Mr. Standfast by John Buchan (top 100 novels of all time .TXT) đź“•
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- Author: John Buchan
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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 patronised 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 sympathise 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 Weser 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.”
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 realise 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 button-hole.
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 hotel 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 working-man 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,
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