GREENMANTLE
by JOHN BUCHAN
To
Caroline Grosvenor
During the past year, in the intervals of an active life, I have amused myself with constructing this tale. It has been scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment – in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half-hours between graver tasks; and it bears, I fear, the mark of its gipsy begetting. But it has amused me to write, and I shall be well repaid if it amuses you – and a few others – to read.
Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land. The one chance in a thousand is habitually taken, and as often as not succeeds. Coincidence, like some new Briareus, stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth. Some day, when the full history is written – sober history with ample documents – the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.
The characters of the tale, if you think hard, you will recall. Sandy you know well. That great spirit was last heard of at Basra, where he occupies the post that once was Harry Bullivant’s. Richard Hannay is where he longed to be, commanding his battalion on the ugliest bit of front in the West. Mr John S. Blenkiron, full of honour and wholly cured of dyspepsia, has returned to the States, after vainly endeavouring to take Peter with him. As for Peter, he has attained the height of his ambition. He has shaved his beard and joined the Flying Corps.
CONTENTS
1. A Mission is Proposed
2. The Gathering of the Missionaries 3. Peter Pienaar
4. Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Loose 5. Further Adventures of the Same
6. The Indiscretions of the Same
7. Christmas Eve
8. The Essen Barges
9. The Return of the Straggler
10. The Garden-House of Suliman the Red 11. The Companions of the Rosy Hours
12. Four Missionaries See Light in Their Mission 13. I Move in Good Society
14. The Lady of the Mantilla
15. An Embarrassed Toilet
16. The Battered Caravanserai
17. Trouble By the Waters of Babylon 18. Sparrows on the Housetops
19. Greenmantle
20. Peter Pienaar Goes to the Wars
21. The Little Hill
22. The Guns of the North
CHAPTER ONE
A Mission is Proposed
I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant’s telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled.
‘Hullo, Dick, you’ve got the battalion. Or maybe it’s a staff billet. You’ll be a blighted brass-hat, coming it heavy over the hard-working regimental officer. And to think of the language you’ve wasted on brass-hats in your time!’
I sat and thought for a bit, for the name ‘Bullivant’ carried me back eighteen months to the hot summer before the war. I had not seen the man since, though I had read about him in the papers. For more than a year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought than to hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers. I had succeeded pretty well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with Bullivant before the war started. [Major Hannay’s narrative of this affair has been published under the title of _The Thirty-nine Steps_.]
The sight of his name on a telegram form seemed to change all my outlook on life. I had been hoping for the command of the battalion, and looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche. But this message jerked my thoughts on to a new road. There might be other things in the war than straightforward fighting. Why on earth should the Foreign Office want to see an obscure Major of the New Army, and want to see him in double-quick time?
‘I’m going up to town by the ten train,’ I announced; ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’
‘Try my tailor,’ said Sandy. ‘He’s got a very nice taste in red tabs. You can use my name.’
An idea struck me. ‘You’re pretty well all right now. If I wire for you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?’
‘Right-o! I’ll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of oysters from Sweeting’s.’
I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in town without coming home depressed to my boots.
I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.
His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the jaw.
‘We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,’ he told his secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors and turned the keys in them.
‘Well, Major Hannay,’ he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the fire. ‘How do you like soldiering?’
‘Right enough,’ I said, ‘though this isn’t just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It’s a comfortless, bloody business. But we’ve got the measure of the old Boche now, and it’s dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the front in a week or two.’
‘Will you get the battalion?’ he asked. He seemed to have followed my doings pretty closely.
‘I believe I’ve a good chance. I’m not in this show for honour and glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to heaven it was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.’
He laughed. ‘You do yourself an injustice. What about the forward observation post at the Lone Tree? You forgot about the whole skin then.’
I felt myself getting red. ‘That was all rot,’ I said, ‘and I can’t think who told you about it. I hated the job, but I had to do it to prevent my subalterns going to glory. They were a lot of fire-eating young lunatics. If I had sent one of them he’d have gone on his knees to Providence and asked for trouble.’
Sir Walter was still grinning.
‘I’m not questioning your caution. You have the rudiments of it, or our friends of the Black Stone would have gathered you in at our last merry meeting. I would question it as little as your courage. What exercises my mind is whether it is best employed in the trenches.’
‘Is the War Office dissatisfied with me?’ I asked sharply.
‘They are profoundly satisfied. They propose to give you command of your battalion. Presently, if you escape a stray bullet, you will no doubt be a Brigadier. It is a wonderful war for youth and brains. But … I take it you are in this business to serve your country, Hannay?’
‘I reckon I am,’ I said. ‘I am certainly not in it for my health.’
He looked at my leg, where the doctors had dug out the shrapnel fragments, and smiled quizzically.
‘Pretty fit again?’ he asked.
‘Tough as a sjambok. I thrive on the racket and eat and sleep like a schoolboy.’
He got up and stood with his back to the fire, his eyes staring abstractedly out of the window at the wintry park.
‘It is a great game, and you are the man for it, no doubt. But there are others who can play it, for soldiering today asks for the average rather than the exception in human nature. It is like a big machine where the parts are standardized. You are fighting, not because you are short of a job, but because you want to help England. How if you could help her better than by commanding a battalion – or a brigade – or, if it comes to that, a division? How if there is a thing which you alone can do? Not some _embusque_ business in an office, but a thing compared to which your fight at Loos was a Sunday-school picnic. You are not afraid of danger? Well, in this job you would not be fighting with an army around you, but alone. You are fond of tackling difficulties? Well, I can give you a task which will try all your powers. Have you anything to say?’
My heart was beginning to thump uncomfortably. Sir Walter was not the man to pitch a case too high.
‘I am a soldier,’ I said, ‘and under orders.’
‘True; but what I am about to propose does not come by any conceivable stretch within the scope of a soldier’s duties. I shall perfectly understand if you decline. You will be acting as I should act myself – as any sane man would. I would not press you for worlds. If you wish it, I will not even make the proposal, but let you go here and now, and wish you good luck with your battalion. I do not wish to perplex a good soldier with impossible decisions.’
This piqued me and put me on my mettle.
‘I am not going to run away before the guns fire. Let me hear what you propose.’
Sir Walter crossed to a cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his chain, and took a piece of paper from a drawer. It looked like an ordinary half-sheet of note-paper.
‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that your travels have not extended to the East.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘barring a shooting trip in East Africa.’
‘Have you by any chance been following the present campaign there?’
‘I’ve read the newspapers pretty regularly since I went to hospital. I’ve got some pals in the Mesopotamia show, and of course I’m keen to know what is going to happen at Gallipoli and Salonika. I gather that Egypt is pretty safe.’
‘If you will give me your attention for ten minutes I will supplement your newspaper reading.’
Sir Walter lay back in an arm-chair and spoke to the ceiling. It was the best story, the clearest and the fullest, I had ever got of any bit of the war. He told me just how and why and when Turkey had left the rails. I heard about her grievances over our seizure of her ironclads, of the mischief the coming of the _Goeben_ had wrought, of Enver and his precious Committee and the way they had got a cinch on the old Turk. When he had spoken for a bit, he began to question me.
‘You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gipsies should have got control of a proud race. The ordinary man will tell you that it was German organization backed up with German money and German arms. You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played so small a part in it all. The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet – I don’t know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.’
‘Look at it in another way,’ he went on. ‘If it were Enver and Germany alone dragging Turkey into a European war for purposes that no Turk cared a rush about, we might expect to find the regular army obedient, and Constantinople. But in the provinces, where Islam is strong, there would be trouble. Many of us counted on that. But we have been disappointed. The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the Mahdi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Moslems are threatening trouble. There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And that wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?’
Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of taxis in Whitehall.
‘Have you an explanation, Hannay?’ he asked again.
‘It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,’ I said. ‘I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.’
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘You must be right. We have laughed at the Holy War, the jehad that old Von der Goltz prophesied. But I believe that stupid old man with the big spectacles was right. There is a jehad preparing. The question is, How?’
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ I said; ‘but I’ll bet it won’t be done by a pack of stout German officers in _pickelhaubes_. I fancy you can’t manufacture Holy Wars out of Krupp guns alone and a few staff officers and a battle cruiser with her boilers burst.’
‘Agreed. They are not fools, however much we try to persuade ourselves of the contrary. But supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction – some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then, my friend?’
‘Then there will be hell let loose in those parts pretty soon.’
‘Hell which may spread. Beyond Persia, remember, lies India.’
‘You keep to suppositions. How much do you know?’ I asked.
‘Very little, except the fact. But the fact is beyond dispute. I have reports from agents everywhere – pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep- skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who use cyphers. They tell the same story. The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star – man, prophecy, or trinket – is coming out of the West. The Germans know, and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.’
‘And the mission you spoke of for me is to go and find out?’
He nodded gravely. ‘That is the crazy and impossible mission.’
‘Tell me one thing, Sir Walter,’ I said. ‘I know it is the fashion in this country if a man has a special knowledge to set him to some job exactly the opposite. I know all about Damaraland, but instead of being put on Botha’s staff, as I applied to be, I was kept in Hampshire mud till the campaign in German South West Africa was over. I know a man who could pass as an Arab, but do you think they would send him to the East? They left him in my battalion – a lucky thing for me, for he saved my life at Loos. I know the fashion, but isn’t this just carrying it a bit too far? There must be thousands of men who have spent years in the East and talk any language. They’re the fellows for this job. I never saw a Turk in my life except a chap who did wrestling turns in a show at Kimberley. You’ve picked about the most useless man on earth.’
‘You’ve been a mining engineer, Hannay,’ Sir Walter said. ‘If you wanted a man to prospect for gold in Barotseland you would of course like to get one who knew the country and the people and the language. But the first thing you would require in him would be that he had a nose for finding gold and knew his business. That is the position now. I believe that you have a nose for finding out what our enemies try to hide. I know that you are brave and cool and resourceful. That is why I tell you the story. Besides …’
He unrolled a big map of Europe on the wall.
‘I can’t tell you where you’ll get on the track of the secret, but I can put a limit to the quest. You won’t find it east of the Bosporus – not yet. It is still in Europe. It may be in Constantinople, or in Thrace. It may be farther west. But it is moving eastwards. If you are in time you may cut into its march to Constantinople. That much I can tell you. The secret is known in Germany, too, to those whom it concerns. It is in Europe that the seeker must search – at present.’
‘Tell me more,’ I said. ‘You can give me no details and no instructions. Obviously you can give me no help if I come to grief.’
He nodded. ‘You would be beyond the pale.’
‘You give me a free hand.’
‘Absolutely. You can have what money you like, and you can get what help you like. You can follow any plan you fancy, and go anywhere you think fruitful. We can give no directions.’
‘One last question. You say it is important. Tell me just how important.’
‘It is life and death,’ he said solemnly. ‘I can put it no higher and no lower. Once we know what is the menace we can meet it. As long as we are in the dark it works unchecked and we may be too late. The war must be won or lost in Europe. Yes; but if the East blazes up, our effort will be distracted from Europe and the great _coup_ may fail. The stakes are no less than victory and defeat, Hannay.’
I got out of my chair and walked to the window. It was a difficult moment in my life. I was happy in my soldiering; above all, happy in the company of my brother officers. I was asked to go off into the enemy’s lands on a quest for which I believed I was manifestly unfitted – a business of lonely days and nights, of nerve- racking strain, of deadly peril shrouding me like a garment. Looking out on the bleak weather I shivered. It was too grim a business, too inhuman for flesh and blood. But Sir Walter had called it a matter of life and death, and I had told him that I was out to serve my country. He could not give me orders, but was I not under orders – higher orders than my Brigadier’s? I thought myself incompetent, but cleverer men than me thought me competent, or at least competent enough for a sporting chance. I knew in my soul that if I declined I should never be quite at peace in the world again. And yet Sir Walter had called the scheme madness, and said that he himself would never have accepted.
How does one make a great decision? I swear that when I turned round to speak I meant to refuse. But my answer was Yes, and I had crossed the Rubicon. My voice sounded cracked and far away.
Sir Walter shook hands with me and his eyes blinked a little.
‘I may be sending you to your death, Hannay – Good God, what a damned task-mistress duty is! – If so, I shall be haunted with regrets, but you will never repent. Have no fear of that. You have chosen the roughest road, but it goes straight to the hill-tops.’
He handed me the half-sheet of note-paper. On it were written three words – ‘_Kasredin_’, ‘_cancer_’, and ‘_v. I._’
‘That is the only clue we possess,’ he said. ‘I cannot construe it, but I can tell you the story. We have had our agents working in Persia and Mesopotamia for years – mostly young officers of the Indian Army. They carry their lives in their hands, and now and then one disappears, and the sewers of Baghdad might tell a tale. But they find out many things, and they count the game worth the candle. They have told us of the star rising in the West, but they could give us no details. All but one – the best of them. He had been working between Mosul and the Persian frontier as a muleteer, and had been south into the Bakhtiari hills. He found out something, but his enemies knew that he knew and he was pursued. Three months ago, just before Kut, he staggered into Delamain’s camp with ten bullet holes in him and a knife slash on his forehead. He mumbled his name, but beyond that and the fact that there was a Something coming from the West he told them nothing. He died in ten minutes. They found this paper on him, and since he cried out the word “Kasredin” in his last moments, it must have had something to do with his quest. It is for you to find out if it has any meaning.’
I folded it up and placed it in my pocket-book.
‘What a great fellow! What was his name?’ I asked.
Sir Walter did not answer at once. He was looking out of the window. ‘His name,’ he said at last, ‘was Harry Bullivant. He was my son. God rest his brave soul!’
CHAPTER TWO
The Gathering of the Missionaries
I wrote out a wire to Sandy, asking him to come up by the two-fifteen train and meet me at my flat.
‘I have chosen my colleague,’ I said.
‘Billy Arbuthnot’s boy? His father was at Harrow with me. I know the fellow – Harry used to bring him down to fish – tallish, with a lean, high-boned face and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl’s. I know his record, too. There’s a good deal about him in this office. He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was heavy enough on him without their efforts. He’s blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit. Also he used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation. Some Englishman was once complaining to old Mahmoud Shevkat about the scarcity of statesmen in Western Europe, and Mahmoud broke in with, “Have you not the Honourable Arbuthnot?” You say he’s in your battalion. I was wondering what had become of him, for we tried to get hold of him here, but he had left no address. Ludovick Arbuthnot – yes, that’s the man. Buried deep in the commissioned ranks of the New Army? Well, we’ll get him out pretty quick!’
‘I knew he had knocked about the East, but I didn’t know he was that kind of swell. Sandy’s not the chap to buck about himself.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ said Sir Walter. ‘He had always a more than Oriental reticence. I’ve got another colleague for you, if you like him.’
He looked at his watch. ‘You can get to the Savoy Grill Room in five minutes in a taxi-cab. Go in from the Strand, turn to your left, and you will see in the alcove on the right-hand side a table with one large American gentleman sitting at it. They know him there, so he will have the table to himself. I want you to go and sit down beside him. Say you come from me. His name is Mr John Scantlebury Blenkiron, now a citizen of Boston, Mass., but born and raised in Indiana. Put this envelope in your pocket, but don’t read its contents till you have talked to him. I want you to form your own opinion about Mr Blenkiron.’
I went out of the Foreign Office in as muddled a frame of mind as any diplomatist who ever left its portals. I was most desperately depressed. To begin with, I was in a complete funk. I had always thought I was about as brave as the average man, but there’s courage and courage, and mine was certainly not the impassive kind. Stick me down in a trench and I could stand being shot at as well as most people, and my blood could get hot if it were given a chance. But I think I had too much imagination. I couldn’t shake off the beastly forecasts that kept crowding my mind.
In about a fortnight, I calculated, I would be dead. Shot as a spy – a rotten sort of ending! At the moment I was quite safe, looking for a taxi in the middle of Whitehall, but the sweat broke on my forehead. I felt as I had felt in my adventure before the war. But this was far worse, for it was more cold-blooded and premeditated, and I didn’t seem to have even a sporting chance. I watched the figures in khaki passing on the pavement, and thought what a nice safe prospect they had compared to mine. Yes, even if next week they were in the Hohenzollern, or the Hairpin trench at the Quarries, or that ugly angle at Hooge. I wondered why I had not been happier that morning before I got that infernal wire. Suddenly all the trivialities of English life seemed to me inexpressibly dear and terribly far away. I was very angry with Bullivant, till I remembered how fair he had been. My fate was my own choosing.
When I was hunting the Black Stone the interest of the problem had helped to keep me going. But now I could see no problem. My mind had nothing to work on but three words of gibberish on a sheet of paper and a mystery of which Sir Walter had been convinced, but to which he couldn’t give a name. It was like the story I had read of Saint Teresa setting off at the age of ten with her small brother to convert the Moors. I sat huddled in the taxi with my chin on my breast, wishing that I had lost a leg at Loos and been comfortably tucked away for the rest of the war.
Sure enough I found my man in the Grill Room. There he was, feeding solemnly, with a napkin tucked under his chin. He was a big fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face. I disregarded the hovering waiter and pulled up a chair beside the American at the little table. He turned on me a pair of full sleepy eyes, like a ruminating ox.
‘Mr Blenkiron?’ I asked.
‘You have my name, Sir,’ he said. ‘Mr John Scantlebury Blenkiron. I would wish you good morning if I saw anything good in this darned British weather.’
‘I come from Sir Walter Bullivant,’ I said, speaking low.
‘So?’ said he. ‘Sir Walter is a very good friend of mine. Pleased to meet you, Mr – or I guess it’s Colonel -‘
‘Hannay,’ I said; ‘Major Hannay.’ I was wondering what this sleepy Yankee could do to help me.
‘Allow me to offer you luncheon, Major. Here, waiter, bring the carte. I regret that I cannot join you in sampling the efforts of the management of this hotel. I suffer, Sir, from dyspepsia – duodenal dyspepsia. It gets me two hours after a meal and gives me hell just below the breast-bone. So I am obliged to adopt a diet. My nourishment is fish, Sir, and boiled milk and a little dry toast. It’s a melancholy descent from the days when I could do justice to a lunch at Sherry’s and sup off oyster-crabs and devilled bones.’ He sighed from the depths of his capacious frame.
I ordered an omelette and a chop, and took another look at him. The large eyes seemed to be gazing steadily at me without seeing me. They were as vacant as an abstracted child’s; but I had an uncomfortable feeling that they saw more than mine.
‘You have been fighting, Major? The Battle of Loos? Well, I guess that must have been some battle. We in America respect the fighting of the British soldier, but we don’t quite catch on to the de-vices of the British Generals. We opine that there is more bellicosity than science among your highbrows. That is so? My father fought at Chattanooga, but these eyes have seen nothing gorier than a Presidential election. Say, is there any way I could be let into a scene of real bloodshed?’
His serious tone made me laugh. ‘There are plenty of your countrymen in the present show,’ I said. ‘The French Foreign Legion is full of young Americans, and so is our Army Service Corps. Half the chauffeurs you strike in France seem to come from the States.’
He sighed. ‘I did think of some belligerent stunt a year back. But I reflected that the good God had not given John S. Blenkiron the kind of martial figure that would do credit to the tented field. Also I recollected that we Americans were nootrals – benevolent nootrals – and that it did not become me to be butting into the struggles of the effete monarchies of Europe. So I stopped at home. It was a big renunciation, Major, for I was lying sick during the Philippines business, and I have never seen the lawless passions of men let loose on a battlefield. And, as a stoodent of humanity, I hankered for the experience.’
‘What have you been doing?’ I asked. The calm gentleman had begun to interest me.
‘Waal,’ he said, ‘I just waited. The Lord has blessed me with money to burn, so I didn’t need to go scrambling like a wild cat for war contracts. But I reckoned I would get let into the game somehow, and I was. Being a nootral, I was in an advantageous position to take a hand. I had a pretty hectic time for a while, and then I reckoned I would leave God’s country and see what was doing in Europe. I have counted myself out of the bloodshed business, but, as your poet sings, peace has its victories not less renowned than war, and I reckon that means that a nootral can have a share in a scrap as well as a belligerent.’
‘That’s the best kind of neutrality I’ve ever heard of,’ I said.
‘It’s the right kind,’ he replied solemnly. ‘Say, Major, what are your lot fighting for? For your own skins and your Empire and the peace of Europe. Waal, those ideals don’t concern us one cent. We’re not Europeans, and there aren’t any German trenches on Long Island yet. You’ve made the ring in Europe, and if we came butting in it wouldn’t be the rules of the game. You wouldn’t welcome us, and I guess you’d be right. We’re that delicate-minded we can’t interfere and that was what my friend, President Wilson, meant when he opined that America was too proud to fight. So we’re nootrals. But likewise we’re benevolent nootrals. As I follow events, there’s a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away. It wasn’t us that stirred up that skunk, but we’ve got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet. See? We can’t fight, but, by God! some of us are going to sweat blood to sweep the mess up. Officially we do nothing except give off Notes like a leaky boiler gives off steam. But as individooal citizens we’re in it up to the neck. So, in the spirit of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson, I’m going to be the nootralist kind of nootral till Kaiser will be sorry he didn’t declare war on America at the beginning.’
I was completely recovering my temper. This fellow was a perfect jewel, and his spirit put purpose into me.
‘I guess you British were the same kind of nootral when your Admiral warned off the German fleet from interfering with Dewey in Manila Bay in ’98.’ Mr Blenkiron drank up the last drop of his boiled milk and lit a thin black cigar.
I leaned forward. ‘Have you talked to Sir Walter?’ I asked.
‘I have talked to him, and he has given me to understand that there’s a deal ahead which you’re going to boss. There are no flies on that big man, and if he says it’s good business then you can count me in.’
‘You know that it’s uncommonly dangerous?’
‘I judged so. But it don’t do to begin counting risks. I believe in an all-wise and beneficent Providence, but you have got to trust Him and give Him a chance. What’s life anyhow? For me, it’s living on a strict diet and having frequent pains in my stomach. It isn’t such an almighty lot to give up, provided you get a good price in the deal. Besides, how big is the risk? About one o’clock in the morning, when you can’t sleep, it will be the size of Mount Everest, but if you run out to meet it, it will be a hillock you can jump over. The grizzly looks very fierce when you’re taking your ticket for the Rockies and wondering if you’ll come back, but he’s just an ordinary bear when you’ve got the sight of your rifle on him. I won’t think about risks till I’m up to my neck in them and don’t see the road out.’
I scribbled my address on a piece of paper and handed it to the stout philosopher. ‘Come to dinner tonight at eight,’ I said.
‘I thank you, Major. A little fish, please, plain-boiled, and some hot milk. You will forgive me if I borrow your couch after the meal and spend the evening on my back. That is the advice of my noo doctor.’
I got a taxi and drove to my club. On the way I opened the envelope Sir Walter had given me. It contained a number of jottings, the dossier of Mr Blenkiron. He had done wonders for the Allies in the States. He had nosed out the Dumba plot, and had been instrumental in getting the portfolio of Dr Albert. Von Papen’s spies had tried to murder him, after he had defeated an attempt to blow up one of the big gun factories. Sir Walter had written at the end: ‘The best man we ever had. Better than Scudder. He would go through hell with a box of bismuth tablets and a pack of Patience cards.’
I went into the little back smoking-room, borrowed an atlas from the library, poked up the fire, and sat down to think. Mr Blenkiron had given me the fillip I needed. My mind was beginning to work now, and was running wide over the whole business. Not that I hoped to find anything by my cogitations. It wasn’t thinking in an arm-chair that would solve the mystery. But I was getting a sort of grip on a plan of operations. And to my relief I had stopped thinking about the risks. Blenkiron had shamed me out of that. If a sedentary dyspeptic could show that kind of nerve, I wasn’t going to be behind him.
I went back to my flat about five o’clock. My man Paddock had gone to the wars long ago, so I had shifted to one of the new blocks in Park Lane where they provide food and service. I kept the place on to have a home to go to when I got leave. It’s a miserable business holidaying in an hotel.
Sandy was devouring tea-cakes with the serious resolution of a convalescent.
‘Well, Dick, what’s the news? Is it a brass hat or the boot?’
‘Neither,’ I said. ‘But you and I are going to disappear from His Majesty’s forces. Seconded for special service.’
‘O my sainted aunt!’ said Sandy. ‘What is it? For Heaven’s sake put me out of pain. Have we to tout deputations of suspicious neutrals over munition works or take the shivering journalist in a motor-car where he can imagine he sees a Boche?’
‘The news will keep. But I can tell you this much. It’s about as safe and easy as to go through the German lines with a walking-stick.’
‘Come, that’s not so dusty,’ said Sandy, and began cheerfully on the muffins.
I must spare a moment to introduce Sandy to the reader, for he cannot be allowed to slip into this tale by a side-door. If you will consult the Peerage you will find that to Edward Cospatrick, fifteenth Baron Clanroyden, there was born in the year 1882, as his second son, Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot, commonly called the Honourable, etc. The said son was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, was a captain in the Tweeddale Yeomanry, and served for some years as honorary attache at various embassies. The Peerage will stop short at this point, but that is by no means the end of the story. For the rest you must consult very different authorities. Lean brown men from the ends of the earth may be seen on the London pavements now and then in creased clothes, walking with the light outland step, slinking into clubs as if they could not remember whether or not they belonged to them. From them you may get news of Sandy. Better still, you will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Mecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy’s friends in it. In shepherds’ huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast-off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes. In the caravanserais of Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires. If you were going to visit Petrograd or Rome or Cairo it would be no use asking him for introductions; if he gave them, they would lead you into strange haunts. But if Fate compelled you to go to Llasa or Yarkand or Seistan he could map out your road for you and pass the word to potent friends. We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we’re all a thousand per cent better than anybody else. Sandy was the wandering Scot carried to the pitch of genius. In old days he would have led a crusade or discovered a new road to the Indies. Today he merely roamed as the spirit moved him, till the war swept him up and dumped him down in my battalion.
I got out Sir Walter’s half-sheet of note-paper. It was not the original – naturally he wanted to keep that – but it was a careful tracing. I took it that Harry Bullivant had not written down the words as a memo for his own use. People who follow his career have good memories. He must have written them in order that, if he perished and his body was found, his friends might get a clue. Wherefore, I argued, the words must be intelligible to somebody or other of our persuasion, and likewise they must be pretty well gibberish to any Turk or German that found them.
The first, ‘_Kasredin_’, I could make nothing of. I asked Sandy.
‘You mean Nasr-ed-din,’ he said, still munching crumpets.
‘What’s that?’ I asked sharply.
‘He’s the General believed to be commanding against us in Mesopotamia. I remember him years ago in Aleppo. He talked bad French and drank the sweetest of sweet champagne.’
I looked closely at the paper. The ‘K’ was unmistakable.
‘Kasredin is nothing. It means in Arabic the House of Faith, and might cover anything from Hagia Sofia to a suburban villa. What’s your next puzzle, Dick? Have you entered for a prize competition in a weekly paper?’
‘_Cancer,_’ I read out.
‘It is the Latin for a crab. Likewise it is the name of a painful disease. It is also a sign of the Zodiac.’
‘_V. I_,’ I read.
‘There you have me. It sounds like the number of a motor-car. The police would find out for you. I call this rather a difficult competition. What’s the prize?’
I passed him the paper. ‘Who wrote it? It looks as if he had been in a hurry.’
‘Harry Bullivant,’ I said.
Sandy’s face grew solemn. ‘Old Harry. He was at my tutor’s. The best fellow God ever made. I saw his name in the casualty list before Kut. … Harry didn’t do things without a purpose. What’s the story of this paper?’
‘Wait till after dinner,’ I said. ‘I’m going to change and have a bath. There’s an American coming to dine, and he’s part of the business.’
Mr Blenkiron arrived punctual to the minute in a fur coat like a Russian prince’s. Now that I saw him on his feet I could judge him better. He had a fat face, but was not too plump in figure, and very muscular wrists showed below his shirt-cuffs. I fancied that, if the occasion called, he might be a good man with his hands.
Sandy and I ate a hearty meal, but the American picked at his boiled fish and sipped his milk a drop at a time. When the servant had cleared away, he was as good as his word and laid himself out on my sofa. I offered him a good cigar, but he preferred one of his own lean black abominations. Sandy stretched his length in an easy chair and lit his pipe. ‘Now for your story, Dick,’ he said.
I began, as Sir Walter had begun with me, by telling them about the puzzle in the Near East. I pitched a pretty good yarn, for I had been thinking a lot about it, and the mystery of the business had caught my fancy. Sandy got very keen.
‘It is possible enough. Indeed, I’ve been expecting it, though I’m hanged if I can imagine what card the Germans have got up their sleeve. It might be any one of twenty things. Thirty years ago there was a bogus prophecy that played the devil in Yemen. Or it might be a flag such as Ali Wad Helu had, or a jewel like Solomon’s necklace in Abyssinia. You never know what will start off a jehad! But I rather think it’s a man.’
‘Where could he get his purchase?’ I asked.
‘It’s hard to say. If it were merely wild tribesmen like the Bedouin he might have got a reputation as a saint and miracle-worker. Or he might be a fellow that preached a pure religion, like the chap that founded the Senussi. But I’m inclined to think he must be something extra special if he can put a spell on the whole Moslem world. The Turk and the Persian wouldn’t follow the ordinary new theology game. He must be of the Blood. Your Mahdis and Mullahs and Imams were nobodies, but they had only a local prestige. To capture all Islam – and I gather that is what we fear – the man must be of the Koreish, the tribe of the Prophet himself.’
‘But how could any impostor prove that? For I suppose he’s an impostor.’
‘He would have to combine a lot of claims. His descent must be pretty good to begin with, and there are families, remember, that claim the Koreish blood. Then he’d have to be rather a wonder on his own account – saintly, eloquent, and that sort of thing. And I expect he’d have to show a sign, though what that could be I haven’t a notion.’
‘You know the East about as well as any living man. Do you think that kind of thing is possible?’ I asked.
‘Perfectly,’ said Sandy, with a grave face.
‘Well, there’s the ground cleared to begin with. Then there’s the evidence of pretty well every secret agent we possess. That all seems to prove the fact. But we have no details and no clues except that bit of paper.’ I told them the story of it.
Sandy studied it with wrinkled brows. ‘It beats me. But it may be the key for all that. A clue may be dumb in London and shout aloud at Baghdad.’
‘That’s just the point I was coming to. Sir Walter says this thing is about as important for our cause as big guns. He can’t give me orders, but he offers the job of going out to find what the mischief is. Once he knows that, he says he can checkmate it. But it’s got to be found out soon, for the mine may be sprung at any moment. I’ve taken on the job. Will you help?’
Sandy was studying the ceiling.
‘I should add that it’s about as safe as playing chuck-farthing at the Loos Cross-roads, the day you and I went in. And if we fail nobody can help us.’
‘Oh, of course, of course,’ said Sandy in an abstracted voice.
Mr Blenkiron, having finished his after-dinner recumbency, had sat up and pulled a small table towards him. From his pocket he had taken a pack of Patience cards and had begun to play the game called the Double Napoleon. He seemed to be oblivious of the conversation.
Suddenly I had a feeling that the whole affair was stark lunacy. Here were we three simpletons sitting in a London flat and projecting a mission into the enemy’s citadel without an idea what we were to do or how we were to do it. And one of the three was looking at the ceiling, and whistling softly through his teeth, and another was playing Patience. The farce of the thing struck me so keenly that I laughed.
Sandy looked at me sharply.
‘You feel like that? Same with me. It’s idiocy, but all war is idiotic, and the most whole-hearted idiot is apt to win. We’re to go on this mad trail wherever we think we can hit it. Well, I’m with you. But I don’t mind admitting that I’m in a blue funk. I had got myself adjusted to this trench business and was quite happy. And now you have hoicked me out, and my feet are cold.’
‘I don’t believe you know what fear is,’ I said.
‘There you’re wrong, Dick,’ he said earnestly. ‘Every man who isn’t a maniac knows fear. I have done some daft things, but I never started on them without wishing they were over. Once I’m in the show I get easier, and by the time I’m coming out I’m sorry to leave it. But at the start my feet are icy.’
‘Then I take it you’re coming?’
‘Rather,’ he said. ‘You didn’t imagine I would go back on you?’
‘And you, sir?’ I addressed Blenkiron.
His game of Patience seemed to be coming out. He was completing eight little heaps of cards with a contented grunt. As I spoke, he raised his sleepy eyes and nodded.
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘You gentlemen mustn’t think that I haven’t been following your most engrossing conversation. I guess I haven’t missed a syllable. I find that a game of Patience stimulates the digestion after meals and conduces to quiet reflection. John S. Blenkiron is with you all the time.’
He shuffled the cards and dealt for a new game.
I don’t think I ever expected a refusal, but this ready assent cheered me wonderfully. I couldn’t have faced the thing alone.
‘Well, that’s settled. Now for ways and means. We three have got to put ourselves in the way of finding out Germany’s secret, and we have to go where it is known. Somehow or other we have to reach Constantinople, and to beat the biggest area of country we must go by different roads. Sandy, my lad, you’ve got to get into Turkey. You’re the only one of us that knows that engaging people. You can’t get in by Europe very easily, so you must try Asia. What about the coast of Asia Minor?’
‘It could be done,’ he said. ‘You’d better leave that entirely to me. I’ll find out the best way. I suppose the Foreign Office will help me to get to the jumping-off place?’
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘it’s no good getting too far east. The secret, so far as concerns us, is still west of Constantinople.’
‘I see that. I’ll blow in on the Bosporus by a short tack.’
‘For you, Mr Blenkiron, I would suggest a straight journey. You’re an American, and can travel through Germany direct. But I wonder how far your activities in New York will allow you to pass as a neutral?’
‘I have considered that, Sir,’ he said. ‘I have given some thought to the pecooliar psychology of the great German nation. As I read them they’re as cunning as cats, and if you play the feline game they will outwit you every time. Yes, Sir, they are no slouches at sleuth- work. If I were to buy a pair of false whiskers and dye my hair and dress like a Baptist parson and go into Germany on the peace racket, I guess they’d be on my trail like a knife, and I should be shot as a spy inside of a week or doing solitary in the Moabite prison. But they lack the larger vision. They can be bluffed, Sir. With your approval I shall visit the Fatherland as John S. Blenkiron, once a thorn in the side of their brightest boys on the other side. But it will be a different John S. I reckon he will have experienced a change of heart. He will have come to appreciate the great, pure, noble soul of Germany, and he will be sorrowing for his past like a converted gun-man at a camp meeting. He will be a victim of the meanness and perfidy of the British Government. I am going to have a first-class row with your Foreign Office about my passport, and I am going to speak harsh words about them up and down this metropolis. I am going to be shadowed by your sleuths at my port of embarkation, and I guess I shall run up hard against the British Legations in Scandinavia. By that time our Teutonic friends will have begun to wonder what has happened to John S., and to think that maybe they have been mistaken in that child. So, when I get to Germany they will be waiting for me with an open mind. Then I judge my conduct will surprise and encourage them. I will confide to them valuable secret information about British preparations, and I will show up the British lion as the meanest kind of cur. You may trust me to make a good impression. After that I’ll move eastwards, to see the demolition of the British Empire in those parts. By the way, where is the rendezvous?’
‘This is the 17th day of November. If we can’t find out what we want in two months we may chuck the job. On the 17th of January we should forgather in Constantinople. Whoever gets there first waits for the others. If by that date we’re not all present, it will be considered that the missing man has got into trouble and must be given up. If ever we get there we’ll be coming from different points and in different characters, so we want a rendezvous where all kinds of odd folk assemble. Sandy, you know Constantinople. You fix the meeting-place.’
‘I’ve already thought of that,’ he said, and going to the writing- table he drew a little plan on a sheet of paper. ‘That lane runs down from the Kurdish Bazaar in Galata to the ferry of Ratchik. Half- way down on the left-hand side is a cafe kept by a Greek called Kuprasso. Behind the cafe is a garden, surrounded by high walls which were parts of the old Byzantine Theatre. At the end of the garden is a shanty called the Garden-house of Suliman the Red. It has been in its time a dancing-hall and a gambling hell and God knows what else. It’s not a place for respectable people, but the ends of the earth converge there and no questions are asked. That’s the best spot I can think of for a meeting-place.’
The kettle was simmering by the fire, the night was raw, and it seemed the hour for whisky-punch. I made a brew for Sandy and myself and boiled some milk for Blenkiron.
‘What about language?’ I asked. ‘You’re all right, Sandy?’
‘I know German fairly well; and I can pass anywhere as a Turk. The first will do for eavesdropping and the second for ordinary business.’
‘And you?’ I asked Blenkiron.
‘I was left out at Pentecost,’ he said. ‘I regret to confess I have no gift of tongues. But the part I have chosen for myself don’t require the polyglot. Never forget I’m plain John S. Blenkiron, a citizen of the great American Republic.’
‘You haven’t told us your own line, Dick,’ Sandy said.
‘I am going to the Bosporus through Germany, and, not being a neutral, it won’t be a very cushioned journey.’
Sandy looked grave.
‘That sounds pretty desperate. Is your German good enough?’
‘Pretty fair; quite good enough to pass as a native. But officially I shall not understand one word. I shall be a Boer from Western Cape Colony: one of Maritz’s old lot who after a bit of trouble has got through Angola and reached Europe. I shall talk Dutch and nothing else. And, my hat! I shall be pretty bitter about the British. There’s a powerful lot of good swear-words in the taal. I shall know all about Africa, and be panting to get another whack at the _verdommt rooinek_. With luck they may send me to the Uganda show or to Egypt, and I shall take care to go by Constantinople. If I’m to deal with the Mohammedan natives they’re bound to show me what hand they hold. At least, that’s the way I look at it.’
We filled our glasses – two of punch and one of milk – and drank to our next merry meeting. Then Sandy began to laugh, and I joined in. The sense of hopeless folly again descended on me. The best plans we could make were like a few buckets of water to ease the drought of the Sahara or the old lady who would have stopped the Atlantic with a broom. I thought with sympathy of little Saint Teresa.
CHAPTER THREE
Peter Pienaar
Our various departures were unassuming, all but the American’s. Sandy spent a busy fortnight in his subterranean fashion, now in the British Museum, now running about the country to see old exploring companions, now at the War Office, now at the Foreign Office, but mostly in my flat, sunk in an arm-chair and meditating. He left finally on December 1st as a King’s Messenger for Cairo. Once there I knew the King’s Messenger would disappear, and some queer Oriental ruffian take his place. It would have been impertinence in me to inquire into his plans. He was the real professional, and I was only the dabbler.
Blenkiron was a different matter. Sir Walter told me to look out for squalls, and the twinkle in his eye gave me a notion of what was coming. The first thing the sportsman did was to write a letter to the papers signed with his name. There had been a debate in the House of Commons on foreign policy, and the speech of some idiot there gave him his cue. He declared that he had been heart and soul with the British at the start, but that he was reluctantly compelled to change his views. He said our blockade of Germany had broken all the laws of God and humanity, and he reckoned that Britain was now the worst exponent of Prussianism going. That letter made a fine racket, and the paper that printed it had a row with the Censor. But that was only the beginning of Mr Blenkiron’s campaign. He got mixed up with some mountebanks called the League of Democrats against Aggression, gentlemen who thought that Germany was all right if we could only keep from hurting her feelings. He addressed a meeting under their auspices, which was broken up by the crowd, but not before John S. had got off his chest a lot of amazing stuff. I wasn’t there, but a man who was told me that he never heard such clotted nonsense. He said that Germany was right in wanting the freedom of the seas, and that America would back her up, and that the British Navy was a bigger menace to the peace of the world than the Kaiser’s army. He admitted that he had once thought differently, but he was an honest man and not afraid to face facts. The oration closed suddenly, when he got a brussels- sprout in the eye, at which my friend said he swore in a very unpacifist style.
After that he wrote other letters to the Press, saying that there was no more liberty of speech in England, and a lot of scallywags backed him up. Some Americans wanted to tar and feather him, and he got kicked out of the Savoy. There was an agitation to get him deported, and questions were asked in Parliament, and the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs said his department had the matter in hand. I was beginning to think that Blenkiron was carrying his tomfoolery too far, so I went to see Sir Walter, but he told me to keep my mind easy.
‘Our friend’s motto is “Thorough”,’ he said, ‘and he knows very well what he is about. We have officially requested him to leave, and he sails from Newcastle on Monday. He will be shadowed wherever he goes, and we hope to provoke more outbreaks. He is a very capable fellow.’
The last I saw of him was on the Saturday afternoon when I met him in St james’s Street and offered to shake hands. He told me that my uniform was a pollution, and made a speech to a small crowd about it. They hissed him and he had to get into a taxi. As he departed there was just the suspicion of a wink in his left eye. On Monday I read that he had gone off, and the papers observed that our shores were well quit of him.
I sailed on December 3rd from Liverpool in a boat bound for the Argentine that was due to put in at Lisbon. I had of course to get a Foreign Office passport to leave England, but after that my connection with the Government ceased. All the details of my journey were carefully thought out. Lisbon would be a good jumping-off place, for it was the rendezvous of scallywags from most parts of Africa. My kit was an old Gladstone bag, and my clothes were the relics of my South African wardrobe. I let my beard grow for some days before I sailed, and, since it grows fast, I went on board with the kind of hairy chin you will see on the young Boer. My name was now Brandt, Cornelis Brandt – at least so my passport said, and passports never lie.
There were just two other passengers on that beastly boat, and they never appeared till we were out of the Bay. I was pretty bad myself, but managed to move about all the time, for the frowst in my cabin would have sickened a hippo. The old tub took two days and a night to waddle from Ushant to Finisterre. Then the weather changed and we came out of snow-squalls into something very like summer. The hills of Portugal were all blue and yellow like the Kalahari, and before we made the Tagus I was beginning to forget I had ever left Rhodesia. There was a Dutchman among the sailors with whom I used to patter the taal, and but for ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good evening’ in broken English to the captain, that was about all the talking I did on the cruise.
We dropped anchor off the quays of Lisbon on a shiny blue morning, pretty near warm enough to wear flannels. I had now got to be very wary. I did not leave the ship with the shore-going boat, but made a leisurely breakfast. Then I strolled on deck, and there, just casting anchor in the middle of the stream, was another ship with a blue and white funnel I knew so well. I calculated that a month before she had been smelling the mangrove swamps of Angola. Nothing could better answer my purpose. I proposed to board her, pretending I was looking for a friend, and come on shore from her, so that anyone in Lisbon who chose to be curious would think I had landed straight from Portuguese Africa.
I hailed one of the adjacent ruffians, and got into his rowboat, with my kit. We reached the vessel – they called her the _Henry the Navigator_ – just as the first shore-boat was leaving. The crowd in it were all Portuguese, which suited my book.
But when I went up the ladder the first man I met was old Peter Pienaar.
Here was a piece of sheer monumental luck. Peter had opened his eyes and his mouth, and had got as far as ‘_Allemachtig_’, when I shut him up.
‘Brandt,’ I said, ‘Cornelis Brandt. That’s my name now, and don’t you forget it. Who is the captain here? Is it still old Sloggett?’
‘_Ja,_’ said Peter, pulling himself together. ‘He was speaking about you yesterday.’
This was better and better. I sent Peter below to get hold of Sloggett, and presently I had a few words with that gentleman in his cabin with the door shut.
‘You’ve got to enter my name in the ship’s books. I came aboard at Mossamedes. And my name’s Cornelis Brandt.’
At first Sloggett was for objecting. He said it was a felony. I told him that I dared say it was, but he had got to do it, for reasons which I couldn’t give, but which were highly creditable to all parties. In the end he agreed, and I saw it done. I had a pull on old Sloggett, for I had known him ever since he owned a dissolute tug- boat at Delagoa Bay.
Then Peter and I went ashore and swaggered into Lisbon as if we owned De Beers. We put up at the big hotel opposite the railway station, and looked and behaved like a pair of lowbred South Africans home for a spree. It was a fine bright day, so I hired a motor-car and said I would drive it myself. We asked the name of some beauty-spot to visit, and were told Cintra and shown the road to it. I wanted a quiet place to talk, for I had a good deal to say to Peter Pienaar.
I christened that car the Lusitanian Terror, and it was a marvel that we did not smash ourselves up. There was something immortally wrong with its steering gear. Half a dozen times we slewed across the road, inviting destruction. But we got there in the end, and had luncheon in an hotel opposite the Moorish palace. There we left the car and wandered up the slopes of a hill, where, sitting among scrub very like the veld, I told Peter the situation of affairs.
But first a word must be said about Peter. He was the man that taught me all I ever knew of veld-craft, and a good deal about human nature besides. He was out of the Old Colony – Burgersdorp, I think – but he had come to the Transvaal when the Lydenburg goldfields started. He was prospector, transport-rider, and hunter in turns, but principally hunter. In those early days he was none too good a citizen. He was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means. Then he took to working off bogus gold propositions on Kimberley and Johannesburg magnates, and what he didn’t know about salting a mine wasn’t knowledge. After that he was in the Kalahari, where he and Scotty Smith were familiar names. An era of comparative respectability dawned for him with the Matabele War, when he did uncommon good scouting and transport work. Cecil Rhodes wanted to establish him on a stock farm down Salisbury way, but Peter was an independent devil and would call no man master. He took to big-game hunting, which was what God intended him for, for he could track a tsessebe in thick bush, and was far the finest shot I have seen in my life. He took parties to the Pungwe flats, and Barotseland, and up to Tanganyika. Then he made a speciality of the Ngami region, where I once hunted with him, and he was with me when I went prospecting in Damaraland.
When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work in the North Transvaal. Beyers would have hanged him if he could have caught him, and there was no love lost between Peter and his own people for many a day. When it was all over and things had calmed down a bit, he settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me when I went on trek. At the time when I left Africa two years before, I had lost sight of him for months, and heard that he was somewhere on the Congo poaching elephants. He had always a great idea of making things hum so loud in Angola that the Union Government would have to step in and annex it. After Rhodes Peter had the biggest notions south of the Line.
He was a man of about five foot ten, very thin and active, and as strong as a buffalo. He had pale blue eyes, a face as gentle as a girl’s, and a soft sleepy voice. From his present appearance it looked as if he had been living hard lately. His clothes were of the cut you might expect to get at Lobito Bay, he was as lean as a rake, deeply browned with the sun, and there was a lot of grey in his beard. He was fifty-six years old, and used to be taken for forty. Now he looked about his age.
I first asked him what he had been up to since the war began. He spat, in the Kaffir way he had, and said he had been having hell’s time.
‘I got hung up on the Kafue,’ he said. ‘When I heard from old Letsitela that the white men were fighting I had a bright idea that I might get into German South West from the north. You see I knew that Botha couldn’t long keep out of the war. Well, I got into German territory all right, and then a _skellum_ of an officer came along, and commandeered all my mules, and wanted to commandeer me with them for his fool army. He was a very ugly man with a yellow face.’ Peter filled a deep pipe from a kudu-skin pouch.
‘Were you commandeered?’ I asked.
‘No. I shot him – not so as to kill, but to wound badly. It was all right, for he fired first on me. Got me too in the left shoulder. But that was the beginning of bad trouble. I trekked east pretty fast, and got over the border among the Ovamba. I have made many journeys, but that was the worst. Four days I went without water, and six without food. Then by bad luck I fell in with ‘Nkitla – you remember, the half-caste chief. He said I owed him money for cattle which I bought when I came there with Carowab. It was a lie, but he held to it, and would give me no transport. So I crossed the Kalahari on my feet. Ugh, it was as slow as a vrouw coming from _nachtmaal_. It took weeks and weeks, and when I came to Lechwe’s kraal, I heard that the fighting was over and that Botha had conquered the Germans. That, too, was a lie, but it deceived me, and I went north into Rhodesia, where I learned the truth. But by then I judged the war had gone too far for me to make any profit out of it, so I went into Angola to look for German refugees. By that time I was hating Germans worse than hell.’
‘But what did you propose to do with them?’ I asked.
‘I had a notion they would make trouble with the Government in those parts. I don’t specially love the Portugoose, but I’m for him against the Germans every day. Well, there was trouble, and I had a merry time for a month or two. But by and by it petered out, and I thought I had better clear for Europe, for South Africa was settling down just as the big show was getting really interesting. So here I am, Cornelis, my old friend. If I shave my beard will they let me join the Flying Corps?’
I looked at Peter sitting there smoking, as imperturbable as if he had been growing mealies in Natal all his life and had run home for a month’s holiday with his people in Peckham.
‘You’re coming with me, my lad,’ I said. ‘We’re going into Germany.’
Peter showed no surprise. ‘Keep in mind that I don’t like the Germans,’ was all he said. ‘I’m a quiet Christian man, but I’ve the devil of a temper.’
Then I told him the story of our mission. ‘You and I have got to be Maritz’s men. We went into Angola, and now we’re trekking for the Fatherland to get a bit of our own back from the infernal English. Neither of us knows any German – publicly. We’d better plan out the fighting we were in – Kakamas will do for one, and Schuit Drift. You were a Ngamiland hunter before the war. They won’t have your _dossier_, so you can tell any lie you like. I’d better be an educated Afrikander, one of Beyers’s bright lads, and a pal of old Hertzog. We can let our imagination loose about that part, but we must stick to the same yarn about the fighting.’
‘_Ja_, Cornelis,’ said Peter. (He had called me Cornelis ever since I had told him my new name. He was a wonderful chap for catching on to any game.) ‘But after we get into Germany, what then? There can’t be much difficulty about the beginning. But once we’re among the beer-swillers I don’t quite see our line. We’re to find out about something that’s going on in Turkey? When I was a boy the predikant used to preach about Turkey. I wish I was better educated and remembered whereabouts in the map it was.’
‘You leave that to me,’ I said; ‘I’ll explain it all to you before we get there. We haven’t got much of a spoor, but we’ll cast about, and with luck will pick it up. I’ve seen you do it often enough when we hunted kudu on the Kafue.’
Peter nodded. ‘Do we sit still in a German town?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I shouldn’t like that, Cornelis.’
‘We move gently eastward to Constantinople,’ I said.
Peter grinned. ‘We should cover a lot of new country. You can reckon on me, friend Cornelis. I’ve always had a hankering to see Europe.’
He rose to his feet and stretched his long arms.
‘We’d better begin at once. God, I wonder what’s happened to old Solly Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the drift when I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that Brits’ lads would take my head for a stone.’
Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as Blenkiron himself. All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about Maritz and his adventures in German South West till I half believed they were true. He made a very good story of our doings, and by his constant harping on it I pretty soon got it into my memory. That was always Peter’s way. He said if you were going to play a part, you must think yourself into it, convince yourself that you were it, till you really were it and didn’t act but behaved naturally. The two men who had started that morning from the hotel door had been bogus enough, but the two men that returned were genuine desperadoes itching to get a shot at England.
We spent the evening piling up evidence in our favour. Some kind of republic had been started in Portugal, and ordinarily the cafes would have been full of politicians, but the war had quieted all these local squabbles, and the talk was of nothing but what was doing in France and Russia. The place we went to was a big, well- lighted show on a main street, and there were a lot of sharp-eyed fellows wandering about that I guessed were spies and police agents. I knew that Britain was the one country that doesn’t bother about this kind of game, and that it would be safe enough to let ourselves go.
I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.
We talked to each other of Maritz and our doings. It didn’t seem to be a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow said that Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hanged. Peter quickly caught his knife-wrist with one hand and his throat with the other, and demanded an apology. He got it. The Lisbon _boulevardiers_ have not lost any lions.
After that there was a bit of a squash in our corner. Those near to us were very quiet and polite, but the outer fringe made remarks. When Peter said that if Portugal, which he admitted he loved, was going to stick to England she was backing the wrong horse, there was a murmur of disapproval. One decent-looking old fellow, who had the air of a ship’s captain, flushed all over his honest face, and stood up looking straight at Peter. I saw that we had struck an Englishman, and mentioned it to Peter in Dutch.
Peter played his part perfectly. He suddenly shut up, and, with furtive looks around him, began to jabber to me in a low voice. He was the very picture of the old stage conspirator.
The old fellow stood staring at us. ‘I don’t very well understand this damned lingo,’ he said; ‘but if so be you dirty Dutchmen are sayin’ anything against England, I’ll ask you to repeat it. And if so be as you repeats it I’ll take either of you on and knock the face off him.’
He was a chap after my own heart, but I had to keep the game up. I said in Dutch to Peter that we mustn’t get brawling in a public house. ‘Remember the big thing,’ I said darkly. Peter nodded, and the old fellow, after staring at us for a bit, spat scornfully, and walked out.
‘The time is coming when the Englander will sing small,’ I observed to the crowd. We stood drinks to one or two, and then swaggered into the street. At the door a hand touched my arm, and, looking down, I saw a little scrap of a man in a fur coat.
‘Will the gentlemen walk a step with me and drink a glass of beer?’ he said in very stiff Dutch.
‘Who the devil are you?’ I asked.
‘_Gott strafe England!_’ was his answer, and, turning back the lapel of his coat, he showed some kind of ribbon in his buttonhole.
‘Amen,’ said Peter. ‘Lead on, friend. We don’t mind if we do.’
He led us to a back street and then up two pairs of stairs to a very snug little flat. The place was filled with fine red lacquer, and I guessed that art-dealing was his nominal business. Portugal, since the republic broke up the convents and sold up the big royalist grandees, was full of bargains in the lacquer and curio line.
He filled us two long tankards of very good Munich beer.
‘_Prosit_,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘You are from South Africa. What make you in Europe?’
We both looked sullen and secretive.
‘That’s our own business,’ I answered. ‘You don’t expect to buy our confidence with a glass of beer.’
‘So?’ he said. ‘Then I will put it differently. From your speech in the cafe I judge you do not love the English.’
Peter said something about stamping on their grandmothers, a Kaffir phrase which sounded gruesome in Dutch.
The man laughed. ‘That is all I want to know. You are on the German side?’
‘That remains to be seen,’ I said. ‘If they treat me fair I’ll fight for them, or for anybody else that makes war on England. England has stolen my country and corrupted my people and made me an exile. We Afrikanders do not forget. We may be slow but we win in the end. We two are men worth a great price. Germany fights England in East Africa. We know the natives as no Englishmen can ever know them. They are too soft and easy and the Kaffirs laugh at them. But we can handle the blacks so that they will fight like devils for fear of us. What is the reward, little man, for our services? I will tell you. There will be no reward. We ask none. We fight for hate of England.’
Peter grunted a deep approval.
‘That is good talk,’ said our entertainer, and his close-set eyes flashed. ‘There is room in Germany for such men as you. Where are you going now, I beg to know.’
‘To Holland,’ I said. ‘Then maybe we will go to Germany. We are tired with travel and may rest a bit. This war will last long and our chance will come.’
‘But you may miss your market,’ he said significantly. ‘A ship sails tomorrow for Rotterdam. If you take my advice, you will go with her.’
This was what I wanted, for if we stayed in Lisbon some real soldier of Maritz might drop in any day and blow the gaff.
‘I recommend you to sail in the _Machado_,’ he repeated. ‘There is work for you in Germany – oh yes, much work; but if you delay the chance may pass. I will arrange your journey. It is my business to help the allies of my fatherland.’
He wrote down our names and an epitome of our doings contributed by Peter, who required two mugs of beer to help him through. He was a Bavarian, it seemed, and we drank to the health of Prince Rupprecht, the same blighter I was trying to do in at Loos. That was an irony which Peter unfortunately could not appreciate. If he could he would have enjoyed it.
The little chap saw us back to our hotel, and was with us the next morning after breakfast, bringing the steamer tickets. We got on board about two in the afternoon, but on my advice he did not see us off. I told him that, being British subjects and rebels at that, we did not want to run any risks on board, assuming a British cruiser caught us up and searched us. But Peter took twenty pounds off him for travelling expenses, it being his rule never to miss an opportunity of spoiling the Egyptians.
As we were dropping down the Tagus we passed the old _Henry the Navigator_.
‘I met Sloggett in the street this morning,’ said Peter, ‘and he told me a little German man had been off in a boat at daybreak looking up the passenger list. Yon was a right notion of yours, Cornelis. I am glad we are going among Germans. They are careful people whom it is a pleasure to meet.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Loose
The Germans, as Peter said, are a careful people. A man met us on the quay at Rotterdam. I was a bit afraid that something might have turned up in Lisbon to discredit us, and that our little friend might have warned his pals by telegram. But apparently all was serene.
Peter and I had made our plans pretty carefully on the voyage. We had talked nothing but Dutch, and had kept up between ourselves the role of Maritz’s men, which Peter said was the only way to play a part well. Upon my soul, before we got to Holland I was not very clear in my own mind what my past had been. Indeed the danger was that the other side of my mind, which should be busy with the great problem, would get atrophied, and that I should soon be mentally on a par with the ordinary backveld desperado.
We had agreed that it would be best to get into Germany at once, and when the agent on the quay told us of a train at midday we decided to take it.
I had another fit of cold feet before we got over the frontier. At the station there was a King’s Messenger whom I had seen in France, and a war correspondent who had been trotting round our part of the front before Loos. I heard a woman speaking pretty clean-cut English, which amid the hoarse Dutch jabber sounded like a lark among crows. There were copies of the English papers for sale, and English cheap editions. I felt pretty bad about the whole business, and wondered if I should ever see these homely sights again.
But the mood passed when the train started. It was a clear blowing day, and as we crawled through the flat pastures of Holland my time was taken up answering Peter’s questions. He had never been in Europe before, and formed a high opinion of the farming. He said he reckoned that such land would carry four sheep a morgen. We were thick in talk when we reached the frontier station and jolted over a canal bridge into Germany.
I had expected a big barricade with barbed wire and entrenchments. But there was nothing to see on the German side but half a dozen sentries in the field-grey I had hunted at Loos. An under- officer, with the black-and-gold button of the Landsturm, hoicked us out of the train, and we were all shepherded into a big bare waiting-room where a large stove burned. They took us two at a time into an inner room for examination. I had explained to Peter all about this formality, but I was glad we went in together, for they made us strip to the skin, and I had to curse him pretty seriously to make him keep quiet. The men who did the job were fairly civil, but they were mighty thorough. They took down a list of all we had in our pockets and bags, and all the details from the passports the Rotterdam agent had given us.
We were dressing when a man in a lieutenant’s uniform came in with a paper in his hand. He was a fresh-faced lad of about twenty, with short-sighted spectacled eyes.
‘Herr Brandt,’ he called out.
I nodded.
‘And this is Herr Pienaar?’ he asked in Dutch.
He saluted. ‘Gentlemen, I apologize. I am late because of the slowness of the Herr Commandant’s motor-car. Had I been in time you would not have been required to go through this ceremony. We have been advised of your coming, and I am instructed to attend you on your journey. The train for Berlin leaves in half an hour. Pray do me the honour to join me in a bock.’
With a feeling of distinction we stalked out of the ordinary ruck of passengers and followed the lieutenant to the station restaurant. He plunged at once into conversation, talking the Dutch of Holland, which Peter, who had forgotten his school-days, found a bit hard to follow. He was unfit for active service, because of his eyes and a weak heart, but he was a desperate fire-eater in that stuffy restaurant. By his way of it Germany could gobble up the French and the Russians whenever she cared, but she was aiming at getting all the Middle East in her hands first, so that she could come out conqueror with the practical control of half the world.
‘Your friends the English,’ he said grinning, ‘will come last. When we have starved them and destroyed their commerce with our under-sea boats we will show them what our navy can do. For a year they have been wasting their time in brag and politics, and we have been building great ships – oh, so many! My cousin at Kiel -‘ and he looked over his shoulder.
But we never heard about that cousin at Kiel. A short sunburnt man came in and our friend sprang up and saluted, clicking his heels like a pair of tongs.
‘These are the South African Dutch, Herr Captain,’ he said.
The new-comer looked us over with bright intelligent eyes, and started questioning Peter in the taal. It was well that we had taken some pains with our story, for this man had been years in German South West, and knew every mile of the borders. Zorn was his name, and both Peter and I thought we remembered hearing him spoken of.
I am thankful to say that we both showed up pretty well. Peter told his story to perfection, not pitching it too high, and asking me now and then for a name or to verify some detail. Captain Zorn looked satisfied.
‘You seem the right kind of fellows,’ he said. ‘But remember’ – and he bent his brows on us – ‘we do not understand slimness in this land. If you are honest you will be rewarded, but if you dare to play a double game you will be shot like dogs. Your race has produced over many traitors for my taste.’
‘I ask no reward,’ I said gruffly. ‘We are not Germans or Germany’s slaves. But so long as she fights against England we will fight for her.’
‘Bold words,’ he said; ‘but you must bow your stiff necks to discipline first. Discipline has been the weak point of you Boers, and you have suffered for it. You are no more a nation. In Germany we put discipline first and last, and therefore we will conquer the world. Off with you now. Your train starts in three minutes. We will see what von Stumm will make of you.’
That fellow gave me the best ‘feel’ of any German I had yet met. He was a white man and I could have worked with him. I liked his stiff chin and steady blue eyes.
My chief recollection of our journey to Berlin was its commonplaceness. The spectacled lieutenant fell asleep, and for the most part we had the carriage to ourselves. Now and again a soldier on leave would drop in, most of them tired men with heavy eyes. No wonder, poor devils, for they were coming back from the Yser or the Ypres salient. I would have liked to talk to them, but officially of course I knew no German, and the conversation I overheard did not signify much. It was mostly about regimental details, though one chap, who was in better spirits than the rest, observed that this was the last Christmas of misery, and that next year he would be holidaying at home with full pockets. The others assented, but without much conviction.
The winter day was short, and most of the journey was made in the dark. I could see from the window the lights of little villages, and now and then the blaze of ironworks and forges. We stopped at a town for dinner, where the platform was crowded with drafts waiting to go westward. We saw no signs of any scarcity of food, such as the English newspapers wrote about. We had an excellent dinner at the station restaurant, which, with a bottle of white wine, cost just three shillings apiece. The bread, to be sure, was poor, but I can put up with the absence of bread if I get a juicy fillet of beef and as good vegetables as you will see in the Savoy.
I was a little afraid of our giving ourselves away in our sleep, but I need have had no fear, for our escort slumbered like a hog with his mouth wide open. As we roared through the darkness I kept pinching myself to make myself feel that I was in the enemy’s land on a wild mission. The rain came on, and we passed through dripping towns, with the lights shining from the wet streets. As we went eastward the lighting seemed to grow more generous. After the murk of London it was queer to slip through garish stations with a hundred arc lights glowing, and to see long lines of lamps running to the horizon. Peter dropped off early, but I kept awake till midnight, trying to focus thoughts that persistently strayed. Then I, too, dozed and did not awake till about five in the morning, when we ran into a great busy terminus as bright as midday. It was the easiest and most unsuspicious journey I ever made.
The lieutenant stretched himself and smoothed his rumpled uniform. We carried our scanty luggage to a _droschke_, for there seemed to be no porters. Our escort gave the address of some hotel and we rumbled out into brightly lit empty streets.
‘A mighty dorp,’ said Peter. ‘Of a truth the Germans are a great people.’
The lieutenant nodded good-humouredly.
‘The greatest people on earth,’ he said, ‘as their enemies will soon bear witness.’
I would have given a lot for a bath, but I felt that it would be outside my part, and Peter was not of the washing persuasion. But we had a very good breakfast of coffee and eggs, and then the lieutenant started on the telephone. He began by being dictatorial, then he seemed to be switched on to higher authorities, for he grew more polite, and at the end he fairly crawled. He made some arrangements, for he informed us that in the afternoon we would see some fellow whose title he could not translate into Dutch. I judged he was a great swell, for his voice became reverential at the mention of him.
He took us for a walk that morning after Peter and I had attended to our toilets. We were an odd pair of scallywags to look at, but as South African as a wait-a-bit bush. Both of us had ready- made tweed suits, grey flannel shirts with flannel collars, and felt hats with broader brims than they like in Europe. I had strong- nailed brown boots, Peter a pair of those mustard-coloured abominations which the Portuguese affect and which made him hobble like a Chinese lady. He had a scarlet satin tie which you could hear a mile off. My beard had grown to quite a respectable length, and I trimmed it like General Smuts’. Peter’s was the kind of loose flapping thing the _taakhaar_ loves, which has scarcely ever been shaved, and is combed once in a blue moon. I must say we made a pretty solid pair. Any South African would have set us down as a Boer from the back-veld who had bought a suit of clothes in the nearest store, and his cousin from some one-horse dorp who had been to school and thought himself the devil of a fellow. We fairly reeked of the sub-continent, as the papers call it.
It was a fine morning after the rain, and we wandered about in the streets for a couple of hours. They were busy enough, and the shops looked rich and bright with their Christmas goods, and one big store where I went to buy a pocket-knife was packed with customers. One didn’t see very many young men, and most of the women wore mourning. Uniforms were everywhere, but their wearers generally looked like dug-outs or office fellows. We had a glimpse of the squat building which housed the General Staff and took off our hats to it. Then we stared at the Marinamt, and I wondered what plots were hatching there behind old Tirpitz’s whiskers. The capital gave one an impression of ugly cleanness and a sort of dreary effectiveness. And yet I found it depressing – more depressing than London. I don’t know how to put it, but the whole big concern seemed to have no soul in it, to be like a big factory instead of a city. You won’t make a factory look like a house, though you decorate its front and plant rose-bushes all round it. The place depressed and yet cheered me. It somehow made the German people seem smaller.
At three o’clock the lieutenant took us to a plain white building in a side street with sentries at the door. A young staff officer met us and made us wait for five minutes in an ante-room. Then we were ushered into a big room with a polished floor on which Peter nearly sat down. There was a log fire burning, and seated at a table was a little man in spectacles with his hair brushed back from his brow like a popular violinist. He was the boss, for the lieutenant saluted him and announced our names. Then he disappeared, and the man at the table motioned us to sit down in two chairs before him.
‘Herr Brandt and Herr Pienaar?’ he asked, looking over his glasses.
But it was the other man that caught my eye. He stood with his back to the fire leaning his elbows on the mantelpiece. He was a perfect mountain of a fellow, six and a half feet if he was an inch, with shoulders on him like a shorthorn bull. He was in uniform and the black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His tunic was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his huge chest, and mighty hands were clasped over his stomach. That man must have had the length of reach of a gorilla. He had a great, lazy, smiling face, with a square cleft chin which stuck out beyond the rest. His brow retreated and the stubby back of his head ran forward to meet it, while his neck below bulged out over his collar. His head was exactly the shape of a pear with the sharp end topmost.
He stared at me with his small bright eyes and I stared back. I had struck something I had been looking for for a long time, and till that moment I wasn’t sure that it existed. Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against. He was as hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd head was effective.
The man at the table was speaking. I took him to be a civilian official of sorts, pretty high up from his surroundings, perhaps an Under-Secretary. His Dutch was slow and careful, but good – too good for Peter. He had a paper before him and was asking us questions from it. They did not amount to much, being pretty well a repetition of those Zorn had asked us at the frontier. I answered fluently, for I had all our lies by heart.
Then the man on the hearthrug broke in. ‘I’ll talk to them, Excellency,’ he said in German. ‘You are too academic for those outland swine.’
He began in the taal, with the thick guttural accent that you get in German South West. ‘You have heard of me,’ he said. ‘I am the Colonel von Stumm who fought the Hereros.’
Peter pricked up his ears. ‘_Ja_, Baas, you cut off the chief Baviaan’s head and sent it in pickle about the country. I have seen it.’
The big man laughed. ‘You see I am not forgotten,’ he said to his friend, and then to us: ‘So I treat my enemies, and so will Germany treat hers. You, too, if you fail me by a fraction of an inch.’ And he laughed loud again.
There was something horrible in that boisterousness. Peter was watching him from below his eyelids, as I have seen him watch a lion about to charge.
He flung himself on a chair, put his elbows on the table, and thrust his face forward.
‘You have come from a damned muddled show. If I had Maritz in my power I would have him flogged at a wagon’s end. Fools and pig-dogs, they had the game in their hands and they flung it away. We could have raised a fire that would have burned the English into the sea, and for lack of fuel they let it die down. Then they try to fan it when the ashes are cold.’
He rolled a paper pellet and flicked it into the air. ‘That is what I think of your idiot general,’ he said, ‘and of all you Dutch. As slow as a fat vrouw and as greedy as an aasvogel.’
We looked very glum and sullen.
‘A pair of dumb dogs,’ he cried. ‘A thousand Brandenburgers would have won in a fortnight. Seitz hadn’t much to boast of, mostly clerks and farmers and half-castes, and no soldier worth the name to lead them, but it took Botha and Smuts and a dozen generals to hunt him down. But Maritz!’ His scorn came like a gust of wind.
‘Maritz did all the fighting there was,’ said Peter sulkily. ‘At any rate he wasn’t afraid of the sight of the khaki like your lot.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t,’ said the giant in a cooing voice; ‘maybe he had his reasons for that. You Dutchmen have always a feather-bed to fall on. You can always turn traitor. Maritz now calls himself Robinson, and has a pension from his friend Botha.’
‘That,’ said Peter, ‘is a very damned lie.’
‘I asked for information,’ said Stumm with a sudden politeness. ‘But that is all past and done with. Maritz matters no more than your old Cronjes and Krugers. The show is over, and you are looking for safety. For a new master perhaps? But, man, what can you bring? What can you offer? You and your Dutch are lying in the dust with the yoke on your necks. The Pretoria lawyers have talked you round. You see that map,’ and he pointed to a big one on the wall. ‘South Africa is coloured green. Not red for the English, or yellow for the Germans. Some day it will be yellow, but for a little it will be green – the colour of neutrals, of nothings, of boys and young ladies and chicken-hearts.’
I kept wondering what he was playing at.
Then he fixed his eyes on Peter. ‘What do you come here for? The game’s up in your own country. What can you offer us Germans? If we gave you ten million marks and sent you back you could do nothing. Stir up a village row, perhaps, and shoot a policeman. South Africa is counted out in this war. Botha is a cleverish man and has beaten you calves’-heads of rebels. Can you deny it?’
Peter couldn’t. He was terribly honest in some things, and these were for certain his opinions.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that is true, Baas.’
‘Then what in God’s name can you do?’ shouted Stumm.
Peter mumbled some foolishness about nobbling Angola for Germany and starting a revolution among the natives. Stumm flung up his arms and cursed, and the Under-Secretary laughed.
It was high time for me to chip in. I was beginning to see the kind of fellow this Stumm was, and as he talked I thought of my mission, which had got overlaid by my Boer past. It looked as if he might be useful.
‘Let me speak,’ I said. ‘My friend is a great hunter, but he fights better than he talks. He is no politician. You speak truth. South Africa is a closed door for the present, and the key to it is elsewhere. Here in Europe, and in the east, and in other parts of Africa. We have come to help you to find the key.’
Stumm was listening. ‘Go on, my little Boer. It will be a new thing to hear a _taakhaar_ on world-politics.’
‘You are fighting,’ I said, ‘in East Africa; and soon you may fight in Egypt. All the east coast north of the Zambesi will be your battle-ground. The English run about the world with little expeditions. I do not know where the places are, though I read of them in the papers. But I know my Africa. You want to beat them here in Europe and on the seas. Therefore, like wise generals, you try to divide them and have them scattered throughout the globe while you stick at home. That is your plan?’
‘A second Falkenhayn,’ said Stumm, laughing.
‘Well, England will not let East Africa go. She fears for Egypt and she fears, too, for India. If you press her there she will send armies and more armies till she is so weak in Europe that a child can crush her. That is England’s way. She cares more for her Empire than for what may happen to her allies. So I say press and still press there, destroy the railway to the Lakes, burn her capital, pen up every Englishman in Mombasa island. At this moment it is worth for you a thousand Damaralands.’
The man was really interested and the Under-Secretary, too, pricked up his ears.
‘We can keep our territory,’ said the former; ‘but as for pressing, how the devil are we to press? The accursed English hold the sea. We cannot ship men or guns there. South are the Portuguese and west the Belgians. You cannot move a mass without a lever.’ ‘
The lever is there, ready for you,’ I said.
‘Then for God’s sake show it me,’ he cried.
I looked at the door to see that it was shut, as if what I had to say was very secret.
‘You need men, and the men are waiting. They are black, but they are the stuff of warriors. All round your borders you have the remains of great fighting tribes, the Angoni, the Masai, the Manyumwezi, and above all the Somalis of the north, and the dwellers on the upper Nile. The British recruit their black regiments there, and so do you. But to get recruits is not enough. You must set whole nations moving, as the Zulu under Tchaka flowed over South Africa.’
‘It cannot be done,’ said the Under-Secretary.
‘It can be done,’ I said quietly. ‘We two are here to do it.’
This kind of talk was jolly difficult for me, chiefly because of Stumm’s asides in German to the official. I had, above all things, to get the credit of knowing no German, and, if you understand a language well, it is not very easy when you are interrupted not to show that you know it, either by a direct answer, or by referring to the interruption in what you say next. I had to be always on my guard, and yet it was up to me to be very persuasive and convince these fellows that I would be useful. Somehow or other I had to get into their confidence.
‘I have been for years up and down in Africa – Uganda and the Congo and the Upper Nile. I know the ways of the Kaffir as no Englishman does. We Afrikanders see into the black man’s heart, and though he may hate us he does our will. You Germans are like the English; you are too big folk to understand plain men. “Civilize,” you cry. “Educate,” say the English. The black man obeys and puts away his gods, but he worships them all the time in his soul. We must get his gods on our side, and then he will move mountains. We must do as John Laputa did with Sheba’s necklace.’
‘That’s all in the air,’ said Stumm, but he did not laugh.
‘It is sober common sense,’ I said. ‘But you must begin at the right end. First find the race that fears its priests. It is waiting for you – the Mussulmans of Somaliland and the Abyssinian border and the Blue and White Nile. They would be like dried grasses to catch fire if you used the flint and steel of their religion. Look what the English suffered from a crazy Mullah who ruled only a dozen villages. Once get the flames going and they will lick up the pagans of the west and south. This is the way of Africa. How many thousands, think you, were in the Mahdi’s army who never heard of the Prophet till they saw the black flags of the Emirs going into battle?’
Stumm was smiling. He turned his face to the official and spoke with his hand over his mouth, but I caught his words. They were: ‘This is the man for Hilda.’ The other pursed his lips and looked a little scared.
Stumm rang a bell and the lieutenant came in and clicked his heels. He nodded towards Peter. ‘Take this man away with you. We have done with him. The other fellow will follow presently.’
Peter went out with a puzzled face and Stumm turned to me.
‘You are a dreamer, Brandt,’ he said. ‘But I do not reject you on that account. Dreams sometimes come true, when an army follows the visionary. But who is going to kindle the flame?’
‘You,’ I said.
‘What the devil do you mean?’ he asked.
‘That is your part. You are the cleverest people in the world. You have already half the Mussulman lands in your power. It is for you to show us how to kindle a holy war, for clearly you have the secret of it. Never fear but we will carry out your order.’
‘We have no secret,’ he said shortly, and glanced at the official, who stared out of the window.
I dropped my jaw and looked the picture of disappointment. ‘I do not believe you,’ I said slowly. ‘You play a game with me. I have not come six thousand miles to be made a fool of.’