Mr. Standfast by John Buchan (best books to read in life TXT) 📖

kind of sound one makes with the lips and teeth without ever letting the tune break out clear. We all do it when we are preoccupied with something—shaving, or writing letters, or reading the newspaper. But I did not think my man was preoccupied. He was whistling to quiet fluttering nerves.

Then I caught the air. It was “Cherry Ripe”.

In a moment, from being hugely at my ease, I became the nervous one. I had been playing peep-bo with the unseen, and the tables were turned. My heart beat against my ribs like a hammer. I shuffled my feet, and again there fell the tense silence.

“Mary,” I said—and the word seemed to explode like a bomb in the stillness—“Mary! It’s me—Dick Hannay.”

There was no answer but a sob and the sound of a timid step.

I took four paces into the darkness and caught in my arms a trembling girl....

Often in the last months I had pictured the kind of scene which would be the culminating point of my life. When our work was over and war had been forgotten, somewhere—perhaps in a green Cotswold meadow or in a room of an old manor—I would talk with Mary. By that time we should know each other well and I would have lost my shyness. I would try to tell her that I loved her, but whenever I thought of what I should say my heart sank, for I knew I would make a fool of myself. You can’t live my kind of life for forty years wholly among men and be of any use at pretty speeches to women. I knew I should stutter and blunder, and I used despairingly to invent impossible situations where I might make my love plain to her without words by some piece of melodramatic sacrifice.

But the kind Fates had saved me the trouble. Without a syllable save Christian names stammered in that eerie darkness we had come to complete understanding. The fairies had been at work unseen, and the thoughts of each of us had been moving towards the other, till love had germinated like a seed in the dark. As I held her in my arms I stroked her hair and murmured things which seemed to spring out of some ancestral memory. Certainly my tongue had never used them before, nor my mind imagined them.... By and by she slipped her arms round my neck and with a half sob strained towards me. She was still trembling.

“Dick,” she said, and to hear that name on her lips was the sweetest thing I had ever known. “Dick, is it really you? Tell me I’m not dreaming.”

“It’s me, sure enough, Mary dear. And now I have found you I will never let you go again. But, my precious child, how on earth did you get here?”

She disengaged herself and let her little electric torch wander over my rough habiliments.

“You look a tremendous warrior, Dick. I have never seen you like this before. I was in Doubting Castle and very much afraid of Giant Despair, till you came.”

“I think I call it the Interpreter’s House,” I said.

“It’s the house of somebody we both know,” she went on. “He calls himself Bommaerts here. That was one of the two names, you remember. I have seen him since in Paris. Oh, it is a long story and you shall hear it all soon. I knew he came here sometimes, so I came here too. I have been nursing for the last fortnight at the Douvecourt Hospital only four miles away.”

“But what brought you alone at night?”

“Madness, I think. Vanity, too. You see I had found out a good deal, and I wanted to find out the one vital thing which had puzzled Mr Blenkiron. I told myself it was foolish, but I couldn’t keep away. And then my courage broke down, and before you came I would have screamed at the sound of a mouse. If I hadn’t whistled I would have cried.”

“But why alone and at this hour?”

“I couldn’t get off in the day. And it was safest to come alone. You see he is in love with me, and when he heard I was coming to Douvecourt forgot his caution and proposed to meet me here. He said he was going on a long journey and wanted to say goodbye. If he had found me alone—well, he would have said goodbye. If there had been anyone with me, he would have suspected, and he mustn’t suspect me. Mr Blenkiron says that would be fatal to his great plan. He believes I am like my aunts, and that I think him an apostle of peace working by his own methods against the stupidity and wickedness of all the Governments. He talks more bitterly about Germany than about England. He had told me how he had to disguise himself and play many parts on his mission, and of course I have applauded him. Oh, I have had a difficult autumn.”

“Mary,” I cried, “tell me you hate him.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I do not hate him. I am keeping that for later. I fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly I will hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an unclean thing. But till then I won’t waste energy on hate. We want to hoard every atom of our strength for the work of beating him.”

She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at her. She was in nurses’ outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed tired. The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out all recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a would-be lover of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had rented his house for the partridge-shooting. “And you, Dick,” she asked; “is it part of a general’s duties to pay visits at night to empty houses?”

“I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track from another angle, but that story must wait.”

“You observe that he has been here today?”

She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a space on its surface cleared from dust. “In a place like this the dust would settle again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should say he has been here just after luncheon.”

“Great Scott!” I cried, “what a close shave! I’m in the mood at this moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.”

She shook her head. “Mr Blenkiron—he’s in Paris too—wouldn’t hear of it. He hasn’t just figured the thing out yet, he says. We’ve identified one of your names, but we’re still in doubt about Chelius.”

“Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?”

“Your guess about the ‘Deep-breathing’ advertisement was very clever, Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr Blenkiron to tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something of the doings of someone who may be Chelius, but we can’t link them with Ivery. We know that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link Bommaerts with Chelius. That’s why I came here. I was trying to burgle this escritoire in an amateur way. It’s a bad piece of fake Empire and deserves smashing.”

I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and with some difficulty I clambered down from the exultant heights. The intoxication of the thing was on me—the winter night, the circle of light in that dreary room, the sudden coming together of two souls from the ends of the earth, the realisation of my wildest hopes, the gilding and glorifying of all the future. But she had always twice as much wisdom as me, and we were in the midst of a campaign which had no use for day-dreaming. I turned my attention to the desk.

It was a flat table with drawers, and at the back a half-circle of more drawers with a central cupboard. I tilted it up and most of the drawers slid out, empty of anything but dust. I forced two open with my knife and they held empty cigar boxes. Only the cupboard remained, and that appeared to be locked. I wedged a key from my pocket into its keyhole, but the thing would not budge.

“It’s no good,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave anything he valued in a place like this. That sort of fellow doesn’t take risks. If he wanted to hide something there are a hundred holes in this Château which would puzzle the best detective.”

“Can’t you open it?” she asked. “I’ve a fancy about that table. He was sitting here this afternoon and he may be coming back.”

I solved the problem by turning up the escritoire and putting my knee through the cupboard door. Out of it tumbled a little dark-green attache case.

“This is getting solemn,” said Mary. “Is it locked?”

It was, but I took my knife and cut the lock out and spilled the contents on the table. There were some papers, a newspaper or two, and a small bag tied with black cord. The last I opened, while Mary looked over my shoulder. It contained a fine yellowish powder.

“Stand back,” I said harshly. “For God’s sake, stand back and don’t breathe.”

With trembling hands I tied up the bag again, rolled it in a newspaper, and stuffed it into my pocket. For I remembered a day near Peronne when a Boche plane had come over in the night and had dropped little bags like this. Happily they were all collected, and the men who found them were wise and took them off to the nearest laboratory. They proved to be full of anthrax germs....

I remembered how Eaucourt Sainte-Anne stood at the junction of a dozen roads where all day long troops passed to and from the lines. From such a vantage ground an enemy could wreck the health of an army....

I remembered the woman I had seen in the courtyard of this house in the foggy dusk, and I knew now why she had worn a gas-mask.

This discovery gave me a horrid shock. I was brought down with a crash from my high sentiment to something earthly and devilish. I was fairly well used to Boche filthiness, but this seemed too grim a piece of the utterly damnable. I wanted to have Ivery by the throat and force the stuff into his body, and watch him decay slowly into the horror he had contrived for honest men.

“Let’s get out of this infernal place,” I said.

But Mary was not listening. She had picked up one of the newspapers and was gloating over it. I looked and saw that it was open at an advertisement of Weissmann’s “Deep-breathing” system.

“Oh, look, Dick,” she cried breathlessly.

The column of type had little dots made by a red pencil below certain words.

“It’s it,” she whispered, “it’s the cipher—I’m almost sure it’s the cipher!”

“Well, he’d be likely to know it if anyone did.”

“But don’t you see it’s the cipher which Chelius uses—the man in Switzerland? Oh, I can’t explain now, for it’s very long, but I think—I think—I have found out what we have all been wanting. Chelius....”

“Whisht!” I said. “What’s that?”

There was a queer sound from the out-of-doors as if a sudden wind had risen in the still night.

“It’s only a car on the main road,” said Mary.

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“By the broken window in the next room. I cycled out here one morning, and walked round the place and found the broken catch.”

“Perhaps it is left open on purpose. That may be the way M. Bommaerts visits his country home.... Let’s get off, Mary, for this place has a curse on it. It deserves fire from heaven.”

I slipped the contents of the attache case into my pockets. “I’m going to drive you back,” I said. “I’ve got a car out there.”

“Then you must take my bicycle and my servant too. He’s an old friend of yours—one Andrew Amos.”

“Now how on earth did Andrew get over here?”

“He’s one of us,” said Mary, laughing at my surprise. “A most useful member of our party, at present disguised as an infirmier in Lady Manorwater’s Hospital at Douvecourt. He is learning French, and....”

“Hush!” I whispered. “There’s someone in the next room.”

I swept her behind a stack of furniture, with my eyes glued on a crack of light below the door. The handle turned and the shadows raced before a big