Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  But his toys were wonderful. The idle ladies who went there for a thrill were not disappointed. In the dusky room, among the strange rosy lights, their hearts seemed to be always fluttering on the brink of a revelation, and they came away excited and comforted, for Dr Lartius was an adept at delicate flattery. Fortune-telling in the ordinary sense there was none, but this young man seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of private affairs, which he used so discreetly that even those who had most reason to desire secrecy were never disquieted. For such entertainments he charged fees — high fees, as the fur coat and the pearl pin required. ‘You wish to be amused,’ he would say, ‘and it is right that you should pay me for it.’

  Even among the idle clients there was a sprinkling of the earnest. With these he had the air of a master towards initiates; they were fellow-pilgrims with him on the Great Road. He would talk to them by the hour, very beautifully, in a soft musical voice. He would warn them against charlatans, those who sought to prostitute a solemn ritual to purposes of vulgar gain. He would unroll for them the history of the great mystics and tell of that secret science known to the old adepts, which had been lost for ages, and was now being recovered piecemeal. These were the most thrilling hours of all, and the fame of Dr Lartius grew great in the drawing-rooms of the Elect. ‘And he’s such a gentleman, my dear - so well-bred and sympathetic and unworldly and absolutely honest!’

  But from others he took no fees. The sad-faced women, mostly in black, who sat in his great velvet chair and asked broken questions, found a very different Dr Lartius. He was no longer fluent and silver-tongued; sometimes he seemed almost embarrassed. He would repeat most earnestly that he was a disciple, a seeker, not a master of hidden things. On such occasions the toys were absent, and if some distracted mother sought knowledge that way she was refused. He rarely had anything definite to impart. When Lady H’s only son was about to exchange from the cavalry to the Foot Guards and his mother wanted to know how the step would affect his chances of survival, she got nothing beyond the obvious remark that this was an infantry war and he would have a better prospect of seeing fighting. Very rarely, he spoke out. Once to Mrs K, whose boy was a prisoner, he gave a full account of life in a German prison-camp, so that, in the absence of letters, her imagination had henceforth something to bite on. Usually his visitors were too embarrassed to be observant, but one or two noted that he was uncommonly well informed about the British Army. He never made a mistake about units, and seemed to know a man’s battalion before he was told it. And when mothers poured out details to him — for from the talk of soldiers on leave and epistolary indiscretions a good deal of information circulated about London — he now and then took notes.

  Yet, though they got little from him that was explicit, these visitors, as a rule, went away comforted. Perhaps it was his gentle soothing manner. Perhaps, as poor Lady M said, it was that he seemed so assured of the spiritual life that they felt that their anxieties were only tiny eddies on the edge of a great sea of peace. At any rate, it was the afflicted even more than the idly curious who spoke well of Dr Lartius.

  Sometimes he had masculine clients — fathers of fighting sons, who said they came on their wives’ behalf, elderly retired Generals who preferred spiritualism to golf, boys whose nerves were in tatters and wanted the solace which in other ages and lands would have been found in the confessional. With these last Dr. Lartius became a new man. He would take off his spectacles and look them in the face with his prominent lustrous eyes, and talk to them with a ring in his pleasant voice. It was not what he said so much, perhaps, as his manner of saying it, but he seemed to have a singular power over boys just a little bit loose from their moorings. ‘Queer thing,’ said one of these, ‘but one would almost think you had been a soldier yourself.’ Dr Lartius had smiled and resumed his spectacles. ‘I am a soldier, but in a different war. I fight with the sword of the spirit against the hidden things of darkness.’

  Towards the end of March the brass plate suddenly disappeared. There was a great fluttering in the dovecotes of the Elect when the news went round that there had been trouble with the police. It had been over the toys, of course, and the taking of fees. The matter never came into court, but Dr Lartius had been warned to clear out, and he obeyed. Many ladies wrote indignant letters to the Home Secretary about persecution, letters which cited ominous precedents from the early history of the Christian Church.

  But in April came consolation. The rumour spread that the Seekers were not to lose their guide. Mr Greatheart would still be available for the comforting of pilgrims. A plate with the name of Dr S. Lartius reappeared in a quiet street in Mayfair. But for the future there would be no question of fees. It was generally assumed that a few devout women had provided a fund for the sustenance of the prophet.

  In May his fame was greater than ever. One evening Lady Samplar, the most ardent of his devotees, spoke of him to a certain General who was a power in the land. The General was popular among the women of her set, but a notorious scoffer. Perhaps this was the secret of his popularity, for each hoped to convert him.

  ‘I want you to see him yourself,’ she said. ‘Only once. I believe in him so firmly that I am willing to stake everything on one interview. Promise me you will let me take you. I only want you to see him and talk to him for ten minutes. I want you to realise his unique personality, for if you once feel him you will scoff no more.’

  The General laughed, shrugged his shoulders, but allowed himself to be persuaded. So it came about that one afternoon in early June he accompanied Lady Samplar to the flat in Mayfair. ‘You must go in alone,’ she told him in the ante-room. ‘I have spoken about you to him, and he is expecting you. I will wait for you here.’

  For half an hour the General was closeted with Dr Lartius. When he returned to the lady his face was red and wrathful.

  ‘That’s the most dangerous fellow in London,’ he declared. ‘Look here, Mollie, you and your friends have been playing the fool about that man. He’s a German spy, if there ever was one. I caught him out, for I trapped him into speaking German. You say he’s a Swiss, but I swear no Swiss ever spoke German just as he speaks it. The man’s a Bavarian. I’ll take my oath he is!’

  It was a very depressed and rather frightened lady who gave him tea a little later in her drawing-room.

  ‘That kind of sweep is far too clever for you innocents,’ she was told. ‘There he has been for months pumping you all without your guessing it. You say he’s a great comfort to the mourners. I daresay he is, but the poor devils tell him everything that’s in their heads. That man has a unique chance of knowing the inside of the British Army. And how has he used his knowledge? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she quavered.

  ‘I’m going to have him laid by the heels,’ he said grimly, as he took his departure. ‘Interned — or put up against a wall, if we can get the evidence. I tell you he’s a Boche pure and simple — not that there’s much purity and simplicity about him.’

  The General was as good as his word, but in one matter he was wrong. The credentials of the prophet’s Swiss nationality were good enough. There was nothing for it but to deport him as an undesirable, so one fine morning Dr S. Lartius got his marching orders. He made no complaint, and took a dignified farewell of his friends. But the Faithful were not silent, and the friendship between Lady Samplar and the General died a violent death. The thing got into the papers. Dr Lartius figured in many unrecognisable portraits in the press, and a bishop preached a sermon in a City church about the worship of false gods.

  II

  As Dr Lartius, closely supervised by the French police, pursued his slow and comfortless journey to the Swiss frontier, he was cheered by several proofs that his fame had gone abroad and that he was not forgotten. At Paris there were flowers in his dingy hotel bedroom, the gift of an unknown admirer, and a little note of encouragement in odd French. At Dijon he received from a strange lady another note telling him that his fr
iends were awaiting him in Berne. When he crossed the border at Pontarlier there were more flowers and letters. The young man paid little attention to such tributes. He spent the journey in quiet reading and meditation, and when he reached Berne did not seem to expect any one to greet him, but collected his luggage and drove off unobtrusively to an hotel.

  He had not been there an hour when a card was brought to him bearing the name of Ernst Ulrici, Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Bonn.

  ‘Dr Lartius,’ said the visitor, a middle-aged man with a peaked grey beard and hair cut en brosse. ‘It is an honour to make your acquaintance. We have heard of your fine work and your world-moulding discoveries.’

  The young man bowed gravely. ‘I am only a seeker,’ he said. ‘I make no claim to be a master — yet. I am only a little way on the road to enlightenment.’

  ‘We have also heard,’ said the other, ‘of how shamelessly the British Government has persecuted learning in your person.’

  The reply was a smile and a shrug. ‘I make no complaint. It is natural that my studies should seem foolishness to the children of this world.’

  Dr Ulrici pressed him further on the matter of Britain, but could wake no bitterness.

  ‘There is war to-day,’ he said at last. ‘You are of German race. Your sympathies are with us?’

  ‘I have no nationality,’ was the answer. ‘All men are my brothers. But I would fain see this bloodshed at an end.’

  ‘How will it end?’ came the question.

  ‘I am no prophet,’ said Dr Lartius. ‘Yet I can tell that Germany will win, but how I can tell I cannot tell.’

  The conversation lasted long and explored many subjects. The German led it cunningly to small matters, and showed a wide acquaintance with the young man’s science. He learned that much of his work had been done with soldiers and soldiers’ kin, and that in the process of it he had heard many things not published in the newspapers. But when he hinted, ever so delicately, that he would be glad to buy the knowledge, a flush passed over the other’s pale face and his voice sharpened.

  ‘I am no spy,’ he said. ‘I do not prostitute my art for hire. It matters nothing to me which side wins, but it matters much that I keep my soul clean.’

  So Dr Ulrici tried another tack. He spoke of the mysteries of the craft, and lured the young man into the confession of hopes and ideals. There could be no communion with the dead, he was told, until communion had first been perfected with the spirits of the living. ‘Let the time come,’ said Dr Lartius, ‘when an unbroken fellowship can be created between souls separated by great tracts of space, and the key has been found. Death is an irrelevant accident. The spirit is untouched by it. Find the trait d’union between spirits still in their fleshly envelope, and it can be continued when that envelope is shed.’

  ‘And you have progressed in this affair?’ asked Ulrici, with scepticism in his tone.

  ‘A few stages,’ said the other, and in the ardour of exposition he gave proofs. He had clients, he said, with whom he had established the mystic catena. He could read their thoughts even now, though they were far away, share in their mental changes, absorb the knowledge which they acquired.

  Soldiers?’ asked the German.

  Some are soldiers. All are the kin of soldiers.’

  But Ulrici was still cold. ‘That is a great marvel,’ he said, ‘and not easy to believe.’

  Dr Lartius was fired. ‘I will give you proofs,’ he said, with unwonted passion in his voice. ‘You can it test them at your leisure. I know things which have not yet come to pass, though no man has spoken to me of them. How do I know them? Because they have come within the cognisance of minds attuned to my own.’

  For a moment he seemed to hesitate. Then he spoke of certain matters - a little change in the method of artillery barrages, a readjustment in the organisation of the British Air Force, an alteration in certain British commands.

  ‘These may be trivial things,’ he said. ‘I do not know. I have no technical skill. But they are still in the future. I offer them to you as proofs of my knowledge.’

  ‘So?’ said the other. ‘They are indeed small things, but they will do for a test...’

  Then he spoke kindly, considerately, of Dr Lartius’s future.

  ‘I think I will go to Munich,’ said the young man. ‘Once I studied at the University there, and I love the bright city. They are a sympathetic people and respect knowledge.’

  Dr Ulrici rose to take his leave. ‘It may be I am able to further your plans, my friend,’ he said.

  Late that night in a big sitting-room in another hotel, furnished somewhat in the style of an official bureau, Ulrici talked earnestly with another man, a heavy, bearded man, who wore the air of a prosperous bagman, but who was addressed with every token of respect.

  ‘This Lartius fellow puzzles me. He is a transparent fanatic, with some odd power in him that sets him above others of his kidney. I fear he will not be as useful to us as we had hoped. If only we had known of him sooner and could have kept him in England.’

  ‘He can’t go back, I suppose?’

  ‘Impossible, sir. But there is still a chance. He has some wild theory that he has established a link with various people, and so acquires automatically whatever new knowledge they gain. Some of these people are soldiers. He has told me things — little things — that I may test this power of his. I am no believer in the spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, but I have lived long enough not to reject a thing because it is new and strange. About that we shall see. If there is anything in it there will be much. Meantime I keep closely in touch with him.’

  ‘What is he going to do?’

  ‘He wants to go to Munich. I am in favour of permitting it, sir. Our good Bavarians are somewhat light in the head, and are always seeking a new thing. They want a little ghostly consolation at present, and this man will give it them. He believes most firmly in our German victory.’

  The other yawned and flung away the end of his cigar. ‘The mountebank seems to have some glimmerings of sense,’ he said.

  III

  So it came about that in August of the year 1917 Dr Lartius was settled in comfortable rooms off the Garmischstrasse in the Bavarian capital, and a new plate of gun-metal and oxidised silver, lettered in the best style of art nouveau, advertised his name to the citizens of Munich.

  Fortune still attended the young man, for, as in London, he seemed to spring at once into fame. Within a week of his arrival people were talking about him, and in a month his chambers were crowded. Perhaps his friend Ulrici had spoken a word in the right place. It was the great season before Caporetto, and Dr Lartius spoke heartening things to his clients. Victory was near and the days of glory; but when asked about the date of peace he was coy. Peace would come, but not yet; for the world there was another winter of war.

  His methods were the same as those which had captured Lady Samplar and her friends. To the idly curious he showed toys; to the emotional he spoke nobly of the life of the spirit and the locked doors of hidden knowledge which were now almost ajar. Rich ladies, bored with the dullness of the opera season and the scarcity of men, found in him a new interest in life. To the sorrowful he gave the comfort which he had given to his London circle — no more. His personality seemed to exhale hope and sympathy, and mourners, remembering his pleasant voice and compelling eyes, departed with a consolation which they could not define.

  That was for the ordinary run of clients; but there were others — fellow-students they professed themselves — to whom he gave stronger meat. He preached his doctrine of the mystic community of thought and knowledge between souls far apart, and now and then he gave proofs such as he had given to Ulrici. It would appear that these proofs stood the test, for his reputation grew prodigiously. He told them little things about forthcoming changes in the Allied armies, and the event always proved him right. They were not things that mattered greatly; but if he could disclose trivialities, some day his method might enable him to reveal a mighty secret
. So more than one Generalstabschef came to sit with him in his twilit room.

  About once a month he used to go back to Berne, and was invariably met at the station by Ulrici. He had been given a very special passport, which took him easily and expeditiously over the frontier, and he had no trouble with station commandants. In these visits he would be closeted with Ulrici for hours. Occasionally he would slip out of his hotel at night for a little, and when Ulrici heard of it he shrugged his shoulders and laughed. ‘He is young,’ he would say with a leer. ‘Even a prophet must have his amusements.’ But he was wrong, for Dr Lartius had not the foibles he suspected.

  The winter passed slowly, and the faces in the Munich streets grew daily more pinched and wan, clothing more shabby, and boots more down at heel. But there was always comfort for seekers in the room in the Garmischstrasse. Whoever lost faith it was not Dr Lartius. Peace was coming, and his hearers judged that he had forgotten his scientific detachment from all patriotisms and was becoming a good German.

  Then in February of the New Year came the rumour of the great advance preparing in the West. The High Command had promised speedy and final victory in return for a little more endurance. Dr Lartius seemed to have the first news of it. ‘It is Peace,’ he said, ‘Peace before winter;’ and his phrase was repeated everywhere and became a popular watchword. So, when the news came at the end of March of the retreat of the French and English to the gates of Amiens, the hungry people smiled to each other and said, ‘He is right, as always. It is Peace.’ Few now cared much about victory, except the high officers and the very rich, but on Peace all were determined.