Mr Standfast rh-3

by John Buchan

  I had been picturing her in my recollection as very young and glimmering, a dancing, exquisite child. But now I revised that picture. The crystal freshness of morning was still there, but I saw how deep the waters were. It was the clean fineness and strength of her that entranced me. I didn’t even think of her as pretty, any more than a man thinks of the good looks of the friend he worships.

  We waited, hardly speaking a word, till Macgillivray came. The first sight of his face told his story.

  ‘Gone?’ asked Blenkiron sharply. The man’s lethargic calm seemed to have wholly deserted him.

  ‘Gone,’ repeated the newcomer. ‘We have just tracked him down. Oh, he managed it cleverly. Never a sign of disturbance in any of his lairs. His dinner ordered at Biggleswick and several people invited to stay with him for the weekend - one a member of the Government. Two meetings at which he was to speak arranged for next week. Early this afternoon he flew over to France as a passenger in one of the new planes. He had been mixed up with the Air Board people for months - of course as another man with another face. Miss Lamington discovered that just too late. The bus went out of its course and came down in Normandy. By this time our man’s in Paris or beyond it.’

  Sir Walter took off his big tortoiseshell spectacles and laid them carefully on the table.

  ‘Roll up the map of Europe,’ he said. ‘This is our Austerlitz. Mary, my dear, I am feeling very old.’

  Macgillivray had the sharpened face of a bitterly disappointed man. Blenkiron had got very red, and I could see that he was blaspheming violently under his breath. Mary’s eyes were quiet and solemn. She kept on patting Sir Walter’s hand. The sense of some great impending disaster hung heavily on me, and to break the spell I asked for details.

  ‘Tell me just the extent of the damage,’ I asked. ‘Our neat plan for deceiving the Boche has failed. That is bad. A dangerous spy has got beyond our power. That’s worse. Tell me, is there still a worst? What’s the limit of mischief he can do?’ Sir Walter had risen and joined Blenkiron on the hearthrug. His brows were furrowed and his mouth hard as if he were suffering Pain.

  ‘There is no limit,’ he said. ‘None that I can see, except the long-suffering of God. You know the man as Ivery, and you knew him as that other whom you believed to have been shot one summer morning and decently buried. You feared the second - at least if you didn’t, I did - most mortally. You realized that we feared Ivery, and you knew enough about him to see his fiendish cleverness. Well, you have the two men combined in one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I ever encountered, the most cunning and patient and long-sighted. Combine him with the other, the chameleon who can blend himself with his environment, and has as many personalities as there are types and traits on the earth. What kind of enemy is that to have to fight?’

  ‘I admit it’s a steep proposition. But after all how much ill can he do? There are pretty strict limits to the activity of even the cleverest spy.’

  ‘I agree. But this man is not a spy who buys a few wretched subordinates and steals a dozen private letters. He’s a genius who has been living as part of our English life. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen. He’s been on terms of intimacy with all kinds of politicians. We know that. He did it as Ivery. They rather liked him, for he was clever and flattered them, and they told him things. But God knows what he saw and heard in his other personalities. For all I know he may have breakfasted at Downing Street with letters of introduction from President Wilson, or visited the Grand Fleet as a distinguished neutral. Then think of the women; how they talk. We’re the leakiest society on earth, and we safeguard ourselves by keeping dangerous people out of it. We trust to our outer barrage. But anyone who has really slipped inside has a million chances. And this, remember, is one man in ten millions, a man whose brain never sleeps for a moment, who is quick to seize the slightest hint, who can piece a plan together out of a dozen bits of gossip. It’s like - it’s as if the Chief of the Intelligence Department were suddenly to desert to the enemy … The ordinary spy knows only bits of unconnected facts. This man knows our life and our way of thinking and everything about us.’

  ‘Well, but a treatise on English life in time of war won’t do much good to the Boche.’

  Sir Walter shook his head. ‘Don’t you realize the explosive stuff that is lying about? Ivery knows enough to make the next German peace offensive really deadly - not the blundering thing which it has been up to now, but something which gets our weak spots on the raw. He knows enough to wreck our campaign in the field. And the awful thing is that we don’t know just what he knows or what he is aiming for. This war’s a packet of surprises. Both sides are struggling for the margin, the little fraction of advantage, and between evenly matched enemies it’s just the extra atom of foreknowledge that tells.’ ‘Then we’ve got to push off and get after him,’ I said cheerfully.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ asked Macgillivray. ‘If it were merely a question of destroying an organization it might be managed, for an organization presents a big front. But it’s a question of destroying this one man, and his front is a razor edge. How are you going to find him? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and such a needle! A needle which can become a piece of straw or a tin-tack when it chooses!’

  ‘All the same we’ve got to do it,’ I said, remembering old Peter’s lesson on fortitude, though I can’t say I was feeling very stout-hearted.

  Sir Walter flung himself wearily into an armchair. ‘I wish I could be an optimist,’ he said, ‘but it looks as if we must own defeat. I’ve been at this work for twenty years, and, though I’ve been often beaten, I’ve always held certain cards in the game. Now I’m hanged if I’ve any. It looks like a knock-out, Hannay. It’s no good deluding ourselves. We’re men enough to look facts in the face and tell ourselves the truth. I don’t see any ray of light in the business. We’ve missed our shot by a hairsbreadth and that’s the same as missing by miles.’

  I remember he looked at Mary as if for confirmation, but she did not smile or nod. Her face was very grave and her eyes looked steadily at him. Then they moved and met mine, and they seemed to give me my marching orders.

  ‘Sir Walter,’ I said, ‘three years ago you and I sat in this very room. We thought we were done to the world, as we think now. We had just that one miserable little clue to hang on to - a dozen words scribbled in a notebook by a dead man. You thought I was mad when I asked for Scudder’s book, but we put our backs into the job and in twenty-four hours we had won out. Remember that then we were fighting against time. Now we have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then we had nothing but a sentence of gibberish. Now we have a great body of knowledge, for Blenkiron has been brooding over Ivery like an old hen, and he knows his ways of working and his breed of confederate. You’ve got something to work on now. Do you mean to tell me that, when the stakes are so big, you’re going to chuck in your hand?’

  Macgillivray raised his head. ‘We know a good deal about Ivery, but Ivery’s dead. We know nothing of the man who was gloriously resurrected this evening in Normandy.’

  ‘Oh, yes we do. There are many faces to the man, but only one mind, and you know plenty about that mind.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Sir Walter. ‘How can you know a mind which has no characteristics except that it is wholly and supremely competent? Mere mental powers won’t give us a clue. We want to know the character which is behind all the personalities. Above all we want to know its foibles. If we had only a hint of some weakness we might make a plan.’

  ‘Well, let’s set down all we know,’ I cried, for the more I argued the keener I grew. I told them in some detail the story of the night in the Coolin and what I had heard there.

  ‘There’s the two names Chelius and Bommaerts. The man spoke them in the same breath as Effenbein, so they must be associated with Ivery’s gang. You’ve got to get the whole Secret Service of the Allies busy to fit a meaning to these two words. Surely to goodness you’ll find something! Remember those name
s don’t belong to the Ivery part, but to the big game behind all the different disguises … Then there’s the talk about the Wild Birds and the Cage Birds. I haven’t a guess at what it means. But it refers to some infernal gang, and among your piles of records there must be some clue. You set the intelligence of two hemispheres busy on the job. You’ve got all the machinery, and it’s my experience that if even one solitary man keeps chewing on at a problem he discovers something.’

  My enthusiasm was beginning to strike sparks from Macgillivray. He was looking thoughtful now, instead of despondent.

  ‘There might be something in that,’ he said, ‘but it’s a far-out chance.’

  ‘Of course it’s a far-out chance, and that’s all we’re ever going to get from Ivery. But we’ve taken a bad chance before and won … Then you’ve all that you know about Ivery here. Go through his _dossier with a small-tooth comb and I’ll bet you find something to work on. Blenkiron, you’re a man with a cool head. You admit we’ve a sporting chance.’

  ‘Sure, Dick. He’s fixed things so that the lines are across the track, but we’ll clear somehow. So far as John S. Blenkiron is concerned he’s got just one thing to do in this world, and that’s to follow the yellow dog and have him neatly and cleanly tidied up. I’ve got a stack of personal affronts to settle. I was easy fruit and he hasn’t been very respectful. You can count me in, Dick.’

  ‘Then we’re agreed,’ I cried. ‘Well, gentlemen, it’s up to you to arrange the first stage. You’ve some pretty solid staff work to put in before you get on the trail.’

  ‘And you?’ Sir Walter asked.

  ‘I’m going back to my brigade. I want a rest and a change. Besides, the first stage is office work, and I’m no use for that. But I’ll be waiting to be summoned, and I’ll come like a shot as soon as you hoick me out. I’ve got a presentiment about this thing. I know there’ll be a finish and that I’ll be in at it, and I think it will be a desperate, bloody business too.’

  I found Mary’s eyes fixed upon me, and in them I read the same thought. She had not spoken a word, but had sat on the edge of a chair, swinging a foot idly, one hand playing with an ivory fan. She had given me my old orders and I looked to her for confirmation of the new.

  ‘Miss Lamington, you are the wisest of the lot of us. What do you say?’

  She smiled - that shy, companionable smile which I had been picturing to myself through all the wanderings of the past month.

  ‘I think you are right. We’ve a long way to go yet, for the Valley of Humiliation comes only half-way in thePilgrim’s Progress. The next stage was Vanity Fair. I might be of some use there, don’t you think?’

  I remember the way she laughed and flung back her head like a gallant boy.

  ‘The mistake we’ve all been making,’ she said, ‘is that our methods are too terre-a-terre. We’ve a poet to deal with, a great poet, and we must fling our imaginations forward to catch up with him. His strength is his unexpectedness, you know, and we won’t beat him by plodding only. I believe the wildest course is the wisest, for it’s the most likely to intersect his … Who’s the poet among us?’

  ‘Peter,’ I said. ‘But he’s pinned down with a game leg in Germany. All the same we must rope him in.’

  By this time we had all cheered up, for it is wonderful what a tonic there is in a prospect of action. The butler brought in tea, which it was Bullivant’s habit to drink after dinner. To me it seemed fantastic to watch a slip of a girl pouring it out for two grizzled and distinguished servants of the State and one battered soldier - as decorous a family party as you would ask to see - and to reflect that all four were engaged in an enterprise where men’s lives must be reckoned at less than thistledown.

  After that we went upstairs to a noble Georgian drawing-room and Mary played to us. I don’t care two straws for music from an instrument - unless it be the pipes or a regimental band - but I dearly love the human voice. But she would not sing, for singing to her, I fancy, was something that did not come at will, but flowed only like a bird’s note when the mood favoured. I did not want it either. I was content to let ‘Cherry Ripe’ be the one song linked with her in my memory.

  It was Macgillivray who brought us back to business.

  ‘I wish to Heaven there was one habit of mind we could definitely attach to him and to no one else.’ (At this moment ‘He’ had only one meaning for us.)

  ‘You can’t do nothing with his mind,’ Blenkiron drawled. ‘You can’t loose the bands of Orion, as the Bible says, or hold Leviathan with a hook. I reckoned I could and made a mighty close study of his devices. But the darned cuss wouldn’t stay put. I thought I had tied him down to the double bluff, and he went and played the triple bluff on me. There’s nothing doing that line.’

  A memory of Peter recurred to me.

  ‘What about the “blind spot”?’ I asked, and I told them old Peter’s pet theory. ‘Every man that God made has his weak spot somewhere, some flaw in his character which leaves a dull patch in his brain. We’ve got to find that out, and I think I’ve made a beginning.’ Macgillivray in a sharp voice asked my meaning.

  ‘He’s in a funk … of something. Oh, I don’t mean he’s a coward. A man in his trade wants the nerve of a buffalo. He could give us all points in courage. What I mean is that he’s not clean white all through. There are yellow streaks somewhere in him … I’ve given a good deal of thought to this courage business, for I haven’t got a great deal of it myself. Not like Peter, I mean. I’ve got heaps of soft places in me. I’m afraid of being drowned for one thing, or of getting my eyes shot out. Ivery’s afraid of bombs - at any rate he’s afraid of bombs in a big city. I once read a book which talked about a thing called agoraphobia. Perhaps it’s that … Now if we know that weak spot it helps us in our work. There are some places he won’t go to, and there are some things he can’t do - not well, anyway. I reckon that’s useful.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Macgillivray. ‘Perhaps it’s not what you’d call a burning and a shining light.’

  ‘There’s another chink in his armour,’ I went on. ‘There’s one person in the world he can never practise his transformations on, and that’s me. I shall always know him again, though he appeared as Sir Douglas Haig. I can’t explain why, but I’ve got a feel in my bones about it. I didn’t recognize him before, for I thought he was dead, and the nerve in my brain which should have been looking for him wasn’t working. But I’m on my guard now, and that nerve’s functioning at full power. Whenever and wherever and howsoever we meet again on the face of the earth, it will be “Dr Livingstone, I presume” between him and me.’

  ‘That is better,’ said Macgillivray. ‘If we have any luck, Hannay, it won’t be long till we pull you out of His Majesty’s Forces.’

  Mary got up from the piano and resumed her old perch on the arm of Sir Walter’s chair.

  ‘There’s another blind spot which you haven’t mentioned.’ It was a cool evening, but I noticed that her cheeks had suddenly flushed.

  ‘Last week Mr Ivery asked me to marry him,’ she said.

  PART II

  CHAPTER TWELVE I Become a Combatant Once More

  I returned to France on 13 September, and took over my old brigade on the 19th of the same month. We were shoved in at the Polygon Wood on the 26th, and after four days got so badly mauled that we were brought out to refit. On 7 October, very much to my surprise, I was given command of a division and was on the fringes of the Ypres fighting during the first days of November. From that front we were hurried down to Cambrai in support, but came in only for the last backwash of that singular battle. We held a bit of the St Quentin sector till just before Christmas, when we had a spell of rest in billets, which endured, so far as I was concerned, till the beginning of January, when I was sent off on the errand which I shall presently relate.

  That is a brief summary of my military record in the latter part Of 1917. I am not going to enlarge on the fighting. Except for the days of the Polygon Wood it was neither very sever
e nor very distinguished, and you will find it in the history books. What I have to tell of here is my own personal quest, for all the time I was living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp as I did during those bleak months in Flanders and Picardy.

  For I had an instinct that the thing was desperately grave, graver even than the battle before me. Russia had gone headlong to the devil, Italy had taken it between the eyes and was still dizzy, and our own prospects were none too bright. The Boche was getting uppish and with some cause, and I foresaw a rocky time ahead till America could line up with us in the field. It was the chance for the Wild Birds, and I used to wake in a sweat to think what devilry Ivery might be engineering. I believe I did my proper job reasonably well, but I put in my most savage thinking over the other. I remember how I used to go over every hour of every day from that June night in the Cotswolds till my last meeting with Bullivant in London, trying to find a new bearing. I should probably have got brain-fever, if I hadn’t had to spend most of my days and nights fighting a stiffish battle with a very watchful Hun. That kept my mind balanced, and I dare say it gave an edge to it; for during those months I was lucky enough to hit on a better scent than Bullivant and Macgillivray and Blenkiron, pulling a thousand wires in their London offices.

  I will set down in order of time the various incidents in this private quest of mine. The first was my meeting with Geordie Hamilton. It happened just after I rejoined the brigade, when I went down to have a look at our Scots Fusilier battalion. The old brigade had been roughly handled on 31st July, and had had to get heavy drafts to come anywhere near strength. The Fusiliers especially were almost a new lot, formed by joining our remnants to the remains of a battalion in another division and bringing about a dozen officers from the training unit at home. I inspected the men and my eyes caught sight of a familiar face. I asked his name and the colonel got it from the sergeant-major. It was Lance-Corporal George Hamilton.