by John Buchan
Most of the summer was spent in getting back his body to its former vigour, for the effects of a long spell of confinement do not disappear in a day. He took rooms at a farmhouse in Northumberland and set himself to recruit his muscles and nerves as steadily as if he had been preparing for an Olympic race. He spent hours daily on the moors in all weathers, and the shepherds were puzzled by the man with the lean face and friendly eyes who quartered the countryside like a sheep-dog. At one of the upland fairs he entered for a hill race, and beat the longest-legged keeper by half a mile. His mind needed no recruitment, for it had been long in training. He spent the evenings with his books, and once a week walked to the nearest town to get the London newspapers. He was waiting for a sign.
That sign came in the first days of August with the outbreak of war.
CHAPTER II
I
In Whitehall on an August morning Adam met Stannix.
The latter had just left the War Office, which had changed suddenly from a mausoleum to a hive. He was in uniform, with scarlet gorget-patches, and was respectfully saluted by whatever wore khaki. At sight of Adam he cried out.
“The man in all the world I most want to see! Where have you come from?”
“From Northumberland, where I have been getting fit. It looks as if I had finished the job just in time.”
“And where are you bound for?”
“To join up.”
“As a private?”
“Of course. I’m no longer a soldier.”
“Nonsense, man. That can’t be allowed. We’re running this business like a pack of crazy amateurs, but there’s a limit to the things we can waste. Brains is one.”
“I must fight,” said Adam. “You’re doing the same.”
“Not I. I’m stuck at home in this damned department store. I want to go out to-morrow, for I’ve been in the Yeomanry for years and know something about the job, but they won’t let me — yet. They told me I must do the thing I’m best fitted for. I pass that on to you.”
Adam shook his head.
“I’m fit for nothing but cannon-fodder. You know that well enough, Kit. And I’m quite content. I’ll find some way of making myself useful, never fear.”
“I daresay you will, but not the best way. This wants perpending. Promise me on your honour that you’ll do nothing to-day, and lunch with me tomorrow. By that time I may have a plan.”
Adam protested, but the other was so urgent that at last he agreed.
Next day they lunched together and Stannix wore an anxious face.
“I’ve seen Ritson and Marlake,” he said, “and they think as I do. If you join up as a private, you’ll presently get your stripes, and pretty soon you’ll be offered a commission. But in a battalion you’ll be no better than a hundred thousand others. I want you to have a show. Well, it can’t be in the open, so it must be in the half-light or the dark. That means risks, far bigger risks than the ordinary fellow is now facing in Flanders, but it also means an opportunity for big service. How do you feel about it?”
Adam’s face brightened.
“I haven’t much capital left, and I want to spend it. I don’t mind risks — I covet them. And I don’t mind working in the dark, for that is where I must live now.”
Stannix wrinkled his brows.
“I was certain you’d take that view, and I told Ritson so. But Adam, old man, I feel pretty miserable about it. For a chance of work for you means a certainty of danger — the most colossal danger.”
“I know, I know,” said Adam cheerfully. “That’s what I’m looking for. Hang it, Kit, I must squeeze some advantage out of my troubles, and one is that my chiefs should not concern themselves about what happens to me. I’m a volunteer for any lost hope.”
“I may be helping to send my best friend to his death,” said Stannix gloomily.
“Everybody is doing that for everybody. You’ll be doing the kindest thing in the world if you give me a run for my money. I’ve counted the cost.”
The result of this talk was that during the following week Adam had various interviews. The first was with Ritson at the War Office, a man who had been one of his instructors at the Staff College. Ritson, grey with overwork, looked shyly at his former pupil. “This is a queer business, Melfort,” he said. “I think you are right. You’re the man I would have picked above all others — only of course I couldn’t have got you if certain things hadn’t happened. . . . You know what’s expected of you and what you’re up against. Good-bye and God bless you! I’ll be like a man looking down into deep water and now and then getting a glimpse of you moving at the bottom.”
Thereafter Adam entered upon a varied life. First he made a journey into the City, to a little street in the neighbourhood of Leadenhall Market. On the door of every narrow, flat-chested house were a score of names, mostly attorneys and notaries public. At the foot of one such list he found J. N. Macandrew, who professed to follow the calling of an average-adjuster. Mr Macandrew was hard to come at. Adam was received in a dingy slip of an office by a pallid boy, who took his card and disappeared. He returned and led the way up a maze of wooden stairs and murky passages, till he left him in a room where sunlight was pouring through a dirty window. There for half an hour Adam kicked his heels. The place had all the cheerful features of an attorney’s waiting-room. On the walls, where the paper was dark with grime, hung an ancient almanac, a bad print of Lord Chancellor Cairns, and a faded photograph of the court of some livery company in the year 1889. On a rickety table stood three venerable Law Lists, an antediluvian Burke, a London directory and a pile of shipping journals. There was a leather arm-chair which looked as if it had seen service, and a pile of cigarette ends in the empty grate, which suggested that the room was much in use.
Adam examined the scanty properties, and then stared out of the window at the jumble of roofs and house-backs. The place was oddly depressing. Here in this rabbit-warren life seemed to shrink to an infinite pettiness. What part could it have in the storm which was scourging the world? . . . He turned, to find that Mr Macandrew had entered the room, though he had heard no door open.
Mr Macandrew’s name was misleading, for he was clearly a Jew, a small man with a nervous mouth and eyes that preferred to look downward. He seemed to have been expecting Adam, for he cut short his explanation. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Please take a seat. Yes, I know all about you. We can have a little talk, can’t we? Will you smoke?”
Adam sat in the rubbed arm-chair, while the other perched himself on the table. It was a curious interview, of which the purpose only gradually became clear. Macandrew asked a few questions about a corner of Belgium which Adam had often visited. Ritson knew about those visits, and might have told him. Then he suddenly broke into the guttural French which is talked in the Meuse valley. “You understand that?” he snapped. “Every word?” Adam replied in the same patois, and was corrected on a point or two. “Pretty good,” said Macandrew. “Good enough, perhaps. You have the right gurgle, but not all the idioms.”
Then he spoke Flemish, which Adam translated after him. “That is good — very good. You do not need to speak it, but it is well to understand it.” He drawled a few sentences in some tongue which sounded mere gibberish. “You do not follow? No matter. That is the speech of the hill people in the high Ardennes — peasant people only, you understand. There are gipsy words in it.”
There followed a series of interrogatories. Adam was asked to describe the daily life on a farm in southeast Belgium. “You have stayed in such a place. Now, give me the duties of the farmer’s son, beginning with the first daylight.” Adam ransacked his memory and did his best, but the catalogue was sketchy. He pleased his interlocutor better with his account of a wayside estaminet, a cattle-fair, and a Sunday pilgrimage. “You can observe,” said Macandrew. “Not yet with sufficient nicety. Yet you have eyes in your head.”
He was suddenly dismissed. The pallid boy appeared, and Macandrew held out his hand. “Goodbye, Mr More. Perhaps we shall
meet again soon.”
As Adam re-threaded the labyrinth of stair and passage, he wondered why he had been addressed as More. That must have been Ritson’s arrangement, and he had not been told of it because his chiefs assumed that he knew enough to be passive in their hands.
A few days later he found himself a guest in a country house which lay under the Hampshire Downs. The invitation had been sent to him by Ritson, and in it he figured as Mr John More. His host was called Warriner, a fine, old, high-coloured sportsman, who looked as if his winters had been spent in the hunting-field, and his summers in tramping his paternal acres. There was a son, in his early twenties, who had come over from a neighbouring training-camp. It appeared that young Warriner was a noted mountaineer, and Adam remembered his name in connection with ascents in the Caucasus. At dinner the talk was very little of the war, and there was no hint of any knowledge of Adam’s past. The father and son, with all the courtesy in the world, seemed to be bent on discovering his tastes in sport and his prowess in games, so that he set them down as the type of Englishman who never outgrows the standards of his public school.
“You look uncommonly fit,” said the son, as they left the smoking-room.
“I try to be,” said Adam. “I haven’t got many things to my credit, but one of them is a hard body.”
“Good,” was the answer. “We’ll have a long day to-morrow. You’ll be called at five. Put on something old and light — flannel bags will do — and strong shoes. We have a bit of striding before us.”
It was a clear cool morning when they started, and Adam thought that he had never seen such a light-foot walker as Frank Warriner. He led him out of the vale up on to the Downs at a steady pace of nearly five miles an hour. Presently the sun grew hot, but there was no slackening of their speed. Adam’s spirits rose, for he understood that his endurance was being tested, and he had little fear of the result. To his surprise their first halt was at a country rectory, where a parson in slippers gave them a tankard of home-brewed beer. He was a fantastic old gentleman, for he directed all his conversation to Adam, and engaged him in a discussion on Norse remains in Britain which appeared to be his hobby. Adam thought it strange that he should have hit on a subject which had always been one of his private interests, and for the half-hour of their visit he did his best to live up to the parson’s enthusiasm. “Good,” said Frank Warriner, as they left the house. “You managed that quite well.”
In the early afternoon they came to a stone wall bounding a great estate. Frank led the way over the wall. “Follow me,” he said. “Colonel Ambridge is a devil about his pheasants. We’ll have some fun getting through this place.” They found themselves in a park studded with coppices, and bordered by a large wood full of thick undergrowth. Frank took an odd way of crossing prohibited ground, for he began by making himself conspicuous, walking boldly across the open in full view of a keeper’s cottage. Presently a man’s voice was heard uplifted, and the two became fugitives. They doubled back behind a group of trees, and Frank made for the big wood. They were followed, for as Adam looked behind him he saw two excited men running to cut them off.
In the wood Frank led him through gaps in the undergrowth, stopping now and then to listen like a stag at pause. There was no doubt about the pursuit, for the noise of heavy feet and crackling twigs was loud behind them. Frank seemed to know the place well, and he had an uncanny gift of locating sound, for he twisted backward and forward like a rabbit. Adam found running bent double and eel-like crawling through bracken a far harder trial than the speed of the morning, but he managed to keep close to his companion. At last Frank straightened himself and laughed. “Now for a sprint,” he said, and he led the way at a good pace down a woodland path, which ended in an alley of rhododendrons.
To Adam’s surprise, instead of avoiding the house they made for it. Frank slowed down at the edge of a carriage drive and walked boldly across the lawn to a stone terrace, and through French windows into a library where a man was sitting. “Hullo, Colonel Ambridge,” he said. “We’re out for a walk and looked in to pass the time of day. May I introduce my friend Mr More?”
The Colonel, a lean dark man of about sixty, behaved like the parson. He gave them drinks, and plunged into military talk, most of it directed to Adam. This was no somnolent retired soldier, but a man remarkably up-to-date in his calling. He spoke of the French generals whose names were becoming familiar in Britain — of Joffre’s colonial service and of Foch’s Principes de la Guerre, and he was critical of the French concentration in Lorraine. France he maintained had departed from the true interpretation of the “war of manoeuvre,” and he was contemptuous of false parallels drawn from Napoleon’s bataillon carrée at Jena. He seemed to have an exact knowledge of the terrain of the war, maps were produced, and Adam, the sweat on his brow and the marks of brier scratches on his cheek, found himself debating closely on points of strategy. There was something sharp and appraising in their host’s eye as they took their leave. “Good,” said Frank again. “You handled old Ambridge well. Now for home, for we mustn’t be late.”
The last part of the ground was covered mainly in a loping trot, which took them back along the ridge of the Downs till they looked down upon the Warriners’ house. Adam calculated that they had done nearly thirty miles, but he realised that the day had not been meant as a mere test of bodily endurance. Those queer visits had had a purpose, and he guessed what it was. To his delight it seemed to him that his companion was flagging a little — at any rate the edge was off his keenness — while he himself had got his second wind.
He found a large tea-party at the Warriners’. “I’m going to cut it,” Frank said, “but you must show yourself. You look all right. You’ve kept amazingly tidy.” Adam obeyed, for he thought he understood the reason.
He could have drunk pints, but he was only given one small cup of weak tea. But he had a full dose of conversation. It appeared to be the special purpose of everyone to talk to him. He had to listen to schemes of hospital work from local ladies, and to amateur military speculations from an old Yeomanry colonel. A Bishop discussed with him the ethics of the war, and a parliamentary candidate had much to say about the party truce. He felt hot, very thirsty, and rather drowsy, but he collected his wits, for he saw that his host’s eye was continually fixed on him. The elder Warriner managed to add himself to any group where Adam talked, and it appeared that he was adroitly trying to draw him out.
“You have been drinking in the peace of England,” the Bishop told him. “To-day will be a cool oasis to remember in the feverish months before you.”
When the guests had gone and he was left with his host, the rosy country squire seemed to have changed to somebody shrewd and authoritative.
“We shall be alone to-night,” he said, “for Frank has gone back to camp. You acquitted yourself well, Mr More. Frank is pretty nearly all out, and he is harder than most people. I daresay you realise the purpose of to-day’s performance. In the game you are entering physical fitness is not enough. A man must have full control of his wits, and be able to use them when his bodily vitality is low. The mind must have the upper hand of the carcass, and not be drugged by exertion into apathy. You appear to fill the bill. . . . Now you’ll want a bath before dinner.
“By the way,” he added, “there’s one thing you may like to know. We won’t talk about the past, but long ago at school I fagged for your father.”
Adam’s next visit was of a different kind. Slowly there had been growing in his mind the comforting reflection that he might be of use to the world, since other people seemed to take pains to assess his capacities. He recognised that the tests were only superficial — what could anyone learn of a man’s powers from a few experiments? — but that they should have been considered worth while increased his confidence. So when he was sent down to spend a day with a certain Theophilus Scrope in a little market-town in Northamptonshire he speculated on what might next be put to the proof. Certain branches of his knowledge had been prob
ed, and his bodily strength, but no one had attempted to assay his mental powers or the quality of his nerves. The latter, he believed, would now be the subject, and he thought of Mr Scrope as a mixture of psychologist and physician.
Mr Scrope was neither. He was a small elderly man with a Chinese cast of face, who wore a skull-cap, and sat with a tartan plaid round his shoulders, though the weather was warm. He had a dreamy eye, and a voice hoarse with age and endless cigarettes. At first his talk meandered about several continents. It appeared that he had spent much of his life in the East, and he entertained Adam with fantastic tales of the Tibetan frontier. His experiences seemed to have impressed themselves on his face, for he had the air of a wise and ancient Lama. He was fond of quoting proverbs from native languages, and now and then he would deliver oracles of his own, looking sideways under his heavy eyelids to see how they were received.
Adam spent a confused morning, sitting in a little garden heavy with the scents of autumn flowers. Mr Scrope seemed to have a genius for the discursive. But gradually it appeared that his reminiscences were directed to one point especially, the everlasting temperamental differences of East and West. His chief instance was the virtue of courage. The East, he said, which did not fear the hereafter, was apathetic towards the mere fact of death, but it had not the same fortitude about life. It was capable of infinite sacrifice but not of infinite effort — it was apt to fling in its hand too soon, and relapse upon passivity. The West, when it had conquered the fear of death, demanded a full price for any sacrifice. Rightly, said the old man, since man’s first duty was towards life.
Then they went indoors to luncheon, which was a modest meal of eggs, cheese and vegetables. After that his host must sleep for an hour, and Adam was left alone to his reflections in a chair on the veranda. . . . He was beginning to see some purpose in the talk of this ancient, who looked like a Buddhist holy man. Mr Scrope must have been informed about his case, and realised that he was dealing with one who had nothing to lose. The moral of his talk was that desperation was valueless by itself and must be subordinated to a purpose. A man’s life was an asset which must be shrewdly bargained for. Adam wondered why he had been sent down into Northamptonshire to hear this platitude.
