by John Buchan
‘Good God!’ I cried. ‘It’s a horrible thought! The only thing for you is to go canny, and not strike till you have got the victims out of their clutches.’
‘We can’t,’ he said solemnly. ‘That is precisely the tragedy of the business. We must strike early in June. I won’t trouble you with the reasons, but believe me, they are final. There is just a chance of a settlement in Ireland, and there are certain events of the first importance impending in Italy and America, and all depend upon the activities of the gang being at an end by midsummer. Do you grasp that? By midsummer we must stretch out our hand. By midsummer, unless they are released, the three hostages will be doomed. It is a ghastly dilemma, but in the public interest there is only one way out. I ought to say that Victor and the Duke and Warcliff are aware of this fact, and accept the situation. They are big men, and will do their duty even if it breaks their hearts.’
There was silence for a minute or two, for I did not know what to say. The whole story seemed to me incredible, and yet I could not doubt a syllable of it when I looked at Macgillivray’s earnest face. I felt the horror of the business none the less because it seemed also partly unreal; it had the fantastic grimness of a nightmare. But most of all I realized that I was utterly incompetent to help, and as I understood that I could honestly base my refusal on incapacity and not on disinclination I began to feel more comfortable.
‘Well,’ said Macgillivray, after a pause, ‘are you going to help us?’
‘There’s nothing doing with that Sunday-paper anagram you showed me. That’s the sort of riddle that’s not meant to be guessed. I suppose you are going to try to work up from the information you have about the combine towards a clue to the hostages.’
He nodded.
‘Now, look here,’ I said; ‘you’ve got fifty of the quickest brains in Britain working at the job. They’ve found out enough to put a lasso round the enemy which you can draw tight whenever you like. They’re trained to the work and I’m not. What on earth would be the use of an amateur like me butting in? I wouldn’t be half as good as any one of the fifty. I’m not an expert, I’m not quick-witted, I’m a slow patient fellow, and this job, as you admit, is one that has to be done against time. If you think it over, you’ll see that it’s sheer nonsense, my dear chap.’
‘You’ve succeeded before with worse material.’
‘That was pure luck, and it was in the War when, as I tell you, my mind was morbidly active. Besides, anything I did then I did in the field, and what you want me to do now is office-work. You know I’m no good at office-work – Blenkiron always said so, and Bullivant never used me on it. It isn’t because I don’t want to help, but because I can’t.’
‘I believe you can. And the thing is so grave that I daren’t leave any chance unexplored. Won’t you come?’
‘No. Because I could do nothing.’
‘Because you haven’t a mind for it.’
‘Because I haven’t the right kind of mind for it.’
He looked at his watch and got up, smiling rather ruefully.
‘I’ve had my say, and now you know what I want of you. I’m not going to take your answer as final. Think over what I’ve said, and let me hear from you within the next day or two.’
But I had lost all my doubts, for it was very clear to me that on every ground I was doing the right thing.
‘Don’t delude yourself with thinking that I’ll change my mind,’ I said, as I saw him into his car. ‘Honestly, old fellow, if I could be an atom of use I’d join you, but for your own sake you’ve got to count me out this time.’
Then I went for a walk, feeling pretty cheerful. I settled the question of the pheasants’ eggs with the keeper, and went down to the stream to see if there was any hatch of fly. It had cleared up to a fine evening, and I thanked my stars that I was out of a troublesome business with an easy conscience, and could enjoy my peaceful life again. I say ‘with an easy conscience’, for though there were little dregs of disquiet still lurking about the bottom of my mind, I had only to review the facts squarely to approve my decision. I put the whole thing out of my thoughts and came back with a fine appetite for tea.
There was a stranger in the drawing-room with Mary, a slim oldish man, very straight and erect, with one of those faces on which life has written so much that to look at them is like reading a good book. At first I didn’t recognize him when he rose to greet me, but the smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and the slow deep voice brought back the two occasions in the past when I had run across Sir Arthur Warcliff… My heart sank as I shook hands, the more as I saw how solemn was Mary’s face. She had been hearing the story which I hoped she would never hear.
I thought it best to be very frank with him. ‘I can guess your errand, Sir Arthur,’ I said, ‘and I’m extremely sorry that you should have come this long journey to no purpose.’ Then I told him of the visits of Mr Julius Victor and Macgillivray, and what they had said, and what had been my answer. I think I made it as clear as day that I could do nothing, and he seemed to assent. Mary, I remember, never lifted her eyes.
Sir Arthur had also looked at the ground while I was speaking, and now he turned his wise old face to me, and I saw what ravages his new anxiety had made in it. He could not have been much over sixty and he looked a hundred.
‘I do not dispute your decision, Sir Richard,’ he said, ‘I know that you would have helped me if it had been possible. But I confess I am sorely disappointed, for you were my last hope. You see – you see – I had nothing left in the world but Davie. If he had died I think I could have borne it, but to know nothing about him and to imagine terrible things is almost too much for my fortitude.’
I have never been through a more painful experience. To hear a voice falter that had been used to command, to see tears in the steadfastest eyes that ever looked on the world, made me want to howl like a dog. I would have given a thousand pounds to be able to bolt into the library and lock the door.
Mary appeared to me to be behaving very oddly. She seemed to have the deliberate purpose of probing the wound, for she encouraged Sir Arthur to speak of his boy. He showed us a miniature he carried with him – an extraordinarily handsome child with wide grey eyes and his head most nobly set upon his shoulders. A grave little boy, with the look of utter trust which belongs to children who have never in their lives been unfairly treated. Mary said something about the gentleness of the face.
‘Yes, Davie was very gentle,’ his father said. ‘I think he was the gentlest thing I have ever known. That little boy was the very flower of courtesy. But he was curiously stoical, too. When he was distressed, he only shut his lips tight, and never cried. I used often to feel rebuked by him.’
And then he told us about Davie’s performances at school, where he was not distinguished, except as showing a certain talent for cricket. ‘I am very much afraid of precocity,’ Sir Arthur said with the ghost of a smile. ‘But he was always educating himself in the right way, learning to observe and think.’ It seemed that the boy was a desperately keen naturalist and would be out at all hours watching wild things. He was a great fisherman, too, and had killed a lot of trout with the fly on hill burns in Galloway. And as the father spoke I suddenly began to realize the little chap, and to think that he was just the kind of boy I wanted Peter John to be. I liked the stories of his love of nature and trout streams. It came on me like a thunderclap that if I were in his father’s place I should certainly go mad, and I was amazed at the old man’s courage.
‘I think he had a kind of genius for animals,’ Sir Arthur said. ‘He knew the habits of birds by instinct, and used to talk of them as other people talk of their friends. He and I were great cronies, and he would tell me long stories in his little quiet voice of birds and beasts he had seen on his walks. He had odd names for them too…’
The thing was almost too pitiful to endure. I felt as if I had known the child all my life. I could see him playing, I could hear his voice, and as for Mary she was unashamedly weep
ing.
Sir Arthur’s eyes were dry now, and there was no catch in his voice as he spoke. But suddenly a sharper flash of realization came on him and his words became a strained cry: ‘Where is he now? What are they doing to him? Oh, God! My beloved little man – my gentle little Davie!’
That fairly finished me. Mary’s arm was round the old man’s neck, and I saw that he was trying to pull himself together, but I didn’t see anything clearly. I only know that I was marching about the room, scarcely noticing that our guest was leaving. I remember shaking hands with him, and hearing him say that it had done him good to talk to us. It was Mary who escorted him to the car, and when she returned it was to find me blaspheming like a Turk at the window. I had flung the thing open, for I felt suffocated, though the evening was cool. The mixture of anger and disgust and pity in my heart nearly choked me.
‘Why the devil can’t I be left alone?’ I cried. ‘I don’t ask for much – only a little peace. Why in Heaven’s name should I be dragged into other people’s business? Why on earth –’
Mary was standing at my elbow, her face rather white and tear-stained.
‘Of course you are going to help,’ she said.
Her words made clear to me the decision which I must have taken a quarter of an hour before, and all the passion went out of me like wind out of a pricked bladder.
‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘By the way, I had better telegraph to Macgillivray. And Warcliff too. What’s his address?’
‘You needn’t bother about Sir Arthur,’ said Mary. ‘Before you came in – when he told me the story – I said he could count on you. Oh, Dick, think if it had been Peter John!’
CHAPTER THREE
Researches in the Subconscious
I went to bed in the perfect certainty that I wouldn’t sleep. That happened to me about once a year, when my mind was excited or angry, and I knew no way of dodging it. There was a fine moon, and the windows were sheets of opal cut by the dark jade limbs of trees; light winds were stirring the creepers; owls hooted like sentries exchanging passwords, and sometimes a rook would talk in his dreams; the little odd squeaks and rumbles of wild life came faintly from the woods; while I lay staring at the ceiling with my thoughts running round about in a futile circus. Mary’s even breathing tantalized me, for I never knew anyone with her perfect gift for slumber. I used to say that if her pedigree could be properly traced it would be found that she descended direct from one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who married one of the Foolish Virgins.
What kept, me wakeful was principally the thought of that poor little boy, David Warcliff. I was sorry for Miss Victor and Lord Mercot, and desperately sorry for the parents of all three, but what I could not stand was the notion of the innocent little chap, who loved birds and fishing and the open air, hidden away in some stuffy den by the worst kind of blackguards. The thing preyed on me till I got to think it had happened to us and that Peter John was missing. I rose and prowled about the windows, looking out at the quiet night, and wondering how the same world could contain so much trouble and so much peace.
I laved my face with cold water and lay down again. It was no good letting my thoughts race, so I tried to fix them on one point in the hope that I would get drowsy. I endeavoured to recapitulate the evidence which Macgillivray had recited, but only made foolishness of it, for I simply could not concentrate. I saw always the face of a small boy, who bit his lips to keep himself from tears, and another perfectly hideous face that kept turning into one of the lead figures in the rose garden. A ridiculous rhyme too ran in my head – something about the ‘midnight sun’ and the ‘fields of Eden’. By and by I got it straightened out into the anagram business Macgillivray had mentioned. I have a fly-paper memory for verse when there is no reason why I should remember it, and I found I could repeat the six lines of the doggerel.
After that I found the lines mixing themselves up and suggesting all kinds of odd pictures to my brain. I took to paraphrasing them – ‘Under the midnight sun, where harvests are poor’ – that was Scandinavia anyhow, or maybe Iceland or Greenland or Labrador. Who on earth was the sower who sowed in the fields of Eden? Adam, perhaps, or Abel, who was the first farmer? Or an angel in heaven? More like an angel, I thought, for the line sounded like a hymn. Anyhow it was infernal nonsense.
The last two lines took to escaping me, and that made me force my mind out of the irritable confusion in which it was bogged. Ah! I had them again:
Where beside the sacred tree
Spins the seer who cannot see.
The sacred tree was probably Yggdrasil and the spinner one of the Norns. I had once taken an interest in Norse mythology, but I couldn’t remember whether one of the Norns was blind. A blind woman spinning. Now where had I heard something like that? Heard it quite recently, too?
The discomfort of wakefulness is that you are not fully awake. But now I was suddenly in full possession of my senses, and worrying at that balderdash like a dog at a bone. I had been quite convinced that there was a clue in it, but that it would be impossible to hit on the clue. But now I had a ray of hope, for I seemed to feel a very faint and vague flavour of reminiscence.
Scandinavian harvests, the fields of Eden, the blind spinner – oh, it was maddening, for every time I repeated them the sense of having recently met with something similar grew stronger. The North – Norway – surely I had it there! Norway – what was there about Norway? – Salmon, elk, reindeer, midnight sun, saeters – the last cried out of me. And the blind old woman that spun!
I had it. These were two of the three facts which Dr Greenslade had suggested the night before as a foundation for his imaginary ‘shocker’. What was the third? A curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. That had no obvious connection with a sower in the fields of Eden. But at any rate he had got two of them identical with the doggerel… It was a clue. It must be a clue. Greenslade had somewhere and somehow heard the jingle or the substance of it, and it had sunk into the subconscious memory he had spoken of, without his being aware of it. Well, I had got to dig it out. If I could discover where and how he had heard the thing, I had struck a trail.
When I had reached this conclusion, I felt curiously easier in my mind, and almost at once fell asleep. I awoke to a gorgeous spring morning, and ran down to the lake for my bath. I felt that I wanted all the freshening and screwing up I could get, and when I dressed after an icy plunge I was ready for all comers.
Mary was down in time for breakfast, and busy with her letters. She spoke little, and seemed to be waiting for me to begin; but I didn’t want to raise the matter which was uppermost in our minds till I saw my way clearer, so I said I was going to take two days to think things over. It was Wednesday, so I wired to Macgillivray to expect me in London on Friday morning, and I scribbled a line to Mr Julius Victor. By half-past nine I was on the road making for Greenslade’s lodgings.
I caught him in the act of starting on his rounds, and made him sit down and listen to me. I had to give him the gist of Macgillivray’s story, with extracts from those of Victor and Sir Arthur. Before I was half-way through he had flung off his overcoat, and before I had finished he had lit a pipe, which was a breach of his ritual not to smoke before the evening. When I stopped he had that wildish look in his light eyes which you see in a cairn terrier’s when he is digging out a badger.
‘You’ve taken on this job?’ he asked brusquely.
I nodded.
‘Well, I shouldn’t have had much respect for you if you had refused. How can I help? Count on me, if I’m any use. Good God! I never heard a more damnable story.’
‘Have you got hold of the rhyme?’ I repeated it, and he said it after me.
‘Now, you remember the talk we had after dinner the night before last. You showed me how a “shocker” was written, and you took at random three facts as the foundation. They were, you remember, a blind old woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a saeter in Norway, and a curiosity shop in North London, kept by a Jew
with a dyed beard. Well, two of your facts are in the six-line jingle I have quoted to you.’
‘That is an odd coincidence. But is it anything more?’
‘I believe that it is. I don’t hold with coincidences. There’s generally some explanation which we’re not clever enough to get at. Your inventions were so odd that I can’t think they were mere inventions. You must have heard them somehow and somewhere. You know what you said about your subconscious memory. They’re somewhere in it, and, if you can remember just how they got there, you’ll give me the clue I want. That six-line rhyme was sent in by people who were so confident that they didn’t mind giving their enemies a clue – only it was a clue which they knew could never be discovered. Macgillivray and his fellows can make nothing of it – never will. But if I can start from the other end I’ll get in on their rear. Do you see what I mean? I’m going to make you somehow or other dig it out.’
He shook his head. ‘It can’t be done, Dick. Admitting your premise – that I heard the nonsense and didn’t invent it – the subconscious can’t be handled like a business proposition. I remember unconsciously and I can’t recall consciously… But I don’t admit your premise. I think the whole thing is common coincidence.’
‘I don’t,’ I said stubbornly, ‘and even if I did I’m bound to assume the contrary, for it’s the only card I possess. You’ve got to sit down, old chap, and do your damnedest to remember. You’ve been in every kind of odd show, and my belief is that you heard that nonsense. Dig it out of your memory and we’ve a chance to win. Otherwise, I see nothing but tragedy.’
He got up and put on his overcoat. ‘I’ve got a long round of visits which will take me all day. Of course I’ll try, but I warn you that I haven’t the ghost of a hope. These things don’t come by care and searching. I’d better sleep at the Manor tonight. How long can you give me?’
