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

“Look at me, Dick, look at your someday-to-be espoused 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 antiaircraft 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.”

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 cabdriver outside finally directed him to the place he sought⁠—the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an English intern, 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