugly feeling at the back of my head that it had been all too easy, and that
Ivery was not the man to be duped in this way for long. That set me
thinking about the queer talk on the crevice. The poetry stuff I dismissed as
the ordinary password, probably changed every time. But who were Chelius

and Bommaerts, and what in the name of goodness were the Wild Birds and
the Cage Birds? Twice in the past three years I had had two such riddles to
solve—Scudder’s scribble in his pocket-book, and Harry Bullivant’s three
words. I remembered how it had only been by constant chewing at them
that I had got a sort of meaning, and I wondered if fate would some day
expound this puzzle also.
Meantime I had to get back to London as inconspicuously as I had come.
It might take some doing, for the police who had been active in Morvern
might be still on the track, and it was essential that I should keep out of
trouble and give no hint to Gresson and his friends that I had been so far
north. However, that was for Amos to advise me on, and about noon I
picked up my waterproof with its bursting pockets and set off on a long
detour up the coast. All that blessed day I scarcely met a soul. I passed a
distillery which seemed to have quit business, and in the evening came to a
little town on the sea where I had a bed and supper in a superior kind of
public-house.
Next day I struck southward along the coast, and had two experiences of
interest. I had a good look at Ranna, and observed that the Tobermory was
no longer there. Gresson had only waited to get his job finished; he could
probably twist the old captain any way he wanted. The second was that at
the door of a village smithy I saw the back of the Portuguese Jew. He was
talking Gaelic this time—good Gaelic it sounded, and in that knot of idlers
he would have passed for the ordinariest kind of gillie.
He did not see me, and I had no desire to give him the chance, for I had
an odd feeling that the day might come when it would be good for us to
meet as strangers.
That night I put up boldly in the inn at Broadford, where they fed me
nobly on fresh sea-trout and I first tasted an excellent liqueur made of
honey and whisky. Next morning I was early afoot, and well before midday
was in sight of the narrows of the Kyle, and the two little stone clachans
which face each other across the strip of sea.
About two miles from the place at a turn of the road I came upon a
farmer’s gig, drawn up by the wayside, with the horse cropping the
moorland grass. A man sat on the bank smoking, with his left arm hooked in
the reins. He was an oldish man, with a short, square figure, and a woollen
comforter enveloped his throat.

CHAPTER VIII
The Adventures of a Bagman
“Ye’re punctual to time, Mr Brand,” said the voice of Amos. “But losh!
man, what have ye done to your breeks! And your buits? Ye’re no just very
respectable in your appearance.”
I wasn’t. The confounded rocks of the Coolin had left their mark on my
shoes, which moreover had not been cleaned for a week, and the same hills
had rent my jacket at the shoulders, and torn my trousers above the right
knee, and stained every part of my apparel with peat and lichen.
I cast myself on the bank beside Amos and lit my pipe. “Did you get my
message?” I asked.
“Ay. It’s gone on by a sure hand to the destination we ken of. Ye’ve
managed well, Mr Brand, but I wish ye were back in London.” He sucked at
his pipe, and the shaggy brows were pulled so low as to hide the wary eyes.
Then he proceeded to think aloud.
“Ye canna go back by Mallaig. I don’t just understand why, but they’re
lookin’ for you down that line. It’s a vexatious business when your friends,
meanin’ the polis, are doing their best to upset your plans and you no able to
enlighten them. I could send word to the Chief Constable and get ye
through to London without a stop like a load of fish from Aiberdeen, but
that would be spoilin’ the fine character ye’ve been at such pains to
construct. Na, na! Ye maun take the risk and travel by Muirtown without
ony creedentials.”
“It can’t be a very big risk,” I interpolated.
“I’m no so sure. Gresson’s left the Tobermory. He went by here
yesterday, on the Mallaig boat, and there was a wee blackavised man with
him that got out at the Kyle. He’s there still, stoppin’ at the hotel. They ca’
him Linklater and he travels in whisky. I don’t like the looks of him.”
“But Gresson does not suspect me?”

“Maybe no. But ye wouldna like him to see ye hereaways. Yon gentry
don’t leave muckle to chance. Be very certain that every man in Gresson’s
lot kens all about ye, and has your description down to the mole on your
chin.”
“Then they’ve got it wrong,” I replied.
“I was speakin’ feeguratively,” said Amos. “I was considerin’ your case
the feck of yesterday, and I’ve brought the best I could do for ye in the gig.
I wish ye were more respectable clad, but a good topcoat will hide
defeecencies.”
From behind the gig’s seat he pulled out an ancient Gladstone bag and
revealed its contents. There was a bowler of a vulgar and antiquated style;
there was a ready-made overcoat of some dark cloth, of the kind that a clerk
wears on the road to the office; there was a pair of detachable celluloid
cuffs, and there was a linen collar and dickie. Also there was a small
handcase, such as bagmen carry on their rounds.
“That’s your luggage,” said Amos with pride. “That wee bag’s full of
samples. Ye’ll mind I took the precaution of measurin’ ye in Glasgow, so
the things’ll fit. Ye’ve got a new name, Mr Brand, and I’ve taken a room for
ye in the hotel on the strength of it. Ye’re Archibald McCaskie, and ye’re
travellin’ for the firm o’ Todd, Sons & Brothers, of Edinburgh. Ye ken the
folk? They publish wee releegious books, that ye’ve bin trying to sell for
Sabbath-school prizes to the Free Kirk ministers in Skye.”
The notion amused Amos, and he relapsed into the sombre chuckle which
with him did duty for a laugh.
I put my hat and waterproof in the bag and donned the bowler and the
top-coat. They fitted fairly well. Likewise the cuffs and collar, though here I
struck a snag, for I had lost my scarf somewhere in the Coolin, and Amos,
pelican-like, had to surrender the rusty black tie which adorned his own
person. It was a queer rig, and I felt like nothing on earth in it, but Amos
was satisfied.
“Mr McCaskie, sir,” he said, “ye’re the very model of a publisher’s
traveller. Ye’d better learn a few biographical details, which ye’ve maybe
forgotten. Ye’re an Edinburgh man, but ye were some years in London,
which explains the way ye speak. Ye bide at 6, Russell Street, off the
Meadows, and ye’re an elder in the Nethergate U.F. Kirk. Have ye ony

special taste ye could lead the crack on to, if ye’re engaged in
conversation?”
I suggested the English classics.
“And very suitable. Ye can try poalitics, too. Ye’d better be a Free-trader
but convertit by Lloyd George. That’s a common case, and ye’ll need to be
by-ordinar common.... If I was you, I would daunder about here for a bit,
and no arrive at your hotel till after dark. Then ye can have your supper and
gang to bed. The Muirtown train leaves at half-seven in the morning.... Na,
ye can’t come with me. It wouldna do for us to be seen thegither. If I meet
ye in the street I’ll never let on I know ye.”
Amos climbed into the gig and jolted off home. I went down to the shore
and sat among the rocks, finishing about tea-time the remains of my
provisions. In the mellow gloaming I strolled into the clachan and got a
boat to put me over to the inn. It proved to be a comfortable place, with a
motherly old landlady who showed me to my room and promised ham and
eggs and cold salmon for supper. After a good wash, which I needed, and an
honest attempt to make my clothes presentable, I descended to the meal in a
coffee-room lit by a single dim paraffin lamp.
The food was excellent, and, as I ate, my spirits rose. In two days I
should be back in London beside Blenkiron and somewhere within a day’s
journey of Mary. I could picture no scene now without thinking how Mary
fitted into it. For her sake I held Biggleswick delectable, because I had seen
her there. I wasn’t sure if this was love, but it was something I had never
dreamed of before, something which I now hugged the thought of. It made
the whole earth rosy and golden for me, and life so well worth living that I
felt like a miser towards the days to come.
I had about finished supper, when I was joined by another guest. Seen in
the light of that infamous lamp, he seemed a small, alert fellow, with a
bushy, black moustache, and black hair parted in the middle. He had fed
already and appeared to be hungering for human society.
In three minutes he had told me that he had come down from Portree and
was on his way to Leith. A minute later he had whipped out a card on which
I read “J. J. Linklater”, and in the corner the name of Hatherwick Bros. His
accent betrayed that he hailed from the west.
“I’ve been up among the distilleries,” he informed me. “It’s a poor
business distillin’ in these times, wi’ the teetotallers yowlin’ about the

nation’s shame and the way to lose the war. I’m a temperate man mysel’,
but I would think shame to spile decent folks’ business. If the Government
want to stop the drink, let them buy us out. They’ve permitted us to invest
good money in the trade, and they must see that we get it back. The other
way will wreck public credit. That’s what I say. Supposin’ some Labour
Government takes the notion that soap’s bad for the nation? Are they goin’
to shut up Port Sunlight? Or good clothes? Or lum hats? There’s no end to
their daftness if they once start on that track. A lawfu’ trade’s a lawfu’ trade,
says I, and it’s contrary to public policy to pit it at the mercy of wheen
cranks. D’ye no agree, sir? By the way, I havena got your name?”
I told him and he rambled on.
“We’re blenders and do a very high-class business, mostly foreign. The
war’s hit us wi’ our export trade, of course, but we’re no as bad as some.
What’s your line, Mr McCaskie?”
When he heard he was keenly interested.
“D’ye say so? Ye’re from Todd’s! Man, I was in the book business
mysel’, till I changed it for something a wee bit more lucrative. I was on the
road for three years for Andrew Matheson. Ye ken the name—Paternoster
Row—I’ve forgotten the number. I had a kind of ambition to start a book-
sellin’ shop of my own and to make Linklater o’ Paisley a big name in the
trade. But I got the offer from Hatherwick’s, and I was wantin’ to get
married, so filthy lucre won the day. And I’m no sorry I changed. If it hadna
been for this war, I would have been makin’ four figures with my salary and
commissions.... My pipe’s out. Have you one of those rare and valuable
curiosities called a spunk, Mr McCaskie?”
He was a merry little grig of a man, and he babbled on, till I announced
my intention of going to bed. If this was Amos’s bagman, who had been
seen in company with Gresson, I understood how idle may be the
suspicions of a clever man. He had probably foregathered with Gresson on
the Skye boat, and wearied that saturnine soul with his cackle.
I was up betimes, paid my bill, ate a breakfast of porridge and fresh
haddock, and walked the few hundred yards to the station. It was a warm,
thick morning, with no sun visible, and the Skye hills misty to their base.
The three coaches on the little train were nearly filled when I had bought
my ticket, and I selected a third-class smoking carriage which held four
soldiers returning from leave.

The train was already moving when a late passenger hurried along the
platform and clambered in beside me. A cheery “Mornin’, Mr McCaskie,”
revealed my fellow guest at the hotel.
We jolted away from the coast up a broad glen and then on to a wide
expanse of bog with big hills showing towards the north. It was a drowsy
day, and in that atmosphere of shag and crowded humanity I felt my eyes
closing. I had a short nap, and woke to find that Mr Linklater had changed
his seat and was now beside me.
“We’ll no get a Scotsman till Muirtown,” he said. “Have ye nothing in
your samples ye could give me to read?”
I had forgotten about the samples. I opened the case and found the oddest
collection of little books, all in gay bindings. Some were religious, with
names like Dew of Hermon and Cool Siloam; some were innocent
narratives, How Tommy saved his Pennies, A Missionary Child in China,
and Little Susie and her Uncle. There was a Life of David Livingstone, a
child’s book on sea-shells, and a richly gilt edition of the poems of one
James Montgomery. I offered the selection to Mr Linklater, who grinned
and chose the Missionary Child. “It’s not the reading I’m accustomed to,”
he said. “I like strong meat—Hall Caine and Jack London. By the way, how
d’ye square this business of yours wi’ the booksellers? When I was in
Matheson’s there would have been trouble if we had dealt direct wi’ the
public like you.”
The confounded fellow started to talk about the details of the book trade,
of which I knew nothing. He wanted to know on what terms we sold
“juveniles”, and what discount we gave the big wholesalers, and what class
of book we put out “on sale”. I didn’t understand a word of his jargon, and I
must have given myself away badly, for he asked me questions about firms
of which I had never heard, and I had to make some kind of answer. I told
myself that the donkey was harmless, and that his opinion of me mattered
nothing, but as soon as I decently could I pretended to be absorbed in the
Pilgrim’s Progress, a gaudy copy of which was among the samples. It
opened at the episode of Christian and Hopeful in the Enchanted Ground,
and in that stuffy carriage I presently followed the example of Heedless and
Too-Bold and fell sound asleep. I was awakened by the train rumbling over
the points of a little moorland junction. Sunk in a pleasing lethargy, I sat
with my eyes closed, and then covertly took a glance at my companion. He

had abandoned the Missionary Child and was reading a little dun-coloured
book, and marking passages with a pencil. His face was absorbed, and it
was a new face, not the vacant, good-humoured look of the garrulous
bagman, but something shrewd, purposeful, and formidable. I remained
hunched up as if still sleeping, and tried to see what the book was. But my
eyes, good as they are, could make out nothing of the text or title, except
that I had a very strong impression that that book was not written in the
English tongue.
I woke abruptly, and leaned over to him. Quick as lightning he slid his
pencil up his sleeve and turned on me with a fatuous smile.
“What d’ye make o’ this, Mr McCaskie? It’s a wee book I picked up at a
roup along with fifty others. I paid five shillings for the lot. It looks like
Gairman, but in my young days they didna teach us foreign languages.”
I took the thing and turned over the pages, trying to keep any sign of
intelligence out of my face. It was German right enough, a little manual of
hydrography with no publisher’s name on it. It had the look of the kind of
textbook a Government department might issue to its officials.
I handed it back. “It’s either German or Dutch. I’m not much of a scholar,
barring a little French and the Latin I got at Heriot’s Hospital.... This is an
awful slow train, Mr Linklater.”
The soldiers were playing nap, and the bagman proposed a game of
cards. I remembered in time that I was an elder in the Nethergate U.F.
Church and refused with some asperity. After that I shut my eyes again, for
I wanted to think out this new phenomenon.
The fellow knew German—that was clear. He had also been seen in
Gresson’s company. I didn’t believe he suspected me, though I suspected
him profoundly. It was my business to keep strictly to my part and give him
no cause to doubt me. He was clearly practising his own part on me, and I
must appear to take him literally on his professions. So, presently, I woke
up and engaged him in a disputatious conversation about the morality of
selling strong liquors. He responded readily, and put the case for alcohol
with much point and vehemence. The discussion interested the soldiers, and
one of them, to show he was on Linklater’s side, produced a flask and
offered him a drink. I concluded by observing morosely that the bagman
had been a better man when he peddled books for Alexander Matheson, and
that put the closure on the business.

That train was a record. It stopped at every station, and in the afternoon it
simply got tired and sat down in the middle of a moor and reflected for an
hour. I stuck my head out of the window now and then, and smelt the rooty
fragrance of bogs, and when we halted on a bridge I watched the trout in the
pools of the brown river. Then I slept and smoked alternately, and began to
get furiously hungry.
Once I woke to hear the soldiers discussing the war. There was an
argument between a lance-corporal in the Camerons and a sapper private
about some trivial incident on the Somme.
“I tell ye I was there,” said the Cameron. “We were relievin’ the Black
Watch, and Fritz was shelling the road, and we didna get up to the line till
one o’clock in the mornin’. Frae Frickout Circus to the south end o’ the
High Wood is every bit o’ five mile.”
“Not abune three,” said the sapper dogmatically.
“Man, I’ve trampit it.”
“Same here. I took up wire every nicht for a week.”
The Cameron looked moodily round the company. “I wish there was
anither man here that kent the place. He wad bear me out. These boys are
no good, for they didna join till later. I tell ye it’s five mile.”
“Three,” said the sapper.
Tempers were rising, for each of the disputants felt his veracity assailed.
It was too hot for a quarrel and I was so drowsy that I was heedless.
“Shut up, you fools,” I said. “The distance is six kilometres, so you’re
both wrong.”
My tone was so familiar to the men that it stopped the wrangle, but it was
not the tone of a publisher’s traveller. Mr Linklater cocked his ears.
“What’s a kilometre, Mr McCaskie?” he asked blandly.
“Multiply by five and divide by eight and you get the miles.”
I was on my guard now, and told a long story of a nephew who had been
killed on the Somme, and how I had corresponded with the War Office
about his case. “Besides,” I said, “I’m a great student o’ the newspapers,
and I’ve read all the books about the war. It’s a difficult time this for us all,
and if you can take a serious interest in the campaign it helps a lot. I mean
working out the places on the map and reading Haig’s dispatches.”

“Just so,” he said dryly, and I thought he watched me with an odd look in
his eyes.
A fresh idea possessed me. This man had been in Gresson’s company, he
knew German, he was obviously something very different from what he
professed to be. What if he were in the employ of our own Secret Service? I
had appeared out of the void at the Kyle, and I had made but a poor
appearance as a bagman, showing no knowledge of my own trade. I was in
an area interdicted to the ordinary public; and he had good reason to keep
an eye on my movements. He was going south, and so was I; clearly we
must somehow part company.
“We change at Muirtown, don’t we?” I asked. “When does the train for
the south leave?”
He consulted a pocket timetable. “Ten-thirty-three. There’s generally four
hours to wait, for we’re due in at six-fifteen. But this auld hearse will be
lucky if it’s in by nine.”
His forecast was correct. We rumbled out of the hills into haughlands and
caught a glimpse of the North Sea. Then we were hung up while a long
goods train passed down the line. It was almost dark when at last we
crawled into Muirtown station and disgorged our load of hot and weary
soldiery.
I bade an ostentatious farewell to Linklater. “Very pleased to have met
you. I’ll see you later on the Edinburgh train. I’m for a walk to stretch my
legs, and a bite o’ supper.” I was very determined that the ten-thirty for the
south should leave without me.
My notion was to get a bed and a meal in some secluded inn, and walk
out next morning and pick up a slow train down the line. Linklater had
disappeared towards the guard’s van to find his luggage, and the soldiers
were sitting on their packs with that air of being utterly and finally lost and
neglected which characterises the British fighting-man on a journey. I gave
up my ticket and, since I had come off a northern train, walked unhindered
into the town.
It was market night, and the streets were crowded. Blue-jackets from the
Fleet, country-folk in to shop, and every kind of military detail thronged the
pavements. Fish-hawkers were crying their wares, and there was a
tatterdemalion piper making the night hideous at a corner. I took a tortuous
route and finally fixed on a modest-looking public-house in a back street.

When I inquired for a room I could find no one in authority, but a slatternly
girl informed me that there was one vacant bed, and that I could have ham
and eggs in the bar. So, after hitting my head violently against a cross-
beam, I stumbled down some steps and entered a frowsty little place
smelling of spilt beer and stale tobacco.
The promised ham and eggs proved impossible—there were no eggs to
be had in Muirtown that night—but I was given cold mutton and a pint of
indifferent ale. There was nobody in the place but two farmers drinking hot
whisky and water and discussing with sombre interest the rise in the price
of feeding-stuffs. I ate my supper, and was just preparing to find the
whereabouts of my bedroom when through the street door there entered a
dozen soldiers.
In a second the quiet place became a babel. The men were strictly sober;
but they were in that temper of friendliness which demands a libation of
some kind. One was prepared to stand treat; he was the leader of the lot, and
it was to celebrate the end of his leave that he was entertaining his pals.
From where I sat I could not see him, but his voice was dominant. “What’s
your fancy, jock? Beer for you, Andra? A pint and a dram for me. This is
better than vongblong and vongrooge, Davie. Man, when I’m sittin’ in those
estamints, as they ca’ them, I often long for a guid Scots public.”
The voice was familiar. I shifted my seat to get a view of the speaker, and
then I hastily drew back. It was the Scots Fusilier I had clipped on the jaw
in defending Gresson after the Glasgow meeting.
But by a strange fatality he had caught sight of me.
“Whae’s that i’ the corner?” he cried, leaving the bar to stare at me. Now
it is a queer thing, but if you have once fought with a man, though only for
a few seconds, you remember his face, and the scrap in Glasgow had been
under a lamp. The jock recognised me well enough.
“By God!” he cried, “if this is no a bit o’ luck! Boys, here’s the man I
feucht wi’ in Glesca. Ye mind I telled ye about it. He laid me oot, and it’s
my turn to do the same wi’ him. I had a notion I was gaun to mak’ a nicht
o’t. There’s naebody can hit Geordie Hamilton without Geordie gettin’ his
ain back some day. Get up, man, for I’m gaun to knock the heid off ye.”
I duly got up, and with the best composure I could muster looked him in
the face.

“You’re mistaken, my friend. I never clapped eyes on you before, and I
never was in Glasgow in my life.”
“That’s a damned lee,” said the Fusilier. “Ye’re the man, and if ye’re no,
ye’re like enough him to need a hidin’!”
“Confound your nonsense!” I said. “I’ve no quarrel with you, and I’ve
better things to do than be scrapping with a stranger in a public-house.”
“Have ye sae? Well, I’ll learn ye better. I’m gaun to hit ye, and then ye’ll
hae to fecht whether ye want it or no. Tam, haud my jacket, and see that my
drink’s no skailed.”
This was an infernal nuisance, for a row here would bring in the police,
and my dubious position would be laid bare. I thought of putting up a fight,
for I was certain I could lay out the jock a second time, but the worst of that
was that I did not know where the thing would end. I might have to fight the
lot of them, and that meant a noble public shindy. I did my best to speak my
opponent fair. I said we were all good friends and offered to stand drinks for
the party. But the Fusilier’s blood was up and he was spoiling for a row,
ably abetted by his comrades. He had his tunic off now and was stamping in
front of me with doubled fists.
I did the best thing I could think of in the circumstances. My seat was
close to the steps which led to the other part of the inn. I grabbed my hat,
darted up them, and before they realised what I was doing had bolted the
door behind me. I could hear pandemonium break loose in the bar.
I slipped down a dark passage to another which ran at right angles to it,
and which seemed to connect the street door of the inn itself with the back
premises. I could hear voices in the little hall, and that stopped me short.
One of them was Linklater’s, but he was not talking as Linklater had
talked. He was speaking educated English. I heard another with a Scots
accent, which I took to be the landlord’s, and a third which sounded like
some superior sort of constable’s, very prompt and official. I heard one
phrase, too, from Linklater—“He calls himself McCaskie.” Then they
stopped, for the turmoil from the bar had reached the front door. The
Fusilier and his friends were looking for me by the other entrance.
The attention of the men in the hall was distracted, and that gave me a
chance. There was nothing for it but the back door. I slipped through it into
a courtyard and almost tumbled over a tub of water. I planted the thing so

that anyone coming that way would fall over it. A door led me into an
empty stable, and from that into a lane. It was all absurdly easy, but as I
started down the lane I heard a mighty row and the sound of angry voices.
Someone had gone into the tub and I hoped it was Linklater. I had taken a
liking to the Fusilier jock.
There was the beginning of a moon somewhere, but that lane was very
dark. I ran to the left, for on the right it looked like a cul-de-sac. This
brought me into a quiet road of two-storied cottages which showed at one
end the lights of a street. So I took the other way, for I wasn’t going to have
the whole population of Muirtown on the hue-and-cry after me. I came into
a country lane, and I also came into the van of the pursuit, which must have
taken a short cut. They shouted when they saw me, but I had a small start,
and legged it down that road in the belief that I was making for open
country.
That was where I was wrong. The road took me round to the other side of
the town, and just when I was beginning to think I had a fair chance I saw
before me the lights of a signal-box and a little to the left of it the lights of
the station. In half an hour’s time the Edinburgh train would be leaving, but
I had made that impossible. Behind me I could hear the pursuers, giving
tongue like hound puppies, for they had attracted some pretty drunken
gentlemen to their party. I was badly puzzled where to turn, when I noticed
outside the station a long line of blurred lights, which could only mean a
train with the carriage blinds down. It had an engine attached and seemed to
be waiting for the addition of a couple of trucks to start. It was a wild
chance, but the only one I saw. I scrambled across a piece of waste ground,
climbed an embankment and found myself on the metals. I ducked under
the couplings and got on the far side of the train, away from the enemy.
Then simultaneously two things happened. I heard the yells of my
pursuers a dozen yards off, and the train jolted into motion. I jumped on the
footboard, and looked into an open window. The compartment was packed
with troops, six a side and two men sitting on the floor, and the door was
locked. I dived headforemost through the window and landed on the neck of
a weary warrior who had just dropped off to sleep.
While I was falling I made up my mind on my conduct. I must be
intoxicated, for I knew the infinite sympathy of the British soldier towards

those thus overtaken. They pulled me to my feet, and the man I had
descended on rubbed his skull and blasphemously demanded explanations.
“Gen’lmen,” I hiccoughed, “I “pologise. I was late for this bl-blighted
train and I mus’ be in E’inburgh “morrow or I’ll get the sack. I “pologise. If
I’ve hurt my friend’s head, I’ll kiss it and make it well.”
At this there was a great laugh. “Ye’d better accept, Pete,” said one. “It’s
the first time anybody ever offered to kiss your ugly heid.”
A man asked me who I was, and I appeared to be searching for a card-
case.
“Losht,” I groaned. “Losht, and so’s my wee bag and I’ve bashed my po’
hat. I’m an awful sight, gen’lmen—an awful warning to be in time for
trains. I’m John Johnstone, managing clerk to Messrs Watters, Brown &
Elph’stone, 923 Charl’tte Street, E’inburgh. I’ve been up north seein’ my
mamma.”
“Ye should be in France,” said one man.
“Wish’t I was, but they wouldn’t let me. ‘Mr Johnstone,’ they said, ‘ye’re
no dam good. Ye’ve varicose veins and a bad heart,’ they said. So I says,
‘Good mornin’, gen’lmen. Don’t blame me if the country’s ru’ned’. That’s
what I said.”
I had by this time occupied the only remaining space left on the floor.
With the philosophy of their race the men had accepted my presence, and
were turning again to their own talk. The train had got up speed, and as I
judged it to be a special of some kind I looked for few stoppings. Moreover
it was not a corridor carriage, but one of the old-fashioned kind, so I was
safe for a time from the unwelcome attention of conductors. I stretched my
legs below the seat, rested my head against the knees of a brawny gunner,
and settled down to make the best of it.
My reflections were not pleasant. I had got down too far below the
surface, and had the naked feeling you get in a dream when you think you
have gone to the theatre in your nightgown. I had had three names in two
days, and as many characters. I felt as if I had no home or position
anywhere, and was only a stray dog with everybody’s hand and foot against
me. It was an ugly sensation, and it was not redeemed by any acute fear or
any knowledge of being mixed up in some desperate drama. I knew I could
easily go on to Edinburgh, and when the police made trouble, as they

would, a wire to Scotland Yard would settle matters in a couple of hours.
There wasn’t a suspicion of bodily danger to restore my dignity. The worst
that could happen would be that Ivery would hear of my being befriended
by the authorities, and the part I had settled to play would be impossible. He
would certainly hear. I had the greatest respect for his intelligence service.
Yet that was bad enough. So far I had done well. I had put Gresson off
the scent. I had found out what Bullivant wanted to know, and I had only to
return unostentatiously to London to have won out on the game. I told
myself all that, but it didn’t cheer my spirits. I was feeling mean and hunted
and very cold about the feet.
But I have a tough knuckle of obstinacy in me which makes me unwilling
to give up a thing till I am fairly choked off it. The chances were badly
against me. The Scottish police were actively interested in my movements
and would be ready to welcome me at my journey’s end. I had ruined my
hat, and my clothes, as Amos had observed, were not respectable. I had got
rid of a four-days’ beard the night before, but had cut myself in the process,
and what with my weather-beaten face and tangled hair looked liker a tinker
than a decent bagman. I thought with longing of my portmanteau in the
Pentland Hotel, Edinburgh, and the neat blue serge suit and the clean linen
that reposed in it. It was no case for a subtle game, for I held no cards. Still
I was determined not to chuck in my hand till I was forced to. If the train
stopped anywhere I would get out, and trust to my own wits and the
standing luck of the British Army for the rest.
The chance came just after dawn, when we halted at a little junction. I
got up yawning and tried to open the door, till I remembered it was locked.
Thereupon I stuck my legs out of the window on the side away from the
platform, and was immediately seized upon by a sleepy Seaforth who
thought I contemplated suicide.
“Let me go,” I said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
“Let him gang, jock,” said another voice. “Ye ken what a man’s like
when he’s been on the bash. The cauld air’ll sober him.”
I was released, and after some gymnastics dropped on the metals and
made my way round the rear of the train. As I clambered on the platform it
began to move, and a face looked out of one of the back carriages. It was
Linklater and he recognised me. He tried to get out, but the door was
promptly slammed by an indignant porter. I heard him protest, and he kept

his head out till the train went round the curve. That cooked my goose all
right. He would wire to the police from the next station.
Meantime in that clean, bare, chilly place there was only one traveller. He
was a slim young man, with a kit-bag and a gun-case. His clothes were
beautiful, a green Homburg hat, a smart green tweed overcoat, and boots as
brightly polished as a horse chestnut. I caught his profile as he gave up his
ticket and to my amazement I recognised it.
The station-master looked askance at me as I presented myself,
dilapidated and dishevelled, to the official gaze. I tried to speak in a tone of
authority.
“Who is the man who has just gone out?”
“Whaur’s your ticket?”
“I had no time to get one at Muirtown, and as you see I have left my
luggage behind me. Take it out of that pound and I’ll come back for the
change. I want to know if that was Sir Archibald Roylance.”
He looked suspiciously at the note. “I think that’s the name. He’s a
captain up at the Fleein’ School. What was ye wantin’ with him?”
I charged through the booking-office and found my man about to enter a
big grey motor-car.
“Archie,” I cried and beat him on the shoulders.
He turned round sharply. “What the devil—! Who are you?” And then
recognition crept into his face and he gave a joyous shout. “My holy aunt!
The General disguised as Charlie Chaplin! Can I drive you anywhere, sir?”

CHAPTER IX
I Take the Wings of a Dove
“Drive me somewhere to breakfast, Archie,” I said, “for I’m perishing
hungry.”
He and I got into the tonneau, and the driver swung us out of the station
road up a long incline of hill. Sir Archie had been one of my subalterns in
the old Lennox Highlanders, and had left us before the Somme to join the
Flying Corps. I had heard that he had got his wings and had done well
before Arras, and was now training pilots at home. He had been a light-
hearted youth, who had endured a good deal of rough-tonguing from me for
his sins of omission. But it was the casual class of lad I was looking for
now.
I saw him steal amused glances at my appearance.
“Been seein’ a bit of life, sir?” he inquired respectfully.
“I’m being hunted by the police,” I said.
“Dirty dogs! But don’t worry, sir; we’ll get you off all right. I’ve been in
the same fix myself. You can lie snug in my little log hut, for that old image
Gibbons won’t blab. Or, tell you what, I’ve got an aunt who lives near here
and she’s a bit of a sportsman. You can hide in her moated grange till the
bobbies get tired.”
I think it was Archie’s calm acceptance of my position as natural and
becoming that restored my good temper. He was far too well bred to ask
what crime I had committed, and I didn’t propose to enlighten him much.
But as we swung up the moorland road I let him know that I was serving
the Government, but that it was necessary that I should appear to be
unauthenticated and that therefore I must dodge the police. He whistled his
appreciation.
“Gad, that’s a deep game. Sort of camouflage? Speaking from my
experience it is easy to overdo that kind of stunt. When I was at Misieux the
French started out to camouflage the caravans where they keep their

pigeons, and they did it so damned well that the poor little birds couldn’t hit
’em off, and spent the night out.”
We entered the white gates of a big aerodrome, skirted a forest of tents
and huts, and drew up at a shanty on the far confines of the place. The hour
was half past four, and the world was still asleep. Archie nodded towards
one of the hangars, from the mouth of which projected the propeller end of
an aeroplane.
“I’m by way of flyin’ that bus down to Farnton tomorrow,” he remarked.
“It’s the new Shark-Gladas. Got a mouth like a tree.”
An idea flashed into my mind.
“You’re going this morning,” I said.
“How did you know?” he exclaimed. “I’m due to go today, but the grouse
up in Caithness wanted shootin’ so badly that I decided to wangle another
day’s leave. They can’t expect a man to start for the south of England when
he’s just off a frowsy journey.”
“All the same you’re going to be a stout fellow and start in two hours’
time. And you’re going to take me with you.”
He stared blankly, and then burst into a roar of laughter. “You’re the man
to go tiger-shootin’ with. But what price my commandant? He’s not a bad
chap, but a trifle shaggy about the fetlocks. He won’t appreciate the joke.”
“He needn’t know. He mustn’t know. This is an affair between you and
me till it’s finished. I promise you I’ll make it all square with the Flying
Corps. Get me down to Farnton before evening, and you’ll have done a
good piece of work for the country.”
“Right-o! Let’s have a tub and a bit of breakfast, and then I’m your man.
I’ll tell them to get the bus ready.”
In Archie’s bedroom I washed and shaved and borrowed a green tweed
cap and a brand-new aquascutum. The latter covered the deficiencies of my
raiment, and when I commandeered a pair of gloves I felt almost
respectable. Gibbons, who seemed to be a jack-of-all-trades, cooked us
some bacon and an omelette, and as he ate Archie yarned. In the battalion
his conversation had been mostly of race-meetings and the forsaken
delights of town, but now he had forgotten all that, and, like every good
airman I have ever known, wallowed enthusiastically in “shop”. I have a
deep respect for the Flying Corps, but it is apt to change its jargon every

month, and its conversation is hard for the layman to follow. He was
desperately keen about the war, which he saw wholly from the viewpoint of
the air. Arras to him was over before the infantry crossed the top, and the
tough bit of the Somme was October, not September. He calculated that the
big air-fighting had not come along yet, and all he hoped for was to be
allowed out to France to have his share in it. Like all good airmen, too, he
was very modest about himself. “I’ve done a bit of steeple-chasin’ and
huntin’ and I’ve good hands for a horse, so I can handle a bus fairly well.
It’s all a matter of hands, you know. There ain’t half the risk of the infantry
down below you, and a million times the fun. Jolly glad I changed, sir.”
We talked of Peter, and he put him about top. Voss, he thought, was the
only Boche that could compare with him, for he hadn’t made up his mind
about Lensch. The Frenchman Guynemer he ranked high, but in a different
way. I remember he had no respect for Richthofen and his celebrated circus.
At six sharp we were ready to go. A couple of mechanics had got out the
machine, and Archie put on his coat and gloves and climbed into the pilot’s
seat, while I squeezed in behind in the observer’s place. The aerodrome was
waking up, but I saw no officers about. We were scarcely seated when
Gibbons called our attention to a motor-car on the road, and presently we
heard a shout and saw men waving in our direction.
“Better get off, my lad,” I said. “These look like my friends.”
The engine started and the mechanics stood clear. As we taxied over the
turf I looked back and saw several figures running in our direction. The next
second we had left the bumpy earth for the smooth highroad of the air.
I had flown several dozen times before, generally over the enemy lines
when I wanted to see for myself how the land lay. Then we had flown low,
and been nicely dusted by the Hun Archies, not to speak of an occasional
machine-gun. But never till that hour had I realised the joy of a straight
flight in a swift plane in perfect weather. Archie didn’t lose time. Soon the
hangars behind looked like a child’s toys, and the world ran away from us
till it seemed like a great golden bowl spilling over with the quintessence of
light. The air was cold and my hands numbed, but I never felt them. As we
throbbed and tore southward, sometimes bumping in eddies, sometimes
swimming evenly in a stream of motionless ether, my head and heart grew
as light as a boy’s. I forgot all about the vexations of my job and saw only
its joyful comedy. I didn’t think that anything on earth could worry me

again. Far to the left was a wedge of silver and beside it a cluster of toy
houses. That must be Edinburgh, where reposed my portmanteau, and
where a most efficient police force was now inquiring for me. At the
thought I laughed so loud that Archie must have heard me. He turned round,
saw my grinning face, and grinned back. Then he signalled to me to strap
myself in. I obeyed, and he proceeded to practise “stunts”—the loop, the
spinning nose-dive, and others I didn’t know the names of. It was glorious
fun, and he handled his machine as a good rider coaxes a nervous horse
over a stiff hurdle. He had that extra something in his blood that makes the
great pilot.
Presently the chessboard of green and brown had changed to a deep
purple with faint silvery lines like veins in a rock. We were crossing the
Border hills, the place where I had legged it for weary days when I was
mixed up in the Black Stone business. What a marvellous element was this
air, which took one far above the fatigues of humanity! Archie had done
well to change. Peter had been the wise man. I felt a tremendous pity for my
old friend hobbling about a German prison-yard, when he had once flown a
hawk. I reflected that I had wasted my life hitherto. And then I remembered
that all this glory had only one use in war and that was to help the muddy
British infantryman to down his Hun opponent. He was the fellow, after all,
that decided battles, and the thought comforted me.
A great exhilaration is often the precursor of disaster, and mine was to
have a sudden downfall. It was getting on for noon and we were well into
England—I guessed from the rivers we had passed that we were somewhere
in the north of Yorkshire—when the machine began to make odd sounds,
and we bumped in perfectly calm patches of air. We dived and then
climbed, but the confounded thing kept sputtering. Archie passed back a
slip of paper on which he had scribbled: “Engine conked. Must land at
Micklegill. Very sorry.” So we dropped to a lower elevation where we could
see clearly the houses and roads and the long swelling ridges of a moorland
country. I could never have found my way about, but Archie’s practised eye
knew every landmark. We were trundling along very slowly now, and even
I was soon able to pick up the hangars of a big aerodrome.
We made Micklegill, but only by the skin of our teeth. We were so low
that the smoky chimneys of the city of Bradfield seven miles to the east
were half hidden by a ridge of down. Archie achieved a clever descent in

the lee of a belt of firs, and got out full of imprecations against the Gladas
engine. “I’ll go up to the camp and report,” he said, “and send mechanics
down to tinker this darned gramophone. You’d better go for a walk, sir. I
don’t want to answer questions about you till we’re ready to start. I reckon
it’ll be an hour’s job.”
The cheerfulness I had acquired in the upper air still filled me. I sat down
in a ditch, as merry as a sand-boy, and lit a pipe. I was possessed by a
boyish spirit of casual adventure, and waited on the next turn of fortune’s
wheel with only a pleasant amusement.
That turn was not long in coming. Archie appeared very breathless.
“Look here, sir, there’s the deuce of a row up there. They’ve been wirin’
about you all over the country, and they know you’re with me. They’ve got
the police, and they’ll have you in five minutes if you don’t leg it. I lied like
billy-o and said I had never heard of you, but they’re comin’ to see for
themselves. For God’s sake get off.... You’d better keep in cover down that
hollow and round the back of these trees. I’ll stay here and try to brazen it
out. I’ll get strafed to blazes anyhow.... I hope you’ll get me out of the
scrape, sir.”
“Don’t you worry, my lad,” I said. “I’ll make it all square when I get
back to town. I’ll make for Bradfield, for this place is a bit conspicuous.
Goodbye, Archie. You’re a good chap and I’ll see you don’t suffer.”
I started off down the hollow of the moor, trying to make speed atone for
lack of strategy, for it was hard to know how much my pursuers
commanded from that higher ground. They must have seen me, for I heard
whistles blown and men’s cries. I struck a road, crossed it, and passed a
ridge from which I had a view of Bradfield six miles off. And as I ran I
began to reflect that this kind of chase could not last long. They were bound
to round me up in the next half-hour unless I could puzzle them. But in that
bare green place there was no cover, and it looked as if my chances were
pretty much those of a hare coursed by a good greyhound on a naked moor.
Suddenly from just in front of me came a familiar sound. It was the roar
of guns—the slam of field-batteries and the boom of small howitzers. I
wondered if I had gone off my head. As I plodded on the rattle of machine-
guns was added, and over the ridge before me I saw the dust and fumes of
bursting shells. I concluded that I was not mad, and that therefore the

Germans must have landed. I crawled up the last slope, quite forgetting the
pursuit behind me.
And then I’m blessed if I did not look down on a veritable battle.
There were two sets of trenches with barbed wire and all the fixings, one
set filled with troops and the other empty. On these latter shells were
bursting, but there was no sign of life in them. In the other lines there
seemed the better part of two brigades, and the first trench was stiff with
bayonets. My first thought was that Home Forces had gone dotty, for this
kind of show could have no sort of training value. And then I saw other
things—cameras and camera-men on platforms on the flanks, and men with
megaphones behind them on wooden scaffoldings. One of the megaphones
was going full blast all the time.
I saw the meaning of the performance at last. Some movie-merchant had
got a graft with the Government, and troops had been turned out to make a
war film. It occurred to me that if I were mixed up in that push I might get
the cover I was looking for. I scurried down the hill to the nearest camera-
man.
As I ran, the first wave of troops went over the top. They did it
uncommon well, for they entered into the spirit of the thing, and went over
with grim faces and that slow, purposeful lope that I had seen in my own
fellows at Arras. Smoke grenades burst among them, and now and then
some resourceful mountebank would roll over. Altogether it was about the
best show I have ever seen. The cameras clicked, the guns banged, a
background of boy scouts applauded, and the dust rose in billows to the sky.
But all the same something was wrong. I could imagine that this kind of
business took a good deal of planning from the point of view of the movie-
merchant, for his purpose was not the same as that of the officer in
command. You know how a photographer finicks about and is dissatisfied
with a pose that seems all right to his sitter. I should have thought the
spectacle enough to get any cinema audience off their feet, but the man on
the scaffolding near me judged differently. He made his megaphone boom
like the swan-song of a dying buffalo. He wanted to change something and
didn’t know how to do it. He hopped on one leg; he took the megaphone
from his mouth to curse; he waved it like a banner and yelled at some
opposite number on the other flank. And then his patience forsook him and

he skipped down the ladder, dropping his megaphone, past the camera-men,
on to the battlefield.
That was his undoing. He got in the way of the second wave and was
swallowed up like a leaf in a torrent. For a moment I saw a red face and a
loud-checked suit, and the rest was silence. He was carried on over the hill,
or rolled into an enemy trench, but anyhow he was lost to my ken.
I bagged his megaphone and hopped up the steps to the platform. At last I
saw a chance of first-class cover, for with Archie’s coat and cap I made a
very good appearance as a movie-merchant. Two waves had gone over the
top, and the cinema-men, working like beavers, had filmed the lot. But
there was still a fair amount of troops to play with, and I determined to
tangle up that outfit so that the fellows who were after me would have
better things to think about.
My advantage was that I knew how to command men. I could see that my
opposite number with the megaphone was helpless, for the mistake which
had swept my man into a shell-hole had reduced him to impotence. The
troops seemed to be mainly in charge of N.C.O.s (I could imagine that the
officers would try to shirk this business), and an N.C.O. is the most literal
creature on earth. So with my megaphone I proceeded to change the battle
order.
I brought up the third wave to the front trenches. In about three minutes
the men had recognised the professional touch and were moving smartly to
my orders. They thought it was part of the show, and the obedient cameras
clicked at everything that came into their orbit. My aim was to deploy the
troops on too narrow a front so that they were bound to fan outward, and I
had to be quick about it, for I didn’t know when the hapless movie-
merchant might be retrieved from the battle-field and dispute my authority.
It takes a long time to straighten a thing out, but it does not take long to
tangle it, especially when the thing is so delicate a machine as disciplined
troops. In about eight minutes I had produced chaos. The flanks spread out,
in spite of all the shepherding of the N.C.O.s, and the fringe engulfed the
photographers. The cameras on their little platforms went down like
ninepins. It was solemn to see the startled face of a photographer, taken
unawares, supplicating the purposeful infantry, before he was swept off his
feet into speechlessness.

It was no place for me to linger in, so I chucked away the megaphone and
got mixed up with the tail of the third wave. I was swept on and came to
anchor in the enemy trenches, where I found, as I expected, my profane and
breathless predecessor, the movie-merchant. I had nothing to say to him, so
I stuck to the trench till it ended against the slope of the hill.
On that flank, delirious with excitement, stood a knot of boy scouts. My
business was to get to Bradfield as quick as my legs would take me, and as
inconspicuously as the gods would permit. Unhappily I was far too great an
object of interest to that nursery of heroes. Every boy scout is an amateur
detective and hungry for knowledge. I was followed by several, who plied
me with questions, and were told that I was off to Bradfield to hurry up part
of the cinema outfit. It sounded lame enough, for that cinema outfit was
already past praying for.
We reached the road and against a stone wall stood several bicycles. I
selected one and prepared to mount.
“That’s Mr Emmott’s machine,” said one boy sharply. “He told me to
keep an eye on it.”
“I must borrow it, sonny,” I said. “Mr Emmott’s my very good friend and
won’t object.”
From the place where we stood I overlooked the back of the battle-field
and could see an anxious congress of officers. I could see others, too, whose
appearance I did not like. They had not been there when I operated on the
megaphone. They must have come downhill from the aerodrome and in all
likelihood were the pursuers I had avoided. The exhilaration which I had
won in the air and which had carried me into the tomfoolery of the past
half-hour was ebbing. I had the hunted feeling once more, and grew middle-
aged and cautious. I had a baddish record for the day, what with getting
Archie into a scrape and busting up an official cinema show—neither
consistent with the duties of a brigadier-general. Besides, I had still to get to
London.
I had not gone two hundred yards down the road when a boy scout,
pedalling furiously, came up abreast me.
“Colonel Edgeworth wants to see you,” he panted. “You’re to come back
at once.”

“Tell him I can’t wait now,” I said. “I’ll pay my respects to him in an
hour.”
“He said you were to come at once,” said the faithful messenger. “He’s in
an awful temper with you, and he’s got bobbies with him.”
I put on pace and left the boy behind. I reckoned I had the better part of
two miles’ start and could beat anything except petrol. But my enemies
were bound to have cars, so I had better get off the road as soon as possible.
I coasted down a long hill to a bridge which spanned a small discoloured
stream that flowed in a wooded glen. There was nobody for the moment on
the hill behind me, so I slipped into the covert, shoved the bicycle under the
bridge, and hid Archie’s aquascutum in a bramble thicket. I was now in my
own disreputable tweeds and I hoped that the shedding of my most
conspicuous garment would puzzle my pursuers if they should catch up
with me.
But this I was determined they should not do. I made good going down
that stream and out into a lane which led from the downs to the market-
gardens round the city. I thanked Heaven I had got rid of the aquascutum,
for the August afternoon was warm and my pace was not leisurely. When I
was in secluded ground I ran, and when anyone was in sight I walked
smartly.
As I went I reflected that Bradfield would see the end of my adventures.
The police knew that I was there and would watch the stations and hunt me
down if I lingered in the place. I knew no one there and had no chance of
getting an effective disguise. Indeed I very soon began to wonder if I should
get even as far as the streets. For at the moment when I had got a lift on the
back of a fishmonger’s cart and was screened by its flapping canvas, two
figures passed on motor-bicycles, and one of them was the inquisitive boy
scout. The main road from the aerodrome was probably now being patrolled
by motor-cars. It looked as if there would be a degrading arrest in one of the
suburbs.
The fish-cart, helped by half a crown to the driver, took me past the
outlying small-villadom, between long lines of workmen’s houses, to
narrow cobbled lanes and the purlieus of great factories. As soon as I saw
the streets well crowded I got out and walked. In my old clothes I must
have appeared like some second-class bookie or seedy horse-coper. The

only respectable thing I had about me was my gold watch. I looked at the
time and found it half past five.
I wanted food and was casting about for an eating-house when I heard the
purr of a motor-cycle and across the road saw the intelligent boy scout. He
saw me, too, and put on the brake with a sharpness which caused him to
skid and all but come to grief under the wheels of a wool-wagon. That gave
me time to efface myself by darting up a side street. I had an unpleasant
sense that I was about to be trapped, for in a place I knew nothing of I had
not a chance to use my wits.
I remember trying feverishly to think, and I suppose that my
preoccupation made me careless. I was now in a veritable slum, and when I
put my hand to my vest pocket I found that my watch had gone. That put
the top stone on my depression. The reaction from the wild burnout of the
forenoon had left me very cold about the feet. I was getting into the under-
world again and there was no chance of a second Archie Roylance turning
up to rescue me. I remember yet the sour smell of the factories and the mist
of smoke in the evening air. It is a smell I have never met since without a
sort of dulling of spirit.
Presently I came out into a market-place. Whistles were blowing, and
there was a great hurrying of people back from the mills. The crowd gave
me a momentary sense of security, and I was just about to inquire my way
to the railway station when someone jostled my arm.
A rough-looking fellow in mechanic’s clothes was beside me.
“Mate,” he whispered. “I’ve got summat o’ yours here.” And to my
amazement he slipped my watch into my hand.
“It was took by mistake. We’re friends o’ yours. You’re right enough if
you do what I tell you. There’s a peeler over there got his eye on you.
Follow me and I’ll get you off.”
I didn’t much like the man’s looks, but I had no choice, and anyhow he
had given me back my watch. He sidled into an alley between tall houses
and I sidled after him. Then he took to his heels, and led me a twisting
course through smelly courts into a tanyard and then by a narrow lane to the
back-quarters of a factory. Twice we doubled back, and once we climbed a
wall and followed the bank of a blue-black stream with a filthy scum on it.
Then we got into a very mean quarter of the town, and emerged in a dingy
garden, strewn with tin cans and broken flowerpots. By a back door we

entered one of the cottages and my guide very carefully locked it behind
him.
He lit the gas and drew the blinds in a small parlour and looked at me
long and quizzically. He spoke now in an educated voice.
“I ask no questions,” he said, “but it’s my business to put my services at
your disposal. You carry the passport.”
I stared at him, and he pulled out his watch and showed a white-and-
purple cross inside the lid.
“I don’t defend all the people we employ,” he said, grinning. “Men’s
morals are not always as good as their patriotism. One of them pinched
your watch, and when he saw what was inside it he reported to me. We soon
picked up your trail, and observed you were in a bit of trouble. As I say, I
ask no questions. What can we do for you?”
“I want to get to London without any questions asked. They’re looking
for me in my present rig, so I’ve got to change it.”
“That’s easy enough,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable for a little
and I’ll fix you up. The night train goes at eleven-thirty.... You’ll find cigars
in the cupboard and there’s this week’s Critic on that table. It’s got a good
article on Conrad, if you care for such things.”
I helped myself to a cigar and spent a profitable half-hour reading about
the vices of the British Government. Then my host returned and bade me
ascend to his bedroom. “You’re Private Henry Tomkins of the 12th
Gloucesters, and you’ll find your clothes ready for you. I’ll send on your
present togs if you give me an address.”
I did as I was bid, and presently emerged in the uniform of a British
private, complete down to the shapeless boots and the dropsical puttees.
Then my friend took me in hand and finished the transformation. He started
on my hair with scissors and arranged a lock which, when well oiled, curled
over my forehead. My hands were hard and rough and only needed some
grubbiness and hacking about the nails to pass muster. With my cap on the
side of my head, a pack on my back, a service rifle in my hands, and my
pockets bursting with penny picture papers, I was the very model of the
British soldier returning from leave. I had also a packet of Woodbine
cigarettes and a hunch of bread-and-cheese for the journey. And I had a
railway warrant made out in my name for London.

Then my friend gave me supper—bread and cold meat and a bottle of
Bass, which I wolfed savagely, for I had had nothing since breakfast. He
was a curious fellow, as discreet as a tombstone, very ready to speak about
general subjects, but never once coming near the intimate business which
had linked him and me and Heaven knew how many others by means of a
little purple-and-white cross in a watch-case. I remember we talked about
the topics that used to be popular at Biggleswick—the big political things
that begin with capital letters. He took Amos’s view of the soundness of the
British working-man, but he said something which made me think. He was
convinced that there was a tremendous lot of German spy work about, and
that most of the practitioners were innocent. “The ordinary Briton doesn’t
run to treason, but he’s not very bright. A clever man in that kind of game
can make better use of a fool than a rogue.”
As he saw me off he gave me a piece of advice. “Get out of these clothes
as soon as you reach London. Private Tomkins will frank you out of
Bradfield, but it mightn’t be a healthy alias in the metropolis.”
At eleven-thirty I was safe in the train, talking the jargon of the returning
soldier with half a dozen of my own type in a smoky third-class carriage. I
had been lucky in my escape, for at the station entrance and on the platform
I had noticed several men with the unmistakable look of plainclothes police.
Also—though this may have been my fancy—I thought I caught in the
crowd a glimpse of the bagman who had called himself Linklater.

CHAPTER X
The Advantages of an Air Raid
The train was abominably late. It was due at eight-twenty-seven, but it
was nearly ten when we reached St Pancras. I had resolved to go straight to
my rooms in Westminster, buying on the way a cap and waterproof to
conceal my uniform should anyone be near my door on my arrival. Then I
would ring up Blenkiron and tell him all my adventures. I breakfasted at a
coffee-stall, left my pack and rifle in the cloak-room, and walked out into
the clear sunny morning.
I was feeling very pleased with myself. Looking back on my madcap
journey, I seemed to have had an amazing run of luck and to be entitled to a
little credit too. I told myself that persistence always pays and that nobody
is beaten till he is dead. All Blenkiron’s instructions had been faithfully
carried out. I had found Ivery’s post office. I had laid the lines of our own
special communications with the enemy, and so far as I could see I had left
no clue behind me. Ivery and Gresson took me for a well-meaning
nincompoop. It was true that I had aroused profound suspicion in the
breasts of the Scottish police. But that mattered nothing, for Cornelius
Brand, the suspect, would presently disappear, and there was nothing
against that rising soldier, Brigadier-General Richard Hannay, who would
soon be on his way to France. After all this piece of service had not been so
very unpleasant. I laughed when I remembered my grim forebodings in
Gloucestershire. Bullivant had said it would be damnably risky in the long
run, but here was the end and I had never been in danger of anything worse
than making a fool of myself.
I remember that, as I made my way through Bloomsbury, I was not
thinking so much of my triumphant report to Blenkiron as of my speedy
return to the Front. Soon I would be with my beloved brigade again. I had
missed Messines and the first part of Third Ypres, but the battle was still
going on, and I had yet a chance. I might get a division, for there had been
talk of that before I left. I knew the Army Commander thought a lot of me.

But on the whole I hoped I would be left with the brigade. After all I was an
amateur soldier, and I wasn’t certain of my powers with a bigger command.
In Charing Cross Road I thought of Mary, and the brigade seemed
suddenly less attractive. I hoped the war wouldn’t last much longer, though
with Russia heading straight for the devil I didn’t know how it was going to
stop very soon. I was determined to see Mary before I left, and I had a good
excuse, for I had taken my orders from her. The prospect entranced me, and
I was mooning along in a happy dream, when I collided violently with an
agitated citizen.
Then I realised that something very odd was happening.
There was a dull sound like the popping of the corks of flat soda-water
bottles. There was a humming, too, from very far up in the skies. People in
the street were either staring at the heavens or running wildly for shelter. A
motor-bus in front of me emptied its contents in a twinkling; a taxi pulled
up with a jar and the driver and fare dived into a second-hand bookshop. It
took me a moment or two to realise the meaning of it all, and I had scarcely
done this when I got a very practical proof. A hundred yards away a bomb
fell on a street island, shivering every window-pane in a wide radius, and
sending splinters of stone flying about my head. I did what I had done a
hundred times before at the Front, and dropped flat on my face.
The man who says he doesn’t mind being bombed or shelled is either a
liar or a maniac. This London air raid seemed to me a singularly unpleasant
business. I think it was the sight of the decent civilised life around one and
the orderly streets, for what was perfectly natural in a rubble-heap like
Ypres or Arras seemed an outrage here. I remember once being in billets in
a Flanders village where I had the Maire’s house and sat in a room
upholstered in cut velvet, with wax flowers on the mantelpiece and oil
paintings of three generations on the walls. The Boche took it into his head
to shell the place with a long-range naval gun, and I simply loathed it. It
was horrible to have dust and splinters blown into that snug, homely room,
whereas if I had been in a ruined barn I wouldn’t have given the thing two
thoughts. In the same way bombs dropping in central London seemed a
grotesque indecency. I hated to see plump citizens with wild eyes, and
nursemaids with scared children, and miserable women scuttling like
rabbits in a warren.

The drone grew louder, and, looking up, I could see the enemy planes
flying in a beautiful formation, very leisurely as it seemed, with all London
at their mercy. Another bomb fell to the right, and presently bits of our own
shrapnel were clattering viciously around me. I thought it about time to take
cover, and ran shamelessly for the best place I could see, which was a Tube
station. Five minutes before the street had been crowded; now I left behind
me a desert dotted with one bus and three empty taxicabs.
I found the Tube entrance filled with excited humanity. One stout lady
had fainted, and a nurse had become hysterical, but on the whole people
were behaving well. Oddly enough they did not seem inclined to go down
the stairs to the complete security of underground; but preferred rather to
collect where they could still get a glimpse of the upper world, as if they
were torn between fear of their lives and interest in the spectacle. That
crowd gave me a good deal of respect for my countrymen. But several were
badly rattled, and one man a little way off, whose back was turned, kept
twitching his shoulders as if he had the colic.
I watched him curiously, and a movement of the crowd brought his face
into profile. Then I gasped with amazement, for I saw that it was Ivery.
And yet it was not Ivery. There were the familiar nondescript features,
the blandness, the plumpness, but all, so to speak, in ruins. The man was in
a blind funk. His features seemed to be dislimning before my eyes. He was
growing sharper, finer, in a way younger, a man without grip on himself, a
shapeless creature in process of transformation. He was being reduced to
his rudiments. Under the spell of panic he was becoming a new man.
And the crazy thing was that I knew the new man better than the old.
My hands were jammed close to my sides by the crowd; I could scarcely
turn my head, and it was not the occasion for one’s neighbours to observe
one’s expression. If it had been, mine must have been a study. My mind was
far away from air raids, back in the hot summer weather of 1914. I saw a
row of villas perched on a headland above the sea. In the garden of one of
them two men were playing tennis, while I was crouching behind an
adjacent bush. One of these was a plump young man who wore a coloured
scarf round his waist and babbled of golf handicaps.... I saw him again in
the villa dining-room, wearing a dinner-jacket, and lisping a little.... I sat
opposite him at bridge, I beheld him collared by two of Macgillivray’s men,
when his comrade had rushed for the thirty-nine steps that led to the sea.... I

saw, too, the sitting-room of my old flat in Portland Place and heard little
Scudder’s quick, anxious voice talking about the three men he feared most
on earth, one of whom lisped in his speech. I had thought that all three had
long ago been laid under the turf....
He was not looking my way, and I could devour his face in safety. There
was no shadow of doubt. I had always put him down as the most amazing
actor on earth, for had he not played the part of the First Sea Lord and
deluded that officer’s daily colleagues? But he could do far more than any
human actor, for he could take on a new personality and with it a new
appearance, and live steadily in the character as if he had been born in it....
My mind was a blank, and I could only make blind gropings at
conclusions.... How had he escaped the death of a spy and a murderer, for I
had last seen him in the hands of justice?... Of course he had known me
from the first day in Biggleswick.... I had thought to play with him, and he
had played most cunningly and damnably with me. In that sweating
sardine-tin of refugees I shivered in the bitterness of my chagrin.
And then I found his face turned to mine, and I knew that he recognised
me. More, I knew that he knew that I had recognised him—not as Ivery, but
as that other man. There came into his eyes a curious look of
comprehension, which for a moment overcame his funk.
I had sense enough to see that that put the final lid on it. There was still
something doing if he believed that I was blind, but if he once thought that I
knew the truth he would be through our meshes and disappear like a fog.
My first thought was to get at him and collar him and summon everybody
to help me by denouncing him for what he was. Then I saw that that was
impossible. I was a private soldier in a borrowed uniform, and he could
easily turn the story against me. I must use surer weapons. I must get to
Bullivant and Macgillivray and set their big machine to work. Above all I
must get to Blenkiron.
I started to squeeze out of that push, for air raids now seemed far too
trivial to give a thought to. Moreover the guns had stopped, but so sheeplike
is human nature that the crowd still hung together, and it took me a good
fifteen minutes to edge my way to the open air. I found that the trouble was
over, and the street had resumed its usual appearance. Buses and taxis were
running, and voluble knots of people were recounting their experiences. I
started off for Blenkiron’s bookshop, as the nearest harbour of refuge.

But in Piccadilly Circus I was stopped by a military policeman. He asked
my name and battalion, and I gave him them, while his suspicious eye ran
over my figure. I had no pack or rifle, and the crush in the Tube station had
not improved my appearance. I explained that I was going back to France
that evening, and he asked for my warrant. I fancy my preoccupation made
me nervous and I lied badly. I said I had left it with my kit in the house of
my married sister, but I fumbled in giving the address. I could see that the
fellow did not believe a word of it.
Just then up came an A.P.M. He was a pompous dug-out, very splendid in
his red tabs and probably bucked up at having just been under fire. Anyhow
he was out to walk in the strict path of duty.
“Tomkins!” he said. “Tomkins! We’ve got some fellow of that name on
our records. Bring him along, Wilson.”
“But, sir,” I said, “I must—I simply must meet my friend. It’s urgent
business, and I assure you I’m all right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll take a
taxi and we’ll go down to Scotland Yard and I’ll stand by what they say.”
His brow grew dark with wrath. “What infernal nonsense is this?
Scotland Yard! What the devil has Scotland Yard to do with it? You’re an
imposter. I can see it in your face. I’ll have your depot rung up, and you’ll
be in jail in a couple of hours. I know a deserter when I see him. Bring him
along, Wilson. You know what to do if he tries to bolt.”
I had a momentary thought of breaking away, but decided that the odds
were too much against me. Fuming with impatience, I followed the A.P.M.
to his office on the first floor in a side street. The precious minutes were
slipping past; Ivery, now thoroughly warned, was making good his escape;
and I, the sole repository of a deadly secret, was tramping in this absurd
procession.
The A.P.M. issued his orders. He gave instructions that my depot should
be rung up, and he bade Wilson remove me to what he called the guard-
room. He sat down at his desk, and busied himself with a mass of buff
dockets.
In desperation I renewed my appeal. “I implore you to telephone to Mr
Macgillivray at Scotland Yard. It’s a matter of life and death, Sir. You’re
taking a very big responsibility if you don’t.”

I had hopelessly offended his brittle dignity. “Any more of your insolence
and I’ll have you put in irons. I’ll attend to you soon enough for your
comfort. Get out of this till I send for you.”
As I looked at his foolish, irritable face I realised that I was fairly UP
against it. Short of assault and battery on everybody I was bound to submit.
I saluted respectfully and was marched away.
The hours I spent in that bare anteroom are like a nightmare in my
recollection. A sergeant was busy at a desk with more buff dockets and an
orderly waited on a stool by a telephone. I looked at my watch and observed
that it was one o’clock. Soon the slamming of a door announced that the
A.P.M. had gone to lunch. I tried conversation with the fat sergeant, but he
very soon shut me up. So I sat hunched up on the wooden form and chewed
the cud of my vexation.
I thought with bitterness of the satisfaction which had filled me in the
morning. I had fancied myself the devil of a fine fellow, and I had been no
more than a mountebank. The adventures of the past days seemed merely
childish. I had been telling lies and cutting capers over half Britain, thinking
I was playing a deep game, and I had only been behaving like a schoolboy.
On such occasions a man is rarely just to himself, and the intensity of my
self-abasement would have satisfied my worst enemy. It didn’t console me
that the futility of it all was not my blame. I was looking for excuses. It was
the facts that cried out against me, and on the facts I had been an idiotic
failure.
For of course Ivery had played with me, played with me since the first
day at Biggleswick. He had applauded my speeches and flattered me, and
advised me to go to the Clyde, laughing at me all the time. Gresson, too,
had known. Now I saw it all. He had tried to drown me between Colonsay
and Mull. It was Gresson who had set the police on me in Morvern. The
bagman Linklater had been one of Gresson’s creatures. The only meagre
consolation was that the gang had thought me dangerous enough to attempt
to murder me, and that they knew nothing about my doings in Skye. Of that
I was positive. They had marked me down, but for several days I had
slipped clean out of their ken.
As I went over all the incidents, I asked if everything was yet lost. I had
failed to hoodwink Ivery, but I had found out his post office, and if he only
believed I hadn’t recognised him for the miscreant of the Black Stone he

would go on in his old ways and play into Blenkiron’s hands. Yes, but I had
seen him in undress, so to speak, and he knew that I had so seen him. The
only thing now was to collar him before he left the country, for there was
ample evidence to hang him on. The law must stretch out its long arm and
collect him and Gresson and the Portuguese Jew, try them by court martial,
and put them decently underground.
But he had now had more than an hour’s warning, and I was entangled
with red-tape in this damned A.P.M.”s office. The thought drove me frantic,
and I got up and paced the floor. I saw the orderly with rather a scared face
making ready to press the bell, and I noticed that the fat sergeant had gone
to lunch.
“Say, mate,” I said, “don’t you feel inclined to do a poor fellow a good
turn? I know I’m for it all right, and I’ll take my medicine like a lamb. But I
want badly to put a telephone call through.”
“It ain’t allowed,” was the answer. “I’d get ’ell from the old man.”
“But he’s gone out,” I urged. “I don’t want you to do anything wrong,
mate, I leave you to do the talkin’ if you’ll only send my message. I’m flush
of money, and I don’t mind handin’ you a quid for the job.”
He was a pinched little man with a weak chin, and he obviously wavered.
“’Oo d’ye want to talk to?” he asked.
“Scotland Yard,” I said, “the home of the police. Lord bless you, there
can’t be no harm in that. Ye’ve only got to ring up Scotland Yard—I’ll give
you the number—and give the message to Mr Macgillivray. He’s the head
bummer of all the bobbies.”
“That sounds a bit of all right,” he said. “The old man ’e won’t be back
for ’alf an hour, nor the sergeant neither. Let’s see your quid though.”
I laid a pound note on the form beside me. “It’s yours, mate, if you get
through to Scotland Yard and speak the piece I’m goin’ to give you.”
He went over to the instrument. “What d’you want to say to the bloke
with the long name?”
“Say that Richard Hannay is detained at the A.P.M.”s office in Claxton
Street. Say he’s got important news—say urgent and secret news—and ask
Mr Macgillivray to do something about it at once.”
“But ’Annay ain’t the name you gave.”

“Lord bless you, no. Did you never hear of a man borrowin’ another
name? Anyhow that’s the one I want you to give.”
“But if this Mac man comes round ’ere, they’ll know ’e’s bin rung up,
and I’ll ’ave the old man down on me.”
It took ten minutes and a second pound note to get him past this hurdle.
By and by he screwed up courage and rang up the number. I listened with
some nervousness while he gave my message—he had to repeat it twice—
and waited eagerly on the next words.
“No, sir,” I heard him say, “’e don’t want you to come round ’ere. ’E
thinks as ’ow—I mean to say, ’e wants—”
I took a long stride and twitched the receiver from him.
“Macgillivray,” I said, “is that you? Richard Hannay! For the love of God
come round here this instant and deliver me from the clutches of a tomfool
A.P.M. I’ve got the most deadly news. There’s not a second to waste. For
God’s sake come quick!” Then I added: “Just tell your fellows to gather
Ivery in at once. You know his lairs.”
I hung up the receiver and faced a pale and indignant orderly. “It’s all
right,” I said. “I promise you that you won’t get into any trouble on my
account. And there’s your two quid.”
The door in the next room opened and shut. The A.P.M. had returned
from lunch....
Ten minutes later the door opened again. I heard Macgillivray’s voice,
and it was not pitched in dulcet tones. He had run up against minor
officialdom and was making hay with it.
I was my own master once more, so I forsook the company of the
orderly. I found a most rattled officer trying to save a few rags of his dignity
and the formidable figure of Macgillivray instructing him in manners.
“Glad to see you, Dick,” he said. “This is General Hannay, sir. It may
comfort you to know that your folly may have made just the difference
between your country’s victory and defeat. I shall have a word to say to
your superiors.”
It was hardly fair. I had to put in a word for the old fellow, whose red tabs
seemed suddenly to have grown dingy.

“It was my blame wearing this kit. We’ll call it a misunderstanding and
forget it. But I would suggest that civility is not wasted even on a poor devil
of a defaulting private soldier.”
Once in Macgillivray’s car, I poured out my tale. “Tell me it’s a
nightmare,” I cried. “Tell me that the three men we collected on the Ruff
were shot long ago.”
“Two,” he replied, “but one escaped. Heaven knows how he managed it,
but he disappeared clean out of the world.”
“The plump one who lisped in his speech?”
Macgillivray nodded.
“Well, we’re in for it this time. Have you issued instructions?”
“Yes. With luck we shall have our hands on him within an hour. We’ve
our net round all his haunts.”
“But two hours’ start! It’s a big handicap, for you’re dealing with a
genius.”
“Yet I think we can manage it. Where are you bound for?”
I told him my rooms in Westminster and then to my old flat in Park Lane.
“The day of disguises is past. In half an hour I’ll be Richard Hannay. It’ll be
a comfort to get into uniform again. Then I’ll look up Blenkiron.”
He grinned. “I gather you’ve had a riotous time. We’ve had a good many
anxious messages from the north about a certain Mr Brand. I couldn’t
discourage our men, for I fancied it might have spoiled your game. I heard
that last night they had lost touch with you in Bradfield, so I rather expected
to see you here today. Efficient body of men the Scottish police.”
“Especially when they have various enthusiastic amateur helpers.”
“So?” he said. “Yes, of course. They would have. But I hope presently to
congratulate you on the success of your mission.”
“I’ll bet you a pony you don’t,” I said.
“I never bet on a professional subject. Why this pessimism?”
“Only that I know our gentleman better than you. I’ve been twice up
against him. He’s the kind of wicked that don’t cease from troubling till
they’re stone-dead. And even then I’d want to see the body cremated and
take the ashes into mid-ocean and scatter them. I’ve got a feeling that he’s
the biggest thing you or I will ever tackle.”

CHAPTER XI
The Valley of Humiliation
I collected some baggage and a pile of newly arrived letters from my
rooms in Westminster and took a taxi to my Park Lane flat. Usually I had
gone back to that old place with a great feeling of comfort, like a boy from
school who ranges about his room at home and examines his treasures. I
used to like to see my hunting trophies on the wall and to sink into my own
armchairs But now I had no pleasure in the thing. I had a bath, and changed
into uniform, and that made me feel in better fighting trim. But I suffered
from a heavy conviction of abject failure, and had no share in
Macgillivray’s optimism. The awe with which the Black Stone gang had
filled me three years before had revived a thousandfold. Personal
humiliation was the least part of my trouble. What worried me was the
sense of being up against something inhumanly formidable and wise and
strong. I believed I was willing to own defeat and chuck up the game.
Among the unopened letters was one from Peter, a very bulky one which
I sat down to read at leisure. It was a curious epistle, far the longest he had
ever written me, and its size made me understand his loneliness. He was
still at his German prison-camp, but expecting every day to go to
Switzerland. He said he could get back to England or South Africa, if he
wanted, for they were clear that he could never be a combatant again; but he
thought he had better stay in Switzerland, for he would be unhappy in
England with all his friends fighting. As usual he made no complaints, and
seemed to be very grateful for his small mercies. There was a doctor who
was kind to him, and some good fellows among the prisoners.
But Peter’s letter was made up chiefly of reflection. He had always been
a bit of a philosopher, and now, in his isolation, he had taken to thinking
hard, and poured out the results to me on pages of thin paper in his clumsy
handwriting. I could read between the lines that he was having a stiff fight
with himself. He was trying to keep his courage going in face of the
bitterest trial he could be called on to face—a crippled old age. He had

always known a good deal about the Bible, and that and the Pilgrim’s
Progress were his chief aids in reflection. Both he took quite literally, as if
they were newspaper reports of actual recent events.
He mentioned that after much consideration he had reached the
conclusion that the three greatest men he had ever heard of or met were Mr
Valiant-for-Truth, the Apostle Paul, and a certain Billy Strang who had been
with him in Mashonaland in ’92. Billy I knew all about; he had been Peter’s
hero and leader till a lion got him in the Blaauwberg. Peter preferred
Valiant-for-Truth to Mr Greatheart, I think, because of his superior
truculence, for, being very gentle himself, he loved a bold speaker. After
that he dropped into a vein of self-examination. He regretted that he fell far
short of any of the three. He thought that he might with luck resemble Mr
Standfast, for like him he had not much trouble in keeping wakeful, and
was also as “poor as a howler”, and didn’t care for women. He only hoped
that he could imitate him in making a good end.
Then followed some remarks of Peter’s on courage, which came to me in
that London room as if spoken by his living voice. I have never known
anyone so brave, so brave by instinct, or anyone who hated so much to be
told so. It was almost the only thing that could make him angry. All his life
he had been facing death, and to take risks seemed to him as natural as to
get up in the morning and eat his breakfast. But he had started out to
consider the very thing which before he had taken for granted, and here is
an extract from his conclusions. I paraphrase him, for he was not
grammatical.

It’s easy enough to be brave if you’re feeling well and have food inside
you. And it’s not so difficult even if you’re short of a meal and seedy, for
that makes you inclined to gamble. I mean by being brave playing the game
by the right rules without letting it worry you that you may very likely get
knocked on the head. It’s the wisest way to save your skin. It doesn’t do to
think about death if you’re facing a charging lion or trying to bluff a lot of
savages. If you think about it you’ll get it; if you don’t, the odds are you
won’t. That kind of courage is only good nerves and experience.... Most
courage is experience. Most people are a little scared at new things ...
You want a bigger heart to face danger which you go out to look for, and
which doesn’t come to you in the ordinary way of business. Still, that’s

pretty much the same thing—good nerves and good health, and a natural
liking for rows. You see, Dick, in all that game there’s a lot of fun. There’s
excitement and the fun of using your wits and skill, and you know that the
bad bits can’t last long. When Arcoll sent me to Makapan’s kraal I didn’t
altogether fancy the job, but at the worst it was three parts sport, and I got
so excited that I never thought of the risk till it was over ...
But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go
even when you’re feeling empty inside, and your blood’s thin, and there’s no
kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble’s not over in an hour or two
but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about
that kind, and he called it “Fortitude”. I reckon fortitude’s the biggest thing
a man can have—just to go on enduring when there’s no guts or heart left in
you. Billy had it when he trekked solitary from Garungoze to the Limpopo
with fever and a broken arm just to show the Portugooses that he wouldn’t
be downed by them. But the head man at the job was the Apostle Paul ...

Peter was writing for his own comfort, for fortitude was all that was left
to him now. But his words came pretty straight to me, and I read them again
and again, for I needed the lesson. Here was I losing heart just because I
had failed in the first round and my pride had taken a knock. I felt honestly
ashamed of myself, and that made me a far happier man. There could be no
question of dropping the business, whatever its difficulties. I had a queer
religious feeling that Ivery and I had our fortunes intertwined, and that no
will of mine could keep us apart. I had faced him before the war and won; I
had faced him again and lost; the third time or the twentieth time we would
reach a final decision. The whole business had hitherto appeared to me a
trifle unreal, at any rate my own connection with it. I had been docilely
obeying orders, but my real self had been standing aside and watching my
doings with a certain aloofness. But that hour in the Tube station had
brought me into the serum, and I saw the affair not as Bullivant’s or even
Blenkiron’s, but as my own. Before I had been itching to get back to the
Front; now I wanted to get on to Ivery’s trail, though it should take me
through the nether pit. Peter was right; fortitude was the thing a man must
possess if he would save his soul.
The hours passed, and, as I expected, there came no word from
Macgillivray. I had some dinner sent up to me at seven o’clock, and about

eight I was thinking of looking up Blenkiron. Just then came a telephone
call asking me to go round to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in Queen Anne’s
Gate.
Ten minutes later I was ringing the bell, and the door was opened to me
by the same impassive butler who had admitted me on that famous night
three years before. Nothing had changed in the pleasant green-panelled hall;
the alcove was the same as when I had watched from it the departure of the
man who now called himself Ivery; the telephone book lay in the very place
from which I had snatched it in order to ring up the First Sea Lord. And in
the back room, where that night five anxious officials had conferred, I
found Sir Walter and Blenkiron.
Both looked worried, the American feverishly so. He walked up and
down the hearthrug, sucking an unlit black cigar.
“Say, Dick,” he said, “this is a bad business. It wasn’t no fault of yours.
You did fine. It was us—me and Sir Walter and Mr Macgillivray that were
the quitters.”
“Any news?” I asked.
“So far the cover’s drawn blank,” Sir Walter replied. “It was the devil’s
own work that our friend looked your way today. You’re pretty certain he
saw that you recognised him?”
“Absolutely. As sure as that he knew I recognised him in your hall three
years ago when he was swaggering as Lord Alloa.”
“No,” said Blenkiron dolefully, “that little flicker of recognition is just
the one thing you can’t be wrong about. Land alive! I wish Mr Macgillivray
would come.”
The bell rang, and the door opened, but it was not Macgillivray. It was a
young girl in a white ball-gown, with a cluster of blue cornflowers at her
breast. The sight of her fetched Sir Walter out of his chair so suddenly that
he upset his coffee cup.
“Mary, my dear, how did you manage it? I didn’t expect you till the late
train.”
“I was in London, you see, and they telephoned on your telegram. I’m
staying with Aunt Doria, and I cut her theatre party. She thinks I’m at the
Shandwick’s dance, so I needn’t go home till morning.... Good evening,
General Hannay. You got over the Hill Difficulty.”

“The next stage is the Valley of Humiliation,” I answered.
“So it would appear,” she said gravely, and sat very quietly on the edge
of Sir Walter’s chair with her small, cool hand upon his.
I had been picturing her in my recollection as very young and
glimmering, a dancing, exquisite child. But now I revised that picture. The
crystal freshness of morning was still there, but I saw how deep the waters
were. It was the clean fineness and strength of her that entranced me. I
didn’t even think of her as pretty, any more than a man thinks of the good
looks of the friend he worships.
We waited, hardly speaking a word, till Macgillivray came. The first
sight of his face told his story.
“Gone?” asked Blenkiron sharply. The man’s lethargic calm seemed to
have wholly deserted him.
“Gone,” repeated the newcomer. “We have just tracked him down. Oh, he
managed it cleverly. Never a sign of disturbance in any of his lairs. His
dinner ordered at Biggleswick and several people invited to stay with him
for the weekend—one a member of the Government. Two meetings at
which he was to speak arranged for next week. Early this afternoon he flew
over to France as a passenger in one of the new planes. He had been mixed
up with the Air Board people for months—of course as another man with
another face. Miss Lamington discovered that just too late. The bus went
out of its course and came down in Normandy. By this time our man’s in
Paris or beyond it.”
Sir Walter took off his big tortoiseshell spectacles and laid them carefully
on the table.
“Roll up the map of Europe,” he said. “This is our Austerlitz. Mary, my
dear, I am feeling very old.”
Macgillivray had the sharpened face of a bitterly disappointed man.
Blenkiron had got very red, and I could see that he was blaspheming
violently under his breath. Mary’s eyes were quiet and solemn. She kept on
patting Sir Walter’s hand. The sense of some great impending disaster hung
heavily on me, and to break the spell I asked for details.
“Tell me just the extent of the damage,” I asked. “Our neat plan for
deceiving the Boche has failed. That is bad. A dangerous spy has got

beyond our power. That’s worse. Tell me, is there still a worst? What’s the
limit of mischief he can do?”
Sir Walter had risen and joined Blenkiron on the hearthrug. His brows
were furrowed and his mouth hard as if he were suffering pain.
“There is no limit,” he said. “None that I can see, except the long-
suffering of God. You know the man as Ivery, and you knew him as that
other whom you believed to have been shot one summer morning and
decently buried. You feared the second—at least if you didn’t, I did—most
mortally. You realised that we feared Ivery, and you knew enough about
him to see his fiendish cleverness. Well, you have the two men combined in
one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I ever encountered, the
most cunning and patient and long-sighted. Combine him with the other, the
chameleon who can blend himself with his environment, and has as many
personalities as there are types and traits on the earth. What kind of enemy
is that to have to fight?”
“I admit it’s a steep proposition. But after all how much ill can he do?
There are pretty strict limits to the activity of even the cleverest spy.”
“I agree. But this man is not a spy who buys a few wretched subordinates
and steals a dozen private letters. He’s a genius who has been living as part
of our English life. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen. He’s been on terms of
intimacy with all kinds of politicians. We know that. He did it as Ivery.
They rather liked him, for he was clever and flattered them, and they told
him things. But God knows what he saw and heard in his other
personalities. For all I know he may have breakfasted at Downing Street
with letters of introduction from President Wilson, or visited the Grand
Fleet as a distinguished neutral. Then think of the women; how they talk.
We’re the leakiest society on earth, and we safeguard ourselves by keeping
dangerous people out of it. We trust to our outer barrage. But anyone who
has really slipped inside has a million chances. And this, remember, is one
man in ten millions, a man whose brain never sleeps for a moment, who is
quick to seize the slightest hint, who can piece a plan together out of a
dozen bits of gossip. It’s like—it’s as if the Chief of the Intelligence
Department were suddenly to desert to the enemy.... The ordinary spy
knows only bits of unconnected facts. This man knows our life and our way
of thinking and everything about us.”

“Well, but a treatise on English life in time of war won’t do much good to
the Boche.”
Sir Walter shook his head. “Don’t you realise the explosive stuff that is
lying about? Ivery knows enough to make the next German peace offensive
really deadly—not the blundering thing which it has been up to now, but
something which gets our weak spots on the raw. He knows enough to
wreck our campaign in the field. And the awful thing is that we don’t know
just what he knows or what he is aiming for. This war’s a packet of
surprises. Both sides are struggling for the margin, the little fraction of
advantage, and between evenly matched enemies it’s just the extra atom of
foreknowledge that tells.”
“Then we’ve got to push off and get after him,” I said cheerfully.
“But what are you going to do?” asked Macgillivray. “If it were merely a
question of destroying an organisation it might be managed, for an
organisation presents a big front. But it’s a question of destroying this one
man, and his front is a razor edge. How are you going to find him? It’s like
looking for a needle in a haystack, and such a needle! A needle which can
become a piece of straw or a tin-tack when it chooses!”
“All the same we’ve got to do it,” I said, remembering old Peter’s lesson
on fortitude, though I can’t say I was feeling very stout-hearted.
Sir Walter flung himself wearily into an arm-chair. “I wish I could be an
optimist,” he said, “but it looks as if we must own defeat. I’ve been at this
work for twenty years, and, though I’ve been often beaten, I’ve always held
certain cards in the game. Now I’m hanged if I’ve any. It looks like a
knock-out, Hannay. It’s no good deluding ourselves. We’re men enough to
look facts in the face and tell ourselves the truth. I don’t see any ray of light
in the business. We’ve missed our shot by a hairsbreadth and that’s the same
as missing by miles.”
I remember he looked at Mary as if for confirmation, but she did not
smile or nod. Her face was very grave and her eyes looked steadily at him.
Then they moved and met mine, and they seemed to give me my marching
orders.
“Sir Walter,” I said, “three years ago you and I sat in this very room. We
thought we were done to the world, as we think now. We had just that one
miserable little clue to hang on to—a dozen words scribbled in a notebook
by a dead man. You thought I was mad when I asked for Scudder’s book,

but we put our backs into the job and in twenty-four hours we had won out.
Remember that then we were fighting against time. Now we have a
reasonable amount of leisure. Then we had nothing but a sentence of
gibberish. Now we have a great body of knowledge, for Blenkiron has been
brooding over Ivery like an old hen, and he knows his ways of working and
his breed of confederate. You’ve got something to work on now. Do you
mean to tell me that, when the stakes are so big, you’re going to chuck in
your hand?”
Macgillivray raised his head. “We know a good deal about Ivery, but
Ivery’s dead. We know nothing of the man who was gloriously resurrected
this evening in Normandy.”
“Oh, yes we do. There are many faces to the man, but only one mind, and
you know plenty about that mind.”
“I wonder,” said Sir Walter. “How can you know a mind which has no
characteristics except that it is wholly and supremely competent? Mere
mental powers won’t give us a clue. We want to know the character which
is behind all the personalities. Above all we want to know its foibles. If we
had only a hint of some weakness we might make a plan.”
“Well, let’s set down all we know,” I cried, for the more I argued the
keener I grew. I told them in some detail the story of the night in the Coolin
and what I had heard there.
“There’s the two names Chelius and Bommaerts. The man spoke them in
the same breath as Elfenbein, so they must be associated with Ivery’s gang.
You’ve got to get the whole Secret Service of the Allies busy to fit a
meaning to these two words. Surely to goodness you’ll find something!
Remember those names don’t belong to the Ivery part, but to the big game
behind all the different disguises.... Then there’s the talk about the Wild
Birds and the Cage Birds. I haven’t a guess at what it means. But it refers to
some infernal gang, and among your piles of records there must be some
clue. You set the intelligence of two hemispheres busy on the job. You’ve
got all the machinery, and it’s my experience that if even one solitary man
keeps chewing on at a problem he discovers something.”
My enthusiasm was beginning to strike sparks from Macgillivray. He was
looking thoughtful now, instead of despondent.
“There might be something in that,” he said, “but it’s a far-out chance.”

“Of course it’s a far-out chance, and that’s all we’re ever going to get
from Ivery. But we’ve taken a bad chance before and won.... Then you’ve
all that you know about Ivery here. Go through his dossier with a small-
tooth comb and I’ll bet you find something to work on. Blenkiron, you’re a
man with a cool head. You admit we’ve a sporting chance.”
“Sure, Dick. He’s fixed things so that the lines are across the track, but
we’ll clear somehow. So far as John S. Blenkiron is concerned he’s got just
one thing to do in this world, and that’s to follow the yellow dog and have
him neatly and cleanly tidied up. I’ve got a stack of personal affronts to
settle. I was easy fruit and he hasn’t been very respectful. You can count me
in, Dick.”
“Then we’re agreed,” I cried. “Well, gentlemen, it’s up to you to arrange
the first stage. You’ve some pretty solid staff work to put in before you get
on the trail.”
“And you?” Sir Walter asked.
“I’m going back to my brigade. I want a rest and a change. Besides, the
first stage is office work, and I’m no use for that. But I’ll be waiting to be
summoned, and I’ll come like a shot as soon as you hoick me out. I’ve got a
presentiment about this thing. I know there’ll be a finish and that I’ll be in
at it, and I think it will be a desperate, bloody business too.”
I found Mary’s eyes fixed upon me, and in them I read the same thought.
She had not spoken a word, but had sat on the edge of a chair, swinging a
foot idly, one hand playing with an ivory fan. She had given me my old
orders and I looked to her for confirmation of the new.
“Miss Lamington, you are the wisest of the lot of us. What do you say?”
She smiled—that shy, companionable smile which I had been picturing to
myself through all the wanderings of the past month.
“I think you are right. We’ve a long way to go yet, for the Valley of
Humiliation comes only half-way in the Pilgrim’s Progress. The next stage
was Vanity Fair. I might be of some use there, don’t you think?”
I remember the way she laughed and flung back her head like a gallant
boy.
“The mistake we’ve all been making,” she said, “is that our methods are
too terre-à-terre. We’ve a poet to deal with, a great poet, and we must fling
our imaginations forward to catch up with him. His strength is his

unexpectedness, you know, and we won’t beat him by plodding only. I
believe the wildest course is the wisest, for it’s the most likely to intersect
his.... Who’s the poet among us?”
“Peter,” I said. “But he’s pinned down with a game leg in Germany. All
the same we must rope him in.”
By this time we had all cheered up, for it is wonderful what a tonic there
is in a prospect of action. The butler brought in tea, which it was Bullivant’s
habit to drink after dinner. To me it seemed fantastic to watch a slip of a girl
pouring it out for two grizzled and distinguished servants of the State and
one battered soldier—as decorous a family party as you would ask to see—
and to reflect that all four were engaged in an enterprise where men’s lives
must be reckoned at less than thistledown.
After that we went upstairs to a noble Georgian drawing-room and Mary
played to us. I don’t care two straws for music from an instrument—unless
it be the pipes or a regimental band—but I dearly love the human voice. But
she would not sing, for singing to her, I fancy, was something that did not
come at will, but flowed only like a bird’s note when the mood favoured. I
did not want it either. I was content to let “Cherry Ripe” be the one song
linked with her in my memory.
It was Macgillivray who brought us back to business.
“I wish to Heaven there was one habit of mind we could definitely attach
to him and to no one else.” (At this moment “He” had only one meaning for
us.)
“You can’t do nothing with his mind,” Blenkiron drawled. “You can’t
loose the bands of Orion, as the Bible says, or hold Leviathan with a hook. I
reckoned I could and made a mighty close study of his de-vices. But the
darned cuss wouldn’t stay put. I thought I had tied him down to the double
bluff, and he went and played the triple bluff on me. There’s nothing doing
that line.”
A memory of Peter recurred to me.
“What about the ‘blind spot’?” I asked, and I told them old Peter’s pet
theory. “Every man that God made has his weak spot somewhere, some
flaw in his character which leaves a dull patch in his brain. We’ve got to
find that out, and I think I’ve made a beginning.”
Macgillivray in a sharp voice asked my meaning.

“He’s in a funk ... of something. Oh, I don’t mean he’s a coward. A man
in his trade wants the nerve of a buffalo. He could give us all points in
courage. What I mean is that he’s not clean white all through. There are
yellow streaks somewhere in him.... I’ve given a good deal of thought to
this courage business, for I haven’t got a great deal of it myself. Not like
Peter, I mean. I’ve got heaps of soft places in me. I’m afraid of being
drowned for one thing, or of getting my eyes shot out. Ivery’s afraid of
bombs—at any rate he’s afraid of bombs in a big city. I once read a book
which talked about a thing called agoraphobia. Perhaps it’s that.... Now if
we know that weak spot it helps us in our work. There are some places he
won’t go to, and there are some things he can’t do—not well, anyway. I
reckon that’s useful.”
“Ye-es,” said Macgillivray. “Perhaps it’s not what you’d call a burning
and a shining light.”
“There’s another chink in his armour,” I went on. “There’s one person in
the world he can never practise his transformations on, and that’s me. I shall
always know him again, though he appeared as Sir Douglas Haig. I can’t
explain why, but I’ve got a feel in my bones about it. I didn’t recognise him
before, for I thought he was dead, and the nerve in my brain which should
have been looking for him wasn’t working. But I’m on my guard now, and
that nerve’s functioning at full power. Whenever and wherever and
howsoever we meet again on the face of the earth, it will be ‘Dr
Livingstone, I presume’ between him and me.”
“That is better,” said Macgillivray. “If we have any luck, Hannay, it
won’t be long till we pull you out of His Majesty’s Forces.”
Mary got up from the piano and resumed her old perch on the arm of Sir
Walter’s chair.
“There’s another blind spot which you haven’t mentioned.” It was a cool
evening, but I noticed that her cheeks had suddenly flushed.
“Last week Mr Ivery asked me to marry him,” she said.

PART II

CHAPTER XII
I Become a Combatant Once More
I returned to France on 13 September, and took over my old brigade on
the 19th of the same month. We were shoved in at the Polygon Wood on the
26th, and after four days got so badly mauled that we were brought out to
refit. On 7 October, very much to my surprise, I was given command of a
division and was on the fringes of the Ypres fighting during the first days of
November. From that front we were hurried down to Cambrai in support,
but came in only for the last backwash of that singular battle. We held a bit
of the St Quentin sector till just before Christmas, when we had a spell of
rest in billets, which endured, so far as I was concerned, till the beginning
of January, when I was sent off on the errand which I shall presently relate.
That is a brief summary of my military record in the latter part of 1917. I
am not going to enlarge on the fighting. Except for the days of the Polygon
Wood it was neither very severe nor very distinguished, and you will find it
in the history books. What I have to tell of here is my own personal quest,
for all the time I was living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses
of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the
tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept
worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of
it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the
duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever
chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp as I did during those bleak
months in Flanders and Picardy.
For I had an instinct that the thing was desperately grave, graver even
than the battle before me. Russia had gone headlong to the devil, Italy had
taken it between the eyes and was still dizzy, and our own prospects were
none too bright. The Boche was getting uppish and with some cause, and I
foresaw a rocky time ahead till America could line up with us in the field. It
was the chance for the Wild Birds, and I used to wake in a sweat to think
what devilry Ivery might be engineering. I believe I did my proper job

reasonably well, but I put in my most savage thinking over the other. I
remember how I used to go over every hour of every day from that June
night in the Cotswolds till my last meeting with Bullivant in London, trying
to find a new bearing. I should probably have got brain-fever, if I hadn’t
had to spend most of my days and nights fighting a stiffish battle with a
very watchful Hun. That kept my mind balanced, and I dare say it gave an
edge to it; for during those months I was lucky enough to hit on a better
scent than Bullivant and Macgillivray and Blenkiron, pulling a thousand
wires in their London offices.
I will set down in order of time the various incidents in this private quest
of mine. The first was my meeting with Geordie Hamilton. It happened just
after I rejoined the brigade, when I went down to have a look at our Scots
Fusilier battalion. The old brigade had been roughly handled on 31st July,
and had had to get heavy drafts to come anywhere near strength. The
Fusiliers especially were almost a new lot, formed by joining our remnants
to the remains of a battalion in another division and bringing about a dozen
officers from the training unit at home.
I inspected the men and my eyes caught sight of a familiar face. I asked
his name and the colonel got it from the sergeant-major. It was Lance-
Corporal George Hamilton.
Now I wanted a new batman, and I resolved then and there to have my
old antagonist. That afternoon he reported to me at brigade headquarters. As
I looked at that solid bandy-legged figure, standing as stiff to attention as a
tobacconist’s sign, his ugly face hewn out of brown oak, his honest, sullen
mouth, and his blue eyes staring into vacancy, I knew I had got the man I
wanted.
“Hamilton,” I said, “you and I have met before.”
“Sirr?” came the mystified answer.
“Look at me, man, and tell me if you don’t recognise me.”
He moved his eyes a fraction, in a respectful glance.
“Sirr, I don’t mind of you.”
“Well, I’ll refresh your memory. Do you remember the hall in Newmilns
Street and the meeting there? You had a fight with a man outside, and got
knocked down.”
He made no answer, but his colour deepened.

“And a fortnight later in a public-house in Muirtown you saw the same
man, and gave him the chase of his life.”
I could see his mouth set, for visions of the penalties laid down by the
King’s Regulations for striking an officer must have crossed his mind. But
he never budged.
“Look me in the face, man,” I said. “Do you remember me now?”
He did as he was bid.
“Sirr, I mind of you.”
“Have you nothing more to say?”
He cleared his throat. “Sirr, I did not ken I was hittin’ an officer.”
“Of course you didn’t. You did perfectly right, and if the war was over
and we were both free men, I would give you a chance of knocking me
down here and now. That’s got to wait. When you saw me last I was serving
my country, though you didn’t know it. We’re serving together now, and
you must get your revenge out of the Boche. I’m going to make you my
servant, for you and I have a pretty close bond between us. What do you say
to that?”
This time he looked me full in the face. His troubled eye appraised me
and was satisfied. “I’m proud to be servant to ye, sirr,” he said. Then out of
his chest came a strangled chuckle, and he forgot his discipline. “Losh, but
ye’re the great lad!” He recovered himself promptly, saluted, and marched
off.

The second episode befell during our brief rest after the Polygon Wood,
when I had ridden down the line one afternoon to see a friend in the Heavy
Artillery. I was returning in the drizzle of evening, clanking along the
greasy pavé between the sad poplars, when I struck a Labour company
repairing the ravages of a Boche strafe that morning. I wasn’t very certain
of my road and asked one of the workers. He straightened himself and
saluted, and I saw beneath a disreputable cap the features of the man who
had been with me in the Coolin crevice.
I spoke a word to his sergeant, who fell him out, and he walked a bit of
the way with me.
“Great Scot, Wake, what brought you here?” I asked.

“Same thing as brought you. This rotten war.”
I had dismounted and was walking beside him, and I noticed that his lean
face had lost its pallor and that his eyes were less hot than they used to be.
“You seem to thrive on it,” I said, for I did not know what to say. A
sudden shyness possessed me. Wake must have gone through some violent
cyclones of feeling before it came to this. He saw what I was thinking and
laughed in his sharp, ironical way.
“Don’t flatter yourself you’ve made a convert. I think as I always
thought. But I came to the conclusion that since the fates had made me a
Government servant I might as well do my work somewhere less cushioned
than a chair in the Home Office.... Oh, no, it wasn’t a matter of principle.
One kind of work’s as good as another, and I’m a better clerk than a navvy.
With me it was self-indulgence: I wanted fresh air and exercise.”
I looked at him—mud to the waist, and his hands all blistered and cut
with unaccustomed labour. I could realise what his associates must mean to
him, and how he would relish the rough tonguing of non-coms.
“You’re a confounded humbug,” I said. “Why on earth didn’t you go into
an O.T.C. and come out with a commission? They’re easy enough to get.”
“You mistake my case,” he said bitterly. “I experienced no sudden
conviction about the justice of the war. I stand where I always stood. I’m a
non-combatant, and I wanted a change of civilian work.... No, it wasn’t any
idiotic tribunal sent me here. I came of my own free will, and I’m really
rather enjoying myself.”
“It’s a rough job for a man like you,” I said.
“Not so rough as the fellows get in the trenches. I watched a battalion
marching back today and they looked like ghosts who had been years in
muddy graves. White faces and dazed eyes and leaden feet. Mine’s a cushy
job. I like it best when the weather’s foul. It cheats me into thinking I’m
doing my duty.”
I nodded towards a recent shell-hole. “Much of that sort of thing?”
“Now and then. We had a good dusting this morning. I can’t say I liked it
at the time, but I like to look back on it. A sort of moral anodyne.”
“I wonder what on earth the rest of your lot make of you?”

“They don’t make anything. I’m not remarkable for my bonhomie. They
think I’m a prig—which I am. It doesn’t amuse me to talk about beer and
women or listen to a gramophone or grouse about my last meal. But I’m
quite content, thank you. Sometimes I get a seat in a corner of a Y.M.C.A.
hut, and I’ve a book or two. My chief affliction is the padre. He was up at
Keble in my time, and, as one of my colleagues puts it, wants to be ‘too
bloody helpful’.... What are you doing, Hannay? I see you’re some kind of
general. They’re pretty thick on the ground here.”
“I’m a sort of general. Soldiering in the Salient isn’t the softest of jobs,
but I don’t believe it’s as tough as yours is for you. D’you know, Wake, I
wish I had you in my brigade. Trained or untrained, you’re a dashed stout-
hearted fellow.”
He laughed with a trifle less acidity than usual. “Almost thou persuadest
me to be combatant. No, thank you. I haven’t the courage, and besides
there’s my jolly old principles. All the same I’d like to be near you. You’re a
good chap, and I’ve had the honour to assist in your education.... I must be
getting back, or the sergeant will think I’ve bolted.”
We shook hands, and the last I saw of him was a figure saluting stiffly in
the wet twilight.

The third incident was trivial enough, though momentous in its results.
Just before I got the division I had a bout of malaria. We were in support in
the Salient, in very uncomfortable trenches behind Wieltje, and I spent three
days on my back in a dug-out. Outside was a blizzard of rain, and the water
now and then came down the stairs through the gas curtain and stood in
pools at my bed foot. It wasn’t the merriest place to convalesce in, but I was
as hard as nails at the time and by the third day I was beginning to sit up
and be bored.
I read all my English papers twice and a big stack of German ones which
I used to have sent up by a friend in the G.H.Q. Intelligence, who knew I
liked to follow what the Boche was saying. As I dozed and ruminated in the
way a man does after fever, I was struck by the tremendous display of one
advertisement in the English press. It was a thing called “Gussiter’s Deep-
breathing System,” which, according to its promoter, was a cure for every
ill, mental, moral, or physical, that man can suffer. Politicians, generals,

admirals, and music-hall artists all testified to the new life it had opened up
for them. I remember wondering what these sportsmen got for their
testimonies, and thinking I would write a spoof letter myself to old Gussiter.
Then I picked up the German papers, and suddenly my eye caught an
advertisement of the same kind in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It was not
Gussiter this time, but one Weissmann, but his game was identical—“deep
breathing”. The Hun style was different from the English—all about the
Goddess of Health, and the Nymphs of the Mountains, and two quotations
from Schiller. But the principle was the same.
That made me ponder a little, and I went carefully through the whole
batch. I found the advertisement in the Frankfurter and in one or two rather
obscure Volkstimmes and Volkszeitungs. I found it too in Der Grosse Krieg,
the official German propagandist picture-paper. They were the same all but
one, and that one had a bold variation, for it contained four of the sentences
used in the ordinary English advertisement.
This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to Macgillivray
pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the enemy, and
advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter’s financial backing. I thought he
might find a Hun syndicate behind him. And then I had another notion,
which made me rewrite my letter.
I went through the papers again. The English ones which contained the
advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the kind of thing no
censorship would object to leaving the country. I had before me a small
sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not the advertisement. That might be
for reasons of circulation, or it might not. The German papers were either
Radical or Socialist publications, just the opposite of the English lot, except
the Grosse Krieg. Now we have a free press, and Germany has, strictly
speaking, none. All her journalistic indiscretions are calculated. Therefore
the Boche has no objection to his rags getting to enemy countries. He wants
it. He likes to see them quoted in columns headed “Through German
Glasses”, and made the text of articles showing what a good democrat he is
becoming.
As I puzzled over the subject, certain conclusions began to form in my
mind. The four identical sentences seemed to hint that “Deep Breathing’
had Boche affiliations. Here was a chance of communicating with the
enemy which would defy the argus-eyed gentlemen who examine the mails.

What was to hinder Mr A at one end writing an advertisement with a good
cipher in it, and the paper containing it getting into Germany by Holland in
three days? Herr B at the other end replied in the Frankfurter, and a few
days later shrewd editors and acute Intelligence officers—and Mr A—were
reading it in London, though only Mr A knew what it really meant.
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 recognised 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-à-
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 ration
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 château. 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 Château 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 whurt,
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
Château.
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 Château 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
civilised 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 châteaux 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 Château, 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 Château 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 XIII
The Adventure of the Picardy Château
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 Château. 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-prefet 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 Château.
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 Château 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 Château, 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.
There was little traffic in the hamlet of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne that night.
Few cars were on the road, and the M.T. detachment, judging from the din,
seemed to be busy on a private spree. It was about nine o’clock when we
turned into the side road, and at the entrance to it I saw a solid figure in
khaki mounting guard beside two bicycles. Something in the man’s gesture,
as he saluted, struck me as familiar, but I had no time to hunt for casual

memories. I left the car just short of the bridge, and took the road which
would bring me to the terraced front of the house.
Once I turned the corner of the Château and saw the long ghostly façade
white in the moonlight, I felt less confident. The eeriness of the place smote
me. In that still, snowy world it loomed up immense and mysterious with its
rows of shuttered windows, each with that air which empty houses have of
concealing some wild story. I longed to have old Peter with me, for he was
the man for this kind of escapade. I had heard that he had been removed to
Switzerland and I pictured him now in some mountain village where the
snow lay deep. I would have given anything to have had Peter with a whole
leg by my side.
I stepped on the terrace and listened. There was not a sound in the world,
not even the distant rumble of a cart. The pile towered above me like a
mausoleum, and I reflected that it must take some nerve to burgle an empty
house. It would be good enough fun to break into a bustling dwelling and
pinch the plate when the folk were at dinner, but to burgle emptiness and
silence meant a fight with the terrors in a man’s soul. It was worse in my
case, for I wasn’t cheered with prospects of loot. I wanted to get inside
chiefly to soothe my conscience.
I hadn’t much doubt I would find a way, for three years of war and the
frequent presence of untidy headquarters’ staffs have loosened the joints of
most Picardy houses. There’s generally a window that doesn’t latch or a
door that doesn’t bar. But I tried window after window on the terrace
without result. The heavy green sun-shutters were down over each, and
when I broke the hinges of one there was a long bar within to hold it firm. I
was beginning to think of shinning up a rain-pipe and trying the second
floor, when a shutter I had laid hold on swung back in my hand. It had been
left unfastened, and, kicking the snow from my boots, I entered a room.
A gleam of moonlight followed me and I saw I was in a big salon with a
polished wood floor and dark lumps of furniture swathed in sheets. I clicked
the bulb at my belt, and the little circle of light showed a place which had
not been dwelt in for years. At the far end was another door, and as I tiptoed
towards it something caught my eye on the parquet. It was a piece of fresh
snow like that which clumps on the heel of a boot. I had not brought it
there. Some other visitor had passed this way, and not long before me.

Very gently I opened the door and slipped in. In front of me was a pile of
furniture which made a kind of screen, and behind that I halted and listened.
There was somebody in the room. I heard the sound of human breathing
and soft movements; the man, whoever he was, was at the far end from me,
and though there was a dim glow of Moon through a broken shutter I could
see nothing of what he was after. I was beginning to enjoy myself now. I
knew of his presence and he did not know of mine, and that is the sport of
stalking.
An unwary movement of my hand caused the screen to creak. Instantly
the movements ceased and there was utter silence. I held my breath, and
after a second or two the tiny sounds began again. I had a feeling, though
my eyes could not assure me, that the man before me was at work, and was
using a very small shaded torch. There was just the faintest moving
shimmer on the wall beyond, though that might come from the crack of
moonlight.
Apparently he was reassured, for his movements became more distinct.
There was a jar as if a table had been pushed back. Once more there was
silence, and I heard only the intake of breath. I have very quick ears, and to
me it sounded as if the man was rattled. The breathing was quick and
anxious.
Suddenly it changed and became the ghost of a whistle—the kind of
sound one makes with the lips and teeth without ever letting the tune break
out clear. We all do it when we are preoccupied with something—shaving,
or writing letters, or reading the newspaper. But I did not think my man was
preoccupied. He was whistling to quiet fluttering nerves.
Then I caught the air. It was “Cherry Ripe”.
In a moment, from being hugely at my ease, I became the nervous one. I
had been playing peep-bo with the unseen, and the tables were turned. My
heart beat against my ribs like a hammer. I shuffled my feet, and again there
fell the tense silence.
“Mary,” I said—and the word seemed to explode like a bomb in the
stillness—“Mary! It’s me—Dick Hannay.”
There was no answer but a sob and the sound of a timid step.
I took four paces into the darkness and caught in my arms a trembling
girl....

Often in the last months I had pictured the kind of scene which would be
the culminating point of my life. When our work was over and war had
been forgotten, somewhere—perhaps in a green Cotswold meadow or in a
room of an old manor—I would talk with Mary. By that time we should
know each other well and I would have lost my shyness. I would try to tell
her that I loved her, but whenever I thought of what I should say my heart
sank, for I knew I would make a fool of myself. You can’t live my kind of
life for forty years wholly among men and be of any use at pretty speeches
to women. I knew I should stutter and blunder, and I used despairingly to
invent impossible situations where I might make my love plain to her
without words by some piece of melodramatic sacrifice.
But the kind Fates had saved me the trouble. Without a syllable save
Christian names stammered in that eerie darkness we had come to complete
understanding. The fairies had been at work unseen, and the thoughts of
each of us had been moving towards the other, till love had germinated like
a seed in the dark. As I held her in my arms I stroked her hair and
murmured things which seemed to spring out of some ancestral memory.
Certainly my tongue had never used them before, nor my mind imagined
them.... By and by she slipped her arms round my neck and with a half sob
strained towards me. She was still trembling.
“Dick,” she said, and to hear that name on her lips was the sweetest thing
I had ever known. “Dick, is it really you? Tell me I’m not dreaming.”
“It’s me, sure enough, Mary dear. And now I have found you I will never
let you go again. But, my precious child, how on earth did you get here?”
She disengaged herself and let her little electric torch wander over my
rough habiliments.
“You look a tremendous warrior, Dick. I have never seen you like this
before. I was in Doubting Castle and very much afraid of Giant Despair, till
you came.”
“I think I call it the Interpreter’s House,” I said.
“It’s the house of somebody we both know,” she went on. “He calls
himself Bommaerts here. That was one of the two names, you remember. I
have seen him since in Paris. Oh, it is a long story and you shall hear it all
soon. I knew he came here sometimes, so I came here too. I have been
nursing for the last fortnight at the Douvecourt Hospital only four miles
away.”

“But what brought you alone at night?”
“Madness, I think. Vanity, too. You see I had found out a good deal, and I
wanted to find out the one vital thing which had puzzled Mr Blenkiron. I
told myself it was foolish, but I couldn’t keep away. And then my courage
broke down, and before you came I would have screamed at the sound of a
mouse. If I hadn’t whistled I would have cried.”
“But why alone and at this hour?”
“I couldn’t get off in the day. And it was safest to come alone. You see he
is in love with me, and when he heard I was coming to Douvecourt forgot
his caution and proposed to meet me here. He said he was going on a long
journey and wanted to say goodbye. If he had found me alone—well, he
would have said goodbye. If there had been anyone with me, he would have
suspected, and he mustn’t suspect me. Mr Blenkiron says that would be
fatal to his great plan. He believes I am like my aunts, and that I think him
an apostle of peace working by his own methods against the stupidity and
wickedness of all the Governments. He talks more bitterly about Germany
than about England. He had told me how he had to disguise himself and
play many parts on his mission, and of course I have applauded him. Oh, I
have had a difficult autumn.”
“Mary,” I cried, “tell me you hate him.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I do not hate him. I am keeping that for later. I
fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly I will
hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an unclean
thing. But till then I won’t waste energy on hate. We want to hoard every
atom of our strength for the work of beating him.”
She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at her.
She was in nurses’ outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed tired.
The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out all
recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a would-be lover
of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had rented his house
for the partridge-shooting. “And you, Dick,” she asked; “is it part of a
general’s duties to pay visits at night to empty houses?”
“I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track from
another angle, but that story must wait.”
“You observe that he has been here today?”

She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a space
on its surface cleared from dust. “In a place like this the dust would settle
again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should say he has been here
just after luncheon.”
“Great Scott!” I cried, “what a close shave! I’m in the mood at this
moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his
lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.”
She shook her head. “Mr Blenkiron—he’s in Paris too—wouldn’t hear of
it. He hasn’t just figured the thing out yet, he says. We’ve identified one of
your names, but we’re still in doubt about Chelius.”
“Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete
before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?”
“Your guess about the ‘Deep-breathing’ advertisement was very clever,
Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr Blenkiron to
tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something of the doings of
someone who may be Chelius, but we can’t link them with Ivery. We know
that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link Bommaerts with Chelius.
That’s why I came here. I was trying to burgle this escritoire in an amateur
way. It’s a bad piece of fake Empire and deserves smashing.”
I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and
with some difficulty I clambered down from the exultant heights. The
intoxication of the thing was on me—the winter night, the circle of light in
that dreary room, the sudden coming together of two souls from the ends of
the earth, the realisation of my wildest hopes, the gilding and glorifying of
all the future. But she had always twice as much wisdom as me, and we
were in the midst of a campaign which had no use for day-dreaming. I
turned my attention to the desk.
It was a flat table with drawers, and at the back a half-circle of more
drawers with a central cupboard. I tilted it up and most of the drawers slid
out, empty of anything but dust. I forced two open with my knife and they
held empty cigar boxes. Only the cupboard remained, and that appeared to
be locked. I wedged a key from my pocket into its keyhole, but the thing
would not budge.
“It’s no good,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave anything he valued in a place
like this. That sort of fellow doesn’t take risks. If he wanted to hide

something there are a hundred holes in this Château which would puzzle the
best detective.”
“Can’t you open it?” she asked. “I’ve a fancy about that table. He was
sitting here this afternoon and he may be coming back.”
I solved the problem by turning up the escritoire and putting my knee
through the cupboard door. Out of it tumbled a little dark-green attache
case.
“This is getting solemn,” said Mary. “Is it locked?”
It was, but I took my knife and cut the lock out and spilled the contents
on the table. There were some papers, a newspaper or two, and a small bag
tied with black cord. The last I opened, while Mary looked over my
shoulder. It contained a fine yellowish powder.
“Stand back,” I said harshly. “For God’s sake, stand back and don’t
breathe.”
With trembling hands I tied up the bag again, rolled it in a newspaper,
and stuffed it into my pocket. For I remembered a day near Peronne when a
Boche plane had come over in the night and had dropped little bags like
this. Happily they were all collected, and the men who found them were
wise and took them off to the nearest laboratory. They proved to be full of
anthrax germs....
I remembered how Eaucourt Sainte-Anne stood at the junction of a dozen
roads where all day long troops passed to and from the lines. From such a
vantage ground an enemy could wreck the health of an army....
I remembered the woman I had seen in the courtyard of this house in the
foggy dusk, and I knew now why she had worn a gas-mask.
This discovery gave me a horrid shock. I was brought down with a crash
from my high sentiment to something earthly and devilish. I was fairly well
used to Boche filthiness, but this seemed too grim a piece of the utterly
damnable. I wanted to have Ivery by the throat and force the stuff into his
body, and watch him decay slowly into the horror he had contrived for
honest men.
“Let’s get out of this infernal place,” I said.
But Mary was not listening. She had picked up one of the newspapers
and was gloating over it. I looked and saw that it was open at an
advertisement of Weissmann’s “Deep-breathing” system.

“Oh, look, Dick,” she cried breathlessly.
The column of type had little dots made by a red pencil below certain
words.
“It’s it,” she whispered, “it’s the cipher—I’m almost sure it’s the cipher!”
“Well, he’d be likely to know it if anyone did.”
“But don’t you see it’s the cipher which Chelius uses—the man in
Switzerland? Oh, I can’t explain now, for it’s very long, but I think—I think
—I have found out what we have all been wanting. Chelius....”
“Whisht!” I said. “What’s that?”
There was a queer sound from the out-of-doors as if a sudden wind had
risen in the still night.
“It’s only a car on the main road,” said Mary.
“How did you get in?” I asked.
“By the broken window in the next room. I cycled out here one morning,
and walked round the place and found the broken catch.”
“Perhaps it is left open on purpose. That may be the way M. Bommaerts
visits his country home.... Let’s get off, Mary, for this place has a curse on
it. It deserves fire from heaven.”
I slipped the contents of the attache case into my pockets. “I’m going to
drive you back,” I said. “I’ve got a car out there.”
“Then you must take my bicycle and my servant too. He’s an old friend
of yours—one Andrew Amos.”
“Now how on earth did Andrew get over here?”
“He’s one of us,” said Mary, laughing at my surprise. “A most useful
member of our party, at present disguised as an infirmier in Lady
Manorwater’s Hospital at Douvecourt. He is learning French, and....”
“Hush!” I whispered. “There’s someone in the next room.”
I swept her behind a stack of furniture, with my eyes glued on a crack of
light below the door. The handle turned and the shadows raced before a big
electric lamp of the kind they have in stables. I could not see the bearer, but
I guessed it was the old woman.
There was a man behind her. A brisk step sounded on the parquet, and a
figure brushed past her. It wore the horizon-blue of a French officer, very

smart, with those French riding-boots that show the shape of the leg, and a
handsome fur-lined pelisse. I would have called him a young man, not more
than thirty-five. The face was brown and clean-shaven, the eyes bright and
masterful.... Yet he did not deceive me. I had not boasted idly to Sir Walter
when I said that there was one man alive who could never again be
mistaken by me.
I had my hand on my pistol, as I motioned Mary farther back into the
shadows. For a second I was about to shoot. I had a perfect mark and could
have put a bullet through his brain with utter certitude. I think if I had been
alone I might have fired. Perhaps not. Anyhow now I could not do it. It
seemed like potting at a sitting rabbit. I was obliged, though he was my
worst enemy, to give him a chance, while all the while my sober senses kept
calling me a fool.
I stepped into the light.
“Hullo, Mr Ivery,” I said. “This is an odd place to meet again!”
In his amazement he fell back a step, while his hungry eyes took in my
face. There was no mistake about the recognition. I saw something I had
seen once before in him, and that was fear. Out went the light and he sprang
for the door.
I fired in the dark, but the shot must have been too high. In the same
instant I heard him slip on the smooth parquet and the tinkle of glass as the
broken window swung open. Hastily I reflected that his car must be at the
moat end of the terrace, and that therefore to reach it he must pass outside
this very room. Seizing the damaged escritoire, I used it as a ram, and
charged the window nearest me. The panes and shutters went with a crash,
for I had driven the thing out of its rotten frame. The next second I was on
the moonlit snow.
I got a shot at him as he went over the terrace, and again I went wide. I
never was at my best with a pistol. Still I reckoned I had got him, for the car
which was waiting below must come back by the moat to reach the
highroad. But I had forgotten the great closed park gates. Somehow or other
they must have been opened, for as soon as the car started it headed straight
for the grand avenue. I tried a couple of long-range shots after it, and one
must have damaged either Ivery or his chauffeur, for there came back a cry
of pain.

I turned in deep chagrin to find Mary beside me. She was bubbling with
laughter.
“Were you ever a cinema actor, Dick? The last two minutes have been a
really high-class performance. ‘Featuring Mary Lamington.’ How does the
jargon go?”
“I could have got him when he first entered,” I said ruefully.
“I know,” she said in a graver tone. “Only of course you couldn’t....
Besides, Mr Blenkiron doesn’t want it—yet.”
She put her hand on my arm. “Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t written it
should happen that way. It would have been too easy. We have a long road
to travel yet before we clip the wings of the Wild Birds.”
“Look,” I cried. “The fire from heaven!”
Red tongues of flame were shooting up from the out-buildings at the
farther end, the place where I had first seen the woman. Some agreed plan
must have been acted on, and Ivery was destroying all traces of his
infamous yellow powder. Even now the concierge with her odds and ends
of belongings would be slipping out to some refuge in the village.
In the still dry night the flames rose, for the place must have been made
ready for a rapid burning. As I hurried Mary round the moat I could see that
part of the main building had caught fire. The hamlet was awakened, and
before we reached the corner of the highroad sleepy British soldiers were
hurrying towards the scene, and the Town Major was mustering the fire
brigade. I knew that Ivery had laid his plans well, and that they hadn’t a
chance—that long before dawn the Château of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne would
be a heap of ashes and that in a day or two the lawyers of the aged Marquise
at Biarritz would be wrangling with the insurance company.
At the corner stood Amos beside two bicycles, solid as a graven image.
He recognised me with a gap-toothed grin.
“It’s a cauld night, General, but the home fires keep burnin’. I havena
seen such a cheery lowe since Dickson’s mill at Gawly.”
We packed, bicycles and all, into my car with Amos wedged in the
narrow seat beside Hamilton. Recognizing a fellow countryman, he gave
thanks for the lift in the broadest Doric. “For,” said he, “I’m not what you
would call a practised hand wi’ a velocipede, and my feet are dinnled wi’
standin’ in the snaw.”

As for me, the miles to Douvecourt passed as in a blissful moment of
time. I wrapped Mary in a fur rug, and after that we did not speak a word. I
had come suddenly into a great possession and was dazed with the joy of it.

CHAPTER XIV
Mr Blenkiron Discourses on Love and War
Three days later I got my orders to report at Paris for special service.
They came none too soon, for I chafed at each hour’s delay. Every thought
in my head was directed to the game which we were playing against Ivery.
He was the big enemy, compared to whom the ordinary Boche in the
trenches was innocent and friendly. I had almost lost interest in my division,
for I knew that for me the real battle-front was not in Picardy, and that my
job was not so easy as holding a length of line. Also I longed to be at the
same work as Mary.
I remember waking up in billets the morning after the night at the
Château with the feeling that I had become extraordinarily rich. I felt very
humble, too, and very kindly towards all the world—even to the Boche,
though I can’t say I had ever hated him very wildly. You find hate more
among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men. I
wanted to be quiet and alone to think, and since that was impossible I went
about my work in a happy abstraction. I tried not to look ahead, but only to
live in the present, remembering that a war was on, and that there was
desperate and dangerous business before me, and that my hopes hung on a
slender thread. Yet for all that I had sometimes to let my fancies go free,
and revel in delicious dreams.
But there was one thought that always brought me back to hard ground,
and that was Ivery. I do not think I hated anybody in the world but him. It
was his relation to Mary that stung me. He had the insolence with all his
toad-like past to make love to that clean and radiant girl. I felt that he and I
stood as mortal antagonists, and the thought pleased me, for it helped me to
put some honest detestation into my job. Also I was going to win. Twice I
had failed, but the third time I should succeed. It had been like ranging
shots for a gun—first short, second over, and I vowed that the third should
be dead on the mark.

I was summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour’s talk with the
greatest British commander. I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that
steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the
biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the
whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the
combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature,
that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was. I wanted to go on
serving under that man. I realised suddenly how much I loved my work, and
when I got back to my quarters that night and saw my men swinging in
from a route march I could have howled like a dog at leaving them. Though
I say it who shouldn’t, there wasn’t a better division in the Army.
One morning a few days later I picked up Mary in Amiens. I always liked
the place, for after the dirt of the Somme it was a comfort to go there for a
bath and a square meal, and it had the noblest church that the hand of man
ever built for God. It was a clear morning when we started from the
boulevard beside the railway station; and the air smelt of washed streets and
fresh coffee, and women were going marketing and the little trams ran
clanking by, just as in any other city far from the sound of guns. There was
very little khaki or horizon-blue about, and I remember thinking how
completely Amiens had got out of the war-zone. Two months later it was a
different story.
To the end I shall count that day as one of the happiest in my life. Spring
was in the air, though the trees and fields had still their winter colouring. A
thousand good fresh scents came out of the earth, and the larks were busy
over the new furrows. I remember that we ran up a little glen, where a
stream spread into pools among sallows, and the roadside trees were heavy
with mistletoe. On the tableland beyond the Somme valley the sun shone
like April. At Beauvais we lunched badly in an inn—badly as to food, but
there was an excellent Burgundy at two francs a bottle. Then we slipped
down through little flat-chested townships to the Seine, and in the late
afternoon passed through St Germains forest. The wide green spaces among
the trees set my fancy dwelling on that divine English countryside where
Mary and I would one day make our home. She had been in high spirits all
the journey, but when I spoke of the Cotswolds her face grew grave.
“Don’t let us speak of it, Dick,” she said. “It’s too happy a thing and I
feel as if it would wither if we touched it. I don’t let myself think of peace

and home, for it makes me too homesick.... I think we shall get there some
day, you and I ... but it’s a long road to the Delectable Mountains, and
Faithful, you know, has to die first.... There is a price to be paid.”
The words sobered me.
“Who is our Faithful?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But he was the best of the Pilgrims.”
Then, as if a veil had lifted, her mood changed, and when we came
through the suburbs of Paris and swung down the Champs Élysées she was
in a holiday humour. The lights were twinkling in the blue January dusk,
and the warm breath of the city came to greet us. I knew little of the place,
for I had visited it once only on a four days’ Paris leave, but it had seemed
to me then the most habitable of cities, and now, coming from the battle-
field with Mary by my side, it was like the happy ending of a dream.
I left her at her cousin’s house near the Rue St Honoré, and deposited
myself, according to instructions, at the Hôtel Louis Quinze. There I
wallowed in a hot bath, and got into the civilian clothes which had been
sent on from London. They made me feel that I had taken leave of my
division for good and all this time. Blenkiron had a private room, where we
were to dine; and a more wonderful litter of books and cigar boxes I have
never seen, for he hadn’t a notion of tidiness. I could hear him grunting at
his toilet in the adjacent bedroom, and I noticed that the table was laid for
three. I went downstairs to get a paper, and on the way ran into Launcelot
Wake.
He was no longer a private in a Labour Battalion. Evening clothes
showed beneath his overcoat. “Hullo, Wake, are you in this push too?”
“I suppose so,” he said, and his manner was not cordial. “Anyhow I was
ordered down here. My business is to do as I am told.”
“Coming to dine?” I asked.
“No. I’m dining with some friends at the Crillon.”
Then he looked me in the face, and his eyes were hot as I first
remembered them. “I hear I’ve to congratulate you, Hannay,” and he held
out a limp hand.
I never felt more antagonism in a human being.
“You don’t like it?” I said, for I guessed what he meant.

“How on earth can I like it?” he cried angrily. “Good Lord, man, you’ll
murder her soul. You an ordinary, stupid, successful fellow and she—she’s
the most precious thing God ever made. You can never understand a
fraction of her preciousness, but you’ll clip her wings all right. She can
never fly now....”
He poured out this hysterical stuff to me at the foot of the staircase within
hearing of an elderly French widow with a poodle. I had no impulse to be
angry, for I was far too happy.
“Don’t, Wake,” I said. “We’re all too close together to quarrel. I’m not fit
to black Mary’s shoes. You can’t put me too low or her too high. But I’ve at
least the sense to know it. You couldn’t want me to be humbler than I felt.”
He shrugged his shoulders, as he went out to the street. “Your infernal
magnanimity would break any man’s temper.”
I went upstairs to find Blenkiron, washed and shaven, admiring a pair of
bright patent-leather shoes.
“Why, Dick, I’ve been wearying bad to see you. I was nervous you
would be blown to glory, for I’ve been reading awful things about your
battles in the noospapers. The war correspondents worry me so I can’t take
breakfast.”
He mixed cocktails and clinked his glass on mine. “Here’s to the young
lady. I was trying to write her a pretty little sonnet, but the darned rhymes
wouldn’t fit. I’ve gotten a heap of things to say to you when we’ve finished
dinner.”
Mary came in, her cheeks bright from the weather, and Blenkiron
promptly fell abashed. But she had a way to meet his shyness, for, when he
began an embarrassed speech of good wishes, she put her arms round his
neck and kissed him. Oddly enough, that set him completely at his ease.
It was pleasant to eat off linen and china again, pleasant to see old
Blenkiron’s benignant face and the way he tucked into his food, but it was
delicious for me to sit at a meal with Mary across the table. It made me feel
that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word. To
Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but mischievous daughter,
while the desperately refined manners that afflicted him whenever women
were concerned mellowed into something like his everyday self. They did
most of the talking, and I remember he fetched from some mysterious

hiding-place a great box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in
Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children. I didn’t want to talk, for it
was pure happiness for me to look on. I loved to watch her, when the
servants had gone, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp
gold hair a little rumpled, cracking walnuts with gusto, like some child who
has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and means to make the
most of it.
With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business.
“You want to know about the staff-work we’ve been busy on at home.
Well, it’s finished now, thanks to you, Dick. We weren’t getting on very fast
till you took to peroosing the press on your sick-bed and dropped us that
hint about the ‘Deep-breathing’ ads.”
“Then there was something in it?” I asked.
“There was black hell in it. There wasn’t any Gussiter, but there was a
mighty fine little syndicate of crooks with old man Gresson at the back of
them. First thing, I started out to get the cipher. It took some looking for,
but there’s no cipher on earth can’t be got hold of somehow if you know it’s
there, and in this case we were helped a lot by the return messages in the
German papers. It was bad stuff when we read it, and explained the darned
leakages in important noos we’ve been up against. At first I figured to keep
the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron
as president. But it wouldn’t do, for at the first hint of tampering with their
communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals. So
we tenderly plucked the flowers.”
“Gresson, too?” I asked.
He nodded. “I guess your seafaring companion’s now under the sod. We
had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over.... But that was
the least of it. For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line on Ivery.”
I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story. He had about a dozen
cross-bearings proving that the organisation of the “Deep-breathing” game
had its headquarters in Switzerland. He suspected Ivery from the first, but
the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working from the other
end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried
to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business. He went to Berne and made a
conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks. He called himself an
agent of the American propaganda there, and took some advertising space

in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the
result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country
if he tampered that amount with their neutrality. He also wrote a lot of rot in
the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he
was a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by “inspirational
advertisement of pure-minded war aims”. All this was in keeping with his
English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.
But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents
working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius. That
was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the Wild Birds.
However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of the “Deep-
breathing’ business. That took some doing and cost a lot of money. His best
people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a milliner’s shop in Lyons
and a concierge in a big hotel at St Moritz. His most important discovery
was that there was a second cipher in the return messages sent from
Switzerland, different from the one that the Gussiter lot used in England. He
got this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn’t make anything out of
it. He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between
the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it....
But he was still a long way from finding out anything that mattered.
Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery. I
must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to him
to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got an
answer. She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens,
and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezières. One day he came to
see her. That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the
whole secret police of France were after him and they never got within sight
or sound. Yet here he was coming openly in the afternoon to have tea with
an English girl. It showed another thing, which made me blaspheme. A man
so resolute and single-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love
to take a risk like that.
He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a
transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G. He was on the staff right
enough too. Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down.
He was quite frank with her, and she with him. They are both peacemakers,
ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness

knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think
of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of
Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness.
He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame
de Mezières. They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with
a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon. He spoke of
his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he became
the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness. Presently the
pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments with Bullivant on
the long-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady
Manorwater’s hospital. She went there to escape from him, but mainly, I
think, to have a look—trembling in every limb, mind you—at the Château
of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.
I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was. No man
ever born could have done that kind of thing. It wasn’t recklessness. It was
sheer calculating courage.
Then Blenkiron took up the tale. The newspaper we found that Christmas
Eve in the Château was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had
pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild
Birds. That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business. But
Blenkiron made doubly sure.
“I considered the time had come,” he said, “to pay high for valuable
noos, so I sold the enemy a very pretty de-vice. If you ever gave your mind
to ciphers and illicit correspondence, Dick, you would know that the one
kind of document you can’t write on in invisible ink is a coated paper, the
kind they use in the weeklies to print photographs of leading actresses and
the stately homes of England. Anything wet that touches it corrugates the
surface a little, and you can tell with a microscope if someone’s been
playing at it. Well, we had the good fortune to discover just how to get over
that little difficulty—how to write on glazed paper with a quill so as the
cutest analyst couldn’t spot it, and likewise how to detect the writing. I
decided to sacrifice that invention, casting my bread upon the waters and
looking for a good-sized bakery in return.... I had it sold to the enemy. The
job wanted delicate handling, but the tenth man from me—he was an
Austrian Jew—did the deal and scooped fifty thousand dollars out of it.

Then I lay low to watch how my friend would use the de-vice, and I didn’t
wait long.”
He took from his pocket a folded sheet of L’Illustration. Over a
photogravure plate ran some words in a large sprawling hand, as if written
with a brush.
“That page when I got it yesterday,” he said, “was an unassuming picture
of General Pétain presenting military medals. There wasn’t a scratch or a
ripple on its surface. But I got busy with it, and see there!”
He pointed out two names. The writing was a set of key-words we did
not know, but two names stood out which I knew too well. They were
“Bommaerts” and “Chelius”.
“My God!” I cried, “that’s uncanny. It only shows that if you chew long
enough—-”
“Dick,” said Mary, “you mustn’t say that again. At the best it’s an ugly
metaphor, and you’re making it a platitude.”
“Who is Ivery anyhow?” I asked. “Do you know more about him than we
knew in the summer? Mary, what did Bommaerts pretend to be?”
“An Englishman.” Mary spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if it
were a perfectly usual thing to be made love to by a spy, and that rather
soothed my annoyance. “When he asked me to marry him he proposed to
take me to a country-house in Devonshire. I rather think, too, he had a place
in Scotland. But of course he’s a German.”
“Ye-es,” said Blenkiron slowly, “I’ve got on to his record, and it isn’t a
pretty story. It’s taken some working out, but I’ve got all the links tested
now.... He’s a Boche and a large-sized nobleman in his own state. Did you
ever hear of the Graf von Schwabing?”
I shook my head.
“I think I have heard Uncle Charlie speak of him,” said Mary, wrinkling
her brows. “He used to hunt with the Pytchley.”
“That’s the man. But he hasn’t troubled the Pytchley for the last eight
years. There was a time when he was the last thing in smartness in the
German court—officer in the Guards, ancient family, rich, darned clever—
all the fixings. Kaiser liked him, and it’s easy to see why. I guess a man who
had as many personalities as the Graf was amusing after-dinner company.
Specially among the Germans, who in my experience don’t excel in the

lighter vein. Anyway, he was William’s white-headed boy, and there wasn’t
a mother with a daughter who wasn’t out gunning for Otto von Schwabing.
He was about as popular in London and Noo York—and in Paris, too. Ask
Sir Walter about him, Dick. He says he had twice the brains of Kuhlmann,
and better manners than the Austrian fellow he used to yarn about.... Well,
one day there came an almighty court scandal, and the bottom dropped out
of the Graf’s world. It was a pretty beastly story, and I don’t gather that
Schwabing was as deep in it as some others. But the trouble was that those
others had to be shielded at all costs, and Schwabing was made the
scapegoat. His name came out in the papers and he had to go .”
“What was the case called?” I asked.
Blenkiron mentioned a name, and I knew why the word Schwabing was
familiar. I had read the story long ago in Rhodesia.
“It was some smash,” Blenkiron went on. “He was drummed out of the
Guards, out of the clubs, out of the country.... Now, how would you have
felt, Dick, if you had been the Graf? Your life and work and happiness
crossed out, and all to save a mangy princeling. ‘Bitter as hell,’ you say.
Hungering for a chance to put it across the lot that had outed you? You
wouldn’t rest till you had William sobbing on his knees asking your pardon,
and you not thinking of granting it? That’s the way you’d feel, but that
wasn’t the Graf’s way, and what’s more it isn’t the German way. He went
into exile hating humanity, and with a heart all poison and snakes, but
itching to get back. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because his kind of German
hasn’t got any other home on this earth. Oh, yes, I know there’s stacks of
good old Teutons come and squat in our little country and turn into fine
Americans. You can do a lot with them if you catch them young and teach
them the Declaration of Independence and make them study our Sunday
papers. But you can’t deny there’s something comic in the rough about all
Germans, before you’ve civilised them. They’re a pecooliar people, a
darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn’t staff all the menial and indecent
occupations on the globe. But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in
the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee. Your German aristocracy
can’t consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand.
They swagger and bluff about the world, but they know very well that the
world’s sniggering at them. They’re like a boss from Salt Creek Gully
who’s made his pile and bought a dress suit and dropped into a Newport

evening party. They don’t know where to put their hands or how to keep
their feet still.... Your copper-bottomed English nobleman has got to keep
jogging himself to treat them as equals instead of sending them down to the
servants’ hall. Their fine fixings are just the high light that reveals the
everlasting jay. They can’t be gentlemen, because they aren’t sure of
themselves. The world laughs at them, and they know it and it riles them
like hell.... That’s why when a Graf is booted out of the Fatherland, he’s got
to creep back somehow or be a wandering Jew for the rest of time.”
Blenkiron lit another cigar and fixed me with his steady, ruminating eye.
“For eight years the man has slaved, body and soul, for the men who
degraded him. He’s earned his restoration and I daresay he’s got it in his
pocket. If merit was rewarded he should be covered with Iron Crosses and
Red Eagles.... He had a pretty good hand to start out with. He knew other
countries and he was a dandy at languages. More, he had an uncommon gift
for living a part. That is real genius, Dick, however much it gets up against
us. Best of all he had a first-class outfit of brains. I can’t say I ever struck a
better, and I’ve come across some bright citizens in my time.... And now
he’s going to win out, unless we get mighty busy.”
There was a knock at the door and the solid figure of Andrew Amos
revealed itself.
“It’s time ye was home, Miss Mary. It chappit half-eleven as I came up
the stairs. It’s comin’ on to rain, so I’ve brought an umbrelly.”
“One word,” I said. “How old is the man?”
“Just gone thirty-six,” Blenkiron replied.
I turned to Mary, who nodded. “Younger than you, Dick,” she said
wickedly as she got into her big Jaeger coat.
“I’m going to see you home,” I said.
“Not allowed. You’ve had quite enough of my society for one day.
Andrew’s on escort duty tonight.”
Blenkiron looked after her as the door closed.
“I reckon you’ve got the best girl in the world.”
“Ivery thinks the same,” I said grimly, for my detestation of the man who
had made love to Mary fairly choked me.

“You can see why. Here’s this degenerate coming out of his rotten class,
all pampered and petted and satiated with the easy pleasures of life. He has
seen nothing of women except the bad kind and the overfed specimens of
his own country. I hate being impolite about females, but I’ve always
considered the German variety uncommon like cows. He has had desperate
years of intrigue and danger, and consorting with every kind of scallawag.
Remember, he’s a big man and a poet, with a brain and an imagination that
takes every grade without changing gears. Suddenly he meets something
that is as fresh and lovely as a spring flower, and has wits too, and the
steeliest courage, and yet is all youth and gaiety. It’s a new experience for
him, a kind of revelation, and he’s big enough to value her as she should be
valued.... No, Dick, I can understand you getting cross, but I reckon it an
item to the man’s credit.”
“It’s his blind spot all the same,” I said.
“His blind spot,” Blenkiron repeated solemnly, “and, please God, we’re
going to remember that.”

Next morning in miserable sloppy weather Blenkiron carted me about
Paris. We climbed five sets of stairs to a flat away up in Montmartre, where
I was talked to by a fat man with spectacles and a slow voice and told
various things that deeply concerned me. Then I went to a room in the
Boulevard St Germain, with a little cabinet opening off it, where I was
shown papers and maps and some figures on a sheet of paper that made me
open my eyes. We lunched in a modest café tucked away behind the Palais
Royal, and our companions were two Alsatians who spoke German better
than a Boche and had no names—only numbers. In the afternoon I went to a
low building beside the Invalides and saw many generals, including more
than one whose features were familiar in two hemispheres. I told them
everything about myself, and I was examined like a convict, and all
particulars about my appearance and manner of speech written down in a
book. That was to prepare the way for me, in case of need, among the vast
army of those who work underground and know their chief but do not know
each other.
The rain cleared before night, and Blenkiron and I walked back to the
hotel through that lemon-coloured dusk that you get in a French winter. We

passed a company of American soldiers, and Blenkiron had to stop and
stare. I could see that he was stiff with pride, though he wouldn’t show it.
“What d’you think of that bunch?” he asked.
“First-rate stuff,” I said.
“The men are all right,” he drawled critically. “But some of the officer-
boys are a bit puffy. They want fining down.”
“They’ll get it soon enough, honest fellows. You don’t keep your weight
long in this war.”
“Say, Dick,” he said shyly, “what do you truly think of our Americans?
You’ve seen a lot of them, and I’d value your views.” His tone was that of a
bashful author asking for an opinion on his first book.
“I’ll tell you what I think. You’re constructing a great middle-class army,
and that’s the most formidable fighting machine on earth. This kind of war
doesn’t want the Berserker so much as the quiet fellow with a trained mind
and a lot to fight for. The American ranks are filled with all sorts, from cow-
punchers to college boys, but mostly with decent lads that have good
prospects in life before them and are fighting because they feel they’re
bound to, not because they like it. It was the same stock that pulled through
your Civil War. We have a middle-class division, too—Scottish Territorials,
mostly clerks and shopmen and engineers and farmers’ sons. When I first
struck them my only crab was that the officers weren’t much better than the
men. It’s still true, but the men are super-excellent, and consequently so are
the officers. That division gets top marks in the Boche calendar for sheer
fighting devilment.... And, please God, that’s what your American army’s
going to be. You can wash out the old idea of a regiment of scallawags
commanded by dukes. That was right enough, maybe, in the days when you
hurrooshed into battle waving a banner, but it don’t do with high explosives
and a couple of million men on each side and a battle front of five hundred
miles. The hero of this war is the plain man out of the middle class, who
wants to get back to his home and is going to use all the brains and grit he
possesses to finish the job soon.”
“That sounds about right,” said Blenkiron reflectively. “It pleases me
some, for you’ve maybe guessed that I respect the British Army quite a
little. Which part of it do you put top?”

“All of it’s good. The French are keen judges and they give front place to
the Scots and the Australians. For myself I think the backbone of the Army
is the old-fashioned English county regiments that hardly ever get into the
papers Though I don’t know, if I had to pick, but I’d take the South
Africans. There’s only a brigade of them, but they’re hell’s delight in a
battle. But then you’ll say I’m prejudiced.”
“Well,” drawled Blenkiron, you’re a mighty Empire anyhow. I’ve
sojourned up and down it and I can’t guess how the old-time highbrows in
your little island came to put it together. But I’ll let you into a secret, Dick. I
read this morning in a noospaper that there was a natural affinity between
Americans and the men of the British Dominions. Take it from me, there
isn’t—at least not with this American. I don’t understand them one little bit.
When I see your lean, tall Australians with the sun at the back of their eyes,
I’m looking at men from another planet. Outside you and Peter, I never got
to fathom a South African. The Canadians live over the fence from us, but
you mix up a Canuck with a Yank in your remarks and you’ll get a bat in
the eye.... But most of us Americans have gotten a grip on your Old
Country. You’ll find us mighty respectful to other parts of your Empire, but
we say anything we damn well please about England. You see, we know her
that well and like her that well, we can be free with her.
“It’s like,” he concluded as we reached the hotel, “it’s like a lot of boys
that are getting on in the world and are a bit jealous and stand-offish with
each other. But they’re all at home with the old man who used to warm
them up with a hickory cane, even though sometimes in their haste they call
him a stand-patter.”

That night at dinner we talked solid business—Blenkiron and I and a
young French lolonel from the IIIme Section at G.Q.G. Blenkiron, I
remember, got very hurt about being called a business man by the
Frenchman, who thought he was paying him a compliment.
“Cut it out,” he said. “It is a word that’s gone bad with me. There’s just
two kind of men, those who’ve gotten sense and those who haven’t. A big
percentage of us Americans make our living by trading, but we don’t think
because a man’s in business or even because he’s made big money that he’s
any natural good at every job. We’ve made a college professor our
President, and do what he tells us like little boys, though he don’t earn more

than some of us pay our works’ manager. You English have gotten business
on the brain, and think a fellow’s a dandy at handling your Government if
he happens to have made a pile by some flat-catching ramp on your Stock
Exchange. It makes me tired. You’re about the best business nation on
earth, but for God’s sake don’t begin to talk about it or you’ll lose your
power. And don’t go confusing real business with the ordinary gift of raking
in the dollars. Any man with sense could make money if he wanted to, but
he mayn’t want. He may prefer the fun of the job and let other people do the
looting. I reckon the biggest business on the globe today is the work behind
your lines and the way you feed and supply and transport your army. It
beats the Steel Corporation and the Standard Oil to a frazzle. But the man at
the head of it all don’t earn more than a thousand dollars a month.... Your
nation’s getting to worship Mammon, Dick. Cut it out. There’s just the one
difference in humanity—sense or no sense, and most likely you won’t find
any more sense in the man that makes a billion selling bonds than in his
brother Tim that lives in a shack and sells corn-cobs. I’m not speaking out
of sinful jealousy, for there was a day when I was reckoned a railroad king,
and I quit with a bigger pile than kings usually retire on. But I haven’t the
sense of old Peter, who never even had a bank account.... And it’s sense that
wins in this war.”
The Colonel, who spoke good English, asked a question about a speech
which some politician had made.
“There isn’t all the sense I’d like to see at the top,” said Blenkiron.
“They’re fine at smooth words. That wouldn’t matter, but they’re thinking
smooth thoughts. What d’you make of the situation, Dick?”
“I think it’s the worst since First Ypres,” I said. “Everybody’s cock-a-
whoop, but God knows why.”
“God knows why,” Blenkiron repeated. “I reckon it’s a simple
calculation, and you can’t deny it any more than a mathematical law. Russia
is counted out. The Boche won’t get food from her for a good many
months, but he can get more men, and he’s got them. He’s fighting only on
one foot, and he’s been able to bring troops and guns west so he’s as strong
as the Allies now on paper. And he’s stronger in reality. He’s got better
railways behind him, and he’s fighting on inside lines and can concentrate
fast against any bit of our front. I’m no soldier, but that’s so, Dick?”

The Frenchman smiled and shook his head. “All the same they will not
pass. They could not when they were two to one in 1914, and they will not
now. If we Allies could not break through in the last year when we had
many more men, how will the Germans succeed now with only equal
numbers?”
Blenkiron did not look convinced. “That’s what they all say. I talked to a
general last week about the coming offensive, and he said he was praying
for it to hurry up, for he reckoned Fritz would get the fright of his life. It’s a
good spirit, maybe, but I don’t think it’s sound on the facts. We’ve got two
mighty great armies of fine fighting-men, but, because we’ve two
commands, we’re bound to move ragged like a peal of bells. The Hun’s got
one army and forty years of stiff tradition, and, what’s more, he’s going all
out this time. He’s going to smash our front before America lines up, or
perish in the attempt.... Why do you suppose all the peace racket in
Germany has died down, and the very men that were talking democracy in
the summer are now hot for fighting to a finish? I’ll tell you. It’s because
old Ludendorff has promised them complete victory this spring if they
spend enough men, and the Boche is a good gambler and is out to risk it.
We’re not up against a local attack this time. We’re standing up to a great
nation going bald-headed for victory or destruction. If we’re broken, then
America’s got to fight a new campaign by herself when she’s ready, and the
Boche has time to make Russia his feeding-ground and diddle our blockade.
That puts another five years on to the war, maybe another ten. Are we free
and independent peoples going to endure that much?... I tell you we’re
tossing to quit before Easter.”
He turned towards me, and I nodded assent.
“That’s more or less my view,” I said. “We ought to hold, but it’ll be by
our teeth and nails. For the next six months we’ll be fighting without any
margin.”
“But, my friends, you put it too gravely,” cried the Frenchman. “We may
lose a mile or two of ground—yes. But serious danger is not possible. They
had better chances at Verdun and they failed. Why should they succeed
now?”
“Because they are staking everything,” Blenkiron replied. “It is the last
desperate struggle of a wounded beast, and in these struggles sometimes the
hunter perishes. Dick’s right. We’ve got a wasting margin and every extra

ounce of weight’s going to tell. The battle’s in the field, and it’s also in
every corner of every Allied land. That’s why within the next two months
we’ve got to get even with the Wild Birds.”
The French colonel—his name was de Vallière—smiled at the name, and
Blenkiron answered my unspoken question.
“I’m going to satisfy some of your curiosity, Dick, for I’ve put together
considerable noos of the menagerie. Germany has a good army of spies
outside her borders. We shoot a batch now and then, but the others go on
working like beavers and they do a mighty deal of harm. They’re
beautifully organised, but they don’t draw on such good human material as
we, and I reckon they don’t pay in results more than ten cents on a dollar of
trouble. But there they are. They’re the intelligence officers and their
business is just to forward noos. They’re the birds in the cage, the—what is
it your friend called them?”
“Die Stubenvögel,” I said.
“Yes, but all the birds aren’t caged. There’s a few outside the bars and
they don’t collect noos. They do things. If there’s anything desperate
they’re put on the job, and they’ve got power to act without waiting on
instructions from home. I’ve investigated till my brain’s tired and I haven’t
made out more than half a dozen whom I can say for certain are in the
business. There’s your pal, the Portuguese Jew, Dick. Another’s a woman in
Genoa, a princess of some sort married to a Greek financier. One’s the
editor of a pro-Ally up-country paper in the Argentine. One passes as a
Baptist minister in Colorado. One was a police spy in the Tzar’s
Government and is now a red-hot revolutionary in the Caucasus. And the
biggest, of course, is Moxon Ivery, who in happier times was the Graf von
Schwabing. There aren’t above a hundred people in the world know of their
existence, and these hundred call them the Wild Birds.”
“Do they work together?” I asked.
“Yes. They each get their own jobs to do, but they’re apt to flock together
for a big piece of devilment. There were four of them in France a year ago
before the battle of the Aisne, and they pretty near rotted the French Army.
That’s so, Colonel?”
The soldier nodded grimly. “They seduced our weary troops and they
bought many politicians. Almost they succeeded, but not quite. The nation

is sane again, and is judging and shooting the accomplices at its leisure. But
the principals we have never caught.”
“You hear that, Dick,” said Blenkiron. “You’re satisfied this isn’t a
whimsy of a melodramatic old Yank? I’ll tell you more. You know how
Ivery worked the submarine business from England. Also, it was the Wild
Birds that wrecked Russia. It was Ivery that paid the Bolshevists to sedooce
the Army, and the Bolshevists took his money for their own purpose,
thinking they were playing a deep game, when all the time he was grinning
like Satan, for they were playing his. It was Ivery or some other of the
bunch that doped the brigades that broke at Caporetto. If I started in to tell
you the history of their doings you wouldn’t go to bed, and if you did you
wouldn’t sleep.... There’s just this to it. Every finished subtle devilry that
the Boche has wrought among the Allies since August 1914 has been the
work of the Wild Birds and more or less organised by Ivery. They’re worth
half a dozen army corps to Ludendorff. They’re the mightiest poison
merchants the world ever saw, and they’ve the nerve of hell....”
“I don’t know,” I interrupted. “Ivery’s got his soft spot. I saw him in the
Tube station.”
“Maybe, but he’s got the kind of nerve that’s wanted. And now I rather
fancy he’s whistling in his flock.”
Blenkiron consulted a notebook. “Pavia—that’s the Argentine man—
started last month for Europe. He transhipped from a coasting steamer in
the West Indies and we’ve temporarily lost track of him, but he’s left his
hunting-ground. What do you reckon that means?
“It means,” Blenkiron continued solemnly, “that Ivery thinks the game’s
nearly over. The play’s working up for the big climax.... And that climax is
going to be damnation for the Allies, unless we get a move on.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s what I’m here for. What’s the move?”
“The Wild Birds mustn’t ever go home, and the man they call Ivery or
Bommaerts or Chelius has to decease. It’s a cold-blooded proposition, but
it’s him or the world that’s got to break. But before he quits this earth we’re
bound to get wise about some of his plans, and that means that we can’t just
shoot a pistol at his face. Also we’ve got to find him first. We reckon he’s in
Switzerland, but that is a state with quite a lot of diversified scenery to lose
a man in.... Still I guess we’ll find him. But it’s the kind of business to plan
out as carefully as a battle. I’m going back to Berne on my old stunt to boss

the show, and I’m giving the orders. You’re an obedient child, Dick, so I
don’t reckon on any trouble that way.”
Then Blenkiron did an ominous thing. He pulled up a little table and
started to lay out Patience cards. Since his duodenum was cured he seemed
to have dropped that habit, and from his resuming it I gathered that his mind
was uneasy. I can see that scene as if it were yesterday—the French colonel
in an armchair smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder, and Blenkiron
sitting primly on the edge of a yellow silk ottoman, dealing his cards and
looking guiltily towards me.
“You’ll have Peter for company,” he said. “Peter’s a sad man, but he has
a great heart, and he’s been mighty useful to me already. They’re going to
move him to England very soon. The authorities are afraid of him, for he’s
apt to talk wild, his health having made him peevish about the British. But
there’s a deal of red-tape in the world, and the orders for his repatriation are
slow in coming.” The speaker winked very slowly and deliberately with his
left eye.
I asked if I was to be with Peter, much cheered at the prospect.
“Why, yes. You and Peter are the collateral in the deal. But the big
game’s not with you.”
I had a presentiment of something coming, something anxious and
unpleasant.
“Is Mary in it?” I asked.
He nodded and seemed to pull himself together for an explanation.
“See here, Dick. Our main job is to get Ivery back to Allied soil where
we can handle him. And there’s just the one magnet that can fetch him back.
You aren’t going to deny that.”
I felt my face getting very red, and that ugly hammer began beating in
my forehead. Two grave, patient eyes met my glare.
“I’m damned if I’ll allow it!” I cried. “I’ve some right to a say in the
thing. I won’t have Mary made a decoy. It’s too infernally degrading.”
“It isn’t pretty, but war isn’t pretty, and nothing we do is pretty. I’d have
blushed like a rose when I was young and innocent to imagine the things
I’ve put my hand to in the last three years. But have you any other way,
Dick? I’m not proud, and I’ll scrap the plan if you can show me another....
Night after night I’ve hammered the thing out, and I can’t hit on a better....

Heigh-ho, Dick, this isn’t like you,” and he grinned ruefully. “You’re
making yourself a fine argument in favour of celibacy—in time of war,
anyhow. What is it the poet sings?—
“‘White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel.’”

I was as angry as sin, but I felt all the time I had no case. Blenkiron
stopped his game of Patience, sending the cards flying over the carpet, and
straddled on the hearthrug.
“You’re never going to be a piker. What’s dooty, if you won’t carry it to
the other side of Hell? What’s the use of yapping about your country if
you’re going to keep anything back when she calls for it? What’s the good
of meaning to win the war if you don’t put every cent you’ve got on your
stake? You’ll make me think you’re like the jacks in your English novels
that chuck in their hand and say it’s up to God, and call that ‘seeing it
through’.... No, Dick, that kind of dooty don’t deserve a blessing. You
dursn’t keep back anything if you want to save your soul.
“Besides,” he went on, “what a girl it is! She can’t scare and she can’t
soil. She’s white-hot youth and innocence, and she’d take no more harm
than clean steel from a muck-heap.”
I knew I was badly in the wrong, but my pride was all raw.
“I’m not going to agree till I’ve talked to Mary.”
“But Miss Mary has consented,” he said gently. “She made the plan.”

Next day, in clear blue weather that might have been May, I drove Mary
down to Fontainebleau. We lunched in the inn by the bridge and walked
into the forest. I hadn’t slept much, for I was tortured by what I thought was
anxiety for her, but which was in truth jealousy of Ivery. I don’t think that I
would have minded her risking her life, for that was part of the game we
were both in, but I jibbed at the notion of Ivery coming near her again. I
told myself it was honourable pride, but I knew deep down in me that it was
jealousy.
I asked her if she had accepted Blenkiron’s plan, and she turned
mischievous eyes on me.

“I knew I should have a scene with you, Dick. I told Mr Blenkiron so....
Of course I agreed. I’m not even very much afraid of it. I’m a member of
the team, you know, and I must play up to my form. I can’t do a man’s
work, so all the more reason why I should tackle the thing I can do.”
“But,” I stammered, “it’s such a ... such a degrading business for a child
like you. I can’t bear.... It makes me hot to think of it.”
Her reply was merry laughter.
“You’re an old Ottoman, Dick. You haven’t doubled Cape Turk yet, and I
don’t believe you’re round Seraglio Point. Why, women aren’t the brittle
things men used to think them. They never were, and the war has made
them like whipcord. Bless you, my dear, we’re the tougher sex now. We’ve
had to wait and endure, and we’ve been so beaten on the anvil of patience
that we’ve lost all our megrims.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes.
“Look at me, Dick, look at your someday-to-be espouséd saint. I’m
nineteen years of age next August. Before the war I should have only just
put my hair up. I should have been the kind of shivering debutante who
blushes when she’s spoken to, and oh! I should have thought such silly, silly
things about life.... Well, in the last two years I’ve been close to it, and to
death. I’ve nursed the dying. I’ve seen souls in agony and in triumph.
England has allowed me to serve her as she allows her sons. Oh, I’m a
robust young woman now, and indeed I think women were always robuster
than men.... Dick, dear Dick, we’re lovers, but we’re comrades too—always
comrades, and comrades trust each other.”
I hadn’t anything to say, except contrition, for I had my lesson. I had
been slipping away in my thoughts from the gravity of our task, and Mary
had brought me back to it. I remember that as we walked through the
woodland we came to a place where there were no signs of war. Elsewhere
there were men busy felling trees, and anti-aircraft guns, and an occasional
transport wagon, but here there was only a shallow grassy vale, and in the
distance, bloomed over like a plum in the evening haze, the roofs of an old
dwelling-house among gardens.
Mary clung to my arm as we drank in the peace of it.
“That is what lies for us at the end of the road, Dick,” she said softly.

And then, as she looked, I felt her body shiver. She returned to the
strange fancy she had had in the St Germains woods three days before.
“Somewhere it’s waiting for us and we shall certainly find it.... But first
we must go through the Valley of the Shadow.... And there is the sacrifice to
be made ... the best of us.”

CHAPTER XV
St Anton
Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the tough and
shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old velveteen shooting-coat
bequeathed to him by a former German master—speaking the guttural
tongue of the Grisons, and with all his belongings in one massive rucksack,
came out of the little station of St Anton and blinked in the frosty sunshine.
He looked down upon the little old village beside its icebound lake, but his
business was with the new village of hotels and villas which had sprung up
in the last ten years south of the station. He made some halting inquiries of
the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him to the place
he sought—the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an
English interné, one Peter Pienaar.
The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey. A
fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British major-general. As
such he had been the inmate of an expensive Paris hotel, till one morning,
in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he had taken the Paris-Mediterranean
Express with a ticket for an officers’ convalescent home at Cannes.
Thereafter he had declined in the social scale. At Dijon he had been still an
Englishman, but at Pontarlier he had become an American bagman of Swiss
parentage, returning to wind up his father’s estate. At Berne he limped
excessively, and at Zurich, at a little back-street hotel, he became frankly
the peasant. For he met a friend there from whom he acquired clothes with
that odd rank smell, far stronger than Harris tweed, which marks the
raiment of most Swiss guides and all Swiss porters. He also acquired a new
name and an old aunt, who a little later received him with open arms and
explained to her friends that he was her brother’s son from Arosa who three
winters ago had hurt his leg wood-cutting and had been discharged from the
levy.
A kindly Swiss gentleman, as it chanced, had heard of the deserving
Joseph and interested himself to find him employment. The said

philanthropist made a hobby of the French and British prisoners returned
from Germany, and had in mind an officer, a crabbed South African with a
bad leg, who needed a servant. He was, it seemed, an ill-tempered old
fellow who had to be billeted alone, and since he could speak German, he
would be happier with a Swiss native. Joseph haggled somewhat over the
wages, but on his aunt’s advice he accepted the job, and, with a very
complete set of papers and a store of ready-made reminiscences (it took him
some time to swot up the names of the peaks and passes he had traversed)
set out for St Anton, having dispatched beforehand a monstrously ill-spelt
letter announcing his coming. He could barely read and write, but he was
good at maps, which he had studied carefully, and he noticed with
satisfaction that the valley of St Anton gave easy access to Italy.
As he journeyed south the reflections of that porter would have surprised
his fellow travellers in the stuffy third-class carriage. He was thinking of a
conversation he had had some days before in a café at Dijon with a young
Englishman bound for Modane....
We had bumped up against each other by chance in that strange flitting
when all went to different places at different times, asking nothing of each
other’s business. Wake had greeted me rather shamefacedly and had
proposed dinner together.
I am not good at receiving apologies, and Wake’s embarrassed me more
than they embarrassed him. “I’m a bit of a cad sometimes,” he said. “You
know I’m a better fellow than I sounded that night, Hannay.”
I mumbled something about not talking rot—the conventional phrase.
What worried me was that the man was suffering. You could see it in his
eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than ever before, and he and I
became true friends, for he laid bare his soul before me. That was his
trouble, that he could lay bare his soul, for ordinary healthy folk don’t
analyse their feelings. Wake did, and I think it brought him relief.
“Don’t think I was ever your rival. I would no more have proposed to
Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She was so sure of
herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she terrified me. My type of
man is not meant for marriage, for women must be in the centre of life, and
we must always be standing aside and looking on. It is a damnable thing to
be left-handed.”

“The trouble about you, my dear chap,” I said, “is that you’re too hard to
please.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate more
than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our
mainspring. Odd, isn’t it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it’s the
truth. We’re full of hate towards everything that doesn’t square in with our
ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves. Fellows like you are so
in love with their cause that they’ve no time or inclination to detest what
thwarts them. We’ve no cause—only negatives, and that means hatred, and
self-torture, and a beastly jaundice of soul.”
Then I knew that Wake’s fault was not spiritual pride, as I had diagnosed
it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.
“I see more than other people see,” he went on, “and I feel more. That’s
the curse on me. You’re a happy man and you get things done, because you
only see one side of a case, one thing at a time. How would you like it if a
thousand strings were always tugging at you, if you saw that every course
meant the sacrifice of lovely and desirable things, or even the shattering of
what you know to be unreplaceable? I’m the kind of stuff poets are made
of, but I haven’t the poet’s gift, so I stagger about the world left-handed and
game-legged.... Take the war. For me to fight would be worse than for
another man to run away. From the bottom of my heart I believe that it
needn’t have happened, and that all war is a blistering iniquity. And yet
belief has got very little to do with virtue. I’m not as good a man as you,
Hannay, who have never thought out anything in your life. My time in the
Labour battalion taught me something. I knew that with all my fine
aspirations I wasn’t as true a man as fellows whose talk was silly oaths and
who didn’t care a tinker’s curse about their soul.”
I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. “I think I
know you. You’re the sort of chap who won’t fight for his country because
he can’t be sure that she’s altogether in the right. But he’d cheerfully die for
her, right or wrong.”
His face relaxed in a slow smile. “Queer that you should say that. I think
it’s pretty near the truth. Men like me aren’t afraid to die, but they haven’t
quite the courage to live. Every man should be happy in a service like you,
when he obeys orders. I couldn’t get on in any service. I lack the bump of
veneration. I can’t swallow things merely because I’m told to. My sort are

always talking about ‘service’, but we haven’t the temperament to serve. I’d
give all I have to be an ordinary cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded
outsider who finds fault with the machinery.... Take a great violent high-
handed fellow like you. You can sink yourself till you become only a name
and a number. I couldn’t if I tried. I’m not sure if I want to either. I cling to
the odds and ends that are my own.”
“I wish I had had you in my battalion a year ago,” I said.
“No, you don’t. I’d only have been a nuisance. I’ve been a Fabian since
Oxford, but you’re a better socialist than me. I’m a rancid individualist.”
“But you must be feeling better about the war?” I asked.
“Not a bit of it. I’m still lusting for the heads of the politicians that made
it and continue it. But I want to help my country. Honestly, Hannay, I love
the old place. More, I think, than I love myself, and that’s saying a devilish
lot. Short of fighting—which would be the sin against the Holy Spirit for
me—I’ll do my damnedest. But you’ll remember I’m not used to team
work. If I’m a jealous player, beat me over the head.”
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 recognised 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 café 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 café, 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 morgen 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 realised 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.
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 XVI
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 realised, 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 château.... 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 manœuvres 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 terrorise 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.
I did not allow myself to think of ultimate escape, for that would only
flurry me, and one step at a time was enough. I remember that I dusted my
clothes, and found that the cut in the back of my head had stopped bleeding.
I retrieved my hat, which had rolled into a corner when I fell.... Then I
turned my attention to the next step.
The tunnel was impossible, and the only way was the door. If I had
stopped to think I would have known that the chances against getting out of
such a house were a thousand to one. The pistol shots had been muffled by
the cavernous walls, but the place, as I knew, was full of servants and, even
if I passed the immediate door, I would be collared in some passage. But I
had myself so well in hand that I tackled the door as if I had been
prospecting to sink a new shaft in Rhodesia.
It had no handle nor, so far as I could see, a keyhole.... But I noticed, as I
turned my torch on the ground, that from the clamp which I had shattered a
brass rod sunk in the floor led to one of the door-posts. Obviously the thing
worked by a spring and was connected with the mechanism of the rack.
A wild thought entered my mind and brought me to my feet. I pushed the
door and it swung slowly open. The bullet which freed me had released the
spring which controlled it.
Then for the first time, against all my maxims of discretion, I began to
hope. I took off my hat and felt my forehead burning, so that I rested it for a
moment on the cool wall.... Perhaps my luck still held. With a rush came
thoughts of Mary and Blenkiron and Peter and everything we had laboured
for, and I was mad to win.
I had no notion of the interior of the house or where lay the main door to
the outer world. My torch showed me a long passage with something like a
door at the far end, but I clicked it off, for I did not dare to use it now. The
place was deadly quiet. As I listened I seemed to hear a door open far away,
and then silence fell again.
I groped my way down the passage till I had my hands on the far door. I
hoped it might open on the hall, where I could escape by a window or a
balcony, for I judged the outer door would be locked. I listened, and there