Mr. Standfast 14Part 2 · Mr Blenkiron Discourses on Love and War
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Mr. Standfast 14
Part 2 · Mr Blenkiron Discourses on Love and War
BuchanEnglish
Three days later I got my orders to report at Paris for special service. They came none too soon, for I chafed at each hour’s delay. Every thought in my head was directed to the game which we were playing against Ivery. He was the big enemy, compared to whom the ordinary Boche in the trenches was innocent and friendly. I had almost lost interest in my division, for I knew that for me the real battle-front was not in Picardy, and that my job was not so easy as holding a length of line. Also I longed to be at the same work as Mary.
I remember waking up in billets the morning after the night at the Château with the feeling that I had become extraordinarily rich. I felt very humble, too, and very kindly towards all the world—even to the Boche, though I can’t say I had ever hated him very wildly. You find hate more among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men. I wanted to be quiet and alone to think, and since that was impossible I went about my work in a happy abstraction. I tried not to look ahead, but only to live in the present, remembering that a war was on, and that there was desperate and dangerous business before me, and that my hopes hung on a slender thread. Yet for all that I had sometimes to let my fancies go free, and revel in delicious dreams.
But there was one thought that always brought me back to hard ground, and that was Ivery. I do not think I hated anybody in the world but him. It was his relation to Mary that stung me. He had the insolence with all his toad-like past to make love to that clean and radiant girl. I felt that he and I stood as mortal antagonists, and the thought pleased me, for it helped me to put some honest detestation into my job. Also I was going to win. Twice I had failed, but the third time I should succeed. It had been like ranging shots for a gun—first short, second over, and I vowed that the third should be dead on the mark.
I was summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour’s talk with the greatest British commander. I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature, that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was. I wanted to go on serving under that man. I realised suddenly how much I loved my work, and when I got back to my quarters that night and saw my men swinging in from a route march I could have howled like a dog at leaving them. Though I say it who shouldn’t, there wasn’t a better division in the Army.
One morning a few days later I picked up Mary in Amiens. I always liked the place, for after the dirt of the Somme it was a comfort to go there for a bath and a square meal, and it had the noblest church that the hand of man ever built for God. It was a clear morning when we started from the boulevard beside the railway station; and the air smelt of washed streets and fresh coffee, and women were going marketing and the little trams ran clanking by, just as in any other city far from the sound of guns. There was very little khaki or horizon-blue about, and I remember thinking how completely Amiens had got out of the war-zone. Two months later it was a different story.
To the end I shall count that day as one of the happiest in my life. Spring was in the air, though the trees and fields had still their winter colouring. A thousand good fresh scents came out of the earth, and the larks were busy over the new furrows. I remember that we ran up a little glen, where a stream spread into pools among sallows, and the roadside trees were heavy with mistletoe. On the tableland beyond the Somme valley the sun shone like April. At Beauvais we lunched badly in an inn—badly as to food, but there was an excellent Burgundy at two francs a bottle. Then we slipped down through little flat-chested townships to the Seine, and in the late afternoon passed through St Germains forest. The wide green spaces among the trees set my fancy dwelling on that divine English countryside where Mary and I would one day make our home. She had been in high spirits all the journey, but when I spoke of the Cotswolds her face grew grave.
“Don’t let us speak of it, Dick,” she said. “It’s too happy a thing and I feel as if it would wither if we touched it. I don’t let myself think of peace and home, for it makes me too homesick.... I think we shall get there some day, you and I ... but it’s a long road to the Delectable Mountains, and Faithful, you know, has to die first.... There is a price to be paid.”
The words sobered me.
“Who is our Faithful?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But he was the best of the Pilgrims.”
Then, as if a veil had lifted, her mood changed, and when we came through the suburbs of Paris and swung down the Champs Élysées she was in a holiday humour. The lights were twinkling in the blue January dusk, and the warm breath of the city came to greet us. I knew little of the place, for I had visited it once only on a four days’ Paris leave, but it had seemed to me then the most habitable of cities, and now, coming from the battle-field with Mary by my side, it was like the happy ending of a dream.
I left her at her cousin’s house near the Rue St Honoré, and deposited myself, according to instructions, at the Hôtel Louis Quinze. There I wallowed in a hot bath, and got into the civilian clothes which had been sent on from London. They made me feel that I had taken leave of my division for good and all this time. Blenkiron had a private room, where we were to dine; and a more wonderful litter of books and cigar boxes I have never seen, for he hadn’t a notion of tidiness. I could hear him grunting at his toilet in the adjacent bedroom, and I noticed that the table was laid for three. I went downstairs to get a paper, and on the way ran into Launcelot Wake.
He was no longer a private in a Labour Battalion. Evening clothes showed beneath his overcoat. “Hullo, Wake, are you in this push too?”
“I suppose so,” he said, and his manner was not cordial. “Anyhow I was ordered down here. My business is to do as I am told.”
“Coming to dine?” I asked.
“No. I’m dining with some friends at the Crillon.”
Then he looked me in the face, and his eyes were hot as I first remembered them. “I hear I’ve to congratulate you, Hannay,” and he held out a limp hand.
I never felt more antagonism in a human being.
“You don’t like it?” I said, for I guessed what he meant.
“How on earth can I like it?” he cried angrily. “Good Lord, man, you’ll murder her soul. You an ordinary, stupid, successful fellow and she—she’s the most precious thing God ever made. You can never understand a fraction of her preciousness, but you’ll clip her wings all right. She can never fly now....”
He poured out this hysterical stuff to me at the foot of the staircase within hearing of an elderly French widow with a poodle. I had no impulse to be angry, for I was far too happy.
“Don’t, Wake,” I said. “We’re all too close together to quarrel. I’m not fit to black Mary’s shoes. You can’t put me too low or her too high. But I’ve at least the sense to know it. You couldn’t want me to be humbler than I felt.”
He shrugged his shoulders, as he went out to the street. “Your infernal magnanimity would break any man’s temper.”
I went upstairs to find Blenkiron, washed and shaven, admiring a pair of bright patent-leather shoes.
“Why, Dick, I’ve been wearying bad to see you. I was nervous you would be blown to glory, for I’ve been reading awful things about your battles in the noospapers. The war correspondents worry me so I can’t take breakfast.”
He mixed cocktails and clinked his glass on mine. “Here’s to the young lady. I was trying to write her a pretty little sonnet, but the darned rhymes wouldn’t fit. I’ve gotten a heap of things to say to you when we’ve finished dinner.”
Mary came in, her cheeks bright from the weather, and Blenkiron promptly fell abashed. But she had a way to meet his shyness, for, when he began an embarrassed speech of good wishes, she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. Oddly enough, that set him completely at his ease.
It was pleasant to eat off linen and china again, pleasant to see old Blenkiron’s benignant face and the way he tucked into his food, but it was delicious for me to sit at a meal with Mary across the table. It made me feel that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word. To Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but mischievous daughter, while the desperately refined manners that afflicted him whenever women were concerned mellowed into something like his everyday self. They did most of the talking, and I remember he fetched from some mysterious hiding-place a great box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children. I didn’t want to talk, for it was pure happiness for me to look on. I loved to watch her, when the servants had gone, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp gold hair a little rumpled, cracking walnuts with gusto, like some child who has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and means to make the most of it.
With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business.
“You want to know about the staff-work we’ve been busy on at home. Well, it’s finished now, thanks to you, Dick. We weren’t getting on very fast till you took to peroosing the press on your sick-bed and dropped us that hint about the ‘Deep-breathing’ ads.”
“Then there was something in it?” I asked.
“There was black hell in it. There wasn’t any Gussiter, but there was a mighty fine little syndicate of crooks with old man Gresson at the back of them. First thing, I started out to get the cipher. It took some looking for, but there’s no cipher on earth can’t be got hold of somehow if you know it’s there, and in this case we were helped a lot by the return messages in the German papers. It was bad stuff when we read it, and explained the darned leakages in important noos we’ve been up against. At first I figured to keep the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron as president. But it wouldn’t do, for at the first hint of tampering with their communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals. So we tenderly plucked the flowers.”
“Gresson, too?” I asked.
He nodded. “I guess your seafaring companion’s now under the sod. We had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over.... But that was the least of it. For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line on Ivery.”
I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story. He had about a dozen cross-bearings proving that the organisation of the “Deep-breathing” game had its headquarters in Switzerland. He suspected Ivery from the first, but the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working from the other end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business. He went to Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks. He called himself an agent of the American propaganda there, and took some advertising space in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount with their neutrality. He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he was a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by “inspirational advertisement of pure-minded war aims”. All this was in keeping with his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.
But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius. That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the Wild Birds. However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of the “Deep-breathing’ business. That took some doing and cost a lot of money. His best people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a milliner’s shop in Lyons and a concierge in a big hotel at St Moritz. His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the return messages sent from Switzerland, different from the one that the Gussiter lot used in England. He got this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn’t make anything out of it. He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it.... But he was still a long way from finding out anything that mattered.
Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery. I must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to him to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got an answer. She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezières. One day he came to see her. That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after him and they never got within sight or sound. Yet here he was coming openly in the afternoon to have tea with an English girl. It showed another thing, which made me blaspheme. A man so resolute and single-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that.
He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G. He was on the staff right enough too. Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down. He was quite frank with her, and she with him. They are both peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness.
He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame de Mezières. They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon. He spoke of his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness. Presently the pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments with Bullivant on the long-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater’s hospital. She went there to escape from him, but mainly, I think, to have a look—trembling in every limb, mind you—at the Château of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.
I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was. No man ever born could have done that kind of thing. It wasn’t recklessness. It was sheer calculating courage.
Then Blenkiron took up the tale. The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Château was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds. That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business. But Blenkiron made doubly sure.
“I considered the time had come,” he said, “to pay high for valuable noos, so I sold the enemy a very pretty de-vice. If you ever gave your mind to ciphers and illicit correspondence, Dick, you would know that the one kind of document you can’t write on in invisible ink is a coated paper, the kind they use in the weeklies to print photographs of leading actresses and the stately homes of England. Anything wet that touches it corrugates the surface a little, and you can tell with a microscope if someone’s been playing at it. Well, we had the good fortune to discover just how to get over that little difficulty—how to write on glazed paper with a quill so as the cutest analyst couldn’t spot it, and likewise how to detect the writing. I decided to sacrifice that invention, casting my bread upon the waters and looking for a good-sized bakery in return.... I had it sold to the enemy. The job wanted delicate handling, but the tenth man from me—he was an Austrian Jew—did the deal and scooped fifty thousand dollars out of it. Then I lay low to watch how my friend would use the de-vice, and I didn’t wait long.”
He took from his pocket a folded sheet of L’Illustration. Over a photogravure plate ran some words in a large sprawling hand, as if written with a brush.
“That page when I got it yesterday,” he said, “was an unassuming picture of General Pétain presenting military medals. There wasn’t a scratch or a ripple on its surface. But I got busy with it, and see there!”
He pointed out two names. The writing was a set of key-words we did not know, but two names stood out which I knew too well. They were “Bommaerts” and “Chelius”.
“My God!” I cried, “that’s uncanny. It only shows that if you chew long enough—-”
“Dick,” said Mary, “you mustn’t say that again. At the best it’s an ugly metaphor, and you’re making it a platitude.”
“Who is Ivery anyhow?” I asked. “Do you know more about him than we knew in the summer? Mary, what did Bommaerts pretend to be?”
“An Englishman.” Mary spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if it were a perfectly usual thing to be made love to by a spy, and that rather soothed my annoyance. “When he asked me to marry him he proposed to take me to a country-house in Devonshire. I rather think, too, he had a place in Scotland. But of course he’s a German.”
“Ye-es,” said Blenkiron slowly, “I’ve got on to his record, and it isn’t a pretty story. It’s taken some working out, but I’ve got all the links tested now.... He’s a Boche and a large-sized nobleman in his own state. Did you ever hear of the Graf von Schwabing?”
I shook my head.
“I think I have heard Uncle Charlie speak of him,” said Mary, wrinkling her brows. “He used to hunt with the Pytchley.”
“That’s the man. But he hasn’t troubled the Pytchley for the last eight years. There was a time when he was the last thing in smartness in the German court—officer in the Guards, ancient family, rich, darned clever—all the fixings. Kaiser liked him, and it’s easy to see why. I guess a man who had as many personalities as the Graf was amusing after-dinner company. Specially among the Germans, who in my experience don’t excel in the lighter vein. Anyway, he was William’s white-headed boy, and there wasn’t a mother with a daughter who wasn’t out gunning for Otto von Schwabing. He was about as popular in London and Noo York—and in Paris, too. Ask Sir Walter about him, Dick. He says he had twice the brains of Kuhlmann, and better manners than the Austrian fellow he used to yarn about.... Well, one day there came an almighty court scandal, and the bottom dropped out of the Graf’s world. It was a pretty beastly story, and I don’t gather that Schwabing was as deep in it as some others. But the trouble was that those others had to be shielded at all costs, and Schwabing was made the scapegoat. His name came out in the papers and he had to go .”
“What was the case called?” I asked.
Blenkiron mentioned a name, and I knew why the word Schwabing was familiar. I had read the story long ago in Rhodesia.
“It was some smash,” Blenkiron went on. “He was drummed out of the Guards, out of the clubs, out of the country.... Now, how would you have felt, Dick, if you had been the Graf? Your life and work and happiness crossed out, and all to save a mangy princeling. ‘Bitter as hell,’ you say. Hungering for a chance to put it across the lot that had outed you? You wouldn’t rest till you had William sobbing on his knees asking your pardon, and you not thinking of granting it? That’s the way you’d feel, but that wasn’t the Graf’s way, and what’s more it isn’t the German way. He went into exile hating humanity, and with a heart all poison and snakes, but itching to get back. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because his kind of German hasn’t got any other home on this earth. Oh, yes, I know there’s stacks of good old Teutons come and squat in our little country and turn into fine Americans. You can do a lot with them if you catch them young and teach them the Declaration of Independence and make them study our Sunday papers. But you can’t deny there’s something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you’ve civilised them. They’re a pecooliar people, a darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn’t staff all the menial and indecent occupations on the globe. But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee. Your German aristocracy can’t consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand. They swagger and bluff about the world, but they know very well that the world’s sniggering at them. They’re like a boss from Salt Creek Gully who’s made his pile and bought a dress suit and dropped into a Newport evening party. They don’t know where to put their hands or how to keep their feet still.... Your copper-bottomed English nobleman has got to keep jogging himself to treat them as equals instead of sending them down to the servants’ hall. Their fine fixings are just the high light that reveals the everlasting jay. They can’t be gentlemen, because they aren’t sure of themselves. The world laughs at them, and they know it and it riles them like hell.... That’s why when a Graf is booted out of the Fatherland, he’s got to creep back somehow or be a wandering Jew for the rest of time.”
Blenkiron lit another cigar and fixed me with his steady, ruminating eye.
“For eight years the man has slaved, body and soul, for the men who degraded him. He’s earned his restoration and I daresay he’s got it in his pocket. If merit was rewarded he should be covered with Iron Crosses and Red Eagles.... He had a pretty good hand to start out with. He knew other countries and he was a dandy at languages. More, he had an uncommon gift for living a part. That is real genius, Dick, however much it gets up against us. Best of all he had a first-class outfit of brains. I can’t say I ever struck a better, and I’ve come across some bright citizens in my time.... And now he’s going to win out, unless we get mighty busy.”
There was a knock at the door and the solid figure of Andrew Amos revealed itself.
“It’s time ye was home, Miss Mary. It chappit half-eleven as I came up the stairs. It’s comin’ on to rain, so I’ve brought an umbrelly.”
“One word,” I said. “How old is the man?”
“Just gone thirty-six,” Blenkiron replied.
I turned to Mary, who nodded. “Younger than you, Dick,” she said wickedly as she got into her big Jaeger coat.
“I’m going to see you home,” I said.
“Not allowed. You’ve had quite enough of my society for one day. Andrew’s on escort duty tonight.”
Blenkiron looked after her as the door closed.
“I reckon you’ve got the best girl in the world.”
“Ivery thinks the same,” I said grimly, for my detestation of the man who had made love to Mary fairly choked me.
“You can see why. Here’s this degenerate coming out of his rotten class, all pampered and petted and satiated with the easy pleasures of life. He has seen nothing of women except the bad kind and the overfed specimens of his own country. I hate being impolite about females, but I’ve always considered the German variety uncommon like cows. He has had desperate years of intrigue and danger, and consorting with every kind of scallawag. Remember, he’s a big man and a poet, with a brain and an imagination that takes every grade without changing gears. Suddenly he meets something that is as fresh and lovely as a spring flower, and has wits too, and the steeliest courage, and yet is all youth and gaiety. It’s a new experience for him, a kind of revelation, and he’s big enough to value her as she should be valued.... No, Dick, I can understand you getting cross, but I reckon it an item to the man’s credit.”
Next morning in miserable sloppy weather Blenkiron carted me about Paris. We climbed five sets of stairs to a flat away up in Montmartre, where I was talked to by a fat man with spectacles and a slow voice and told various things that deeply concerned me. Then I went to a room in the Boulevard St Germain, with a little cabinet opening off it, where I was shown papers and maps and some figures on a sheet of paper that made me open my eyes. We lunched in a modest café tucked away behind the Palais Royal, and our companions were two Alsatians who spoke German better than a Boche and had no names—only numbers. In the afternoon I went to a low building beside the Invalides and saw many generals, including more than one whose features were familiar in two hemispheres. I told them everything about myself, and I was examined like a convict, and all particulars about my appearance and manner of speech written down in a book. That was to prepare the way for me, in case of need, among the vast army of those who work underground and know their chief but do not know each other.
The rain cleared before night, and Blenkiron and I walked back to the hotel through that lemon-coloured dusk that you get in a French winter. We passed a company of American soldiers, and Blenkiron had to stop and stare. I could see that he was stiff with pride, though he wouldn’t show it.
“What d’you think of that bunch?” he asked.
“First-rate stuff,” I said.
“The men are all right,” he drawled critically. “But some of the officer-boys are a bit puffy. They want fining down.”
“They’ll get it soon enough, honest fellows. You don’t keep your weight long in this war.”
“Say, Dick,” he said shyly, “what do you truly think of our Americans? You’ve seen a lot of them, and I’d value your views.” His tone was that of a bashful author asking for an opinion on his first book.
“I’ll tell you what I think. You’re constructing a great middle-class army, and that’s the most formidable fighting machine on earth. This kind of war doesn’t want the Berserker so much as the quiet fellow with a trained mind and a lot to fight for. The American ranks are filled with all sorts, from cow-punchers to college boys, but mostly with decent lads that have good prospects in life before them and are fighting because they feel they’re bound to, not because they like it. It was the same stock that pulled through your Civil War. We have a middle-class division, too—Scottish Territorials, mostly clerks and shopmen and engineers and farmers’ sons. When I first struck them my only crab was that the officers weren’t much better than the men. It’s still true, but the men are super-excellent, and consequently so are the officers. That division gets top marks in the Boche calendar for sheer fighting devilment.... And, please God, that’s what your American army’s going to be. You can wash out the old idea of a regiment of scallawags commanded by dukes. That was right enough, maybe, in the days when you hurrooshed into battle waving a banner, but it don’t do with high explosives and a couple of million men on each side and a battle front of five hundred miles. The hero of this war is the plain man out of the middle class, who wants to get back to his home and is going to use all the brains and grit he possesses to finish the job soon.”
“That sounds about right,” said Blenkiron reflectively. “It pleases me some, for you’ve maybe guessed that I respect the British Army quite a little. Which part of it do you put top?”
“All of it’s good. The French are keen judges and they give front place to the Scots and the Australians. For myself I think the backbone of the Army is the old-fashioned English county regiments that hardly ever get into the papers Though I don’t know, if I had to pick, but I’d take the South Africans. There’s only a brigade of them, but they’re hell’s delight in a battle. But then you’ll say I’m prejudiced.”
“Well,” drawled Blenkiron, you’re a mighty Empire anyhow. I’ve sojourned up and down it and I can’t guess how the old-time highbrows in your little island came to put it together. But I’ll let you into a secret, Dick. I read this morning in a noospaper that there was a natural affinity between Americans and the men of the British Dominions. Take it from me, there isn’t—at least not with this American. I don’t understand them one little bit. When I see your lean, tall Australians with the sun at the back of their eyes, I’m looking at men from another planet. Outside you and Peter, I never got to fathom a South African. The Canadians live over the fence from us, but you mix up a Canuck with a Yank in your remarks and you’ll get a bat in the eye.... But most of us Americans have gotten a grip on your Old Country. You’ll find us mighty respectful to other parts of your Empire, but we say anything we damn well please about England. You see, we know her that well and like her that well, we can be free with her.
“It’s like,” he concluded as we reached the hotel, “it’s like a lot of boys that are getting on in the world and are a bit jealous and stand-offish with each other. But they’re all at home with the old man who used to warm them up with a hickory cane, even though sometimes in their haste they call him a stand-patter.”
That night at dinner we talked solid business—Blenkiron and I and a young French lolonel from the IIIme Section at G.Q.G. Blenkiron, I remember, got very hurt about being called a business man by the Frenchman, who thought he was paying him a compliment.
“Cut it out,” he said. “It is a word that’s gone bad with me. There’s just two kind of men, those who’ve gotten sense and those who haven’t. A big percentage of us Americans make our living by trading, but we don’t think because a man’s in business or even because he’s made big money that he’s any natural good at every job. We’ve made a college professor our President, and do what he tells us like little boys, though he don’t earn more than some of us pay our works’ manager. You English have gotten business on the brain, and think a fellow’s a dandy at handling your Government if he happens to have made a pile by some flat-catching ramp on your Stock Exchange. It makes me tired. You’re about the best business nation on earth, but for God’s sake don’t begin to talk about it or you’ll lose your power. And don’t go confusing real business with the ordinary gift of raking in the dollars. Any man with sense could make money if he wanted to, but he mayn’t want. He may prefer the fun of the job and let other people do the looting. I reckon the biggest business on the globe today is the work behind your lines and the way you feed and supply and transport your army. It beats the Steel Corporation and the Standard Oil to a frazzle. But the man at the head of it all don’t earn more than a thousand dollars a month.... Your nation’s getting to worship Mammon, Dick. Cut it out. There’s just the one difference in humanity—sense or no sense, and most likely you won’t find any more sense in the man that makes a billion selling bonds than in his brother Tim that lives in a shack and sells corn-cobs. I’m not speaking out of sinful jealousy, for there was a day when I was reckoned a railroad king, and I quit with a bigger pile than kings usually retire on. But I haven’t the sense of old Peter, who never even had a bank account.... And it’s sense that wins in this war.”
The Colonel, who spoke good English, asked a question about a speech which some politician had made.
“There isn’t all the sense I’d like to see at the top,” said Blenkiron. “They’re fine at smooth words. That wouldn’t matter, but they’re thinking smooth thoughts. What d’you make of the situation, Dick?”
“I think it’s the worst since First Ypres,” I said. “Everybody’s cock-a-whoop, but God knows why.”
“God knows why,” Blenkiron repeated. “I reckon it’s a simple calculation, and you can’t deny it any more than a mathematical law. Russia is counted out. The Boche won’t get food from her for a good many months, but he can get more men, and he’s got them. He’s fighting only on one foot, and he’s been able to bring troops and guns west so he’s as strong as the Allies now on paper. And he’s stronger in reality. He’s got better railways behind him, and he’s fighting on inside lines and can concentrate fast against any bit of our front. I’m no soldier, but that’s so, Dick?”
The Frenchman smiled and shook his head. “All the same they will not pass. They could not when they were two to one in 1914, and they will not now. If we Allies could not break through in the last year when we had many more men, how will the Germans succeed now with only equal numbers?”
Blenkiron did not look convinced. “That’s what they all say. I talked to a general last week about the coming offensive, and he said he was praying for it to hurry up, for he reckoned Fritz would get the fright of his life. It’s a good spirit, maybe, but I don’t think it’s sound on the facts. We’ve got two mighty great armies of fine fighting-men, but, because we’ve two commands, we’re bound to move ragged like a peal of bells. The Hun’s got one army and forty years of stiff tradition, and, what’s more, he’s going all out this time. He’s going to smash our front before America lines up, or perish in the attempt.... Why do you suppose all the peace racket in Germany has died down, and the very men that were talking democracy in the summer are now hot for fighting to a finish? I’ll tell you. It’s because old Ludendorff has promised them complete victory this spring if they spend enough men, and the Boche is a good gambler and is out to risk it. We’re not up against a local attack this time. We’re standing up to a great nation going bald-headed for victory or destruction. If we’re broken, then America’s got to fight a new campaign by herself when she’s ready, and the Boche has time to make Russia his feeding-ground and diddle our blockade. That puts another five years on to the war, maybe another ten. Are we free and independent peoples going to endure that much?... I tell you we’re tossing to quit before Easter.”
He turned towards me, and I nodded assent.
“That’s more or less my view,” I said. “We ought to hold, but it’ll be by our teeth and nails. For the next six months we’ll be fighting without any margin.”
“But, my friends, you put it too gravely,” cried the Frenchman. “We may lose a mile or two of ground—yes. But serious danger is not possible. They had better chances at Verdun and they failed. Why should they succeed now?”
“Because they are staking everything,” Blenkiron replied. “It is the last desperate struggle of a wounded beast, and in these struggles sometimes the hunter perishes. Dick’s right. We’ve got a wasting margin and every extra ounce of weight’s going to tell. The battle’s in the field, and it’s also in every corner of every Allied land. That’s why within the next two months we’ve got to get even with the Wild Birds.”
The French colonel—his name was de Vallière—smiled at the name, and Blenkiron answered my unspoken question.
“I’m going to satisfy some of your curiosity, Dick, for I’ve put together considerable noos of the menagerie. Germany has a good army of spies outside her borders. We shoot a batch now and then, but the others go on working like beavers and they do a mighty deal of harm. They’re beautifully organised, but they don’t draw on such good human material as we, and I reckon they don’t pay in results more than ten cents on a dollar of trouble. But there they are. They’re the intelligence officers and their business is just to forward noos. They’re the birds in the cage, the—what is it your friend called them?”
“Die Stubenvögel,” I said.
“Yes, but all the birds aren’t caged. There’s a few outside the bars and they don’t collect noos. They do things. If there’s anything desperate they’re put on the job, and they’ve got power to act without waiting on instructions from home. I’ve investigated till my brain’s tired and I haven’t made out more than half a dozen whom I can say for certain are in the business. There’s your pal, the Portuguese Jew, Dick. Another’s a woman in Genoa, a princess of some sort married to a Greek financier. One’s the editor of a pro-Ally up-country paper in the Argentine. One passes as a Baptist minister in Colorado. One was a police spy in the Tzar’s Government and is now a red-hot revolutionary in the Caucasus. And the biggest, of course, is Moxon Ivery, who in happier times was the Graf von Schwabing. There aren’t above a hundred people in the world know of their existence, and these hundred call them the Wild Birds.”
“Do they work together?” I asked.
“Yes. They each get their own jobs to do, but they’re apt to flock together for a big piece of devilment. There were four of them in France a year ago before the battle of the Aisne, and they pretty near rotted the French Army. That’s so, Colonel?”
The soldier nodded grimly. “They seduced our weary troops and they bought many politicians. Almost they succeeded, but not quite. The nation is sane again, and is judging and shooting the accomplices at its leisure. But the principals we have never caught.”
“You hear that, Dick,” said Blenkiron. “You’re satisfied this isn’t a whimsy of a melodramatic old Yank? I’ll tell you more. You know how Ivery worked the submarine business from England. Also, it was the Wild Birds that wrecked Russia. It was Ivery that paid the Bolshevists to sedooce the Army, and the Bolshevists took his money for their own purpose, thinking they were playing a deep game, when all the time he was grinning like Satan, for they were playing his. It was Ivery or some other of the bunch that doped the brigades that broke at Caporetto. If I started in to tell you the history of their doings you wouldn’t go to bed, and if you did you wouldn’t sleep.... There’s just this to it. Every finished subtle devilry that the Boche has wrought among the Allies since August 1914 has been the work of the Wild Birds and more or less organised by Ivery. They’re worth half a dozen army corps to Ludendorff. They’re the mightiest poison merchants the world ever saw, and they’ve the nerve of hell....”
“I don’t know,” I interrupted. “Ivery’s got his soft spot. I saw him in the Tube station.”
“Maybe, but he’s got the kind of nerve that’s wanted. And now I rather fancy he’s whistling in his flock.”
Blenkiron consulted a notebook. “Pavia—that’s the Argentine man—started last month for Europe. He transhipped from a coasting steamer in the West Indies and we’ve temporarily lost track of him, but he’s left his hunting-ground. What do you reckon that means?
“It means,” Blenkiron continued solemnly, “that Ivery thinks the game’s nearly over. The play’s working up for the big climax.... And that climax is going to be damnation for the Allies, unless we get a move on.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s what I’m here for. What’s the move?”
“The Wild Birds mustn’t ever go home, and the man they call Ivery or Bommaerts or Chelius has to decease. It’s a cold-blooded proposition, but it’s him or the world that’s got to break. But before he quits this earth we’re bound to get wise about some of his plans, and that means that we can’t just shoot a pistol at his face. Also we’ve got to find him first. We reckon he’s in Switzerland, but that is a state with quite a lot of diversified scenery to lose a man in.... Still I guess we’ll find him. But it’s the kind of business to plan out as carefully as a battle. I’m going back to Berne on my old stunt to boss the show, and I’m giving the orders. You’re an obedient child, Dick, so I don’t reckon on any trouble that way.”
Then Blenkiron did an ominous thing. He pulled up a little table and started to lay out Patience cards. Since his duodenum was cured he seemed to have dropped that habit, and from his resuming it I gathered that his mind was uneasy. I can see that scene as if it were yesterday—the French colonel in an armchair smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder, and Blenkiron sitting primly on the edge of a yellow silk ottoman, dealing his cards and looking guiltily towards me.
“You’ll have Peter for company,” he said. “Peter’s a sad man, but he has a great heart, and he’s been mighty useful to me already. They’re going to move him to England very soon. The authorities are afraid of him, for he’s apt to talk wild, his health having made him peevish about the British. But there’s a deal of red-tape in the world, and the orders for his repatriation are slow in coming.” The speaker winked very slowly and deliberately with his left eye.
I asked if I was to be with Peter, much cheered at the prospect.
“Why, yes. You and Peter are the collateral in the deal. But the big game’s not with you.”
I had a presentiment of something coming, something anxious and unpleasant.
“Is Mary in it?” I asked.
He nodded and seemed to pull himself together for an explanation.
“See here, Dick. Our main job is to get Ivery back to Allied soil where we can handle him. And there’s just the one magnet that can fetch him back. You aren’t going to deny that.”
I felt my face getting very red, and that ugly hammer began beating in my forehead. Two grave, patient eyes met my glare.
“I’m damned if I’ll allow it!” I cried. “I’ve some right to a say in the thing. I won’t have Mary made a decoy. It’s too infernally degrading.”
“It isn’t pretty, but war isn’t pretty, and nothing we do is pretty. I’d have blushed like a rose when I was young and innocent to imagine the things I’ve put my hand to in the last three years. But have you any other way, Dick? I’m not proud, and I’ll scrap the plan if you can show me another.... Night after night I’ve hammered the thing out, and I can’t hit on a better.... Heigh-ho, Dick, this isn’t like you,” and he grinned ruefully. “You’re making yourself a fine argument in favour of celibacy—in time of war, anyhow. What is it the poet sings?—
“‘White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel.’”
I was as angry as sin, but I felt all the time I had no case. Blenkiron stopped his game of Patience, sending the cards flying over the carpet, and straddled on the hearthrug.
“You’re never going to be a piker. What’s dooty, if you won’t carry it to the other side of Hell? What’s the use of yapping about your country if you’re going to keep anything back when she calls for it? What’s the good of meaning to win the war if you don’t put every cent you’ve got on your stake? You’ll make me think you’re like the jacks in your English novels that chuck in their hand and say it’s up to God, and call that ‘seeing it through’.... No, Dick, that kind of dooty don’t deserve a blessing. You dursn’t keep back anything if you want to save your soul.
“Besides,” he went on, “what a girl it is! She can’t scare and she can’t soil. She’s white-hot youth and innocence, and she’d take no more harm than clean steel from a muck-heap.”
I knew I was badly in the wrong, but my pride was all raw.
“I’m not going to agree till I’ve talked to Mary.”
“But Miss Mary has consented,” he said gently. “She made the plan.”
Next day, in clear blue weather that might have been May, I drove Mary down to Fontainebleau. We lunched in the inn by the bridge and walked into the forest. I hadn’t slept much, for I was tortured by what I thought was anxiety for her, but which was in truth jealousy of Ivery. I don’t think that I would have minded her risking her life, for that was part of the game we were both in, but I jibbed at the notion of Ivery coming near her again. I told myself it was honourable pride, but I knew deep down in me that it was jealousy.
I asked her if she had accepted Blenkiron’s plan, and she turned mischievous eyes on me.
“I knew I should have a scene with you, Dick. I told Mr Blenkiron so.... Of course I agreed. I’m not even very much afraid of it. I’m a member of the team, you know, and I must play up to my form. I can’t do a man’s work, so all the more reason why I should tackle the thing I can do.”
“But,” I stammered, “it’s such a ... such a degrading business for a child like you. I can’t bear.... It makes me hot to think of it.”
Her reply was merry laughter.
“You’re an old Ottoman, Dick. You haven’t doubled Cape Turk yet, and I don’t believe you’re round Seraglio Point. Why, women aren’t the brittle things men used to think them. They never were, and the war has made them like whipcord. Bless you, my dear, we’re the tougher sex now. We’ve had to wait and endure, and we’ve been so beaten on the anvil of patience that we’ve lost all our megrims.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes.
“Look at me, Dick, look at your someday-to-be espouséd saint. I’m nineteen years of age next August. Before the war I should have only just put my hair up. I should have been the kind of shivering debutante who blushes when she’s spoken to, and oh! I should have thought such silly, silly things about life.... Well, in the last two years I’ve been close to it, and to death. I’ve nursed the dying. I’ve seen souls in agony and in triumph. England has allowed me to serve her as she allows her sons. Oh, I’m a robust young woman now, and indeed I think women were always robuster than men.... Dick, dear Dick, we’re lovers, but we’re comrades too—always comrades, and comrades trust each other.”
I hadn’t anything to say, except contrition, for I had my lesson. I had been slipping away in my thoughts from the gravity of our task, and Mary had brought me back to it. I remember that as we walked through the woodland we came to a place where there were no signs of war. Elsewhere there were men busy felling trees, and anti-aircraft guns, and an occasional transport wagon, but here there was only a shallow grassy vale, and in the distance, bloomed over like a plum in the evening haze, the roofs of an old dwelling-house among gardens.
Mary clung to my arm as we drank in the peace of it.
“That is what lies for us at the end of the road, Dick,” she said softly.
And then, as she looked, I felt her body shiver. She returned to the strange fancy she had had in the St Germains woods three days before.
“Somewhere it’s waiting for us and we shall certainly find it.... But first we must go through the Valley of the Shadow.... And there is the sacrifice to be made ... the best of us.”
