Mr Standfast

Title MR STANDFAST

Author JOHN BUCHAN

TO THAT MOST GALLANT COMPANY THE OFFICERS AND MEN OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN INFANTRY BRIGADE on the Western Front

NOTE

The earlier adventures of Richard Hannay, to which occasional reference is made in this narrative, are recounted in The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle. J.B.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE The Wicket-Gate

I spent one-third of my journey looking out of the window of a first-class carriage, the next in a local motor-car following the course of a trout stream in a shallow valley, and the last tramping over a ridge of downland through great beechwoods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of the third stage calmed and heartened me, and I reached the gates of Fosse Manor with a mighty appetite and a quiet mind.

As we slipped up the Thames valley on the smooth Great Western line I had reflected ruefully on the thorns in the path of duty. For more than a year I had never been out of khaki, except the months I spent in hospital. They gave me my battalion before the Somme, and I came out of that weary battle after the first big September fighting with a crack in my head and a D.S.O. I had received a C.B. for the Erzerum business, so what with these and my Matabele and South African medals and the Legion of Honour, I had a chest like the High Priest’s breastplate. I rejoined in January, and got a brigade on the eve of Arras. There we had a star turn, and took about as many prisoners as we put infantry over the top. After that we were hauled out for a month, and subsequently planted in a bad bit on the Scarpe with a hint that we would soon be used for a big push. Then suddenly I was ordered home to report to the War Office, and passed on by them to Bullivant and his merry men. So here I was sitting in a railway carriage in a grey tweed suit, with a neat new suitcase on the rack labelled C.B. The initials stood for Cornelius Brand, for that was my name now. And an old boy in the corner was asking me questions and wondering audibly why I wasn’t fighting, while a young blood of a second lieutenant with a wound stripe was eyeing me with scorn.

The old chap was one of the cross-examining type, and after he had borrowed my matches he set to work to find out all about me. He was a tremendous fire-eater, and a bit of a pessimist about our slow progress in the west. I told him I came from South Africa and was a mining engineer.

‘Been fighting with Botha?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not the fighting kind.’ The second lieutenant screwed up his nose.

‘Is there no conscription in South Africa?’

‘Thank God there isn’t,’ I said, and the old fellow begged permission to tell me a lot of unpalatable things. I knew his kind and didn’t give much for it. He was the sort who, if he had been under fifty, would have crawled on his belly to his tribunal to get exempted, but being over age was able to pose as a patriot. But I didn’t like the second lieutenant’s grin, for he seemed a good class of lad. I looked steadily out of the window for the rest of the way, and wasn’t sorry when I got to my station.

I had had the queerest interview with Bullivant and Macgillivray. They asked me first if I was willing to serve again in the old game, and I said I was. I felt as bitter as sin, for I had got fixed in the military groove, and had made good there. Here was I - a brigadier and still under forty, and with another year of the war there was no saying where I might end. I had started out without any ambition, only a great wish to see the business finished. But now I had acquired a professional interest in the thing, I had a nailing good brigade, and I had got the hang of our new kind of war as well as any fellow from Sandhurst and Camberley. They were asking me to scrap all I had learned and start again in a new job. I had to agree, for discipline’s discipline, but I could have knocked their heads together in my vexation.

What was worse they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell me anything about what they wanted me for. It was the old game of running me in blinkers. They asked me to take it on trust and put myself unreservedly in their hands. I would get my instructions later, they said.

I asked if it was important.

Bullivant narrowed his eyes. ‘If it weren’t, do you suppose we could have wrung an active brigadier out of the War Office? As it was, it was like drawing teeth.’

‘Is it risky?’ was my next question.

‘in the long run - damnably,’ was the answer.

‘And you can’t tell me anything more?’

‘Nothing as yet. You’ll get your instructions soon enough. You know both of us, Hannay, and you know we wouldn’t waste the time of a good man on folly. We are going to ask you for something which will make a big call on your patriotism. It will be a difficult and arduous task, and it may be a very grim one before you get to the end of it, but we believe you can do it, and that no one else can … You know us pretty well. Will you let us judge for you?’

I looked at Bullivant’s shrewd, kind old face and Macgillivray’s steady eyes. These men were my friends and wouldn’t play with Me.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m willing. What’s the first step?’

‘Get out of uniform and forget you ever were a soldier. Change your name. Your old one, Cornelis Brandt, will do, but you’d better spell it “Brand” this time. Remember that you are an engineer just back from South Africa, and that you don’t care a rush about the war. You can’t understand what all the fools are fighting about, and you think we might have peace at once by a little friendly business talk. You needn’t be pro-German - if you like you can be rather severe on the Hun. But you must be in deadly earnest about a speedy peace.’

I expect the corners of my mouth fell, for Bullivant burst out laughing.

‘Hang it all, man, it’s not so difficult. I feel sometimes inclined to argue that way myself, when my dinner doesn’t agree with me. It’s not so hard as to wander round the Fatherland abusing Britain, which was your last job.’

‘I’m ready,’ I said. ‘But I want to do one errand on my own first. I must see a fellow in my brigade who is in a shell-shock hospital in the Cotswolds. Isham’s the name of the place.’

The two men exchanged glances. ‘This looks like fate,’ said Bullivant. ‘By all means go to Isham. The place where your work begins is only a couple of miles off. I want you to spend next Thursday night as the guest of two maiden ladies called Wymondham at Fosse Manor. You will go down there as a lone South African visiting a sick friend. They are hospitable souls and entertain many angels unawares.’

‘And I get my orders there?’

‘You get your orders, and you are under bond to obey them.’ And Bullivant and Macgillivray smiled at each other.

I was thinking hard about that odd conversation as the small Ford car, which I had wired for to the inn, carried me away from the suburbs of the county town into a land of rolling hills and green water-meadows. It was a gorgeous afternoon and the blossom of early June was on every tree. But I had no eyes for landscape and the summer, being engaged in reprobating Bullivant and cursing my fantastic fate. I detested my new part and looked forward to naked shame. It was bad enough for anyone to have to pose as a pacifist, but for me, strong as a bull and as sunburnt as a gipsy and not looking my forty years, it was a black disgrace. To go into Germany as an anti-British Afrikander was a stoutish adventure, but to lounge about at home talking rot was a very different-sized job. My stomach rose at the thought of it, and I had pretty well decided to wire to Bullivant and cry off. There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man.

When I got to Isham and found poor old Blaikie I didn’t feel happier. He had been a friend of mine in Rhodesia, and after the German SouthWest affair was over had come home to a Fusilier battalion, which was in my brigade at Arras. He had been buried by a big crump just before we got our second objective, and was dug out without a scratch on him, but as daft as a hatter. I had heard he was mending, and had promised his family to look him up the first chance I got. I found him sitting on a garden seat, staring steadily before him like a lookout at sea. He knew me all right and cheered up for a second, but very soon he was back at his staring, and every word he uttered was like the careful speech of a drunken man. A bird flew out of a bush, and I could see him holding himself tight to keep from screaming. The best I could do was to put a hand on his shoulder and stroke him as one strokes a frightened horse. The sight of the price my old friend had paid didn’t put me in love with pacificism.

We talked of brother officers and South Africa, for I wanted to keep his thoughts off the war, but he kept edging round to it.

‘How long will the damned thing last?’ he asked.

‘Oh, it’s practically over,’ I lied cheerfully. ‘No more fighting for you and precious little for me. The Boche is done in all right … What you’ve got to do, my lad, is to sleep fourteen hours in the twenty-four and spend half the rest catching trout. We’ll have a shot at the grouse-bird together this autumn and we’ll get some of the old gang to join us.’

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a V.A.D. and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

‘Who on earth’s that?’ I asked Blaikie.

‘That? Oh, one of the sisters,’ he said listlessly. ‘There are squads of them. I can’t tell one from another.’

Nothing gave me such an impression of my friend’s sickness as the fact that he should have no interest in something so fresh and jolly as that girl. Presently my time was up and I had to go, and as I looked back I saw him sunk in his chair again, his eyes fixed on vacancy, and his hands gripping his knees.

The thought of him depressed me horribly. Here was I condemned to some rotten buffoonery in inglorious safety, while the salt of the earth like Blaikie was paying the ghastliest price. From him my thoughts flew to old Peter Pienaar, and I sat down on a roadside wall and read his last letter. It nearly made me howl. Peter, you must know, had shaved his beard and joined the Royal Flying Corps the summer before when we got back from the Greenmantle affair. That was the only kind of reward he wanted, and, though he was absurdly over age, the authorities allowed it. They were wise not to stickle about rules, for Peter’s eyesight and nerve were as good as those of any boy of twenty. I knew he would do well, but I was not prepared for his immediately blazing success. He got his pilot’s certificate in record time and went out to France; and presently even we foot-sloggers, busy shifting ground before the Somme, began to hear rumours of his doings. He developed a perfect genius for air-fighting. There were plenty better trick-flyers, and plenty who knew more about the science of the game, but there was no one with quite Peter’s genius for an actual scrap. He was as full of dodges a couple of miles up in the sky as he had been among the rocks of the Berg. He apparently knew how to hide in the empty air as cleverly as in the long grass of the Lebombo Flats. Amazing yarns began to circulate among the infantry about this new airman, who could take cover below one plane of an enemy squadron while all the rest were looking for him. I remember talking about him with the South Africans when we were out resting next door to them after the bloody Delville Wood business. The day before we had seen a good battle in the clouds when the Boche plane had crashed, and a Transvaal machine-gun officer brought the report that the British airman had been Pienaar. ‘Well done, the old _takhaar!’ he cried, and started to yarn about Peter’s methods. It appeared that Peter had a theory that every man has a blind spot, and that he knew just how to find that blind spot in the world of air. The best cover, he maintained, was not in cloud or a wisp of fog, but in the unseeing patch in the eye of your enemy. I recognized that talk for the real thing. It was on a par with Peter’s doctrine of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘the double bluff’ and all the other principles that his queer old mind had cogitated out of his rackety life.

By the end of August that year Peter’s was about the best-known figure in the Flying Corps. If the reports had mentioned names he would have been a national hero, but he was only ‘Lieutenant Blank’, and the newspapers, which expatiated on his deeds, had to praise the Service and not the man. That was right enough, for half the magic of our Flying Corps was its freedom from advertisement. But the British Army knew all about him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as if he were a crack football-player. There was a very big German airman called Lensch, one of the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August claimed to have destroyed thirty-two Allied machines. Peter had then only seventeen planes to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his score. Lensch was a mighty man of valour and a good sportsman after his fashion. He was amazingly quick at manoeuvring his machine in the actual fight, but Peter was supposed to be better at forcing the kind of fight he wanted. Lensch, if you like, was the tactician and Peter the strategist. Anyhow the two were out to get each other. There were plenty of fellows who saw the campaign as a struggle not between Hun and Briton, but between Lensch and Pienaar.

The 15th September came, and I got knocked out and went to hospital. When I was fit to read the papers again and receive letters, I found to my consternation that Peter had been downed. It happened at the end of October when the southwest gales badly handicapped our airwork. When our bombing or reconnaissance jobs behind the enemy lines were completed, instead of being able to glide back into safety, we had to fight our way home slowly against a head-wind exposed to Archies and Hun planes. Somewhere east of Bapaume on a return journey Peter fell in with Lensch - at least the German Press gave Lensch the credit. His petrol tank was shot to bits and he was forced to descend in a wood near Morchies. ‘The celebrated British airman, Pinner,’ in the words of the German communique, was made prisoner.

I had no letter from him till the beginning of the New Year, when I was preparing to return to France. It was a very contented letter. He seemed to have been fairly well treated, though he had always a low standard of what he expected from the world in the way of comfort. I inferred that his captors had not identified in the brilliant airman the Dutch miscreant who a year before had broken out of a German jail. He had discovered the pleasures of reading and had perfected himself in an art which he had once practised indifferently. Somehow or other he had got a Pilgrim’s Progress, from which he seemed to extract enormous pleasure. And then at the end, quite casually, he mentioned that he had been badly wounded and that his left leg would never be much use again.

After that I got frequent letters, and I wrote to him every week and sent him every kind of parcel I could think of. His letters used to make me both ashamed and happy. I had always banked on old Peter, and here he was behaving like an early Christian martyr - never a word of complaint, and just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the high veld and we were off to ride down springbok. I knew what the loss of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his pride. The rest of life must have unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as if he were on the top of his form and kept commiserating me on the discomforts of my job. The picture of that patient, gentle old fellow, hobbling about his compound and puzzling over his Pilgrim’s Progress, a cripple for life after five months of blazing glory, would have stiffened the back of a jellyfish.

This last letter was horribly touching, for summer had come and the smell of the woods behind his prison reminded Peter of a place in the Woodbush, and one could read in every sentence the ache of exile. I sat on that stone wall and considered how trifling were the crumpled leaves in my bed of life compared with the thorns Peter and Blaikie had to lie on. I thought of Sandy far off in Mesopotamia, and old Blenkiron groaning with dyspepsia somewhere in America, and I considered that they were the kind of fellows who did their jobs without complaining. The result was that when I got up to go on I had recovered a manlier temper. I wasn’t going to shame my friends or pick and choose my duty. I would trust myself to Providence, for, as Blenkiron used to say, Providence was all right if you gave him a chance. It was not only Peter’s letter that steadied and calmed me. Isham stood high up in a fold of the hills away from the main valley, and the road I was taking brought me over the ridge and back to the stream-side. I climbed through great beechwoods, which seemed in the twilight like some green place far below the sea, and then over a short stretch of hill pasture to the rim of the vale. All about me were little fields enclosed with walls of grey stone and full of dim sheep. Below were dusky woods around what I took to be Fosse Manor, for the great Roman Fosse Way, straight as an arrow, passed over the hills to the south and skirted its grounds. I could see the stream slipping among its water-meadows and could hear the plash of the weir. A tiny village settled in a crook of the hill, and its church-tower sounded seven with a curiously sweet chime. Otherwise there was no noise but the twitter of small birds and the night wind in the tops of the beeches.

In that moment I had a kind of revelation. I had a vision of what I had been fighting for, what we all were fighting for. It was peace, deep and holy and ancient, peace older than the oldest wars, peace which would endure when all our swords were hammered into ploughshares. It was more; for in that hour England first took hold of me. Before my country had been South Africa, and when I thought of home it had been the wide sun-steeped spaces of the veld or some scented glen of the Berg. But now I realized that I had a new home. I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us. I knew what it meant to be a poet, though for the life of me I could not have made a line of verse. For in that hour I had a prospect as if from a hilltop which made all the present troubles of the road seem of no account. I saw not only victory after war, but a new and happier world after victory, when I should inherit something of this English peace and wrap myself in it till the end of my days.

Very humbly and quietly, like a man walking through a cathedral, I went down the hill to the Manor lodge, and came to a door in an old red-brick facade, smothered in magnolias which smelt like hot lemons in the June dusk. The car from the inn had brought on my baggage, and presently I was dressing in a room which looked out on a water-garden. For the first time for more than a year I put on a starched shirt and a dinner-jacket, and as I dressed I could have sung from pure lightheartedness. I was in for some arduous job, and sometime that evening in that place I should get my marching orders. Someone would arrive - perhaps Bullivant - and read me the riddle. But whatever it was, I was ready for it, for my whole being had found a new purpose. Living in the trenches, you are apt to get your horizon narrowed down to the front line of enemy barbed wire on one side and the nearest rest billets on the other. But now I seemed to see beyond the fog to a happy country.

High-pitched voices greeted my ears as I came down the broad staircase, voices which scarcely accorded with the panelled walls and the austere family portraits; and when I found my hostesses in the hall I thought their looks still less in keeping with the house. Both ladies were on the wrong side of forty, but their dress was that of young girls. Miss Doria Wymondham was tall and thin with a mass of nondescript pale hair confined by a black velvet fillet. Miss Claire Wymondham was shorter and plumper and had done her best by ill-applied cosmetics to make herself look like a foreign demi-mondaine. They greeted me with the friendly casualness which I had long ago discovered was the right English manner towards your guests; as if they had just strolled in and billeted themselves, and you were quite glad to see them but mustn’t be asked to trouble yourself further. The next second they were cooing like pigeons round a picture which a young man was holding up in the lamplight.

He was a tallish, lean fellow of round about thirty years, wearing grey flannels and shoes dusty from the country roads. His thin face was sallow as if from living indoors, and he had rather more hair on his head than most of us. In the glow of the lamp his features were very clear, and I examined them with interest, for, remember, I was expecting a stranger to give me orders. He had a long, rather strong chin and an obstinate mouth with peevish lines about its corners. But the remarkable feature was his eyes. I can best describe them by saying that they looked hot - not fierce or angry, but so restless that they seemed to ache physically and to want sponging with cold water.

They finished their talk about the picture - which was couched in a jargon of which I did not understand one word - and Miss Doria turned to me and the young man.

‘My cousin Launcelot Wake - Mr Brand.’

We nodded stiffly and Mr Wake’s hand went up to smooth his hair in a self-conscious gesture.

‘Has Barnard announced dinner? By the way, where is Mary?’

‘She came in five minutes ago and I sent her to change,’ said Miss Claire. ‘I won’t have her spoiling the evening with that horrid uniform. She may masquerade as she likes out-of-doors, but this house is for civilized people.’

The butler appeared and mumbled something. ‘Come along,’ cried Miss Doria, ‘for I’m sure you are starving, Mr Brand. And Launcelot has bicycled ten miles.’

The dining-room was very unlike the hall. The panelling had been stripped off, and the walls and ceiling were covered with a dead-black satiny paper on which hung the most monstrous pictures in large dull-gold frames. I could only see them dimly, but they seemed to be a mere riot of ugly colour. The young man nodded towards them. ‘I see you have got the Degousses hung at last,’ he said.

‘How exquisite they are!’ cried Miss Claire. ‘How subtle and candid and brave! Doria and I warm our souls at their flame.’

Some aromatic wood had been burned in the room, and there was a queer sickly scent about. Everything in that place was strained and uneasy and abnormal - the candle shades on the table, the mass of faked china fruit in the centre dish, the gaudy hangings and the nightmarish walls. But the food was magnificent. It was the best dinner I had eaten since 1914. ‘Tell me, Mr Brand,’ said Miss Doria, her long white face propped on a much-beringed hand. ‘You are one of us? You are in revolt against this crazy war?’

‘Why, yes,’ I said, remembering my part. ‘I think a little common-sense would settle it right away.’

‘With a little common-sense it would never have started,’ said Mr Wake.

‘Launcelot’s a C.O., you know,’ said Miss Doria.

I did not know, for he did not look any kind of soldier … I was just about to ask him what he commanded, when I remembered that the letters stood also for ‘Conscientious Objector,’ and stopped in time.

At that moment someone slipped into the vacant seat on my right hand. I turned and saw the V.A.D. girl who had brought tea to Blaikie that afternoon at the hospital.

‘He was exempted by his Department,’ the lady went on, ‘for he’s a Civil Servant, and so he never had a chance of testifying in court, but no one has done better work for our cause. He is on the committee of the L.D.A., and questions have been asked about him in Parliament.’

The man was not quite comfortable at this biography. He glanced nervously at me and was going to begin some kind of explanation, when Miss Doria cut him short. ‘Remember our rule, Launcelot. No turgid war controversy within these walls.’

I agreed with her. The war had seemed closely knit to the Summer landscape for all its peace, and to the noble old chambers of the Manor. But in that demented modish dining-room it was shriekingly incongruous.

Then they spoke of other things. Mostly of pictures or common friends, and a little of books. They paid no heed to me, which was fortunate, for I know nothing about these matters and didn’t understand half the language. But once Miss Doria tried to bring me in. They were talking about some Russian novel - a name like Leprous Souls - and she asked me if I had read it. By a curious chance I had. It had drifted somehow into our dug-out on the Scarpe, and after we had all stuck in the second chapter it had disappeared in the mud to which it naturally belonged. The lady praised its ‘poignancy’ and ‘grave beauty’. I assented and congratulated myself on my second escape - for if the question had been put to me I should have described it as God-forgotten twaddle.

I turned to the girl, who welcomed me with a smile. I had thought her pretty in her V.A.D. dress, but now, in a filmy black gown and with her hair no longer hidden by a cap, she was the most ravishing thing you ever saw. And I observed something else. There was more than good looks in her young face. Her broad, low brow and her laughing eyes were amazingly intelligent. She had an uncanny power of making her eyes go suddenly grave and deep, like a glittering river narrowing into a pool.

‘We shall never be introduced,’ she said, ‘so let me reveal myself. I’m Mary Lamington and these are my aunts … Did you really like Leprous Souls?’

it was easy enough to talk to her. And oddly enough her mere presence took away the oppression I had felt in that room. For she belonged to the out-of-doors and to the old house and to the world at large. She belonged to the war, and to that happier world beyond it - a world which must be won by going through the struggle and not by shirking it, like those two silly ladies.

I could see Wake’s eyes often on the girl, while he boomed and oraculated and the Misses Wymondham prattled. Presently the conversation seemed to leave the flowery paths of art and to verge perilously near forbidden topics. He began to abuse our generals in the field. I could not choose but listen. Miss Lamington’s brows were slightly bent, as if in disapproval, and my own temper began to rise.

He had every kind of idiotic criticism - incompetence, faint-heartedness, corruption. Where he got the stuff I can’t imagine, for the most grousing Tommy, with his leave stopped, never put together such balderdash. Worst of all he asked me to agree with him.

It took all my sense of discipline. ‘I don’t know much about the subject,’ I said, ‘but out in South Africa I did hear that the British leading was the weak point. I expect there’s a good deal in what you say.’

It may have been fancy, but the girl at my side seemed to whisper ‘Well done!’

Wake and I did not remain long behind before joining the ladies; I purposely cut it short, for I was in mortal fear lest I should lose my temper and spoil everything. I stood up with my back against the mantelpiece for as long as a man may smoke a cigarette, and I let him yarn to me, while I looked steadily at his face. By this time I was very clear that Wake was not the fellow to give me my instructions. He wasn’t playing a game. He was a perfectly honest crank, but not a fanatic, for he wasn’t sure of himself. He had somehow lost his self-respect and was trying to argue himself back into it. He had considerable brains, for the reasons he gave for differing from most of his countrymen were good so far as they went. I shouldn’t have cared to take him on in public argument. If you had told me about such a fellow a week before I should have been sick at the thought of him. But now I didn’t dislike him. I was bored by him and I was also tremendously sorry for him. You could see he was as restless as a hen.

When we went back to the hall he announced that he must get on the road, and commandeered Miss Lamington to help him find his bicycle. It appeared he was staying at an inn a dozen miles off for a couple of days’ fishing, and the news somehow made me like him better. Presently the ladies of the house departed to bed for their beauty sleep and I was left to my own devices.

For some time I sat smoking in the hall wondering when the messenger would arrive. It was getting late and there seemed to be no preparation in the house to receive anybody. The butler came in with a tray of drinks and I asked him if he expected another guest that night.

‘I ‘adn’t ‘eard of it, sir,’ was his answer. ‘There ‘asn’t been a telegram that I know of, and I ‘ave received no instructions.’

I lit my pipe and sat for twenty minutes reading a weekly paper. Then I got up and looked at the family portraits. The moon coming through the lattice invited me out-of-doors as a cure for my anxiety. It was after eleven o’clock, and I was still without any knowledge of my next step. It is a maddening business to be screwed up for an unpleasant job and to have the wheels of the confounded thing tarry.

Outside the house beyond a flagged terrace the lawn fell away, white in the moonshine, to the edge of the stream, which here had expanded into a miniature lake. By the water’s edge was a little formal garden with grey stone parapets which now gleamed like dusky marble. Great wafts of scent rose from it, for the lilacs were scarcely over and the may was in full blossom. Out from the shade of it came suddenly a voice like a nightingale.

It was singing the old song ‘Cherry Ripe’, a common enough thing which I had chiefly known from barrel-organs. But heard in the scented moonlight it seemed to hold all the lingering magic of an elder England and of this hallowed countryside. I stepped inside the garden bounds and saw the head of the girl Mary.

She was conscious of my presence, for she turned towards me.

‘I was coming to look for you,’ she said, ‘now that the house is quiet. I have something to say to you, General Hannay.’

She knew my name and must be somehow in the business. The thought entranced me. ‘Thank God I can speak to you freely,’ I cried. ‘Who and what are you - living in that house in that kind of company?’

‘My good aunts!’ She laughed softly. ‘They talk a great deal about their souls, but they really mean their nerves. Why, they are what you call my camouflage, and a very good one too.’

‘And that cadaverous young prig?’

‘Poor Launcelot! Yes - camouflage too - perhaps something a little more. You must not judge him too harshly.’

‘But … but -‘ I did not know how to put it, and stammered in my eagerness. ‘How can I tell that you are the right person for me to speak to? You see I am under orders, and I have got none about you.’

‘I will give You Proof,’ she said. ‘Three days ago Sir Walter Bullivant and Mr Macgillivray told you to come here tonight and to wait here for further instructions. You met them in the little smoking-room at the back of the Rota Club. You were bidden take the name of Cornelius Brand, and turn yourself from a successful general into a pacifist South African engineer. Is that correct?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘You have been restless all evening looking for the messenger to give you these instructions. Set your mind at ease. No messenger is coming. You will get your orders from me.’

‘I could not take them from a more welcome source,’ I said.

‘Very prettily put. If you want further credentials I can tell you much about your own doings in the past three years. I can explain to you who don’t need the explanation, every step in the business of the Black Stone. I think I could draw a pretty accurate map of your journey to Erzerum. You have a letter from Peter Pienaar in your pocket - I can tell you its contents. Are you willing to trust me?’

‘With all my heart,’ I said.

‘Good. Then my first order will try you pretty hard. For I have no orders to give you except to bid you go and steep yourself in a particular kind of life. Your first duty is to get “atmosphere”, as your friend Peter used to say. Oh, I will tell you where to go and how to behave. But I can’t bid you do anything, only live idly with open eyes and ears till you have got the “feel” of the situation.’

She stopped and laid a hand on my arm.

‘It won’t be easy. It would madden me, and it will be a far heavier burden for a man like you. You have got to sink down deep into the life of the half-baked, the people whom this war hasn’t touched or has touched in the wrong way, the people who split hairs all day and are engrossed in what you and I would call selfish little fads. Yes. People like my aunts and Launcelot, only for the most part in a different social grade. You won’t live in an old manor like this, but among gimcrack little “arty” houses. You will hear everything you regard as sacred laughed at and condemned, and every kind of nauseous folly acclaimed, and you must hold your tongue and pretend to agree. You will have nothing in the world to do except to let the life soak into you, and, as I have said, keep your eyes and ears open.’

‘But you must give me some clue as to what I should be looking for?’

‘My orders are to give you none. Our chiefs - yours and mine - want you to go where you are going without any kind of _parti _pris. Remember we are still in the intelligence stage of the affair. The time hasn’t yet come for a plan of campaign, and still less for action.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said. ‘Is it a really big thing we’re after?’

‘A - really - big - thing,’ she said slowly and very gravely. ‘You and I and some hundred others are hunting the most dangerous man in all the world. Till we succeed everything that Britain does is crippled. If we fail or succeed too late the Allies may never win the victory which is their right. I will tell you one thing to cheer you. It is in some sort a race against time, so your purgatory won’t endure too long.’

I was bound to obey, and she knew it, for she took my willingness for granted.

From a little gold satchel she selected a tiny box, and opening it extracted a thing like a purple wafer with a white St Andrew’s Cross on it.

‘What kind of watch have you? Ah, a hunter. Paste that inside the lid. Some day you may be called on to show it … One other thing. Buy tomorrow a copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress and get it by heart. You will receive letters and messages some day and the style of our friends is apt to be reminiscent of John Bunyan … The car will be at the door tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give you the address of the rooms that have been taken for you … Beyond that I have nothing to say, except to beg you to play the part well and keep your temper. You behaved very nicely at dinner.’

I asked one last question as we said good night in the hall. ‘Shall I see you again?’

‘Soon, and often,’ was the answer. ‘Remember we are colleagues.’

I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured with the thought of the girl who had sung ‘Cherry Ripe’ in the garden. I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in the choice of his intermediary, for I’m hanged if I would have taken such orders from anyone else.

CHAPTER TWO ‘The Village Named Morality’

UP on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked by muddy trickles - the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would look for in a day’s journey. But presently they reach the edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea. So with the story I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred jimson.

The house - or ‘home’ as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick - was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common. It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean as soap and water and scrubbing could make it. The three-quarters of an acre of garden were mainly devoted to the culture of potatoes, though under the parlour window Mrs jimson had a plot of sweet-smelling herbs, and lines of lank sunflowers fringed the path that led to the front door. It was Mrs jimson who received me as I descended from the station fly - a large red woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in a gown which, both in shape and material, seemed to have been modelled on a chintz curtain. She was a good kindly soul, and as proud as Punch of her house.

‘We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,’ she said. ‘You must take us as you find us.’

I assured her that I asked for nothing better, and as I unpacked in my fresh little bedroom with a west wind blowing in at the window I considered that I had seen worse quarters.

I had bought in London a considerable number of books, for I thought that, as I would have time on my hands, I might as well do something about my education. They were mostly English classics, whose names I knew but which I had never read, and they were all in a little flat-backed series at a shilling apiece. I arranged them on top of a chest of drawers, but I kept the Pilgrim’s Progress beside my bed, for that was one of my working tools and I had got to get it by heart.

Mrs jimson, who came in while I was unpacking to see if the room was to my liking, approved my taste. At our midday dinner she wanted to discuss books with me, and was so full of her own knowledge that I was able to conceal my ignorance.

‘We are all labouring to express our personalities,’ she informed me. ‘Have you found your medium, Mr Brand? is it to be the pen or the pencil? Or perhaps it is music? You have the brow of an artist, the frontal “bar of Michelangelo”, you remember!’

I told her that I concluded I would try literature, but before writing anything I would read a bit more.

It was a Saturday, so jimson came back from town in the early afternoon. He was a managing clerk in some shipping office, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his appearance. His city clothes were loose dark-grey flannels, a soft collar, an orange tie, and a soft black hat. His wife went down the road to meet him, and they returned hand-in-hand, swinging their arms like a couple of schoolchildren. He had a skimpy red beard streaked with grey, and mild blue eyes behind strong glasses. He was the most friendly creature in the world, full of rapid questions, and eager to make me feel one of the family. Presently he got into a tweed Norfolk jacket, and started to cultivate his garden. I took off my coat and lent him a hand, and when he stopped to rest from his labours - which was every five minutes, for he had no kind of physique - he would mop his brow and rub his spectacles and declaim about the good smell of the earth and the joy of getting close to Nature.

Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with a kind of wistfulness. ‘You are one of the doers, Mr Brand,’ he said, ‘and I could find it in my heart to envy you. You have seen Nature in wild forms in far countries. Some day I hope you will tell us about your life. I must be content with my little corner, but happily there are no territorial limits for the mind. This modest dwelling is a watch-tower from which I look over all the world.’

After that he took me for a walk. We met parties of returning tennis-players and here and there a golfer. There seemed to be an abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The names of some of them jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic. Several were pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else, and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new Orientalism in England. I noticed that these people, according to jimson, were all ‘great’, and that they all dabbled in something ‘new’. There were quantities of young women, too, most of them rather badly dressed and inclining to untidy hair. And there were several decent couples taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the world Over. Most of these last were jimson’s friends, to whom he introduced me. They were his own class - modest folk, who sought for a coloured background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this odd settlement.

At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick.

‘It is one great laboratory of thought,’ said Mrs jimson. ‘It is glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people who are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the intellectual history of England is being made in our studies and gardens. The war to us seems a remote and secondary affair. As someone has said, the great fights of the world are all fought in the mind.’

A spasm of pain crossed her husband’s face. ‘I wish I could feel it far away. After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that gives people like us leisure and peace to think. Our duty is to do the best which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing compared with what our young soldiers are giving! I may be quite wrong about the war … I know I can’t argue with Letchford. But I will not pretend to a superiority I do not feel.’

I went to bed feeling that in jimson I had struck a pretty sound fellow. As I lit the candles on my dressing-table I observed that the stack of silver which I had taken out of my pockets when I washed before supper was top-heavy. It had two big coins at the top and sixpences and shillings beneath. Now it is one of my oddities that ever since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins symmetrically, with the smallest uppermost. That made me observant and led me to notice a second point. The English classics on the top of the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them. Izaak Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns was wedged disconsolately between two volumes of Hazlitt. Moreover a receipted bill which I had stuck in the Pilgrim’s Progress to mark my place had been moved. Someone had been going through my belongings.

A moment’s reflection convinced me that it couldn’t have been Mrs jimson. She had no servant and did the housework herself, but my things had been untouched when I left the room before supper, for she had come to tidy up before I had gone downstairs. Someone had been here while we were at supper, and had examined elaborately everything I possessed. Happily I had little luggage, and no papers save the new books and a bill or two in the name of Cornelius Brand-The inquisitor, whoever he was, had found nothing … The incident gave me a good deal of comfort. It had been hard to believe that any mystery could exist in this public place, where people lived brazenly in the open, and wore their hearts on their sleeves and proclaimed their opinions from the rooftops. Yet mystery there must be, or an inoffensive stranger with a kit-bag would not have received these strange attentions. I made a practice after that of sleeping with my watch below my pillow, for inside the case was Mary Lamington’s label. Now began a period of pleasant idle receptiveness. Once a week it was my custom to go up to London for the day to receive letters and instructions, if any should come. I had moved from my chambers in Park Lane, which I leased under my proper name, to a small flat in Westminster taken in the name of Cornelius Brand. The letters addressed to Park Lane were forwarded to Sir Walter, who sent them round under cover to my new address. For the rest I used to spend my mornings reading in the garden, and I discovered for the first time what a pleasure was to be got from old books. They recalled and amplified that vision I had seen from the Cotswold ridge, the revelation of the priceless heritage which is England. I imbibed a mighty quantity of history, but especially I liked the writers, like Walton, who got at the very heart of the English countryside. Soon, too, I found the Pilgrim’s Progress not a duty but a delight. I discovered new jewels daily in the honest old story, and my letters to Peter began to be as full of it as Peter’s own epistles. I loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had sung to me in the June night.

In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught of cool nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place which sold nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the dusk, I was so much in love with the land that I could have sung with the pure joy of it. And in the evening, after a bath, there would be supper, when a rather fagged jimson struggled between sleep and hunger, and the lady, with an artistic mutch on her untidy head, talked ruthlessly of culture.

Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a great help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most of the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick. About half were respectable citizens who came there for country air and low rates, but even these had a touch of queerness and had picked up the jargon of the place. The younger men were mostly Government clerks or writers or artists. There were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the outskirts were several bigger houses - mostly houses which had been there before the garden city was planted. One of them was brand-new, a staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck on the top of a hill among raw gardens. It belonged to a man called Moxon Ivery, who was a kind of academic pacificist and a great god in the place. Another, a quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a London publisher, an ardent Liberal whose particular branch of business compelled him to keep in touch with the new movements. I used to see him hurrying to the station swinging a little black bag and returning at night with the fish for dinner.

I soon got to know a surprising lot of people, and they were the rummiest birds you can imagine. For example, there were the Weekeses, three girls who lived with their mother in a house so artistic that you broke your head whichever way you turned in it. The son of the family was a conscientious objector who had refused to do any sort of work whatever, and had got quodded for his pains. They were immensely proud of him and used to relate his sufferings in Dartmoor with a gusto which I thought rather heartless. Art was their great subject, and I am afraid they found me pretty heavy going. It was their fashion never to admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought hideous. Also they talked a language that was beyond me. This kind of conversation used to happen. - miss WEEKES: ‘Don’t you admire Ursula jimson?’ SELF: ‘Rather!’ miss w.: ‘She is so John-esque in her lines.’ SELF: ‘Exactly!’ miss w.: ‘And Tancred, too - he is so full of nuances.’ SELF: ‘Rather!’ miss w.: ‘He suggests one of Degousse’s countrymen.’ SELF: ‘Exactly!’

They hadn’t much use for books, except some Russian ones, and I acquired merit in their eyes for having read Leprous Souls. If you talked to them about that divine countryside, you found they didn’t give a rap for it and had never been a mile beyond the village. But they admired greatly the sombre effect of a train going into Marylebone station on a rainy day.

But it was the men who interested me most. Aronson, the novelist, proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money. He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were. I should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him considerably. He told me that he sought ‘reality’ and ‘life’ and ‘truth’, but it was hard to see how he could know much about them, for he spent half the day in bed smoking cheap cigarettes, and the rest sunning himself in the admiration of half-witted girls. The creature was tuberculous in mind and body, and the only novel of his I read, pretty well turned my stomach. Mr Aronson’s strong point was jokes about the war. If he heard of any acquaintance who had joined up or was even doing war work his merriment knew no bounds. My fingers used to itch to box the little wretch’s ears.

Letchford was a different pair of shoes. He was some kind of a man, to begin with, and had an excellent brain and the worst manners conceivable. He contradicted everything you said, and looked out for an argument as other people look for their dinner. He was a double-engined, high-speed pacificist, because he was the kind of cantankerous fellow who must always be in a minority. if Britain had stood out of the war he would have been a raving militarist, but since she was in it he had got to find reasons why she was wrong. And jolly good reasons they were, too. I couldn’t have met his arguments if I had wanted to, so I sat docilely at his feet. The world was all crooked for Letchford, and God had created him with two left hands. But the fellow had merits. He had a couple of jolly children whom he adored, and he would walk miles with me on a Sunday, and spout poetry about the beauty and greatness of England. He was forty-five; if he had been thirty and in my battalion I could have made a soldier out of him.

There were dozens more whose names I have forgotten, but they had one common characteristic. They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I used to amuse myself with finding their originals in the Pilgrim’s Progress. When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter, they fell woefully short. They shut out the war from their lives, some out of funk, some out of pure levity of mind, and some because they were really convinced that the thing was all wrong. I think I grew rather popular in my role of the seeker after truth, the honest colonial who was against the war by instinct and was looking for instruction in the matter. They regarded me as a convert from an alien world of action which they secretly dreaded, though they affected to despise it. Anyhow they talked to me very freely, and before long I had all the pacifist arguments by heart. I made out that there were three schools. One objected to war altogether, and this had few adherents except Aronson and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in Dartmoor. The second thought that the Allies’ cause was tainted, and that Britain had contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe. This included all the adherents of the L.D.A. - or League of Democrats against Aggression - a very proud body. The third and much the largest, which embraced everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and that the business could now be settled by negotiation, since Germany had learned her lesson. I was myself a modest member of the last school, but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and I hoped with luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances approved my progress. Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature, and that I would end by waving the red flag.

Spiritual pride and vanity, as I have said, were at the bottom of most of them, and, try as I might, I could find nothing very dangerous in it all. This vexed me, for I began to wonder if the mission which I had embarked on so solemnly were not going to be a fiasco. Sometimes they worried me beyond endurance. When the news of Messines came nobody took the slightest interest, while I was aching to tooth every detail of the great fight. And when they talked on military affairs, as Letchford and others did sometimes, it was difficult to keep from sending them all to the devil, for their amateur cocksureness would have riled job. One had got to batten down the recollection of our fellows out there who were sweating blood to keep these fools snug. Yet I found it impossible to be angry with them for long, they were so babyishly innocent. Indeed, I couldn’t help liking them, and finding a sort of quality in them. I had spent three years among soldiers, and the British regular, great follow that he is, has his faults. His discipline makes him in a funk of red-tape and any kind of superior authority. Now these people were quite honest and in a perverted way courageous. Letchford was, at any rate. I could no more have done what he did and got hunted off platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the streets than I could have written his leading articles.

All the same I was rather low about my job. Barring the episode of the ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a clue or a hint of any mystery. The place and the people were as open and bright as a Y.M.C.A. hut. But one day I got a solid wad of comfort. In a corner of Letchford’s paper, the _Critic, I found a letter which was one of the steepest pieces of invective I had ever met with. The writer gave tongue like a beagle pup about the prostitution, as he called it, of American republicanism to the vices of European aristocracies. He declared that Senator La Follette was a much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the toiling millions who had no other friend. He was mad with President Wilson, and he prophesied a great awakening when Uncle Sam got up against John Bull in Europe and found out the kind of standpatter he was. The letter was signed ‘John S. Blenkiron’ and dated ‘London, 3 July-‘

The thought that Blenkiron was in England put a new complexion on my business. I reckoned I would see him soon, for he wasn’t the man to stand still in his tracks. He had taken up the role he had played before he left in December 1915, and very right too, for not more than half a dozen people knew of the Erzerum affair, and to the British public he was only the man who had been fired out of the Savoy for talking treason. I had felt a bit lonely before, but now somewhere within the four corners of the island the best companion God ever made was writing nonsense with his tongue in his old cheek.

There was an institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention. On the south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout population. Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including three Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and about ten varieties of Mystic whose names I could never remember. The hall had been the gift of the publisher I have spoken of, and twice a week it was used for lectures and debates. The place was managed by a committee and was surprisingly popular, for it gave all the bubbling intellects a chance of airing their views. When you asked where somebody was and were told he was ‘at Moot,’ the answer was spoken in the respectful tone in which you would mention a sacrament.

I went there regularly and got my mind broadened to cracking point. We had all the stars of the New Movements. We had Doctor Chirk, who lectured on ‘God’, which, as far as I could make out, was a new name he had invented for himself. There was a woman, a terrible woman, who had come back from Russia with what she called a ‘message of healing’. And to my joy, one night there was a great buck nigger who had a lot to say about ‘Africa for the Africans’. I had a few words with him in Sesutu afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. Some of the people were extraordinarily good, especially one jolly old fellow who talked about English folk songs and dances, and wanted us to set up a Maypole. In the debates which generally followed I began to join, very coyly at first, but presently with some confidence. If my time at Biggleswick did nothing else it taught me to argue on my feet.

The first big effort I made was on a full-dress occasion, when Launcelot Wake came down to speak. Mr Ivery was in the chair - the first I had seen of him - a plump middle-aged man, with a colourless face and nondescript features. I was not interested in him till he began to talk, and then I sat bolt upright and took notice. For he was the genuine silver-tongue, the sentences flowing from his mouth as smooth as butter and as neatly dovetailed as a parquet floor. He had a sort of man-of-the-world manner, treating his opponents with condescending geniality, deprecating all passion and exaggeration and making you feel that his urbane statement must be right, for if he had wanted he could have put the case so much higher. I watched him, fascinated, studying his face carefully; and the thing that struck me was that there was nothing in it - nothing, that is to say, to lay hold on. It was simply nondescript, so almightily commonplace that that very fact made it rather remarkable.

Wake was speaking of the revelations of the Sukhomhnov trial in Russia, which showed that Germany had not been responsible for the war. He was jolly good at the job, and put as clear an argument as a first-class lawyer. I had been sweating away at the subject and had all the ordinary case at my fingers’ ends, so when I got a chance of speaking I gave them a long harangue, with some good quotations I had cribbed out of the Vossische Zeitung, which Letchford lent me. I felt it was up to me to be extra violent, for I wanted to establish my character with Wake, seeing that he was a friend of Mary and Mary would know that I was playing the game. I got tremendously applauded, far more than the chief speaker, and after the meeting Wake came up to me with his hot eyes, and wrung my hand. ‘You’re coming on well, Brand,’ he said, and then he introduced me to Mr Ivery. ‘Here’s a second and a better Smuts,’ he said.

Ivery made me walk a bit of the road home with him. ‘I am struck by your grip on these difficult problems, Mr Brand,’ he told me. ‘There is much I can tell you, and you may be of great value to our cause.’ He asked me a lot of questions about my past, which I answered with easy mendacity. Before we parted he made me promise to come one night to supper.

Next day I got a glimpse of Mary, and to my vexation she cut me dead. She was walking with a flock of bareheaded girls, all chattering hard, and though she saw me quite plainly she turned away her eyes. I had been waiting for my cue, so I did not lift my hat, but passed on as if we were strangers. I reckoned it was part of the game, but that trifling thing annoyed me, and I spent a morose evening.

The following day I saw her again, this time talking sedately with Mr Ivery, and dressed in a very pretty summer gown, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with flowers in it. This time she stopped with a bright smile and held out her hand. ‘Mr Brand, isn’t it?’ she asked with a pretty hesitation. And then, turning to her companion - ‘This is Mr Brand. He stayed with us last month in Gloucestershire.’

Mr Ivery announced that he and I were already acquainted. Seen in broad daylight he was a very personable fellow, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with a middle-aged figure and a curiously young face. I noticed that there were hardly any lines on it, and it was rather that of a very wise child than that of a man. He had a pleasant smile which made his jaw and cheeks expand like indiarubber. ‘You are coming to sup with me, Mr Brand,’ he cried after me. ‘On Tuesday after Moot. I have already written.’ He whisked Mary away from me, and I had to content myself with contemplating her figure till it disappeared round a bend of the road.

Next day in London I found a letter from Peter. He had been very solemn of late, and very reminiscent of old days now that he concluded his active life was over. But this time he was in a different mood. ’I think,’ he wrote, ‘__that you and I will meet again soon, my old friend. Do you remember when we went after the big black-maned lion in the Rooirand and couldn’t get on his track, and then one morning we woke up and said we would get him today? - and we did, but he very near got you first. I’ve had a feel these last days that we’re both going down into the Valley to meet with Apolyon, and that the devil will give us a bad time, but anyhow we’ll be _together.’

I had the same kind of feel myself, though I didn’t see how Peter and I were going to meet, unless I went out to the Front again and got put in the bag and sent to the same Boche prison. But I had an instinct that my time in Biggleswick was drawing to a close, and that presently I would be in rougher quarters. I felt quite affectionate towards the place, and took all my favourite walks, and drank my own health in the brew of the village inns, with a consciousness of saying goodbye. Also I made haste to finish my English classics, for I concluded I wouldn’t have much time in the future for miscellaneous reading.

The Tuesday came, and in the evening I set out rather late for the Moot Hall, for I had been getting into decent clothes after a long, hot stride. When I reached the place it was pretty well packed, and I could only find a seat on the back benches. There on the platform was Ivery, and beside him sat a figure that thrilled every inch of me with affection and a wild anticipation. ‘I have now the privilege,’ said the chairman, ‘of introducing to you the speaker whom we so warmly welcome, our fearless and indefatigable American friend, Mr Blenkiron.’

It was the old Blenkiron, but almightily changed. His stoutness had gone, and he was as lean as Abraham Lincoln. Instead of a puffy face, his cheek-bones and jaw stood out hard and sharp, and in place of his former pasty colour his complexion had the clear glow of health. I saw now that he was a splendid figure of a man, and when he got to his feet every movement had the suppleness of an athlete in training. In that moment I realized that my serious business had now begun. My senses suddenly seemed quicker, my nerves tenser, my brain more active. The big game had started, and he and I were playing it together.

I watched him with strained attention. It was a funny speech, stuffed with extravagance and vehemence, not very well argued and terribly discursive. His main point was that Germany was now in a fine democratic mood and might well be admitted into a brotherly partnership - that indeed she had never been in any other mood, but had been forced into violence by the plots of her enemies. Much of it, I should have thought, was in stark defiance of the Defence of the Realm Acts, but if any wise Scotland Yard officer had listened to it he would probably have considered it harmless because of its contradictions. It was full of a fierce earnestness, and it was full of humour - long-drawn American metaphors at which that most critical audience roared with laughter. But it was not the kind of thing that they were accustomed to, and I could fancy what Wake would have said of it. The conviction grew upon me that Blenkiron was deliberately trying to prove himself an honest idiot. If so, it was a huge success. He produced on one the impression of the type of sentimental revolutionary who ruthlessly knifes his opponent and then weeps and prays over his tomb.

just at the end he seemed to pull himself together and to try a little argument. He made a great point of the Austrian socialists going to Stockholm, going freely and with their Government’s assent, from a country which its critics called an autocracy, while the democratic western peoples held back. ‘I admit I haven’t any real water-tight proof,’ he said, ‘but I will bet my bottom dollar that the influence which moved the Austrian Government to allow this embassy of freedom was the influence of Germany herself. And that is the land from which the Allied Pharisees draw in their skirts lest their garments be defiled!’

He sat down amid a good deal of applause, for his audience had not been bored, though I could see that some of them thought his praise of Germany a bit steep. It was all right in Biggleswick to prove Britain in the wrong, but it was a slightly different thing to extol the enemy. I was puzzled about his last point, for it was not of a piece with the rest of his discourse, and I was trying to guess at his purpose. The chairman referred to it in his concluding remarks. ‘I am in a position,’ he said, ‘to bear out all that the lecturer has said. I can go further. I can assure him on the best authority that his surmise is correct, and that Vienna’s decision to send delegates to Stockholm was largely dictated by representations from Berlin. I am given to understand that the fact has in the last few days been admitted in the Austrian Press.’

A vote of thanks was carried, and then I found myself shaking hands with Ivery while Blenkiron stood a yard off, talking to one of the Misses Weekes. The next moment I was being introduced.

‘Mr Brand, very pleased to meet you,’ said the voice I knew so well. ‘Mr Ivery has been telling me about you, and I guess we’ve got something to say to each other. We’re both from noo countries, and we’ve got to teach the old nations a little horse-sense.’

Mr Ivery’s car - the only one left in the neighbourhood - carried us to his villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-room. It was not a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an expensive hotel, and the supper we had was as good as any London restaurant. Gone were the old days of fish and toast and boiled milk. Blenkiron squared his shoulders and showed himself a noble trencherman.

‘A year ago,’ he told our host, ‘I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic. I had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my stomach. Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star surgeons way out west in White Springs, Nebraska. They were reckoned the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing devilments from his intestines. Now, sir, I’ve always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet through my head. “There’s no other way,” I said to myself. “Either you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice and get cut up, or it’s you for the Golden Shore.” So I set my teeth and journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my duodenum. They saw that the darned thing wouldn’t do, so they sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic. It was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the side of our First Parent. They’ve got a mighty fine way of charging, too, for they take five per cent of a man’s income, and it’s all one to them whether he’s a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week. I can tell you I took some trouble to be a very rich man last year.’

All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor. I was trying to assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery. I had a ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might into my memory, I couldn’t place him. He was the incarnation of the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands too far. He was always damping down Blenkiron’s volcanic utterances. ‘Of course, as you know, the other side have an argument which I find rather hard to meet …’ ‘I can sympathize with patriotism, and even with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to this difficulty.’ ‘Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much as ill-judging,’ - these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in. And he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had with every sort of person - including members of the Government. I remember that he expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.

Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it because Blenkiron seemed to collect his wits and try to argue, just as he had done at the end of his lecture. He was speaking about a story he had heard from someone, who had heard it from someone else, that Austria in the last week of July 1914 had accepted Russia’s proposal to hold her hand and negotiate, and that the Kaiser had sent a message to the Tsar saying he agreed. According to his story this telegram had been received in Petrograd, and had been re-written, like Bismarck’s Ems telegram, before it reached the Emperor. He expressed his disbelief in the yarn. ‘I reckon if it had been true,’ he said, ‘we’d have had the right text out long ago. They’d have kept a copy in Berlin. All the same I did hear a sort of rumour that some kind of message of that sort was published in a German paper.’

Mr Ivery looked wise. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I happen to know that it has been published. You will find it in the Wieser Zeitung.’

‘You don’t say?’ he said admiringly. ‘I wish I could read the old tombstone language. But if I could they wouldn’t let me have the papers.’

‘Oh yes they would.’ Mr Ivery laughed pleasantly. ‘England has still a good share of freedom. Any respectable person can get a permit to import the enemy press. I’m not considered quite respectable, for the authorities have a narrow definition of patriotism, but happily I have respectable friends.’

Blenkiron was staying the night, and I took my leave as the clock struck twelve. They both came into the hall to see me off, and, as I was helping myself to a drink, and my host was looking for my hat and stick, I suddenly heard Blenkiron’s whisper in my ear. ‘London … the day after tomorrow,’ he said. Then he took a formal farewell. ‘Mr Brand, it’s been an honour for me, as an American citizen, to make your acquaintance, sir. I will consider myself fortunate if we have an early reunion. I am stopping at Claridge’s Ho-tel, and I hope to be privileged to receive you there.’

CHAPTER THREE The Reflections of a Cured Dyspeptic

Thirty-five hours later I found myself in my rooms in Westminster. I thought there might be a message for me there, for I didn’t propose to go and call openly on Blenkiron at Claridge’s till I had his instructions. But there was no message - only a line from Peter, saying he had hopes of being sent to Switzerland. That made me realize that he must be pretty badly broken up.

Presently the telephone bell rang. It was Blenkiron who spoke. ‘Go down and have a talk with your brokers about the War Loan. Arrive there about twelve o’clock and don’t go upstairs till you have met a friend. You’d better have a quick luncheon at your club, and then come to Traill’s bookshop in the Haymarket at two. You can get back to Biggleswick by the 5.16.’

I did as I was bid, and twenty minutes later, having travelled by Underground, for I couldn’t raise a taxi, I approached the block of chambers in Leadenhall Street where dwelt the respected firm who managed my investments. It was still a few minutes before noon, and as I slowed down a familiar figure came out of the bank next door.

Ivery beamed recognition. ‘Up for the day, Mr Brand?’ he asked. ‘I have to see my brokers,’ I said, ‘read the South African papers in my club, and get back by the 5.16. Any chance of your company?’

‘Why, yes - that’s my train. _Au _revoir. We meet at the station.’ He bustled off, looking very smart with his neat clothes and a rose in his buttonhole.

I lunched impatiently, and at two was turning over some new books in Traill’s shop with an eye on the street-door behind me. It seemed a public place for an assignation. I had begun to dip into a big illustrated book on flower-gardens when an assistant came up. ‘The manager’s compliments, sir, and he thinks there are some old works of travel upstairs that might interest you.’ I followed him obediently to an upper floor lined with every kind of volume and with tables littered with maps and engravings. ‘This way, sir,’ he said, and opened a door in the wall concealed by bogus book-backs. I found myself in a little study, and Blenkiron sitting in an armchair smoking.

He got up and seized both my hands. ‘Why, Dick, this is better than good noos. I’ve heard all about your exploits since we parted a year ago on the wharf at Liverpool. We’ve both been busy on our own jobs, and there was no way of keeping you wise about my doings, for after I thought I was cured I got worse than hell inside, and, as I told you, had to get the doctor-men to dig into me. After that I was playing a pretty dark game, and had to get down and out of decent society. But, holy Mike! I’m a new man. I used to do my work with a sick heart and a taste in my mouth like a graveyard, and now I can eat and drink what I like and frolic round like a colt. I wake up every morning whistling and thank the good God that I’m alive, It was a bad day for Kaiser when I got on the cars for White Springs.’

‘This is a rum place to meet,’ I said, ‘and you brought me by a roundabout road.’

He grinned and offered me a cigar.

‘There were reasons. It don’t do for you and me to advertise our acquaintance in the street. As for the shop, I’ve owned it for five years. I’ve a taste for good reading, though you wouldn’t think it, and it tickles me to hand it out across the counter … First, I want to hear about Biggleswick.’

‘There isn’t a great deal to it. A lot of ignorance, a large slice of vanity, and a pinch or two of wrong-headed honesty - these are the ingredients of the pie. Not much real harm in it. There’s one or two dirty literary gents who should be in a navvies’ battalion, but they’re about as dangerous as yellow Kaffir dogs. I’ve learned a lot and got all the arguments by heart, but you might plant a Biggleswick in every shire and it wouldn’t help the Boche. I can see where the danger lies all the same. These fellows talked academic anarchism, but the genuine article is somewhere about and to find it you’ve got to look in the big industrial districts. We had faint echoes of it in Biggleswick. I mean that the really dangerous fellows are those who want to close up the war at once and so get on with their blessed class war, which cuts across nationalities. As for being spies and that sort of thing, the Biggleswick lads are too callow.’

‘Yes,’ said Blenkiron reflectively. ‘They haven’t got as much sense as God gave to geese. You’re sure you didn’t hit against any heavier metal?’

‘Yes. There’s a man called Launcelot Wake, who came down to speak once. I had met him before. He has the makings of a fanatic, and he’s the more dangerous because you can see his conscience is uneasy. I can fancy him bombing a Prime Minister merely to quiet his own doubts.’

‘So,’ he said. ‘Nobody else?’

I reflected. ‘There’s Mr Ivery, but you know him better than I. I shouldn’t put much on him, but I’m not precisely certain, for I never had a chance of getting to know him.’

‘Ivery,’ said Blenkiron in surprise. ‘He has a hobby for half-baked youth, just as another rich man might fancy orchids or fast trotters. You sure can place him right enough.’

‘I dare say. Only I don’t know enough to be positive.’

He sucked at his cigar for a minute or so. ‘I guess, Dick, if I told you all I’ve been doing since I reached these shores you would call me a romancer. I’ve been way down among the toilers. I did a spell as unskilled dilooted labour in the Barrow shipyards. I was barman in a ho-tel on the Portsmouth Road, and I put in a black month driving a taxicab in the city of London. For a while I was the accredited correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and used to go with the rest of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries of State and War Office generals. They censored my stuff so cruel that the paper fired me. Then I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a fortnight in a little farm in Suffolk. By and by I came back to Claridge’s and this bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.

‘I had learned,’ he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes on me, ‘that the British workingman is about the soundest piece of humanity on God’s earth. He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit when he thinks the Government are giving him a crooked deal, but he’s gotten the patience of job and the sand of a gamecock. And he’s gotten humour too, that tickles me to death. There’s not much trouble in that quarter for it’s he and his kind that’s beating the Hun … But I picked up a thing or two besides that.’

He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘I reverence the British Intelligence Service. Flies don’t settle on it to any considerable extent. It’s got a mighty fine mesh, but there’s one hole in that mesh, and it’s our job to mend it. There’s a high-powered brain in the game against us. I struck it a couple of years ago when I was hunting Dumba and Albert, and I thought it was in Noo York, but it wasn’t. I struck its working again at home last year and located its head office in Europe. So I tried Switzerland and Holland, but only bits of it were there. The centre of the web where the old spider sits is right here in England, and for six months I’ve been shadowing that spider. There’s a gang to help, a big gang, and a clever gang, and partly an innocent gang. But there’s only one brain, and it’s to match that that the Robson Brothers settled my duodenum.’

I was listening with a quickened pulse, for now at last I was getting to business.

‘What is he - international socialist, or anarchist, or what?’ I asked.

‘Pure-blooded Boche agent, but the biggest-sized brand in the catalogue - bigger than Steinmeier or old Bismarck’s Staubier. Thank God I’ve got him located … I must put you wise about some things.’

He lay back in his rubbed leather armchair and yarned for twenty minutes. He told me how at the beginning of the war Scotland Yard had had a pretty complete register of enemy spies, and without making any fuss had just tidied them away. After that, the covey having been broken up, it was a question of picking off stray birds. That had taken some doing. There had been all kinds of inflammatory stuff around, Red Masons and international anarchists, and, worst of all, international finance-touts, but they had mostly been ordinary cranks and rogues, the tools of the Boche agents rather than agents themselves. However, by the middle Of 1915 most of the stragglers had been gathered in. But there remained loose ends, and towards the close of last year somebody was very busy combining these ends into a net. Funny cases cropped up of the leakage of vital information. They began to be bad about October 1916, when the Hun submarines started on a special racket. The enemy suddenly appeared possessed of a knowledge which we thought to be shared only by half a dozen officers. Blenkiron said he was not surprised at the leakage, for there’s always a lot of people who hear things they oughtn’t to. What surprised him was that it got so quickly to the enemy.

Then after last February, when the Hun submarines went in for frightfulness on a big scale, the thing grew desperate. Leakages occurred every week, and the business was managed by people who knew their way about, for they avoided all the traps set for them, and when bogus news was released on purpose, they never sent it. A convoy which had been kept a deadly secret would be attacked at the one place where it was helpless. A carefully prepared defensive plan would be checkmated before it could be tried. Blenkiron said that there was no evidence that a single brain was behind it all, for there was no similarity in the cases, but he had a strong impression all the time that it was the work of one man. We managed to close some of the bolt-holes, but we couldn’t put our hands near the big ones. ‘By this time,’ said he, ‘I reckoned I was about ready to change my methods. I had been working by what the highbrows call induction, trying to argue up from the deeds to the doer. Now I tried a new lay, which was to calculate down from the doer to the deeds. They call it deduction. I opined that somewhere in this island was a gentleman whom we will call Mr X, and that, pursuing the line of business he did, he must have certain characteristics. I considered very carefully just what sort of personage he must be. I had noticed that his device was apparently the Double Bluff. That is to say, when he had two courses open to him, A and B, he pretended he was going to take B, and so got us guessing that he would try A. Then he took B after all. So I reckoned that his camouflage must correspond to this little idiosyncrasy. Being a Boche agent, he wouldn’t pretend to be a hearty patriot, an honest old blood-and- bones Tory. That would be only the Single Bluff. I considered that he would be a pacifist, cunning enough just to keep inside the law, but with the eyes of the police on him. He would write books which would not be allowed to be exported. He would get himself disliked in the popular papers, but all the mugwumps would admire his moral courage. I drew a mighty fine picture to myself of just the man I expected to find. Then I started out to look for him.’

Blenkiron’s face took on the air of a disappointed child. ‘It was no good. I kept barking up the wrong tree and wore myself out playing the sleuth on white-souled innocents.’

‘But you’ve found him all right,’ I cried, a sudden suspicion leaping into my brain.

‘He’s found,’ he said sadly, ‘but the credit does not belong to John S. Blenkiron. That child merely muddied the pond. The big fish was left for a young lady to hook.’

‘I know,’ I cried excitedly. ‘Her name is Miss Mary Lamington.’

He shook a disapproving head. ‘You’ve guessed right, my son, but you’ve forgotten your manners. This is a rough business and we won’t bring in the name of a gently reared and pure-minded young girl. If we speak to her at all we call her by a pet name out of the Pilgrim’s Progress … Anyhow she hooked the fish, though he isn’t landed. D’you see any light?’

‘Ivery,’ I gasped.

‘Yes. Ivery. Nothing much to look at, you say. A common, middle-aged, pie-faced, golf-playing highbrow, that you wouldn’t keep out of a Sunday school. A touch of the drummer, too, to show he has no dealings with your effete aristocracy. A languishing silver-tongue that adores the sound of his own voice. As mild, you’d say, as curds and cream.’

Blenkiron got out of his chair and stood above me. ‘I tell you, Dick, that man makes my spine cold. He hasn’t a drop of good red blood in him. The dirtiest apache is a Christian gentleman compared to Moxon Ivery. He’s as cruel as a snake and as deep as hell. But, by God, he’s got a brain below his hat. He’s hooked and we’re playing him, but Lord knows if he’ll ever be landed!’

‘Why on earth don’t you put him away?’ I asked.

‘We haven’t the proof - legal proof, I mean; though there’s buckets of the other kind. I could put up a morally certain case, but he’d beat me in a court of law. And half a hundred sheep would get up in Parliament and bleat about persecution. He has a graft with every collection of cranks in England, and with all the geese that cackle about the liberty of the individual when the Boche is ranging about to enslave the world. No, sir, that’s too dangerous a game! Besides, I’ve a better in hand, Moxon Ivery is the best-accredited member of this State. His _dossier is the completest thing outside the Recording Angel’s little notebook. We’ve taken up his references in every corner of the globe and they’re all as right as Morgan’s balance sheet. From these it appears he’s been a high-toned citizen ever since he was in short-clothes. He was raised in Norfolk, and there are people living who remember his father. He was educated at Melton School and his name’s in the register. He was in business in Valparaiso, and there’s enough evidence to write three volumes of his innocent life there. Then he came home with a modest competence two years before the war, and has been in the public eye ever since. He was Liberal candidate for a London constitooency and he has decorated the board of every institootion formed for the amelioration of mankind. He’s got enough alibis to choke a boa constrictor, and they’re water-tight and copper-bottomed, and they’re mostly damned lies … But you can’t beat him at that stunt. The man’s the superbest actor that ever walked the earth. You can see it in his face. It isn’t a face, it’s a mask. He could make himself look like Shakespeare or Julius Caesar or Billy Sunday or Brigadier-General Richard Hannay if he wanted to. He hasn’t got any personality either - he’s got fifty, and there’s no one he could call his own. I reckon when the devil gets the handling of him at last he’ll have to put sand on his claws to keep him from slipping through.’

Blenkiron was settled in his chair again, with one leg hoisted over the side.

‘We’ve closed a fair number of his channels in the last few months. No, he don’t suspect me. The world knows nothing of its greatest men, and to him I’m only a Yankee peace-crank, who gives big subscriptions to loony societies and will travel a hundred miles to let off steam before any kind of audience. He’s been to see me at Claridge’s and I’ve arranged that he shall know all my record. A darned bad record it is too, for two years ago I was violent pro-British before I found salvation and was requested to leave England. When I was home last I was officially anti-war, when I wasn’t stretched upon a bed of pain. Mr Moxon Ivery don’t take any stock in John S. Blenkiron as a serious proposition. And while I’ve been here I’ve been so low down in the social scale and working in so many devious ways that he can’t connect me up … As I was saying, we’ve cut most of his wires, but the biggest we haven’t got at. He’s still sending stuff out, and mighty compromising stuff it is. Now listen close, Dick, for we’re coming near your own business.’

It appeared that Blenkiron had reason to suspect that the channel still open had something to do with the North. He couldn’t get closer than that, till he heard from his people that a certain Abel Gresson had turned up in Glasgow from the States. This Gresson he discovered was the same as one Wrankester, who as a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World had been mixed up in some ugly cases of sabotage in Colorado. He kept his news to himself, for he didn’t want the police to interfere, but he had his own lot get into touch with Gresson and shadow him closely. The man was very discreet but very mysterious, and he would disappear for a week at a time, leaving no trace. For some unknown reason - he couldn’t explain why - Blenkiron had arrived at the conclusion that Gresson was in touch with Ivery, so he made experiments to prove it.

‘I wanted various cross-bearings to make certain, and I got them the night before last. My visit to Biggleswick was good business.’

‘I don’t know what they meant,’ I said, ‘but I know where they came in. One was in your speech when you spoke of the Austrian socialists, and Ivery took you up about them. The other was after supper when he quoted the Wieser Zeitung.’

‘You’re no fool, Dick,’ he said, with his slow smile. ‘You’ve hit the mark first shot. You know me and you could follow my process of thought in those remarks. Ivery, not knowing me so well, and having his head full of just that sort of argument, saw nothing unusual. Those bits of noos were pumped into Gresson that he might pass them on. And he did pass them on - to ivery. They completed my chain.’

‘But they were commonplace enough things which he might have guessed for himself.’

‘No, they weren’t. They were the nicest tit-bits of political noos which all the cranks have been reaching after.’

‘Anyhow, they were quotations from German papers. He might have had the papers themselves earlier than you thought.’

‘Wrong again. The paragraph never appeared in the Wieser Zeitung. But we faked up a torn bit of that noospaper, and a very pretty bit of forgery it was, and Gresson, who’s a kind of a scholar, was allowed to have it. He passed it on. Ivery showed it me two nights ago. Nothing like it ever sullied the columns of Boche journalism. No, it was a perfectly final proof … Now, Dick, it’s up to you to get after Gresson.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m jolly glad I’m to start work again. I’m getting fat from lack of exercise. I suppose you want me to catch Gresson out in some piece of blackguardism and have him and Ivery snugly put away.’

‘I don’t want anything of the kind,’ he said very slowly and distinctly. ‘You’ve got to attend very close to your instructions, I cherish these two beauties as if they were my own white-headed boys. I wouldn’t for the world interfere with their comfort and liberty. I want them to go on corresponding with their friends. I want to give them every facility.’

He burst out laughing at my mystified face.

‘See here, Dick. How do we want to treat the Boche? Why, to fill him up with all the cunningest lies and get him to act on them. Now here is Moxon Ivery, who has always given them good information. They trust him absolutely, and we would be fools to spoil their confidence. Only, if we can find out Moxon’s methods, we can arrange to use them ourselves and send noos in his name which isn’t quite so genooine. Every word he dispatches goes straight to the Grand High Secret General Staff, and old Hindenburg and Ludendorff put towels round their heads and cipher it out. We want to encourage them to go on doing it. We’ll arrange to send true stuff that don’t matter, so as they’ll continue to trust him, and a few selected falsehoods that’ll matter like hell. It’s a game you can’t play for ever, but with luck I propose to play it long enough to confuse Fritz’s little plans.’

His face became serious and wore the air that our corps commander used to have at the big pow-wow before a push.

‘I’m not going to give you instructions, for you’re man enough to make your own. But I can give you the general hang of the situation. You tell Ivery you’re going North to inquire into industrial disputes at first hand. That will seem to him natural and in line with your recent behaviour. He’ll tell his people that you’re a guileless colonial who feels disgruntled with Britain, and may come in useful. You’ll go to a man of mine in Glasgow, a red-hot agitator who chooses that way of doing his bit for his country. It’s a darned hard way and darned dangerous. Through him you’ll get in touch with Gresson, and you’ll keep alongside that bright citizen. Find out what he is doing, and get a chance of following him. He must never suspect you, and for that purpose you must be very near the edge of the law yourself. You go up there as an unabashed pacifist and you’ll live with folk that will turn your stomach. Maybe you’ll have to break some of these two-cent rules the British Government have invented to defend the realm, and it’s up to you not to get caught out … Remember, you’ll get no help from me. you’ve got to wise up about Gresson with the whole forces of the British State arrayed officially against you. I guess it’s a steep proposition, but you’re man enough to make good.’

As we shook hands, he added a last word. ‘You must take your own time, but it’s not a case for slouching. Every day that passes ivery is sending out the worst kind of poison. The Boche is blowing up for a big campaign in the field, and a big effort to shake the nerve and confuse the judgement of our civilians. The whole earth’s war-weary, and we’ve about reached the danger-point. There’s pretty big stakes hang on you, Dick, for things are getting mighty delicate.’

I purchased a new novel in the shop and reached St Pancras in time to have a cup of tea at the buffet. Ivery was at the bookstall buying an evening paper. When we got into the carriage he seized my _Punch and kept laughing and calling my attention to the pictures. As I looked at him, I thought that he made a perfect picture of the citizen turned countryman, going back of an evening to his innocent home. Everything was right - his neat tweeds, his light spats, his spotted neckcloth, and his Aquascutum.

Not that I dared look at him much. What I had learned made me eager to search his face, but I did not dare show any increased interest. I had always been a little off-hand with him, for I had never much liked him, so I had to keep on the same manner. He was as merry as a grig, full of chat and very friendly and amusing. I remember he picked up the book I had brought off that morning to read in the train - the second volume of Hazlitt’s _Essays, the last of my English classics - and discoursed so wisely about books that I wished I had spent more time in his company at Biggleswick.

‘Hazlitt was the academic Radical of his day,’ he said. ‘He is always lashing himself into a state of theoretical fury over abuses he has never encountered in person. Men who are up against the real thing save their breath for action.’

That gave me my cue to tell him about my journey to the North. I said I had learned a lot in Biggleswick, but I wanted to see industrial life at close quarters. ‘Otherwise I might become like Hazlitt,’ I said.

He was very interested and encouraging. ‘That’s the right way to set about it,’ he said. ‘Where were you thinking of going?’

I told him that I had half thought of Barrow, but decided to try Glasgow, since the Clyde seemed to be a warm corner.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I only wish I was coming with you. It’ll take you a little while to understand the language. You’ll find a good deal of senseless bellicosity among the workmen, for they’ve got parrot-cries about the war as they used to have parrot-cries about their labour politics. But there’s plenty of shrewd brains and sound hearts too. You must write and tell me your conclusions.’

It was a warm evening and he dozed the last part of the journey. I looked at him and wished I could see into the mind at the back of that mask-like face. I counted for nothing in his eyes, not even enough for him to want to make me a tool, and I was setting out to try to make a tool of him. It sounded a forlorn enterprise. And all the while I was puzzled with a persistent sense of recognition. I told myself it was idiocy, for a man with a face like that must have hints of resemblance to a thousand people. But the idea kept nagging at me till we reached our destination.

As we emerged from the station into the golden evening I saw Mary Lamington again. She was with one of the Weekes girls, and after the Biggleswick fashion was bareheaded, so that the sun glinted from her hair. Ivery swept his hat off and made her a pretty speech, while I faced her steady eyes with the expressionlessness of the stage conspirator.

‘A charming child,’ he observed as we passed on. ‘Not without a touch of seriousness, too, which may yet be touched to noble issues.’

I considered, as I made my way to my final supper with the jimsons, that the said child was likely to prove a sufficiently serious business for Mr Moxon Ivery before the game was out.

CHAPTER FOUR Andrew Amos

I took the train three days later from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. I went to the Pentland Hotel in Princes Street and left there a suitcase containing some clean linen and a change of clothes. I had been thinking the thing out, and had come to the conclusion that I must have a base somewhere and a fresh outfit. Then in well-worn tweeds and with no more luggage than a small trench kit-bag, I descended upon the city of Glasgow.

I walked from the station to the address which Blenkiron had given me. It was a hot summer evening, and the streets were filled with bareheaded women and weary-looking artisans. As I made my way down the Dumbarton Road i was amazed at the number of able-bodied fellows about, considering that you couldn’t stir a mile on any British front without bumping up against a Glasgow battalion. Then I realized that there were such things as munitions and ships, and I wondered no more.

A stout and dishevelled lady at a close-mouth directed me to Mr Amos’s dwelling. ‘Twa stairs up. Andra will be in noo, havin’ his tea. He’s no yin for overtime. He’s generally hame on the chap of six.’ I ascended the stairs with a sinking heart, for like all South Africans I have a horror of dirt. The place was pretty filthy, but at each landing there were two doors with well-polished handles and brass plates. On one I read the name of Andrew Amos.

A man in his shirt-sleeves opened to me, a little man, without a collar, and with an unbuttoned waistcoat. That was all I saw of him in the dim light, but he held out a paw like a gorilla’s and drew me in.

The sitting-room, which looked over many chimneys to a pale yellow sky against which two factory stalks stood out sharply, gave me light enough to observe him fully. He was about five feet four, broad-shouldered, and with a great towsy head of grizzled hair. He wore spectacles, and his face was like some old-fashioned Scots minister’s, for he had heavy eyebrows and whiskers which joined each other under his jaw, while his chin and enormous upper lip were clean-shaven. His eyes were steely grey and very solemn, but full of smouldering energy. His voice was enormous and would have shaken the walls if he had not had the habit of speaking with half-closed lips. He had not a sound tooth in his head.

A saucer full of tea and a plate which had once contained ham and eggs were on the table. He nodded towards them and asked me if I had fed.

‘Ye’ll no eat onything? Well, some would offer ye a dram, but this house is staunch teetotal. I door ye’ll have to try the nearest public if ye’re thirsty.’

I disclaimed any bodily wants, and produced my pipe, at which he started to fill an old clay. ‘Mr Brand’s your name?’ he asked in his gusty voice. ‘I was expectin’ ye, but Dod! man ye’re late!’

He extricated from his trousers pocket an ancient silver watch, and regarded it with disfavour. ‘The dashed thing has stoppit. What do ye make the time, Mr Brand?’

He proceeded to prise open the lid of his watch with the knife he had used to cut his tobacco, and, as he examined the works, he turned the back of the case towards me. On the inside I saw pasted Mary Lamington’s purple-and-white wafer.

I held my watch so that he could see the same token. His keen eyes, raised for a second, noted it, and he shut his own with a snap and returned it to his pocket. His manner lost its wariness and became almost genial.

‘Ye’ve come up to see Glasgow, Mr Brand? Well, it’s a steerin’ bit, and there’s honest folk bides in it, and some not so honest. They tell me ye’re from South Africa. That’s a long gait away, but I ken something aboot South Africa, for I had a cousin’s son oot there for his lungs. He was in a shop in Main Street, Bloomfountain. They called him Peter Dobson. Ye would maybe mind of him.’

Then he discoursed of the Clyde. He was an incomer, he told me, from the Borders, his native place being the town of Galashiels, or, as he called it, ‘Gawly’. ‘I began as a powerloom tuner in Stavert’s mill. Then my father dee’d and I took up his trade of jiner. But it’s no world nowadays for the sma’ independent business, so I cam to the Clyde and learned a shipwright’s job. I may say I’ve become a leader in the trade, for though I’m no an official of the Union, and not likely to be, there’s no man’s word carries more weight than mine. And the Goavernment kens that, for they’ve sent me on commissions up and down the land to look at wuds and report on the nature of the timber. Bribery, they think it is, but Andrew Amos is not to be bribit. He’ll have his say about any Goavernment on earth, and tell them to their face what he thinks of them. Ay, and he’ll fight the case of the workingman against his oppressor, should it be the Goavernment or the fatted calves they ca’ Labour Members. Ye’ll have heard tell o’ the shop stewards, Mr Brand?’

I admitted I had, for I had been well coached by Blenkiron in the current history of industrial disputes.

‘Well, I’m a shop steward. We represent the rank and file against office-bearers that have lost the confidence o’ the workingman. But I’m no socialist, and I would have ye keep mind of that. I’m yin o’ the old Border radicals, and I’m not like to change. I’m for individual liberty and equal rights and chances for all men. I’ll no more bow down before a Dagon of a Goavernment official than before the Baal of a feckless Tweedside laird. I’ve to keep my views to mysel’, for thae young lads are all drucken-daft with their wee books about Cawpital and Collectivism and a wheen long senseless words I wouldna fyle my tongue with. Them and their socialism! There’s more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign trash. But, as I say, I’ve got to keep a quiet sough, for the world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles. It all comes of a defective eddication.’

‘And what does a Border radical say about the war?’ I asked.

He took off his spectacles and cocked his shaggy brows at me. ‘I’ll tell ye, Mr Brand. All that was bad in all that I’ve ever wrestled with since I cam to years o’ discretion - Tories and lairds and manufacturers and publicans and the Auld Kirk - all that was bad, I say, for there were orra bits of decency, ye’ll find in the Germans full measure pressed down and running over. When the war started, I considered the subject calmly for three days, and then I said: “Andra Amos, ye’ve found the enemy at last. The ones ye fought before were in a manner o’ speakin’ just misguided friends. It’s either you or the Kaiser this time, my man!”’

His eyes had lost their gravity and had taken on a sombre ferocity. ‘Ay, and I’ve not wavered. I got a word early in the business as to the way I could serve my country best. It’s not been an easy job, and there’s plenty of honest folk the day will give me a bad name. They think I’m stirrin’ up the men at home and desertin’ the cause o’ the lads at the front. Man, I’m keepin’ them straight. If I didna fight their battles on a sound economic isshue, they would take the dorts and be at the mercy of the first blagyird that preached revolution. Me and my like are safety-valves, if ye follow me. And dinna you make ony mistake, Mr Brand. The men that are agitating for a rise in wages are not for peace. They’re fighting for the lads overseas as much as for themselves. There’s not yin in a thousand that wouldna sweat himself blind to beat the Germans. The Goavernment has made mistakes, and maun be made to pay for them. If it were not so, the men would feel like a moose in a trap, for they would have no way to make their grievance felt. What for should the big man double his profits and the small man be ill set to get his ham and egg on Sabbath mornin’? That’s the meaning o’ Labour unrest, as they call it, and it’s a good thing, says I, for if Labour didna get its leg over the traces now and then, the spunk o’ the land would be dead in it, and Hindenburg could squeeze it like a rotten aipple.’

I asked if he spoke for the bulk of the men.

‘For ninety per cent in ony ballot. I don’t say that there’s not plenty of riff-raff - the pint-and-a-dram gentry and the soft-heads that are aye reading bits of newspapers, and muddlin’ their wits with foreign whigmaleeries. But the average man on the Clyde, like the average man in ither places, hates just three things, and that’s the Germans, the profiteers, as they call them, and the Irish. But he hates the Germans first.’

‘The Irish!’ I exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Ay, the Irish,’ cried the last of the old Border radicals. ‘Glasgow’s stinkin’ nowadays with two things, money and Irish. I mind the day when I followed Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule policy, and used to threep about the noble, generous, warm-hearted sister nation held in a foreign bondage. My Goad! I’m not speakin’ about Ulster, which is a dour, ill-natured den, but our own folk all the same. But the men that will not do a hand’s turn to help the war and take the chance of our necessities to set up a bawbee rebellion are hateful to Goad and man. We treated them like pet lambs and that’s the thanks we get. They’re coming over here in thousands to tak the jobs of the lads that are doing their duty. I was speakin’ last week to a widow woman that keeps a wee dairy down the Dalmarnock Road. She has two sons, and both in the airmy, one in the Cameronians and one a prisoner in Germany. She was telling me that she could not keep goin’ any more, lacking the help of the boys, though she had worked her fingers to the bone. “Surely it’s a crool job, Mr Amos,” she says, “that the Goavernment should tak baith my laddies, and I’ll maybe never see them again, and let the Irish gang free and tak the bread frae our mouth. At the gasworks across the road they took on a hundred Irish last week, and every yin o’ them as young and well set up as you would ask to see. And my wee Davie, him that’s in Germany, had aye a weak chest, and Jimmy was troubled wi’ a bowel complaint. That’s surely no justice!”. …’

He broke off and lit a match by drawing it across the seat of his trousers. ‘It’s time I got the gas lichtit. There’s some men coming here at half-ten.’

As the gas squealed and flickered in the lighting, he sketched for me the coming guests. ‘There’s Macnab and Niven, two o’ my colleagues. And there’s Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, and a lad Wilkie - he’s got consumption, and writes wee bits in the papers. And there’s a queer chap o’ the name o’ Tombs - they tell me he comes frae Cambridge, and is a kind of a professor there - anyway he’s more stuffed wi’ havers than an egg wi’ meat. He telled me he was here to get at the heart o’ the workingman, and I said to him that he would hae to look a bit further than the sleeve o’ the workin’-man’s jaicket. There’s no muckle in his head, poor soul. Then there’ll be Tam Norie, him that edits our weekly paper - Justice for _All. Tam’s a humorist and great on Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o’ a dwinin’ teetotum … Ye’ll understand, Mr Brand, that I keep my mouth shut in such company, and don’t express my own views more than is absolutely necessary. I criticize whiles, and that gives me a name of whunstane common-sense, but I never let my tongue wag. The feck o’ the lads comin’ the night are not the real workingman - they’re just the froth on the pot, but it’s the froth that will be useful to you. Remember they’ve heard tell o’ ye already, and ye’ve some sort o’ reputation to keep up.’

‘Will Mr Abel Gresson be here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Him and me havena yet got to the point O’ payin’ visits. But the men that come will be Gresson’s friends and they’ll speak of ye to him. It’s the best kind of introduction ye could seek.’

The knocker sounded, and Mr Amos hastened to admit the first comers. These were Macnab and Wilkie: the one a decent middle-aged man with a fresh-washed face and a celluloid collar-, the other a round-shouldered youth, with lank hair and the large eyes and luminous skin which are the marks of phthisis. ‘This is Mr Brand boys, from South Africa,’ was Amos’s presentation. Presently came Niven, a bearded giant, and Mr Norie, the editor, a fat dirty fellow smoking a rank cigar. Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, when he arrived, proved to be a pleasant young man in spectacles who spoke with an educated voice and clearly belonged to a slightly different social scale. Last came Tombs, the Cambridge ‘professor, a lean youth with a sour mouth and eyes that reminded me of Launcelot Wake.

‘Ye’ll no be a mawgnate, Mr Brand, though ye come from South Africa,’ said Mr Norie with a great guffaw.

‘Not me. I’m a working engineer,’ I said. ‘My father was from Scotland, and this is my first visit to my native country, as my friend Mr Amos was telling you.’

The consumptive looked at me suspiciously. ‘We’ve got two-three of the comrades here that the cawpitalist Government expelled from the Transvaal. If ye’re our way of thinking, ye will maybe ken them.’

I said I would be overjoyed to meet them, but that at the time of the outrage in question I had been working on a mine a thousand miles further north.

Then ensued an hour of extraordinary talk. Tombs in his sing-song namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information. He asked endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really understood his language. I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest lamp-post. And all the while Amos and Macnab and Niven carried on their own conversation about the affairs of their society, wholly impervious to the tornado raging around them.

It was Mr Norie, the editor, who brought me into the discussion.

‘Our South African friend is very blate,’ he said in his boisterous way. ‘Andra, if this place of yours wasn’t so damned teetotal and we had a dram apiece, we might get his tongue loosened. I want to hear what he’s got to say about the war. You told me this morning he was sound in the faith.’

‘I said no such thing,’ said Mr Amos. ‘As ye ken well, Tam Norie, I don’t judge soundness on that matter as you judge it. I’m for the war myself, subject to certain conditions that I’ve often stated. I know nothing of Mr Brand’s opinions, except that he’s a good democrat, which is more than I can say of some o’ your friends.’

‘Hear to Andra,’ laughed Mr Norie. ‘He’s thinkin’ the inspector in the Socialist State would be a waur kind of awristocrat then the Duke of Buccleuch. Weel, there’s maybe something in that. But about the war he’s wrong. Ye ken my views, boys. This war was made by the cawpitalists, and it has been fought by the workers, and it’s the workers that maun have the ending of it. That day’s comin’ very near. There are those that want to spin it out till Labour is that weak it can be pit in chains for the rest o’ time. That’s the manoeuvre we’re out to prevent. We’ve got to beat the Germans, but it’s the workers that has the right to judge when the enemy’s beaten and not the cawpitalists. What do you say, Mr Brand?’

Mr Norie had obviously pinned his colours to the fence, but he gave me the chance I had been looking for. I let them have my views with a vengeance, and these views were that for the sake of democracy the war must be ended. I flatter myself I put my case well, for I had got up every rotten argument and I borrowed largely from Launcelot Wake’s armoury. But I didn’t put it too well, for I had a very exact notion of the impression I wanted to produce. I must seem to be honest and in earnest, just a bit of a fanatic, but principally a hard-headed businessman who knew when the time had come to make a deal. Tombs kept interrupting me with imbecile questions, and I had to sit on him. At the end Mr Norie hammered with his pipe on the table.

‘That’ll sort ye, Andra. Ye’re entertain’ an angel unawares. What do ye say to that, my man?’

Mr Amos shook his head. ‘I’ll no deny there’s something in it, but I’m not convinced that the Germans have got enough of a wheepin’.’ Macnab agreed with him; the others were with me. Norie was for getting me to write an article for his paper, and the consumptive wanted me to address a meeting.

‘Wull ye say a’ that over again the morn’s night down at our hall in Newmilns Street? We’ve got a lodge meeting o’ the I.W.B., and I’ll make them pit ye in the programme.’ He kept his luminous eyes, like a sick dog s, fixed on me, and I saw that I had made one ally. I told him I had come to Glasgow to learn and not to teach, but I would miss no chance of testifying to my faith.

‘Now, boys, I’m for my bed,’ said Amos, shaking the dottle from his pipe. ‘Mr Tombs, I’ll conduct ye the morn over the Brigend works, but I’ve had enough clavers for one evening. I’m a man that wants his eight hours’ sleep.’

The old fellow saw them to the door, and came back to me with the ghost of a grin in his face.

‘A queer crowd, Mr Brand! Macnab didna like what ye said. He had a laddie killed in Gallypoly, and he’s no lookin’ for peace this side the grave. He’s my best friend in Glasgow. He’s an elder in the Gaelic kirk in the Cowcaddens, and I’m what ye call a free-thinker, but we’re wonderful agreed on the fundamentals. Ye spoke your bit verra well, I must admit. Gresson will hear tell of ye as a promising recruit.’ ‘It’s a rotten job,’ I said.

‘Ay, it’s a rotten job. I often feel like vomiting over it mysel’. But it’s no for us to complain. There’s waur jobs oot in France for better men … A word in your ear, Mr Brand. Could ye not look a bit more sheepish? Ye stare folk ower straight in the een, like a Hieland sergeant-major up at Maryhill Barracks.’ And he winked slowly and grotesquely with his left eye.

He marched to a cupboard and produced a black bottle and glass. ‘I’m blue-ribbon myself, but ye’ll be the better of something to tak the taste out of your mouth. There’s Loch Katrine water at the pipe there … As I was saying, there’s not much ill in that lot. Tombs is a black offence, but a dominie’s a dominie all the world over. They may crack about their Industrial Workers and the braw things they’re going to do, but there’s a wholesome dampness about the tinder on Clydeside. They should try Ireland.’

Supposing,’ I said, ‘there was a really clever man who wanted to help the enemy. You think he could do little good by stirring up trouble in the shops here?’

‘I’m positive.’

‘And if he were a shrewd fellow, he’d soon tumble to that?’

‘Ay.’ ‘Then if he still stayed on here he would be after bigger game - something really dangerous and damnable?’

Amos drew down his brows and looked me in the face. ‘I see what ye’re ettlin’ at. Ay! That would be my conclusion. I came to it weeks syne about the man ye’ll maybe meet the morn’s night.’

Then from below the bed he pulled a box from which he drew a handsome flute. ‘Ye’ll forgive me, Mr Brand, but I aye like a tune before I go to my bed. Macnab says his prayers, and I have a tune on the flute, and the principle is just the same.’

So that singular evening closed with music - very sweet and true renderings of old Border melodies like ‘My Peggy is a young thing’, and ‘When the kye come hame’. I fell asleep with a vision of Amos, his face all puckered up at the mouth and a wandering sentiment in his eye, recapturing in his dingy world the emotions of a boy.

The widow-woman from next door, who acted as house-keeper, cook, and general factotum to the establishment, brought me shaving water next morning, but I had to go without a bath. When I entered the kitchen I found no one there, but while I consumed the inevitable ham and egg, Amos arrived back for breakfast. He brought with him the morning’s paper. ‘The _Herald says there’s been a big battle at Eepers,’ he announced.

I tore open the sheet and read of the great attack Of 31 July which was spoiled by the weather. ‘My God!’ I cried. ‘They’ve got St Julien and that dirty Frezenberg ridge … and Hooge … and Sanctuary Wood. I know every inch of the damned place. …’

‘Mr Brand,’ said a warning voice, ‘that’ll never do. If our friends last night heard ye talk like that ye might as well tak the train back to London … They’re speakin’ about ye in the yards this morning. ye’ll get a good turnout at your meeting the night, but they’re SaYin’ that the polis will interfere. That mightna be a bad thing, but I trust ye to show discretion, for ye’ll not be muckle use to onybody if they jyle ye in Duke Street. I hear Gresson will be there with a fraternal message from his lunatics in America … I’ve arranged that ye go down to Tam Norie this afternoon and give him a hand with his bit paper. Tam will tell ye the whole clash o’ the West country, and I look to ye to keep him off the drink. He’s aye arguin’ that writin’ and drinkin’ gang thegither, and quotin’ Robert Burns, but the creature has a wife and five bairns dependin’ on him.’

I spent a fantastic day. For two hours I sat in Norie’s dirty den, while he smoked and orated, and, when he remembered his business, took down in shorthand my impressions of the Labour situation in South Africa for his rag. They were fine breezy impressions, based on the most whole-hearted ignorance, and if they ever reached the Rand I wonder what my friends there made of Cornelius Brand, their author. I stood him dinner in an indifferent eating-house in a street off the Broomielaw, and thereafter had a drink with him in a public-house, and was introduced to some of his less reputable friends.

About tea-time I went back to Amos’s lodgings, and spent an hour or so writing a long letter to Mr Ivery. I described to him everybody I had met, I gave highly coloured views of the explosive material on the Clyde, and I deplored the lack of clearheadedness in the progressive forces. I drew an elaborate picture of Amos, and deduced from it that the Radicals were likely to be a bar to true progress. ‘They have switched their old militancy,’ I wrote, ‘on to another track, for with them it is a matter of conscience to be always militant.’ I finished up with some very crude remarks on economics culled from the table-talk of the egregious Tombs. It was the kind of letter which I hoped would establish my character in his mind as an industrious innocent.

Seven o’clock found me in Newmilns Street, where I was seized upon by Wilkie. He had put on a clean collar for the occasion and had partially washed his thin face. The poor fellow had a cough that shook him like the walls of a power-house when the dynamos are going.

He was very apologetic about Amos. ‘Andra belongs to a past worrld,’ he said. ‘He has a big reputation in his society, and he’s a fine fighter, but he has no kind of Vision, if ye understand me. He’s an auld Gladstonian, and that’s done and damned in Scotland. He’s not a Modern, Mr Brand, like you and me. But tonight ye’ll meet one or two chaps that’ll be worth your while to ken. Ye’ll maybe no go quite as far as them, but ye’re on the same road. I’m hoping for the day when we’ll have oor Councils of Workmen and Soldiers like the Russians all over the land and dictate our terms to the pawrasites in Pawrliament. They tell me, too, the boys in the trenches are comin’ round to our side.’

We entered the hall by a back door, and in a little waiting-room I was introduced to some of the speakers. They were a scratch lot as seen in that dingy place. The chairman was a shop-steward in one of the Societies, a fierce little rat of a man, who spoke with a cockney accent and addressed me as ‘Comrade’. But one of them roused my liveliest interest. I heard the name of Gresson, and turned to find a fellow of about thirty-five, rather sprucely dressed, with a flower in his buttonhole. ‘Mr Brand,’ he said, in a rich American voice which recalled Blenkiron’s. ‘Very pleased to meet you, sir. We have Come from remote parts of the globe to be present at this gathering.’ I noticed that he had reddish hair, and small bright eyes, and a nose with a droop like a Polish jew’s.

As soon as we reached the platform I saw that there was going to be trouble. The hall was packed to the door, and in all the front half there was the kind of audience I expected to see - working-men of the political type who before the war would have thronged to party meetings. But not all the crowd at the back had come to listen. Some were scallawags, some looked like better-class clerks out for a spree, and there was a fair quantity of khaki. There were also one or two gentlemen not strictly sober.

The chairman began by putting his foot in it. He said we were there tonight to protest against the continuation of the war and to form a branch of the new British Council of Workmen and Soldiers. He told them with a fine mixture of metaphors that we had got to take the reins into our own hands, for the men who were running the war had their own axes to grind and were marching to oligarchy through the blood of the workers. He added that we had no quarrel with Germany half as bad as we had with our own capitalists. He looked forward to the day when British soldiers would leap from their trenches and extend the hand of friendship to their German comrades.

‘No me!’ said a solemn voice. ‘I’m not seekin’ a bullet in my wame,’ - at which there was laughter and cat-calls.

Tombs followed and made a worse hash of it. He was determined to speak, as he would have put it, to democracy in its own language, so he said ‘hell’ several times, loudly but without conviction. Presently he slipped into the manner of the lecturer, and the audience grew restless. ‘I propose to ask myself a question -‘ he began, and from the back of the hall came - ‘And a damned sully answer ye’ll get.’ After that there was no more Tombs.

I followed with extreme nervousness, and to my surprise got a fair hearing. I felt as mean as a mangy dog on a cold morning, for I hated to talk rot before soldiers - especially before a couple of Royal Scots Fusiliers, who, for all I knew, might have been in my own brigade. My line was the plain, practical, patriotic man, just come from the colonies, who looked at things with fresh eyes, and called for a new deal. I was very moderate, but to justify my appearance there I had to put in a wild patch or two, and I got these by impassioned attacks on the Ministry of Munitions. I mixed up a little mild praise of the Germans, whom I said I had known all over the world for decent fellows. I received little applause, but no marked dissent, and sat down with deep thankfulness.

The next speaker put the lid on it. I believe he was a noted agitator, who had already been deported. Towards him there was no lukewarmness, for one half of the audience cheered wildly when he rose, and the other half hissed and groaned. He began with whirlwind abuse of the idle rich, then of the middle-classes (he called them the ‘rich man’s flunkeys’), and finally of the Government. All that was fairly well received, for it is the fashion of the Briton to run down every Government and yet to be very averse to parting from it. Then he started on the soldiers and slanged the officers (‘gentry pups’ was his name for them), and the generals, whom he accused of idleness, of cowardice, and of habitual intoxication. He told us that our own kith and kin were sacrificed in every battle by leaders who had not the guts to share their risks. The Scots Fusiliers looked perturbed, as if they were in doubt of his meaning. Then he put it more plainly. ‘Will any soldier deny that the men are the barrage to keep the officers’ skins whole?’

‘That’s a bloody lee,’ said one of the Fusilier jocks.

The man took no notice of the interruption, being carried away by the torrent of his own rhetoric, but he had not allowed for the persistence of the interrupter. The jock got slowly to his feet, and announced that he wanted satisfaction. ‘If ye open your dirty gab to blagyird honest men, I’ll come up on the platform and wring your neck.’

At that there was a fine old row, some crying out ‘Order’, some ‘Fair play’, and some applauding. A Canadian at the back of the hall started a song, and there was an ugly press forward. The hall seemed to be moving up from the back, and already men were standing in all the passages and right to the edge of the platform. I did not like the look in the eyes of these newcomers, and among the crowd I saw several who were obviously plainclothes policemen.

The chairman whispered a word to the speaker, who continued when the noise had temporarily died down. He kept off the army and returned to the Government, and for a little sluiced out pure anarchism. But he got his foot in it again, for he pointed to the Sinn Feiners as examples of manly independence. At that, pandemonium broke loose, and he never had another look in. There were several fights going on in the hall between the public and courageous supporters of the orator.

Then Gresson advanced to the edge of the platform in a vain endeavour to retrieve the day. I must say he did it uncommonly well. He was clearly a practised speaker, and for a moment his appeal ‘Now, boys, let’s cool down a bit and talk sense,’ had an effect. But the mischief had been done, and the crowd was surging round the lonely redoubt where we sat. Besides, I could see that for all his clever talk the meeting did not like the look of him. He was as mild as a turtle dove, but they wouldn’t stand for it. A missile hurtled past my nose, and I saw a rotten cabbage envelop the baldish head of the ex-deportee. Someone reached out a long arm and grabbed a chair, and with it took the legs from Gresson. Then the lights suddenly went out, and we retreated in good order by the platform door with a yelling crowd at our heels.

It was here that the plainclothes men came in handy. They held the door while the ex-deportee was smuggled out by some side entrance. That class of lad would soon cease to exist but for the protection of the law which he would abolish. The rest of us, having less to fear, were suffered to leak into Newmilns Street. I found myself next to Gresson, and took his arm. There was something hard in his coat pocket.

Unfortunately there was a big lamp at the point where we emerged, and there for our confusion were the Fusilier jocks. Both were strung to fighting pitch, and were determined to have someone’s blood. Of me they took no notice, but Gresson had spoken after their ire had been roused, and was marked out as a victim. With a howl of joy they rushed for him.

I felt his hand steal to his side-pocket. ‘Let that alone, you fool,’ I growled in his ear.

‘Sure, mister,’ he said, and the next second we were in the thick of it.

It was like so many street fights I have seen - an immense crowd which surged up around us, and yet left a clear ring. Gresson and I got against the wall on the side-walk, and faced the furious soldiery. My intention was to do as little as possible, but the first minute convinced me that my companion had no idea how to use his fists, and I was mortally afraid that he would get busy with the gun in his pocket. It was that fear that brought me into the scrap. The jocks were sportsmen every bit of them, and only one advanced to the combat. He hit Gresson a clip on the jaw with his left, and but for the wall would have laid him out. I saw in the lamplight the vicious gleam in the American’s eye and the twitch of his hand to his pocket. That decided me to interfere and I got in front of him.

This brought the second jock into the fray. He was a broad, thickset fellow, of the adorable bandy-legged stocky type that I had seen go through the Railway Triangle at Arras as though it were blotting-paper. He had some notion of fighting, too, and gave me a rough time, for I had to keep edging the other fellow off Gresson.

‘Go home, you fool,’ I shouted. ‘Let this gentleman alone. I don’t want to hurt you.’

The only answer was a hook-hit which I just managed to guard, followed by a mighty drive with his right which I dodged so that he barked his knuckles on the wall. I heard a yell of rage, and observed that Gresson seemed to have kicked his assailant on the shin. I began to long for the police.

Then there was that swaying of the crowd which betokens the approach of the forces of law and order. But they were too late to prevent trouble. In self-defence I had to take my jock seriously, and got in my blow when he had overreached himself and lost his balance. I never hit anyone so unwillingly in my life. He went over like a poled ox, and measured his length on the causeway.

I found myself explaining things politely to the constables. ‘These men objected to this gentleman’s speech at the meeting, and I had to interfere to protect him. No, no! I don’t want to charge anybody. It was all a misunderstanding.’ I helped the stricken jock to rise and offered him ten bob for consolation.

He looked at me sullenly and spat on the ground. ‘Keep your dirty money,’ he said. ‘I’ll be even with ye yet, my man - you and that red-headed scab. I’ll mind the looks of ye the next time I see ye.’ Gresson was wiping the blood from his cheek with a silk handkerchief. ‘I guess I’m in your debt, Mr Brand,’ he said. ‘You may bet I won’t forget it.’

I returned to an anxious Amos. He heard my story in silence and his only comment was -‘Well done the Fusiliers!’

‘It might have been worse, I’ll not deny,’ he went on. ‘Ye’ve established some kind of a claim upon Gresson, which may come in handy … Speaking about Gresson, I’ve news for ye. He’s sailing on Friday as purser in the Tobermory. The Tobermory’s a boat that wanders every month up the West Highlands as far as Stornoway. I’ve arranged for ye to take a trip on that boat, Mr Brand.’

I nodded. ‘How did you find out that?’ I asked.

‘It took me some finding,’ he said dryly, ‘but I’ve ways and means. Now I’ll not trouble ye with advice, for ye ken your job as well as me. But I’m going north myself the morn to look after some of the Ross-shire wuds, and I’ll be in the way of getting telegrams at the Kyle. Ye’ll keep that in mind. Keep in mind, too, that I’m a great reader of thePilgrim’s Progress and that I’ve a cousin of the name of Ochterlony.’

CHAPTER FIVE Various Doings in the West

The _Tobermory was no ship for passengers. Its decks were littered with a hundred oddments, so that a man could barely walk a step without tacking, and my bunk was simply a shelf in the frowsty little saloon, where the odour of ham and eggs hung like a fog. I joined her at Greenock and took a turn on deck with the captain after tea, when he told me the names of the big blue hills to the north. He had a fine old copper-coloured face and side-whiskers like an archbishop, and, having spent all his days beating up the western seas, had as many yarns in his head as Peter himself.

‘On this boat,’ he announced, ‘we don’t ken what a day may bring forth. I may put into Colonsay for twa hours and bide there three days. I get a telegram at Oban and the next thing I’m awa ayont Barra. Sheep’s the difficult business. They maun be fetched for the sales, and they’re dooms slow to lift. So ye see it’s not what ye call a pleasure trip, Maister Brand.’

Indeed it wasn’t, for the confounded tub wallowed like a fat sow as soon as we rounded a headland and got the weight of the south-western wind. When asked my purpose, I explained that I was a colonial of Scots extraction, who was paying his first visit to his fatherland and wanted to explore the beauties of the West Highlands. I let him gather that I was not rich in this world’s goods.

‘ Ye’ll have a passport?’ he asked. ‘They’ll no let ye go north o’ Fort William without one.’

Amos had said nothing about passports, so I looked blank.

‘I could keep ye on board for the whole voyage,’ he went on, ‘but ye wouldna be permitted to land. if ye’re seekin’ enjoyment, it would be a poor job sittin’ on this deck and admirin’ the works O’ God and no allowed to step on the pier-head. Ye should have applied to the military gentlemen in Glesca. But ye’ve plenty o’ time to make up your mind afore we get to Oban. We’ve a heap o’ calls to make Mull and Islay way.’

The purser came up to inquire about my ticket, and greeted me with a grin.

,Ye’re acquaint with Mr Gresson, then?’ said the captain. ‘Weel, we’re a cheery wee ship’s company, and that’s the great thing on this kind o’ job.’

I made but a poor supper, for the wind had risen to half a gale, and I saw hours of wretchedness approaching. The trouble with me is that I cannot be honestly sick and get it over. Queasiness and headache beset me and there is no refuge but bed. I turned into my bunk, leaving the captain and the mate smoking shag not six feet from my head, and fell into a restless sleep. When I woke the place was empty, and smelt vilely of stale tobacco and cheese. My throbbing brows made sleep impossible, and I tried to ease them by staggering upon deck. I saw a clear windy sky, with every star as bright as a live coal, and a heaving waste of dark waters running to ink-black hills. Then a douche of spray caught me and sent me down the companion to my bunk again, where I lay for hours trying to make a plan of campaign.

I argued that if Amos had wanted me to have a passport he would have provided one, so I needn’t bother my head about that. But it was my business to keep alongside Gresson, and if the boat stayed a week in some port and he went off ashore, I must follow him. Having no passport I would have to be always dodging trouble, which would handicap my movements and in all likelihood make me more conspicuous than I wanted. I guessed that Amos had denied me the passport for the very reason that he wanted Gresson to think me harmless. The area of danger would, therefore, be the passport country, somewhere north of Fort William.

But to follow Gresson I must run risks and enter that country. His suspicions, if he had any, would be lulled if I left the boat at Oban, but it was up to me to follow overland to the north and hit the place where the Tobermory made a long stay. The confounded tub had no plans; she wandered about the West Highlands looking for sheep and things; and the captain himself could give me no timetable of her voyage. It was incredible that Gresson should take all this trouble if he did not know that at some place - and the right place - he would have time to get a spell ashore. But I could scarcely ask Gresson for that information, though I determined to cast a wary fly over him. I knew roughly the Tobermory’s course - through the Sound of Islay to Colonsay; then up the east side of Mull to Oban; then through the Sound of Mull to the islands with names like cocktails, Rum and Eigg and Coll; then to Skye; and then for the Outer Hebrides. I thought the last would be the place, and it seemed madness to leave the boat, for the Lord knew how I should get across the Minch. This consideration upset all my plans again, and I fell into a troubled sleep without coming to any conclusion.

Morning found us nosing between Jura and Islay, and about midday we touched at a little port, where we unloaded some cargo and took on a couple of shepherds who were going to Colonsay. The mellow afternoon and the good smell of salt and heather got rid of the dregs of my queasiness, and I spent a profitable hour on the pier-head with a guide-book called Baddely’s Scotland, and one of Bartholomew’s maps. I was beginning to think that Amos might be able to tell me something, for a talk with the captain had suggested that the _Tobermory would not dally long in the neighbourhood of Rum and Eigg. The big droving season was scarcely on yet, and sheep for the Oban market would be lifted on the return journey. In that case Skye was the first place to watch, and if I could get wind of any big cargo waiting there I would be able to make a plan. Amos was somewhere near the Kyle, and that was across the narrows from Skye. Looking at the map, it seemed to me that, in spite of being passportless, I might be able somehow to make my way up through Morvern and Arisaig to the latitude of Skye. The difficulty would be to get across the strip of sea, but there must be boats to beg, borrow or steal.

I was poring over Baddely when Gresson sat down beside me. He was in a good temper, and disposed to talk, and to my surprise his talk was all about the beauties of the countryside. There was a kind of apple-green light over everything; the steep heather hills cut into the sky like purple amethysts, while beyond the straits the western ocean stretched its pale molten gold to the sunset. Gresson waxed lyrical over the scene. ‘This just about puts me right inside, Mr Brand. I’ve got to get away from that little old town pretty frequent or I begin to moult like a canary. A man feels a man when he gets to a place that smells as good as this. Why in hell do we ever get messed up in those stone and lime cages? I reckon some day I’ll pull my freight for a clean location and settle down there and make little poems. This place would about content me. And there’s a spot out in California in the Coast ranges that I’ve been keeping my eye on,’ The odd thing was that I believe he meant it. His ugly face was lit up with a serious delight.

He told me he had taken this voyage before, so I got out Baddely and asked for advice. ‘I can’t spend too much time on holidaying,’ I told him, ‘and I want to see all the beauty spots. But the best of them seem to be in the area that this fool British Government won’t let you into without a passport. I suppose I shall have to leave you at Oban.’

‘Too bad,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Well, they tell me there’s some pretty sights round Oban.’ And he thumbed the guide-book and began to read about Glencoe.

I said that was not my purpose, and pitched him a yarn about Prince Charlie and how my mother’s great-grandfather had played some kind of part in that show. I told him I wanted to see the place where the Prince landed and where he left for France. ‘So far as I can make out that won’t take me into the passport country, but I’ll have to do a bit of footslogging. Well, I’m used to padding the hoof. I must get the captain to put me off in Morvern, and then I can foot it round the top of Lochiel and get back to Oban through Appin. How’s that for a holiday trek?’

He gave the scheme his approval. ‘But if it was me, Mr Brand, I would have a shot at puzzling your gallant policemen. You and I don’t take much stock in Governments and their two-cent laws, and it would be a good game to see just how far you could get into the forbidden land. A man like you could put up a good bluff on those hayseeds. I don’t mind having a bet …’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m out for a rest, and not for sport. If there was anything to be gained I’d undertake to bluff my way to the Orkney Islands. But it’s a wearing job and I’ve better things to think about.’ ‘So? Well, enjoy yourself your own way. I’ll be sorry when you leave us, for I owe you something for that rough-house, and beside there’s darned little company in the old moss-back captain.’

That evening Gresson and I swopped yarns after supper to the accompaniment of the ‘Ma Goad!’ and ‘Is’t possible?’ of captain and mate. I went to bed after a glass or two of weak grog, and made up for the last night’s vigil by falling sound asleep. I had very little kit with me, beyond what I stood up in and could carry in my waterproof pockets, but on Amos’s advice I had brought my little nickel-plated revolver. This lived by day in my hip pocket, but at night I put it behind my pillow. But when I woke next morning to find us casting anchor in the bay below rough low hills, which I knew to be the island of Colonsay, I could find no trace of the revolver. I searched every inch of the bunk and only shook out feathers from the mouldy ticking. I remembered perfectly putting the thing behind my head before I went to sleep, and now it had vanished utterly. Of course I could not advertise my loss, and I didn’t greatly mind it, for this was not a job where I could do much shooting. But it made me think a good deal about Mr Gresson. He simply could not suspect me; if he had bagged my gun, as I was pretty certain he had, it must be because he wanted it for himself and not that he might disarm me. Every way I argued it I reached the same conclusion. In Gresson’s eyes I must seem as harmless as a child.

We spent the better part of a day at Colonsay, and Gresson, so far as his duties allowed, stuck to me like a limpet. Before I went ashore I wrote out a telegram for Amos. I devoted a hectic hour to the _Pilgrim’s Progress, but I could not compose any kind of intelligible message with reference to its text. We had all the same edition - the one in the Golden _Treasury series - so I could have made up a sort of cipher by referring to lines and pages, but that would have taken up a dozen telegraph forms and seemed to me too elaborate for the purpose. So I sent this message:

__Ochterlony, Post Office, Kyle, I hope to spend part of holiday near you and to see you if boat’s programme permits. Are any good cargoes waiting in your neighbourhood? Reply Post Office, _Oban.

It was highly important that Gresson should not see this, but it was the deuce of a business to shake him off. I went for a walk in the afternoon along the shore and passed the telegraph office, but the confounded fellow was with me all the time. My only chance was just before we sailed, when he had to go on board to check some cargo. As the telegraph office stood full in view of the ship’s deck I did not go near it. But in the back end of the clachan I found the schoolmaster, and got him to promise to send the wire. I also bought off him a couple of well-worn sevenpenny novels.

The result was that I delayed our departure for ten minutes and when I came on board faced a wrathful Gresson. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asked. ‘The weather’s blowing up dirty and the old man’s mad to get off. Didn’t you get your legs stretched enough this afternoon?’

I explained humbly that I had been to the schoolmaster to get something to read, and produced my dingy red volumes. At that his brow cleared. I could see that his suspicions were set at rest.

We left Colonsay about six in the evening with the sky behind us banking for a storm, and the hills of Jura to starboard an angry purple. Colonsay was too low an island to be any kind of breakwater against a western gale, so the weather was bad from the start. Our course was north by east, and when we had passed the butt-end of the island we nosed about in the trough of big seas, shipping tons of water and rolling like a buffalo. I know as much about boats as about Egyptian hieroglyphics, but even my landsman’s eyes could tell that we were in for a rough night. I was determined not to get queasy again, but when I went below the smell of tripe and onions promised to be my undoing; so I dined off a slab of chocolate and a cabin biscuit, put on my waterproof, and resolved to stick it out on deck.

I took up position near the bows, where I was out of reach of the oily steamer smells. It was as fresh as the top of a mountain, but mighty cold and wet, for a gusty drizzle had set in, and I got the spindrift of the big waves. There I balanced myself, as we lurched into the twilight, hanging on with one hand to a rope which descended from the stumpy mast. I noticed that there was only an indifferent rail between me and the edge, but that interested me and helped to keep off sickness. I swung to the movement of the vessel, and though I was mortally cold it was rather pleasant than otherwise. My notion was to get the nausea whipped out of me by the weather, and, when I was properly tired, to go down and turn in.

I stood there till the dark had fallen. By that time I was an automaton, the way a man gets on sentry-go, and I could have easily hung on till morning. My thoughts ranged about the earth, beginning with the business I had set out on, and presently - by way of recollections of Blenkiron and Peter - reaching the German forest where, in the Christmas of 1915, I had been nearly done in by fever and old Stumm. I remembered the bitter cold of that wild race, and the way the snow seemed to burn like fire when I stumbled and got my face into it. I reflected that sea-sickness was kitten’s play to a good bout of malaria.

The weather was growing worse, and I was getting more than spindrift from the seas. I hooked my arm round the rope, for my fingers were numbing. Then I fell to dreaming again, principally about Fosse Manor and Mary Lamington. This so ravished me that I was as good as asleep. I was trying to reconstruct the picture as I had last seen her at Biggleswick station …

A heavy body collided with me and shook my arm from the rope. I slithered across the yard of deck, engulfed in a whirl of water. One foot caught a stanchion of the rail, and it gave with me, so that for an instant I was more than half overboard. But my fingers clawed wildly and caught in the links of what must have been the anchor chain. They held, though a ton’s weight seemed to be tugging at my feet … Then the old tub rolled back, the waters slipped off, and I was sprawling on a wet deck with no breath in me and a gallon of brine in my windpipe.

I heard a voice cry out sharply, and a hand helped me to my feet. It was Gresson, and he seemed excited.

‘God, Mr Brand, that was a close call! I was coming up to find you, when this damned ship took to lying on her side. I guess I must have cannoned into you, and I was calling myself bad names when I saw you rolling into the Atlantic. If I hadn’t got a grip on the rope I would have been down beside you. Say, you’re not hurt? I reckon you’d better come below and get a glass of rum under your belt. You’re about as wet as mother’s dish-clouts.’

There’s one advantage about campaigning. You take your luck when it comes and don’t worry about what might have been. I didn’t think any more of the business, except that it had cured me of wanting to be sea-sick. I went down to the reeking cabin without one qualm in my stomach, and ate a good meal of welsh-rabbit and bottled Bass, with a tot of rum to follow up with. Then I shed my wet garments, and slept in my bunk till we anchored off a village in Mull in a clear blue morning.

It took us four days to crawl up that coast and make Oban, for we seemed to be a floating general store for every hamlet in those parts. Gresson made himself very pleasant, as if he wanted to atone for nearly doing me in. We played some poker, and I read the little books I had got in Colonsay, and then rigged up a fishing-line, and caught saithe and lythe and an occasional big haddock. But I found the time pass slowly, and I was glad that about noon one day we came into a bay blocked with islands and saw a clean little town sitting on the hills and the smoke of a railway engine.

I went ashore and purchased a better brand of hat in a tweed store. Then I made a bee-line for the post office, and asked for telegrams. One was given to me, and as I opened it I saw Gresson at my elbow.

It read thus:

_Brand, Post office, Oban. Page 117, paragraph 3. _Ochterlony.

I passed it to Gresson with a rueful face.

‘There’s a piece of foolishness,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a cousin who’s a Presbyterian minister up in Ross-shire, and before I knew about this passport humbug I wrote to him and offered to pay him a visit. I told him to wire me here if it was convenient, and the old idiot has sent me the wrong telegram. This was likely as not meant for some other brother parson, who’s got my message instead.’

‘What’s the guy’s name?’ Gresson asked curiously, peering at the signature.

‘Ochterlony. David Ochterlony. He’s a great swell at writing books, but he’s no earthly use at handling the telegraph. However, it don’t signify, seeing I’m not going near him.’ I crumpled up the pink form and tossed it on the floor. Gresson and I walked to the _Tobermory together.

That afternoon, when I got a chance, I had out my Pilgrim’s Progress. Page 117, paragraph 3, read:

‘__Then I saw in my dream, that a little off the road, over against the Silver-mine, stood Demas (gentlemanlike) to call to passengers to come and see: who said to Christian and his fellow, Ho, turn aside hither and I will show you a _thing.

At tea I led the talk to my own past life. I yarned about my experiences as a mining engineer, and said I could never get out of the trick of looking at country with the eye of the prospector. ‘For instance,’ I said, ‘if this had been Rhodesia, I would have said there was a good chance of copper in these little kopjes above the town. They’re not unlike the hills round the Messina mine.’ I told the captain that after the war I was thinking of turning my attention to the West Highlands and looking out for minerals.

‘Ye’ll make nothing of it,’ said the captain. ‘The costs are ower big, even if ye found the minerals, for ye’d have to import a’ your labour. The West Hielandman is no fond o’ hard work. Ye ken the psalm o’ the crofter?

__O that the peats would cut themselves, The fish chump on the shore, And that I in my bed might lie Henceforth for ever _more!’

‘Has it ever been tried?’ I asked.

‘Often. There’s marble and slate quarries, and there was word o’ coal in Benbecula. And there’s the iron mines at Ranna.’

‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

‘Up forenent Skye. We call in there, and generally bide a bit. There’s a heap of cargo for Ranna, and we usually get a good load back. But as I tell ye, there’s few Hielanders working there. Mostly Irish and lads frae Fife and Falkirk way.’

I didn’t pursue the subject, for I had found Demas’s silver-mine. If the _Tobermory lay at Ranna for a week, Gresson would have time to do his own private business. Ranna would not be the spot, for the island was bare to the world in the middle of a much-frequented channel. But Skye was just across the way, and when I looked in my map at its big, wandering peninsulas I concluded that my guess had been right, and that Skye was the place to make for.

That night I sat on deck with Gresson, and in a wonderful starry silence we watched the lights die out of the houses in the town, and talked of a thousand things. I noticed - what I had had a hint of before - that my companion was no common man. There were moments when he forgot himself and talked like an educated gentleman: then he would remember, and relapse into the lingo of Leadville, Colorado. In my character of the ingenuous inquirer I set him posers about politics and economics, the kind of thing I might have been supposed to pick up from unintelligent browsing among little books. Generally he answered with some slangy catchword, but occasionally he was interested beyond his discretion, and treated me to a harangue like an equal. I discovered another thing, that he had a craze for poetry, and a capacious memory for it. I forgot how we drifted into the subject, but I remember he quoted some queer haunting stuff which he said was Swinburne, and verses by people I had heard of from Letchford at Biggleswick. Then he saw by my silence that he had gone too far, and fell back into the jargon of the West. He wanted to know about my plans, and we went down into the cabin and had a look at the map. I explained my route, up Morvern and round the head of Lochiel, and back to Oban by the east side of Loch Linnhe.

‘Got you,’ he said. ‘You’ve a hell of a walk before you. That bug never bit me, and I guess I’m not envying you any. And after that, Mr Brand?’

‘Back to Glasgow to do some work for the cause,’ I said lightly. ‘Just so,’ he said with a grin. ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’

We steamed out of the bay next morning at dawn, and about nine o’clock I got on shore at a little place called Lochaline. My kit was all on my person, and my waterproof’s pockets were stuffed with chocolates and biscuits I had bought in Oban. The captain was discouraging. ‘Ye’ll get your bellyful o’ Hieland hills, Mr Brand, afore ye win round the loch head. Ye’ll be wishin’ yerself back on the _Tobermory.’ But Gresson speeded me joyfully on my way, and said he wished he were coming with me. He even accompanied me the first hundred yards, and waved his hat after me till I was round the turn of the road.

The first stage in that journey was pure delight. I was thankful to be rid of the infernal boat, and the hot summer scents coming down the glen were comforting after the cold, salt smell of the sea. The road lay up the side of a small bay, at the top of which a big white house stood among gardens. Presently I had left the coast and was in a glen where a brown salmon-river swirled through acres of bog-myrtle. It had its source in a loch, from which the mountain rose steeply - a place so glassy in that August forenoon that every scar and wrinkle of the hillside were faithfully reflected. After that I crossed a low pass to the head of another sea-lock, and, following the map, struck over the shoulder of a great hill and ate my luncheon far up on its side, with a wonderful vista of wood and water below me.

All that morning I was very happy, not thinking about Gresson or Ivery, but getting my mind clear in those wide spaces, and my lungs filled with the brisk hill air. But I noticed one curious thing. On my last visit to Scotland, when I covered more moorland miles a day than any man since Claverhouse, I had been fascinated by the land, and had pleased myself with plans for settling down in it. But now, after three years of war and general rocketing, I felt less drawn to that kind of landscape. I wanted something more green and peaceful and habitable, and it was to the Cotswolds that my memory turned with longing.

I puzzled over this till I realized that in all my Cotswold pictures a figure kept going and coming - a young girl with a cloud of gold hair and the strong, slim grace of a boy, who had sung ‘Cherry Ripe’ in a moonlit garden. Up on that hillside I understood very clearly that I, who had been as careless of women as any monk, had fallen wildly in love with a child of half my age. I was loath to admit it, though for weeks the conclusion had been forcing itself on me. Not that I didn’t revel in my madness, but that it seemed too hopeless a business, and I had no use for barren philandering. But, seated on a rock munching chocolate and biscuits, I faced up to the fact and resolved to trust my luck. After all we were comrades in a big job, and it was up to me to be man enough to win her. The thought seemed to brace any courage that was in me. No task seemed too hard with her approval to gain and her companionship somewhere at the back of it. I sat for a long time in a happy dream, remembering all the glimpses I had had of her, and humming her song to an audience of one black-faced sheep.

On the highroad half a mile below me, I saw a figure on a bicycle mounting the hill, and then getting off to mop its face at the summit. I turned my Ziess glasses on to it, and observed that it was a country policeman. It caught sight of me, stared for a bit, tucked its machine into the side of the road, and then very slowly began to climb the hillside. Once it stopped, waved its hand and shouted something which I could not hear. I sat finishing my luncheon, till the features were revealed to me of a fat oldish man, blowing like a grampus, his cap well on the back of a bald head, and his trousers tied about the shins with string.

There was a spring beside me and I had out my flask to round off my meal.

‘Have a drink,’ I said.

His eye brightened, and a smile overran his moist face.

‘Thank you, sir. It will be very warrm coming up the brae.’

‘You oughtn’t to,’ I said. ‘You really oughtn’t, you know. Scorching up hills and then doubling up a mountain are not good for your time of life.’

He raised the cap of my flask in solemn salutation. ‘Your very good health.’ Then he smacked his lips, and had several cupfuls of water from the spring.

‘You will haf come from Achranich way, maybe?’ he said in his soft sing-song, having at last found his breath.

‘Just so. Fine weather for the birds, if there was anybody to shoot them.’

‘Ah, no. There will be few shots fired today, for there are no gentlemen left in Morvern. But I wass asking you, if you come from Achranich, if you haf seen anybody on the road.’

From his pocket he extricated a brown envelope and a bulky telegraph form. ‘Will you read it, sir, for I haf forgot my spectacles?’

It contained a description of one Brand, a South African and a suspected character, whom the police were warned to stop and return to Oban. The description wasn’t bad, but it lacked any one good distinctive detail. Clearly the policeman took me for an innocent pedestrian, probably the guest of some moorland shooting-box, with my brown face and rough tweeds and hobnailed shoes.

I frowned and puzzled a little. ‘I did see a fellow about three miles back on the hillside. There’s a public-house just where the burn comes in, and I think he was making for it. Maybe that was your man. This wire says “South African”; and now I remember the fellow had the look of a colonial.’

The policeman sighed. ‘No doubt it will be the man. Perhaps he will haf a pistol and will shoot.’

‘Not him,’ I laughed. ‘He looked a mangy sort of chap, and he’ll be scared out of his senses at the sight of you. But take my advice and get somebody with you before you tackle him. You’re always the better of a witness.’

‘That is so,’ he said, brightening. ‘Ach, these are the bad times! in old days there wass nothing to do but watch the doors at the flower-shows and keep the yachts from poaching the sea-trout. But now it is spies, spies, and “Donald, get out of your bed, and go off twenty mile to find a German.” I wass wishing the war wass by, and the Germans all dead.’

‘Hear, hear!’ I cried, and on the strength of it gave him another dram.

I accompanied him to the road, and saw him mount his bicycle and zig-zag like a snipe down the hill towards Achranich. Then I set off briskly northward. It was clear that the faster I moved the better. As I went I paid disgusted tribute to the efficiency of the Scottish police. I wondered how on earth they had marked me down. Perhaps it was the Glasgow meeting, or perhaps my association with Ivery at Biggleswick. Anyhow there was somebody somewhere mighty quick at compiling a _dossier. Unless I wanted to be bundled back to Oban I must make good speed to the Arisaig coast.

Presently the road fell to a gleaming sea-loch which lay like the blue blade of a sword among the purple of the hills. At the head there was a tiny clachan, nestled among birches and rowans, where a tawny burn wound to the sea. When I entered the place it was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and peace lay on it like a garment. In the wide, sunny street there was no sign of life, and no sound except of hens clucking and of bees busy among the roses. There was a little grey box of a kirk, and close to the bridge a thatched cottage which bore the sign of a post and telegraph office.

For the past hour I had been considering that I had better prepare for mishaps. If the police of these parts had been warned they might prove too much for me, and Gresson would be allowed to make his journey unmatched. The only thing to do was to send a wire to Amos and leave the matter in his hands. Whether that was possible or not depended upon this remote postal authority.

I entered the little shop, and passed from bright sunshine to a twilight smelling of paraffin and black-striped peppermint balls. An old woman with a mutch sat in an armchair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.

Beside her I noticed a little pile of books, one of which was a Bible. Open on her lap was a paper, the __United Free Church _Monthly. I noticed these details greedily, for I had to make up my mind on the part to play.

‘It’s a warm day, mistress,’ I said, my voice falling into the broad Lowland speech, for I had an instinct that she was not of the Highlands.

She laid aside her paper. ‘It is that, sir. It is grand weather for the hairst, but here that’s no till the hinner end o’ September, and at the best it’s a bit scart o’ aits.’

‘Ay. It’s a different thing down Annandale way,’ I said.

Her face lit up. ‘Are ye from Dumfries, sir?’

‘Not just from Dumfries, but I know the Borders fine.’

‘Ye’ll no beat them,’ she cried. ‘Not that this is no a guid place and I’ve muckle to be thankfu’ for since John Sanderson - that was ma man - brought me here forty-seeven year syne come Martinmas. But the aulder I get the mair I think o’ the bit whaur I was born. It was twae miles from Wamphray on the Lockerbie road, but they tell me the place is noo just a rickle o’ stanes.’ ‘I was wondering, mistress, if I could get a cup of tea in the village.’

‘Ye’ll hae a cup wi’ me,’ she said. ‘It’s no often we see onybody frae the Borders hereaways. The kettle’s just on the boil.’

She gave me tea and scones and butter, and black-currant jam, and treacle biscuits that melted in the mouth. And as we ate we talked of many things - chiefly of the war and of the wickedness of the world.

‘There’s nae lads left here,’ she said. ‘They a’ joined the Camerons, and the feck o’ them fell at an awfu’ place called Lowse. John and me never had no boys, jist the one lassie that’s married on Donald Frew, the Strontian carrier. I used to vex mysel’ about it, but now I thank the Lord that in His mercy He spared me sorrow. But I wad hae liked to have had one laddie fechtin’ for his country. I whiles wish I was a Catholic and could pit up prayers for the sodgers that are deid. It maun be a great consolation.’

I whipped out the Pilgrim’s Progress from my pocket. ‘That is the grand book for a time like this.’

‘Fine I ken it,’ she said. ‘I got it for a prize in the Sabbath School when I was a lassie.’

I turned the pages. I read out a passage or two, and then I seemed struck with a sudden memory.

‘This is a telegraph office, mistress. Could I trouble you to send a telegram? You see I’ve a cousin that’s a minister in Ross-shire at the Kyle, and him and me are great correspondents. He was writing about something in thePilgrim’s Progress and I think I’ll send him a telegram in answer.’

‘A letter would be cheaper,’ she said.

‘Ay, but I’m on holiday and I’ve no time for writing.’

She gave me a form, and I wrote:

__ochterlony. Post Office, Kyle. - Demas will be at his mine within the week. Strive with him, lest I faint by the _way.

‘Ye’re unco lavish wi’ the words, sir,’ was her only comment.

We parted with regret, and there was nearly a row when I tried to pay for the tea. I was bidden remember her to one David Tudhole, farmer in Nether Mirecleuch, the next time I passed by Wamphray.

The village was as quiet when I left it as when I had entered. I took my way up the hill with an easier mind, for I had got off the telegram, and I hoped I had covered my tracks. My friend the postmistress would, if questioned, be unlikely to recognize any South African suspect in the frank and homely traveller who had spoken with her of Annandale and thePilgrim’s Progress.

The soft mulberry gloaming of the west coast was beginning to fall on the hills. I hoped to put in a dozen miles before dark to the next village on the map, where I might find quarters. But ere I had gone far I heard the sound of a motor behind me, and a car slipped past bearing three men. The driver favoured me with a sharp glance, and clapped on the brakes. I noted that the two men in the tonneau were carrying sporting rifles.

‘ Hi, you, sir,’ he cried. ‘Come here.’ The two rifle-bearers - solemn gillies - brought their weapons to attention.

‘By God,’ he said, ‘it’s the man. What’s your name? Keep him covered, Angus.’

The gillies duly covered me, and I did not like the look of their wavering barrels. They were obviously as surprised as myself.

I had about half a second to make my plans. I advanced with a very stiff air, and asked him what the devil he meant. No Lowland Scots for me now. My tone was that of an adjutant of a Guards’ battalion.

My inquisitor was a tall man in an ulster, with a green felt hat on his small head. He had a lean, well-bred face, and very choleric blue eyes. I set him down as a soldier, retired, Highland regiment or cavalry, old style.

He produced a telegraph form, like the policeman.

‘Middle height - strongly built - grey tweeds - brown hat - speaks with a colonial accent - much sunburnt. What’s your name, sir?’

I did not reply in a colonial accent, but with the hauteur of the British officer when stopped by a French sentry. I asked him again what the devil he had to do with my business. This made him angry and he began to stammer.

‘I’ll teach you what I have to do with it. I’m a deputy-lieutenant of this county, and I have Admiralty instructions to watch the coast. Damn it, sir, I’ve a wire here from the Chief Constable describing you. You’re Brand, a very dangerous fellow, and we want to know what the devil you’re doing here.’

As I looked at his wrathful eye and lean head, which could not have held much brains, I saw that I must change my tone. if I irritated him he would get nasty and refuse to listen and hang me up for hours. So my voice became respectful.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I’ve not been accustomed to be pulled up suddenly, and asked for my credentials. My name is Blaikie, Captain Robert Blaikie, of the Scots Fusiliers. I’m home on three weeks’ leave, to get a little peace after Hooge. We were only hauled out five days ago.’ I hoped my old friend in the shell-shock hospital at Isham would pardon my borrowing his identity.

The man looked puzzled. ‘How the devil am I to be satisfied about that? Have you any papers to prove it?’

‘Why, no. I don’t carry passports about with me on a walking tour. But you can wire to the depot, or to my London address.’

He pulled at his yellow moustache. ‘I’m hanged if I know what to do. I want to get home for dinner. I tell you what, sir, I’ll take you on with me and put you up for the night. My boy’s at home, convalescing, and if he says you’re pukka I’ll ask your pardon and give you a dashed good bottle of port. I’ll trust him and I warn you he’s a keen hand.’

There was nothing to do but consent, and I got in beside him with an uneasy conscience. Supposing the son knew the real Blaikie! I asked the name of the boy’s battalion, and was told the 10th Seaforths. That wasn’t pleasant hearing, for they had been brigaded with us on the Somme. But Colonel Broadbury - for he told me his name - volunteered another piece of news which set my mind at rest. The boy was not yet twenty, and had only been out seven months. At Arras he had got a bit of shrapnel in his thigh, which had played the deuce with the sciatic nerve, and he was still on crutches.

We spun over ridges of moorland, always keeping northward, and brought up at a pleasant white-washed house close to the sea. Colonel Broadbury ushered me into a hall where a small fire of peats was burning, and on a couch beside it lay a slim, pale-faced young man. He had dropped his policeman’s manner, and behaved like a gentleman. ‘Ted,’ he said, ‘I’ve brought a friend home for the night. I went out to look for a suspect and found a British officer. This is Captain Blaikie, of the Scots Fusiliers.’

The boy looked at me pleasantly. ‘I’m very glad to meet you, sir. You’ll excuse me not getting up, but I’ve got a game leg.’ He was the copy of his father in features, but dark and sallow where the other was blond. He had just the same narrow head, and stubborn mouth, and honest, quick-tempered eyes. It is the type that makes dashing regimental officers, and earns V.C.s, and gets done in wholesale. I was never that kind. I belonged to the school of the cunning cowards.

In the half-hour before dinner the last wisp of suspicion fled from my host’s mind. For Ted Broadbury and I were immediately deep in ‘shop’. I had met most of his senior officers, and I knew all about their doings at Arras, for his brigade had been across the river on my left. We fought the great fight over again, and yarned about technicalities and slanged the Staff in the way young officers have, the father throwing in questions that showed how mighty proud he was of his son. I had a bath before dinner, and as he led me to the bathroom he apologized very handsomely for his bad manners. ‘Your coming’s been a godsend for Ted. He was moping a bit in this place. And, though I say it that shouldn’t, he’s a dashed good boy.’

I had my promised bottle of port, and after dinner I took on the father at billiards. Then we settled in the smoking-room, and I laid myself out to entertain the pair. The result was that they would have me stay a week, but I spoke of the shortness of my leave, and said I must get on to the railway and then back to Fort William for my luggage.

So I spent that night between clean sheets, and ate a Christian breakfast, and was given my host’s car to set me a bit on the road. I dismissed it after half a dozen miles, and, following the map, struck over the hills to the west. About midday I topped a ridge, and beheld the Sound of Sleat shining beneath me. There were other things in the landscape. In the valley on the right a long goods train was crawling on the Mallaig railway. And across the strip of sea, like some fortress of the old gods, rose the dark bastions and turrets of the hills of Skye.

CHAPTER SIX The Skirts of the Coolin

Obviously I must keep away from the railway. If the police were after me in Morvern, that line would be warned, for it was a barrier I must cross if I were to go farther north. I observed from the map that it turned up the coast, and concluded that the place for me to make for was the shore south of that turn, where Heaven might send me some luck in the boat line. For I was pretty certain that every porter and station-master on that tin-pot outfit was anxious to make better acquaintance with my humble self.

I lunched off the sandwiches the Broadburys had given me, and in the bright afternoon made my way down the hill, crossed at the foot of a small fresh-water lochan, and pursued the issuing stream through midge-infested woods of hazels to its junction with the sea. It was rough going, but very pleasant, and I fell into the same mood of idle contentment that I had enjoyed the previous morning. I never met a soul. Sometimes a roe deer broke out of the covert, or an old blackcock startled me with his scolding. The place was bright with heather, still in its first bloom, and smelt better than the myrrh of Arabia. It was a blessed glen, and I was as happy as a king, till I began to feel the coming of hunger, and reflected that the Lord alone knew when I might get a meal. I had still some chocolate and biscuits, but I wanted something substantial.

The distance was greater than I thought, and it was already twilight when I reached the coast. The shore was open and desolate - great banks of pebbles to which straggled alders and hazels from the hillside scrub. But as I marched northward and turned a little point of land I saw before me in a crook of the bay a smoking cottage. And, plodding along by the water’s edge, was the bent figure of a man, laden with nets and lobster pots. Also, beached on the shingle was a boat.

I quickened my pace and overtook the fisherman. He was an old man with a ragged grey beard, and his rig was seaman’s boots and a much-darned blue jersey. He was deaf, and did not hear me when I hailed him. When he caught sight of me he never stopped, though he very solemnly returned my good evening. I fell into step with him, and in his silent company reached the cottage.

He halted before the door and unslung his burdens. The place was a two-roomed building with a roof of thatch, and the walls all grown over with a yellow-flowered creeper. When he had straightened his back, he looked seaward and at the sky, as if to prospect the weather. Then he turned on me his gentle, absorbed eyes. ‘It will haf been a fine day, sir. Wass you seeking the road to anywhere?’

‘I was seeking a night’s lodging,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a long tramp on the hills, and I’d be glad of a chance of not going farther.’

‘We will haf no accommodation for a gentleman,’ he said gravely.

‘I can sleep on the floor, if you can give me a blanket and a bite of supper.’

‘Indeed you will not,’ and he smiled slowly. ‘But I will ask the wife. Mary, come here!’

An old woman appeared in answer to his call, a woman whose face was so old that she seemed like his mother. In highland places one sex ages quicker than the other.

‘This gentleman would like to bide the night. I wass telling him that we had a poor small house, but he says he will not be minding it.’

She looked at me with the timid politeness that you find only in outland places.

‘We can do our best, indeed, sir. The gentleman can have Colin’s bed in the loft, but he will haf to be doing with plain food. Supper is ready if you will come in now.’

I had a scrub with a piece of yellow soap at an adjacent pool in the burn and then entered a kitchen blue with peat-reek. We had a meal of boiled fish, oatcakes and skim-milk cheese, with cups of strong tea to wash it down. The old folk had the manners of princes. They pressed food on me, and asked me no questions, till for very decency’s sake I had to put up a story and give some account of myself.

I found they had a son in the Argylls and a young boy in the Navy. But they seemed disinclined to talk of them or of the war. By a mere accident I hit on the old man’s absorbing interest. He was passionate about the land. He had taken part in long-forgotten agitations, and had suffered eviction in some ancient landlords’ quarrel farther north. Presently he was pouring out to me all the woes of the crofter - woes that seemed so antediluvian and forgotten that I listened as one would listen to an old song. ‘You who come from a new country will not haf heard of these things,’ he kept telling me, but by that peat fire I made up for my defective education. He told me of evictions in the year. One somewhere in Sutherland, and of harsh doings in the Outer Isles. It was far more than a political grievance. It was the lament of the conservative for vanished days and manners. ‘Over in Skye wass the fine land for black cattle, and every man had his bit herd on the hillside. But the lairds said it wass better for sheep, and then they said it wass not good for sheep, so they put it under deer, and now there is no black cattle anywhere in Skye.’ I tell you it was like sad music on the bagpipes hearing that old fellow. The war and all things modern meant nothing to him; he lived among the tragedies of his youth and his prime.

I’m a Tory myself and a bit of a land-reformer, so we agreed well enough. So well, that I got what I wanted without asking for it. I told him I was going to Skye, and he offered to take me over in his boat in the morning. ‘It will be no trouble. Indeed no. I will be going that way myself to the fishing.’

I told him that after the war, every acre of British soil would have to be used for the men that had earned the right to it. But that did not comfort him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but about the men who had been driven from it fifty years before. His desire was not for reform, but for restitution, and that was past the power of any Government. I went to bed in the loft in a sad, reflective mood, considering how in speeding our newfangled plough we must break down a multitude of molehills and how desirable and unreplaceable was the life of the moles.

In brisk, shining weather, with a wind from the south-east, we put off next morning. In front was a brown line of low hills, and behind them, a little to the north, that black toothcomb of mountain range which I had seen the day before from the Arisaig ridge.

‘That is the Coolin,’ said the fisherman. ‘It is a bad place where even the deer cannot go. But all the rest of Skye wass the fine land for black cattle.’

As we neared the coast, he pointed out many places. ‘Look there, Sir, in that glen. I haf seen six cot houses smoking there, and now there is not any left. There were three men of my own name had crofts on the machars beyond the point, and if you go there you will only find the marks of their bit gardens. You will know the place by the gean trees.’ When he put me ashore in a sandy bay between green ridges of bracken, he was still harping upon the past. I got him to take a pound - for the boat and not for the night’s hospitality, for he would have beaten me with an oar if I had suggested that. The last I saw of him, as I turned round at the top of the hill, he had still his sail down, and was gazing at the lands which had once been full of human dwellings and now were desolate.

I kept for a while along the ridge, with the Sound of Sleat on my right, and beyond it the high hills of Knoydart and Kintail. I was watching for the _Tobermory, but saw no sign of her. A steamer put out from Mallaig, and there were several drifters crawling up the channel and once I saw the white ensign and a destroyer bustled northward, leaving a cloud of black smoke in her wake. Then, after consulting the map, I struck across country, still keeping the higher ground, but, except at odd minutes, being out of sight of the sea. I concluded that my business was to get to the latitude of Ranna without wasting time.

So soon as I changed my course I had the Coolin for company. Mountains have always been a craze of mine, and the blackness and mystery of those grim peaks went to my head. I forgot all about Fosse Manor and the Cotswolds. I forgot, too, what had been my chief feeling since I left Glasgow, a sense of the absurdity of my mission. It had all seemed too far-fetched and whimsical. I was running apparently no great personal risk, and I had always the unpleasing fear that Blenkiron might have been too clever and that the whole thing might be a mare’s nest. But that dark mountain mass changed my outlook. I began to have a queer instinct that that was the place, that something might be concealed there, something pretty damnable. I remember I sat on a top for half an hour raking the hills with my glasses. I made out ugly precipices, and glens which lost themselves in primeval blackness. When the sun caught them - for it was a gleamy day - it brought out no colours, only degrees of shade. No mountains I had ever seen - not the Drakensberg or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white peaks around Erzerum - ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about Ivery. There seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being, dwelling in villas and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of precipices. But I felt there was, for I had begun to realize the bigness of my opponent. Blenkiron had said that he spun his web wide. That was intelligible enough among the half-baked youth of Biggleswick, and the pacifist societies, or even the toughs on the Clyde. I could fit him in all right to that picture. But that he should be playing his game among those mysterious black crags seemed to make him bigger and more desperate, altogether a different kind of proposition. I didn’t exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to my past weeks had been that I was out of my proper job, and this was more my line of country. I always felt that I was a better bandit than a detective. But a sort of awe mingled with my satisfaction. I began to feel about Ivery as I had felt about the three devils of the Black Stone who had hunted me before the war, and as I never felt about any other Hun. The men we fought at the Front and the men I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even old Stumm himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable enough, but you could gauge and calculate their capacities. But this Ivery was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into unexpected crannies and that you couldn’t fight in an upstanding way. Till then, in spite of Blenkiron’s solemnity, I had regarded him simply as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on that sunny hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups calling, I got a chill in my spine when I thought of him.

I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry. There was something about the war that made me ravenous, and the less chance of food the worse I felt. If I had been in London with twenty restaurants open to me, I should as likely as not have gone off my feed. That was the cussedness of my stomach. I had still a little chocolate left, and I ate the fisherman’s buttered scones for luncheon, but long before the evening my thoughts were dwelling on my empty interior.

I put up that night in a shepherd’s cottage miles from anywhere. The man was called Macmorran, and he had come from Galloway when sheep were booming. He was a very good imitation of a savage, a little fellow with red hair and red eyes, who might have been a Pict. He lived with a daughter who had once been in service in Glasgow, a fat young woman with a face entirely covered with freckles and a pout of habitual discontent. No wonder, for that cottage was a pretty mean place. It was so thick with peat-reek that throat and eyes were always smarting. It was badly built, and must have leaked like a sieve in a storm. The father was a surly fellow, whose conversation was one long growl at the world, the high prices, the difficulty of moving his sheep, the meanness of his master, and the godforsaken character of Skye. ‘Here’s me no seen baker’s bread for a month, and no company but a wheen ignorant Hielanders that yatter Gawlic. I wish I was back in the Glenkens. And I’d gang the morn if I could get paid what I’m awed.’

However, he gave me supper - a braxy ham and oatcake, and I bought the remnants off him for use next day. I did not trust his blankets, so I slept the night by the fire in the ruins of an armchair, and woke at dawn with a foul taste in my mouth. A dip in the burn refreshed me, and after a bowl of porridge I took the road again. For I was anxious to get to some hilltop that looked over to Ranna.

Before midday I was close under the eastern side of the Coolin, on a road which was more a rockery than a path. Presently I saw a big house ahead of me that looked like an inn, so I gave it a miss and struck the highway that led to it a little farther north. Then I bore off to the east, and was just beginning to climb a hill which I judged stood between me and the sea, when I heard wheels on the road and looked back.

It was a farmer’s gig carrying one man. I was about half a mile off, and something in the cut of his jib seemed familiar. I got my glasses on him and made out a short, stout figure clad in a mackintosh, with a woollen comforter round its throat. As I watched, it made a movement as if to rub its nose on its sleeve. That was the pet trick of one man I knew. Inconspicuously I slipped through the long heather so as to reach the road ahead of the gig. When I rose like a wraith from the wayside the horse started, but not the driver.

‘So ye’re there,’ said Amos’s voice. ‘I’ve news for ye. The _Tobermory will be in Ranna by now. She passed Broadford two hours syne. When I saw her I yoked this beast and came up on the chance of foregathering with ye.’

‘How on earth did you know I would be here?’ I asked in some surprise.

‘Oh, I saw the way your mind was workin’ from your telegram. And says I to mysel’ - that man Brand, says I, is not the chiel to be easy stoppit. But I was feared ye might be a day late, so I came up the road to hold the fort. Man, I’m glad to see ye. Ye’re younger and soopler than me, and yon Gresson’s a stirrin’ lad.’

‘There’s one thing you’ve got to do for me,’ I said. ‘I can’t go into inns and shops, but I can’t do without food. I see from the map there’s a town about six miles on. Go there and buy me anything that’s tinned - biscuits and tongue and sardines, and a couple of bottles of whisky if you can get them. This may be a long job, so buy plenty.’

‘Whaur’ll I put them?’ was his only question.

We fixed on a cache, a hundred yards from the highway in a place where two ridges of hill enclosed the view so that only a short bit of road was visible.

‘I’ll get back to the Kyle,’ he told me, ‘and a’body there kens Andra Amos, if ye should find a way of sendin’ a message or comin’ yourself. Oh, and I’ve got a word to ye from a lady that we ken of. She says, the sooner ye’re back in Vawnity Fair the better she’ll be pleased, always provided ye’ve got over the Hill Difficulty.’

A smile screwed up his old face and he waved his whip in farewell. I interpreted Mary’s message as an incitement to speed, but I could not make the pace. That was Gresson’s business. I think I was a little nettled, till I cheered myself by another interpretation. She might be anxious for my safety, she might want to see me again, anyhow the mere sending of the message showed I was not forgotten. I was in a pleasant muse as I breasted the hill, keeping discreetly in the cover of the many gullies. At the top I looked down on Ranna and the sea.

There lay the _Tobermory busy unloading. It would be some time, no doubt, before Gresson could leave. There was no row-boat in the channel yet, and I might have to wait hours. I settled myself snugly between two rocks, where I could not be seen, and where I had a clear view of the sea and shore. But presently I found that I wanted some long heather to make a couch, and I emerged to get some. I had not raised my head for a second when I flopped down again. For I had a neighbour on the hilltop.

He was about two hundred yards off, just reaching the crest, and, unlike me, walking quite openly. His eyes were on Ranna, so he did not notice me, but from my cover I scanned every line of him. He looked an ordinary countryman, wearing badly cut, baggy knickerbockers of the kind that gillies affect. He had a face like a Portuguese Jew, but I had seen that type before among people with Highland names; they might be Jews or not, but they could speak Gaelic. Presently he disappeared. He had followed my example and selected a hiding-place.

It was a clear, hot day, but very pleasant in that airy place. Good scents came up from the sea, the heather was warm and fragrant, bees droned about, and stray seagulls swept the ridge with their wings. I took a look now and then towards my neighbour, but he was deep in his hidey-hole. Most of the time I kept my glasses on Ranna, and watched the doings of the Tobermory. She was tied up at the jetty, but seemed in no hurry to unload. I watched the captain disembark and walk up to a house on the hillside. Then some idlers sauntered down towards her and stood talking and smoking close to her side. The captain returned and left again. A man with papers in his hand appeared, and a woman with what looked like a telegram. The mate went ashore in his best clothes. Then at last, after midday, Gresson appeared. He joined the captain at the piermaster’s office, and presently emerged on the other side of the jetty where some small boats were beached. A man from the Tobermory came in answer to his call, a boat was launched, and began to make its way into the channel. Gresson sat in the stern, placidly eating his luncheon.

I watched every detail of that crossing with some satisfaction that my forecast was turning out right. About half-way across, Gresson took the oars, but soon surrendered them to the _Tobermory man, and lit a pipe. He got out a pair of binoculars and raked my hillside. I tried to see if my neighbour was making any signal, but all was quiet. Presently the boat was hid from me by the bulge of the hill, and I caught the sound of her scraping on the beach.

Gresson was not a hill-walker like my neighbour. It took him the best part of an hour to get to the top, and he reached it at a point not two yards from my hiding-place. I could hear by his labouring breath that he was very blown. He walked straight over the crest till he was out of sight of Ranna, and flung himself on the ground. He was now about fifty yards from me, and I made shift to lessen the distance. There was a grassy trench skirting the north side of the hill, deep and thickly overgrown with heather. I wound my way along it till I was about twelve yards from him, where I stuck, owing to the trench dying away. When I peered out of the cover I saw that the other man had joined him and that the idiots were engaged in embracing each other.

I dared not move an inch nearer, and as they talked in a low voice I could hear nothing of what they said. Nothing except one phrase, which the strange man repeated twice, very emphatically. ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, and I noticed that his voice had not the Highland inflection which I looked for. Gresson nodded and glanced at his watch, and then the two began to move downhill towards the road I had travelled that morning.

I followed as best I could, using a shallow dry watercourse of which sheep had made a track, and which kept me well below the level of the moor. It took me down the hill, but some distance from the line the pair were taking, and I had to reconnoitre frequently to watch their movements. They were still a quarter of a mile or so from the road, when they stopped and stared, and I stared with them. On that lonely highway travellers were about as rare as roadmenders, and what caught their eye was a farmer’s gig driven by a thickset elderly man with a woollen comforter round his neck.

I had a bad moment, for I reckoned that if Gresson recognized Amos he might take fright. Perhaps the driver of the gig thought the same, for he appeared to be very drunk. He waved his whip, he jiggoted the reins, and he made an effort to sing. He looked towards the figures on the hillside, and cried out something. The gig narrowly missed the ditch, and then to my relief the horse bolted. Swaying like a ship in a gale, the whole outfit lurched out of sight round the corner of hill where lay my cache. If Amos could stop the beast and deliver the goods there, he had put up a masterly bit of buffoonery.

The two men laughed at the performance, and then they parted. Gresson retraced his steps up the hill. The other man - I called him in my mind the Portuguese Jew - started off at a great pace due west, across the road, and over a big patch of bog towards the northern butt of the Coolin. He had some errand, which Gresson knew about, and he was in a hurry to perform it. It was clearly my job to get after him.