Mr. Standfast by John Buchan (mystery books to read .TXT) 📕

He inclined his head gravely towards me. “What’s your notion, Dick?”

“We’ve got to make the punishment fit the crime,” I said. I was so tired that I had to form my sentences laboriously, as if I were speaking a half-understood foreign tongue.

“Meaning?”

“I mean that if you hand him over to the French he’ll either twist out of their hands somehow or get decently shot, which is far too good for him. This man and his kind have sent millions of honest folk to their graves. He has sat spinning his web like a great spider and for every thread there has been an ocean of blood spilled. It’s his sort that made the war, not the brave, stupid, fighting Boche. It’s his sort that’s responsible for all the clotted beastliness⁠ ⁠… And he’s never been in sight of a shell. I’m for putting him in the front line. No, I don’t mean any Uriah the Hittite business. I want him to have a sporting chance, just what other men have. But, by God, he’s going to learn what is the upshot of the strings he’s been pulling so merrily⁠ ⁠… He told me in two days’ time Germany would smash our armies to hell. He boasted that he would be mostly responsible for it. Well, let him be there to see the smashing.”

“I reckon that’s just,” said Blenkiron.

Ivery’s eyes were on me now, fascinated and terrified like those of a bird before a rattlesnake. I saw again the shapeless features of the man in the Tube station, the residuum of shrinking mortality behind his disguises. He seemed to be slipping something from his pocket towards his mouth, but Geordie Hamilton caught his wrist.

“Wad ye offer?” said the scandalized voice of my servant. “Sirr, the prisoner would appear to be trying to puishon hisself. Wull I search him?”

After that he stood with each arm in the grip of a warder.

“Mr. Ivery,” I said, “last night, when I was in your power, you indulged your vanity by gloating over me. I expected it, for your class does not breed gentlemen. We treat our prisoners differently, but it is fair that you should know your fate. You are going into France, and I will see that you are taken to the British front. There with my old division you will learn something of the meaning of war. Understand that by no conceivable chance can you escape. Men will be detailed to watch you day and night and to see that you undergo the full rigour of the battlefield. You will have the same experience as other people, no more, no less. I believe in a righteous God and I know that sooner or later you will find death⁠—death at the hands of your own people⁠—an honourable death which is far beyond your deserts. But before it comes you will have understood the hell to which you have condemned honest men.”

In moments of great fatigue, as in moments of great crisis, the mind takes charge and may run on a track independent of the will. It was not myself that spoke, but an impersonal voice which I did not know, a voice in whose tones rang a strange authority. Ivery recognized the icy finality of it, and his body seemed to wilt, and droop. Only the hold of the warders kept him from falling.

I, too, was about at the end of my endurance. I felt dimly that the room had emptied except for Blenkiron and Amos, and that the former was trying to make me drink brandy from the cup of a flask. I struggled to my feet with the intention of going to Mary, but my legs would not carry me⁠ ⁠… I heard as in a dream Amos giving thanks to an Omnipotence in whom he officially disbelieved. “What’s that the auld man in the Bible said? Now let thou thy servant depart in peace. That’s the way I’m feelin’ mysel’.” And then slumber came on me like an armed man, and in the chair by the dying wood-ash I slept off the ache of my limbs, the tension of my nerves, and the confusion of my brain.

The following evening⁠—it was the 20th day of March⁠—I started for France after the dark fell. I drove Ivery’s big closed car, and within sat its owner, bound and gagged, as others had sat before him on the same errand. Geordie Hamilton and Amos were his companions. From what Blenkiron had himself discovered and from the papers seized in the Pink Chalet I had full details of the road and its mysterious stages. It was like the journey of a mad dream. In a back street of a little town I would exchange passwords with a nameless figure and be given instructions. At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron’s own arrangements began, and soon I was drinking coffee with a young lieutenant of Chasseurs, and had taken the gag from Ivery’s mouth. The bluecoats looked curiously at the man in the green ulster whose face was the colour of clay and who lit cigarette from cigarette with a shaky hand.

The lieutenant rang up a General of Division who knew all about us. At his headquarters I explained my purpose, and he telegraphed to an Army Headquarters for a permission which was granted. It was not for nothing that in January I had seen certain great personages in Paris, and that Blenkiron had