Mr. Standfast, John Buchan [best large ebook reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: John Buchan
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“‘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.”
St Anton
Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the tough and shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old velveteen shooting-coat bequeathed to him by a former German master—speaking the guttural tongue of the Grisons, and with all his belongings in one massive rucksack, came out of the little station of St Anton and blinked in the frosty sunshine. He looked down upon the little old village beside its icebound lake, but his business was with the new village of hotels and villas which had sprung up in the last ten years south of the station. He made some halting inquiries of the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him to the place he sought—the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an English interné, one Peter Pienaar.
The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey. A fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British major-general. As such he had been the inmate of an expensive Paris hotel, till one morning, in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he had taken the Paris-Mediterranean Express with a ticket for an officers’ convalescent home at Cannes. Thereafter he had declined in the social scale. At Dijon he had been still an Englishman, but at Pontarlier he had become an American bagman of Swiss parentage, returning to wind up his father’s estate. At Berne he limped excessively, and at Zurich, at a little back-street hotel, he became frankly the peasant. For he met a friend there from whom he acquired clothes with that odd rank smell, far stronger than Harris tweed, which marks the raiment of most Swiss guides and all Swiss porters. He also acquired a new name and an old aunt, who a little later received him with open arms and explained to her friends that he was her brother’s son from Arosa who three winters ago had hurt his leg wood-cutting and had been discharged from the levy.
A kindly Swiss gentleman, as it chanced, had heard of the deserving Joseph and interested himself to find him employment. The said philanthropist made a hobby of the French and British prisoners returned from Germany, and had in mind an officer, a crabbed South African with a bad leg, who needed a servant. He was, it seemed, an ill-tempered old fellow who had to be billeted alone, and since he could speak German, he would be happier with a Swiss native. Joseph haggled somewhat over the wages, but on his aunt’s advice he accepted the job, and, with a very complete set of papers and a store of ready-made reminiscences (it took him some time to swot up the names of the peaks and passes he had traversed) set out for St Anton, having dispatched beforehand a monstrously ill-spelt letter announcing his coming. He could barely read and write, but he was good at maps, which he had studied carefully, and he noticed with satisfaction that the valley of St Anton gave easy access to Italy.
As he journeyed south the reflections of that porter would have surprised his fellow travellers in the stuffy third-class carriage. He was thinking of a conversation he had had some days before in a café at Dijon with a young Englishman bound for Modane....
We had bumped up against each other by chance in that strange flitting when all went to different places at different times, asking nothing of each other’s business. Wake had greeted me rather shamefacedly and had proposed dinner together.
I am not good at receiving apologies, and Wake’s embarrassed me more than they embarrassed him. “I’m a bit of a cad sometimes,” he said. “You know I’m a better fellow than I sounded that night, Hannay.”
I mumbled something about not talking rot—the conventional phrase. What worried me was that the man was suffering. You could see it in his eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than ever before, and he and I became true friends, for he laid bare his soul before me. That was his trouble, that he could lay bare his soul, for ordinary healthy folk don’t analyse their feelings. Wake did, and I think it brought him relief.
“Don’t think I was ever your rival. I would no more have proposed to Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She was so sure of herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she terrified me. My type of man is not meant for marriage, for women must be in the centre of life, and we must always be standing aside and looking on. It is a damnable thing to be left-handed.”
“The trouble about you, my dear chap,” I said, “is that you’re too hard to please.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred as our mainspring. Odd, isn’t it, for people who preach brotherly love? But it’s the truth. We’re full of hate towards everything that doesn’t square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-like nerves. Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that they’ve no time or inclination to detest what thwarts them. We’ve no cause—only negatives, and that means hatred, and self-torture, and a beastly jaundice of soul.”
Then I knew that Wake’s fault was not spiritual pride, as I had diagnosed it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.
“I see more than other people see,” he went on, “and I feel more. That’s the curse on me. You’re a happy man and you get things done, because you only see one side of a case, one thing at a time. How would you like it if a thousand strings were always tugging at you, if you saw that every course meant the sacrifice of lovely and desirable things, or even the shattering of what you know to be unreplaceable? I’m the kind of stuff poets are made of, but I haven’t the poet’s gift, so I stagger about the world left-handed and game-legged.... Take the war. For me to fight would be worse than for another man to run away. From the bottom of my heart I believe that it needn’t have happened, and that all war is a blistering iniquity. And yet belief has got very little to do with virtue. I’m not as good a man as you, Hannay, who have never thought out anything in your life. My time in the Labour battalion taught me something. I knew that with all my fine aspirations I wasn’t as true a man as fellows whose talk was silly oaths and who didn’t care a tinker’s curse about their soul.”
I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. “I think I know you. You’re the sort of chap who won’t fight for his country because he can’t be sure that she’s altogether in the right. But he’d cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.”
His face relaxed in a slow smile. “Queer that you should say that. I think it’s pretty near the truth. Men like me aren’t afraid to die, but they haven’t quite the courage to live. Every man should be happy in a service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn’t get on in any service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can’t swallow things merely because I’m told to. My sort are always talking about ‘service’, but we haven’t the temperament to serve. I’d give all I have to be an ordinary cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded outsider who finds fault with the machinery.... Take a great violent high-handed fellow like you. You can sink yourself till you become only a name and a number. I couldn’t if I tried. I’m not sure if
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