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Mr. Standfast

by John Buchan · English · Gutenberg #560 · 698,618 chars · public domain (US)

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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 ***




[illustration] 




Mr. Standfast

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 wh

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