The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

In the ears of the undebauched Gresson most of these voices were more like curbs than spurs to the promptings of youth. But just as he turned from the Place Notre Dame, to go back to the Rue du Soleil, the sudden casting of one of the wee jets of electric light on his uniform and his face was followed by an English greeting that pulled him up with a jerk: “Alone! At this late hour! What would Mother say?”

  The mere words were nothing: their jaunty jocosity was the common slang of a trade. Nor was it anything out of the way that the words were spoken in English: half the sisterhood did that in France. What made him stop and say “Hullo!” was the quality of the voice. It was everything that nobody could expect from the tongue of a street-walker hawking her person to any chance ruffian a foreign army might throw in her way. It had depths and reserves. Like some rare and gifted woman’s most furtive looks, it seemed subtly to index and vouch for many old forces and causes, of slow growth and long operation—character, race, a culture carefully sheltered and long in the building. Besides, the brazen facetiousness had come out, as it were, in spite of some revolt in the speaker. And yet, as he gasped his “Hullo!” she acted the courtesan with a will. She flashed her lamp on her own face, her hair, her bust, as if to say. “There! See the goods, before buying.”

  Gresson gasped again. The woman was a Juno; no, a Tragic Muse—tall, deep-bosomed, the regular features grave with a deep and ample expressiveness, the face of one of those most beautiful women who have achieved an intense absorption in some other thing than their own beauty. And she doing this!—she that, to see or to hear, made you feel how gloriously far a woman may be from a mere slave or a mere animal. There must be some enormous mistake somewhere, some sort of fantastic illusion. All the ardent, super-rational respect of clean-minded boys for womankind in the mass was tingling in the voice of Gresson when he made shift to answer politely, in his bad French, “And you, Madame! Under enemy fire!”

  “Enemy? German?” she asked.

  He explained that the dry buzz which was then growing louder was more smoothly continuous than the hum of any British aeroplane. “He’s coming this way,” he said. “Look!”

  He pointed upwards at a white patch that had just broken out on the under-side of a cloud almost directly above them. At that place the fiery stares of two British ground searchlights had just rushed together. They had been searching the sky for the raider, each light working on its own, as two town policemen search a suspected backyard with their lanterns. Now one of them had found, and the other had instantly wheeled round to share in the find and to help keep the quarry in sight. Like a fly walking on a high ceiling, a black speck was scudding across the disk that the searchlights had painted in luminous fresco on the black dome of night. But the disk moved with the speck: wherever the speck went, its halo of brilliance was round it.

  The girl gazed up eagerly. When she sighted the thing that was ranging the sky, with its glory all about it, she let out an “Ah!” that made Gresson feel sure she was not funked at all, and yet that she was decidedly stirred.

  “Like God!” she muttered. It made Gresson start. The words had an aptness, no doubt, to that enskyed engine of wrath, remote, alone, girdled with light, throbbing with power, like a Jehovah of old when he floated out on black wings over a culpable earth, with his bolt in his hand. But, Gosh! what a woman, to see it like that! French, and yet able to stand off and see a Boche bomber busy above her as anything but a foul vampire bat let out of Hell for an hour. Our Tommies might think in that detached way about enemies. But a civilian!—a woman!—a French one at that! She must be a genius.

  While Gresson digested this latest course of the full meal of surprise that the evening had brought him, Jehovah let fly, to some purpose. When a bomb of some size falls anywhere near in the dark, it feels as if the big splash of flame from the burst were all round you. The sound, too, fills your whole world for a moment. Then there comes, just for a second, a quite remarkable silence, and then certain smaller noises consequent on the original smash, begin to rise clear of the silence. When Gresson’s eyes and ears came to themselves, a large broken branch of a tree was settling down to the ground with a soft leafy crash of crushed boughs, some man up the street was screaming with pain, and the singular girl was a blob of black daubed anyhow on the blackish grey of the pavement. The metal of her little flash-lamp tinkled on the stone as it fell out of her slackening hand.

  He grabbed the lamp and looked at her. She was alive: her eye flinched under the light. She had no obvious wound. But she had the look that Gresson, a youth now well versed in bloodshed, liked least of all the looks painted on faces and bodies by the queer artistry of scientific slaughter. It was the battered, bullied look of a mouse kicked to death in the dust. As often happened through the caprices of shell-fire, she was stripped half-naked; her hat, with its flowers, was tumbled and spoilt, the little gewgaws of her pitiful occupation were all disordered. What remained of her clothing was knocked about, dirtied and torn.

  That grotesque and cruel disarraying moved the young expert in carnage more than he could have believed until he felt it. All thought of sex was gone in a moment. Now she was only a sort of poor human rag-doll that had been used as a football—that or a child caught and horribly mauled by some brute of a force while trundling her little soiled hoop through the mud. He laid her easy and straightened her dishevelled clothes as well as he could and then waited a minute, wondering whether a flake of the bomb had done her business for good, or only grazed and badly shocked her. In either case, what must he do? Get her to a hospital, he supposed. While he leant over her, thinking, she suddenly spoke, faintly but in the most earnest entreaty, as though she had detected his thought. “Not to a hospital. No.”

  “All right,” he assured her. “Don’t worry.”

  She took a moment of rest and then said, in a voice that tried to be firm, “Will you help me to rise?”

  He tried, and she made a game effort. It was hopeless. One knee was clean out of action. When she attempted to use it her whole weight came upon him at once. “Madame,” he urged, “may I carry you to the hospital? It is two hundred yards only.”

  She said, “No, no, I beg you, for the love of God,” so piteously that he was silenced. “You don’t know,” she said in a passionate whisper, “the way French hospital people would treat a—a woman like me.”

  That brought him a new pang of compassion. He couldn’t do what she dreaded so much. But, Lord! how his mess would guffaw, could they see him there now, stuck and perplexed, with the head and neck of a Midianitish tragedy queen sustained in his arms! “But, Madame, what to do?” he said, in a voice almost as imploring as hers.

  “You’ll help me?—no?” she entreated, always in English. “I live—oh, not very far off, with you helping me. I have a friend there—I’ll be all right there if, with your infinite goodness——”

  But no mere helping would do it. Shyly and carefully he lifted her up in his arms, said, “You must tell me the way,” and so set off, he knew not whither, through the empty and echoing streets. She steered him up the Street of St. Denis, along the Street of the Three Pebbles—the Regent Street or Broadway of Amiens—and down the smaller Street of the Three Naked Bodies without Heads to an unlighted house at its far end.

  Not a soul did they meet on this picturesque progress except a corporal’s party of English Military Police, out upon their everlasting quest of drunks and strays. As a matter of form, the corporal challenged the odd caravan. He was not scandalized seriously. Any natural gift for wonder with which a British soldier-policeman set out to scour the streets of Amiens in those days was much assisted to wear itself out. Even the sight of a second lieutenant bearing away a pallid Aspasia, with blood dripping from the long heels of her shoes, did not astonish. “Pass, British officer, and all’s correct” was the formula that the corporal used to disclaim further interest in the incident.

  Gresson could have wishe
d that the words described the case better. Correct! Why, not to speak of its more general lack of correctness, the girl had moved convulsively in his arms at the corporal’s challenge; one of her hands had plunged somewhere into her dress and had not altogether come out again, but he could have sworn that between its half-hidden fingers he saw the shine of a silvery little pistol—the miniature kind that can give you an adequate dose, and yet have a remarkably small displacement of air in a pocket.

  “I shouldn’t bring that any further out if I were you,” Gresson had said at the moment—in his bad French, but in the fatherly tone that an old professional handler of arms of precision may permit himself in explaining the etiquette of their use to an inexperienced young woman. And she had taken it so—had left the firearm in its lair and had brought the hand out and shown him its palm, open and empty, and said, “See! I am sage,” like a French child when it vows to be good. But why pistols at all?

  And why the queer mode of their entry into the dark little house in the Street of the Three Naked Bodies? He was for ringing the bell, but she said, “No. Please bring me near. I will knock,” and then she beat a curious little tattoo on the glass panel with a big ring that she wore. It was as if somebody had been standing just on the other side of the door, waiting in the dark for that tattoo, so immediately did a dim light appear within and the door open. Its opener was a staid woman of thirty or so, in the rig of a hospital nurse, who lost her composure at once, gave a cry of horror and flung herself on the patient with a wild outburst of sorrow and tenderness.

  “She’s hurt. Can’t walk. A bomb, you know,” said Gresson, in his bad French. “Permit me to carry her to her room.”

  The nurse, gulping sobs and alternately charging ahead a few steps and looking anxiously back, gave him a lead up the stairs. Concerned as he still was, it was a relief to be out of the streets. Here would he see, at any rate, no British corporal. Sheltered from public derision, he could take notice of things. And what a house it was! Every lamp, every hanging, every fireplace and chair had the grim, cold, dully classical look common in French bourgeois interiors. He had been billeted in such houses. But the home of the stodgiest trader, the steeliest country attorney, had looked less drearily loyal to the conventions than this. And it an arbour for Venus, a Paphian bower! Why, it was enough to freeze a Bacchante.

  These women, too! A dim lamp overhead will make almost any face appear grave, but neither of theirs needed that. They made him feel he had gained their goodwill, but also that there was something about them which he was utterly “out of”—far outside it, and never to come any nearer, and yet unaccountably warmly regarded. Could that be common in women for whom the bedevilment of their womanhood had become a career? And how the damaged one had stuck the torments that his joggly walk must have inflicted! A Joan of Arc, begad!

  He laid her reverentially down on her bed that the other showed him. Then he put on the right cheerful tone, as he thought, for the sick, and said farewell in his decentest French. “Eh, bien, au revoir, Mesdames.”

  With a most friendly earnestness the wounded woman said, “No. Never. Never. If you should ever meet me again, by an accident, you are to think only this—that you are in danger, and go away very quickly, without looking or speaking. Please do not think me ungrateful. I was not unconscious, not for one little moment, tonight. I know all your courage and kindness and strength and your clean and delicate heart when I was abased. I only say ‘Never’ because this is the one kind thing I can say without a disloyalty.”

  She spoke with feeling, as if there were really some dreadful danger, as in the old romances, from which he was to be guarded. Well, he supposed that a “woman of pleasure,” with all that she knew, must want to warn any man, to whom she wished well—to warn him off her own world with its expense of spirit and its wastes of pain. He looked across at the older woman, as if in appeal against a judgement too drastic.

  Between the two women there seemed to pass glances that questioned and answered, and then the elder one shook her head too, always with that blended expression of reticence and benevolence.

  He couldn’t help jibbing, at the last moment, against this decree of finality in his severance from an enigma so beautiful. “Madame,” he said rather pleadingly, “may I not have even a name to remember?”

  She turned her dead-white face on the pillow and looked at his eager ingenuous one—the face of the English “nice boy,” at its nicest—with a sort of fierce kindness. “Yes,” she said, “Judith. Remember it carefully.”

  She closed her eyes, and the other woman let him out of the house.

  He went off straight to ring at the Hôtel du Rhin and get a bed. He felt, in a way, a little discomfited. Had he not gone forth, like others, to see life and have a good time, as they say? Had not the Medical Officer winked when he borrowed the horse? What would they say in the mess when he went back and avowed that he still had his ridiculous innocence? Wouldn’t they laugh? And yet he was elated, too. He hadn’t got what they thought so much of. But he had got what, somehow, was bigger. The skirts of something high and passionate had brushed him as it passed. In some indefinable way there was more in the world than before: life was a taller adventure.

  II

  An average, however accurately drawn, is only an average. It isn’t a maximum. Not through any precaution of his, Gresson survived the next fortnight. He did well in a futile attack and under a smashing counter-attack. When the rags that were left of the Division were taken out of the line, he was the only officer left in his Company. So he was now the acting commander of all the thirty-seven NCOs and men that were left on their legs.

  Through Albert and Amiens the dog-tired remnant trailed back at his heels to Ailly, on the Somme, to rest and re-fit, and one of its many long halts was made under the trees of the Boulevard du Mail at Amiens, a few minutes’ walk from the Street of the Three Naked Bodies. Gresson’s own legs felt like sackfuls of lead, but he plodded off to get a daylight glimpse of the casket containing the mystery. All its mystery was gone. A fly-blown “House to Let” bill was stuck in a window: the shutters were closed.

  So that was to be the absolute end of his one Arabian night’s entertainment. He stumped back to the men who were lolling and chaffing under the dusty leaves, and in ten minutes more they tramped off for Picquigny and Ailly.

  Gresson asked nothing more of God and the great and wise among men than that his acting command should be made substantive. But the ways of Higher Commands are not a subaltern’s ways, nor are his wishes theirs. Just when the men were getting comfortably settled in and playing football rapturously in the August dust, orders came to Ailly from on high for Gresson to report at once to Colonel Mallom, of Intelligence, at GHQ.

  He found this red-tabbed Colonel refreshingly unregimental. He talked to a fellow as if such things as ranks did not exist. So Gresson, he said—he seemed to know all about Gresson—had taken an engineering course at Charlottenburg, before 1914. Yes, a two-year course. Did Gresson know Germany well? Some bits of it—yes—Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfort—most of the Rhineland. Did he speak German well? Even the humble-hearted Gresson couldn’t deny it as flatly as he could deny any imputation of speaking good French. Hadn’t he and his sister had a beloved Hanoverian governess all the days of their childhood? Anyhow, the Colonel cut out any modest shilly-shally by speaking himself, from that point onward, in German of a perfection that Gresson observed with respectful, though silent, astonishment. Gresson, in turn, seemed to make a handsome impression. “Gad!” said the Colonel, reverting to English at last. “Some linguist! You won’t be a Second Loot long.”

  “I’m in acting command of a Company, sir,” Gresson replied, with some pride.

  “And that’s a damn fine thing to be,” said Mallom cordially. “I’ve tried it. I’ve tried only one thing that’s finer. D’you guess what it is?”

  “I don’t, sir,” said
Gresson. In fact he doubted whether the world contained such a jewel.

  “It’s a game,” said the Colonel, “with much the same risk, only you take it alone, and you take it dead cold—no one within fifty miles who isn’t an enemy.”

  “I see it now, sir,” said Gresson.

  “Of course it’s a volunteer’s job. I don’t press you to go into Germany—don’t even advise you. All I say is that, with your local knowledge and very exceptional German and—if you’ll excuse me—your very ingenious mug, you might do Intelligence work of deuced high value. Feel like it?”

  Gresson’s heart was jumping with glee. Why, here he was, at the very heart of the rose, let into the last, inmost mystery and thrill of glorious war. “Who wouldn’t, sir?” he said.

  III

  In a snug country house in Artois a party of British officers seemed to be living a nice peaceful life of their own for a good part of the war. They did not dine out, but men from neighbouring messes would see two or three of them on the road and would think what an odd lot they were, and how fresh and unweathered the coveted ribbons that most of them wore, and what indoor people some of them looked, and how much time they all seemed to have on their hands for a walk or a ride. Some wag suggested that they had founded a sort of male convent, the latest wonder of the war, where all the official rewards of combatant valour were gained by an innocent life of fasting and prayer. Probably none of the neighbours noticed that now and then one of these persons of leisure would disappear for a few days, or a month, or altogether, nor knew that one of her hermits had just been listed in the Gazette as “Missing”: believed to have died in enemy hands.

  In this shy place and in other purlieus of Intelligence the ingenious Gresson now went to school. He learnt the whole system and structure of espionage and of counter-espionage, its twin sister. He got up the “Underground Railway”—the routes by which escaped British prisoners of war or hunted spies were guided, and passed on from guide to guide, till a “ferry” across the enemy line had been reached and the final rush must be risked. He heard about the pigeon post and the little fire-balloons that sailed off eastward on west winds with a pigeon or two in the basket hanging below, and the little flame nicely adjusted to let the balloon down where friends would expect it, about the right distance behind the enemy’s front. His mind came to see Germany and the occupied parts of Belgium and France as a map speckled thickly with infinitesimal spots of sound British red—eyes and ears of British Intelligence, noting each movement of German troops, guns, supplies, railway metal, and hospital outfit.