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Title: A Prince of the Captivity
Author: Buchan, John (1875-1940)
Date of first publication: July 1933
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Hodder and Stoughton, May 1935
   [eighth printing]
Date first posted: 28 May 2017
Date last updated: 28 May 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1440

This ebook was produced by Al Haines, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  A PRINCE
  OF THE
  CAPTIVITY

  BY
  JOHN BUCHAN


  HODDER AND STOUGHTON
  LIMITED      LONDON




  FIRST PRINTED            JULY 1933
  REPRINTED                JULY 1933
  REPRINTED                JULY 1933
  REPRINTED                AUGUST 1933
  REPRINTED                AUGUST 1933
  REPRINTED                OCTOBER 1933
  REPRINTED                DECEMBER 1933
  REPRINTED                MAY 1935

  _Made and Printed in Great Britain for_
  _Hodder & Stoughton Limited by_
  _Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury._




  TO
  EDWARD STEPHEN HARKNESS




                    "As when a Prince
  Of dispers'd Israel, chosen in the shade,
  Rules by no canon save his inward light,
  And knows no pageant save the pipes and shawms
  Of his proud spirit."




  Thus said Jesus, upon whom be peace.
  The World is a bridge; pass over
  it, but build no house upon it.

  _The Emperor Akbar's inscription
  at Fatehpur-Sikri._




  _The characters in this book are entirely imaginary
  and have no relation to any living persons_




_BOOK I_




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      I


I

On a warm June evening three men were sitting in the smoking-room of a
London club. One was an old man, with a face which had once been
weather-beaten and was now intricately seamed with veins and wrinkles.
His bearing, his shoulders trimly squared even at seventy, spoke of the
old style of British regimental officer. The second was in his early
thirties, a heavy young man, with nothing of the Guardsman about him
except his tie. The third might have been any age between forty and
sixty, and had writ plain upon him the profession of the law.

The newsboys were shouting in Pall Mall.

"They can't have got the verdict yet," said the last. "Jenks was only
beginning to sum up when I left. We shall hear nothing for another
hour."

The old man shivered. "Good God! It is awful to be waiting here to know
whether Tom Melfort's boy is to go to prison for six years or ten. I
suppose there's no chance of an acquittal."

"None," said the lawyer. "You see, he pled guilty. Leithen was his
counsel, and I believe did his best to get him to change his mind. But
the fellow was adamant."

The young soldier, whose name was Lyson, shook his head.

"That was like Adam. There never was a more obstinate chap in his quiet
way. Very easy and good-natured till you presumed just a little too
much on his placidity, and then you found yourself hard up against a
granite wall."

"How well did you know him?" the lawyer asked.

"I was at school with him and we passed out of Sandhurst together. He
was a friend, but not what you would call an intimate. Too clever, and
a little too much of the wise youth. . . . Oh yes, he was popular, for
he was a first-class sportsman and a good fellow, but he had a bit too
much professional keenness for lazy dogs like me. After that he went
straight ahead, as you know, and left us all behind. Somebody told me
that old Mullins said he was the most brilliant man they had had at the
Staff College for a generation. He had got a European war on the brain,
and spent most of his leave tramping about the Ardennes or bicycling in
Lorraine."

"If this thing hadn't happened, what would you have said about his
character?"

"Sound as the Bank of England," was the answer. "A trifle puritanical,
maybe. I used to feel that if I ever did anything mean I should be more
ashamed to face Adam Melfort than any other man alive. You remember how
he looked, sir," and he turned to the old man. "Always in
training--walked with a light step as if he were on the hill after
deer--terribly quick off the mark in an argument--all fine and hard and
tightly screwed together. The grip of his small firm hand had a sort of
electric energy. Not the kind of man you would think likely to take the
wrong turning."

"I am not very clear. . . . What exactly happened?" asked the old man.

"Common vulgar forgery," the lawyer replied. "He altered a cheque which
was made out to his wife--part of her allowance from a rich
great-uncle. The facts were not in doubt, and he made no attempt to
dispute them. He confessed what he had done, and explained it by a
sudden madness. The funny thing was that he did not seem to be ashamed
of it. He stood there quite cool and collected, with a ghost of a smile
on his face, making admissions which he must have known were going to
wreck him for good. You say he was wrapt up in his career, but I never
saw anyone face a crash more coolly. . . . The absence of motive
puzzles me. Were the Melforts hard up? They never behaved as if they
were."

"Adam was supposed to be fairly well off. He was an only son, and his
father died years ago. But I fancy his lady wife made the money fly."

"I saw her in the witness-box," said the lawyer. "Pretty as a picture
and nicely dressed for the part. She gave her evidence in a voice like
music and wept most becomingly. Even old Jenks was touched. . . . Poor
little soul! It isn't much fun for her. . . . Who was she, by the way?
Somebody told me she was Irish."

"She was Camilla Considine," said Lyson. "Sort of far-away cousin of my
own. Adam first met her hunting with the Meath. I haven't seen a great
deal of them lately, but I shouldn't have said that the marriage was
made in Heaven. Oh yes! She was--she is--angelically pretty, with
spun-gold hair and melting blue eyes--the real fairy-tale princess
type. But I never considered that she had the mind of a canary. She
can't be still, but hops from twig to twig, and her twigs were not the
kind of perch that Adam fancied. They each went pretty much their own
way. There was a child that died, you know, and after that there was
nothing to hold them together. . . . Adam had his regimental duties,
and, when he got leave, as I have said, he was off to some strategic
corner of Europe. Camilla hunted most of the winter--she rode superbly,
and there were plenty of people ready to mount her--and in London she
was always dancing about. You couldn't open a picture-paper without
seeing her photograph.

"No," he continued in reply to a question, "I never heard any
suggestion of scandal. Camilla lived with rather a raffish set, but she
was not the kind of woman to have lovers. Not human enough. There was
something curiously sexless about her. She lived for admiration and
excitement, but she gave passion a miss. . . . She and Adam had one
thing in common--they were both fine-drawn and rarefied--not much
clogged with fleshly appetites. But while Adam had a great brain and
the devil of a purpose, Camilla was rather bird-witted--a lovely
inconsequent bird. God knows how he ever came to be attracted by her! I
thought the marriage absurd at the time, and, now that it has crashed,
I see that it was lunacy from the start. I reckoned on disaster, but
not from Adam's side."

"It's the motive I can't get at," said the lawyer. "If, as you say,
Melfort and his wife were more or less estranged, why should he risk
his career, not to speak of his soul, to provide her with more money?
The cheque was made out to her, remember, so she must have been privy
to the business. I can imagine a doting husband playing the fool in
that way, but I understand that they scarcely saw each other. He didn't
want money for himself, did he? Had he been speculating, do you
suppose?"

"Not a chance of it. He had no interests outside soldiering--except
that he used to read a lot. . . . . I daresay Camilla may have outrun
the constable. Her clothes alone must have cost a pretty penny. . . .
No, I can't explain it except by sudden madness, and that gets us
nowhere, for it's not the kind of madness that I ever connected with
Adam Melfort. I can see him killing a man for a principle--he had
always a touch of the fanatic--but cheating, never!"

The newsboys' shouting was loud in Pall Mall. "Let's send for the last
evening paper," said the lawyer. "It ought to have the verdict. . . .
Hullo, here's Stannix. He may know."

A fourth man joined the group in the corner. He was tall, with a fine
head, which looked the more massive because he wore his hair longer
than was the fashion. The newcomer flung himself wearily into a chair.
He summoned a waiter and ordered a whisky-and-soda. His face was white
and strained, as if he had been undergoing either heavy toil or heavy
anxiety.

"What's the news, Kit?" the younger soldier asked.

"I've just come from the court. Two years' imprisonment in the second
division."

The lawyer whistled. "That's a light sentence for forgery," he said. .
. . But the old man, in his high dry voice, quavered, "My God! Tom
Melfort's boy!"

"Leithen handled it very well," said the newcomer. "Made the most of
his spotless record and all that sort of thing, and had a fine
peroration about the sudden perversities that might overcome the best
of men. You could see that Jenks was impressed. The old chap rather
relishes pronouncing sentence, but in this case every word seemed to be
squeezed out of him unwillingly, and he did not indulge in a single
moral platitude."

"I suppose we may say that Melfort has got off easily," said the lawyer.

"On the contrary," said the man called Stannix, "he has been crushed
between the upper and the nether millstone."

"But on the facts the verdict was just."

"It was hideously unjust--but then Adam courted the injustice. He asked
for it--begged for it."

Lyson spoke. "You're his closest friend, Kit. What in God's name do you
make of it all?"

Stannix thirstily gulped down his drink. "I wish you had seen him when
he heard the sentence. You remember the quiet dreamy way he had
sometimes--listening as if his thoughts were
elsewhere--half-smiling--his eyes a little vacant. Well, that was how
he took it. Perfectly composed--apparently quite unconscious that he
was set up there for all the world to throw stones at. Think what a
proud fellow he was, and then ask yourself how he managed to put his
pride behind him. . . . Mrs Melfort was sitting below, and when Jenks
had finished Adam bowed to him, and looked down at his wife. He smiled
at her and waved his hand, and then marched out of the dock with his
head high. . . . I caught a glimpse of her face, and--well, I don't
want to see it again. There was a kind of crazed furtive relief in it
which made my spine cold."

"You think . . ." the lawyer began.

"I think nothing. Adam Melfort is the best friend I have in the
world--the best man I have ever known--and I am bound to back him up
whatever line he takes. He has chosen to admit forgery and go to gaol.
He drops out of His Majesty's service and his life is ruined. Very
well. That is his choice, and I accept it. . . . But I am going to say
something to you fellows which I must say, but which I will never
repeat again. I sat through the trial and heard all the evidence. I
watched Adam's face--you see, I know his ways. And I came to one clear
conclusion, and I'm pretty certain that Ned Leithen reached it too. He
was lying--lying--every word he spoke was a lie."

"I see!" said the lawyer. "_Splendide mendax!_"

The old man, who had not listened very closely, took up his tale.
"Lying!" he moaned. "Great God! Tom Melfort's boy!"



II

Adam Melfort began his new life in a kind of daze. The stone walls
which made his prison did not circumscribe him, for he was living in a
far narrower enclosure of the mind. The dismal fare, the monotonous
routine were scarcely noticed: he was allowed books, but he never
opened them; visitors were permitted on certain days, but he did not
welcome them, and the few who came--a cousin, a brother officer or two,
Christopher Stannix--found a man who seemed to have lost interest in
the outer world and had no need of consolation. His wife was not among
these visitors.

The truth was, that ever since the tragedy Adam's mind had been busied
with a problem of conduct. He believed that he had acted rightly, but
doubt intervened with maddening iteration, and a thousand times he had
to set the facts in order and review his decision.

It was a long story which he had to recount to himself and it involved
a stern inquisition into his past. Much he could pass lightly
over--fortunately, for the recollection was like opening graves. . . .
His boyhood, for example, the intricate, exciting world of school, the
shining months of holiday on Eilean Bn--the pictures which crowded on
him were almost too hard a trial for his fortitude. . . . Sandhurst was
easier, for there he had entered manhood and begun the life which had
now shipwrecked. There the vague dreams of boyhood had hardened into a
very clear purpose which absorbed all his interests, and for which he
believed that he had a special talent. Military problems fascinated
him, and he had the kind of brain, half-mathematical, half-imaginative,
which they demand. There is no higher pleasure in life than to discover
in youth a clear aptitude and to look forward to a lifetime to be spent
in its development. He had been very serious about the business, and
had prided himself on keeping mind and body in perfect discipline, for
at the back of his head he had a vision of a time coming when every
atom of his power would be requisitioned. He felt himself dedicated to
a cause far higher than personal success. But this success had come to
him--at Sandhurst, in his regiment, at the Staff College. Adam had
little vanity, but he could not be insensitive to the opinion of his
colleagues, and that opinion had, beyond doubt, marked him out for high
achievement.

Then into his absorbed Spartan life Camilla had come like a disquieting
west wind. She was the kind of woman with whom men like Adam have
fallen in love since the beginning of time--that Rosalind-youth, which
to the mystery of sex adds the mystery of spring, the germinal magic of
a re-created earth. He had marvellously idealised her, and had never
sought to penetrate the secret of her glancing, bewildering charm. His
carefully planned scheme of life went to pieces, and for three
tempestuous months he was the devout, unconsidering lover.

Disillusion came in the first year of marriage. The woman he lived with
could no longer be set on a pedestal for worship; he had perforce to
explore the qualities of head and heart behind the airy graces. His
exploration yielded nothing. Camilla was almost illiterate, having been
brought up in a ramshackle country-house among dogs and horses and
hard-riding squireens. That he had known, but he had not realised the
incurable lightness of her mind. During their courtship her eyes had
often been abstracted when he talked to her, and he had fancied that
this betokened a world of private thought. He learned now that it meant
only vacuity. Her brain was feather-weight, though she had many small
ingenuities in achieving her own purposes. Into his interests and
pursuits she stubbornly refused to enter. At first she would turn the
edge of graver topics with a laugh and a kiss, but presently she yawned
in his face.

He discovered, too, that her tenderness was only skin-deep. Her soft
melting eyes were not an index to a sensitive heart. Her nature had a
hard glossy enamel of selfishness, and her capacity for emotion seemed
to be limited to occasional outbursts of self-pity. Her light laughter
could be cruel indeed, and often cut him deep, but he hid his wounds
when he saw that she could never understand in what she had offended.
She lived for admiration and gaiety, blind to anything but the surface
of things. She was curiously obtuse to human values, and made intimates
of all who flattered her; but she was safe enough, for she had no
passion, and her bird-like flutterings carried her through dangerous
places. . . . A child was born after a year of marriage, in whom she
took little interest, except now and then to pose with him, as the
young mother, to a fashionable photographer. The boy died when he was
five years old, and, after an hour's sobbing Camilla tripped again into
the limelight. The broken-hearted Adam sat down to face the finality of
his blunder. He realised that he had been a romantic fool, who had
sought a goddess and found a dancing-girl. His wife was untamable,
since there was nothing to tame.

He did not blame her; his reproaches were all for himself. He
understood that if she gave him no affection, his affection for her was
also long ago dead. He had been in love with a dream, and had awakened
to detest the reality. Not detest perhaps; his feelings were rather
disillusion, pity, and self-reproach. Especially self-reproach. He
blamed himself bitterly for his folly and blindness. He had married
this woman on false pretences, loving something which she was not; so
from the first the marriage had been stained with infidelity. Adam was
one of those people who keep so much space around their souls that they
are always lonely, and this leads often to quixotic codes of conduct.
The hard good sense which he showed in his profession was absent in his
inner world. He tortured himself with remorse; he had domesticated a
being without mind or heart, but the blame was wholly his.

So he schooled himself to make reparation. He let Camilla go her own
way, and stinted himself that she might have money to spend. His
Continental wandering was done in third-class carriages and on a
bicycle, while she had the car on the Riviera. Occasionally they dined
out together, but for the most part they went their own roads. Some of
her doings and many of her companions gravely hurt his pride, but he
made no complaint. His manner towards her was always courteous and
friendly, and if now and then his face showed involuntary disapproval
she did not observe it. She set him down as a part of the conventional
background of her life, like the butler or the chauffeur--a pleasant
piece of background which was never out of temper.

After seven years of marriage the crash came. Camilla had always been
extravagant, and for the past year she had been rapidly amassing debts.
Twice she had appealed to Adam, who had paid off all the liabilities
she confessed to, liabilities which were far short of the true figure.
Then had come a final recklessness, so wild that she was afraid to
approach her husband again. For a certain fancy-dress ball she bought a
jewel for which she had no means of paying, and, when a little later
she was in need of immediate money for a trip to Nice, she sold it at a
heavy loss. The jewellers became pressing, her bank refused to allow
her a further overdraft and clamoured for a reduction, and in a panic
she had recourse to the money-lenders. That settled the jewellers, but
it left her the prey to periodical demands which she had no means of
meeting. Somewhere at the back of her mind she had a real dread of the
fraternity; a tradesman's pertinacity could be overcome, but the
soft-spoken people with Scotch names and curved noses would take no
denial. For all her light-headedness, she had a certain sense of social
decorum, and she shrank from a public scandal like a child from the
dark.

For a week or two she was a harassed woman, and then her great-uncle's
quarterly cheque seemed to offer a way of escape. He was a rich man and
would never notice a few hundreds less to his credit. If she asked him
for the money he would be certain to give it to her; but she was afraid
to plague an old man in bad health with her affairs. She presumed on
his generosity, for he had always been indulgent to her. She was
behaving well, she told herself, since she was saving him trouble. . .
. She was neat-handed and took pains with the forgery, and when it was
done she breathed freely. She paid in the cheque and had once again an
easy mind.

But suddenly dreadful things began to happen. It was like a volcanic
eruption in ground where no volcano had ever been dreamed of. There
were enquiries from the bank, urgent enquiries. Then came a visit of
solemn, smooth-faced men who, she realised with terror, were
detectives. After that there was a wild fluttering panic, a breakdown
in tears, an incoherent confession like that of a bewildered child. . .
.

Adam, she thought, behaved well, for he invented a very clever story.
She had changed the figure--that could not be denied and she had
admitted it--but Adam with a very white face had declared that she had
done it by his command, that he had forced her to it. . . . After that
no one seemed to trouble about her, only to look at her
sympathetically, but they troubled a great deal about Adam. It appeared
that he had done something very wrong--or said he had--Camilla was
rather confused about the whole affair. Of course he had not touched
the cheque, but perhaps he was right, and she had altered it under his
influence--she had heard of such things happening--anyhow, Adam always
spoke the truth. She was sorry for him, but immensely relieved that she
was out of the scrape, and soon she was far more sorry for herself. For
Adam had to leave the house and be tried in a court and perhaps go to
prison, and that would be a terrible business for her. . . .

For a moment Camilla had felt a glow of gratitude towards him, but that
was soon swamped in self-pity. If only she had not meddled with the
wretched cheque! But Adam said he was responsible for that and she
would not let herself think further about it. . . . After all, she did
not care much for him, though he seemed to care for her. Their marriage
had been comfortable but nothing more. And now the comfort was gone,
and she foresaw endless worries. Camilla took refuge in tears.

Adam's action had surprised himself, but he realised that it was the
consequence of a long process of thought. For years he had been
convincing himself that he had wronged Camilla, and that it was his
duty to make restitution, and his sudden resolve on that tragic morning
in Eaton Place was the result of this premeditation. . . . For a little
the necessity of playing a part and brazening it out kept him from
thinking, but during the trial he had been beset with doubts.

He had smashed his career. Well, that was inevitable, for in making
reparation something must be broken. . . . He had cut himself off from
serving his country. That was more serious, but private honour must
come first with a man. . . . But this private honour! That was what
most concerned him. He had lied deliberately, and never in his life had
he lied before. Adam felt himself smirched and grubby, fallen suddenly
out of a clean world into the mire. He was no casuist, and this
tormenting doubt pursued him to the dock, and from the dock to his
prison cell. A man was entitled to sacrifice much in the way of duty,
but was he entitled to sacrifice his soul?

Peace came to him at last because of one reflection. The alternative
was that Camilla should be sitting in this place of bare walls and rude
furniture. Such a wheel would have broken the butterfly. God would
forgive, thought Adam, a man's sin if it was designed to shield the
weak.



III

The peace did not last long. He had settled a scruple, but he had still
to face the litter of a broken life. He had been desperately in love
with his work, and had developed a loyalty to his service and to his
regiment the stronger because it had no rival in his home. The task of
a modern soldier is a curious compound of those of the mathematician
and the imaginative creator, for he has to work meticulously at
intricate combinations of detail, and at the same time allow for the
human factor's innumerable permutations. Adam's mind had wrought
happily among the undergrowth, but he had also an eye for the trees,
and in his moments of insight for the shape of the wood. It was these
last flashes of pre-vision which had been the high moments in his
career, and had impressed his colleagues. He had always been an
assiduous student of military history, and that had led him into other
history, and he had learned the major part played by economics and
civil statesmanship in the art of war. As he studied Europe he seemed
to see forces everywhere straining towards the point of clash, and he
had set himself to work out the problems which that clashing involved.
Along with one or two other young men he had established a new school
of military thought, to which one distinguished statesman had been
converted. There was a cognate school in the French Army, and the two
exchanged memoranda. Academic for the moment, but soon, he believed, to
be an urgent reality. . . . And now this happy activity, this happier
companionship, was gone for ever.

For days Adam lived in blank, unrelieved misery. This was not a problem
to be solved, but a judgment to be endured, and he could only meet it
with a leaden stoicism. . . . He had settled a large part of his income
on Camilla, but he had enough left to support existence. Existence it
would be, not life. He was a disgraced man to whom all honourable
careers were closed. His interest had been so concentrated on his
profession that outside it the world was blank. He struggled to attain
fortitude by reminding himself of others who had built up broken
lives--disgraced men who had fought their way back, blind men who had
won new energy from their handicap. . . . But what could he do? He had
but the one calling, and he could not force the gate that had clanged
behind him. There was the Foreign Legion, of course. But could he face
the blind monotony of the rabble at the foot of the tower when he had
once been the watchman on the battlements?

He slept badly, and would lie and torture himself with a retrospect
like a chess-board. He saw everything in cold black and white, so that
what he looked at seemed scarcely human life, but a kind of cosmic
puzzle for which there was no solution.


One morning he woke with an odd feeling that something pleasant had
happened. He had been dreaming of Eilean Bn.

It was different from the island which he remembered. There were the
white sands that he knew, and the white quartz boulders tumbled amid
the heather. There were the low hills, shaped into gracious folds, with
the little sea-trout river running through green pastures to the sea.
There was the forest of wild-wood on Sgurr Bn, where the first
woodcock came in October, and Sgurr Bn, with its queer stony fingers
that used to flush blood-red in the sunset. There was the whitewashed
lodge among the dwarfish oaks and birches, the mossy lawn, and the pond
where the wildfowl thronged in winter.

But the place seemed to have grown larger. Beyond Sgurr Bn should
have been the cliffs where the choughs bred, and the long slopes of
thyme and bent stretching to that western sea which in the stillest
summer weather did not cease its murmur. But now the sea had fled from
Sgurr Bn. In his dream he had been walking westward, for he wanted to
visit again the sandy cove where he used to bathe and look out to the
skerries where the great grey seals lived. But it seemed to him that
the thymy downs now extended for ever. He had stridden over them for
hours and had found delectable things--a new lochan with trout rising
among yellow water-lilies, a glen full of alders and singing waters, a
hollow with old gnarled firs in it and the ruins of a cottage pink with
foxgloves. But he had never come within sight of the sea, though it
seemed to him that the rumour of its tides was always in his ear.


That dream opened a new stage in Adam's life. His mind ceased to move
in a terrible wheel of abstractions, and he saw concrete pictures
again. Two especially, on which he would dwell with an emotion that had
in it more of comfort than pain.

The first was a small child slowly ascending the steep stairs in a
London house that led from the day-nursery to the night-nursery. Nigel,
named after Adam's grandfather, was a solemn, square boy with a Roman
head set finely upon stalwart little shoulders. Adam led a busy life in
those days, but he usually contrived to return home just as the child,
his hair still damp from his bath, was moving bed-wards. Nigel would
never permit himself to be carried by the nurse up those stairs. Very
slowly he made his progress, delaying on each step, impeded by bedroom
slippers slightly too large for him. He carried in both hands his
supper, a glass of milk, and a plate containing two biscuits, an orange
or a banana. It was part of the ritual that he should be his own
food-bearer, and it was his pride that he never spilled a drop of milk,
except on one disastrous day when over-lengthy new pyjamas had tripped
him up, and he and his supper had cascaded back to the landing. Adam
generally found him on the second lowest step, and used to applaud his
grave ascent. Then he would tuck him up in bed, when the supper was
eaten, and listen to his prayers repeated slowly and dogmatically to
his Scotch nurse. Sometimes, when there was no dinner engagement, Adam
would tell Nigel a story, most often a recollection from his own
childhood and always about Eilean Bn.

Camilla rarely appeared on these occasions, except to hurry Adam's
dressing when they were dining out. She had not much to say to Nigel,
or he to her. But the father and the son had an immense deal to confide
to each other. The child was fanciful, and had invented a batch of
familiar spirits out of his sponge, his tooth-brush, his dressing-gown,
and an old three-pronged poker which stood by the nursery fireplace. He
would recount the sayings of these familiars, who held strong and
damnatory views on unpleasant duties like nail-cutting and hair-washing
and visits to the dentist. But especially he would question his father
about Eilean Bn. Adam drew many maps of the island in a realistic
Elizabethan manner, and Nigel would make up stories about sundry
appetising creeks and provocative skerries. He never visited Eilean
Bn, for Camilla was bored by it when she was taken there at the end
of her honeymoon, so it had been let for a term of years to a Glasgow
manufacturer. But any seaside place to which Nigel journeyed was
contrasted by him unfavourably with that isle of dreams. There were too
many houses at Bournemouth, and too many people at Broadstairs, and a
horrible band in green jackets at Eastbourne, and a man who made ugly
faces at Littlehampton, but at Eilean Bn there would be only his
father and the sea and the grey seals and the curlews and a kindly
genie called "Peteross."

When Nigel died of meningitis after two days' delirium the bottom
dropped out of Adam's world. Fortunately at the time he was desperately
busy, and his duties took him on a two months' mission to a foreign
capital. He drugged himself with work, and when the strain slackened
and his mind could again make timid excursions, he found that he could
patch up his world with stoicism. Stoicism had always been Nigel's
strong suit, for the little boy had been wonderfully brave, and had
taken pride in never whimpering. Adam told himself that he must do
likewise to be worthy of the child who had so brightened his house of
life. One regret tormented him--that he had never taken Nigel to Eilean
Bn. He put the thought of the place from him in distaste, for it
awoke an unavailing bitterness.


But now he found that by some happy magic the two memories had
intertwined themselves. Nigel had taken possession of Eilean Bn. He
was to be met with not only on the nursery stairs in Eaton Place, but
on the white island sands and on the slopes of the hills, a tiny figure
in shorts and a light blue jersey, with hair the palest gold against a
sunburnt skin.

Adam had found a companion for his dream revisitings. He would let
himself fall into a waking trance, and spend happy hours recaptured
from childhood. . . . Nigel was a delight to behold. It had been a hot
summer when he died, and the child had been ailing a little before his
last illness. Adam remembered meeting him one sultry evening as he
returned with his nurse from the Park, and a pang had gone through his
heart at the sight of the small pale face and clammy forehead. He had
then and there resolved to send him to the country; indeed, the very
day when the child sickened he had been negotiating for rooms in a
Cotswold farm. . . . But now Nigel was as firm and sweet as a nut, and
nearly as brown. It was a joy to see his hard little legs twinkle as he
ran shouting in the ripples of the tide.

In Nigel's company Adam seemed to live over again his very early
childhood, when the place was as big as a continent, and as little
explored as central Arabia. Peter Ross, the keeper, was the tutelary
deity of those days. Peter was a very old man who did not belong to the
islands, but had come centuries before from the mainland in the time of
Adam's grandfather. The Melforts had been a mainland family, until
Kinloch Melfort was sold by the grandfather in the time when Highland
deer-forests fetched fancy prices. That grandfather had been a famous
diplomat, whose life had been mostly spent out of England, and he had
longed for an island in which to spend his old age. Consequently the
lodge at Eilean Bn was filled with strange foreign things, rugs on
which were pictured funny little men and horses, great jars of china
and many-coloured metals, and heads of grim wild beasts among which the
island deer-horns looked shy and feeble. To the boy's eye the house had
been full of enchantments, but Peter Ross made the out-of-doors more
magical still.

Peter was full of stories in all of which he had himself played a part.
He had been down among the whales like Jonah, and he had heard the
silkies singing at dawn on farther islets than St Kilda, and he had
seen in the gloaming the white hind, which means to the spectator death
or fortune according as he behaves in face of the portent. Peter could
tell tales far more exciting than those in the big _Grimm_ in the
nursery, since most of them were laid in Eilean Bn. There was a
mermaid who once lived on Craiglussa, and her songs used to wile ships
on to cruel reefs; at low tide you could see some of the timbers of the
lost merchantmen. Up in a cave on Sgurr Bn a holy man had dwelt, so
holy that his prayers could bring the fish into Ardmore bay, and
immobilise pirates so that they remained stuck fast a mile from shore,
where they danced in fury on their decks. The tumbled grey stones in
the heather as you went south to Silver Strand had once been the house
of a witch who flew daily to France to dine in the French king's
kitchen. The old folk knew the sound of her flight, which was like the
whistle of gigantic wild geese before a frost. And Peter had other
stories into which the great ones out of history entered. The good King
Robert had sat on the topmost rock of Sgurr Bn watching for the spire
of smoke from the far mainland which would tell him that he might
safely go back to Scotland and take up his quest for the crown; and
only the other day, so Peter reckoned it, a young prince with yellow
hair had hidden for a week in the caves beyond the Strand, while
English ships, his enemies, quartered the seas. Peter had sung many
songs about this prince, and he called him the Prionnsa Bn, which
made Adam fancy that Eilean Bn must have been his peculiar kingdom.

So the whole island had been a haunted place, and every day an
adventure. Adam went over in minutest detail each step of the ritual.
There was the waking to the sound of clucking hens, and corncrakes in
the meadow, and very far off the tinkle of anvil and hammer in John
Roy's smithy. Through the open window drifted the scent of climbing
white roses and new-cut hay. That was part of the morning smell of the
house, and the rest was a far-off odour of cooking, a faint flavour of
paraffin lamps, and the delicious mustiness of an old dwelling. When he
went to school there was a corner in one of the passages where you
could get the same kind of smell, and Adam used to hang about and sniff
it hungrily till his eyes filled. . . . Then came breakfast--porridge
and milk, with the stern eye of a lady called Missmass watching to see
that the bowl was tidily emptied. Miss Mathieson was part housekeeper
and part governess, a kindly dragon who could be cajoled into providing
a snack of scones and jelly, and permitting a meal to be eaten on the
hills or by the sea instead of in the nursery. But she was iron on one
point--that all expeditions beyond the garden and the home meadow
should be accompanied by Peter Ross. . . .

Then with beating heart Adam would set out with Peter--Peter with his
old gun in the crook of his arm, and at his heels a wall-eyed retriever
called Toss. Sometimes they fished, with worm when the Lussa was red
and swollen, but more often with black hackles of Peter's dressing.
Sometimes Adam was permitted to fire a shot, the gun resting on a dyke,
at a ruffian hoodie crow. Usually Adam would go into camp, on his
honour not to stray beyond certain limits, while Peter departed on his
own errands. These were the happiest times, for the boy could make a
castle for himself and defend it against the world; or play the
explorer in deep dells of the burn where the water-crows flashed and
sometimes an otter would slide into a pool; or climb the little rocks
at the tide's edge and discover green darting crabs and curious
star-fish. When they returned home Adam felt that he had been roaming
the wide earth and had been in touch with immense mysteries. There were
certain specific smells which belonged to those wonderful days--thyme
hot in the sun, bog-myrtle crushed in grubby hands, rotting seaweed,
and the salty wind which blew up the Sound from the open seas of the
south. Freshness above all, freshness which stung the senses like icy
water.

For a time Adam in his memories stuck to his childhood, for he wanted
Nigel's company. But gradually he seemed to be growing up in the dream
world, while the little boy remained the same. Almost before he knew he
had become a youth, and was no longer at Eilean Bn in June, that
month which is the high tide of the northern spring. He was at school
now, in his last year there, and his holiday was at Easter, when the
shadow of winter had scarcely lifted. . . . Nigel was still at his
ageless play in the glen below the house and on the nearest beach under
Peter Ross's eye, but Adam himself went farther afield. He remembered
the first time he climbed Sgurr Bn and saw the mysterious waters on
the far side, and the first sea-trout caught by himself in the Lussa's
sea-pool, which filled and emptied with the tides. Once in a long day
he had walked the whole twenty-three miles of the island's
circumference. The place, before so limitless, had now shrunk to a
domain which could be mastered. Soon he knew every cranny as well as
Peter Ross himself.

But if the terrestrial horizon had narrowed the spiritual was enlarged.
Adam was back in the delirious mood when youth is first conscious of
its temporal heritage. In those April days he would stride about Eilean
Bn with his thoughts half in the recesses of his own soul and half in
the undiscovered world which lay beyond the restless seas. The
landscape suited his mood, for it was still blanched with the winter
storms, and the hills would look almost transparent under the pale
April skies, the more since a delicate haze of moorburn brooded over
them. The hawthorns, which in June were heavy with blossom, were
scarcely budding, and this bareness discovered the primrose clumps at
their roots. The burns were blue and cold, and there was a perpetual
calling of migrant birds. To Adam it seemed the appropriate landscape
and weather for his now-conscious youth, for it was tonic and austere,
a spur to enterprise, a call to adventure. . . . He had discovered
poetry, too, and his head was a delectable confusion of rhymes. As he
sat in his narrow cell he had only to shut his eyes, and croon to
himself the airs which he had then sung, to recover the exquisite
delirium of those April days. Shakespeare especially, it was
Shakespeare's songs that had haunted him then. _Blow, blow, thou winter
wind_--that had been his accompaniment on tempestuous mornings, when
from the south-west came the scurries of chill rain. _Sigh no more,
ladies_, had been for him the last word in philosophy. _O mistress
mine! where are you roaming?_--was there not in that all the magic of
youth and spring? He hummed it to himself now without a thought of
Camilla, for the mistress he had sung of was not of flesh and blood.
And then there was _Fear no more the heat o' the sun_, which made a
noble conclusion to the whole matter. The race must have a goal, or it
would be no race; some day man must take his wages and go bravely home.

A scent is the best reviver of memories, but there were no scents in
his cell except those of scrubbed wood, yellow soap, and new linoleum.
But a tune is the next best, and, as Adam _soothed_ to himself the airs
which had entranced the boy, he seemed to slip happily into his old
world.

Gradually the feeling grew upon him that everything was not lost. He
had still Eilean Bn, and only now he understood that it was the
dearest thing to him in life. It was still his--the lease to the
Glasgow manufacturer would be up in a year's time. It was there waiting
for Nigel and himself. The thought of it obliterated all the misery of
the last years. To return there would be like the sick Naaman bathing
in the waters of Jordan.


For a little while Adam was happy in this resolution. He would go back
to the home of his fathers, and live as they had lived in simpler days.
The world had broken him, so he would flee from the world. People had
gone into monasteries after disasters to re-make their souls, and why
not he? The very thought of the green island gave him a sense of
coolness and space and peace. Youth was waiting there to be recaptured,
youth and happiness. And Nigel too--Nigel would be lonely without him.
He had dreamed himself into a mood in which the little figure in shorts
and blue jersey was as much a part of his home as Sgurr Bn itself.

And then one morning he had a dismal awakening. All the rosy veils of
fancy seemed to be ripped from the picture as if by a sharp east wind,
and he saw the baselessness of his dreams.

For what had been the magic of Eilean Bn to the heart of youth? A
call to enterprise, nothing less. A summons to go out and do great
things in the world. Once, long ago, when he had realised his passion
for the place, he had toyed with the notion of making his life in it,
and had instantly rejected the thought. Eilean Bn would scorn such a
weakling. Its ancient peace was not for the shirker. It was a paradise
from which a man might set out, and to which he might return when he
had fought his battles, but in which he dared not pitch his camp till
he had won a right to rest.

Miserably he understood that the peace for which he had longed had to
be fought for. . . . But now he was tragically out of the fighting-line
for ever.



IV

There followed a week of more bitter emptiness than he had ever known
before. He had let his dreams run away with him, and had suddenly awoke
to their baselessness. Eilean Bn seemed to slip out of the world into
some eternal ocean where Nigel, for ever out of his reach, played on
its sands. He felt himself naked, stripped to the buff, without a rag
to call his own.

Those were days of dull misery and nights of dreamless sleep and
unrefreshed awakening. . . . And then one morning he arose with a verse
in his head. He had always been a voracious reader of poetry, and had
remembered the things which caught his fancy. This verse was about the
soul and body being ploughed under by God. He had forgotten the author,
but bit by bit he managed to build up one quatrain, and it seemed to
run something like this:

  "Come ill, come well, the cross, the crown,
    The rainbow or the thunder--
  I fling my soul and body down
    For God to plough them under."


There was a strange fascination in the idea. Adam had the underlying
fatalism which is the bequest of ancestral Calvinism, even though its
specific tenets may have been long ago forgotten. He had always drawn
comfort from the thought that, while it was a man's duty to strive to
the uttermost, the result was determined by mightier things than man's
will. He had believed most devoutly in God, though he would have been
puzzled to define his creed. Suddenly there came over him a sense of
the microscopic littleness and the gossamer fragility of human life.
Everything lay in the hands of God, though men fussed and struggled and
made a parade of freedom. Might not there be a more potent strength in
utter surrender?

His mind became acid-clear. He had nothing--nothing. His chances in
life, so zealously cherished, had departed like smoke. His reputation
was shattered for ever. He had sunk into the underworld of those who
are eternally discounted. . . . But if he was stripped to the bone,
that meant also that he had nothing to lose--nothing but Eilean Bn,
which was not really of this world. . . . But had he nothing left? He
had health and an exercised body--brains--much knowledge. Was there no
use to be made of these even in the underworld of the disconsidered?
Might there not be a tremendous power in complete submission? If soul
and body were offered to God to plough under, might not there be a
harvest from the sacrifice?

The thought came upon him with the force of a revelation. His
feebleness had suddenly become strength. He asked nothing of life,
neither length of days, nor wealth, nor fame, nor comfort. He was out
of the daylight and honour of the firing-line, but there must be work
to do in dark places for one who was prepared to keep nothing back.
Desperate men he had been told were always formidable, but desperation
was commonly a wild neurotic thing, incalculable and undirected, based
on ignoble passions like jealousy and fear. What of a desperation which
had in it no taint of self, which was passionless and reasoned, not a
wayward lightning but a steady flame? He might win the right to Eilean
Bn by other means than the glittering career he had once mapped out
for himself.

A new kind of peace fell upon him. It was not the peace of the fakir
who has renounced everything for the high road and the begging-bowl,
but something more absolute still, for Adam did not ask for a hope of
Heaven. Even Eilean Bn dropped out of his picture. He was content to
lay himself under the eternal plough. . . . He took to prayer, which
was a kind of communing with his own soul. . . . And finally there came
a night when he dedicated himself humbly yet exultingly to whatever
uttermost service might be asked, and rose from his knees with the
certainty that his vow had been accepted.


Christopher Stannix, who was his most regular visitor, noticed a change
in Adam. The muddy prison colour in his face had given place to the hue
of health, which was inevitable, for he was now striving consciously to
keep his body fit. His old alertness had returned, and, instead of the
dull apathy of the first days, he showed a lively curiosity about
events in the outer world. He asked for books, and an odd collection
they made. Milton was the only poet--naturally, Stannix thought, for
Adam seemed to have pulled himself together and to be making a stand
against fortune, and Milton in his blindness had done the same. There
were various books of philosophy, including a newly published volume of
Bergson, and various works on the higher mathematics. Also there was a
mass of travel literature, and many grammars. There was no request for
any military books.

Adam had resolved to equip himself for his task in this enforced
leisure which had been granted him. The first thing was to keep his
mind bright and clear, so he toiled at the stiffest mental gymnastics
which he could find. The second was to enlarge his knowledge, for one
who worked in the shadows must know more than those in the daylight. He
had decided that soldiering, the scientific side of it at any rate, was
no more for him, so he put his old interests aside. Since he did not
know where his future service might lie, he set about informing himself
on those parts of the globe which were strange to him. He had always
had a passion for geography, and now, by much reading and poring over
maps, he acquired an extensive book-knowledge of many countries.
Languages, too, for which he had a turn. He already spoke French and
German well--German almost like a native, and he had a fair knowledge
of Italian and Spanish. To these he now added Russian and Turkish, and,
having in his youth learned enough Icelandic to read the Sagas, he made
himself a master of the Scandinavian tongues. He found his days pass
pleasantly, for he had an ordered programme to get through, and he had
the consciousness that he was steadily advancing in competence. Every
scrap of knowledge which he acquired might some day, under God's hand,
be of vital import.

But there were two tasks which he could not yet touch--the most urgent
tasks of all. He must school his body to endure the last extremes of
fatigue and pain, and prison gave him no chance for such a training.
Also he must acquire a courage like tempered steel. It was not enough
to hold one's life cheap: that was merely a reasoned purpose; what was
needed was to make fortitude a settled habit, so that no tremor of
nerves should ever mar his purpose. On that point alone he had qualms.
He had still to lift his body, with all its frailties, to the
close-knit resolution of his mind.



V

Adam came out of prison in March 1914. His lawyer had seen to the
preliminaries, and Camilla intended to divorce him for desertion under
Scots law. He had settled upon her most of his income, leaving himself
one thousand pounds a year, apart from Eilean Bn. She ultimately
married a hunting baronet in Yorkshire, and passed out of his life. The
island he let for a further term of seven years to its former tenant.
If he was ever to return there, he had a heavy road to travel first.

Most of the summer was spent in getting back his body to its former
vigour, for the effects of a long spell of confinement do not disappear
in a day. He took rooms at a farmhouse in Northumberland and set
himself to recruit his muscles and nerves as steadily as if he had been
preparing for an Olympic race. He spent hours daily on the moors in all
weathers, and the shepherds were puzzled by the man with the lean face
and friendly eyes who quartered the countryside like a sheep-dog. At
one of the upland fairs he entered for a hill race, and beat the
longest-legged keeper by half a mile. His mind needed no recruitment,
for it had been long in training. He spent the evenings with his books,
and once a week walked to the nearest town to get the London
newspapers. He was waiting for a sign.

That sign came in the first days of August with the outbreak of war.




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      II


I

In Whitehall on an August morning Adam met Stannix.

The latter had just left the War Office, which had changed suddenly
from a mausoleum to a hive. He was in uniform, with scarlet
gorget-patches, and was respectfully saluted by whatever wore khaki. At
sight of Adam he cried out.

"The man in all the world I most want to see! Where have you come from?"

"From Northumberland, where I have been getting fit. It looks as if I
had finished the job just in time."

"And where are you bound for?"

"To join up."

"As a private?"

"Of course. I'm no longer a soldier."

"Nonsense, man. That can't be allowed. We're running this business like
a pack of crazy amateurs, but there's a limit to the things we can
waste. Brains is one."

"I must fight," said Adam. "You're doing the same."

"Not I. I'm stuck at home in this damned department store. I want to go
out to-morrow, for I've been in the Yeomanry for years and know
something about the job, but they won't let me--yet. They told me I
must do the thing I'm best fitted for. I pass that on to you."

Adam shook his head.

"I'm fit for nothing but cannon-fodder. You know that well enough, Kit.
And I'm quite content. I'll find some way of making myself useful,
never fear."

"I daresay you will, but not the best way. This wants perpending.
Promise me on your honour that you'll do nothing to-day, and lunch with
me to-morrow. By that time I may have a plan."

Adam protested, but the other was so urgent that at last he agreed.

Next day they lunched together and Stannix wore an anxious face.

"I've seen Ritson and Marlake," he said, "and they think as I do. If
you join up as a private, you'll presently get your stripes, and pretty
soon you'll be offered a commission. But in a battalion you'll be no
better than a hundred thousand others. I want you to have a show. Well,
it can't be in the open, so it must be in the half-light or the dark.
That means risks, far bigger risks than the ordinary fellow is now
facing in Flanders, but it also means an opportunity for big service.
How do you feel about it?"

Adam's face brightened.

"I haven't much capital left, and I want to spend it. I don't mind
risks--I covet them. And I don't mind working in the dark, for that is
where I must live now."

Stannix wrinkled his brows.

"I was certain you'd take that view, and I told Ritson so. But Adam,
old man, I feel pretty miserable about it. For a chance of work for you
means a certainty of danger--the most colossal danger."

"I know, I know," said Adam cheerfully. "That's what I'm looking for.
Hang it, Kit, I must squeeze some advantage out of my troubles, and one
is that my chiefs should not concern themselves about what happens to
me. I'm a volunteer for any lost hope."

"I may be helping to send my best friend to his death," said Stannix
gloomily.

"Everybody is doing that for everybody. You'll be doing the kindest
thing in the world if you give me a run for my money. I've counted the
cost."

The result of this talk was that during the following week Adam had
various interviews. The first was with Ritson at the War Office, a man
who had been one of his instructors at the Staff College. Ritson, grey
with overwork, looked shyly at his former pupil. "This is a queer
business, Melfort," he said. "I think you are right. You're the man I
would have picked above all others--only of course I couldn't have got
you if certain things hadn't happened. . . . You know what's expected
of you and what you're up against. Good-bye and God bless you! I'll be
like a man looking down into deep water and now and then getting a
glimpse of you moving at the bottom."


Thereafter Adam entered upon a varied life. First he made a journey
into the City, to a little street in the neighbourhood of Leadenhall
Market. On the door of every narrow, flat-chested house were a score of
names, mostly attorneys and notaries public. At the foot of one such
list he found J. N. Macandrew, who professed to follow the calling of
an average-adjuster. Mr Macandrew was hard to come at. Adam was
received in a dingy slip of an office by a pallid boy, who took his
card and disappeared. He returned and led the way up a maze of wooden
stairs and murky passages, till he left him in a room where sunlight
was pouring through a dirty window. There for half an hour Adam kicked
his heels. The place had all the cheerful features of an attorney's
waiting-room. On the walls, where the paper was dark with grime, hung
an ancient almanac, a bad print of Lord Chancellor Cairns, and a faded
photograph of the court of some livery company in the year 1889. On a
rickety table stood three venerable Law Lists, an antediluvian Burke, a
London directory and a pile of shipping journals. There was a leather
arm-chair which looked as if it had seen service, and a pile of
cigarette ends in the empty grate, which suggested that the room was
much in use.

Adam examined the scanty properties, and then stared out of the window
at the jumble of roofs and house-backs. The place was oddly depressing.
Here in this rabbit-warren life seemed to shrink to an infinite
pettiness. What part could it have in the storm which was scourging the
world? . . . He turned, to find that Mr Macandrew had entered the room,
though he had heard no door open.

Mr Macandrew's name was misleading, for he was clearly a Jew, a small
man with a nervous mouth and eyes that preferred to look downward. He
seemed to have been expecting Adam, for he cut short his explanation.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Please take a seat. Yes, I know all about
you. We can have a little talk, can't we? Will you smoke?"

Adam sat in the rubbed arm-chair, while the other perched himself on
the table. It was a curious interview, of which the purpose only
gradually became clear. Macandrew asked a few questions about a corner
of Belgium which Adam had often visited. Ritson knew about those
visits, and might have told him. Then he suddenly broke into the
guttural French which is talked in the Meuse valley. "You understand
that?" he snapped. "Every word?" Adam replied in the same patois, and
was corrected on a point or two. "Pretty good," said Macandrew. "Good
enough, perhaps. You have the right gurgle, but not all the idioms."

Then he spoke Flemish, which Adam translated after him. "That is
good--very good. You do not need to speak it, but it is well to
understand it." He drawled a few sentences in some tongue which sounded
mere gibberish. "You do not follow? No matter. That is the speech of
the hill people in the high Ardennes--peasant people only, you
understand. There are gipsy words in it."

There followed a series of interrogatories. Adam was asked to describe
the daily life on a farm in south-east Belgium. "You have stayed in
such a place. Now, give me the duties of the farmer's son, beginning
with the first daylight." Adam ransacked his memory and did his best,
but the catalogue was sketchy. He pleased his interlocutor better with
his account of a wayside estaminet, a cattle-fair, and a Sunday
pilgrimage. "You can observe," said Macandrew. "Not yet with sufficient
nicety. Yet you have eyes in your head."

He was suddenly dismissed. The pallid boy appeared, and Macandrew held
out his hand. "Good-bye, Mr More. Perhaps we shall meet again soon."

As Adam re-threaded the labyrinth of stair and passage, he wondered why
he had been addressed as More. That must have been Ritson's
arrangement, and he had not been told of it because his chiefs assumed
that he knew enough to be passive in their hands.


A few days later he found himself a guest in a country house which lay
under the Hampshire Downs. The invitation had been sent to him by
Ritson, and in it he figured as Mr John More. His host was called
Warriner, a fine, old, high-coloured sportsman, who looked as if his
winters had been spent in the hunting-field, and his summers in
tramping his paternal acres. There was a son, in his early twenties,
who had come over from a neighbouring training-camp. It appeared that
young Warriner was a noted mountaineer, and Adam remembered his name in
connection with ascents in the Caucasus. At dinner the talk was very
little of the war, and there was no hint of any knowledge of Adam's
past. The father and son, with all the courtesy in the world, seemed to
be bent on discovering his tastes in sport and his prowess in games, so
that he set them down as the type of Englishman who never outgrows the
standards of his public school.

"You look uncommonly fit," said the son, as they left the smoking-room.

"I try to be," said Adam. "I haven't got many things to my credit, but
one of them is a hard body."

"Good," was the answer. "We'll have a long day to-morrow. You'll be
called at five. Put on something old and light--flannel bags will
do--and strong shoes. We have a bit of striding before us."

It was a clear cool morning when they started, and Adam thought that he
had never seen such a light-foot walker as Frank Warriner. He led him
out of the vale up on to the Downs at a steady pace of nearly five
miles an hour. Presently the sun grew hot, but there was no slackening
of their speed. Adam's spirits rose, for he understood that his
endurance was being tested, and he had little fear of the result. To
his surprise their first halt was at a country rectory, where a parson
in slippers gave them a tankard of home-brewed beer. He was a fantastic
old gentleman, for he directed all his conversation to Adam, and
engaged him in a discussion on Norse remains in Britain which appeared
to be his hobby. Adam thought it strange that he should have hit on a
subject which had always been one of his private interests, and for the
half-hour of their visit he did his best to live up to the parson's
enthusiasm. "Good," said Frank Warriner, as they left the house. "You
managed that quite well."

In the early afternoon they came to a stone wall bounding a great
estate. Frank led the way over the wall. "Follow me," he said. "Colonel
Ambridge is a devil about his pheasants. We'll have some fun getting
through this place." They found themselves in a park studded with
coppices, and bordered by a large wood full of thick undergrowth. Frank
took an odd way of crossing prohibited ground, for he began by making
himself conspicuous, walking boldly across the open in full view of a
keeper's cottage. Presently a man's voice was heard uplifted, and the
two became fugitives. They doubled back behind a group of trees, and
Frank made for the big wood. They were followed, for as Adam looked
behind him he saw two excited men running to cut them off.

In the wood Frank led him through gaps in the undergrowth, stopping now
and then to listen like a stag at pause. There was no doubt about the
pursuit, for the noise of heavy feet and crackling twigs was loud
behind them. Frank seemed to know the place well, and he had an uncanny
gift of locating sound, for he twisted backward and forward like a
rabbit. Adam found running bent double and eel-like crawling through
bracken a far harder trial than the speed of the morning, but he
managed to keep close to his companion. At last Frank straightened
himself and laughed. "Now for a sprint," he said, and he led the way at
a good pace down a woodland path, which ended in an alley of
rhododendrons.

To Adam's surprise, instead of avoiding the house they made for it.
Frank slowed down at the edge of a carriage drive and walked boldly
across the lawn to a stone terrace, and through French windows into a
library where a man wag sitting. "Hullo, Colonel Ambridge," he said.
"We're out for a walk and looked in to pass the time of day. May I
introduce my friend Mr More?"

The Colonel, a lean dark man of about sixty, behaved like the parson.
He gave them drinks, and plunged into military talk, most of it
directed to Adam. This was no somnolent retired soldier, but a man
remarkably up-to-date in his calling. He spoke of the French generals
whose names were becoming familiar in Britain--of Joffre's colonial
service and of Foch's _Principes de la Guerre_, and he was critical of
the French concentration in Lorraine. France he maintained had departed
from the true interpretation of the "war of manoeuvre," and he was
contemptuous of false parallels drawn from Napoleon's _bataillon
carre_ at Jena. He seemed to have an exact knowledge of the terrain
of the war, maps were produced, and Adam, the sweat on his brow and the
marks of brier scratches on his cheek, found himself debating closely
on points of strategy. There was something sharp and appraising in
their host's eye as they took their leave. "Good," said Frank again.
"You handled old Ambridge well. Now for home, for we mustn't be late."

The last part of the ground was covered mainly in a loping trot, which
took them back along the ridge of the Downs till they looked down upon
the Warriners' house. Adam calculated that they had done nearly thirty
miles, but he realised that the day had not been meant as a mere test
of bodily endurance. Those queer visits had had a purpose, and he
guessed what it was. To his delight it seemed to him that his companion
was flagging a little--at any rate the edge was off his keenness--while
he himself had got his second wind.

He found a large tea-party at the Warriners'. "I'm going to cut it,"
Frank said, "but you must show yourself. You look all right. You've
kept amazingly tidy." Adam obeyed, for he thought he understood the
reason.

He could have drunk pints, but he was only given one small cup of weak
tea. But he had a full dose of conversation. It appeared to be the
special purpose of everyone to talk to him. He had to listen to schemes
of hospital work from local ladies, and to amateur military
speculations from an old Yeomanry colonel. A Bishop discussed with him
the ethics of the war, and a parliamentary candidate had much to say
about the party truce. He felt hot, very thirsty, and rather drowsy,
but he collected his wits, for he saw that his host's eye was
continually fixed on him. The elder Warriner managed to add himself to
any group where Adam talked, and it appeared that he was adroitly
trying to draw him out.

"You have been drinking in the peace of England," the Bishop told him.
"To-day will be a cool oasis to remember in the feverish months before
you."

When the guests had gone and he was left with his host, the rosy
country squire seemed to have changed to somebody shrewd and
authoritative.

"We shall be alone to-night," he said, "for Frank has gone back to
camp. You acquitted yourself well, Mr More. Frank is pretty nearly all
out, and he is harder than most people. I daresay you realise the
purpose of to-day's performance. In the game you are entering physical
fitness is not enough. A man must have full control of his wits, and be
able to use them when his bodily vitality is low. The mind must have
the upper hand of the carcass, and not be drugged by exertion into
apathy. You appear to fill the bill. . . . Now you'll want a bath
before dinner.

"By the way," he added, "there's one thing you may like to know. We
won't talk about the past, but long ago at school I fagged for your
father."


Adam's next visit was of a different kind. Slowly there had been
growing in his mind the comforting reflection that he might be of use
to the world, since other people seemed to take pains to assess his
capacities. He recognised that the tests were only superficial--what
could anyone learn of a man's powers from a few experiments?--but that
they should have been considered worth while increased his confidence.
So when he was sent down to spend a day with a certain Theophilus
Scrope in a little market-town in Northamptonshire he speculated on
what might next be put to the proof. Certain branches of his knowledge
had been probed, and his bodily strength, but no one had attempted to
assay his mental powers or the quality of his nerves. The latter, he
believed, would now be the subject, and he thought of Mr Scrope as a
mixture of psychologist and physician.

Mr Scrope was neither. He was a small elderly man with a Chinese cast
of face, who wore a skull-cap, and sat with a tartan plaid round his
shoulders, though the weather was warm. He had a dreamy eye, and a
voice hoarse with age and endless cigarettes. At first his talk
meandered about several continents. It appeared that he had spent much
of his life in the East, and he entertained Adam with fantastic tales
of the Tibetan frontier. His experiences seemed to have impressed
themselves on his face, for he had the air of a wise and ancient Lama.
He was fond of quoting proverbs from native languages, and now and then
he would deliver oracles of his own, looking sideways under his heavy
eyelids to see how they were received.

Adam spent a confused morning, sitting in a little garden heavy with
the scents of autumn flowers. Mr Scrope seemed to have a genius for the
discursive. But gradually it appeared that his reminiscences were
directed to one point especially, the everlasting temperamental
differences of East and West. His chief instance was the virtue of
courage. The East, he said, which did not fear the hereafter, was
apathetic towards the mere fact of death, but it had not the same
fortitude about life. It was capable of infinite sacrifice but not of
infinite effort--it was apt to fling in its hand too soon, and relapse
upon passivity. The West, when it had conquered the fear of death,
demanded a full price for any sacrifice. Rightly, said the old man,
since man's first duty was towards life.

Then they went indoors to luncheon, which was a modest meal of eggs,
cheese and vegetables. After that his host must sleep for an hour, and
Adam was left alone to his reflections in a chair on the veranda. . . .
He was beginning to see some purpose in the talk of this ancient, who
looked like a Buddhist holy man. Mr Scrope must have been informed
about his case, and realised that he was dealing with one who had
nothing to lose. The moral of his talk was that desperation was
valueless by itself and must be subordinated to a purpose. A man's life
was an asset which must be shrewdly bargained for. Adam wondered why he
had been sent down into Northamptonshire to hear this platitude.

But when the old man appeared he changed his view. For Mr Scrope,
refreshed by sleep, became a shrewd inquisitor, and probed with a
lancet Adam's innermost heart. Never had he dreamed that he could so
expose his secret thoughts to any man. More, he had his own beliefs
made clear to himself, for what had been only vague inclinations
crystallised under this treatment into convictions. His companion was
no longer a whimsical old gentleman with the garrulity of age, but a
sage with an uncanny insight into his own private perplexities. Duty
was expounded as a thing both terrible and sweet, transcending life and
death, a bridge over the abyss to immortality. But it required the
service of all of a man's being, and no half-gods must cumber its
altar. Adam felt himself strangely stirred; stoicism was not his mood
now, but exaltation. "He that findeth his life shall lose it, but he
that loseth his life shall find it," the other quoted. "That is not
enough," he added. "He that findeth his soul shall lose it--that is the
greater commandment. You must be prepared to sacrifice much that you
think honourable and of good report if you would fulfil the whole Law."

There was a kindly gleam in his dim old eyes as he bade his guest
good-bye. "You have the root of the matter, I think," were his last
words. "You will make your soul, as the priests say, and if you do that
you have won, whatever happens--yes, whatever happens." It seemed
almost a benediction.


After that Adam was sent back to the City of London. There he was no
longer received in the dingy waiting-room, but in Macandrew's own
sanctum, a place to which the road was even more intricate. He
realised, though he had had no word from Ritson, that his services had
been accepted.

For weeks he worked hard under the tuition of a very different
Macandrew. His instruction was of the most detailed and practical kind.
From plans and books he studied a certain area of Flanders, and was
compelled to draw map after map and endure endless cross-examinations
till his tutor was satisfied. He was made to learn minutely the routine
of the country life. "You will work on a farm," he was told, "but as
you will have come from the town you must have urban knowledge, too,
and that I will provide." It was provided at immense length, for his
master was not easily satisfied. "There is nothing too small to be
unimportant," Macandrew said. "It is the very little things that make
the difference." He had to commit to memory curious pieces of slang and
patois and learn how to interweave them naturally with his talk.
Disguises, too; there were afternoons when Adam had to masquerade in
impossible clothes and be taught how to live up to them, and to acquire
the art of giving himself by small changes a different face. His
special part was kept always before his mind. "You must think yourself
into it," he was told, "and imagine that you have never been otherwise.
That is the only real disguise."

Then there was the whole complicated business of cyphers and codes.
These must be subtle and yet simple, for Adam must carry them in his
head. He had to practise his powers of memory, and was surprised to
find how they developed with exercise. And he was told of certain
people who were key-people, the pivots of the intelligence system in
which he would serve. This was the most difficult business of all, for
these persons would take on many forms, and it was necessary to have
certain marks of identification and passports to their confidence. Adam
was almost in despair at the mass of knowledge, vital knowledge, which
he must keep always in the background of his mind. "It is altogether
necessary," said Macandrew. "You are a quick learner and will not fail.
The clues are intricate because the facts are intricate. There is no
simple key to complex things."

As the weeks passed Adam had moments of impatience. "There will be
peace before I am ready," he complained, and was told, "Not so. The war
will be very long."

A new Macandrew had revealed himself, a man confident and eager and
untiring, but one who still kept his eyes lowered when he spoke. Adam
often wondered what was in those eyes. It appeared that his real name
was Meyer, and that he was a Belgian Jew, who had long foreseen the war
and had made many preparations. Adam discovered one day the motive for
his devotion to the British cause. The man was an ardent Zionist, and
the mainspring of his life was his dream of a reconstituted Israel. He
believed that this could not come about except as a consequence of a
great war, which should break down the traditional frontiers of Europe,
and that Britain was the agent destined by God to lead his people out
of the wilderness. He would not speak much on the subject, but it was
the only one which made him raise his eyes and look Adam in the face,
and then Adam read in them the purpose which makes saints and martyrs.

When they parted at last he gave Adam a tiny amulet of silver and
ebony, shaped like a blunt cross. "You will wear that, please--people
will think it a peasant charm--it may be useful when we meet, for I am
not quick at faces. . . . Assuredly we shall meet. Are we not both
working for the peace and felicity of Jerusalem?"



II

In the second week of January, in the year 1915, those who passed the
untidy farm of the Widow Raus might have seen a new figure busy about
the steading. When the neighbours enquired his name they were told that
he was the Widow's nephew Jules--Jules Broecker, the only child of
Marie, her dead sister. The Widow was volubly communicative. The poor
Jules had no near kinsfolk but her, and she could not leave him alone
in Brussels, for he was simpler than other folk--and she meaningly
tapped her forehead. He would be useful about the farm, for he was a
strong lad, and would have his bite and sup and a bed to lie on in
these bad times as long as she was above ground. Madame Raus was a
short plump woman with grey hair neatly parted in the middle and
plastered down with grease. Out of doors--and she was mostly out of
doors--she wore a man's cap to keep her head tidy. She had a name for
closeness, and she was the soul of discretion, for she did not grumble
like most people at the high-handed ways of the local German
Commandant. She has no proper feelings, that one, her neighbours said,
and they looked on her with cold eyes as being apathetic about her
country's wrongs. But the Widow had had an only son who never returned
from the Yser, and she did not forget.

Jules Broecker appeared suddenly one morning at the farm, having come
on foot from Brussels, his little trunk of bullock-hide following him
in a farm-cart. When summoned before the Commandant he had his papers
in good order, his certificate of residence in the city, his permission
to leave, and the vis on it stamped by the officer at Nivelles. The
neighbours knew all about him, for they remembered Marie Broecker and
had heard of her simpleton son. But no one had met him on the Brussels
road--which was natural, for he came not from Brussels but from the
south, having been landed from an aeroplane in a field twenty miles off
during the darkness of a January night.

His appearance supported his aunt's commendation. He seemed wiry and
strong, though he slouched heavily. He had a wispish blond beard which
looked as if it had never been shaved, and sandy hair which was cut at
long intervals by the blacksmith in Villers l'Evque. His clothes were
odd, for he wore corduroy trousers, much too small for him, which had
once belonged to the deceased Raus, and though the first months of the
year were chilly he was generally coatless. His face was always dirty,
which, said the neighbours, was a disgrace to the Widow; but on Sundays
he was smartened up, and appeared at mass in a celluloid collar and a
queer old jacket with metal buttons. From long before the first light
he was busy about the farm, and could be heard after dark had fallen
whistling lugubriously as he fed the cattle.

The steading was an ill-tended place--a vast midden surrounded by
wooden pens and byres, with at one end a great brick barn, and at the
other the single-storeyed dwelling-house. There was not much grown in
the way of crops, only a few roots and a patch of barley, but the
grass-lands along the brook were rich, and the Widow pastured no less
than six cows. She had a special permit for this, which was
ill-regarded in the neighbourhood, for she was a famous cheese-maker,
and sold her cheese (at a starvation price) to the nearest German
base-camp. Jules had a hard life of it, for he was cow-herd, milker,
and man of all work; but he bore it with a simpleton's apathy, clumping
about the dirty yard in his wooden clogs, his shoulders bowed and his
head on his chest. Now and then he was observed to straighten his back
and listen, when the wind brought from the west the low grumble of
distant guns. Then he would smile idiotically to himself, as if it was
some play got up for his entertainment.

Clearly a natural, all agreed. Marie's husband was remembered as having
been a little weak in his wits, and the son plainly took after him.
Jules had large vacant blue eyes, and when he was spoken to his face
took on a vacant simper. His habits were odd, for he would work hard
for a week and then go off wandering, leaving his aunt to make the
rafters ring with maledictions. On such occasions she would reveal
shamelessly the family skeleton. "He is Jean Broecker's own son," she
would declare, "feckless, witless, shiftless! But what would you have?
An old woman cannot control an able-bodied idiot. Would that Raus were
alive to lay a dog-whip on the scamp's shoulders!" But the Widow's
wrath was short-lived, and when Jules returned he was not given a
dog-whip but a special supper, and she would even bathe his inflamed
feet. For it appeared that he was a mighty walker, and in his
wanderings travelled far up and down the Meuse valley to places which
no one in Villers l'Evque had ever visited. He would tell foolish
empty tales of his travels, and giggle over them. Beyond doubt, a
natural!

But a harmless one. Jules was not unpopular. For one thing he was
socially inclined, and when he was idle would gossip with anyone in his
queer high voice and clipped town accent. Sometimes he would talk about
his life in Brussels, but his stories never reached any point--he would
break off with a guffaw before the end. But he seemed to have picked up
some good ideas about farming, and in the Three Parrots estaminet,
which was the farmers' house of call, he was sometimes listened to. He
liked of an evening, if his work was finished in time, to go down to
the village, and he patronised all three of the ale-houses. He never
stood treat, for he was not entrusted with money, and he never drank
himself--did not like the smell of beer and brandy, he said, and made
faces of disgust. His one vice was smoking, but unlike the other
countryfolk he did not use a pipe--only cigarettes, which he was clever
at rolling when anyone gave him tobacco. Now and then he was presented
with a packet of cheap caporals which lasted him a long time, and he
had generally a cigarette stuck behind his left ear as a sort of iron
ration. People tolerated him because he was quiet and simple, and many
even came to like him, for so far as his scattered wits allowed he was
neighbourly. Also he provided the village with perpetual surprises. He
seemed to be oblivious of the severe regime of the military occupation,
and many prophesied early disaster.

But no disaster came to this chartered libertine. Villers l'Evque was
a key-point, for it stood at the crossing of two great high roads and
not three miles from the junction of two main railways. Therefore the
discipline for its dwellers was strict. There were always second-line
troops stationed near, and the beer-shops were usually full of
Landsturm. At first Jules was made a butt of by the German soldiers,
raw young peasants like himself for the most part, with a sprinkling of
more elderly tradesmen. They played tricks on him, pulled a chair from
beneath him, slipped lighted matches down his neck, and once gave him
an explosive cigarette which badly burned his lips. But he was so
good-humoured under this persecution that it presently ceased, and he
was treated more like a pet dog or a mascot. They taught him their
songs, which he sang in an absurd falsetto that became a recognised
evening's entertainment. Also they talked freely to him, for they could
not regard anything so feckless as an enemy. Homesick boys who had
picked up a little French would tell him of their recent doings--he was
a good listener and quick at helping them out when they were at a loss
for a word and relapsed into German. His pale eyes had sympathy in
them, if little intelligence.

Word of this village natural came to headquarters, and every now and
then he had to appear before the local Commandant. These officers were
frequently changed, but for the most part they were of the same
type--elderly dug-outs who asked only for a quiet life. At such
interviews Jules produced his papers, and told in a wailing recitative
the simple story of his life. The worst that happened was usually a
warning to stay at home and not tramp the country, lest he should find
himself one fine day against a wall looking at a firing squad--at which
he would grin sheepishly and nod his head. But one day he had a
terrifying experience. There was a new Commandant, a Bavarian captain
who had been temporarily invalided from the front line, a young man
with an eye like an angry bird's, and no bowels of compassion for
simple folk. For two hours he kept Jules under the fire of his
questions, which he delivered with a lowering brow and a menacing
voice. "That animal may be dangerous," he told his lieutenant. "He is
witless, and so can be used as a tool by clever men. A telephone wire,
you understand--a senseless thing over which news passes. He must be
sent farther east." But this Commandant was moved elsewhere in a week,
and nothing more was heard of his threat. A more dangerous man, if
Jules had had the sense to realise it, was a friendly, fatherly
personage, who tried to draw him into confidences, and would suddenly
ask questions in German and English. But Jules only stared dully at
such experiments, until his inquisitor shrugged his shoulders and gave
them up.

Had anyone from Villers l'Evque met Jules on the road on one of his
tramps he would have seen only a shaggy young peasant--rather better
shod than most peasants, since he had got the cobbler to make him a
stout pair of marching boots--who seemed in high spirits, for he cried
a greeting to every passer-by and would sing silly child's songs in his
high falsetto. But much of Jules's travelling was done off the roads,
where no one saw him, and in the dark of moonless nights. Then he was a
different being. His clumsy gait and slouching carriage disappeared,
and he would cover country at a pace which no peasant could have
matched. Into queer places his road often took him. He would lie for
long in a marshy meadow till a snipe's bleat made him raise his head,
and then another man would crawl through the reeds and the two would
talk. Once he spent two days in the undergrowth of a wood close to a
road where German columns passed without end. He seemed to have many
friends. There was an old wood-cutter in the hills between the Meuse
and the Ourthe who several times gave him shelter, and foresters in the
Ardennes, and a blind woman who kept an inn outside Namur on the
Seilles road. Indeed, there was a host of people who had something to
say to him in whispers, and when he listened to them his face would
lose its vacancy. They seemed to respect him too, and when they spoke
to him their tone had not the condescension of the Villers folk. . . .

Sometimes he did strange things. In a lonely place at night he would
hide himself for many hours, his head raised like that of a horse at
covert-side who waits for the first music of the hounds. Often he
waited till dawn and nothing came, but sometimes there would be a beat
of wings far up in the air which was not the beat of a Fokker, and the
noise would follow of a heavy body crushing the herbage. He would grope
his way in the direction of the sound, and a man would appear from the
machine with whom he spoke--and that speech was not French or Flemish.
By and by the aeroplane would vanish again into the night sky, and
Jules would look after it wistfully for a little, before by devious
paths he took his road home.

A close observer, had there been one at hand, would have been puzzled
by his treatment of cigarettes. On his travels he was always giving and
receiving them, and some he never smoked. A barmaid would toss him
carelessly a dilapidated caporal, and it would go behind his ear, and
no match would come near it. More than once in the Three Parrots a
pedlar from Lige, or a drover who had brought to the valley some of
the small cattle of the hills, would offer him a box from which he
would take two, one to smoke and one to keep. In turn he would give
away cigarettes which he had rolled himself, and some went to very
special people, who did not smoke them, but carried them with them in
their travels, and in the end handed them secretly to somebody else. If
such cigarettes had been unrolled, it would have been found that the
paper was stiffer than the ordinary and more opaque, and that on the
inner side next the tobacco there was something written in a small fine
hand. Jules himself could write this hand, and practised it late at
night in his cubby-hole of a bedroom next to Widow Raus's cow-shed.

These cigarettes wandered far, most of them beyond the frontier. A girl
who had been a mannequin in a Paris shop took some of them to Holland;
some went into the heavens with the airmen whom Jules met in the dark
of the night; and some journeyed to Brussels and Antwerp and then by
devious ways to the coast and over-seas. There was that in them which
would have interested profoundly the Commandant at Villers
l'Evque--notes of German troops and concentrations, and now and then
things which no one knew outside the High Command, such as the outline
for the Ypres attack in the spring of '15, and the projected Flanders
offensive which was to follow the grand assault on Verdun. . . . Only
once was Jules in danger of detection, and that was when a Wrtemberg
captain, who was a little fuddled, plucked the cigarette from his ear
and lit it. He swore that the thing drew badly and flung it on the
floor, whereupon the provident Jules picked up the stump and himself
smoked it to a finish.

Twice he went to Brussels to see his relatives, journeys arranged for
by much weary intercession with the Commandant, and duly furnished with
passes. On these visits he did not see much of his kin, but he
interviewed a motley of queer persons in back streets. Under the
strictest military rule there are always a few people who can move
about freely--women who are favoured by high officials, bagmen of the
right sympathies who keep the wheels of commerce moving, all the class,
too, who pander to human vices. With some of these Jules mixed, and
Villers would have rubbed its eyes to see how he bore himself. Instead
of a disconsidered servant he became a master, and in back rooms, which
could only be reached by difficult alleys and through a multitude of
sentries, he would give instructions which were docilely received by
men and women who were not peasants.

Once it was necessary that he should cross the Dutch border by what was
called in the slang of his underworld the "Alle Couverte." He started
his journey as an old mechanic with a permit to take up a plumber's job
at Turnhout. But long before he got to Turnhout he changed his
appearance, and he had a week in the straw of barns and many anxious
consultations with furtive people till early one dark autumn morning he
swam a canal, crawled through a gap in the electrified wire (where
oddly enough the sentry was for a moment absent) and two hours later
breakfasted with a maker of chemical manures who seemed to be expecting
him. His host spoke to him in English and lent him clothes which made
him look like a young merchants' clerk after he had shaved his beard. .
. . Jules spent four days in Holland, and at an hotel in Amsterdam had
a meeting, which lasted late into the night, with an English business
man who was interested in oil--a business man whose back was very
straight for one who spent his days in a counting-house. Jules called
him "Sir" and stood at attention till he was bidden to sit down. This
Englishman had much to tell him and much to hear, and what he heard he
wrote down in a little black notebook. He addressed Jules as "More,"
but once he slipped and called him "Melfort." Then he seemed to
recollect himself. "I think you knew Melfort," he said. "Adam Melfort.
You may be interested to hear that his D.S.O. has just been
gazetted--he is a second-lieutenant on the Special List."

Jules was absent that time for more than a month from the Raus farm. He
returned at last from Brussels with a doctor's certificate duly
countersigned by the military, which testified that he had been ill
with typhoid in the house of a second cousin. His beard had been shaved
during his fever, and his lean cheeks and the sprouting growth on his
chin were visible proof of his sickness. He returned to his old
routine, except that the Widow for a little did not work him so hard on
the farm. "That Jules!" she complained to the neighbours. "The good God
is too hard on him. He has bereft him of sense, and now He has made him
as feeble as a pullet." Also his wanderings ceased for the space of
more than a month.


Time passed and the Widow's half-witted nephew grew into the life of
the place, so that he was as familiar an object as the windmill on the
rise above the Bois de Villers. Commandant succeeded Commandant, and
the _dossier_ of Jules was duly handed on. The tides of war ebbed and
flowed. Sometimes the neighbourhood of Villers was black with troops
moving westward, and then would come a drain to the south and only a
few Landsturm companies were left in the cantonments. There was such a
drain during the summer of '16 when the guns were loud on the Somme.
But early in '17 the movement from the east began again, and Jules took
to wandering more widely than ever. Great things seemed to be preparing
on the Flanders front.

In two years he had acquired a routine and a technique. He had taken
the advice of Macandrew and thought himself so comprehensively into his
part that his instincts and half his thoughts had become those of a
Flanders peasant. In a difficulty he could trust himself to behave
naturally according to his type. Yet there remained one side of him
which was not drugged. He had to keep his mind very bright and clear,
quick to catch at gossamer threads of evidence, swift to weave them
into the proper deductions, always alert and resourceful and wholly at
his command.

It was this continual intellectual stimulus which made bearable a life
as brutish as a farm animal's. Now and then, to be sure, he had his
moments of revolt which were resolutely suppressed. He had long ago
conquered any repugnance to his physical environment, the smells, the
coarse food, the bestial monotony, the long toil in mud and filth. But
there would come times when he listened to the far-off grumbling guns
in the west with a drawn face. His friends were there, fighting cleanly
in the daylight, while he was ingloriously labouring in the shadows. He
had moods when he longed desperately for companionship. British
prisoners would pass on their way to Germany, heavy-eyed men, often
wounded and always weary, who tried to keep their heads high. He would
have given his soul for a word with them. And once he saw in such a
batch some men of his own regiment, including an officer who had joined
along with him. The mere sound of English speech was torture. In those
moods he had no source of comfort save in the bare conviction that he
must stick to his duty. At night on his bed he could recapture no
healing memories of Eilean Bn. He was so deep in a hideous rut that
he could not see beyond it to his old world.

He had two experiences which shook his foundations. Once at a midnight
rendezvous with an English aeroplane there was a hitch in taking-off,
an alarm was given, and soldiers from a German post appeared at the
edge of the meadow. Jules knew that with his help the machine could get
away, but it would mean a grave risk of discovery. As it was, he obeyed
the airman's hoarse injunction, "For God's sake clear out--never mind
me," and, crawling down a little brook, found safe hiding in the
forest. He saw the airman badly wounded and carried off into captivity,
but not before he had reduced the 'plane to ashes; and he realised that
he could have saved him. That was a bitter draught of which the taste
long remained. It was no good reminding himself that he had done his
duty, when that duty seemed a defiance of every honest human
inclination. . . .

The other experience was worse. There was a girl who had been a
prostitute in Lille, and who served in an estaminet on the Brussels
road. She was one of his helpers--M 23 on the register of his
underworld. Now a certain Bavarian sergeant, who desired to be her
lover, but whom she had repulsed, discovered her in some small act of
treachery to the authorities which was no part of Jules's own affair.
He exacted his revenge to the full, and Jules happened to enter the
estaminet when the sergeant and another soldier were in the act of
arresting her. They made a brutal business of it, the sergeant had her
arms twisted behind her back, and her face was grey with fear and pain.
For an instant Jules forgot his part, the simper left his mouth, his
jaw set, and he ran to her aid. But the girl was wiser than he. She
flung at him a string of foul names, and the black eyes under the
tinted lids blazed a warning. He had to submit to be soundly cuffed by
the soldiers, and to see the woman dragged screaming into a covered
waggon. After that it took him a long time to recover his peace of
mind. The words of the old man in the Northamptonshire village were his
chief comfort. "You must be prepared to sacrifice much that you think
honourable and of good report if you would fulfil the whole Law."

On a certain day in March '17 an urchin from the village brought Jules
a message which had been left for him by a farmer from the Sambre
side--that he had better bestir himself about the summering of the
young beasts. It was an agreed password, and it made Jules knit his
brows, for it meant that the long chain of intelligence which he
supervised was in danger. That night he went on his travels and
presently his fears were confirmed. The enemy had discovered one link
and might discover the whole, for the interconnection was close, unless
his suspicions could be switched on to a different track.

Three nights later Jules found a British aeroplane at a place agreed on
for emergency meetings, meetings appointed by a very delicate and bold
method which was only to be used in an hour of crisis. There was a
passenger beside the pilot, an officer in a great blanket coat, who sat
hunched on the ground and listened with a grim face to Jules's story.

"What devil's own luck!" he said. "At this time of all others! The
Arras affair as you know is due in three weeks--and there are others to
follow. We simply cannot do without your crowd. Have you anything to
suggest?"

"Yes," was the answer. "I have thought it all out, and there is one
way. The enemy is on the alert and must be soothed down. That can be
done only by giving him good ground for his suspicions--but it must not
be the right ground. We want a decoy. You follow me, sir?"

The other nodded. "But what--or rather who?" he asked.

"Myself. You see, sir, I think I have done my work here. The machine is
working well, and I can safely hand over the direction of it to S. S. I
have taught him all I know, and he's a sound fellow. It's the machine
that matters, not me, so my proposal is that to save the machine I draw
suspicion on myself. I know the Germans pretty well, and they like to
hunt one hare at a time. I can so arrange it that every doubt and
suspicion they entertain can be made to fasten on me. I will give them
a run for their money, and after that S. S. and his lads will be
allowed to function in peace."

"Gad, that's a sporting notion," said the officer. "But what about
yourself? Can you keep out of their hands long enough?"

"I think so. I know the countryside better than most people, and I have
a good many possible lairs. I shall want a clear week to make
arrangements, for they are bound to be rather complicated. For one
thing I must get Mother Raus to a hole where she cannot be found. Then
I press the button and become a fugitive. I think I can count on
keeping the hounds in full cry for a week."

"Won't it be hard to pick you up if the pace is hot?"

"I don't want to be picked up. I must draw the hunt as far east as
possible--away from the front. That will make S. S. and his machine
more secure."

The other did not reply for a little.

"You realise that if you're caught it's all up with you?" he said at
length.

"Of course. But that has been true every moment during the past two
years. I'm only slightly speeding up the risks. Besides, I don't think
I shall be caught."

"You'll try for Holland?"

"Holland or Germany. It will probably take some time."

The officer stood up and glanced at his luminous wrist-watch. "We
should be safe here for the next hour. I want all the details of the
new lay-out--S. S. I mean."

When this conference was finished he turned to Jules and offered his
hand.

"You are right. It's the only way, and a big part of the fate of the
war hangs on it. I won't wish you good luck, for that's too feeble for
such an occasion. But I'd like to say this to you, More. I've seen many
gallant things done in my time, and I've met many brave men, but by
God! for sheer cold-blooded pluck I never knew the like of you. If you
win out, I shall have a good deal to say about that."


Two days later the Widow Raus set off for Brussels to visit her
relations. She took with her a great basket of eggs and butter, and she
got a lift in a German transport waggon to save the railway fare.
Thereafter she disappeared, and though her whereabouts were sought by
many they were never discovered. She did not emerge into the light
again till a certain day in December 1918, when she was one of many
women thanked by her King, and was given a red ribbon to wear on her
ample bosom.

Left alone at the farm, Jules went on his travels for two days, during
which he had interviews with many people in retired places. Then he
returned and showed himself in the Three Parrots. But that night he
left the farm, which was occupied next morning by soldiers who were in
a hurry. They ransacked every room, slit the mattresses, pulled up the
floors, probed in straw heaps in the outhouses. There were wild rumours
in the village. Jules the simpleton had, it appeared, been a spy--some
said an Englishman--and a confederate had betrayed him. A damning
message from him had been found, for it seemed he could write, and he
had been drawn into rash talk by a woman in the German pay. Much of the
leakage to the Allies of vital secrets had been traced to him. He would
be taken soon, of course, and set up against a wall--there was no hope
of escape from the fine-meshed net which enveloped the land. But the
bravery of it! Many a villager wished he had been kinder to the angel
they had entertained unawares, and dolefully awaited the news of his
end.

It did not come, for Jules seemed to have slipped out of the world. "He
has been taken," said one rumour. "He will be taken," said all. But the
best-informed knew nothing for certain. Only the discipline was
uncomfortably tightened in the countryside, and the German officers
looked darkly on every peasant they met. "Curse that Jules!" some began
to say. "He has only made our bondage more burdensome."

Meantime Jules was far away. He had made his plans with care, and began
by drawing the hunt northward as if he were making for Brussels. The
first day he took pains to show himself at places from which the news
could be carried. Then he doubled back to the Meuse valley, and in the
dark, in a miller's cellar, shaved his beard, and was transformed into
a young woodcutter who spoke the patois of the hills and was tramping
to Lige, with papers all complete, to a job in a timber yard. His
plan was to change his appearance again in Lige, and, having muddied
the trail, to get to Antwerp, where certain preparations had been made
in advance.

But on one point he had miscalculated. The chase became far closer than
he had foreseen, for Belgium was suddenly stirred to a fury of
spy-hunting. The real Jules had been lost sight of somewhere in the
beet-fields of Gembloux, but every stranger was a possible Jules, and a
man had to be well-accredited indeed before he could move a step
without suspicion. He realised that he simply could not afford to be
arrested, or even detained, so he was compelled to run desperate risks.

The story of his month's wanderings was never fully told, but these are
the main points in it.

In Lige the woodcutter only escaped arrest on suspicion by slipping
into a little civilian hospital where he knew the matron, and being in
bed with the blankets up to his chin and bandages round his forehead
when the military police arrived in quest of him. . . . He travelled by
rail to Malines as a young doctor who had taken a Berlin degree, and
was ready to discourse in excellent German on the superior medical
science of the exalted country where he had had his training. At
Malines there was danger, for his permit was not strictly in order, and
he realised that five minutes' cross-examination by a genuine doctor
would expose the nakedness of the land. So he had to sink again into
the gutter, and had a wretched week in a downpour of rain doing odd
jobs among the market gardens, where there was a demand for labour. He
was now a Dutch subject, speaking abominable French, and had been
provided with papers by a little man who wore a skull-cap, was rarely
sober, kept a disreputable pawnshop, and was known to certain people by
a letter and a numeral. . . .

He tramped his way to Antwerp, and there suffered so severe an
interrogation that he did not return for his _permission de sjour_.
Instead he found lodging in a street near the docks, where his
appearance was considerably improved by the attentions of a lady of
doubtful fame who had many friends. He was still a Dutchman, but of a
higher class, for he had now a good black coat and a white collar, and
his papers showed that he was a clerk in a Rotterdam office, who had
come to Antwerp on his firm's business. He had permission to return to
Holland, a permission which expired two days ahead.

Then, as bad luck would have it, he fell ill--the first time in two
years. The drenchings in the rain and the scanty food had reduced his
vitality, and he caught some infection in his squalid lodgings. For
twenty-four hours he was in a high fever, and when he rose he could
scarcely stagger. He dared not delay. If he stayed he must go to
hospital, and there he would suffer a stern inquisition. As it was,
before he had the strength to move, he had outstayed by one day the
limits of his permit. . . . There was nothing for it but to take the
risk. With a blinding headache, and legs that gave at the knees, and a
deadly oppression on his chest, he took the tramway which jolted him to
the frontier. There he was examined by the German post.

"Back you go," said the sergeant. "You have outstayed your permitted
time. This permit must be corrected at the office of the Military
Governor."

"Let him pass," said another, who seemed to have more authority. "The
Dutchman is sick--mortally sick. We have no use for another bloody
consumptive."

The Dutch sentries did no more than glance at his papers. That
afternoon he took the train for Rotterdam, drove to a good hotel, and
sent a message to a man he knew. Then for the next month he descended
into the pit of pneumonia and very slowly climbed up the farther side.



III

Adam took a long time to recover his strength. There were friends who
came to sit with him when he was permitted to receive visitors, one
especially who was of a family long settled in Java, and whose dark
colouring and yellow-tinged eyeballs suggested a dash of native blood.
He called himself Lassom, and seemed to be a man of influence, for he
managed to procure little comforts which were hard to come by in that
difficult time. On his watch-chain he wore a little amulet of ebony and
silver. From him the convalescent got the first news of the progress of
the war on all fronts, for hitherto he had been shut up in a narrow
enclave. Lassom, whose name had been Macandrew in the office near
Leadenhall Street, required an exact report of all that had happened
during the past two years in the neighbourhood of Villers l'Evque.

Once an Englishman came to see Adam as he sat in a corner of the hotel
balcony in the sunshine of early summer. "In the Army List," he told
him, "you still figure as a second-lieutenant on the Special List.
That, however, may not be for long. By the way, they have given you a
bar to your D.S.O. for your last performance. I take it that for some
time you have been shooting at your limit, as the gunners say. Well,
you won't have anything so arduous for a bit--anyhow, till you're fit
again. Lassom will give you your instructions when you are ready, and
will make all arrangements."

The Englishman was a friendly person, and showed himself ready to
gossip, but the man whom he called John More seemed curiously
uninterested. The news about the bar to his D.S.O. left him cold. The
truth was that he was suffering from a heavy drop in mental vitality.
He had been like a squirrel going steadily round a cage, and he found
it hard to realise the world outside the bars, or to think of any other
form of motion but the treadmill. The fact that so far he had succeeded
gave him no satisfaction. Lassom divined his mood and took the best way
of doctoring it. Having got the information he wanted, he strove to
draw the convalescent out of the abyss of the immediate past and to
wash from his memory the Raus farm and all it stood for. There were
bigger duties before him, he said, and he tried to divert his thoughts,
so to speak, from minor tactics to major strategy, thereby giving his
mind new subjects to play with. But above all he looked after his body,
and in the beginning of June carried him off to a village on the Texel
coast.

There, in a little painted wooden inn above the salty dunes, the
invalid became whole again in mind and body. But it was not the
wholesome food and the tonic sea winds that worked the cure, but the
fact that he had recovered Eilean Bn. Something in the tang of the
air, the scents, and the crying of curlews along the shore did the
trick, and Adam, who had long been excluded from the happy isle, found
that once more his dreams and his waking visions carried him swiftly to
its greenery. . . . Nigel was there unchanged; it was two years since
he had been able to see the child clearly, but now he heard his voice,
felt the firm cool clutch of his hand, saw the grey eyes light up with
recognition. . . . The boy accompanied him in his rambles, a docile
little figure trotting at his heels. It was to the west side of Sgurr
Bn that they went most often, where the magical western ocean always
sounded in their ears. But they never came within actual sight of its
waters, so he could not show Nigel the far skerries, the black ribs of
wave-scourged basalt where the grey seals lived. There was always a
ridge of hill or a thicket which shut off the view. But Adam felt no
impatience. Some day he would cross the last rise and descend upon
those sands which were whiter than Barra or Iona.

One day he began to bestir himself and asked about his next job.

"Ha!" cried the delighted Lassom. "For this I have been waiting. You
are cured now, and we talk business. In your next job you enter Germany
with the approbation of her Imperial Government. You will be a Danish
_commis-voyageur_, who is confided in by the authorities. You will give
these authorities information, and most of it will be true--but not
all. You will likewise gather information, which must all be true. You
will not be alone as in Flanders, for I accompany you. But for the
purpose it is necessary that we approach the Fatherland by what you
call a voluptuous curve. Next week we cross the Skager Rack.

"You have been happy these last days," Lassom said that night after
supper. "Your eyes bear witness. You have been seeing pretty pictures.
Tell me."

Then for the first time Adam told another of Eilean Bn--not much,
only a sentence or two about his childhood's home, and its lonely
peace. But Lassom understood.

"Ah," he said, "it is as I guessed. We have each our Jerusalem."


The two men had a difficult journey, mostly in coasting smacks, whose
skippers demanded a great price before they would tempt the infested
seas. In the end they reached Gothenburg, where a noted merchant of the
place, who had a Scots name, but whose family had been Swedish for
three centuries, assisted them to a change in their mode of life. Adam
became a high-coloured business man in early middle age, who wore horn
spectacles like an American--he professed to have been much in
America--dressed carefully, and had a neat blond moustache. He spoke
Swedish like a Dane, said his host. He travelled in wood-pulp
propositions, and was minutely instructed in the business by the
merchant with the Scots name. Presently he knew enough to talk
technicalities, and he met at dinner various local citizens in the same
line of business, to whom he paraded his experiences in Britain,
Canada, and the States. Lassom also was different. He had let his beard
grow, and had trimmed it to a point, and he too wore glasses. He was an
American citizen of German descent, and of an extreme German
patriotism--by profession a lecturer in chemistry at a Middle Western
university. His country's entry into the war on the Allied side had
left him without a home, and driven him for comfort to pure science. He
had much to say of new processes in the making of chemical wood-pulp,
which he hoped to perfect. Altogether a gentle academic figure, who
woke up now and then to deliver an impassioned harangue on the
wickedness of the world.

The two went to Stockholm at different times and by different routes.
In that city of the isles Adam found himself in a society which was
strongly sympathetic to Germany, and he met many unobtrusive folk in
whom it was easy to recognise German agents. Presently with some of
them he began to have highly confidential conversations, especially
when Lassom arrived, for Lassom seemed to have a vast acquaintanceship.
One day in an office on the top floor of a fine new apartment-house he
had an interview with a thin, grey-bearded man, who spoke openly of his
visiting Germany. "It can be arranged," he was told, "for one who is
discreet and well-accredited, such as you, Herr Randers." He bent his
brows on Adam, and his small bright eyes seemed to hold a world of
menace and warning. "You are neutral, yes," he continued, "but
neutrality is no protection for the bungler--or the traitor." He gave
him certain provisional instructions with the same heavily charged
voice and the same lowering brows.

Lassom, when he was told of the interview, laughed. "That is according
to plan," he said. "That is he whom we call the Cossack. Formidable, is
he not? He has also another name and a number, for he is one of us. He
is a Czech, and the Czechs, having no fatherland at present, are the
greatest secret agents in this war."

Then they went to Copenhagen, a precarious journey, and in Copenhagen
Adam spent two weeks of crowded busyness. His Danish was fluent, but,
said his friends, the speech of a man who had been much about the world
and had picked up uncouth idioms. But oftenest he found himself talking
German, for that tongue was favoured by the men--and women--whom he met
by appointment at odd hours in back rooms in hotels and suburban
tea-houses and private flats. Lassom did not appear at these
conferences, but he was always at hand to advise. "It is necessary that
you have open communications behind you," he said, "for you are a
channel between an enclosed Germany and the world--one of a thousand
channels. You must have a conduit both for your exports and your
imports."

Adam met, too, many people in Copenhagen who made no secret of their
sympathy with the Allies, and with such he had to be on his best
behaviour. The florid bagman had no bias one way or another; the war
was not his war, and would to Heaven it was over, that honest men might
get to work again! "These folk do not like you," Lassom told him, "but
it is necessary that the others should know that you have access to
their company. . . . Now, my friend, to work. There is much to talk
over between us, for the day after to-morrow you cross the frontier."

Adam left Copenhagen alone. But, when five days later he sat in the
lounge of a Cologne hotel, he saw Lassom at the other side of the room
behind a newspaper.


Flanders had been lonely enough, but this new life was a howling desert
for Adam, because he could not even keep company with himself. For
every waking hour he was on the stretch, since he lived in the midst of
a crowd and had to maintain a tight clutch on his wits. No more days
and nights of wandering when he could forget for a little the anxieties
of his task. His existence was passed in a glare like that of an
arc-lamp.

Lassom he saw regularly, but only for hurried moments, for Lassom was
constantly on the road. He recrossed the Dutch and Danish frontiers
frequently; sometimes the Swiss too, for he was busy in mysterious
negotiations with neutrals on the supply of vital chemicals. Adam
himself had a double rle. He was supposed to be engaged in various
branches of neutral trade, and carried samples which, with Lassom's
assistance, were periodically renewed. But his main task in the eyes of
the authorities was to be the means of bringing them news through
neighbouring countries of the Allied plans. This meant that he, too,
occasionally passed the borders, and was fed with tit-bits of
confidential information by several people in Zurich and Copenhagen.
These tit-bits were mostly of small importance, but they were
invariably true, and their accuracy was his prime credential. But now
and then came pieces of weightier news, which he made a point of
offering diffidently, as if not perfectly sure of their source. Yet, on
the credit of the many accurate details he had furnished, these other
things were as a rule believed--and acted upon--and their falsity did
not shake his credit. For example, there was the report of a British
attack due at Lens in February, '18, which led to a wasteful and futile
German concentration.

That was one side. The other was not known to the stiff soldiers who
received him for regular conferences and treated him so
condescendingly. All the time he was busy collecting knowledge for
export--knowledge of the condition of the people and the state of the
popular mind, and word of military operations, which great folk
sometimes discussed in highly technical language in his presence,
believing them beyond his comprehension. It was Adam's news that
largely filled those desperately secret reports on Germany's internal
condition which circulated among the inner Cabinets of the Allies. Now
and then he sent them fateful stuff--the story, for instance, of the
exact sector and day of the great German assault of March, '18, which
the British staff alone believed. Lassom was the principal agency for
getting this information out of Germany, but sometimes impersonal means
had to be found--sealed Kodak films, the inner packets of chewing-gum,
whatever, in the hands of innocent-looking returning nationals, might
be trusted to escape the eye of the frontier guards.

Adam had still another task. There was much ingenious Allied propaganda
already circulating in the country, based for the most part on
Switzerland. It was not anti-German but anti-war, and its distributors
were largely members of the Socialist Left Wing. He had to keep an eye
on this, and now and then to direct it. It was a delicate business, for
it would have been ruin to one of his antecedents to be seen speaking
to the intellectuals of the pavement. Yet this was the only duty from
which he extracted any comfort, for each encounter involved a direct
personal risk which steadied his nerves.

For the rest he hated his work bitterly--far more bitterly than at any
moment of his years in Flanders. There was no groove to get into where
one could move automatically, since every day, almost every hour,
demanded a new concentration of his powers. It was work which he
loathed, dirty work, all the dirtier for being done under conditions of
comparative bodily comfort. He had nothing to complain of; he lived as
well and slept as soft as other people; he had even a certain amount of
consideration paid to him; the risk, so long as he kept his head, was
not great, and he had a task which kept his mind working at high
tension. There were immense ultimate dangers, no doubt, but they did
not come within his immediate vision. What irked him was the necessity
of thinking another's thoughts and living another's life every minute
of his waking hours. He felt the man who had been Adam Melfort slipping
away from him, and his place being taken by a hard, glossy, fraudulent
being whom he detested.

Now and then he had narrow escapes which helped his self-respect. Once
he was all but caught in the kitchen of a man who had a cobbler's shop
in Freiburg, and who had for some time been closely sought in
Westphalia. Adam got out of a back window, and had two days of
circuitous tramping in snowy forests before he was certain that he had
shaken off pursuit. Twice, when his secret information had proved
false, he looked into the barrel of a pistol in the hand of a furious
_Erster Generalstabsoffizier_. More than once he was rigorously
examined and every detail of his _dossier_ tested. But he had grown an
adept at this business, and each syllable of his bourgeois bewilderment
rang true.

Once, when his soul was sick within him, he laid it bare to Lassom.

"I have learned nothing," he told him, "except to be an actor of
character parts, and to keep the shutter down on my thoughts."

"Not so," said the other. "You have sharpened your mind to a razor
edge, and made steel hawsers of your nerves. You have acquired the
patience of God. You have taught yourself to look at life uncoloured by
the personal equation. What more would you have?"

"Tell me, am I honestly and truly serving my country?"

"You served her nobly in Flanders--that you know as well as I."

"But here?"

Lassom looked grave. "Here you are worth to her--how shall I put
it?--more than a division of good troops. More, I think, than an army
corps."


There came an hour in May '18 when Lassom arrived by night and sat on
his bed.

"There are commands for you to leave Germany," he said. "You have
finished your task. This people is breaking, for the last gambler's
throw has failed, and your work now lies elsewhere."

"Am I suspected?"

"Not yet. But suspicion is coming to birth, and in a week, my friend,
it might be hard for you to cross the frontier."

"And you?"

"I stay. I have still work to do."

"You will be in danger?"

"Maybe. That is no new thing."

"Then I will not leave you."

"You must. You add to my danger, if danger there is. I am a man of many
shifts, remember. Also it is your duty to obey orders." He passed to
Adam a slip of paper with a few words on it, which Adam read carefully
and then burned.

"_Au revoir_," said Lassom gaily. "We will meet some day outside
Jerusalem."

On the fourth morning after that visit Adam was speaking English to two
men in a small hotel in a side street of Geneva. A few hours earlier,
in the courtyard of a military prison in a certain Rhineland city, a
small man with a pointed beard and a nervous mouth had confronted a
firing squad. On that occasion he did not look down, as had been his
habit, but faced the rifles with steady, smiling eyes.



IV

On the quay at Marseilles, as Adam was embarking in a converted liner,
he met Lyson, the brother-officer whom we have seen waiting in the Pall
Mall club for the verdict. They said much to each other before they had
to separate.

Lyson, who was on his way to Palestine, was now an acting
lieutenant-colonel on the staff. He looked curiously at Adam's Special
List badge, second-lieutenant's star, and undecorated breast.

"I suppose your rig is part of the game," he said, "but it is a little
behind the times. What has become of your order ribbons?"

Adam smiled. "They're not much use in this show. I have been on enemy
soil till a week ago, and I fancy I am going back to it."

"Still, you're among friends for the present. I should have thought too
that you'd take your proper rank on your travels." When Adam looked
puzzled, he exclaimed. "Didn't you know? It was in the _Gazette_ months
ago. You have been reinstated in the regiment without any loss of
seniority. Also they gave you a brevet."

Adam was surprised that the news excited him so little. The regiment
and all it stood for seemed a thing very small and far-away. The name
on his passport was John More, and he did not trouble to have it
altered. But he held his head a little higher among the crowd of
officers, mostly very young, who for the next fortnight voyaged in his
company over dangerous seas.


At Salonika after various interviews he was handed over to a Greek
doctor, whose profession seemed to embrace many queer duties. In his
house he stayed for three days, and during that time he exchanged his
khaki uniform for reach-me-down flannels. Also various things were done
to his appearance. His face had become very lean, but his skin was
puffy and white from a sedentary life, so now it was stained to an even
brown. During those days he talked nothing but Turkish, and his host
had something to say about his pronunciation. Then one evening, with a
brand-new kit-bag, he embarked in a sea-plane and headed eastward. Two
days later he was in occupation of a back room in the house of a man
called Kuriotes, a Greek fruit-merchant in the town of Kassaba, where
the railway line from Smyrna climbs to the Anatolian plateau.

Here he suffered a complete metamorphosis and acquired a new set of
papers. It appeared that he was a Hanoverian by birth, who had for ten
years been in business in Stambul--there were all kinds of details
about his past life set down very fully in close German typescript. His
identity card was signed by the German Ambassador, and stamped by the
Turkish Ministry of the Interior. It seemed that he had been
commissioned, and had served on the Balkan front as an interpreter, and
was now to act in the same capacity with a Turkish division.

To the back room came a certain Circassian colonel, Aziz by name, who
commanded a battalion in the same division, and from him Adam learned
many things. One was that the best German troops had been withdrawn
from the Palestine front to stop the gaps in Europe, and that many of
the guns were following. The latter were being replaced by an odd
assortment, including Skoda mountain howitzers which had once been
destined for the Hedjaz. The word of Germany was now all in all, and
Enver was sulking. But the great Liman was not loved, and the Turks
were very weary of the business. "They will send us south," said the
colonel, "but if Allah wills, the war may be over before we reach
Aleppo." He winked, for he had been much in Egypt and had picked up
foreign manners.

Adam joined his division at Afium Karahissar on the great Bagdad
railway, and found his task as interpreter a delicate one. The Austrian
officers of the Skoda batteries were sullen and puzzled, and
perpetually quarrelling with the divisional staff. . . . But bit by bit
he discovered other duties. His business now was not that of a spy but
of a fomenter of mischief, a begetter of delays--for great things were
preparing in the south, where Liman was holding a long line in face of
an enemy who showed an ominous quiescence. Adam had been instructed in
his rle and he found many helpers. Aziz, for one, who during the
endless delays of the journey was very busy and often absent from camp.
Everywhere in the army there seemed to be disaffection, and the
countryside was plagued with brigandage and full of deserters and
broken men. Purposeless brigandage it seemed to be, for there was a
perpetual destruction of bridges and culverts and telegraphs, which can
have offered no booty to the destroyers. Adam, as the only German
officer in the division, was the recipient of the complaints and curses
of many furious Teutonic colleagues. More than once he was placed under
arrest, and was only released by the intercession of his corps
commander. He was set down by his German superiors as lazy and
incompetent, one whose natural loutishness had been swollen by the
idleness of his years in Stambul. Yet he was quietly busy, and in his
own purposes he was rather efficient.

Orders from headquarters, frequently countermanded and habitually
misinterpreted, kept the division north of the Bulgar Dagh till early
August, and it did not reach Aleppo till the beginning of September.
During the summer heats Adam had been a good deal away from
headquarters by permission of Colonel Aziz, and had been in many
strange places and among many queer folk in his task of tangling up the
connections which linked the embarrassed Liman to his base. . . . These
were laborious and difficult days, but he found them curiously
exhilarating. He felt himself within the electric zone of war, an actor
in a drama which was moving to some stupendous climax. The toil of it
rejuvenated a body which had been too long cramped and under-exercised.
Moreover, he was among novel scenes, and his interest in the unfamiliar
revived in him. Almost he became young again.

By way of motor-car, motor-bicycle or weedy horse, and sometimes on his
own feet, he prowled about a land which had been for many thousands of
years the cockpit of war. It was all pared and gnawed to the bone. He
found everywhere irrigated fields where the water-furrows were dry, and
orchards which had been felled for firewood. He entered towns where the
lattices hung broken, and the mud walls crumbled, and only a lean child
or a beggar showed in the narrow streets. He had days of blistering
heat, when the sky was copper above and the earth iron below, and when
hot winds stirred the baked mud into dust-devils. He had days, too,
when bitter blasts blew from the north-east, or when the rain storms
swept in battalions till he could almost cheat himself into the belief
that he was on a Scots moor and that the tamarisk scrub was heather.
The open air and the weather's moods put new vigour into his body, and
never for one moment was he sick or sorry. There was disease everywhere
among the troops, but, while his colleagues went down like ninepins
with fever and dysentery and heat-stroke, Adam in his shabby field-grey
went steadily about his business. "You are a mountaineer like my own
folk," said the admiring Aziz. "You are as hard as the hillside quartz."

As they moved south he began to mix with new types--shaggy Druses,
sleek Damascenes, Arabs from the Syrian desert as thin and fine as
sword-blades. His imagination caught fire, and he had visions of the
vast hidden life astir behind the front where Liman played his
mechanical game of war. That life was breaking loose from the game, and
it was his task to expedite the breaking. For a blow was in
preparation, and its force must be aided by defection in the rear, so
that when it fell it would strike not a solid but a hollow shell.


The blow came, as all the world knows, at dawn on the 19th of
September, by which time Adam's division had not reached the Asian
corps in Djevad's Eighth Army to which it had been attached as reserve.
It was still a mile or two short of Nablus. Presently it was caught up
in the backwash of the great defeat, and turned its face northward.
Down upon it came the fog of war, nay the deeper fog of a pell-mell
retreat. . . . These were busy days for Adam--and for Aziz and for many
obscurer folk. There was a German staff-officer who used to appear
mysteriously at cross-roads and give authoritative orders to fleeing
columns. He must have been raw to his job, for most of his orders
contrived to shepherd those who obeyed them into the arms of Allenby's
terrible horsemen.

Adam had one moment of indecision. Liman was routed, so his task must
be over. Was not the next step for him to be picked up by the pursuit
and restored to his own people? But a thought deterred him. He did not
know what might be happening in the north. There might be a stand
beyond the Lebanon at Homs or Aleppo, or in Anatolia itself, and work
for him to do. So he clung to his fleeing division, and struggled with
it past Rayat to the broad-gauge line, and across the Orontes till the
minarets of Aleppo rose above its orchards--on past the junction with
the Bagdad railway, and up the long slopes of the hills which circle
Alexandretta. The division was now only a rabble of scared and starving
men, and soon he was convinced that Turkey's last shot was fired, and
that for her broken army not even the shores of the Marmora would be a
sanctuary. His work was done.

He realised something more--that it was high time for him to go. Aziz
had left him, and there were ugly faces turned on him among the troops.
He was a reminder of the race that had led the children of Islam into
the mire. One night he had to run for it to escape a rifle bullet at
the hands of a crazed sergeant. He had for some days dropped his
uniform, retaining only his field-boots, and wore a ragged Turkish
tunic and greatcoat. He had made ready, too, a slender packet of food,
and he had a map, a compass, and twenty rounds for his revolver. Thus
equipped, he hid for one night in the scrub of a nullah, and next
morning started, like Xenophon's Ten Thousand, on his march to the sea.

For three weeks he was a hunted man, and had his fill of the hardships
which those British soldiers suffered who escaped from a Turkish
prison-camp. To be sure, there was no pursuit, but there was a more
menacing thing, a land where all order and discipline had gone, and a
stranger was like a sheep among wolf-packs. The countryside was
starving, with the people fighting like wild beasts for food. Also it
was strewn with broken men on the same desperate errand as himself,
striking out frantically for safety like a weak swimmer in a heavy sea.
He moved only by night, and in these weeks he learned the shifts of
primeval man whose mind is narrowed to a single purpose--the purpose of
the meanest sentient thing. He had schooled his body to need the
minimum of food, but even that little was in constant jeopardy. He had
twice to fight for his life with famished dogs, and used up four of his
pistol cartridges. Once he stumbled on a group of Kurdish soldiers who
had set up as bandits, and only the fortunate approach of a moonless
night enabled him to escape. Every day he felt his strength growing
less, so he husbanded it like a miser. Lightheadedness was what he
feared: too often the scrub and the hills would dance about him, and he
would lie face down, his fingers pressed on his throbbing eyeballs,
till he won touch with earth again.

It was a nightmare time, but he was not unhappy, for a veil seemed to
be lifting from his horizon. He had recaptured his own country. The
most alien sights and scents were translated into the idiom of home. As
he lay in the hot tamarisk at midday he smelled thyme and bracken, and
under a sky of glittering stars he could make believe that he was
belated on some familiar moorland. Especially in rain could he retrieve
these links, for the odour of wet earth seemed to re-create for him a
whole world of ancient comfortable things. His body might be stretched
to its ultimate endurance, but his mind was at peace. . . .

One afternoon he came over a scarp of hill and looked down at last on
the sea. There was a little bay below him and a few fishers' huts; off
shore lay a British destroyer, from which a watering-party had just
landed. He looked at this assurance of safety with no quickening of the
pulse, for he was too weary for such emotion. Besides, he had somehow
expected it.

He was taken on board and met by a brisk young lieutenant. There had
been a conversation between the lieutenant and a petty officer.
"Escaped prisoner, I suppose. Good God, what a scarecrow! I suppose we
must take charge of the poor devil. Bring him along at once."

A few words from Adam sent the lieutenant's hand to his cap.

"Adam Melfort! Of course I know all about you, sir! What almighty luck
that we put in to this God-forgotten hole! You want a long drink, and
then a bath, and a square meal, and then you ought to sleep for a week.
I can lend you some kit. . . . Hold on, sir. Perhaps you haven't heard
the news. It came through to us last night. The jolly old war is over.
Yesterday morning Germany got down from her perch."

But Adam scarcely listened, for he was in a happy dream. The lapping of
green water and the tang of salt had carried him over great tracts of
space and time. He had found Eilean Bn.




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      III


I

In the smoking-room of the club where this story opened Christopher
Stannix sat on a warm June evening. It was the day of the Peace
celebrations in London, when the returning generals had passed through
the streets, and from Pall Mall came the shuffling sound of homing
spectators. The war had grizzled Stannix's thick dark hair above the
temples, and had slightly rounded his shoulders, for he had spent four
years at office work. Also it had hollowed his cheeks, and made faint
pencillings at the corners of his eyes. His face was that of a man a
decade older than his age. The lawyers' primness of mouth had gone, for
he had given up the Bar, and, having been in the House of Commons since
1913, had now turned definitely to politics. He was one of the younger
men who were beginning to make their mark in the dull and docile
Coalition Parliament.

Lyson, his companion, was in uniform, for he had been engaged in the
day's procession. He was skimming an evening paper while the other
ordered tea, and dispensing fragments of news.

"Hullo!" he said, "I see Falconet is lost. No word of him for four
months, and he is more than a month overdue at his base. You remember
him, Kit? The long American who had a hospital at Arville? Began the
war as a French airman, till he smashed himself up. He was a bit of a
nuisance to us at G.H.Q."

"He was a bit of a nuisance to us at the War Office," said Stannix. "I
never saw a man with his temper so handy. I daresay that was due to his
left arm giving him neuritis. Also he was some kind of
multi-millionaire and used to getting his own way. Well I remember his
lean twitching face and his eye like a moulting eagle's. Where do you
say he has got to now?"

"That's the puzzle. He has gone over the edge somewhere in Northern
Greenland. He always made a hobby of exploring unholy corners of the
earth and financed several expeditions, and he had some theory about
Greenland, so, as soon as he was certain that the Allies were winning,
he bolted off to have a look at it. Funny business, if you come to
think of it, changing the racket of the front for the peace of an
Arctic desert! And now he has gone and lost himself, and this paper
says they're talking of a relief party."

"We're in for a lot of that sort of thing," said Stannix. "There's
going to be all kinds of queer by-products of the war. You know how
after a heavy day you are sometimes too tired to sleep. Well, that is
the position of a good many to-day--too tired to rest--must have some
other kind of excitement--running round like sick dogs till the real
crash comes. The big problem for the world is not economic but
psychological--how to get men's minds on an even keel again."

"I daresay that is true," said the other. "But the odd thing is that it
is not the people who had the roughest time that are the most
unsettled. There was a little chap at home who was the local postman.
He enlisted at the start in a Fusilier battalion and had four of the
most hellish years that ever fell to the lot of man--Gallipoli and
France--blown-up, buried, dysentery, trench-fever, and most varieties
of wounds. To-day he is back at his old job, toddling round the
villages, and you would never guess from his looks or his talk that he
had been out of Dorset. . . . Then take Adam Melfort. I suppose he had
about as nerve-racking a show as anybody, but you couldn't tell it on
him. I ran across him the other day, and, except that he was fined down
to whalebone and catgut, he was just the same quiet, placid,
considering old bird."

Stannix smiled. "Funny that you should mention Adam, for he was the
case I had chiefly in mind. With him it's not so simple an affair as
your postman. You see, he was in the war, but not _of_ it. He stood a
little way apart and got a bird's-eye view. For him it was only a spell
of training for something much bigger, and now he is looking at the
world like a philosopher and wondering what his real job is to be."

Lyson's face kindled into interest. "Tell me about Adam. You see a lot
of him, I know, and I don't often manage to run him to ground. I'd give
a good deal to get back to the old terms with him."

Stannix shook his head. "You never will. I can't myself. Adam has made
his choice. When he crashed, he decided that God meant him to drop out
of the firing-line, and had work for him somewhere in the rear. He has
gone deliberately underground, and means to stay there. That was why he
was by miles the best secret-service man we had--he took to the job
like a crusade, something to which he was specially called by the
Almighty. He is the complete philosophic fatalist, waiting for destiny
to show him his next move. He's a lonely man, if you like, but he
doesn't mind that, for he knows that it is his strength. Every
journalist is talking about the 'brotherhood of the trenches'--a silly,
rhetorical phrase, but there's something in it--people who went through
the same beastliness together did acquire a sort of common feeling.
Well, Adam had no chance of that; he was as much outside it as if he
had been a conchy. He has missed all the comfort one gets from a sense
of companionship, but he has missed, too, the confusion of the
mass-mind. He has no delusions and no sentimentalities. He is looking
at our new world with clear dispassionate eyes, like a visitor from
another planet. But, all the same, when he finds his predestined job it
will be like the releasing of a steel spring."

"By Jove, that sounds like trouble for somebody. What is it to be?
Russia?"

"It might be. He talks the language, and might put a spoke in the
Bolshy wheels. But he hasn't made up his mind--at least he hadn't last
week. He has been spending recent months having a general look round."

"Go on. Tell me," said Lyson. "I'm deeply interested."

Stannix laughed. "It was a funny business, and I saw something of it,
for I had to chaperon him in most of his investigations. You see, he
had lost touch a little with his kind, and he realised that he must
find it again if he was to be of any use. . . . The first thing was to
meet the people who had been fighting, of whom he knew nothing at all.
He saw a fairly representative lot, from the hearty fellows who had
found it rather a lark and were half sorry it was over to the damaged
sensitives who had a grievance against humanity. I fancy he did not get
much out of any of them, and decided that it would be many a day before
we could be certain what effect the war had had on our people. . . .
Then he made a tour of the serious folk--the internationalists and the
social reformers. He hung about the universities to have a look at the
young entry, and went into W.E.A. circles, and put in some time with a
Glasgow riveter. Adam was never very communicative, so I don't know
what conclusion he came to, but he did not seem to be depressed by his
experiences. . . . Oh, and he sat out a good many debates in the House
of Commons. He found them a dusty business, and used to come down from
the gallery with puzzled eyes. I wanted to get some of the politicians
to meet him, but he wouldn't have it--didn't want to hear other
people's conclusions--wanted to make his own."

"Can't we get him back into the Service?" Lyson asked. "I know he has
sent in his papers, but that could be arranged. There are twenty jobs
on hand for which he would be the spot man."

"Not a chance of it. I put that to him, for it seemed to me common
sense. I told him that he was a brilliant soldier and should stick to
the profession for which he had been trained. No earthly use. You know
that look of intelligent obstinacy which is more unshakable than the
Pyramids. 'You forget,' he said, 'that in the past four years I've had
a training for other things.'"

"A pretty desperate training," Lyson commented.

"Yes," said Stannix, "that is the right word. Remember that Adam is a
desperate man. There is nothing in Heaven or earth left for him to
fear."


One night later in the summer Stannix dined with Adam Melfort at a
restaurant. Thereafter they made a curious progress. First they went to
a meeting of a group of serious people who were perturbed about the
state of the world, and listened to a paper on the "Economics of
Victory." It was held in the drawing-room of a private house and the
paper was read by a brilliant young Oxford don who had made a high
reputation for his work abroad on behalf of the British Treasury. . . .
They did not wait for the discussion, but moved on to a newly-formed
club, patronised mainly by ex-cavalry officers, which boasted a
super-excellent American bar. There, as they drank cocktails, they
listened to the gossip of youth. Stannix knew many of the members, but
he did not introduce Adam. The talk was chiefly of money, for most of
the young men seemed to have gone into business and precociously
acquired the City jargon. They were determined to have a good time and
had somehow or other to find the cash for it. . . . Then they went to a
ball, given by a celebrated hostess who was making a resolute effort to
restore the pre-war gaiety. It was gay enough; dementedly gay, it
seemed to Adam, as he recalled the balls where he had once danced with
Camilla. The female clothes were odd, the dances were extravagant
things, the music was barbarous, and the men and women seemed to be
there not for amusement but for an anodyne. Adam and Stannix stood in a
corner and looked on.

"Isn't that Meeson?" the former asked, mentioning the name of a Cabinet
Minister.

"Yes," said Stannix. "He comes to this sort of thing, for he thinks it
smart, and smartness was beyond him in his old days in the suburbs.
There's Wendell--that man dancing with the Jewess. He comes because he
wants to be thought young--age, you know, is the chief crime to-day.
Most of the boys want to make up for the war, and the girls have four
dull years to forget. It's all perfectly natural, I suppose, but rather
foolish. Half the world is destroyed, so we caper among the ruins. You
don't seem as shocked as I expected."

"I'm not in the least shocked," was the answer. "I'm only wondering how
long it will last. We must pull up our socks pretty soon, or the rest
of the world will go."

Late that night the two sat in Stannix's rooms.

"Well, you've had your look-round," the host said. "I take it that
to-night was the last lap. I hope I took you to the right places. What
do you make of it all?"

"Nothing very clear." Adam had acquired a trick of speaking very slowly
and softly, as if words were precious and had to be respectfully
treated--a common thing with men who for a long season have had to
forgo their own language. "There must be a time of confusion--another
year at least, I should say. Everybody is self-conscious and
egotistical. Creevey to-night was not trying to solve an economic
problem, but to show how clever he was. The lads at the Pegasus have
had too much in the way of duty and want to make pets of themselves.
The dancing people were not natural--they were all trying to
make-believe and play a part. That is going on for a little while till
the ground begins to quake under them. I'm not wanted yet, I think.

"And I'm not ready myself," he went on. "I've been coming to realise
that for some time, and now I'm sure. First of all, I'm not fit enough.
. . . Oh yes, I'm fitter than you, far fitter than most people, but I'm
not in the hard training I should be in. To-day I couldn't make my body
do what it ought to do. I want some good, tough, physical toil."

"Anything else?" Stannix asked. He smiled as he looked at Adam's lean
face, his frame without an ounce of needless flesh, and the alert poise
of his head.

"Yes, I want a spell of quiet. You see, I have been living for four
years in a circus. It hasn't damaged my nerves in the ordinary
sense--they're under pretty good control--but it has made my mind
airless and stuffy. I want to get some sort of poise again, and that
means being alone. What I need is space and silence--frozen silence."

"How are you going to find it?"

"I'm on the road to it. I've been busy for weeks making arrangements
with the Danish Government and with his American relatives. The day
after to-morrow I sail for Iceland. I'm going to find Falconet."



II

On the last day of September Adam sat on a hummock of snow looking east
to where, far below Danmarks Fjord, lay a blue gash in the white
ice-cap. The cirrhus clouds of the afternoon before had been a true
augury, and all night a gale had howled round the little tent. But the
wind had blown itself out before morning, and now the air was clear and
quiet. It was the first peaceful hour he had had for days when he could
review his position.

At Shannon Island he had found the schooner which Falconet had
instructed to meet him in June. A base had been erected there like a
lumber-camp, huts and store-rooms and dog-houses, for money had not
been spared, but there was no sign of its master. Falconet had made
elaborate plans. A sealing sloop had crawled up the coast as soon as
spring opened the shore waters, and its crew had pushed on when
navigation became impossible, and had laid down depots and caches of
food at points up the coast as far north as Independence Fjord. Such
spots had been carefully marked on the latest map, which was
Rasmussen's. Falconet himself had set off with two sledges and dog
teams in March to cross the inland ice. His objective was a bay on the
extreme north shore of Greenland, of which Rasmussen had heard rumours
through the Arctic Highlanders of Thule. They called it Gundbjorns
Fjord--a curious name, thought Adam, who remembered that to the old
Norsemen Gundbjorns Reef had been the legendary edge of the world.
Falconet had his own theories about Greenland travel. He had taken but
the one companion, his stores were of a scientific compactness, his
dogs were the best that money could buy, and he held that by travelling
light he could reach his goal in early summer, replenish his supplies
from bear and musk-ox (he was a famous shot), and return by the coast
depots in time to rejoin his ship at the end of July.

But something had miscarried. Ship's parties had gone up the coast
almost as far as Kronprinz Christians Land, and had found no sign of
him. He could not be returning by the inland ice, for his food supplies
would not permit of that. His American friends had been anxious, and
Washington and Copenhagen had laid their heads together, so Adam had
found his proposal welcomed. Falconet might be ill, or he might have
had an accident; if he did not come south before the winter he would
perish; clearly someone must go and look for him. Time was of the
essence of the business, so the route must be the inland ice, the road
Falconet had himself travelled, for the coast road would mean a detour
round two sides of a triangle.

So Adam started from Shannon Island with three sledges and two
companions--one a Danish naval officer called Nelles who had been with
Koch, and the other a young American, Myburg, who had explored the
Beaufort Sea before the war. Their plan was to find Falconet somewhere
in the north of Peary Land and bring him down the coast by the chain of
depots, before the sun disappeared. If they were delayed they would
winter on Shannon Island and go home in the spring. Nine years before
Ejnar Mikkelsen had covered most of the ground in a couple of months,
and Nelles, who was the local expert, believed that, if Falconet was
alive, he could be found and brought back before the close of
September. It was arranged that in that month relays of dog-teams
should be waiting at points on the coast as far north as Danmarks Fjord.

At first fortune had been with Adam and his party. They climbed on to
the ice-cap a little south of Cape Bismarck, and, keeping the nunataks
of Dronning Louises Land on their left, travelled for five days on
tolerable ice in good weather, with few bergs to surmount and no
crevasses to delay them. Then suddenly their luck turned. A wind of 120
miles an hour blew from the east, and the plateau became the playground
of gales. They came on ice-fields like mammoth ploughlands, where they
scarcely made three miles in the day, and mountainous seracs which
would have puzzled an Alpine climber. They found valleys with lakes and
rivers of blue ice out of which they had to climb painfully. There was
trouble, too, with the dogs. Five of them one night broke into the
stores and ate one-half of the total dog-feed. Several died of gashes
from the sharp ice, and two more from eating the livers of their dead
companions. For nearly a week the party was storm-bound, lying in their
tents in the lee of an ice-scarp, while blizzard after blizzard
threatened to blow the whole outfit to Baffin's Bay.

The culminating disaster came in the fourth week out, when one of the
sledges, driven by the young American Myburg, broke through the crust
and disappeared in a bottomless abyss. Adam and Nelles made vain
efforts at rescue, and Adam had himself lowered on a cable made up of
haul-ropes into the cruel blue depths. There was no sign of life;
hundreds of feet down in the bowels of the ice-cap, man and dogs had
met their death. The tragedy was followed by a storm which delayed the
survivors for three days, and gave Nelles too good a chance to brood.
He was a dreamy morose man, and an indifferent companion, and from that
day onward Adam found his moods hard to deal with. Death and the
madness which is worse than death had cast their shadow over him.

Adam himself had found the weeks pass quickly. He had a straightforward
task--to shape a course which he more or less understood, and to
complete that course in the shortest possible time. It was only a
question of common sense, resolution and physical fitness; the
difficulties were known, and had been surmounted by many others since
the days of Henry Hudson; if each of them put out his powers to the
fullest stretch they would reach Gundbjorns Fjord, barring accidents,
and whether or not they found Falconet was in the lap of the gods. Such
was his mood at the start, and even the tragic fate of Myburg did not
greatly change it. Death was an irrelevant factor in any enterprise,
and since one could not ensure against it one must leave it out of
reckoning. His fatalism was more than a creed now, and had become an
instinct of which he was conscious in every waking hour. Always, above
and around him, was this sense of guidance.

He had got the solitude he desired, and the long white distances
streaked with blue shadows, the unfeatured universe in which nothing
moved but winds and clouds, soothed and comforted him. . . . But it was
a kind of comfort which he had not expected. He had wanted to get away
from men and their littleness, but he found that the littleness was in
nature. All his life he had dreamed of exploring the last undiscovered
geographical secrets, and had thought of the world as a field of
mystery of which only the edge had been lit up. Now he realised that
the globe had suddenly gone small, and that man had put his impress
upon the extremest wilds. The forgotten khanates of central Asia were
full of communist squabbles. The holy cities of Arabia had been bases
and objectives in the war. Epidemics, germinated in the squalor of
Europe, had destroyed whole tribes of savages in Africa. He remembered
conversations he had heard that summer in England, when untrodden
equatorial forests had been thought of only as reservoirs of wood
alcohol, and plans were preparing for making a road by air to every
corner of the inaccessible. The world had shrunk, but humanity was
extended--that was the moral that he drew from his reflections. Many
things had gone, but the spirit of man had enlarged its borders. The
problem of the future was the proper ordering of that spirit.


As they moved north from the head of Danmarks Fjord over the snow-cap
of Erichsens Land, there was one human spirit that troubled him. Every
day Nelles became more difficult. He was a big fellow, and with his
heavy clothes and matted hair and beard and red-rimmed eyes he looked
like a bear wakened out of its winter sleep. He had always been silent
and uncompanionable, though a magnificent worker, but since Myburg's
death he had taken to talking--wild incoherent talk in a voice that
rose often into a scream.

He wanted to turn back. They had lost time and would for certain be
caught by winter. Falconet was dead--must be dead long ago--and what
advantage was there in finding a corpse? His passion made him eloquent,
and he would draw terrible pictures of an ice-cave at Gundbjorns Fjord,
and two dead men with staring eyes awaiting them. "I will not go!" he
cried. "I will not meet the dead. For the love of God let us turn now,
or we shall be wrapped in the same winding-sheet."

Adam reasoned with him patiently, but the madness grew with every hour.
He became slovenly, and one night left the dogs unfed, with the
consequence that next day two were sick. He would eat little himself,
and his blackening lips showed signs of scurvy. Adam decided that this
state of affairs could not go on, and that it would be better to send
him home with one sledge. He had no doubt where his own duty lay. Even
if Falconet was dead he must reach him and make certain of his fate. He
might be alive and crippled or ill; in that case the only hope was to
winter with him and nurse him. If provisions ran short he would get him
down to the nearest depot on Independence Fjord, the farthest north of
those which the schooner parties had established. Adam, with his
blistered flaking skin and bleared eyes, would not have seemed to an
unskilled observer a man in the best physical condition, but he knew
that his body had never been harder, and he believed that he had
strength enough and to spare for his purpose.

He gave Nelles one final trial. Down perilous icy shelves they
descended to the shore of Independence Fjord, and, travelling half a
day to the east, found without trouble the beacon which marked the
ultimate food depot. The cache was a large one and in good order, and
they strengthened with boulders its defences against inquisitive bears.
A fresh snowfall had covered all but the top of the dwarf Arctic
willows and the heather, but there was at least a hint of vegetation,
the first they had seen for many weeks. They went into camp, and since
the place had a reputation for game they went hunting. A seal was
killed which gave the dogs fresh food, and, though each of the men had
a touch of snow-blindness which made stalking difficult, they managed
to get a young musk-ox and a brace and a half of ptarmigan. That night
they had a feast of fat things.

But the meal did not change Nelles's purpose, though it seemed to give
him a better balance. The sight of something other than snow and ice
and the taste of fresh meat had increased his determination to go back.
He began by arguing reasonably. This, he said, was the last chance, and
there was just time, if God willed, to reach the ship before the winter
gales. They would go down the coast and get supplies from the chain of
depots. He understood sledging on shore ice better than on the ice-cap,
and he had no fear for the journey. Otherwise only death awaited
them--death beside a dead man, if indeed they ever found Falconet's
corpse. When his arguments did not prevail his voice grew wild and
shrill, he gesticulated, implored and wept. Adam came to a decision.

"I am going on," he said, "for I have a charge laid on me. You are
different. If I find Falconet you will only be another mouth to feed,
and if I fail you will be another victim. I order you to go back. You
have a map with the depots marked, and you already know something of
the coast route. I put you on your honour to take no more food than you
need from the caches, for Falconet and I must depend on them on our way
south. If the ship has gone when you reach Shannon Island you can
winter comfortably in the huts. If she is still there, you will tell
Captain Tonning to come back as soon as the seas are open and to send
his sloop to scout up the coast. Tell him I will have Falconet home by
next summer."

That night Adam heard Nelles babbling in his sleep. Next morning he set
off with four dogs and one of the sledges for Cap Rigsdagen, and did
not once look back. He was whistling as far as his cracked lips allowed
him.


Beyond Independence Fjord Adam entered a fantastic world. The shadow of
the coming night was beginning to droop over it, but it had a queer
sunset opalescence, so that often it was hard to believe that there was
substance behind the dissolving shapes of cloud and rock and snow. For
the first days there was little wind, the four dogs travelled well, and
Adam had peace to consider his plans. He had enough food and petroleum
to last him till the spring, but not enough for more than one. Falconet
and his companion had taken ample stores with them for the time they
expected to be absent, but not enough for a winter. There was no chance
now of getting back to the ship before it was forced to escape from the
grip of the ice; so, if he found Falconet and supplies were short,
there would be nothing for it but to make for the nearest
depot--Independence Fjord--and work their way from cache to cache down
the coast. Even in winter such short journeys would be feasible. He
must find Falconet, alive or dead, for he could not have missed him on
the road. He had never met him, but he had heard much of his furious
energy and resolution. That was not the sort of man to be easily beaten
by difficulties. Adam was fairly certain of his course, and had taken
observations as regularly as a deep-sea skipper. In four days--a week
at the most--he should be across the low ice-cap of Peary Land and
looking down on the ultimate Polar Sea.

But suddenly the weather worsened. A gale blew from the north while he
was among a chain of nunataks glazed into black ice, where the going
was hard. One evening he saw a great white wall moving towards him,
which was the snow blown into a solid screen by the wind. He and his
dogs were almost smothered; in the teeth of it movement was impossible,
and it was late before the tent could be pitched and the stove got
going. For the first time he really felt the Arctic cold, since that
night the heat of his body seemed powerless to conquer the chill of his
soaked clothes. As he peered through the blizzard he began to share
Nelles's forebodings of what might lie beyond it.

The storm died down, and there fell a strange calm; the air was still
and not too cold, but even at midday there was a sense of twilight. At
last one afternoon he found himself looking down on a long sword-cut
which cleft the ice-cap, and beyond it to a wilderness of opal and
pearl, and he knew that he had reached his goal. But the gale had blown
the sun out of the sky. The whole heavens were a pale gold, and
pinnacles of the land ice were tipped and flushed with fire. Even as he
gazed a grey shadow seemed to creep slowly from the horizon and one by
one put out the fairy lights. Adam realised that he was watching the
Polar night emerge from the Polar Sea, and that for a third of the year
the world would be sunless.

He guided the dogs without difficulty down a cleft of the ice-cap to
the edge of the fjord. There he saw what he expected. On a mound of
snow a discoloured American flag hung limply from a post. There was
something beside it which startled him--a little cross of wood, with an
inscription burned on it--_M. P., July 27th, 1919_. He remembered that
Falconet's companion had been called Magnus Paulsen.

His first thought was that he had arrived too late. Falconet was gone,
after burying his dead comrade under his country's flag. . . . Then a
little to the left under the lee of a cliff he saw something which was
not a hummock of snow. A boulder, riven from the precipice by some
winter storm, made a small cave over which a kind of roof had been
stretched. Inside there was darkness, and Adam stumbled over something
which he recognised as a food box. He struck a light, and saw a rough
bed on which lay the figure of a man. He thought he was dead, till his
breathing told him that he was asleep.



III

Adam found a lantern and lit up the interior of the cleft. It made a
lop-sided hut, but, except at the mouth, where blocks of snow had been
piled to lessen the aperture, the floor was dry. The light woke the
sleeper, who started up as if to reach for a weapon, and then dropped
feebly back. Adam saw a face as thin and beaky as a crow's, with pallid
skin showing between a black, tangled mane of hair.

"Who the devil are you?" The words came out in slow gasps.

"I was sent to find you. Melfort's my name--an Englishman. You're
Falconet, aren't you?"

"What is left of him," was the answer. "You can't move me. . . . I
think my back is broken. . . . Paulsen is dead--his head was smashed to
pulp by an accursed ice-fall. The dogs too--I had to shoot the last to
put him out of pain. I'm for it all right. . . . But I'm glad to see
you, whoever you are. . . . I'd like company when I peg out."

"You're not going to peg out. Let me have a look at you before I put
things straight."

Slowly and painfully layers of filthy clothing were stripped off, till
Falconet's body was revealed. His back and shoulders were a mass of
bruises and unhealed scars, and his left arm was broken and unset. He
was in the last stage of emaciation. Adam had enough medical knowledge
to decide that there was no damage to the spine, but that lacerated
muscles had induced a partial paralysis of one side. The man was worn
to a shadow by pain, malnutrition and poisoned blood.

Bit by bit Falconet's story came out. He and Paulsen had reached
Gundbjorns Fjord a month later than they had planned, owing to storms
on the ice-cap. They had made camp in the cleft, and, believing that
they had still ample time to rejoin the ship by the coast route, had
set out to explore the coast to the west. Their dogs had been reduced
to six, but, since the coast depots would enable them to travel light,
this loss did not trouble them. They had pushed forty miles or so along
the shore and had discovered and surveyed a new fjord, living largely
off the ptarmigan and duck which they shot. On their return, when they
were within a mile of their camp, they passed under a great nose of
ice, which had been loosened by a spell of warm weather. It fell on
them, killing Paulsen, killing or maiming all the dogs, and leaving
Falconet himself unconscious under a corner of the avalanche. He had
come to his senses, extricated Paulsen's body, and somehow dragged it
and himself back to camp.

All this had happened nine weeks earlier. Since then he had been in
constant pain, and had had much ado to get himself the means of life,
for every movement had become agony. He was almost too weak to cook
meals, and had subsisted largely on chocolate and meat lozenges. But
indeed food mattered little to him, for the torture of his body forced
him to have recourse to opiates from the medicine box, and thirst vexed
him more than hunger. He had made up his mind for death, and had been
growing so lightheaded that he was scarcely conscious of his
surroundings. Adam's arrival had startled him into sanity, but
presently he fancied that it was Paulsen he saw, and his mind wavered
miserably between the living and the dead.

Adam boiled water on the stove and washed the foul body. He set the
broken arm in splints, and dressed such of the wounds as had become
sores. He forced him to drink a bowl of hot soup, found him a change of
shirt, and did his best to make him a softer bed. Falconet was asleep
before he had finished these ministrations. It was rough nursing, but
the best he could give. As he watched the figure in its restless sleep,
looking for all the world like some peasant victim of a Russian famine,
he could not refrain from smiling, for he remembered that this was Jim
Falconet, who had once captained a famous polo team on their visit to
England, and was believed to be the third or fourth richest man in the
world.

Then he set about making an inventory. There was enough dog-feed to
last the winter, and Falconet's stores and his own ought to carry the
two of them through. The risk lay in running short of petroleum, which
would have to be strictly rationed. Clearly the man could not be moved
for weeks. Adam believed that he had suffered no serious mischief, and
that with care his strong physique would right itself. . . . He tidied
up the hut, which was in a hideous mess, and found quarters for his
dogs in an alcove near the entrance. Then out of some broken
packing-cases he made a fire, more for the comfort of his mind than of
his body, and as he watched its tiny glow struggling with the velvet
dark he had a moment of satisfaction. He had carried out the first part
of his task.


Very soon Adam found that what had been his fancies on the ice-cap had
become grim truth. For the wide Arctic world was narrowed for him to a
few stuffy cubic feet in a cranny of rock, and his problem to a strife
not with wild nature but with a human soul.

Falconet's body was the least part of the task. The problem was to
avoid blood-poisoning, and Adam put all his wits to the job. His own
case of medicines was well stocked, but Falconet's was in dire
disorder; but out of the two he got enough drugs on which to base a
simple regime. Diet was the trouble, for to a sick man the coarse
satisfying Arctic food was ill suited. Adam managed, before the last
daylight disappeared, to shoot some ptarmigan on the fringes of the
ice-cap, and to give the patient a few days of fresh chicken-broth.
With careful dressing the sores began to mend, and the swollen and
displaced muscles after much bandaging came slowly into order. The arm,
too, set well, and presently Falconet was able to move more
comfortably. But acute attacks of neuritis followed, and the flow of
returning strength into the man's veins seemed to be as painful as the
running back of the blood to a frozen limb.

Meantime the daylight ebbed, till at noon there was only a misty grey
twilight. There was a spell of fine weather in November, when the stars
blazed so bright that they seemed to be set not in two dimensions on a
flat plane but hung solidly in receding avenues of utter blackness. The
brightest time was night, when there was a moon, and the cliffs and the
fjord swam in frosty silver. With December came storms, which howled
among the crags and blocked up the entrance to the hut with forty-foot
drifts. The place became as cold as a hyperborean hell, cold and yet
airless. There was no means of making fire, and there was little light,
for the petroleum, if it was to last the winter, had to be jealously
conserved. Already with the constant melting of snow and boiling of
water for Falconet's dressings it had run lower than Adam's plans
allowed. He would have made an effort to get a further supply from the
cache at Independence Fjord if he had dared to leave the sick man alone
for a week.

By Christmas Falconet's body had mended, and he was able to walk to the
door in a lull of the weather and breathe fresh air. But this return of
his physical powers seemed to be accompanied by a disorientation of
mind. In his lonely vigil before Adam's arrival he had brought himself
to face death with calmness, but, having been plucked from the grave,
it appeared that he could not recover his bearings. He was morose and
peevish, and liable to uncontrollable rages. The spirit of a grown man
had been exchanged for the temper of a suspicious child. He had lost
the power of self-restraint, and there was no companionship to be got
out of him. He babbled to himself, his voice acquired a high querulous
pitch, and he became the prey of childish nightmares. For no apparent
cause he would lie shivering and moaning, and when Adam tried to soothe
him he screamed like an animal. . . . On Christmas night a little extra
feast was prepared, a fire was made of empty boxes, and two cigars were
added to the rations. But the festival was a tragic failure, for the
cigar made Falconet sick, and, when Adam tried to cheer him with talk
about the world they had left, he cursed and wept and went sulking to
his sleeping-bag. For the better part of a week his wits seemed to
leave him altogether, and Adam had to watch his every movement lest he
should cut his throat.

The two men in the hut came to loathe each other. Adam confessed it to
himself with shame. His tending of the other's body in all its
noisomeness had given him a horror of it. As the cold increased it was
necessary for warmth that they should creep close together, and he
shrank with a kind of nausea from such contacts. Falconet's growing
witlessness added to the repulsion, for the gaunt hairy creature seemed
to have shed all that made humanity tolerable. Days and nights were
alike dark, for they could afford little light. They rarely spoke to
each other, and never conversed. They sat or lay in their sleeping-bags
in a dreadful frozen monotony of dislike. Adam's one relaxation was to
tend the dogs. He would bury his head in their fur, for the smell of it
brought back to him a happier world. To feed them and exercise them
seemed his one link with sanity. The dark world out-of-doors was a less
savage place than the squalid hut.

He realised that he was facing the severest test of his life, for he
had himself to conquer. Here at the back end of creation he was bound
to a lunatic, and all the terrors and perils of the Polar night were
narrowed to the relation between two human souls. In his loneliness
during the war he had had at any rate the free use of his mind, but now
under the strain he felt his mind warping. He had to fight down crude
and petty things which he thought he had long since put behind
him--above all he had to conquer the sane man's horror of the insane,
the clean man's repulsion from the foul. This was a fiercer trial than
he had envisaged when he set out from England. He had desired space and
solitude and he had found them; he had wanted to inure his body to
extreme fatigue and he had done it; but he had not reckoned upon this
spiritual conflict in a kennel darker than a city slum. . . . But he
must go through with the job he had undertaken. Falconet had been a
great man and was worth saving, and the task could not be left
half-finished.

Adam nerved himself for a supreme effort. Through all his outbreaks and
spasms he nursed Falconet with patient tenderness. He soothed him and
coaxed him and in the end he quieted him. By the beginning of February
Falconet's increased bodily well-being reacted on his mind. Now and
then he talked rationally. He began to fuss about Paulsen's grave,
which, he feared, might be exposed when summer thinned the snow. Once
or twice he stammered a few words of gratitude.


One February day, while Adam was feeding the dogs, he saw in the south
a strange glow. For a moment he was puzzled and thought of some new
kind of aurora borealis; then an explanation flashed on him, and he
called excitedly to Falconet to come out. The two men watched the glow
deepen, till their eyes, so long accustomed to darkness, ached at the
sight. Then suddenly one of the ice peaks above the fjord flushed into
deep rose, and the glow from the south seemed to run across the frozen
ocean to meet them. A ray, an authentic ray of sunlight, made a path in
it, and over the edge of the world appeared a semicircle of blood-red.
The dogs in the hut felt its advent, for they set up a wild barking.
The sun had come back to the world.

Adam and Falconet moved down towards the shore, bathed in the cold
primeval radiance. For the first time for months they saw their
shadows, ghostly indeterminate things running far behind them into the
north. Then they heard a croak overhead, and looked up to see a raven.
He had been flying west to the ice-cap, but the sight of the sun made
him change his course, and with a steady beat of wings he flew south to
welcome it.

Falconet grinned, and his face was that of a sane man.

"We've got to follow that old bird," he said. "It knows what's good for
it."



IV

They started for home on the first day of March, when the allowance of
daylight was still scanty. The easier road to Independence Fjord was by
the shore ice, but it would have been three times as long, so, since
the petroleum supply was very low, Adam decided to return as he had
come, by the ice-cap. The advent of spring had worked a miracle with
Falconet. His great bodily strength came back in waves, the hollows in
his cheeks filled out, his voice lost its ugly pitch, and he became at
moments almost jolly. Adam shut away the memory of the dark days of
hatred, and set himself to rediscover his companion. One thing he
realised with alarm. The winter's strain had told on his own health. He
looked at food with distaste, and he began to suffer from blinding
headaches.

The ice-cap greeted them with violent gales, and once again among the
nunataks they had to lie up for days, desperately cold, for they had
only a minimum of petroleum to carry them to Independence Fjord. The
dogs' pads had become soft during the winter, and every one went lame
and left blood in its tracks. After the gales came a clammy fog,
through which the sun's rays never penetrated. It was hard travelling
for both men, for their reindeer-skin kamiks had been worn into holes,
and there was no fresh sedge-grass with which to stuff them. The novel
light induced snow-blindness in both, and they had to fumble along with
their eyes partially bandaged. Adam felt his strength steadily ebbing.
Tasks which on the outward journey he would have made light of were now
beyond his power. His gums were swelling, and the skin all over his
body was mysteriously peeling off in strips. Worst of all he suffered
from distressing fits of light-headedness, during which every ice-fall
became an Alpine peak and the nunataks danced like dervishes around him.

When they reached the depot at Independence Fjord and could get warmth
and light again, Falconet insisted that they should keep camp for two
days to give Adam a chance to recover. The rest cured his
snow-blindness, and, since Falconet managed to shoot a bear, he had a
diet of beef-tea which put a little vigour into his bones. Also the
signs of the returning spring seemed to unlock his past again. There
were gulls about--Sabine's gull and the ivory gull--and skuas and
king-eiders, and the sight brought back Eilean Bn. In baking days in
Anatolia he had thought most pleasantly of that island as wreathed in
mist or scourged by spring hail, but now he pictured it as green and
flowery, sleeping in the blue of summer afternoons. In this world of
ice and rock he drew warmth from the vision of its graciousness.

The winter rles were reversed, and Falconet took charge. There was a
fierce kindliness in the man, and, as they lay at night in the little
tent, he talked--talked well, with an obvious purpose of cheering his
companion. He asked many questions about Adam's past, and, since two
men in such a position have no need of reticence, he heard the full
truth.

"I was a soldier," Adam told him. "Then I had to leave the army, for I
went to prison."

"So!" Falconet whistled. "I wonder whom you were shielding. Skip that
bit, sonny, and get on to the war. What front were you on--the Western,
Palestine, Mespot?"

"None. I wasn't a combatant--except for a few months when I wore German
uniform with the Turks. For nearly four years I was behind the enemy
lines."

Falconet's eager questions bit by bit drew out the story. Adam told it
candidly, for he had no self-consciousness about it--he saw small
credit in the course which had been the only one open to a man in his
position. But Falconet was loud in his exclamations.

"Say," he asked. "What did your Government give you for your four years
in hell?"

"I was restored to my regimental rank."

"Yes. That's the sort of thing you would want. . . . Great God, man, I
never heard a yarn like yours. You must have a nerve like a six-inch
cable. What's to be done with you? You're not going to throw all that
training away?"

"Not if I can help it. I came out here to round it off."

Falconet pondered. "I see the sense in that. You wanted to get away
from mankind for a bit . . . and you struck the most ill-conditioned
specimen on the American continent. You saved that specimen's life,
too. But for you I should have been a corpse in that bloody hut. . . .
Now you're going to drink some soup and get off to sleep again."

They moved on in a flush of fine weather, and crossed the mouth of
Danmarks Fjord on snow which was beginning to break up into channels
and rivulets. The sun shone and they journeyed in a world of gleaming
crystal, out of which would rise towards evening wonderful mirages of
hills and cities. Close to the land the ice was smooth and bare, and it
was possible to hoist a sail and travel fast. But the first day out
Adam realised that the days of rest had not cured his malady. So far he
had had no fever, but now his temperature rose high, and he became so
weak and giddy that he could not keep up with the sledge, even when
holding on to the uprights. There was nothing for it but that he should
become a passenger, which was possible, since they travelled light,
having the depots to count on for supplies. He wandered off into a mad
world, and one day he was so delirious that he had to be tied on to
keep him from rolling off in his wild starts. To make things worse they
struck a bad patch of shore ice, seamed with water lanes and acres of
deep slushy snow.

Of these days Adam had no clear remembrance. He seemed to be
perpetually sinking into gulfs and screaming warnings . . . and then he
would know nothing till he saw Falconet's anxious face and felt hot
soup being fed to him in spoonfuls. Nelles had carried out his orders,
and had taken little from each depot, so there was no lack of petroleum
and man's food and dogs' food. Once they made camp on a shore where the
spring had begun to melt the snow, and mosses were showing, and willow
scrub and greening grass. Here Falconet was lucky enough to shoot a
bear, and, following some wild lore of his boyhood, he stripped Adam
and wrapped him in the reeking pelt.

The fever may have run its natural course, or the bearskin may have had
some therapeutic power, for from that night Adam began to mend. His
temperature fell, the giddy world became stable, his limbs moved again
according to his will. Soon he could leave the sledge and stagger
beside it, and he could help to set up the tent in the evening.
Falconet would have none of his aid till he was satisfied that he was a
whole man once more.

"There's one thing you've got to learn," he said fiercely, "and that's
to _take_. So far you've only known how to _give_. But if a fellow
isn't ready to take from a friend when he's in need, then his giving is
only a darned insult and an infernal bit of patronage. Put that in your
pipe and smoke it, Mister Melfort."


Suddenly something went wrong with the depots. They came to one which
looked as if it had been pulled about by wild beasts. The boxes were
stove in and their contents scattered and spoiled, and there was not a
drop of petroleum in the cans. They put the mischief down to a bear,
and, since the stage from the last depot had been over difficult ice,
it did not seem worth while to go back and collect the supplies which
still remained there. They decided to push on to the next cache.

But the next cache, reached after a desperate toil over shore ice from
which the snow was fast melting, proved no better. Nelles seemed to
have made a fire and burned up everything, for among the ashes they
found only a crumpled petroleum tin and some twisted iron fragments
which had once been the hoops of a barrel.

They held a council, for the position was grave. Nelles had broken
faith--or he had lost his wits--or someone or something coming after
him had rifled the depots. They had with them food at the utmost for
seven days and petroleum for a little longer. They could not go back,
for though they had left a fair quantity of stores at the first caches
there was not enough to enable them to reach Shannon Island. On they
must go in the hope that in the next depot, or the next, there would be
supplies, or that they might meet a search-party from the ship, which
by this time must have reached the Greenland coast. They slept ill that
night and next morning reduced their rations to a pound a day. There
were no biscuits left--only pemmican, some tinned vegetables and a
little tea.

At the next depot they found the same devastation, and they found also
the clue to it. Two of Nelles's dogs lay dead with split skulls, their
bones picked clean by the ravens. The man had gone mad--berserk
mad--and had raged down the coast rioting in destruction. Adam
remembered his lowering brows and sullen brooding eyes.

Every day the going became harder. From the ice-cap above the shore
cliffs waterfalls were thundering, and the beaches were chains of
little torrents. The snow was melting fast from the sea ice, and soon
that ice would begin to break up, and they would be forced to keep to
the terrible moraines of the land. They were now on half a pound of
food a day and the dogs had become miserable bags of skin and bone.
Presently one died, and his companion lost his senses and ran round in
circles till they were forced to shoot him. The sledge was light
enough, but with only two dogs they made slow going among the slush and
the water-logged ice. Once the sledge toppled into a voe, and
Falconet's diaries were only rescued by a miracle. Each depot told the
same tragic tale of blackened desolation, except that in one they found
an undamaged tin of cocoa.

Presently they were forced to kill the remaining two dogs, and
relinquish the sledge. This meant that each had to carry a load, and
stumble painfully along the boulder-strewn shore. Their one hope now
was a search-party from the ship, and that was only a shadow. Dog-flesh
is not good for human beings, but it was sufficient to keep life in
them, and that and a little tea were all they had. They had petroleum
to last for two days more. In grim silence they struggled on, savage
with hunger, their feet so heavy that to lift them at all was an
effort. They made short days with long rests, and the nights in the
open were bitter. They would rise from the tortures of cold and
emptiness and take the road without looking at each other, as if each
feared what he might see in his companion's eyes.

Once Falconet said: "If we come out of this, we two are going to keep
together for the rest of our lives. How do you reckon the chances? A
million to one against?"

"Evens," said Adam. "They're never worse than evens if you keep up your
heart."

That day Falconet shot a goose and, finding a patch of scrub and
heather on the edge of a small fjord, they made a fire and roasted it.
The meat carried them on for two days, while they traversed a
much-encumbered beach under huge dripping cliffs where there was no
hope of game. After that they had half a pound of pemmican and a rib of
dog to carry them to the next depot--their tea and petroleum were
finished.

Next morning Adam's bleared eyes studied the map.

"We shall make the depot before evening," he said.

"And leave our bones there," said Falconet.

That day their exhaustion reached the outside limit of what man can
endure. The sharpness of the hunger-pangs had gone, but both men were
half-delirious. They constantly fell, and Falconet twisted his ankle so
badly that they could only move at a snail's pace. Neither spoke a
word, and Adam had to concentrate all his vanishing faculties to keep
in touch with solid earth. Sometimes he thought that he was walking on
clouds, till he found himself lying among the stones with blood oozing
from his forehead. He took Falconet's pack on his own shoulders, and
had to give Falconet a hand over the icy streams. "I will not go mad,"
he told himself, and he bent his mind to the road, fixing a point
ahead, and wagering with himself about the number of steps he would
take to reach it. According to the map a depot lay beyond a rocky cape
which bounded the long beach over which they were floundering.

They turned the cape in the late afternoon and looked on a little bay
with a beacon on a knoll. A wild hope rose in Adam's heart. Surely this
place was still intact--the demented Nelles must have broken down
before he reached it. Hope put strength into his legs, the more as he
found his feet suddenly on soft herbage.

But Nelles had reached it. There was something dark and crumpled lying
half-buried by a patch of old snow. He had reached it and died beside
it, for the stones had not been moved from the cache's mouth, Adam's
feeble hands uncovered the food box, which was intact. "We have won on
the post," he whispered to Falconet, for his tongue had swollen with
starvation. "Lie flat on your back till I get a fire going. We touch
nothing but soup to-night, but to-morrow we shall breakfast in style."

They made a mighty bonfire and slept beside it for twelve hours. Next
day Falconet nursed his ankle, and dozed in the sun, and in the evening
two men, plucked from the jaws of death, feasted nobly, since the rest
of the depots were safe and there was no need to hoard. Falconet had
come out of his stupor, and sat staring into the green dusk, which was
all the night at that season.

"We're two mighty small atoms," he said, "to have beaten old man Odin
and his bunch. And the dice weren't kind to us. My God, I've taken some
risks in my day, but nothing like this. . . . Do you know, I asked you
a week back what the chances were, and you said 'Evens.' I expect you
were a bit loony at the time--we both were."

"No, I meant it," said Adam. "It's the strength of the human spirit
that matters. Man can face up to anything the universe can pit against
him if his nerve doesn't crack. Our trouble was not snow and cold and
famine but the human part. Something gave in Nelles's brain, and he
played the deuce with a perfectly sound scheme. The hell of that winter
hut of ours was not the cold and the dark but the boredom--the way you
and I got across each other. . . . We're going back to a badly broken
world, and the problem is to find the men big enough to mend it. Our
business is to discover genius and put quality into humanity."

"That's the job you've been training for?"

"I think so."

"Well, you can count me in to my last dime," said Falconet.


A week later the two men met the party from the ship which had been
sent out to find them.




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY       IV


At Reykjavik in Iceland Adam and Falconet were met by the latter's
yacht. Falconet was, among other things, a newspaper proprietor on a
large scale, and he was able to control the curiosity of the press. The
message which he sent off from Reykjavik merely announced his safe
return, accompanied by his companion Mr Melfort, after wintering in
North Greenland, adding that the scientific results of the expedition
would in due course be given to the world. This was published copiously
in the American press, and to a lesser degree in the English papers,
many of which left out the name of Falconet's companion. Not more than
half a dozen people realised that Adam was back from the wilds.

The yacht touched at Liverpool, where Falconet turned a flinty face to
enquiring journalists. There Adam left it, and, dressed in a suit of
Falconet's which did not fit him, returned to the rooms in the Temple
which he had taken when he came out of prison, and had retained ever
since. His first business was to provide himself with clothes and other
necessaries. Then he engaged a servant, a man called Crabb, who had
once been his footman and had lost his left arm in the war; he had
found on his arrival a letter from Crabb asking for employment, and had
some difficulty in disinterring him from a Rotherhithe slum. After that
he set himself down for two long days to read the weekly papers for the
past year. Then, having got his bearings, he rang up Christopher
Stannix, who, he gathered from his reading, had become lately a
prominent figure in the national life and was now a member of the
Government.

Stannix came to the Temple that evening during a slack interval in the
House. To Adam's eyes he seemed to have put on flesh, and his face had
acquired that slightly frozen composure which is a necessary protection
for those who are much in the limelight. What he thought of Adam may be
judged by his behaviour. He dragged him to the window and looked at him
from all sides, and then dropped into a chair and laughed.

"Man, you have come back ten years younger--more--twenty years. You
don't look twenty-five. I've seen Falconet, who told me something. Not
much, for he said you didn't want it talked about--but I gather that
the two of you went through a rather special hell. It has shaken
Falconet, but you seem to have thriven on it. . . . But for God's sake,
get a new tailor. . . . What's your next step? Whom do you want to
meet? I'm rather tied up just now, but I'm entirely at your service. .
. . Oh, Adam, old fellow, I'm glad to see you. You're like somebody
recovered from the dead."

"I want to meet Scrope, if he's alive. I told you about him--the old
fellow in Northamptonshire that Ritson sent me to see in September '14."

"That's a queer thing, for he wants to meet _you_. I had a letter from
him this morning. He knows that you're home, as he knows most things.
I'll get in touch with him at once."

Stannix telephoned next morning that Scrope was coming to town, and
desired Adam to dine with him three days thence. That afternoon there
arrived an emissary from Scrope in the shape of a tall young man with
perfect clothes and a pleasant vacant face. He introduced himself as
Captain Frederick Shaston, late of the 9th Lancers, and now an idle
sojourner in the metropolis.

"Mr Scrope sent me to be kind to you, sir," he said with a very boyish
grin. "I gather you've been having a tough time, and he thought you
ought to frisk a bit, so I've come to show you round. . . . It's a
jolly morning, and I've got my car here. What about a run down to the
country? You'd like to see England again at her best."

So Adam spent a day of clear sunshine on the roads of the southern
midlands. They climbed the Chilterns, where the beeches were in their
young green livery, and ran across the Aylesbury vale among blossoming
hawthorns and through woods which were a mist of blue. High up on
Cotswold they had the kingdoms of the earth beneath them, and from the
Severn scarp looked over to the dim hills of Wales. Shaston would stop
at some view-point, and make some enthusiastic comment, but Adam noted
that the banality of his speech was at variance with the cool
appraising eyes which he turned on him. In the bright afternoon they
slipped slowly down the scented valley-roads of Thames. Adam said
little, but after a year of barrens and icy seas the ancient habitable
land was an intoxication.

That evening Shaston took him to dine at a restaurant with a party of
young men, who treated him at first with nervous respect. But, though
he was not disposed to talk of himself and had still the slow formal
speech of one who had not spoken English much for years, his
friendliness presently dispelled their shyness, and the evening ended
merrily with a visit to a boxing match and a supper of broiled bones
and beer. Next day Shaston took him to Roehampton to watch polo, where
he, who had not spoken to a woman for years, was compelled to mingle
with a group of laughing girls. They went to a play that night with a
party, and Adam did not fall asleep.

"Please don't thank me," said Shaston when they parted. "I've had the
time of my life. I can't tell you what a privilege it is to show you
round. I hope you'll tell Mr Scrope that I didn't bore you too much."

"How do you come to know Mr Scrope so well?" Adam asked.

"I don't know him well," was the surprising answer. "No one does. But
he knows all about me, and about everybody else and everything. He's
about the largest size of man we've got, don't you think?"


Adam rubbed his eyes at the sight of Scrope in the little restaurant in
Jermyn Street. He had been a few minutes late, and found his host
already seated at a table in a quiet corner. When he had last seen him
six years before he had thought him very frail and old, a
valetudinarian nearer eighty than seventy, shivering under his plaid on
a mild autumn day. The man now before him looked a hale fellow not
beyond the sixties, and his Mongolian countenance was ruddy instead of
ivory-white. Two things only remained unchanged, his voice husky from
cigarette-smoking, and his dreamy heavy-lidded eyes.

Scrope seemed to be no longer a vegetarian, for instead of the mess of
eggs and vegetables with which he had once regaled Adam, he had now
ordered a well-considered normal meal. He seemed to divine his guest's
surprise.

"I have come out into the world again. I thought I had found sanctuary,
but it was ordained otherwise; and if I am to be of use in the world I
must conform--ever so little. So must you, my friend. You liked
Shaston?"

"Yes. You sent him to find out if I had become a fossil. What did he
report?"

Scrope laughed.

"Shaston is what you call a flat-catcher. He looks innocent, and
sometimes foolish, but he is very, very acute. He reported that you had
not lost touch with common life. He described you as 'bonhomous,' which
is old-fashioned slang, for he is sometimes old-fashioned. That has
laid my fears, but I confess that it has also surprised me. I have
acquainted myself with your doings for the past six years, and they
have been the kind to drive a man back inside himself, and make him an
alien from the ordinary tastes of mankind. By all the rules you should
have become a prig, Mr Melfort, and somewhat inhuman. Shaston reports
otherwise. He says that you can still feel the elation of a May
morning, that you can laugh with simple people at obvious things, and
even condescend a little to play the fool. That means that there is
something about you that I do not yet know. What is it? You have
falsified rules which cannot be falsified. I expected to find you stiff
and angular and insensitive, and I thought that it would be my first
business to crack your shell. But lo and behold! there is no shell to
crack. What has kept you mellow?"

"I will tell you," said Adam. With this man, as with Meyer, the Belgian
Jew who had called himself Macandrew, he could have no secrets. He told
him the story of Eilean Bn.

Scrope listened with his eyes downcast, and his fingers playing tunes
on the table-cloth. When Adam stopped his face was marvellously
wrinkled by a smile, so that he looked like the good mandarin from a
willow-pattern plate.

"That is right. You have had a fountain in the desert. That means that
you are hard-trained, but not, as I had feared, over-trained. Eilean
Bn! I think I too could be happy with dreams of such a place. Our
race must turn its eyes west when it looks for Mecca."

Till the meal was over Scrope talked of what had been going on in the
world since Adam went behind the northern ice. He talk brilliantly,
with hoarse chuckles and much gesticulation of delicate hands, and
again the many-wrinkled smile. But when coffee had been served and he
had presented Adam with a cigar from a case like a sarcophagus, he fell
suddenly silent. There was a party dining a little way off, with a man
in it who seemed to claim his attention.

"You know him?" he asked.

Adam saw a short, squarely-built young man with a big head of dark
hair, a sallow face with a lofty brow and high cheek-bones, and a
strong, slightly protuberant chin. He was talking volubly, and kept his
chin thrust forward so that there was something almost simian in his
air. He looked like an immensely intelligent ape, poised and ready to
bound upon an enemy. But his face was pleasant, for he had a quick
smile, and everything about him from the crouched shoulders to the
glowing eyes spoke of an intense vitality.

"No. . . . Wait a moment. I think . . . Yes, I have seen him before. A
year ago I heard him read a paper at a club--I've forgotten its name.
Creevey, isn't he? Some kind of university swell?"

"Creevey--Warren Creevey," said Scrope. "A very remarkable man. Take a
good look at him, for you will see him again. I've a notion that you
will have a deal to do with him before you die."

Adam obeyed.

"I don't like him," he said.

Scrope laughed.

"You have had to learn in the last five years to judge men rapidly and
to go mainly by their faces. I don't quarrel with your verdict. You
have learned also to judge ability by the same test. How do you place
Mr Warren Creevey?"

"I should try to avoid antagonising him. If he were my enemy I should
cross to the other side of the road."

"So! Well, you will not meet him just yet, for he swims in a different
pool. He is very clever and is making a great deal of money, and he
also lives the life of pleasure. But some day . . ."

Scrope kept his eyes fixed on the party for a second longer, and then
swung round and looked Adam in the face.

"I have seen Falconet. Have you found your work yet?"

"I know what the world needs."

"Come, that is something. That's more than the world itself knows. What
is it?"

"Quality."

"By which you mean, leaders?"

Adam nodded.

"Are you going to take on the job yourself?"

"No. I can never be in the firing-line. I belong to the underworld. But
I can help to find the men we want, and perhaps give them confidence."

"I see. A midwife to genius."

There was a big mirror opposite where the two men sat, and, as it
chanced, both were gazing at it and saw their faces reflected. Adam had
not much interest in his own looks, but as he gazed and saw Scrope's
ruddy Mongolian countenance beside him, and a little way off half the
profile of Creevey, he could not but be aware that he looked different
from other people in England. Scrope saw the distinction in sharper
contrast. He saw a face, irregular and not specially handsome, in which
supreme concentration had brought all the parts into unity, and to
which cool nerves and peace of spirit had given the bloom of a boy. He
laid his hand on Adam's shoulder.

"You accept that? And yet you are also disappointed? Confess that you
are disappointed."

"I have no cause to be disappointed."

"Which means that you are. You must be. You have fined down your body
till it is like that of a blood-horse--you have every muscle and nerve
in proper control--you have taught yourself to endure in silence like a
fakir--you have a brain which is a noble machine and which is wholly at
your command--and you have forgotten the meaning of fear. Such a man as
you was meant to ride beside Raymond into Jerusalem. As it is, you
propose to be bottle-holder to something called genius, which you will
probably have to dig out of the mud."

"I might have wished for something different," was Adam's reply, "but I
must take what is sent me."

The old hand patted his shoulder.

"You are wiser than Naaman the Syrian," said Scrope. "I was afraid that
I should have to say to you like Naaman's servant 'My lord, had the
prophet commanded thee some great thing'--but I find that you have
renounced the great thing."

"Not the great thing. But we cannot expect the spectacular thing, we
who work in the shadows."

"I stand corrected." Scrope withdrew his hand from his companion's
shoulder, and sat farther back in his chair from where he could see
Adam's face clearly in the glow of a neighbouring lamp.

"Yes," he said. "You are a formidable fellow, Melfort. You are the
rational fanatic--the practical mystic--the unselfish careerist--any
blend of contradictories you please. . . . You should have been a
preacher. You might have been a second John Wesley, riding on his old
white horse throughout England preparing the day of the Lord."

"I have no gospel to preach. My business is to find the man who has."

"Oh yes, I know. I agree. . . . All the same, you are a leader, though
you may pretend only to follow. For before you follow you will have to
create your leader."

Scrope flung himself back in his chair, and looked at Adam from under
wrinkled brows.

"You say you have no gospel? Man, you have the gospel which the world
needs to-day, and that is, how to get comfort. What said old
Solomon?--'Behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no
comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but
they had no comforter.' . . . Do not be afraid, my son. I may not live
to see it, but every atom of your training will be called into play
before you die. You are right to stick to the shadows, but I think that
before the end you will be forced out into the sunlight. You may yet
enter Jerusalem by the side of Raymond."

The party at the next table were leaving. Mr Warren Creevey was putting
a cloak about a pretty woman's shoulders, and his rich voice, thick as
if it came through layers of chalk, was elevated in some species of
banter.

Without raising his chin from his breast Scrope nodded in his direction.

"But I think that first you will have left that paynim skewered on your
lance."


Falconet was raging about London. A year's seclusion from the world
seemed to have released a thousand steel springs in his body and mind.
He lectured to the Royal Geographical Society on his discoveries in
North Greenland, which were of some importance, but he kept to his
bargain, and so minimised the hardships of his journey that he had no
need to bring in Adam's name. But what filled his days and encroached
on his nights was a series of consultations with every type of
man--financier, merchant, journalist, politician--on the organisation
which he meant to set up in his own country. It was characteristic of
Falconet that in an enterprise he began by seeking advice from all and
sundry, and ended by following strictly his own notions.

Adam's words at the end of the Greenland journey had sunk deep into his
mind. The hope of a broken world was to find men big enough to mend it.
Quality, human quality, was the crying need, and just as the war had
revealed surprising virtues in unlikely places, so this quality must
not be sought for only in the old grooves. He gave a dinner at a flat
which he had taken in St James's Street, and to it he summoned Stannix
and Adam.

"I've seen your wise man," he told Stannix. "Had two hours with him on
Monday and an hour yesterday. He impressed me considerably, but I
couldn't quite place him. Say, what's his record? He looks as if he had
been a lot about the globe."

"It would be hard to say exactly," Stannix replied, "for Scrope has
always been something of a mystery man. He began, I believe, as a
famous Oriental scholar and a professor at Cambridge. Then he had a
call, and went out to India on his own account as some kind of
missionary. He led a queer life, if all tales be true, on the Sikkim
frontier, and became our chief authority on Tibet--he accompanied
Younghusband's 1903 expedition. After that he disappeared for years,
during which he is believed to have been wandering about the world. . .
. No, I don't think he has written anything since his Cambridge days.
He amasses knowledge, but he gives it out sparingly. . . . When he
returned to England he somehow or other got in touch with the
Government, and the War Office especially thought the world of him. He
was by way of being a sick man and never left his country retreat. Then
during the war he picked up amazingly, and now he looks a generation
younger. I fancy he can't be more than sixty-eight. He is the most
knowledgeable creature alive, for if he doesn't know a thing himself he
knows how to find out about it. You press a button and get immediate
results. But his wisdom is greater than his knowledge. I don't know
anyone whose judgment I'd sooner trust about men or things."

Falconet listened intently.

"I admit all that. Anyone with half an eye could see it. Where he falls
down is that he isn't interested in organisation. He is like an oracle
in a cave that gives sound advice but doesn't trouble about seeing it
carried out. He agrees with our view, Adam's and mine, but he isn't
worrying about what to do next. Now that man Creevey----"

Falconet broke off to expound his own plans. "Organisation is
nine-tenths of the fight," he proclaimed, "I'm going to start a great
machine for the inquisition of genius." He produced from a pocket of
his dinner-jacket a formidable sheaf of papers. "See here," he said as
he spread them on the table. "First we have the geographical lay-out.
I'm going to have informal committees up and down the land to consider
likely cases. No advertising, you understand--all the work must be
private and underground--but I shall have on these committees just the
people who will made good sleuths. Then here is my system of
checking-up on their reports. We can't afford to make mistakes, so I've
got this elaborate arrangement for getting cross-bearings--the schools,
the universities, the bankers, the business folk, and a lot of shrewd
private citizens. . . . So, when we get a likely case, it will be
sifted and winnowed, and before we bank on it we'll be certain that
it's the best-grade wheat."

Falconet's dark hawk-like face was flushed with enthusiasm.

"Here's the kind of thing I figure on. There's a lad on a farm in
Nebraska who has mathematical genius. Well, he won't be allowed to
drift into a third-class bank or a second-class job in a school--we'll
give him a chance to beat Einstein. Another is a natural-born leader of
men. That kind of fellow is apt to become an agitator and end in gaol,
but we'll see that he gets a field where his talent won't be cramped
and perverted. . . . We'll cast our net wide over all sorts of
talent--art and literature and philosophy and science and every kind of
practical gift, but it's the last I'm specially thinking about. I want
to spot the men who might be leaders--in business, politics, I don't
care what--for it's leaders we're sick for the lack of. We've got to
see that our Miltons don't remain mute and inglorious, but above all
that our Hampdens are not left to rot on a village green."

"Is the real Hampden ever left to rot?" Stannix asked.

"You bet your life he is. It's only one in a hundred that gets his feet
out of the clay. And in these days it's only going to be one in a
thousand, unless we lend a hand.

"It's a question of organisation," Falconet continued. "We have all the
parts of a fine excavating and sifting machine if we can assemble them.
That's going to be my business till I cross Jordan--to see that the
best man gets his chance."

"It will cost a lot of money."

"I have money to burn. I've been spending nothing for two years, and
God knows how my pile has been mounting up. This is a darned lot better
way of getting quit of it than founding dud libraries or paying hordes
of dingy fellows to cut up frogs. . . . Say, Adam, you'll need some
cash. I'm sticking to my own country, but you'll need the same kind of
machine here. Remember what I told you. I expect you to draw on me for
all you want."

"I don't think I shall want much," said Adam. "I have a little of my
own, and it may be enough."

"But that's idiocy," said Falconet fiercely. "You can't do anything
without a machine. Take it from me, that's sound, though old man Scrope
doesn't understand it. And a good machine costs a hell of a lot."

"But I'm different from you. You're a big man in the public eye, and
you can do things on the grand scale. I must keep in the background."

"Well, if that isn't the darnedest nonsense! I'm speaking seriously,
Adam. I count myself your best friend--at any rate you are mine--and
Stannix here is another. You've got to forget all that's by and gone.
The prison business, as all the world knows, was an infernal blunder,
and it's been washed out by what happened since. Weren't you restored
to your regiment with full honours? You did a hundred men's jobs in the
war, and if people had been allowed to know about it you'd have been as
famous as Lawrence--the Arabian fellow, I mean. In Greenland you were
the largest scale hero, but your infernal modesty wouldn't let me
breathe a word about it. What's the sense of it all? You could do the
job you're out for a million times better if every man and woman in
England had your picture in their album."

Adam shook his head.

"I'm afraid that is impossible. You see, I know best where my
usefulness comes in."

"That you don't, and you won't get any sane man to agree with you.
Creevey . . ." Falconet stopped.

"Creevey?" Stannix asked. "Do you mean Warren Creevey?" There was a
sharp note in his voice.

"That's the man. About the brightest citizen I've struck on these
shores. Mailsetter put me on to him, and he has helped me some. I never
met a fellow with such a lightning brain. _He_ understands
organization, if you like. If you throw out a notion he has a scheme
ready for carrying it out before you have finished your sentence. He'd
be worth half a million dollars salary to any big concern. They tell me
he's a pretty successful business man anyway. Well, Creevey takes my
view about Adam."

"But Creevey knows nothing about him--never heard of him--never met
him," said Stannix. His face wore an air of mystified apprehension.

"Oh yes, he does. I can't remember how Adam's name came up, and of
course I gave nothing away,--about Greenland and the other thing. But
he seemed to know a lot about him and to be very interested. . . ."

The door bell rang, and Falconet looked a little shy.

"Speak of the Devil! I expect that's our friend. I asked him to come
round this evening. You know him, Stannix, don't you? I want to
introduce him to Adam."

The man who followed Falconet's servant looked different from the
crouching, sparkling figure, set among appreciative women, whom Adam
had seen at the restaurant. Creevey wore a dark morning suit, and
explained that he had been sitting on a currency committee at the
Treasury till eight-thirty. He had snatched a mouthful of dinner at his
club, but he accepted a glass of Falconet's old brandy and a cigar.

It was strange how he seemed to take up space in the room. He in no way
asserted himself. The thick chalky voice was low-pitched, the forward
thrust of the jaw was rather enquiring than aggressive, and the dark
glowing eyes were friendly enough. He talked brilliantly about common
things--the last news of the Europe-Australia flight, the
obstructiveness of M. Poincar, Mr Shaw's latest mammoth drama,
and--with a compliment to Stannix--the level of debate in the new
Parliament. He seemed to take the measure of his company, and
effortlessly to dominate it.

Yet he did not put it at its ease. Stannix was coldly polite, and his
haggard face was set hard. Falconet, anxious to be showman to this
phoenix and at the same time detecting Stannix's dislike, was patently
unhappy. Only Adam seemed oblivious of the strain. He looked at
Creevey's blunt mobile features, agreeable because of the extreme
intelligence that lit them up from behind, and his fathomless eyes, and
they seemed to cast him into a trance. His face had the air of one in
mazes of curious dreams.

That night Stannix wrote in his diary:

"I have seen in the body two anti-types--Warren Creevey and Adam
Melfort. I believe they were conscious of it too, for Creevey has been
making enquiries about Adam, and Adam to-night sat fascinated, as if a
snake's eyes were fixed on him. A queer contrast--the one all grossness
and genius, the other with his 'flesh refined to flame.' I thought of
other anti-types in history--Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Csar,
Lorenzo and Savonarola, Napoleon and Wellington--but none seemed quite
to make a parallel: Ormuzd and Ahriman were the nearest. . . .

"Of one thing I am certain. That meeting in Falconet's flat had fate
behind it. To-night two remarkable men for the first time saw each his
eternal enemy."




_BOOK II_




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      I


I

Adam's first sight of Utlaw was on a dry-fly stream on the Warwick and
Gloucester borders.

He had been down for a week-end to stay with Kenneth Armine, who had
been at school with him, and on the Saturday morning he went out to
remove a few grayling from Armine's little river. It was a quiet
November day, windless and very mild. Early frosts and the gales of
late October had stripped the leafage from the coverts and yellowed the
water-side meadows, but the woods had not yet taken on their winter
umbers and steel-greys and the only colour was in the patches of
fresh-turned plough. It was a moment in the year which Adam loved, when
the world seemed to rest for a little before beginning its slow
germinal movement towards spring.

To take the soft-mouthed grayling on a dry-fly needs a good eye and a
deft hand. Fishing the shallow stickles with a long line, Adam had
failed to satisfy himself, and he was in the fisherman's mood of
complete absorption when, turning a corner, he was aware of another
angler on the water. He waded ashore, intending to begin again at a
point some distance upstream. As he passed the other he stopped for a
moment to watch him. He was a young man with a shock of untidy fair
hair, who had an old-fashioned wicker creel slung on his back. He was
fishing earnestly but clumsily the tail of a deep pool--a good place
for a trout in June, but not for a grayling in November. He turned and
cried out a greeting. "Done anything?" he asked. "A few," said Adam.
"Good for you. I can't stir a fin." The voice was attractive and the
half-turned face was merry.

An hour later the sun came out and Adam sat himself on a ridge of dry
moss to eat his sandwiches. Presently he was joined by the other
fisherman, who came whistling up the bank. He was a young man who might
be thirty, but no more. He was of the middle size, square-shouldered
and thickly made, and his shock head was massive and well-shaped. He
wore a tattered trench waterproof and what looked like ancient
trench-boots, and his walk revealed a slight limp. He had wide-set
friendly grey eyes, which scanned Adam sharply and seemed to approve of
him.

"May I lunch beside you?" he asked, and again Adam noted the charm of
his voice. The accent was the soft slur of the west midlands.

He peered inside the fishing-bag which lay on the moss.

"Great Scott! You've a dozen beauties, and I've nothing to show for my
morning. I raised several, but they wouldn't take hold. Not nippy
enough at the striking, I expect. But what does it matter on a day like
this? It's enough to be alive." He inhaled a long breath of the soft
air, and then fell to work vigorously on a packet of bread and cheese.
Clearly he was lame, for when he sat down he stretched out his left leg
stiffly. His fishing paraphernalia was not elaborate, for, besides the
old wicker basket, he had a cheap rod with an antiquated type of reel.

He had nothing to drink with him, so Adam handed him over the bottle of
beer with which Armine's butler had provided him. The young man
required some pressing, and only accepted it on the donor's assurance
that he never drank at meals and did not want to carry the beastly
thing home.

"I say, this is fine," he exclaimed after a long draught. "Bass tastes
its best out of doors. This reminds me of my first drink after Bourlon
Wood--about the same time of the year as this, and much the same
weather. It's funny to think that that was only three years ago. Were
you on the Western Front?"

"I didn't fight in the War."

The grey eyes, regarding Adam's lean fitness, had a shadow of surprise
in them.

"Lucky for you! I got a bit too much of it, but mercifully the worst
was a crocked leg. I can still enjoy life, not like the poor devils who
have gas in their lungs or damaged guts. It must be rotten to come out
to a place like this and get no good of it because of your vile body.
Thank God, that isn't my way of it. I don't often get a day in the
country, but when I do it makes me daft. If I hadn't a game leg I could
dance a jig. . . . No, I'm not much of a fisherman, though I love it. I
get few chances on a stream like this--mostly bait-fishing in the Canal
or an odd day after perch on one of the Club reservoirs. You must be a
dab at the game. Do you live hereabouts?"

Adam told him that he lived in London, but that his job took him a good
deal about the country. He could see that his companion set him down as
a commercial traveller.

"I do a bit of moving about too," he said. "But not in places where you
can catch fish. I come from Birkpool, and my beat is a score or two
grimy villages round about it. I'm not complaining, for I'm after
bigger things than fish, but I thank Heaven that there are still places
like this in the world. When things get too beastly, I think about a
bend of a river with a wooded hill above and a meadow between."

Adam felt oddly attracted to this expansive young man. There was such
frank gusto in his enjoyment, and his eyes looked out on the world with
so much candour and purpose.

"I'm going to help you to catch a few grayling," he said. "You mustn't
go home with an empty creel."

So till the dusk fell the other was given his first lesson in the
mysteries of the dry-fly. Adam made him take his own rod and instructed
him how to cast the tiny midge on a long line, how to recognise the
gentle sucking rises, and how to strike with a firm but delicate hand.
The young man proved an apt pupil, for he had excellent eyesight and a
quick wrist. By the end of the afternoon he had half a dozen fragrant
fish of his own catching.

"I must be off to catch my train back," he said, as he reeled in
regretfully. "You're staying the night at the pub? Lucky dog! What does
a rod like that cost? I must save up my pennies for one, for this old
weaver's beam of mine is no earthly . . . I wish you'd tell me your
name. Milford? Mine's Utlaw--Joe Utlaw. I'm district organiser for the
Associated Metal-workers--not a sinecure these days I can tell you.
Look me up the next time your round takes you to Birkpool. Here's my
office address, and also my private digs." He tore a leaf from a
notebook and scribbled something on it.

"I'm very much obliged to you, Mr Milford. You've given me the
afternoon of my life. If I can do anything for you in return . . ." The
care-free boy had gone and the young man became suddenly formal, and
rather impressive. But as he disappeared up the farm-road to the
station Adam could hear his whistling begin again. The tune was "The
Lincolnshire Poacher."


The way back for Adam lay through a wood of tall beeches which lined
the northern slopes of the valley. The air was clear and sharpening
with a premonition of frost, while behind the trees the sun was setting
in a sky of dusky gold. Beyond the wood the ground fell to the hollow
in the hills where the Court lay among trim lawns. Adam stopped to
admire the old brick which glowed like a jewel in the sunset. From the
chimneys spires of amethyst smoke rose into the still evening.

A cocker spaniel fawned at his feet, a wire-haired terrier butted its
head against his knees, and the owner of the dogs swung himself over a
fence.

"Had one of your idyllic days?" he asked. He looked into the
fishing-bag. "Not bad. We'd better leave the fish at old Perley's, for
Jackie can't abide grayling."

Kenneth Armine was three years Adam's junior. At school he had been his
fag, and their friendship had been sincere ever since, though till
lately their converse had been intermittent. He had gone to Oxford and
then to an honorary attachship at an Embassy, after which followed
half a dozen years of travel in outlandish places, varied by two
unsuccessful contests for Parliament. In the war he had fought his way
up from second-lieutenant to the command of a famous line battalion,
and he had acquired a considerable reputation as a fire-eater. He was
adored by his men, who let their imaginations expand on his doings. But
the repute was unjustified, for he was the least pugnacious of mortals,
and had a horror of suffering which he jealously concealed. The truth
was that he had one of those short-range imaginations which are a
safeguard against common fear, so that under shell-fire he was
composed, and in an attack a model of businesslike calm. One young
officer who accompanied him in a morning's walk in an unpleasant part
of the Ypres Salient reported that at a particularly unwholesome sunken
road his commanding officer seemed to be deep in thought. But his mind
was not on some high matter of strategy, for when he beckoned the
nervous youth to him it was only to observe that this was a place where
the partridges would come over well.

Like many others of his type Armine went through the war without a
scratch or an ailment. For some months he had a job with the Army on
the Rhine, and then he came home and married. His father, the old
Marquis of Warmestre, lived secluded with his collection of coins and
gems at the main family place in Devonshire, and gave over Armine Court
to his son. Armine was a friend of Christopher Stannix, in whose
company Adam met him again and picked up the threads of their
friendship. He had the slight trim figure of one who has once been a
good light-weight boxer. Like all his family he was sallow and dark,
with a hint of the Celt in his long nose and quick black eyes. Yet his
stock was solid English, descending without admixture from the
ancientry of Saxondom, and his Scottish Christian name was due to a
mother's whim.

His muddy boots fell into step with Adam's brogues, as they descended
the slope to a ha-ha which bounded the lawns.

"I've had a heavy agricultural afternoon," Armine said. "Been round the
near farms, and must have walked ten miles in mud. I can't get these
fellows to see reason. Old Stockley wants to buy his farm--made a bit
of money, and would like to feel himself a landowner. I don't mind, for
very soon land is going to be a millstone round a man's neck and I'd be
glad to lessen the size of mine. But what on earth is old Stockley to
do when he has spent his nest-egg on becoming a squire and is pinched
for working capital? He is a fine Randolph Caldecott type with a red
face and a bird's-eye neckcloth, but his notion of farming is to hunt
two days a week and to potter round his fields on a fat cob. How is he
going to live when prices drop and there's a glut of production
throughout the globe? Labour costs are bound to go up--the labourer has
higher wages but is a dashed lot worse off than his father for all
that. And when trouble comes Stockley and his kind won't have me to
lean on, if they set up for themselves. A good thing for me, you say?
Maybe, but we've been too long here for me to take a bagman's view of
property. I know it's absurd, and Jenkinson keeps pressing me to take
the chance of a good bargain, but I simply can't do it. Too infernally
unconscientious. There's another chap called Ward--started ten years
ago with a hundred pounds, and now has a pedigree flock of Oxford
Downs, and a big milk run in Birkpool, and his wife and three sons and
two daughters all work on the farm like blacks. I'd sell him his land
to-morrow, but he is far too wise to buy--he likes a squire as a
buffer. The trouble is that everybody wants to pinch some little
advantage for themselves out of things as they are to-day, and nobody
bothers to look ahead."

Armine expanded on the topic. He had large dreams for English
agriculture. He wanted more people on the land--smaller farms, more
arable, less pasture--but the drift seemed to be towards letting plough
slip back to prairie. Stock, he held, was the English staple, for the
quality of English stock would always beat the world, so he held that
arable should be subsidiary to stock, and that the full richness of
English pasturing was untapped. Adam, who knew nothing of midland
farming, listened with half an ear.

"I wish to Heaven," his host concluded, "we could get the right kind of
leader for our country labourers, somebody who would act as a gadfly
and make our jolly old bucolics sit up and think. It's the only chance
of salvation for master and man. But the common breed of Labour leader
has a head like a door-post."

"There was one on the river to-day," said Adam, "a man called Utlaw
from Birkpool."

Armine awoke to a lively interest.

"Utlaw; The chap was in my battalion. Got a commission after Cambrai.
Now I come to think of it, he wrote to me about fishing, and I told
Jenkinson to give him a day whenever he asked for it. Why the devil
doesn't he look me up when he comes here? I've heard about his doings
in Birkpool. He's a big swell in his Union, and I'm told as red as they
make 'em. They want me to be Mayor of that delectable city, and if I am
I daresay I'll run up hard against Mr Utlaw. . . . But I don't know. He
was a dashed good battalion officer, and a very decent sort of fellow."

Armine continued to soliloquise.

"I'm glad you mentioned him, for I must keep my eye on him. Horrid the
way one forgets about all the good fellows one fought beside. I tell
you what--Utlaw is some sort of shape as a leader. He had no luck in
the war or he would have had his company. Bit of a sea-lawyer he was,
but reasonable too. Now I remember, he put up a good show at Calais in
December '18. You remember there was a nasty business with the troops
there, for the demobbing was mismanaged and some of the older men were
getting a dirty deal from the War Office. So far as my lot was
concerned there was no trouble, for Utlaw got hold of them at the
start, found out their grievances, made himself their spokesman, and
gave me the case I wanted to put up to headquarters. It needed some
doing to hold a lot of tired, disgruntled men and talk them into
reason. . . . What's he like now? The same tow-headed, cheery,
talkative blighter? The next time he comes here I must get hold of him.
I want a yarn with him, and he'd amuse Jackie."


Adam descended the broad shining staircase very slowly, for he felt
that he was recovering a lost world. He had had a bath and had dressed
leisurely before a bright fire, and his senses seemed to have a new
keenness and to be the quick conveyers of memories. The scents of the
Court--half-sweet, half-acrid--wood smoke, old beeswaxed floors, masses
of cut flowers--blended into a delicate comfort, the essence of all
that was habitable and secure. He had dwelt so long in tents that he
had forgotten it. Now it laid a caressing touch on him, and seemed to
clamour to have its spell acknowledged. He found himself shaking his
head; he did not want it, and very gently he relaxed the clinging
hands. But it was something to preserve--for others, for the world. As
he descended he looked at the pictures on the staircase, furniture
pictures most of them, with their crudities mellowed by time. There
were two tall ivory pagodas at the foot of the stairs, loot from the
Summer Palace; in the hall there were skins and horns of beasts, and
curio cabinets, and settees whose velvet had withstood the wear of
generations, and above the fireplace a family group of
seventeenth-century Armines, with the dead infants painted beneath as a
row of tiny kneeling cherubs. The common uses of four centuries were
assembled here--crude English copies of Flemish tapestry, a Restoration
cupboard, Georgian stools, a Coromandel screen, the drums of a
Peninsular regiment, a case of Victorian samplers--the oddments left by
a dozen generations. This was a house which fitted its possessors as
closely as a bearskin fits the bear. To shake loose from such a
dwelling would be like the pulling up of mandrakes. . . . Need there be
any such shaking loose? Surely a thing so indigenous must be left to
England? But at the back of his head he heard the shriek of the
uprooted mandrakes.

A young woman was standing on the kerb of the fireplace with her head
resting on the ledge of the stone chimney. When she saw him she came
forward and gave him both her hands.

"Such a damned disinheriting countenance!" she quoted. "I never saw
such a solemn face, Adam dear. Do you disapprove of my new
arrangements? You can't pull the Court about much, you know--something
comes in the way and the furniture simply refuses to be moved. . . . I
only got back an hour ago and I'm stiffer than a poker. Thirty miles in
a car driven by myself after a day in those rotten Mivern pastures! Ken
will be down in a moment. He has been farming, and I left him getting
the mud out of his hair."

Jacqueline Armine had a voice so musical and soothing that whatever she
said sounded delicious. She was tall, and the new fashion in clothes
intensified her slimness. One could picture her long graceful limbs
moving about the great house followed by a retinue of dogs and
children. Dogs there were in plenty--two terriers, the cocker that Adam
had met that afternoon, and a most ingratiating lurcher, but the
children were represented only by a red-haired urchin of one year now
asleep upstairs in bed. He drew his colouring from his mother, for
Jacqueline's hair was a brilliant thing, a fiery aureole in sunlight,
but a golden russet in the shadows. It was arranged so as to show much
of the forehead, and the height of the brow and her clear pale
colouring gave her the air of a Tudor portrait. She came of solid East
Anglian stock, for the Albans had been settled on the brink of the
fen-country since the days of Hereward, but a Highland mother had given
her a sparkle like light on a river shallow, as well as a voice which
should have been attuned to soft Gaelic. Her manner seemed to welcome
everyone into a warm intimacy, but it was illusory, for the real
Jacqueline lived in her own chamber well retired from the public rooms
of life. The usual thing said about her was that she oxygenated the air
around her and made everything seem worth doing; consequently she was
immensely popular, as those must be who give to the world more than
they take from it. Having been brought up largely in the company of
grooms and gillies she had a disconcerting frankness about matters
commonly kept out of polite conversation. Someone once said that to
know her was to understand what Elizabethan girls were like, virgins
without prurience or prudery.

At dinner Armine, who had gone without luncheon and tea, was very
hungry, and it was his habit when hungry to be talkative. He discoursed
on his farming investigations of the afternoon.

"They keep on telling me that the one part of England that isn't
shell-shocked is the deep country. Like the county line regiments, they
say--honest fellows that did their job and won the war, and never asked
questions. It's all bunkum. The old shire-horse of a farmer is just as
unsettled as the rest of us, and wants to snaffle a bit for himself out
of the pool. There is a lunatic idea about that we won something by the
war, and that there's a big pile of loot to be shared out. Whereas of
course we won nothing. All we did was to lose a little less than the
other chap, and that's what we call a victory. The fellow that said
that no war could ever be profitable to anybody was dead right. Yet
everybody's after his share in an imaginary loot. Old Stockley wants to
become a squire, and Ward's reaching out for another farm over Ambleton
way. And Utlaw and his lot want higher wages and shorter hours. You
must meet Utlaw, Jackie. He was in my battalion, and Adam forgathered
with him to-day on the river. You've often said you wanted to make a
domestic pet of a Labour leader.--And the politicians are promising a
new earth, and the parsons a new Heaven, and there's a general scramble
each for the booty he fancies. But there's no booty, only an overdraft
at the bank."

"That's nonsense," said his wife. "You shouldn't go too much into
agricultural circles, Ken. It goes to your head, my dear, and you
grouse like an old moss-back. You shall come to London with me at once
and get your mind clear. You shall meet my Mr Creevey."

"Now who on earth is your Mr Creevey?"

"He's a friend of Aunt Georgie, and the cleverest thing alive. When I
was up shopping last week, Aunt Georgie gave a party, and I sat next to
Mr Creevey--rather a hideous young man till you notice his eyes.
Somebody was talking just like you, how we had won the war only to lose
the peace--that kind of melancholia. Up spake Mr Creevey and made us
all cheerful again. I can't repeat his arguments, for he talked like a
very good book, but the gist of them was that we had gained what
mattered most. He called it a quickened sense of acquisitiveness, and
he said that the power to acquire would follow, if we had a little
intelligence."

Armine shook his head.

"That's begging the whole question. It's the lack of intelligence I
complain of. What's the good of wanting to acquire if you haven't the
sense to know how to do it. There's a get-rich-quick mania
about--that's my complaint. Everybody wants to take short cuts--those
rotten painters who splash about colours before they have learned how
to draw, and those rotten writers whose tricks disguise their
emptiness, and those rotten politicians who--who--well, I'm hanged if I
know what they want to do. I don't say we haven't a chance, for the war
has burned up a lot of rubbish, and you can't go through four years of
hell without getting something out of it--being keyed up to something
pretty big. There's a great game to be played, I don't deny, but nobody
is trying to understand the rules. We're all muddled or feverish--all
except Adam, who stands aside and smiles."

"I wish I knew what you were doing!" Lady Armine turned on Adam.

"I've cross-examined him, Jackie," said her husband. "He never tells me
anything, and I've known him ever since he used to lick me for burning
his toast."

Adam had slowly felt his way back into the social atmosphere. He was no
longer tongue-tied, and his words were not drawn slowly and painfully
as out of a deep well. But he was still the observer, and even the
friendliest of company could not make him expand.

"It wouldn't interest you to hear what I've been doing. I've been
exploring queer places."

"Among what Utlaw calls the 'workers'?"

"Yes. I've had a look at most of the big industries. From close at
hand, too. I've lived among the people."

"And the intellectuals? They're an uneasy lot. Every batch of them has
got a different diagnosis and a different cure, and they're all as
certain about things as the Almighty."

Adam smiled. "I've sampled most varieties of them--the half-baked, the
over-baked, and the cracked in the firing."

"Have you tried the uplift circles?" Jacqueline interposed.

"You mean?"

"Oh, all the fancy creeds. The gentry who minister to minds diseased.
The mystics who lift you to a higher plane. The psycho-therapists who
dig out horrors from your past. The Christian Scientists with large
soft hands and a good bedside manner. The spooky people. Aunt Georgie
has them all. The last I saw there was a drooping Hindu who was some
kind of god."

"No," said Adam, "I left the toy-shops alone!"

"Well, and what do you make of it?" Armine was fiercely interrogative.
"You've had a look round politics. Is there any fellow in that show who
can pull things straight? They're playing the old game in which they
are experts, but it isn't the game the country requires. I had hopes of
Kit Stannix, but I'm afraid the machine is too strong for him. He has
become just a cog in it like the rest. And the Church--the Churches?
Have you discovered a prophet who can put the fear of God into the
tribes of Israel?"

"Do you know my brother?" Jacqueline asked.

Armine raised his head.

"Yes," said Armine. "What about Frank Alban? You haven't run across
him? Well, you ought to. Brother Frank is just a little different from
anybody else. He takes my view of things, but, being a saint, he is
hopeful."

"He's at St Chad's now," said Jacqueline. "There are tremendous crowds
at his Wednesday afternoon sermons. They are the strangest things you
ever heard--mostly the kind of slangy familiar stuff he used to give
the troops, and then suddenly comes a sort of self-communing that you
can't forget, and an impassioned appeal that makes you want to howl.
Ken, this must be seen to at once. Adam and Frank must meet. They'd do
each other good."

"That's the best we can do for you," said Armine. "Frank Alban with
only one lung, and plenty of people who think him loony. . . . Another
glass of port? Well, let's get round the library fire, for it's going
to freeze. 'Pon my soul, things are so dicky that I may have to take a
hand myself."



II

Mrs Gallop, at No 3, Charity Row, in the dingy suburb of Birkpool which
went by the incongruous name of Rosedale, had found a tenant for the
back room on her upper floor. The houses in the Row were a relic of
happier days when Rosedale had been almost country, for they were small
two-storeyed things, built originally to accommodate the first
overspill of Birkpool residents. To-day their undue lowliness
contrasted oddly with the tall tenements which hemmed them round.

Her tenant was a pleasant gentleman who, she understood, was by
profession an insurance agent or a commercial traveller. The room was
not easy to let, for it was small, and its outlook was on the blank
wall of the new block behind Charity Row. She had two good rooms on the
ground-floor, which Mr Utlaw occupied; he needed space, for he had many
visitors, and what had once been the best parlour, before Mr Gallop's
decease compelled his widow to take lodgers, was often full of folk who
stayed till all hours--Mrs Gallop was apt to be kept awake by their
talk. But Mr Milford, for that was her upstairs tenant's name, was
easily satisfied and never complained. He was not often there, so there
was little profit from his board, but he kept the room on during his
absences. He was a quiet gentleman, very easy and soft-spoken, and he
was a friend of Mr Utlaw, so the household at No 3 was a happy family.

Adam's base was his chambers in the Temple. There for perhaps half the
year he lived an ordinary London life. He saw his old friends--few in
number now, for the war had cut deep swathes in that group--and he made
new ones. He forced himself to move in as many circles as possible, and
in the lax post-war society this was easy enough. To his satisfaction
he found that he was taken as a newcomer, cumbered with no past. No one
associated him with the ancient scandal, and his doings in the war were
known to only a dozen or two people who held their tongues. He was good
to look upon, still young, apparently comfortably off, and something
remote and mysterious about him, his modesty and reticence in an
expansive world, gave him the charm of strangeness. He might have been
a social success if he had allowed himself to be exploited. As it was,
he was a Cinderella who departed before the stroke of midnight; no one
saw enough of him to place him, but he had the gift of whetting
people's appetites for a fuller knowledge. Only with Stannix, Shaston
and a few others did he put off his defensive armour and live in any
intimacy.

With the help of his servant Crabb he made his Temple rooms a
starting-point for a descent into a variety of new worlds. He was very
clear that to understand these worlds he must live in them as a
veritable inhabitant, and the power of adapting his personality, which
he had acquired during four difficult years, stood him in good stead.
An odd figure often left the Temple whom only Crabb could have
recognised as his master, and after a long interval an odder figure
would return, sometimes with its fingers flattened and stained with
unfamiliar tasks, once or twice very ragged and the worse for wear. It
had been easy for him to slip into the bagman of Mrs Gallop's
lodgings--a few Cockney vowels, clothes slightly astray from the
conventions of Mayfair, one or two mannerisms unknown to his class; his
homeliness and friendliness did the rest.

Utlaw took him for what he professed to be, one of the cogs in the
commercial machine, who had a better mind than was usual with his type,
and aspired to higher things. Two nights after his first arrival, Adam
had been invited to a coffee-drinking in Utlaw's rooms. There was
nearly a score of people there, who made the air solid with cigarette
smoke, strained the resources of the establishment in the matter of
black coffee, and argued till three in the morning. Most of the guests
were young, and about half of them were returned soldiers, while the
others had been exempted for bodily weakness or munition work, or had
had a stormy conscientious career in and out of gaol. By tacit consent
the war was never mentioned, and all were very busy in pegging out
claims in the new world. It was an atmosphere with which Adam was
familiar, the crude, violent, innocent disputation of bewildered youth.
One man he found who was busy educating himself in tutorial classes,
reading Plato no less, with a dream of a university far ahead. Another
preached the pure Marxian gospel, and there was a heated argument
between a group who found their spiritual home in Russia and a League
of Nations enthusiast who upheld the virtues of law. All were poor,
each had a precarious present, but all believed in a better future
which with their hands and brains they would wring out of the reluctant
lords of society. Adam had heard it all a hundred times, but he was
impressed with Utlaw's handling of the talkers. He seemed to treat the
whole thing as a relaxation from the business of life, an adventure not
to be taken too seriously. He would prick a speculative bubble with a
hard fact, and reduce the temperature of debate with his homely humour.
Once he interposed with a cold douche.

"How on earth can you get Lenin's workers' paradise in Britain?" he
cried. "For that you want a self-supporting country. We're parasites
and must live by our exports, and that means capitalism until the day
comes when we have halved our population and can be independent of our
neighbours. We're as complicated as hell, and for Bolshevism you want
simplicity. . . ." "Savagery," someone suggested. "Aye, savagery," he
said. "You can't have it both ways. Our job is to make the best of what
we've got."

Adam found it hard to see much of Utlaw. The man was furiously busy.
There were the weekly lodge meetings and a host of less formal
gatherings to be attended. There was the day-to-day work of health
insurance, and pensions, and workmen's compensation cases--work
equivalent to that of a solicitor in a large practice. There were
endless little disputes to be arranged before they became acrimonious,
difficulties with arrogant foremen and with slack workmen, and now and
then full-dress diplomatic conferences with employers singly and in
combination. There was a daily letter-bag like that of the editor of a
popular newspaper. But if he heard little of Utlaw's work from Utlaw
himself, he heard much of it from other people. At the coffee-party a
man called Bill Wrong had been present, an official of another Union,
and with him Adam struck up an acquaintance, which presently ramified
into many acquaintances in Bill's class. Everywhere he found Utlaw
spoken of with a curious respect.

"He's got guts, has Joe," said Wrong. "The best kind, for he'll not
only stand up to the enemy, but he'll knock his own folk about if he
thinks they're playing the goat."

He had a dozen stories to tell of how Utlaw had fought with the masters
and won, and the fights had left no unpleasantness behind them. "He's
got a wonderful gift that way. Learned it in the army, maybe. . . . My
varicose veins kept me out of that kind of thing and I often wish to
God they hadn't. Joe can hand you out the rough stuff and you only like
him the better for it. If I call a man a bloody fool I'm apt to get a
bloody nose, but if Joe does it he gets stood a drink."


One Saturday afternoon Adam was bidden to tea in the rooms downstairs.
There was another guest, a girl in a biscuit-coloured coat trimmed with
some cheap fur, who moved away from Utlaw's side when Adam entered. She
was small and slight and pale, with dark hair rather badly shingled.
The moulding of her face was fine, and the deep eyes under the
curiously arched eyebrows made her nearly beautiful. The impression
which Adam received was of ardour and purpose and speed--almost of
hurry, for she seemed to have spared little time to attend to her
appearance. She was untidy, but she suggested haste rather than
slovenliness.

"I want to introduce you to my fiance," Utlaw said. "Florrie, this is
Mr Milford--Miss Florence Covert. Since we're all going to be friends,
you'd better get her name right at the start. It's spelt Covert and
pronounced Court in the best Norman style. But that's the only
oligarchic touch about Florrie. Otherwise she's a good democrat."

Miss Covert, as Adam learned afterwards, was the daughter of a country
clergyman of ancient stock. Finding the tedium of vicarage life
unbearable, she had broken away to make her own career. The family were
very poor, but she had managed to get a scholarship at a women's
college where she had taken a good degree, and she was now a
welfare-worker in Eaton's, the big biscuit factory. Adam was at first a
little nervous, for this girl had sharp eyes and might penetrate his
disguise, so he was at some pains to accentuate the idioms of his new
rle. He must have succeeded, for her manner, which was at first
suspicious and defensive, presently became easy and natural. She
accepted him for what he professed to be--one of Joe's friends of the
lesser bourgeoisie, who were to be tolerated but not encouraged, since
they could never be of much use to him.

It was easy to place her. She was devouringly ambitious, first for her
man and then for herself. There could be no question but that she was
deeply in love. Her protective, possessing eyes followed Utlaw with an
ardent affection. He had spruced himself up for the tea-party, and wore
a neat blue suit, coloured linen, and the tie of his old
grammar-school, but his smartness only accentuated his class. He was
the child of the people, and the girl, for all her dowdiness, was
clearly not.

"I saw our new Mayor yesterday," Utlaw observed, "Viscount
Armine--ain't Birkpool going up in the world? I've told you about him,
Florrie. He commanded my battalion, and he's given me some fine days
fishing on his water at the Court. A good chap, old Sniffy--that was
the men's name for him, for when he gave you a telling-off he would
look down his nose and sniff as if he had a cold in his head.--Bet he
wakens up some of the frozen feet on the Town Council, for he's a
pretty good imitation of a Bolshie. Half these young lords are, for the
war has stirred 'em up, and being aristocrats and never having had to
bother about ways and means, they're of the spending type and quite
ready for a new deal."

"It won't last," said the girl scornfully.

"I don't say it will--with most. With some, maybe. When they get down
to rock facts, most will be scared and run away. But I daresay one or
two will finish the course. You see that class of fellow is accustomed
to take risks--loves 'em--the sporting instinct you'd call it, while
the middle-classes play for safety. So if you're going to have a big
experiment you'll always get one or two of the old gentry to back you.
Their fathers were shy of the working man apart from their own folk,
for they knew nothing about him, but this generation has lived four
years with him in the trenches and is inclined to make a pal of him.
No, it isn't patronage. It's a natural affinity, just as a pedigree
hound will make friends with a tyke and both combined will maul a
respectable collie. If you set Armine down among our boys, in half an
hour they'll be calling each other by their Christian names, whereas a
man like Tombs will be 'sirred' till the end of time."

"I don't think these public-house affinities count for much," said Miss
Covert. "Charles Tombs is a stick, but he has a wonderful mind. What
has your Lord Armine to give to the world?"

"Oh, I don't say that Sniffy is much of a thinker, but he's a human
being, which is something. The world could do with more like him
to-day. He's very friendly to yours truly. He wanted to know all about
my work. You haven't to tell him a thing twice, for he's very quick in
the uptake. He asked if I was married, so I told him about you, and he
said he must meet you--said his wife would like to know you. I've never
seen Lady Armine."

"I have. She was pointed out to me the other day in Bertram Street. A
lovely lady with Titian hair, who walks as if she knew she was somebody
and expected people to make way for her. Don't let's have any nonsense,
Joe dear. I'm not going to be taken up by Lady Armine, and I won't let
these grandees make a fool of you. There's no more contemptible figure
than a Labour leader who allows himself to be made a lap-dog by the
enemy. We're a class army and we must stick together till the battle is
won."

Utlaw laughed. "Good for you, Florrie. You would have made a fine
_tricotreuse_ in the French Revolution."

The girl neither assented nor demurred to any of Utlaw's generalities;
what attracted her was the technique of the game. Adam drank his tea
and listened in silence to a discussion on Utlaw's prospects, for it
appeared that Miss Covert accepted him as a loyal friend of her
lover's, though not a friend who could be of much use. At any rate his
advice was never asked. There was the question of a seat in Parliament.
Not just yet, perhaps. There was no chance of a vacancy in Birkpool,
and a constituency in the North, where his Union was powerful, was too
rich a prize to be had at the first time of asking. Besides, the
present Parliament was hopeless, and to be a member of it would only
compromise him. . . . But he must keep himself before the public. He
must speak at Mr Twining's big meeting next month, and he must be ready
for a great effort at the next Conference. Who were his real friends?
Deverick was no use, but Judson, and Gray, and Trant himself were
friendly. Trant had said to someone who had told a friend of hers. . . .

Adam had the impression that Miss Covert was suffering from inverted
snobbery. She was contemptuous about the Armines, and would have Utlaw
stick to his class, but she was determined that he should be high in
that class's hierarchy. She pronounced the names of Labour notables
with an almost sacramental reverence. She retailed what she believed to
be the gossip of the inner circle as an aspiring hostess exults over
the doings of Royalty. Trant, the party leader, Gray with his wizard
locks and wild eloquence, Judson with his smashing repartees were all
to her creatures of romance, as fascinating as a duke to a
novel-reading shopgirl. . . . Well, that was no bad thing. If the woman
who adored Utlaw had this minor worldly wisdom, she would keep his feet
on the ground. The danger was that he would think too much of ultimate
things and forget the gross and immediate facts.

Yet Adam felt that he had not succeeded with Miss Covert. She had held
him at arm's length, not because she was suspicious of him, but because
she considered him negligible. An incident a few days later did not
help matters. In the street he met Jacqueline Armine.

"Carry this puppy for me, Adam," she cried. "My car's parked at the
Town Hall and I've mislaid my chauffeur. I had to bring the little
brute to the vet, for he has damaged his off hind paw. I won't ask what
you're doing here, for Ken says that is what I must never ask. You're
very shabby, my dear. Have you come down in the world?"

"The Court!" she exclaimed in answer to his question. "Ken is there,
and half a dozen young couples who have planted themselves on us
uninvited. What is to be made of the youth of to-day? They're all
penniless, and they all want to get married at once. When their parents
frown they fly for refuge to me, because I'm believed to have a large
heart. I can tell you it's no fun having your house made a rendezvous
for amorous paupers. The chaperone business is beyond me, so I don't
try. They're scarcely out of the nursery, you know. What is to be done
about this craze for child marriage? It's worse than India. Why
couldn't we adopt a good Indian custom when we were at it? Suttee, for
example. The world is cluttered up with superfluous widows."

Just before they reached the car Miss Covert passed them. Adam lifted
his hat with difficulty owing to the puppy, and to Jacqueline's hand,
which at the moment was affectionately laid on his arm. He received a
curt bow and a surprised glance from the deep eyes.

"Who's that Charlotte Corday?" Jacqueline asked.

"The girl Utlaw is engaged to. You've heard Kenneth speak of him."

"Rather. I want to meet him. Her too. We're going to take our Mayoral
duties very seriously. Hullo, there's Simpson. Give him the puppy and
thank you so much, Adam dear. Can't you come on to us and see our Abode
of Love? Oh, by the way, brother Frank is coming here soon to preach.
If you're in Birkpool, go and hear him. It's an experience."

If Miss Covert remained aloof, Adam found that he was moving towards a
closer friendship with Utlaw. His silent ways made him a good listener,
and presently he became the recipient of the other's confidences. Utlaw
was one of those people who discover their own minds to themselves by
talking, and often he would ascend to Adam's little room before going
to bed and unburden himself of some of his cogitations of the day. The
man had an explosive vitality which carried him through the roughest
places. His maxim was that you must always be, as he phrased it, "atop
of your job." Once let it crush you or tangle you, and you were done.
But it was not always easy to keep this pre-eminence, and he had often
in Adam's presence to argue himself out of moods which inclined to
lethargy or depression. His humour was his salvation, for he had a
pleasant gift of laughing at himself. "Life's a perpetual affair of
going over the top," he said; "and it doesn't provide a rum ration.
You've got to find that for yourself. Mine is a jack-in-the-box
elasticity. If I'm suppressed I can't help bobbing up. Also my feeling
about the comedy of it all. Once I can see the idiocy of a fellow and
laugh at him I know I've got him in my hand.

"Florrie tells me she saw you with Lady Armine," he said one evening.
"I didn't know you knew her."

"I don't know her very well. She asked me to carry her lame pup. She's
a sister of a parson called Frank Alban who's coming to preach next
month in St Mark's."

"Alban! You don't say! I met him in France. I don't trouble Church
much, but I shall go to hear him. He used to have fire in his belly."


One morning a strange figure presented itself in Adam's room. It was
that of a short elderly man who was nearly as broad as he was long. He
must have been over sixty, for his mop of hair was white and his square
face was deeply lined. His eyes under bushy eyebrows were a steely
grey; his chin and portentous upper lip were clean shaven, but hair
like a fur muffler enveloped his cheeks and throat. His name was Andrew
Amos, and in the war he had been a pillar of a service so secret that
the name of no one of its members and no one of its reports ever
appeared on paper. Adam had been sent to him by Scrope and had lodged
with him during some illuminating months on the Clyde. Amos was as
inflexible in his politics as he had been in his patriotism; he was a
Radical of the old rock and no Socialist, but his class loyalty was as
vigorous as Miss Covert's. He had a conception of the rights of the
wage-earner which he held as stoutly as he held his own creed of
militant atheism, and he would never deviate one jot from it as long as
he had breath in his body. Eighty years earlier he would have been a
Chartist leader.

He accepted a second breakfast--tea and two of Mrs Gallop's indifferent
eggs.

"Maister Scrope sent me here," he explained. "He wanted me to get a
line on Joe Utlaw, and as I ken a' the Union folk and they ken me, he
thocht I would be better at the job than you. I've been here three
weeks, and I think I've made a fair diagnosis. He'll dae. Utlaw will
dae. Yon yin has the root o' the matter in him."

When his clay pipe was lit Mr Amos expanded.

"There's twae types o' Labour prophets on the road the day. There's
them that canna see an inch beyond bigger wages and shorter hours, and
there's them that takes the long view. I ca' them the arithmetical and
the pheelosophical schools. Utlaw belongs to the second. The warst o't
is that most o' his school are inclined to a windy Socialism. He is
not, at least not in the ordinary sense, and that's a proof o' an
independent mind. The feck o' the workers o' my acquaintance wad spew
if they properly understood what the Socialism was that a man like
Tombs preaches. They've mair in common wi' an oppressive Tweedside
laird than wi' the wersh callants that ca' themselves Marxians. But
unless there's folk to guide them richt they'll be stampeded like sheep
intil a fauld whaur they dinna belong. Utlaw kens this, and that's why
I say he's a man wi' a superior and independent mind.

"He's a queer yin too." Amos removed his pipe and grinned broadly,
thereby revealing a dazzling set of new, ill-fitting teeth. "He doesna
care muckle what he says. He can be dooms funny when he likes--whiles
not altogether decent--like Robert Burns he can give ye a waft o' the
kitchen-midden. But his great gift is for rough-tonguing without
offence. I've heard straight langwidge in my time, but no often as
straight as his. He can misca' an audience till ye'd think they'd want
his blood, and yet they only like him the better for't. I've been
considerin' the why and wherefore o't and my conclusion is this. He's
the common denominator of a' that's English. Not Scotch--he wadna gang
down wi' our lads, and he'd get his heid broke afore he was a week on
the Clyde. But he's English to the marrow o' his banes, and the folk
that listen to him ken that they're listenin' to their ainsels if they
had just the power o' expression.

"His danger?" he said in reply to a question of Adam's. "'Deed I think
that he'll maybe be ower successful. He has an uncommon gift o' the
gab, and he's young, and he has imagination, and guid kens this warld's
a kittle place for them that has ten talents. I whiles think that
there's mair to be gotten out o' the folk that has just the yin
talent--or maybe twae. Brains and character are no often in equal
proportions, and if they're no, the balance, as Robert Burns says, is
wrang adjusted."


Adam attended St Mark's when Frank Alban preached. The church was in
the centre of a large slum parish, and had been famous in the past for
certain audacities of ritual which had led to episcopal interference.
Its vicar had recently died, and at the moment the living was vacant.
There was a movement abroad which called itself the Faith and
Brotherhood League, and under its auspices special sermons were being
preached in the industrial cities. St Mark's had been selected in
Birkpool because of its size and its situation.

The place was crowded, for Alban's recent utterances had given him some
celebrity in the popular press. The congregation was made up largely of
women, most of them well-dressed, but there was a fair proportion of
young men. Adam went there expecting little, but eager to see
Jacqueline Armine's brother. He had not been greatly impressed by what
he had read in the newspapers. The Wednesday services at St Chad's,
from the published extracts, had seemed to him clever nonsense, the
provocative utterance of paradoxical youth. He expected this, combined
with some breezy, man-to-man padre talk, for Alban had made a
considerable reputation among the troops in the war.

The first sight of the man confirmed this expectation. Frank Alban had
none of his sister's colouring. He had a finely cut pale face like a
tragic actor's, dark hair thinning into a natural tonsure, and
nondescript deep-sunk eyes. He looked a fragile, almost a sick man. . .
. Then came a series of surprises. To begin with there was the voice.
It was sweet, not powerful, husky and a little breathless, the voice of
a man with weak lungs. But it had a curiously attractive, even
compelling, power. One could not choose but listen. The face of the
man, too, was transfigured when he spoke, as if a light had been lit
behind it. The impression he gave was one of intense, quivering
earnestness. He read the New Testament lesson, a chapter of St John's
Gospel, and Adam thought that he had never heard the Scriptures more
nobly interpreted. It was not that the voice and elocution were
pre-eminent, but that the reader seemed to be communicating to his
audience exultingly a revelation which had just been granted him.

The next surprise was the sermon. Here was none of the jolly
man-and-a-brother business which Adam had anticipated. Alban stood in
the pulpit like some medival preaching friar, and held his hearers in
a sort of apocalyptic trance. He had no topical allusions, no
contemporary morals; his theme was the eternal one of the choice which
confronts every mortal, the broad path or the narrow path, the
mountain-gate which is too narrow for body and soul and sin. It
reminded Adam of sermons he had heard from old Calvinistic divines in
his youth. The tenor was the same, though it was notably free from the
language of conventional piety. In a world, said the preacher, where
everyone was clamouring for material benefits, there was a risk of
soul-starvation. He pictured the Utopia of the _arrivistes_ and the
Utopia of the social reformers, the whole gamut of dreams from the
vulgar to the idealistic. But did even the noblest express the full
needs of humanity? He repeated in his wistful voice the text which
Scrope had once quoted to Adam: "Behold the tears of such as were
oppressed and they had no comforter; and on the side of their
oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter."

In the church porch, as the solemnised and rather mystified
congregation dispersed, Adam ran across Andrew Amos.

"What did ye think o' him?" asked the old man, who had not forgotten
the sermon-tasting habits of his youth in spite of his latter-day
scepticism. "Yon's an orator and no mistake. Man, it's queer to reflect
that if he strippit his discourse of Biblical jargon, it would be a
very fair statement of faact. There's a sound biological basis for the
doctrine o' the twa roads. In a' evolution there's a point where a
movement must swither between progress and degeneration, and that's
just the amount o' free-will I'll admit in the universe."

That night Utlaw came up to Adam's room before going to bed. He too had
been to St Mark's.

"That's dangerous stuff," was his comment. "I've heard a lot about
Frank Alban, but I never thought he was that class. Oh, wonderful, I
allow! If anybody in my job could talk like that he'd be leading the
country inside four years. But all the same it's dangerous stuff.
That's the 'otherworldliness' that our Marxians are terrified of. If
you take his view, then all we're trying to achieve is futile, and the
only thing that matters is for a man to save his soul though he lives
his life in hoggish misery. That sort of thing is the anodyne that
blankets reform. . . . All the same there's some truth in it, but I
can't quite fix it. No soft soap about Frank Alban. He is out to make
the world uncomfortable, and, by God, he succeeds. My mind felt all
rubbed up the wrong way. . . . By the way, he's staying some days in
Birkpool. He's coming to tea with some of us at the Institute on
Wednesday. You'd better come along. You know his sister and might like
to meet him."

Frank Alban out of church was a most unclerical figure, for he turned
up on the Wednesday night in a tweed suit and an Eton Ramblers' tie. He
had none of the hearty ways of the traditional army padre, and none of
the earnestness of his preaching manner. He looked a retiring delicate
man, perhaps a few years over thirty. His voice was low and hoarse, and
he was liable to fits of coughing.

But he had the gift of putting people at their ease. There was
something about his shy friendliness which bound together in one
fraternity the motley group in the upper room of the Institute. The
guests were all Utlaw's friends and associates--minor Union officials,
the organisers of W.E.A. classes, a Socialist parson who had won a seat
on the town council, one or two women, including Florrie Covert. Alban
greeted Adam as a stranger, at which Florrie opened her eyes. She had
gathered from Utlaw that Adam knew Lady Armine through her brother.

It appeared that Alban had been spending his time looking at housing
conditions in Birkpool and going over some of the chief works. He
deplored the flimsiness of his London life.

"St Chad's is too fashionable. How can I speak to men's hearts if there
is a microphone two feet off broadcasting my sermon as if it were a
music-hall turn, and half a dozen reporters looking out for spicy
tit-bits? I know it is all well meant, but it kills freedom. The result
is that I dare not be unprepared, and must write everything beforehand,
and that you know, Mr Utlaw, is the end of sincere speaking. You can't
hope to persuade unless you can look into people's eyes. . . . Also
there are too many women."

"What ails you at the women?" Florrie asked tartly.

"There are too many of them, and they are there for the wrong purpose.
They are either good souls who lead a sheltered life, or girls looking
for a new sensation."

"You mean they're in love with you?" said Florrie.

He flushed. "God forbid! I mean that I've nothing to say to them. If
I'm any use it's not in confirming believers in their faith or giving
the idle a new thrill. My job is to trouble people's minds as my own is
troubled. I want to be a gadfly to sting honest lethargy into thought.
We're done, you know, if we go on being self-satisfied."

"That's my complaint about you," said a shaggy youth in a red tie. "You
want to keep us in a state of blind torpor about the dirty deal we're
getting in this world, and satisfy us with celestial husks."

Frank did not answer. Instead he asked questions--questions about the
way in which the Birkpool workers lived. He had seen enough for himself
to make his interrogations intelligent, and Utlaw, who did most of the
answering, took him seriously.

"They've a better life than their fathers had who were in the same job.
You can say that if you can say nothing else. Big wages were earned in
the war, and there were a good many nest-eggs laid by. At present
there's not much poverty and only the average amount of unemployment.
That will come, for the whole system is rotten. The firms have been
afraid to declare too big dividends, so they've been 'cutting the
cake,' as we call it, and distributing bonus shares to their
shareholders. What's the result? Every business is over-capitalised and
trembling like a pyramid stuck on its point. Once let the draught
come--and it's coming all right--and the whole thing will topple over.
It's a mug's game, and do you think our fellows don't know it? It's
maddening for an intelligent man to see a business on which his
livelihood depends at the mercy of stock-jobbing finance and him and
his friends powerless to interfere. The human touch has gone to-day.
There's a board of big-wigs in London, and a general manager who spends
his life in the train and doesn't know a single man by head-mark, and,
as like as not, a works manager who knows the men all right but whose
job is only to be a slave-driver. Oh, there's plenty of decent fellows
among the masters, but the system is bad. Capital gets too much out of
the pool, and labour and brains too little. That's the first thing
we've got to change."

The parson town-councillor replied to one of Frank's questions about
housing. Birkpool, he said, was as bad as any place in the land, except
some of the mining villages in the North. There was little comfort and
not much decency. The parson was a dreamer, but he was also full of
facts.

"The life is hard," he said, "but that by itself wouldn't matter. It's
not so hard as a miner's or a deep-sea fisherman's. The trenches were
foul enough, but our men learned there the blessings of cleanliness,
and they haven't forgotten it. The younger lot don't take well with six
days of filth year in and year out and a perfunctory clean-up at the
week-ends. The marvel is that they manage somehow to keep their
self-respect."

The talk ranged at large, Frank interrupting many times with questions.
He never looked at Adam, but he kept his eyes steadily on Utlaw.

"You say we're at the cross-roads?" he asked. "You mean, that the men
want more of everything--money, leisure, chances? Their horizon has
been enlarged? That's partly the spread of education, I suppose, and
partly the war."

"Yes, but we're at the cross-roads in another sense. Unless I'm wildly
wrong we're on the brink of devilish bad times. Britain has lost her
monopoly in most things, and she has to compete against rivals who can
undersell her every day. How are we going to meet that situation? By
scaling down our standard of life?"

"By God, no," said the young man with the red tie. "We can't scrap what
we have so painfully won. There'll be a revolution first."

"I don't know about that," said Utlaw. "It's no good kicking against
the pricks. Our people will stand up to an economic crisis as they
stood up to the war, if it's put fairly before them. But they must be
prepared for it. You must take them into your confidence. Above all,
they must be certain that they are getting a fair deal."

"I want you to tell me something," said Frank. He had been sitting on
the table dangling his legs, and he now stood up before the gas fire.
"I see generally what you're after--a fairer share of the reward of
industry for labour and more say in its management. You want first of
all security, and after that better chances, better conditions and more
leisure. You want to give the ordinary fellow a better life. But merely
tinkering at his material environment won't do that."

"Agreed," said Utlaw. "We've got to go further and think of what you
call his soul. Leisure's no use to him unless he is fitted to make
something out of it. He must be given access to all the treasures of
thought and knowledge which till the other day were the perquisites of
the few." Utlaw delivered this oracularly, for it had been the
peroration of a speech.

"I know, I know," said Frank. "There's fine work being done in that
direction--I've seen something of it in Birkpool this week. But does it
go far enough? After all, everyone hasn't a capacity for culture. But
everyone has a soul to be saved and perfected."

There was an odd silence in the room, for Frank's voice had lost its
easy friendliness and suddenly become hoarse and strained. He was not
looking at Utlaw now, but through him to something very distant.

"This is my point," he said, and the words seemed to come with
difficulty. "Succeed as much as you please, recast industry on a better
pattern, and manual labour will still be the ancient curse of Adam. It
has lost the interest of the craftsman, and is for the most part a
dismal monotonous grind. . . . Again, you may tidy up your shops and
factories, but most of the work will have to be done among dirt--and
not honest country muck but the hideous grime of man's devising. Too
much of that kind of dirt is bad for the human spirit. . . . Then you
say that even the material side is insecure. At any moment, in spite of
all you have done, the worker may have to face an economic blizzard,
and he has no shelter against it such as his master possesses. But you
admit that he must stand up and face it, for there is no other way. . .
. What does all that mean? Surely that the one thing which matters is
to strengthen the man's soul. Open his eyes, enlarge his interests as
much as you please, but make certain above all that he has an inner
peace and fortitude of spirit."

"How are you going to do it?"

Frank smiled.

"I apologise for talking shop. My answer is by what theologians call
the grace of God. The way to it was laid down nineteen hundred years
ago, and it is still open. . . ."

"Christ was a red-hot Socialist," said the young man.

"Not the ordinary kind," said Frank. "He did not call the rich men
knaves--he called them fools."


Adam found his arm seized as he made his way home, and to his surprise
saw Frank at his side.

"I didn't introduce myself properly," he said, "for I gather that you
don't want to have attention called to you. I noticed you never opened
your mouth to-night. But I know a good deal about you from Jackie.
Lyson, too--you served with him, didn't you? He's an old friend of
mine, and once he told me a little--a very little--about your doings. I
want to talk to you--not now, but somewhere soon--a long talk. You can
help me a lot."

The street was well lit, so he may have seen surprise in Adam's face,
for he laughed.

"Oh, I know I'm supposed to be officially helpful, but I'm a broken
reed. I'm as much adrift from my moorings as anybody. I'm sick to death
of my work in London, and unless I chuck it I shall become a public
scandal. I believe in God, but I'm not very clear about anything else.
I call myself a Seeker. You remember Cromwell's words--'The best sect
next to a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be
at the end.' That's my comfort, and I'm on the look out for others to
keep me company. . . . You're one. Kenneth Armine's voice becomes
reverential when he mentions you, and he has no great bump of
veneration. . . . And I think Utlaw is another. You agree? One man with
faith can move mountains, but three might be an Army of the Lord."



III

A month later Adam noticed that Utlaw's face had begun to wear a
curious look of strain and worry. He dated it from Twining's great
meeting in the Town Hall, a Labour rally at which Utlaw had proposed
the vote of thanks in a speech which completely outclassed the banal
rhetoric of the principal orator. Twining was a man who had grown grey
in the service of the party, and was very generally respected, but
constant speaking out-of-doors had stripped his voice of all tone, and
his ideas were those of the last little official handbook. After him
Utlaw's living appeal was like champagne after skim milk. It had been a
fine performance, but it had been interrupted. He got no such
respectful hearing as Twining got. Clearly there were elements in
Birkpool hostile to him, and one man in particular had made himself
conspicuous by savage interjections.

Ever since then Utlaw's manner had been constrained, as if he were
cumbered with difficult private thoughts. He never appeared now in
Adam's room before going to bed. He seemed to avoid him, and, though
very friendly when they met, showed no wish to meet often. Florrie,
too, looked haggard and miserable. Twice Adam saw her leaving Utlaw's
room, and he met her occasionally in the street, and each time he was
struck by the anxiety in her face. Was it a lovers' quarrel? Or was
Utlaw face to face with some serious difficulty in his work?

One evening came Andrew Amos, who enlightened him.

"I've been verifyin' my faacts," said Amos, "and now I've come to put
them before you. Utlaw's in bad trouble--ye might say in danger. It's
no blame to him, but it's no just that easy to see the way out o' it."

Then Andrew told his tale. There was a man called Marrish, who had once
been an official of Utlaw's Union, and had indeed been the runner-up
for the post of local organiser. After his rejection he had left his
Union job and become a free-lance journalist. He was a small dark man
with a touch of the Jew in him, and had been born in the Transvaal and
begun life in the Rand mines. For Utlaw he cherished an extreme
jealousy, which was not improved by certain public encounters in which
he got the worst of it. He was a fanatic of the Left, and Utlaw's
moderation seemed to him treason to the cause, so public differences
were added to private grievances. The situation was embittered by his
lack of success in his new profession. Marrish had a clever pen, but he
had not much sense of atmosphere, and he attributed the coldness of the
Labour press towards his work to Utlaw's influence. The man had a
delicate wife, and was himself threatened by diabetes, and the misery
of his existence he set down at Utlaw's door. Utlaw, young, healthy,
popular, expansive, seemed to his morose soul to be the enemy to whose
sinister power all his misfortunes were due. He was excluded from lodge
meetings, but whenever Utlaw appeared on a public platform Marrish was
there to make a row, and at Twining's rally he had been especially
violent.

Now things had become worse. Marrish had grown half demented. He had
not enough to eat and far too much to think about. He had begun to
drink, too, which was bad, for he had once been a fanatical
teetotaller. Not in his cups only, but in cold blood he was announcing
his intention of doing Utlaw in. He had relapsed into the atmosphere of
his early days when a revolver was apt to be the final arbitrament.

"It's a nasty business," said Amos. "Ye see the man is no what you
might ca' certifiably mad. It wadna be possible to get him locked up.
And his threats are no enough to bring him inside the law--he's ower
clever for that--just a hint here and a hint there--nothing ye could
frame a charge on. Besides, if ye sent him to prison or got him bound
over, what good would that do? He would be wilder than ever and the
mair determined to wait his chance. I've made it my job to see
something o' the body, and, I tell ye, there's murder in his een. . . .
Now, sir, what's to be done? Any moment Marrish may put a bullet in
Joe's brain. After that they may lock him up or hang him, but the
mischief will be done. Till Marrish is settled wi' Utlaw gangs in
constant danger o' his life. It's like that auld story about the sword
o' Damicockles."

There was that in Amos's eye which made Adam ask if he had ever been
himself in the same predicament.

"Yince," was the grinning answer, "and I took the offensive. I lay in
wait for the man and gie'd him sic a hammerin' that he never wantit to
see my face again. But my yin wasna mad--just bad, and that was simple.
Daftness is the wanchancy thing that ye canna deal wi'. My mind's clear
that something must be done and the thing brocht to a heid, or Joe will
get a bullet where he doesna want it, or gang in fear that will make
his life a misery."

"Have you anything to suggest?" Adam asked.

"Not preceesely. But he canna go on dodgin' the body and keepin' him at
arm's length. He maun get some kind o' settlement."

"And precipitate a tragedy?"

"Maybe. But onything is better than to gang as the Bible says in an
awful looking for of judgment."

Adam spent a day in making enquiries, after telephoning to London to
one or two obscure acquaintances. He had Marrish pointed out to him in
a back room of a public house, and he did not like the look of his
dead-white face and hot eyes. Utlaw had an evening meeting, and Adam
attended it, and contrived to keep close behind him on his walk home.
He entered the house a minute later and walked into the big downstairs
room.

Utlaw was shuttering the window. He turned his head and Adam noted the
quick hunted look.

"I can't talk to you to-night, Milford," he said. "I've a lot of work
to do. Sorry, but you must be a good chap and leave me alone."

"I'm afraid I must talk to you. Sit down and have a pipe. I've come to
know about Marrish. You and I must have it out. The thing is too
serious to let slide."

Utlaw dropped the bar of the shutter, and flung himself into an
arm-chair. "Did you lock the front door when you came in? . . . You're
right. It's damnably serious. I've been living in hell for the last
week or two. And poor Florrie also. But it's no good. You can't do
anything for me. It's my own show which I must go through alone."

"That's true. You must go through it alone. But possibly I can help
you."

Utlaw said nothing for a minute. He was staring into the ashes of a
dying fire with his brows knitted.

"I could ask for police protection," he said at last. "But that would
mean publicity, and it would be no use, for Marrish if he means
business would get me in the end. Or I could have my own
bodyguard--there are plenty of young fellows who would be ready for the
job. But that would be no good either, for there would be bound to come
a time when Marrish would have his chance. So I have simply ignored the
whole thing and led my ordinary life. My hope, if I have any hope, is
that Marrish when he sees how little I care for his threats will think
better of them--that my sanity will cure his madness."

"Isn't the other result more likely--that your contempt may increase
his madness? Besides, he has only to catch a glimpse of you to see that
his threats are taking effect. You're a different man since Twining's
meeting. You look ill--sometimes you look as if you were under sentence
of death."

"You've realised that? Well, that's exactly how I feel. But what else
is there to do? Any action I take will merely postpone the trouble. The
only thing for me is to set my teeth and go through with it, trusting
to luck. But, my God! it's a stiff test of fortitude. I don't think I'm
more of a coward than other folk, but this waiting and waiting and
waiting turns my nerve to water. There are moments when I could go down
on my knees to Marrish and ask him to shoot and shoot quick."

"You are an uncommonly brave man. But you're trying yourself too high.
It would break the nerve of an archangel to go on as you're doing. Now,
I'm going to prescribe for you. I'm older than you, and I've seen more
of the world. Things must be brought to a head right now. . . . Listen
to me and don't interrupt. You and Marrish must meet. Here--in this
room--with nobody near. He must be given every chance, so that if he
means to murder you he can do it and get away. You mustn't be armed.
You must offer him the key and tell him to lock the door and put it in
his pocket. . . . He may shoot at once, but it isn't likely. He will
feel himself on the top of the situation and be in no hurry. Then you
must talk to him--you know how to talk. Tell me, has he any earthly
shadow of a grievance against you?"

"Not an earthly. It's all a wretched misunderstanding. I rather liked
him and wanted to help him, but he went off at a bend into raving
dislike."

"Good. Well, you must dig up all his grievances, and spread them out
and explain them. Madmen get things in a tangled clump, and it is half
the battle if you can sort out the threads. The clump looks big, but
each of the threads looks small and silly. . . . You run a risk, of
course, but you have a good chance, and if you don't do something of
the kind the risk becomes a black certainty. You've got to end the
thing once and for all--that's common sense, for you can't go on the
way you're going. Marrish must leave this room satisfied--a sane man
again as far as you are concerned--and he must leave it your friend."

Utlaw got to his feet. "Come now, that sounds good sense. It's action
anyway, and that's easier for me than waiting."

They talked for an hour till Adam said good night. Utlaw asked a final
question.

"Were you ever in deadly danger of your life?"

"Often."

"But I mean, a cold-blooded affair like this?"

"Yes. Worse than this."

"For God's sake tell me about it."

"Not now. Some day, perhaps."

"You're an extraordinary fellow, Milford, and I can't make you out. I
thought of going to Lord Armine, for he was my old commanding officer,
and I felt that my trouble might be a soldier's affair. But I didn't,
for I reflected that Sniffy was a bit too thick in the head to take it
in. But you--you order me about like a brigadier and you seem to have
the wisdom of the serpent and the dove all in one. If I survive the
next week I'm going to know what you were doing before you settled into
your bagman's job."


Early next morning Adam saw Amos and despatched him on an errand. An
hour later Amos telephoned and his voice was grave.

"I've seen him, Mr Milford. Things is waur than I thought. The man's
bleezin' mad. He's a sort of a fisherman, and I said it was a grand
mornin' and proposed that him and me should take a day on the Nesh. I
saw that his thoughts were far awa' from fishing, but he agreed. He
said he wanted to get a look at the countryside, for, says he, this is
likely my last day on earth. He has a pistol in his pooch, and I can
see that he's ettlin' to kill Joe and syne do awa' wi' himsel'. He has
gotten his resolution up to the stickin' point, and means the blackest
kind o' business. Joe's been in no danger afore, for the body hadna
made up his mind, but now he's for it. What about speeritin' Marrish
away for a month or two in the hopes that he will cool down? I could
maybe arrange it. . . ."

"No, no," said Adam, "that would only postpone the reckoning. I'll join
you at one o'clock at the bend of the Nesh below Applecombe Mill. Then
I'll judge for myself. If he's stark mad we'll have him certified, and
if there's any rudiments of sense in him we may straighten things out.
Keep him off the drink at all costs."

"That'll be easy enough. He hasna tastit for three days. There's ower
muckle fire in his heid to want alcohol. . . . Weel, I'll expect ye at
yin o'clock. It's no likely I'll have a very cheery mornin'."

Adam reached the river in the high noon of a May day, when the
hawthorns were bowed down with blossom, and the waterside meadows were
"enamelled," as the poets say, with daisies and buttercups. He was
wearing an old suit of rough tweeds, and a broad-brimmed felt hat that
gave him something of a colonial air. Amos sat stolidly on the bank
watching his float, a figure as square and restful as a tree-stump.
Marrish had given up the pretence of fishing and was walking about
bareheaded, sometimes throwing a word to Amos, sometimes talking to
himself. He looked ill; his face had the yellow pallor of the diabetic,
he had not shaved for days, his thick black hair was unkempt, and his
eyes were not good to look on. He started as Adam appeared, and his
hand went to his pocket.

Amos slowly raised himself to his feet.

"Hullo, Mr Milford. Are you out like huz for a day's airin'? Man, it's
graund weather. But the fish are no takin'; for I've had just the yin
bite. Maybe there's thunder in the air. D'ye ken my freend, Mr Marrish?
He's out o' South Africa like yoursel'." He consulted an enormous
silver watch. "It's about time for our meat. Haud on, and I'll fetch
the creel wi' our pieces."

Adam held out his hand.

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr Marrish. I've heard a lot of you from a
friend, Johnny Sprot."

Marrish stared at him for a moment, and then extended an unwilling
hand. Adam noted how hot and dry it was. He seemed to be wrestling with
a painful memory.

"Johnny Sprot! That's a thousand years ago. I've forgotten all about
that."

"Johnny hasn't forgotten," said Adam cheerfully. "He was in London the
other day. He constantly talks about you. Says you were his best friend
and a comrade of his boyhood and all that, and longs to see you again.
Sit down and let's have a crack while old Amos fetches the lunch."

Marrish sat himself slowly on the grass as if his legs were cramped.
Adam was so situated that he looked him full in the face and his kindly
domineering manner had its effect. Marrish's hot gaze met his and
Adam's steady grey eyes seemed to hold him fascinated. He stopped
jerking his shoulders and his lips ceased to mutter.

"I don't want to hear about Johnny Sprot," he said. "That's all dead
and buried."

"Nonsense, man. You can't bury your youth, and you can't bury Johnny.
He's the alivest thing on earth--the kind of friend that sticks closer
than a brother. I'd rather lose twenty thousand pounds than wreck a
friendship."

"I'm done with friends. I have only enemies."

"Well, that's better than nothing, for an enemy may be a friend
to-morrow."

"By God, no. My enemies are enemies to the other side of Tophet. I
stand alone."

"Not you. You've a wife, haven't you?"

"What the hell has that to do with you?"

Adam looked at him steadily.

"Look here, Mr Marrish, you've got to mend your manners. When I ask a
civil question, I expect a civil answer. I don't stand for insolence."

"You don't," Marrish almost screamed, and half rose to his feet. "Then,
by God, you've got to lump it or clear out of this."

His right hand went to his pocket, but Adam was too quick for him. In a
single deft movement he had one arm round the other's shoulders,
pinioning Marrish's left arm to his side, while his right had grasped
the hand in the pocket. Marrish, under-nourished and sick, had no
chance against this exercised strength. The pressure of Adam's fingers
on the other's right wrist paralysed it. Adam drew out the pistol.

He ignored Marrish utterly and examined the little weapon.

"A pretty toy. Loaded too. Isn't that unnecessary for an English
riverside on a summer day? You're a bit of a marksman, Mr Marrish,
aren't you? Johnny had a story of a scrap with some drunken natives at
Geduld where you were pretty useful."

Adam turned round and faced him. Marrish was sitting humped up with
eyes like a sick dog's.

"Geduld, wasn't it?" he repeated.

"No, it was at the Vlak Reef."

"Well, it was a good show, anyway. Take back your gun and keep it for
its proper use."

Marrish did not replace the pistol in his pocket. It lay on the grass
between them. There was no sign of Amos with the lunch, for that worthy
was obeying orders.

"Johnny said you were the best-natured chap going," Adam went on.
"You're a little off-colour this morning, aren't you? You look to me
like a sick man. Give me your hands. I know something about doctoring."

Marrish, who seemed in a daze, surrendered both hands, and Adam's
strong grasp enclosed his wrists, and his cool eyes held the other's
fevered ones in a strict control. "Do you remember this?" he asked.
"It's not the English way of diagnosis. It's the trick of the old
witch-doctor on the Black Umvelos', that you and Johnny Sprot met when
you took a waggon-load of stores to peddle in Zululand. But it's mighty
sound medicine. . . . Shall I tell you what I learn from the blood beat
in your veins and the pupils of your eyes? You are sick in body, but
not deathly sick. There's a whole man behind waiting to be cleansed of
its leprosy. You are sick in mind, but not deathly sick, for there's a
good fellow behind that ought to be released. But I see in the back of
your eyes a small crazy devil. I know that devil well, and out he must
come, for he's the source of all the mischief. . . . What a godless
fool you were ever to come to Birkpool! You were never meant for a
rotten black city like that. It has poisoned your blood and choked your
lungs. And you were never meant for the game you've been trying to
play--too good in one way--too stiff in your joints also. England wants
a darned lot of understanding, and you hadn't the patience to learn.
I'll tell you where you should be."

Still holding Marrish's wrists and mastering his eyes Adam began to
talk about the High Veld. He had never been there himself, but he had
made it his business from his early days at the Staff College to study
the atmospheres of many parts of the globe. Once in the Rhineland he
had escaped from a dangerous place by talking to a Bavarian of the
Wettersteingebirge with apparently intimate knowledge. He knew enough
of Marrish's early career to select the high lights. He spoke of
prospecting journeys in Lydenburg and the Zoutspansberg, where the
uplands break down in forested cliffs to the bushveld, and a man may
look across a hundred miles to the blue peaks in Portuguese territory.
He spoke of trading journeys in the Low Country, the red, scarred
tracks through the bush, the slow milky rivers, and the camp in the
evening with the mules kicking at their peg-ropes, and the wood fires
crackling, and the guinea-fowl clucking in the trees. He spoke of hot
middays on the High Veld, when the pans of Ermelo become in the mirage
a shoreless ocean. Above all he spoke of that delectable climate where
a man could go to bed supperless and weary on the cold ground and wake
whistling with sheer bodily well-being--and of a world where there was
hope and horizon, since everything was still in the making. Into
Marrish's glazed eyes there came gleams of reminiscence, and now and
then a flicker of assent. Sometimes he corrected Adam. "Not the
Olifants," he would say. "It was farther north--the Klein Letaba."

By and by Adam dropped his wrists. He lifted the pistol.

"Johnny said you used to be a fine shot. Let me see you hit the grey
knot in that willow stump across the river, three yards below the big
elm."

Marrish automatically took the weapon and fired. He was within six
inches of the knot.

"Let me try," said Adam. His shot was an inch nearer.

Marrish fired again, almost repeating Adam's shot.

Adam's next attempt was wide, but he fired a second time and just
grazed the knot. Marrish almost plucked the pistol from his hand and
sent a bullet plumb into the knot's centre.

"By Jove, that's pretty shooting. Johnny was right. Hullo, the gun's
empty. Have you any more cartridges?"

Marrish seemed to awake to a maddened recollection. "Curse you!" he
cried. "You've done me in. I wanted those bullets . . . I wanted them
to-day for . . ."

"For what?" Adam asked, and once again he took the other's hands--his
hands, not his wrists.

"For my enemy--the man who has ruined me . . . and a last one for
myself."

"So?" said Adam. "You're a sicker man than I thought. There's that
small crooked devil to be got out of you. Now take your time--very
slowly. I want to know all about that little devil."

The hands in Adam's grasp were quivering like a bird that a boy has
caged. Marrish was talking rapidly, incoherently, words tripping on
each other's heels. His voice had lost its shrillness, and had become
low and intense. . . . He told of his coming to Birkpool, his dreams
and ambitions, his successes--and then the appearance of the other man
who jostled him aside. He did not mention Utlaw by name--he was only
"he," as if the figure so dominated the world that even a stranger must
recognise the incubus. There followed a long catalogue of injuries
evidently carefully tabulated in his mind--many of them childish, but
clearly to him a great mountain of wrongs. Little sayings were
misconstrued, casual acts perverted, till all his troubles--his
journalistic failures, the slights of his party, his poverty, his own
ill-health and his wife's--were made to spring from the one tap-root of
personal malevolence. Adam let him talk till his confession ebbed away
in a moan of misery.

He dropped his hands.

"Poor old chap," he said. "You've made an infernal mess of things."

"Not me . . ." Marrish began.

"Yes, you. For you've lost your pride. You've forgotten the man you
once were. Do you mean to say that when you and Johnny were partners
you would have ever admitted that any man could down you? When you took
a knock you blamed it on the cussedness of things and not on the other
fellow. But now, when you've taken a collection of knocks because
you're in the wrong groove and a world you don't understand, you're
weak enough to put it all on the other chap. You're a fool, Marrish.
And a bit of a coward."

"That's a lie. I've faced up squarely . . ."

"Not you. You've knuckled under, and consoled yourself by putting it
all down to an imaginary enemy, and nursing your hate for him till you
can't see daylight. That's the behaviour of a sulky child. If you had
faced up to things you'd have seen you were in the wrong place, cut
your losses, and shifted yourself to a better. . . . Who, by the way,
is the man you blame?"

Marrish muttered a word, and it was spoken not defiantly but
shamefacedly. Adam had planned out beforehand every move in the game,
and the slight change of tone told him that he was winning.

"Utlaw!" he cried, and then laughed. "Utlaw! Man, you've been barking
up the wrong tree. Utlaw never had a hard thought about you. If he had,
he would have scored heavily, for he has made you hate him, and that's
the worst affliction you can put on a man. Have you ever had a happy
moment since you started this grouch? No. It has come between you and
food and sleep, and it's made the whole earth black for you. Utlaw
would have scored, if he had wanted to--only he's not that kind of
fellow."

"What do you know about him?" Marrish asked fiercely, as if he claimed
a proprietary right in his enemy.

"I knew him in the war, where one learned a good deal about other
people. Utlaw never in all his days cherished a grudge against anybody.
He hasn't time for it--his head is too full of his maggots. He's a good
chap, but he's a fool--like you, Marrish--the same kind of fool."

The other lifted his weary eyes.

"I'm a fool all right--Utlaw's a scoundrel," he said.

"No, he's a fool. He's like you--he's in a game where he can't win and
he'll eat out his heart in trying. He wants to build things up, and has
all kinds of fine notions--just as you had once. But he is working with
tools that will break in his hand. He is slaving for people who in the
end will turn him down. That's the curse of this rotten political game.
In two years or five years he will be sitting with a broken heart in
the dust among the ruins of his dreams. That is why I call him a fool.
But he won't be such an utter fool as you, for he won't have invented
an imaginary enemy and be torturing himself with hating. He has too
much guts and sense for that. . . . You thought of putting a bullet
into him? Well, if he deserved it he would still have scored off you.
He would have made your life a hell with your hate, and you would be
putting him out of the world before he had lost his illusions. Not a
bad way of dying, you know--only of course he doesn't deserve it. If
you killed him it would be like murdering a child."

Marrish had his eyes on the ground. Adam's steady gaze exercised some
mysterious compulsion, for slowly he lifted them and looked him in the
face. The heat of purpose had gone out of him, and what remained was
bewilderment, almost fear.

"You meant your last bullet for yourself? Well, you'd probably make a
mess of it. Then you would spend some weeks in a prison hospital till
they patched you up. After that would come the trial. If you were well
defended, they might find you mad, and put you away during His
Majesty's pleasure. A nice kind of life for you! For of course you are
not mad. You're as sane as I am. If you were lucky the judge would put
on a black cap and presently you'd swing. You're a man of
imagination--you started life with hopes and ideals--do you realise
what the bitterness of those last days would be when you knew that they
were all to end with a six-foot drop?"

"I wouldn't mind," the other muttered.

"Don't be too sure. God never meant you for a murderer--you're not a
cool hand--when you saw Utlaw's brains on the floor you'd be sick and
scared and as like as not would blow away a bit of your jaw. It often
happens that way. But assume that your shot went true. You'd be done
with your troubles, you say. Maybe, but you'd also be done with life.
You're still a young man. You've been living in a bad dream, but you
know that there are still jolly things in the world. This countryside,
for instance. You came out to-day to have a last look at it? Am I
right? That shows that you have not lost the capacity for pleasure.
When I was talking about the Houtbosch I saw a spark come into your
eyes. You're not the shrivelled husk you think yourself. There's still
blood in your veins. Are you going to end all that--for a babyish whim?

"And there's another thing," Adam went on. "You've always been a proud
fellow. You've been proud of yourself, and your friends have been proud
of you. How are those friends going to feel when they hear that David
Marrish has died shamefully--either by his own hand or by the
hangman's? . . . And what about your wife? You thank God that you have
no children, though there was a time when you didn't feel like that.
But you're going to leave a wife behind who trusts in you. You've been
a good husband to her, but now you're going to inflict on her the
uttermost wrong. . . . A murderer's widow. . . . Without a hope or a
penny in the world. . . . You've been kind to her, and nursed her
tenderly and stinted yourself that she might have food and medicine.
And now you're going to be savagely, brutally, hellishly cruel to a
poor woman who gave you all she had."

For a moment it looked as if Marrish would attack him. The man got to
his feet and stood with a contorted face and uplifted arm. Then he
seemed to collapse into a heap. He was weeping, bitterly, convulsively,
and his meagre body was shaken with sobs.

Adam flung an arm round his shoulders.

"Poor old chap," he said gently. "That's right. Let the tears come.
When you've wept enough, you'll be yourself again."

For some time the two men sat there as the afternoon lengthened. Adam's
arm seemed to comfort Marrish, and he lay back into the curve of it.
Presently the sobbing ceased, and there was a long silence.

"I'm going to take charge of you," Adam said. "Never mind who I am. Say
that I'm a healer of sick souls, and that I intend to make a proper job
of you. This country's no place for you, and you're going back to the
place where your roots are. You've plenty of good work in you, and I'll
see that you get it out. Johnny Sprot wants you to join him. He has a
tidy handful of propositions up in Rhodesia, and he wants a partner.
Among other things, there's a newspaper for you to run. You're a good
organiser, and there's a field with Johnny for your talents. . . . Are
you hungry? For I am, ravenously, and Amos seems to have gone over the
sky-line with the lunch. I've got a little two-seater car and I'm going
to take you back to Birkpool. Then I'll tell you what you must do. Get
shaved and tidied up, and you and Mrs Marrish will come and feed with
me. I'm at the King's Head. There we'll talk about plans, and to-morrow
I'll take you up to London to see some friends. I'm in charge of this
outfit, remember, and you must obey orders."

Marrish turned on him a white tear-stained face. His eyes were quiet
now and a little dim.

"I don't know . . ." he began.

"You don't, but never mind that now--you will in time. One thing you do
know, that you're the old David Marrish again. . . . Oh, by the way,
you've another job before you to-night. You were going to see
Utlaw--you had fixed that up, hadn't you? Well, you must keep the
appointment just the same. He knows that you've been talking loose
about him. Tell him you have come to apologise and make up the quarrel.
Say that you have been all kinds of a fool. That's the amends that an
honest man makes for an occasional folly. . . . If you like, you can
tell him that he's a fool also--that he has got into the wrong game the
same as you, and will find it out some day."

Adam took up the pistol from the grass.

"There! You'd better take that," he said.

Marrish looked at it with a shudder.

"Take it," Adam repeated. "You can't leave it lying here. It's your
property."

Marrish took the thing gingerly as if it had been a hot iron. But he
did not replace it in his pocket. Holding it by the muzzle he hurled it
from him high into the air. It fell in the middle of the stream, and he
watched till the last ripple made by it had died away. He had the face
of one performing an act of reparation.


That night Utlaw came up and sat on Adam's bed. He looked like a man
dog-tired but very happy.

"It's all over," he said. "I've seen Marrish. He asked for an
appointment to-night and I gave it him. I did all you advised
me--nobody about, the key lying on the table ready to hand him, nothing
to defend myself with--but I felt like a criminal going to the gallows.
I opened the door to him myself, and I can tell you my knees were
knocking together. . . . Then a miracle happened. I didn't offer him
the key--I saw at the first glance there was no need. He looked quiet
and sober and--and--kindly. Yes, kindly. He said he had come to
apologise for playing the goat. Apparently he is leaving Birkpool at
once. . . . We sat down and smoked a pipe together and had a long
friendly talk. I blame myself for not having had it all out with him
before--it's a lesson to me I shall never forget. It was all a hideous
misunderstanding. The man's a thundering good fellow--a better fellow
than me by a long sight. He has brains, too. He knows the difficult job
I've got and talked acutely about it--told me I was a bit of a fool
myself for trying to do the impossible. We parted like long-lost
brothers, and he's going to keep me posted about his doings. . . . Then
I went round to see Florrie and took her out and gave her supper, for
neither of us has been able to eat a bite to-day. We both felt as if we
had got a reprieve. She's fallen for you completely, Milford, and by
God, so have I. You're the kind of friend to go to in a fix. . . . As I
say, I've learned my lesson. Never funk trouble. It's Mount Everest
when you fight shy of it, but when you face up to it it's a molehill. .
. . Whew! I'm weary. I'm going to bed to sleep a round of the clock."


Adam did not go to bed. He sat and smoked long into the night. He
thought of Utlaw; now that he had faced death in cold blood Utlaw would
be twice the man he had been. But chiefly he thought of himself.

This was the kind of thing that he could do, for which his long
training fitted him. But the other job--the main job? He believed that
he had found the quality that he sought in three men, but it was still
only potential, it had still to be shaped to leadership. At any moment
one or the other, or all three, might crack in his hands. In his hands!
That was the trouble. Had he the power, the brain, the mastery, to
shape the career of a fellow-mortal? For a black moment of disillusion
he felt that such a purpose was sheer arrogance. It was a task which
should be left to God, and who was he to thrust himself in as God's
vicegerent?




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      II


I

As Adam dressed for dinner in his little Temple bedroom, which looked
out on the top of a dusty plane tree and a flat-chested building of old
brick, he had one of his rare moments of introspection when he tried to
orientate himself with the world.

He was living a normal life again in close contact with his fellows. To
that he had schooled himself--not without difficulty after his six
years of solitude. He had a task before him which absorbed all his
energies of mind and body, but he had early realised that he must fail
if he regarded people as only figures in a mathematical problem. So he
laboured to cultivate the common sympathies. But he knew that his
success was limited. He understood them and could use them, but they
did not deeply move him. Marrish was a case in point. He had saved the
man from disaster, and Marrish's letters now were full of a doglike
worshipping affection. But for Marrish himself he had no strong
feeling; he had been only an incident in Utlaw's life. Utlaw was the
vital matter. Yet how much did he care for Utlaw apart from Utlaw's
political career? . . . Adam laid down his brushes and regarded his
face in the mirror. All his emotions were now tenuous things with a
utilitarian purpose. Might not this lack of an ultimate human warmth be
fatal in some critical hour?

It was the same, he reflected, with other things. He nominally shared
in the ordinary tastes and pursuits of his kind, but how much did they
mean to him? He was a brilliant fisherman, but he fished only to get
solitude for his thoughts. Books he read only to extend his knowledge,
the conversation of his fellows he welcomed only for the light it cast
upon the talkers. The beauty of nature and of art scarcely affected
him. He had no weaknesses of the flesh, no foibles of the mind. Had he
any friends for whom he felt the true unself-regarding passion of
friendship? Stannix, perhaps. Lyson, maybe? Kenneth Armine? He was not
certain. He realised suddenly that he was living in a world where all
things, except the one, were dim and subfusc and shadowy.

But was this wholly true? What of that steady exhilaration of his which
was like a recovered youth? He had no need for stoicism. In his dingy
Birkpool room, in the monotonous life to which for months he would
condemn himself, he had never a moment of ennui. There seemed to be an
inner fount of cheerfulness always flowing. His cause was an anchor to
keep him steady, but it could not give this perpetual afflatus of
spirit like a May morning.

He had no need to ask himself the reason. There was a secret world
waiting for him across whose border he could step at will. It was only
in moments of reflection like this that he understood how large a part
Eilean Bn played in his life. Half his time was spent among its cool
winds and shining spaces. For him it was all that art and literature
could give. How could he be rapt by the sight of a lush English meadow
or a flowery woodland when his heart was given to his own place--the
spire of Sgurr Bn, the thymy downlands, the singing tides of the
western sea? . . . And Nigel who trotted by his side and talked the
wise talk of childhood. He had retained humanity because Nigel and
Eilean Bn were the passion of his innermost heart. His secret world
was no lotus-eating paradise where a man squandered his strength in
dreams. It was rather a vantage-ground which gave him a Pisgah view of
the things of common life and a half-contemptuous empire over them.

He laughed as he finished dressing, for he thought how inviolable was
his secret. He went a great deal about in London and had been at some
pains to keep up a pretence of the commonplace. A few people, his old
friends, knew something of him, but they respected his desire to be
inconspicuous. The others, the men and women he casually met, regarded
him as an agreeable, well-mannered _rentier_ who filled a place at a
dinner-party, took a gun at a shoot, and joined in a rubber of bridge
at the club. He was aware that he was popular, since he trod on no toes
and stood in no one's light. . . . Women rather liked him, but women
interested him not at all. Jacqueline Armine perhaps was an exception.
With her he had advanced to a certain intimacy, for there was something
about her which reminded him of Nigel. One or two had shown a desire
for friendship, or at least flirtation, but his reserve had warned them
off. He could when he chose become as wooden as a fence-post.

As he filled his cigarette case he remembered that there were two
people who had seemed to detect more in him than he wished to reveal.
The first was Warren Creevey, who was becoming a very notable figure in
the public eye. On one side he was a professional sophist, a master of
brilliant dialectic, who delighted in maintaining paradoxes of his own
and still more in shattering the platitudes of other men. But he was
also a great figure in the City, a bold speculator in the wavering
exchanges of the globe, and at the same time an acute economist who was
frequently taken into the conclaves which discussed international
settlements. Creevey had shown some wish for his acquaintance. They
rarely met without Creevey trying to probe him with his delicate
scalpel.

The other was Mrs Pomfrey. Of her he had no fear, for she made no
advances, but he had a lively curiosity about her. He was aware of her
as a quiet figure with intelligent eyes, content to wait in the
background, but wielding enormous power in her apparent detachment. She
had succeeded in imposing her personality on contemporary life without
obviously exerting herself. She had of course the advantage of great
wealth. Her husband had been a shipowner whose fortune had become
colossal during the war, and at his death just before the Armistice all
of it had been left to her. The Pomfreys had come to London from the
North in 1912, and, though they professed to be plain folk without
social ambition, their house in Charles Street had very soon become a
meeting-place for important people of diverse types. The attraction was
the wife, for Pomfrey was a silent man, concerned with the cares of
many businesses. Lilah Pomfrey had no beauty to help her, and only a
sketchy education. She had been her husband's secretary in far-off
days, and came out of a middle-class Northumbrian home; her one
affectation was that she was disposed to exaggerate the humility of her
origin, and to speak of herself as a "daughter of the people." She was
short and powerfully built--had she been a man her physical strength
would have been remarkable. Her face was broad, with strong cheek-bones
and a wide kindly mouth; her colouring was a little dusky, and with her
coal-black hair and dark eyes it suggested some trace of gipsy blood.

Most people when they talked of her set down her attraction to her gift
of sympathy and her staunch fidelity. She never betrayed a confidence
and was the most loyal of friends; she had proved on more than one
occasion that she could also be an unforgiving enemy. She had succeeded
where her rivals had failed. Lady Bland ruthlessly pursued every
notable, and by dint of much asking swept a motley crowd of celebrities
into her drawing-room, but she remained a comic figure and the target
for malicious gibes. Mrs Macrimmon collected bored royalties, most of
them foreign, but her fame was confined to the picture-papers. Mrs
Diamond from Chicago made a speciality of youth, and was consequently a
frequent character in the novels of youth, and now and then the subject
of odes in _vers libres_ by young poets. These all had an ambition to
be queens of salons to which intellect would gather and which would be
a power-house of many movements; but their much-paragraphed
entertainments were like circuses which were forgotten utterly when the
last performer had made his bow.

Mrs Pomfrey was different. She did not seek, she was sought; her
invitations were to most people like royal commands. She spoke little,
but what she said in her deep voice with its pleasant north-country
burr was remembered. She dispensed not entertainment but friendship.
Men of every type, leaders in finance and politics, were believed to
seek her advice, but, since she was not vain, she never talked about
it. . . . Adam was nervous when he caught her deep, appraising eyes
fixed on him. Twice she had asked him to dinner, and both times he had
found an excuse for declining.

To-night he was dining with Lady Flambard in Berkeley Square. Sally
Flambard was Mrs Pomfrey's exact opposite, like her only in the absence
of vanity. She was slight, fair, and volatile as a bird, living, as a
French admirer once said, perpetually _sur la branche_. All that was
new intoxicated her, but the waves of novelty passed through her life
and left no mark. The basis of her character was her eager interest in
things and her human warmth. She was prepared to do battle to the death
for her friends, and never refused a challenge, but her affection was
not yoked with prudence, and those who liked her best had to be most on
their guard. She was popular because of her power of aerating the
atmosphere, but she was a dynamo, not an anchor. Those who went to Mrs
Pomfrey for counsel sought Lady Flambard's company for stimulus.


There were five people in the long, low drawing-room, which was dim
with summer twilight. Sir Evelyn Flambard had gone down to the country
to look at his young horses, so there was no host. Creevey, wearing
knee-breeches and decorations, for he was going on to a ceremonial
ball, was talking to Jacqueline Armine. The latter rose at Adam's
entrance and came forward.

"Bless you, Adam," she said, "where have you been hiding yourself? Ken
is dying to see you. He's Mayor of Birkpool, you know, and he's down in
that filthy city to-day talking sense to town councillors. No, we're at
the Court--we've no town house this summer--economy, I
say--self-indulgence, Ken says, for he hates London. Have you heard the
news about Frank? He has taken St Mark's--the living is in the gift of
the Corporation, and they were lucky to get him. . . . Hullo, here he
is. Not dressed, too, like a sordid Member of Parliament. That's an
affectation, for he can't be as busy as all that. . . ."

Lady Flambard took Adam's arm.

"You take in Mrs Pomfrey. You know her, don't you?"

He bowed to a lady in the dusk behind Jacqueline. Mrs Pomfrey was going
on to the same ball as Creevey and wore a wonderful gown of black and
red. Her jewels were emeralds. Adam realised anew the air of substance
she carried with her--not material only, but a certain tough solidity
of spirit. She seemed like one who could command all the apparatus of
life, moving in a sphere in which she was securely at home. Beside her
Jacqueline Armine and Sally Flambard looked like gossamer visitants
from a more rarefied planet. Frank Alban, too, with his lean plain face
and shabby clothes, suggested failure, disquiet, the uncomfortable
struggles of a lower order of things. But Creevey paired well with her,
and it seemed appropriate that they should both be in gala dress. They
were both assured and successful children of their world.

At the little round dinner-table Adam sat between Mrs Pomfrey and
Jacqueline. Sally Flambard and Frank Alban at the start did most of the
talking. His hostess had much to say of Frank's flight from London.

"Don't tell me it's the call of duty. You're afraid, Frank, black
afraid of the worshipping ladies in trouble about their souls."

"Not their souls," said Jacqueline. "Their emotions, my dear. It's the
idle young women in search of a new sensation who scare Frank. Well, he
won't have any in Birkpool. We've not a feminised society down there.
Ken has forbidden me to powder my nose in public."

"Frank's afraid of women," said Sally firmly. "That's the drawback of
British youth. In my country we bring up boys and girls together so
that they mix naturally, but here you still hanker after the convent
and the monastery till they reach what you call years of discretion.
But discretion has to be learned and you expect it to come in a single
dose. In America we break in our young bit by bit."

"It works well with your adorable ladies," said Creevey. "But what
about the men?"

"They're well enough. A little apt to be run by their womenkind, but
that's a fault on the right side. If I have any doubt it's about the
girls. They don't transplant well. Our bright brittle young things
should marry into their own kind. I know I'm giving away my case to
Lilah, who hates Englishmen marrying Americans. But take me--I'm a
warning. I love every inch of England, but I shall never belong here.
If I hadn't Evelyn to anchor me, I should be the most _dracin_
thing alive."

"What has an angel to do with roots?" Creevey asked.

"You should have been an American, Mr Creevey," Sally replied. "That's
just the kind of heavy compliment our menfolk are always paying. I mean
what I say. When I look at the way you Englishwomen have your feet in
your native mud, I could howl with envy. I know my cottagers at
Flambard and all their troubles, and I doctor their babies, and look
after the district nurse, and run a Women's Institute, and get up every
sort of show, and yet I no more belong there than my pekinese."

"No, no, my dear," said Jacqueline. "You're a model. I wish I did my
duty by Armine Court as you do yours by Flambard. All of us to-day are
hopping about on the twigs. Ken gave me a talking-to yesterday--said I
was of a composition to which water would add stability! He got that
out of some book, and was very pleased with it."

She turned to Creevey, who was her neighbour on the left.

"We're becoming a new type--physically, I mean. There's very little
need for slimming now. I agree with Julius Csar--I prefer people
about me that are fat and comfortable, and I can't find them. Look at
us here. Sally and I are wraiths, and Frank is a mere anatomy. I often
feel as wispish as a leaf in the wind. I want to be substantial. Lilah
and Mr Creevey are better, but of course they're not plump, and Adam
looks like a prize-fighter in hard training. What has become of the
nice, easy-going, well-padded people with soft voices and wide smiles?
We don't breed 'em nowadays."

"What about Jimmy Raven?" someone asked.

"Oh, Jimmy! He used to be a beautiful young man, and now he is fat and
waddles--but that's because he has taken up with some slushy religion,
and believes that there is no such thing as pain or wickedness, and
that we're all in a Pullman express bound for the Golden Shore. Charles
Lamancha says it's biology--that atrophy of mind is usually attended by
hypertrophy of body. Have I got the words right?"

"We're lean," said Creevey, and his voice belied his words, for its
chalky richness seemed to argue a eupeptic body--"because we're
dissatisfied, and that is not a bad thing to be. We're all seekers."

Adam glanced across the table at Frank and saw a whimsical look on his
face. These were the very words he had used during that walk home
through the Birkpool streets.

"Seekers after what?" Frank asked. "A City of God? Or only some new
thing?"

Creevey raised his massive head, and his eyes had an ironic seriousness.

"You can give it any fine name you like. Geraldine says it is a land
fit for heroes, and President Wilson says it is a world fit for
democracy, and the little poets call it a new renaissance. But we are
not so much the slave of words to-day, and these pretty things are only
meant for perorations. The motive at the base of everything is money.
Call it economic stability if it pleases you, but that only means
money. Everyone wants more out of the pool--workman, master,
professional man, _rentier_, statesman, people. What's behind the
League of Nations? Not the horror of war, not humanity, except in the
case of a few old ladies and imaginative youths. It's disgust at having
to waste good money in blowing things to bits."

"But Ken says that there is no pool to grab things out of," put in
Jacqueline.

"My dear lady, there will always be a pool, and clever people will
always have their hands in it."

"But what is to happen," Frank asked, "even if the pool turns out to be
large enough and a great multitude can have a share in it? What are
they going to do with their share? Is the new millennium to be like a
Brighton hotel, all upholstery and rich cooking and a jazz band?"

"Why should it? Comfort need not be gross, it may have all the
refinements. You can't have civilisation without money behind it. The
great day of Athens was when she was cock of the Aegean and levied
tribute from her dependencies. I'm no materialist, but I thank my stars
I live in an age when people have an eye for facts. A little sound
biology is what is needed. You've got to have a quantitative basis, as
the wiseacres say, for qualitative progress."

"But how if quality is choked by quantity?" Frank asked.

"It needn't be. That's one of the arbitrary antitheses that your
profession is always inventing--God or Mammon, the Church or the World,
the Narrow Road or the Broad Road, and so forth. Quality may be choked
by quantity, but it will most certainly be starved by scarcity."

Adam, who had been talking to Mrs Pomfrey, addressed Creevey for the
first time.

"Perhaps you're right that the money motive is predominant with
everybody. But assume that the confusion of the globe is only
beginning, and that in a year or two the whole economic fabric will be
cracking. Assume too that the only hope of saving it will be by a great
effort of discipline and sacrifice. Will you get that effort merely for
the money motive? Mustn't you bring in an altogether different kind of
appeal?"

Creevey shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't think there need be any cracking if people show common sense.
If there is, you won't mend it by any of the old-fashioned appeals. The
world is out of the mood for them. It doesn't understand the language."

He broke off to answer a question from his hostess. Mrs Pomfrey was
speaking in her low-pitched husky voice, and Adam had to incline his
head to catch her words.

"I think Mr Creevey is wrong," she said. "Our troubles are only
beginning, and we need a change of heart if we are to meet them. I want
to see a new Crusade and I want Mr Alban to be its Peter the Hermit."

Frank Alban opposite seemed to be trying to catch her words, and Adam
repeated them. The young man laughed, but there was no mirth in his
laugh.

"I wish I had Peter the Hermit's job. It was a simple affair to
persuade men who believed in God to set out to reclaim God's holy city
from the infidel--and to go with them. To go with them, to share all
their hardships and dangers. I have to persuade people that there is a
God at all, and to make them believe that evil is a more awful thing
than pain, and that a starved soul is worse than a starved body. I
can't tell them to pack up and follow me across the globe--that would
be straightforward enough. I can only tell them to go on as they are
and grub along in their deadly monotonous lives. And the infernal thing
is that I can't join them. I can't make my life like theirs. If I tried
it would only be a pose and they would see through it. People like me
need never fear an empty belly or the loss of a roof over our heads. A
preacher should be a little bit above his hearers, and I feel most of
the time below mine. When I see a woman with a thin face and hands worn
to the bone with toil, or a middle-aged workman struggling to keep his
job against the handicap of failing strength--then I feel that my job
is an infernal imposture. I wish that I were a penniless Franciscan in
the fifteenth century, because then we should all be on a level. Only
you can't put back the hands of your accursed clock. I'm suffering from
the nightmare of other people's poverty . . . and I sometimes think
that the nightmare is worse than the fact."

Mrs Pomfrey nodded. "I think I know what you mean. But may not your
suffering give you power? It will sharpen your sympathy."

She turned to Adam. "Don't you agree with me?"

"Melfort doesn't know what we mean," Frank said. "He's the real
Franciscan if you like. He has been through so many kinds of naked hell
that a consumptive tramp on a winter day expects more from the world
than he does. He is the man who should be at my job--only if my perch
is too low his is too high, and he could never drag an ordinary fellow
within sight of it."

Adam shook his head.

"Nonsense, Alban," he said, "I can't lead men. The best I can do is to
help those who can."

Mrs Pomfrey turned to him.

"I wish you could tell me something about yourself," she said. "I have
only heard rumours. But I am afraid you won't. You seem to me the only
modest person left in an advertising world." She looked on him with her
friendly eyes, and then turned them on Frank, and Adam seemed to see in
the way in which she regarded the other something more than
friendliness, something possessive and affectionate.

Jacqueline had caught a word.

"Modest!" she exclaimed. "You're utterly wrong, Lilah. Adam is the most
immodest creature alive. We are wistful waifs compared to him. He knows
where he is, and knows it so clearly that he never troubles to explain.
Mr Creevey says that we are all seekers to-day. I don't think Adam is
one. He has found something--only he won't tell."

Creevey lifted his head, which as usual had sunk between his broad
drooping shoulders. He looked at Adam with his inscrutable, challenging
smile.

"That is my notion of success," he said--"to have found what you want
and to be able to keep it to yourself. Only there is no standing still
in life. What one man has found may conflict with what others are
seeking, and he may have to fight to retain it."

He lifted his glass of port.

"I drink," he said, "to the success of the best man. That the best
should win is all that matters."

Afterwards in the drawing-room Adam talked to Jacqueline Armine.

"I can't make Ken out," she said. "I seem to have entirely lost the
hang of him. He came back from the war declaring that he meant to enjoy
himself for the rest of his natural life. He was crazy about the Court
and started putting it to rights--got the coverts tidied up and began
to rear pheasants in the old way. He spent a lot of money on the farms,
far more than he'll ever get back. He wouldn't take the hounds, but he
hunted regularly twice a week. Then you know how keen he is about
horses--he has every kind of theory about how to breed up to an
ideal--and he talked about a racing stable. Well, he seems to have
forgotten all that. He's had a call and has gone dotty about the public
service, and I find it very wearing to keep pace with him.

"No, it's not Birkpool only," she said in reply to a question of
Adam's. "It was quite natural that he should be Mayor--that's a family
tradition. It's everything else. He naturally wishes he was in the
House--not the Lords, but the Commons--he has so much he wants to say.
You've seen from the papers that he has taken to making speeches? He
has heaps of queer friends up and down the country and they arrange
meetings for him. Pretty strong meat he gives them too. The seventh
Marquis has been sending anxious wires, and small wonder, if Ken said
half the things he's reputed to have said! He's a mixture of high Tory
and rampant Bolshie--says he doesn't care a hoot for democracy and all
the old Victorian idols, but that we have got to preserve the stamina
of England, and that it can only be done by facing facts and having a
fresh deal. He has big meetings and plenty of oppositions, for he
slangs all sides impartially, but it looks as if he were getting a
following, and where it's to end I'm blessed if I know. The idyllic
existence I had hoped for is all in smithereens."

"What about Birkpool?" Adam asked.

"Birkpool!" she exclaimed. "That's going to be a tough proposition.
Instead of being content with a few functions--Lady Armine's Charity
Ball, the Mayor's dinners--that sort of thing, after the peaceful
fashion of his forbears, he must needs stick his nose into all the
unsavoury corners and shout his criticisms from the roof-tops. He has
quarrelled with half the councillors because he told them they were
silly old men who didn't understand their silly old jobs. He is on to
housing at present--says it's a howling scandal, and that he'll show up
the grafters if he has to spend the rest of his days fighting libel
actions. He has managed to hang up the new Town Hall--says that
Birkpool must wash its face first before it thinks about a bib and
tucker.

"Popular?" she went on. "Ken will always be popular with his own kind.
Most of the respectables hate him and blackguard him in private, but
they are too great snobs to attack him openly. The press crabs him
respectfully and regretfully. The man in the street is ready to cheer
him on as he would back a dog in a fight. I do my best to keep the
peace by making love to the womenkind of the magnates. I stuff the
Court with week-end parties that need the tact of an archangel, and my
face is perpetually contorted in an uneasy smile. . . . Adam, I verily
believe you had something to do with all this. Ken is constantly
quoting you. If you have, you have done an ill turn to a woman that
always wished you well."

"I think you rather like it," said Adam.

"I don't dislike it--yet, for I love a row. But I'm worried about where
it is going to lead. I'm a wife and a mother and I want peace. Birkpool
is rapidly becoming a powder magazine. There's Ken, and there's the
Labour man Utlaw. Of course you know him. And you know his sweetheart,
too. There's a clever girl if you want 'em clever. I've made great
friends with Miss Florence Covert, pronounced Court. I like Utlaw, and
Ken swears by him, but the association of the two bodes trouble. Ken,
if you please, is President of the Conservative Association, and spends
most of his time with the Labour leaders, so honest Tories feel as if
they were standing on their heads. Utlaw's salvation will be his
wife--they are to be married next month, you know. You thought her very
rabid and class-conscious. So she is, but I'm not quite sure which
class. It may not be her husband's. . . . And last of all there's
Frank, and he's the worst. It's hard luck for Birkpool that all the
high explosives should be concentrated there. God knows what will
happen when Frank gets into his stride, and adds the thunder of Sinai
to the very considerable noise which Ken and Utlaw are making. Lilah
may get her Peter the Hermit after all accompanying the crusade to
Westminster."

She looked across the room to where Creevey and Mrs Pomfrey were
talking in a corner. The two heads seen in the shadowed light had a
certain resemblance in their suggestions of massiveness and restrained
power.

"What, by the way, do you make of Lilah?" she asked. "No, I forgot, you
never attempt hasty summaries of people. You've only just got to know
her? Well, I'll give you the benefit of my larger knowledge. Lilah
fascinates me--she is so good, so unscrupulously good. There is no
trouble she won't take to help a friend, and there's none I believe she
wouldn't take to down an enemy, if she had one. She is always quite
convinced that she is on the side of the angels. How blessed that must
be! I wish I had half her conviction."

"She has an odd face," said Adam. "What do you read in it? A woman is
the best judge of a woman."

"I read heart--genuine goodness of heart. I read brains. There's no
doubt about that. I haven't any myself, but I can recognise them and
admire them from afar. Ask Kit Stannix, and he will tell you that she
knows more and can reason better than most men. . . . I read also
complete lack of imagination. She has sympathy, but it is of the
obvious kind, without insight--and she has no wings. She is devoted to
brother Frank, and very good for him. She may be his salvation, just as
Florence Covert may be the salvation of Utlaw. Oh no, I don't mean that
they're in love or will ever marry. Frank is not the marrying kind, and
Lilah has had all the matrimony she wants. But she will keep his feet
on the ground, and prevent him becoming an ineffectual angel. . . . You
don't look as if you liked the prospect. I believe you have a morbid
weakness for angels."



II

After his marriage Utlaw moved to a little raw house in the Portsdown
Road, and Adam occupied his former rooms on the ground-floor in Charity
Row. This was convenient in many ways, for it enabled him to put up
Amos in his old room, when that worthy descended upon Birkpool from the
North. Also he could leave the house inconspicuously at odd hours
without distracting Mrs Gallop.

In these days he had gone back to his former habits. The bagman
remained only for the benefit of his landlady and the Utlaws. Marrish
before he left England had put him in touch with the disgruntled
section of Birkpool Labour, and with Amos's help he had penetrated to
circles which even the Utlaws scarcely touched. He was now a Scot, back
from South Africa, who had been much about on the Continent and had the
name of an extremist. He talked little, but he looked the part of a
maker of revolutions, and hints from Amos skilfully established that
repute. So bit by bit he got the confidence of the wilder elements
without scaring the moderates. One conclusion he soon reached. He felt
under his hand the throbbing of a great unrest which must sooner or
later be dangerous. There was no confidence in the masters, and less in
the Government; so soon as the economic strain began--and that was
daily drawing nearer--there would be a perilous stirring of overwrought
nerves and puzzled brains.

But there was confidence in Utlaw--that was plain. Even the fiercest
was not prepared to do more than respectfully criticise. The man had
some dmonic power which gave him an unquestioned mastery. Perhaps the
main reason was that which Amos had once given, that he was Englishness
incarnate, and therefore a natural leader of Englishmen. His familiar
kindliness endeared him even to those who suffered from the rough edge
of his tongue. He was credited with illimitable "guts." His joyous
ribaldries were affectionately quoted. They were proud of him too--he
had placed their Union on the national map in a way that old Deverick
had never done--he was a "coming man," and when he arrived his
followers would not be forgotten. Deverick was due for retirement soon,
and Utlaw must be his successor. There was talk of Parliament too.
Birkpool chuckled to think how Joe would batter the hard faces there,
and set the frozen feet jigging.

One afternoon Adam went to call on Mrs Utlaw. Jacqueline Armine had
warned him of a change in that young woman.

"We had the Utlaws at the Court for the weekend before last," she told
him. "It was rather a wonderful menagerie even for me. We had three
couples of Birkpool grandees: Sir Thomas and Lady, Sir Josiah and
Lady--war knights, you know--and the Clutterbucks, who have just bought
the Ribstones' place and are setting up as gentry. Rather nice couples
they were, very genteel, very mindful of their manners, and the
womenkind had the latest Paris models. Their fine feathers made me feel
a crone. Then we had the Lamanchas by way of pleasing Birkpool, and I
must say Mildred played up nobly. But the real yeast in the loaf was
the Utlaws. Do you know, Adam, that's an extraordinary fellow? He can
lay himself alongside any type of man or woman and get on with them. He
had been having all kinds of rows with the grandees and been calling
them outrageous names and making game of them, which is what they like
least, but he hadn't been an hour in their company before they would
have fed out of his hand. I think it's his gift of liking people and
showing that he likes them. He had them roaring at his jokes, and I
believe they actually came to regard him as a sort of ally, for I heard
old Clutterbuck confiding to him some of his grievances against Ken.
Charles Lamancha, too. You know how he behaves--elaborately civil to
anybody he regards as an inferior, but shockingly impolite to his
equals. Well, Charles was very polite to the grandees, but he wasn't
polite to Utlaw, and that's the greatest compliment he could have paid
him. It was 'Sir Thomas' and 'Sir Josiah' and 'Mr Clutterbuck,' but it
was 'Utlaw' and 'Don't be a damned fool'--Charles's best barrack-room
form. I believe he asked him to stay with him when he could take a
holiday--I know he liked him--you could see it in Charles's crooked
smile. How does Utlaw manage it? I suppose it was his regimental
training which has made him at home with Charles's type. He would have
made a great diplomat if he had been caught young."

"And the bride?" Adam asked.

"That was the greatest marvel of all. Florrie--oh, we're on Christian
terms now--was the perfect little lady. She cast back to her
great-grandmother, who I believe was a Risingham. You would have
thought she had spent all her life in the soft lazy days of an old
country house. She had the air, you know, of helping Mildred and me to
put the Birkpool people at their ease. No effort, no show, very quiet
and modest, but perfectly secure. She's beginning to learn how to dress
herself, too. All the men fell in love with her, and Mildred took her
to her bosom, and you know that our dear Mildred is not forthcoming.
But I could see that the grandee ladies hated her. Not that she
patronised them, but they could feel that she was of a different type
and they weren't prepared for it. That young person is going to raise
antagonisms which her husband won't find it easy to settle."

The Utlaws' house was the ordinary suburban bungalow, but its mistress
had made the interior delightful. It was furnished with economy and
taste, the little drawing-room was full of flowers and books, and Adam
was given tea out of very pretty china. Jacqueline was right. Florrie
Utlaw had begun to take pains with her appearance. Her hair was better
waved, her face was less thin, and a new air of well-being revealed its
charming contours, while her deep eyes, though hungry as ever, were
also happy.

She greeted Adam with a quiet friendliness. He was on her man's side
and therefore she was on his. She had given up her job at Eaton's she
told him--Joe had insisted--and now she reigned in a little enclave of
their own which was going to enlarge itself some day into a great
domain.

There was none of the uneasy inverted snobbery in her manner which he
had formerly noted. She talked briskly of affairs and personages in the
world in which Utlaw was making his mark, but with a cool businesslike
air. She condescended a little to Adam, for he was not of that world;
he was not a person to be cultivated for any use he might be--only to
be welcomed for his loyalty. . . . Of Judson, him of the smashing
repartees, once to her a demigod, she was frankly critical. "He's so
rough that people believe him to be a diamond," she said. "That's not
mine, it's Joe's. I think the men are growing a little tired of
him--the perpetual steam-hammer business is getting to be a bore." Gray
was still a hero, for he had magnetism and poetry. About Trant, the
party leader, she was enthusiastic. Joe had been seeing a lot of him
lately, and was being brought into private consultation. "He is a great
gentleman," she said, "for he has no vanity. Joe always says that the
man without vanity can do anything he pleases." Friendliness to Joe was
of course a sufficient passport to her favour, but Adam remembered also
that Sir Derrick Trant belonged to a family that had fought at Crcy.

He asked how the new Mayor was doing. Her eyes sparkled.

"You remember what I said when we first met, Mr Milford? I was utterly
wrong. Lord Armine is a real man. He is on the wrong side of course,
but he has courage and big ideas, many of them quite sound. It's great
luck that Joe and he were in the same battalion, for they meet on a
proper basis. They are like two schoolboys when they get together--it's
'Mr Utlaw' and 'Lord Armine' at the start, and at the end it's 'Joe'
and 'Sniffy.' I love Lady Armine, too, and think her perfectly
beautiful. You know her a little, don't you? She told me she remembered
meeting you."

There was no mention of the Utlaws' visit to the Court. If there was
any snobbishness in Florrie, she was too clever to show it.

Chiefly she talked of Joe's career. There was a chance of an early seat
in Parliament, for Robson was dying and the East division of
Flackington was in the pocket of the Union. She was anxious for him to
get at once into the House. "He needs a proper sounding-board," she
said, "to make his voice carry. Meetings up and down the country are
all very well, but the papers only report the big men. In the House Joe
would be a national figure within six months. He is a deadly debater,
not a tub-thumper like Judson. Trant says he would give anything to
have him at his back when the Factory Bill comes on."

But the urgent matter was the national secretaryship of the Union when
Deverick resigned next month. Mrs Utlaw's new matronly calm slipped
from her and she became the eternal female fighting for her mate's
rights.

"It's a test case," she declared. "Joe is far the biggest man in the
show, and if it goes by merit nobody else can have a look in. If they
pass him over, then there's no gratitude in the movement, and no
decency."

She let herself go, and Adam was introduced to a long roll of
grievances. It was a thankless job serving the people--plenty of kicks,
no ha'pence, and only once in a blue moon a thank you. Florrie twined
her fingers, her eyes glowed, and her words were like a torrent long
dammed. Adam understood that this was her way of seeking relief; she
could do it with him, for he was obscure and safe. He was very certain
that to most of the complaints Utlaw himself would never have given a
second thought; he had mentioned them in her presence in his expansive
way, and she had docketed them and stored them up in her heart. He
realised two other things. Florrie--perhaps Utlaw too--was getting a
little out of sympathy with the whole Trade Union machine and the
political party of which it was the centre. And there was a reasonable
chance that Utlaw would not succeed Deverick.


Lord Lamancha, a member of the Cabinet, gave a dinner with a small
party to follow, and, since a royal personage was to be present, Adam
had to wear his miniature medals. They made a formidable string, for a
number of foreign orders had been thrown upon him unsought, dispensed
from the pool which his superiors had had at their discretion. He hated
displaying them, but it was less conspicuous to fall in with the
conventional etiquette than to disregard it. He had accepted the
invitation, because a German statesman was to be there whom he wanted
to meet.

It was a man's dinner, and his seat was on the right hand of the German
guest, whose name was Hermann Loeffler, with on his other side
Christopher Stannix. Loeffler was a small spare man who carried himself
so well that he seemed to be of the ordinary height. He looked fifty,
but was probably younger, for his thick black hair was prematurely
grizzled. It grew low on a broad forehead, beneath which the face
narrowed till it terminated in a short beard. This beard obscured the
lower part, but Adam had a notion that, if the man were clean-shaved,
his mouth and jaw would be seen to be firmly and delicately modelled.

Loeffler was in the uneasy German Cabinet--Minister of Commerce, Adam
thought--and like most of his colleagues, his career had been
variegated. He had begun life as a scholar, and long ago had published
a learned work on St Augustine. Then for a short period he had been a
journalist on a famous Rhineland paper, where he had become a friend of
Walter Rathenau, who had detected in him a special financial talent and
had brought him into the banking business. He had served during the
four years of war in a Westphalian regiment, and after the Armistice,
again under the gis of Rathenau, had entered politics. He was sprung
from the lower bourgeoisie, and was the kind of man who would never
have risen under the old regime, but who might have a career in a
middle-class republic. Stannix had praised him--said he was honest and
courageous and reasonable, the sort of fellow one could work with.

But it was not Loeffler's political prospects that interested Adam.
Once early in 1918 a certain middle-aged Danish business man called
Randers, who had a neat blond moustache and wore big horn-rimmed
spectacles like an American, had found himself in a difficult position
in a Rhineland town. Circumstances had arisen which caused the military
authorities to have their suspicions about this well-credentialled
Dane. In particular there had been a Major Loeffler, who had been badly
wounded at Cambrai and had been given a base job for six months. Of all
his war experiences Adam looked back upon his examination by Loeffler
as his severest trial. He had liked him, he remembered, liked his
honest eyes and his good manners, and he had profoundly respected his
acumen. This was one of the men whom he had hoped to meet again, and
the first mention of him in the press had set him following his career.

Loeffler spoke English slowly and badly, though he understood it fairly
well, so after he had been engaged in an embarrassed conversation with
Lamancha for a quarter of an hour he was relieved when his other
neighbour addressed him in German. Excellent German, too, spoken with
the idiom, and almost with the accent, of his own district. Adam pushed
his name card towards him, and Loeffler read it with eye-glasses poised
on the tip of his blunt nose.

"You speak our language to admiration," he said. "Ah, you learned it as
a staff officer long ago? You English are better linguists than us
Germans--your tongues are more adaptable. Maybe your minds also." He
smiled in his friendly, peering way.

They slipped into an intimate conversation, for Loeffler found it easy
to be frank with one to whom understanding seemed to come readily and
who had an air of good-will. He spoke of the sufferings of his
country--the middle-classes for the most part ruined, with all their
careful standards of life crumbling about them--world-famous scholars
earning their bread by typing and copying--little businesses that had
been so secure and comfortable gone in a night. "They are bearing it
well," he said. "My people have much stoicism in their bones, and they
can endure without crying out." He spoke of evil elements, the
financiers who flourished in any _dbcle_, the hordes of the
restless and disinherited, the poison of Communism filtering through
from Russia. "Yet there is hope. We have a stalwart youth growing up
which, if it is well guided, may build our land again. The peril is
that even honest men may be tempted to seek short cuts, and the good
God does not permit of short cuts in this life of ours. If they are
shown a little light, even though it is at the end of a long tunnel,
they will endure. But if not--if they have no hope--they may break
loose, and that will mean a world-confusion.

"There must be no more war," he said. "Now is the time, when all men
have seen its folly, to purge mankind of that ancient
auto-intoxication. But you will not do this only by erecting a
supra-national machine for peace. I am a supporter of the League of
Nations--beyond doubt, but it is not enough. You cannot have a League
without the nations, and these nations must first of all be re-made.
Only then can you have a new world-mind. Chiefly Germany and Britain,
for these are the key-points. France is a great people unlike all
others, but France will never stand out. She will fall in--after
protestations--with the general sense of humanity, and presently make
herself its high priest and interpreter. That is her _mtier_--she
gives form to what others originate. America! She is a world to
herself, and will walk alone and listen to no one's advice till she
learns the folly of it by harsh experience. Like our practical people
she will practise the mistakes of her predecessors till she finds them
out. But Germany must set her house in order without delay, for delay
means disaster. Britain, too, for you are still the pivot of the world,
and if you fall no one can stand. I am not very happy about your
Britain. You will pardon a stranger for his arrogance, but I do not
think you are yet awake. We Germans are awake--to a far more difficult
task than yours, and wakefulness, however unpleasant, is better than
sleep."

He broke off to answer a question of Lamancha's, which had to be
repeated twice before he grasped its purport. Adam turned to Stannix.

"Lord, I wish I had your gift of tongues, Adam," the latter said. "I am
not much of a judge, but you seem to speak rather better German than
Loeffler. . . . You asked me about Utlaw before dinner, and I hadn't
the chance to reply. I heard this afternoon that he had missed the
Union secretaryship. They have taken Potter. A bad mistake, I think, in
their own interest, but that's not any concern of mine. What worries me
is its effect on Utlaw. He is bound to be pretty sick about it. I only
hope it won't make him run out."

"How do you mean?"

"Forswear his class. Utlaw's strength is that he is class-conscious in
the only reasonable way. He knows his people through and through, and,
while he is just a little above them so as to give him the vantage for
leadership, he is bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. He is
loyal to them and they know it, but he's too loyal to them to tell them
lies and mislead them, and they know that too. But he's devouringly
ambitious, and a man of his brains won't stand being elbowed aside by
nonentities. We mustn't forget the cut-throat competition among the
Labour people. There are too many running for the same stakes, and if a
man stumbles he's trampled down. It's a far crueller business than in
our own jog-trot party. Besides, they are eaten up with vanity."

"Utlaw has no vanity."

Stannix pursed his lips.

"Perhaps not. But all his competitors have it abundantly, and that
means that merit isn't given a chance. How can it be if everybody
thinks himself God Almighty. . . . I am not so sure that Utlaw has
none, either. He wouldn't be human if he hadn't. He has been up here at
the Economy Commission, as you know, and has done amazingly well. I've
rarely seen a better performance. Made his points clearly and
neatly--always ready to meet a sound argument and genially contemptuous
of a bad one--prepared to give way with a good grace when
necessary--accepted gratefully half a loaf and adroitly swapped it for
a whole one--he has a real genius for affairs. Compliments were flying
about, Trant made a pet of him, and Geraldine laid himself out to be
gracious. The man couldn't help being flattered. Now what I ask is,
with all this reputation behind him, how he is going to take being
turned down by his own people."

"I don't think he'll play the fool," said Adam firmly.

"I hope not, but the temptation will be great, and I think too well of
him to want him on our side. His strength is to stay where Providence
has put him. . . . Happily I don't suppose he could afford to cut the
painter. He hasn't a bob, I'm told."

After dinner Adam saw no more of Loeffler, who had a short talk with
the royal personage, and then seemed to be engaged in conference with
various members of the Cabinet. The Lamanchas' house was well adapted
for entertaining, and the big rooms were not inconveniently crowded.
Adam found a corner by the balustrade at the head of the main
staircase, where he could see the guests arriving in the hall below and
the procession upwards to where they were received by the host and
hostess. It amused him to watch this particular ritual on the few
occasions when he went to parties--the free-and-easy ascent, the sudden
moment of self-consciousness as they made their bow, the drifting off
into absorbed little coteries. Most people had a party guise, something
different in their faces as well as in their clothes, a relapse to the
common denominator of the herd. But some retained a rugged
individuality and so were out of the picture. Thirlstone, for instance,
who looked a backwoodsman however he was dressed, and Manton, the
steeplechase rider, whose trousers always suggested breeches.

One man he noted on the staircase who was different from the others. He
was taking nothing for granted, for his eager, curious eyes darted
about with evident enjoyment, as if he were a child out for a treat.
Adam saw that it was Utlaw, rather smart, with a flower in his
buttonhole, and a new dress-suit, which had certainly not been made in
Birkpool. He saw too that the uplifted face had recognised him,
recognised him with surprise. So he did not move from his place, for
the time had come to drop the bagman.

Utlaw made his way to him.

"Good Lord, Milford," he said, "what are you doing here?"

"I dined here," said Adam. "The Lamanchas are old friends of mine."

Utlaw's eyes were on his medal ribbons.

"The D.S.O. and a bar. I thought you told me you weren't in the war.
You didn't get that for staying at home."

"I didn't say I wasn't in the war. I said I wasn't fighting."

"Your service must have been pretty active, anyway, or you wouldn't
have got that. Look here, Milford, what sort of a game have you been
playing with me? What about the bagman in Mrs Gallop's upstairs room?"

Adam laughed.

"You invented that for yourself, you know. I only didn't undeceive you.
I went to Birkpool to make friends with you and I hope I have
succeeded?"

Utlaw's face, which for a moment had clouded, broke into a grin.

"You jolly well have, old chap. And I can tell you I want all the
friends I've got. Have you heard that they've turned me down for the
Union secretaryship? Dirty work at the cross-roads! My lads in Birkpool
will have something to say about that. . . ."

He broke off and advanced to greet a lady who had just arrived and who
seemed to welcome the meeting. Adam saw that it was Mrs Pomfrey.



III

For some months Adam was little absent from Birkpool.

His relations with Utlaw were on a new basis. He was still to most
people the commercial gentleman who lodged with Mrs Gallop, but Utlaw
was aware that he played other parts into which he forbore to enquire,
though he showed his awareness by often asking his opinion about this
man and that and his views on popular feeling. But he treated him now
not only as a friend but as a counsellor, the repository of much
knowledge which he did not himself possess.

Clearly Utlaw was going through a difficult time. Robson, though given
up by the doctors, obstinately refused to die, and the East Flackington
seat, which might have been a consolation for the loss of the Union
secretaryship, had not yet come his way. He had lost something of his
easy mastery of his job--was no longer "on the top of it," to use his
own phrase; he was self-conscious and inclined to be irritable, and
Florrie in the background was no peacemaker. He must have told her
something of Adam's real position, for she showed a new desire for his
society, and would pour out her grievances to him. Her politics now
were her husband's career, nothing else. She was inclined to be
impatient with any who raised difficulties for him in his daily work,
and she was beginning to be contemptuous about the leaders of his
party. "There's only one relic of feudalism left in Britain," she used
to declare, "the super-fatted, hermetically-sealed, feudal aristocracy
of the trade unions. People like Judson and Potter are the real
oligarchs. Compared to them Lord Armine is a Jacobin." Adam recognised
the sentence from a recent anonymous article in the press, of whose
authorship he was now made aware. Florrie was trying to supplement
their income by journalism, and succeeding.

It was his business to keep Utlaw to his job in spite of his wife, and
he found it increasingly difficult. Utlaw had lost some of his old
mastery over his people; he was still a leader, but a leader without
any clear purpose. He had lost his single-heartedness, and appeared not
to regret it. He invited Creevey to Birkpool to talk to a big debating
society which he had founded, and though Creevey's brilliant
opportunism may have been unintelligible to most of his audience, it
seemed to be acceptable to Utlaw, and it helped to confuse the minds of
some of his chief lieutenants. The man's opinions were in a flux. More
serious, he seemed to be slipping away from his class. He was less a
worker in a wide movement than the chief of a private army of
condottieri which he might swing over to any side.

Frank Alban was also difficult. His first months at St Mark's had been
the biggest sensation Birkpool had ever known. The church was crowded,
and Frank's sermons to his disgust were reported in the popular London
press. That soon passed, but he remained a potent influence, and the
Albanites became a force in the city. So long as he dealt with faith
there was no opposition, but when he turned to works he encountered
ugly obstacles. He had a remarkable way of handling boys, and his first
big enterprise was a chain of boys' clubs in which he enlisted as
fellow-workers an assortment of Birkpool youth. But presently he came
hard up against social evils in the employment of boy labour and the
eternal housing tangle, and he broke his shins against many educational
and industrial stone walls. Birkpool did not know what to make of this
turbulent priest who was not content to stick to his own calling, and
Frank had moments of bitter hopelessness.

Adam was his chief consultant, and in his case as in Utlaw's the
difficulty was to keep him to his job. He had much of Newman's gallant
intransigence, but that inability to compromise, which gave him his
power as a preacher, made his path thorny in practical affairs. The
temptation was to retire inside his own soul, the old temptation of the
saint. His high-strung spirituality was in perpetual danger of being
introverted, and the crusader of retiring to his cell.

In dealing with him Adam had an ally in Kenneth Armine. The Mayor was
not a saint, but he was notably a crusader. His father died about this
time, and the new Marquis of Warmestre had now the House of Lords as a
platform. On several occasions he uplifted his voice there to the
amazement of his friends and the embarrassment of his party, and he
could draw large audiences in most parts of the land. His creed was a
hotch-potch, much of it crude and boyish, but it was preached with
amazing gusto, and one or two dogmas stood out like rocks in a yeasty
ocean. One was the gravity of the times, since Britain and the world
stood at the cross-roads. Another was the need for a great effort of
intelligence, sacrifice, and discipline if the people were to pull
through. When his critics pointed out that much of his stuff was not
remarkable for its intelligence, he joyfully agreed. That was not his
business, he said; he was no thinker, his job was to stir up the
thinkers; but he knew the one thing needful, which might be hid from
the wise but was revealed to plain fellows like himself.

"Send brother Frank to me," he would say; "I'll cure him of his
megrims. Hang it all, does the man expect to find his job easy? Mine is
as stiff as Hades, and it's by a long chalk simpler than his. I'll keep
him up to the mark. . . . No, I'm enjoying myself. Jackie hates it, and
I'm sorry about that, but I'm bound to go through with it. We've got a
chance here, what with Frank and Utlaw to help me, and I'm going to see
that we don't miss it. It's the only way, you know. You can't fire the
country as a whole--too big and too damp. You must take it bit by bit.
If we kindle Birkpool the blaze will spread, and presently we'll have a
glorious bonfire of rubbish."


One day Adam visited Scrope at the same house in the Northamptonshire
village where he had first met him. He had had a letter from Freddy
Shaston telling him that the old man was failing rapidly and could not
last long. "He wants to see you and you must go. Take the chance, for a
lot of wisdom will leave the world with him." Adam had come to know
Shaston well. A partner in a firm of stockbrokers, his real business in
life was to be Scrope's _chela_, to be his eyes and ears for a world in
which he could no longer mingle. He had no desire to do anything, only
to find out about things; as he said, his job was Intelligence not
Operations, but it was a task in which he had few equals.

It was a bleak day in December, and there was no sitting out, as on the
first visit, in a garden heavy with autumn blossom. The garden was now
sprinkled with snow. Adam found Scrope propped up with pillows in an
arm-chair beside a blazing fire, and the first glance showed him that
he had not many weeks to live. The vigour which he had recovered in the
war had ebbed, the face had fallen in and the cheekbones stood out
white and shining, the voice had lost its crispness and came out slow
and flat and languid. But there was still humour and interest in the
old eyes.

"I have gone back to sanctuary," he said, "my last sanctuary. I am very
near that happy island of which you told me. What, by the way, was its
name? Eilean Bn?"

He looked for a little into the fire and smiled.

"You still frequent it? Not in the body, of course. You cannot go back
to it yet awhile. But it is more to you than a pleasant fancy, I think.
It is a Paradise to which you will some day return. But you must earn
the right to it. Is it not so? . . . You see I understand you, for all
my life I too have lived with dreams."

For some time he seemed to be sunk in a feebleness from which he could
not rouse himself. He asked questions and did not wait for their
answer. Then some wave of life flowed back into his body, and he sat
more upright among his pillows. "Give me a cigarette, please," he said,
"one of the little black ones in the Chinese box. I allow myself six in
the day. Now I think we can talk. . . . Have you found your Messiah?"

"No," said Adam. "I do not think there will be any one Messiah."

Scrope nodded.

"I think likewise. The day has gone when one man could swing the world
into a new orbit. It is too large, this world, and people speak with
too many tongues. But you have found something? Shall I guess? You have
found one who may be a John the Baptist, and you have found an apostle
or two? Am I right? You see, I have been trying to follow your doings a
little. I have learned much of Birkpool."

"I can have no secrets from you," Adam said. "I have found a man who
preaches the fear of God. I have found a man who can lead. And I have
found a man who has a fire in his belly and fears nothing."

Scrope mused.

"And your hope is that these may be the grain of mustard seed which
will grow into a great tree--an Yggdrasil with its roots in the sea and
its shadow over all the land? Something that will bind together the
loose soil of the country? Well, I agree with you in one thing. Our
malady to-day is disintegration. We are in danger of splitting into
nebul of whirling atoms. There is no cohesion in any of our beliefs
and institutions, and what is worse, we have lost the desire for
cohesion. It is a pleasant world for some people. Mr Warren Creevey,
for instance. He loves dilapidation, for it gives scope to his swift
flashing mind. Also he makes much money by it. He would keep the world
disintegrated if he could, for he has no interest in things that
endure. He is a good Heraclitean, and worships the flux. . . . A
pleasant world for such as he, but a dangerous world. Do you see much
of Mr Creevey?"

Adam replied that he met him occasionally, but did not know him well.

"No! Then my prophecy is not yet fulfilled that your lines of life
would cross. But I stick to it. Somewhen, somewhere, somehow you will
do battle with him. . . . And now for the apostles you have discovered."

"Do you know them?" Adam asked.

Scrope smiled.

"I can guess them. Yes, I know a good deal about them. I do not think
your discernment has been at fault. But--but!! I would prepare you for
disappointments. No one of them is quite of your own totem, and they
may fail you. Your John the Baptist may grow weary of the Scribes and
Pharisees and flee to his hermitage--or, worse still, to a papal
throne. Your leader may lead his people into the desert and lose them
there. Your fearless man may become muscle-bound and the fire die out
of him. One and all may get soft or sour. That is the trouble of
working through other people. Are you prepared for that? You are? Well,
what then?"

"I shall find others."

"Doubtless. But they also may fail you. And meanwhile time is passing
and any day crisis may be upon us. . . . You wish to be a king-maker,
but what if there are no kings? The king-maker may be forced in spite
of himself to be royal."

Adam shook his head.

"Not this one. He knows his limitations. I have no power except in the
shadows."

"I think you may be deceiving yourself. Power is one and indivisible.
It is only an accident whether it works behind the scenes or on the
stage. . . . Listen to me, my friend. You have a divine patience and
have been content to work at that for which you are least
fitted--imponderable, monotonous things--a touch here and an adjustment
there. You have succeeded--perhaps. But what of those other gifts, your
real gifts? You say you have found the man who is fearless. But you
yourself fear nothing but God. You have found a leader. But leadership
is only courage and wisdom and a great carelessness of self. Do you
lack these things? Will you not be forced some day into the light?"

Once again, as at Birkpool after the Marrish business, doubt descended
upon Adam's mind. Scrope's confidence in him seemed to be a searchlight
which revealed his own incapacity. He was not a leader, and yet he was
essaying the task of a leader--to shape men's souls. Was he succeeding?
Could he succeed? Were they not slipping away from him? He had trained
himself for one purpose, and that was sacrifice, but in this work the
utmost sacrifice of himself would avail nothing. He was attempting a
creative task, but had God destined him for any such high purpose? Was
not the clay exalting itself above the potter?

A nurse entered to give Scrope his medicine, and to warn Adam that the
time permitted by the doctor was up. When she had gone, and Adam was on
his feet to depart, the old man held his hand.

"This is good-bye. The troublesome accident we call death will come
between us for a little. Presently I return to the _anima mundi_ for a
new birth. Let us put it in that way, for one metaphor is as good as
another when we speak of mysteries. But I believe that I shall still be
aware of this little world of time, and from somewhere in the stars I
shall watch the antics of mankind. I think I shall see one thing. You
will ride beside Raymond into Jerusalem . . . or if you cannot find
your Raymond you will enter alone. . . ."

"I shall find my Raymond," said Adam, "but I shall not ride beside him.
. . ."

Scrope was not listening.

"Or," he continued, his voice ebbing away into feebleness, "you will
leave your body outside the gate."


Falconet had been a regular if not very voluminous correspondent, but
he had stuck to his own country. Early in the spring, however, he
visited England and occupied his old flat in St James's Street. He had
changed little; he was still lean and dark and hawklike and impetuous,
but his full lower lip projected more than ever as if he had
encountered a good deal of opposition and had had some trouble with his
temper.

"I'm mighty glad to see you," he told Adam. "I've a whale of a lot to
tell you and to hear from you. Which will begin? Me? Right. Well, I've
got my lay-out pretty satisfactory and it's starting to work. Dandiest
bit of organisation you ever saw. Cross-bearings come in a flood
whenever I press the button. Any fellow we fancy is passed on by those
that don't make mistakes. Result is, we've gotten some high-grade ore
and pretty soon we shall have the precious metal."

"Then you are satisfied?"

Falconet twisted his face.

"I'm satisfied that I'm going to add twenty per cent, or maybe
twenty-five per cent, to the net competence of the American people. I'm
on the way to grading up its quality. I'm saving for it a lot of fine
stuff that would otherwise be stifled in its native mud. . . . That's
something, anyway."

"But you don't think it enough?"

Falconet laughed.

"Say, Adam, do you take me for a man that's easy contented? I don't
think it enough--not by the length and breadth of hell. I've got some
lads that will make good--one of them is going to be the biggest
chemist on earth, they tell me--another will make big business sit up
in a year or two. Fine work, you say. Yes, but it doesn't come within a
million miles of touching the spot. They're going to make their names
and their piles, but they're not going to help America one little bit
in the thing she needs. They're not considering the real things, and if
they were they wouldn't be any manner of good. They're not the type
that can swing opinion.

"We're in a mighty bad way," he continued, getting to his feet and,
after his fashion, picking up the sofa cushions, pummelling them, and
flinging them down again. "Oh, I know we're richer than Croesus--fat as
Jeshurun, and consequently kicking. We have drawn in our skirts from
poor old Europe in case we are defiled, and we are looking to go on
prospering in God's country and letting the world go hang. It won't be
God's country long at that rate. Our pikers don't see that in the end
they can't keep out of the world any more than they kept out of the
war. We're as smug as a mayor of a one-horse township that imagines his
burg the centre of creation. How in hell can you get quality into a
nation that don't believe in quality--that just sits back and counts
its dollars and thanks God that it isn't as other men? What we need is
a change of view--not heart, for our heart's sound enough--the trouble
is with our eyes. But as I say, there's nobody that can swing opinion.
I've done my best, and I've been giving a good deal of attention to my
newspapers. You know I bought the _Beacon_. I've got a crackerjack of
an editor, and day in and day out we keep on preaching common sense.
But we're only read by the converted, and don't cut any ice with the
masses. That's the cursed thing about a democracy. In the old days,
when you had converted the King and the Prime Minister you had done
your job, but now you have got to convert about a hundred million folks
that don't know the first thing about the question. Cut out a strip of
the East and we're the most ignorant nation on earth about
fundamentals. We have built up a wonderful, high-powered machine that
don't allow us to think."

"There's the same trouble everywhere," said Adam. "We're too clever to
be wise."

"And that's God's truth. I'm weary to death of clever men. That's
what's muddying the waters. And I've gotten to be very weary of your
man Creevey. At first I thought him the brightest thing I had ever
struck. Well, he is too infernally bright. He has crossed to our side
of the water pretty often--three months ago he was over about the
French loan, and I can tell you that your Mr Creevey hasn't been doing
any good. He has a great reputation in Wall Street and our newspapers
have fallen for him, for he takes some pains to cultivate them and
knows just the sort of dope to hand out. He can make a thing more clear
than the Almighty ever meant it to be, and the ordinary citizen,
finding his prejudices made to look scientific, cheers loudly and
thinks himself a finer guy than ever. He has been doing his best to
confirm us in our self-sufficiency. If money was his object, I would
say that he was a bear of American securities and was out to engineer a
smash. That's partly why I came over here--to get a close-up of the
doings of Mr Warren Creevey."

Adam asked about Falconet's visit to the Continent.

"I had three weeks in Paris. There Creevey is their own white-haired
boy. They told me there that he was the only Englishman with an
international mind. . . . Then I went to Germany. That's a difficult
proposition, and I haven't rightly got the hang of it. I'm going back
next week. But I've got the hang of one German. A little dusty fellow.
One of their leading politicians. Loeffler they call him. Heard of him?"

Adam nodded.

"Write his name down in your pocket book and remember my words.
Loeffler is going to matter a lot. He hasn't any cleverness, but he has
a whole heap of horse sense and all the sand on earth. That little man
goes in as much danger of his life as a Chicago gangster, and he don't
scare worth a damn. I'm going back to Loeffler. . . . And now let's
hear what you've been doing."

When Adam had reported Falconet scratched his head.

"You've got to put me wise about this island," he said. "It's a big
disappointment that old man Scrope has died on me. I was sort of
counting on a talk with him. . . . Maybe you have been wiser than me.
I've been looking too much for brains, and you've gone for magnetism.
You must let me in on your game, for I'd like to see your notion of
quality. . . . I've heard of your man Utlaw. Say, do you know Mrs
Pomfrey?"

"A little. Have you been meeting her?"

"Yes. I got a note from her when I landed--with a line of introduction
from Creevey, no less. I took luncheon with her yesterday. That's a
fine lady. I'd like to check up with you on what she told me about
England--I reckon she's likely to be right, though, for they tell me
she's close to your Government. She has never been in America, but she
seemed to have a pretty cute notion of how things were with us. She
didn't mention you, but she had quite a lot to say about Mr Utlaw. Said
that in a year or two he would be the only one of the Labour men that
counted. Do you pass that? On our side they don't signify--not yet. Our
work-folk are too busy buying automobiles and radio sets to trouble
about politics. Here I know it is different. But tell me, Adam. Is it
healthy for a Labour man to be made a pet of by society dames?"

"I'm not afraid of Mrs Pomfrey for Utlaw," said Adam. "I'm more afraid
of Creevey."

Falconet looked thoughtful.

"Yep. I can see Creevey making mischief there. . . . Well, it's a
darned interesting world, though mighty confusing. As my old father
used to say when he was running a merger and had all the yellow dogs
howling at his heels, it's a great game if you don't weaken."




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      III


I

In the late summer things began to go ill in Birkpool. The big works
had few contracts, and the extension which the war had brought about,
and which had rarely been accompanied by any serious reorganisation or
replacement of antiquated machinery, was beginning to prove so much
adipose tissue. Men were turned away daily, and the programme of
forward orders was so lean that the city anticipated a grim winter. One
or two small expert businesses were still flourishing, but Birkpool had
its eggs in few baskets, and the weight of taxation and the competition
of foreign countries were playing havoc with its heavy industries. The
minds of those who live by the work of their hands are not elastic or
easily adjusted to a new outlook. The ordinary wage-earner was puzzled,
angry, apprehensive, and deeply suspicious.

The weather did not improve matters. August is the Birkpool holiday
month, and all August a wet wind had blown from Wales. September was
little better, and in October gales from the North Sea and the fenlands
brought scurries of cold rain. Lowering skies and swimming streets
added to the depression which was settling upon Birkpool as thick as
its customary coronal of smoke.

On one such day Adam was passing down a side street, where dingy
tram-cars screamed on the metals, and foul torrents roared in the
gutters, and the lash of the rain washed the grease from the cobbles.
There was a shabby post-office, for in that quarter of Birkpool even
the banks and post-offices looked shabby, from the swing-doors of which
men and women were emerging. They had been drawing their old-age
pensions, the women were clutching their purses in their lean,
blue-veined hands, and all had that look of desperate anxiety which the
poor wear when they carry with them the money that alone stands between
them and want. A miserable tramp on the kerb was singing "Annie Laurie"
in a cracked voice, and from a neighbouring alley, which led to a
factory, there poured a crowd of grimy workmen released at the
dinner-hour, turning up the collars of their thin jackets against the
sleet. The place smelt of straw, filth, stale food and damp--damp above
everything.

Outside the post-office Adam found Frank Alban. He carried an umbrella
which he had not opened, and the rain had soaked his ancient flannel
suit. He was watching the old-age pensioners, some of whom recognised
him; an old woman bobbed a curtsy, and a man or two touched his cap.
But Frank did not return the greetings. He seemed wrapped up in some
painful dream.

He gripped Adam's arm fiercely.

"I wanted to see you," he said. "Where are you going? I'll walk with
you. Never mind the rain--I like it--a wetting's neither here nor
there. I can't talk holding up an umbrella."

"I'm going to my rooms," Adam said. "I can give you luncheon--bread and
cheese and beer. And a dry coat. . . . You're a fool to allow yourself
to get wet," he added, as Frank coughed.

"I'm a fool--yes. But a risk of pneumonia is not the worst kind of
folly."

He said nothing more, but held Adam's arm in a vice till they reached
Charity Row, and Adam had insisted on his changing his socks and had
sent his coat to be dried in Mrs Gallop's kitchen.

"Now, what's your trouble?" Adam asked.

"The old one. I'm a misfit. A humbug. I have no business to be here.
I'm not tough enough. You won't understand me, Adam, for you're tough
in the right way. Most people are only tough because they are callous,
but that's not your case. You're tough because there's very few hells
you haven't been through yourself and come out on the other side. I'm
not like that. I have to tell people to keep a high head and endure
what I've never endured myself--what I couldn't stick out for a week.
That's why I say that I'm a humbug."

"What has happened? You have done a power of good here."

"Have I?" Frank asked bitterly. "Well, I haven't it in me to do any
more. Man, don't you see what is happening? The shadow of misery is
closing down upon this place. It's so thick that you can almost touch
it. I see the eyes of men and women getting fear into them--fear like a
captured bird's. They see all the little comforts they have created
beginning to slip away and themselves drifting back to the kennels.
They are the finest stock on earth--there's nothing soft or rotten in
them, and that's the tragedy. What in God's name can I do for them?"

He checked Adam's interruption with a lifted hand.

"Oh, I know what you are going to say. That my job is to give them a
celestial hope to make up for their terrestrial beastliness. I believe
in that hope--I believe in it as passionately as ever--but I can't hand
it on to them. Why? Because I'm not worthy. I feel the most abject
inferiority in my bones. I blush and get cold shivers in my spine when
I try it. I ought to be one of them, sharing in all their miseries. I
ought to be doing a day's work beside them in the shops, and then
preaching to them as to brothers in misfortune. They would respect me
then, and I should respect myself. . . . The day of the fatted parson
is past. He should be a preaching friar as in the Middle Ages, or a
fakir with nothing to him but a begging-bowl and the message of God."

"You wouldn't last long at that job," said Adam.

"I wouldn't. I wouldn't last a month--I'm not man enough. But it's the
honest way. Only I can't do it, I've come out of the wrong kind of
stable. That's why I say I'm a wretched misfit. It's killing me. That
wouldn't matter if I were to go down in a good cause, but as it is I
should only be perishing for my folly. I can't think with my head
now--only with my heart."

"Or your nerves," said Adam.

"Call it anything you like. I'm beneath my job instead of being above
it. I've been trying to puzzle the thing out, and unless I'm going to
crash I must get back to thinking with my mind."

"We have often had this out before, haven't we?"

"Yes, and you've always cheered me up. A stalwart fellow like you
heartens a waif like me. But not for ever. Things have come to a pass
when even you can do nothing for me. I'm in the wrong crowd and must
get out of it!"

"What do you propose?"

Frank lifted a miserable face.

"I must get back to my cell--to some kind of cell. I must get my
balance again. Perhaps there is still work for me to do. . . . Someone
said that the great battles of the world were all won first in the
mind."

"Who said that?" Adam asked sharply.

"I'm not sure. I think it was that man Creevey. You met him at Lady
Flambard's, you remember."

"You've been meeting him?"

"Yes. He's a friend of Mrs Pomfrey's. . . ."

There was a knock at the door, and Mrs Gallop appeared, a breathless
and flushed Mrs Gallop. She saw Frank, recognised him, for she was a
great churchgoer, and bobbed a curtsy, a reminiscence of her village
school-days.

"Beg pardon, sir, but her ladyship is 'ere. The Marchioness----"

She ushered in Jacqueline, a picturesque figure in a white hunting
waterproof, the collar of which framed a face all aglow with the sting
of the rain.

"Hurrah, Adam!" she cried, "what fun to find you at home! This is the
first time I've raided your lair. . . . And brother Frank no less! You
oughtn't to be out in this weather, you know. I'm glad to see that
Adam's looking after you. And food! May I have some luncheon, please? I
love bread and cheese above all things--and beer--have you any more
beer? I'm in Birkpool on my usual errand--the vet. Gabriel, my Irish
setter, has got what looks like canker in the ear. I've just deposited
him with Branker, and I thought I'd look you up. My car will be round
in half an hour. I'm at the Court, a grass widow. Ken is off on one of
his provincial ramps."

Frank looked at his watch, got up, and announced that he must keep an
appointment. He nodded to his sister, who had flung off her waterproof
and laid a small dripping green hat on the fender.

"You're an unfeeling brute, Frank," she said. "You never ask after my
health, though you see I'm as lame as a duck. Cubbing the day before
yesterday. I'm going to ride straddle, and have no more to do with
those infernal side-saddles. They're all right when you fall clear in a
big toss, but in a little one they hurt you horribly. No bones broken,
thank you--only a strained muscle. Good-bye, Frank dear. Go and buy
yourself a mackintosh. An umbrella in Birkpool is no more use than a
sick headache."

When he had gone Jacqueline looked quizzically at Adam.

"Frank is a little shy with me at present," she said. "He knows I don't
approve of the company he keeps."

As she munched her bread and cheese, her small delicate face took on a
sudden shrewdness. The airy Artemis became for a moment the reflecting
Athene.

"This is telling tales out of school, but he sees too much of Lilah
Pomfrey. I don't mean that there's any philandering, and I've nothing
against Lilah, but she's not the best company for Frank in his present
frame of mind. She rather worships him and that brings out his weak
points. He takes after my mother's side of the house--Highland
sensitiveness and self-consciousness--and instead of laughing at his
moods she encourages them. She is making a sentimentalist out of an
idealist. And the next step, you know, is a cynic."

Jacqueline poured herself out a glass of beer with a most professional
head on it.

"Didn't somebody say that the world was divided into the hard-hearted
kind and the soft-hearted cruel? Ken is always quoting that. . . . More
by token I want to talk to you about Ken. I can't stay now, but some
day soon we must have it out. You've made him a perfectly impossible
husband, Adam dear."

"I?"

"Yes, you," she went on. "You know very well that you're behind all
Ken's daftness. He takes everything you say for gospel. But for you he
would have been a most respectable Mayor of Birkpool, and at the end of
his term of office would have been presented with a service of plate
subscribed for by all good citizens. As it is, good citizens spit when
his name is mentioned. He has made everybody uncomfortable, and has got
nothing out of it except the affection of the rag-tag and bob-tail. . .
. And look at his processing up and down the country. He is never off
the stump, and he talks the wildest stuff. Oh, I know some people
admire it. Charles Lamancha says that if you know Ken you understand
the kind of fellows the Cavaliers were who rode with Rupert. But that
is not much of a certificate, for as far as I can understand history
Rupert muddled all his battles. He is getting a black name with his
party, too. Mr Stannix told me that he would have been safe for the
vacant under-secretaryship last spring if he hadn't blotted his
copy-book. As it was, they were compelled to give it to Jimmy Raven,
who is a congenital idiot."

Jacqueline glanced through the rain-dimmed window and saw that her car
had arrived. She rescued her partially dried hat from the fender, and
with Adam's help struggled into her waterproof.

"I'm going to have all this out with you some day soon," she said. "I'm
not thinking of Ken's career--I'm thinking of his happiness--and mine
and young Jeremy's. And the country's good, too. Ken's digging up
dangerous things out of people's minds--and dangerous things out of his
own. The Armines are a queer race, you know, and I don't want any
return to prehistoric freaks. Atavism is a kittle thing to play with.
He says that he is getting back to Old England, but Old England had its
unpleasant side. We learned that last June with our Women's Institute.
Did I tell you about it? Well, we have an enlightened vicar who is keen
on teaching the people history by ocular demonstration, and so he got
them to act the founding of Arcote priory, and the flight after Naseby,
and Lady Armine sheltering Charles--all with the proper clothes and
correct detail. Then this summer he thought he would go a bit farther
back and have the dancing on Midsummer Eve round the standing stones on
Armine Hill. It was a fine moonlight night, but everybody was rather
shy at first, and I thought it was going to be a fiasco. And then it
began to go well--a little too well. You will scarcely believe it, but
our village started to revert to type. You never saw such a
pandemonium. The Sunday-school teachers became mnads, and those that
weren't shingled let their hair down, and Pobjoy the earth-stopper
behaved like a dancing dervish, and Gosling the verger thought he was a
high-priest and tried to brain the vicar. It seems that the chief
feature of those revels had been the sacrifice of a virgin, and they
dashed nearly succeeded--Jenny Dart it was--one of our laundrymaids. I
can tell you we had the deuce's own job whipping them off."



II

A fortnight later Adam dined with Christopher Stannix in a private room
at the House of Commons. The only other guest was Falconet, who was on
the eve of returning to America.

Stannix held a curious position in the Government. He was reported to
be a most competent administrator and his actual department was little
criticised. In the House he confined himself in his speeches to sober
and incontrovertible arguments on facts. But he was also credited with
a singularly receptive mind, and had become the acknowledged unofficial
intelligence officer of the Cabinet. What his views on policy were the
world was left to guess. He was believed to be often at variance with
some of his colleagues, notably with Geraldine the Prime Minister, and
his friendship with members of the Opposition, particularly with Trant,
was a scandal to the more precise. Yet no one questioned his party
loyalty, and the many who at the time professed themselves sick of
politics and politicians were accustomed to except Stannix, and to wish
him a cleaner job.

Adam and Falconet had been waiting for ten minutes before he joined
them and dinner could begin.

"Well, we're in for it," he announced, when the waiter had left the
room after serving the soup. "I ran across Judson in the Lobby just
now, and he was positively menacing. You know how he slings the
'bloodys' in his talk. To-night he was so excited that his conversation
was mostly expletives and not very easy to follow. The big strike
apparently is pretty well certain. The employers want a cut in wages in
the new agreement and an extension of hours--they are on their uppers
they say, and a lot of shops will have to close down if they don't get
what they ask. They've been at the Ministry of Labour to-day presenting
their case, and I gather from Leveson that he is so convinced by it
that he won't have the Government intervene."

"Have you seen their case?" Adam asked.

"Not yet. But I can imagine what it is like. A perfectly conclusive
argument on facts and figures on the present basis of the industry. The
only answer to it would be to question the basis. That is probably
pretty rotten--all top-heavy from ill-considered war development and
financial hokey-pokey."

"What do the men say?"

"Adamant, so far. Stuck their toes in. Won't budge and won't argue. The
usual thing. They're certain they are getting a dirty deal, but they
can't put it into reasonable English. Our people won't stand out for
logic, but they'll fight like devils for an instinct. It's going to be
an ugly business if it comes off, for God knows we can't afford a big
stoppage. Our finances are running briskly downhill. I saw Creevey
to-day--I don't much care for him as you know, but whenever he talks on
finance I'm impressed. He was pointing out that we had established a
standard of living for our people which was not warranted by the
saleable value of our products--which means that we are not paying our
way. He is not prepared to go back on our social services--says it
can't be done. Perhaps he is right, for all parties go on sluicing out,
or promising to sluice out, new benefits from the public funds--our own
people are just as bad as any other. Creevey doesn't seem to mind
that--he has no politics, he says, but I often think that he is the
biggest Socialist of them all--he has the kind of quick autocratic mind
that always wants to boss and regiment people. But he is clear that
sooner or later we must face a scaling down of wages--money wages. As a
matter of fact, it is quite true that we have enormously raised the
standard of real wages in our trades as compared with before the war."

"That's because you have taught people to want a better kind of life."

"No doubt. And that is a good thing if we could afford it. But it looks
as if we couldn't. A strike won't help matters. The poor devils will be
beaten in the end, and the national income will have dropped by thirty
or forty millions, and nobody, master or man, will be a penny the
better off. . . . Leveson says there is only one hope. If the
metal-workers stand out the strike will probably never begin."

"Is there any chance of that?"

"I gather there is a fair chance. Potter, their new leader, is the
ordinary thick-headed bellicose type, but there is Utlaw to be reckoned
with. That means Birkpool. If Birkpool is against a strike it won't
come off--at least so they tell me. You know more about that than I do,
Adam. Could Utlaw swing his men the way he wanted?"

"Probably--any way he wanted. But what is to be his way?"

"Creevey seems to think that he is sound."

"What do you call sound?"

"On the side of common sense. He knows that it is folly to quarrel
about the share from the pool, when the pool is shrinking."

"But aren't you all behaving as if the pool were bottomless with your
policy of increased social services? Creevey and the rest of you?"

Stannix laughed. "That's a fair riposte. But it's easier to be
provident in the finance of one industry, where you can get the facts
into a reasonable compass, than in the finances of a nation, when you
can get few of the facts agreed. . . . But tell us about Utlaw, for you
know him better than I. By the way, I see that Robson is dead at last.
That means a vacancy in East Flackington, and Utlaw will have a
bye-election to add to his other cares. We shall oppose him of
course--bound to--but not very whole-heartedly, and I fancy he'll get a
lot of our people's votes. But about the strike--which way will he go?"

"I don't know," Adam replied. "But I know which way he ought to go."

"And that is?"

"Bring every man out and keep them out till they win."

"But--hang it, man, what do you mean?"

"Look at it this way. Utlaw is nothing of your ordinary Socialist. He's
an English brand that looks at facts rather than Marxian whimsies. He
knows his people and loves them--yes, loves them--that's half the
secret of his power. He sees that they have painfully and slowly
climbed a little way up the hill and he wants to keep them there. He
doesn't believe in a society where wage-earners are only a set of
figures in a state register; he thinks of them as individuals, each of
whom is entitled to some kind of free individual life. He won't have
the moral fibre of his people weakened. Therefore he stands for high
wages. Wages, he says, are the key to everything. It's the old question
of property. A reasonable amount of property is necessary for liberty.
Therefore any attack on wages is to be fought tooth and nail. If the
masters produce figures to show that they can't pay, he says he is
entitled to ask whether the masters are not muddling their businesses.
That's what the ordinary workman is asking. You don't find much belief
in the plenary inspiration of employers to-day. Utlaw would go farther.
If the extravagance of the State is crippling the employers he would
have that checked in the interests of the worker. He has no notion of
expensive pauperisation. Wages are his Ark of the Covenant, for he
regards them as the price of individuality. . . . One thing more. He
admits that matters may get worse with us, and that if we are to go on
we may have to ask for a great effort of sacrifice and discipline from
everybody. But that must be equal all round. He won't have the chance
of that appeal spoiled by compulsory, one-sided, premature sacrifice."

"Good God, Adam," said Stannix, "that's the longest speech you ever
made in your life. Is that your confession of faith?"

Adam laughed.

"I'm sorry to be so verbose. No, it isn't my creed. I should put it
quite differently, and nobody would agree with me. But I know that it
is what Utlaw believes."

"Then it looks as if Creevey and Leveson were backing the wrong horse.
Will he stick to that?"

"I don't know. If he doesn't he ceases to be a leader. I should be
sorry, for we want all the leaders we can get against the evil days
that are coming."

"Hullo!" said Stannix as the door opened. "Here's another rebel. Come
in, Ken, and join us. Here, waiter, lay another place for Lord
Warmestre. You'll soon catch us up. Do you know Mr Falconet? Adam has
been talking the wildest heresies, and they came out so pat that he
must have been bottling them up for months. Where have you been?
Putting spokes in their Lordships' wheels?"

"I've been listening to the dullest debate you ever heard in your days.
I think I went to sleep. I heard that Adam was dining here, so I
tracked you to this underground den. I never know whether I'm still on
speaking terms with you fellows."

"I don't mind you," said Stannix. "I rather like your way of behaving.
But Geraldine is looking for you with a tomahawk. To crown all your
other offences, you've stolen his thunder. It appears that he has been
incubating an emigration scheme on the same lines as yours, and now the
thing has gone off at half-cock. He can't touch it now that you've
given it the flavour of heterodoxy."

"He can't--and he never would," said Kenneth grimly. "None of your
crowd wants to get things done. They're content if they get a nice
little formula for their perorations. I don't mean you, Kit. You're not
so bad, but you're a lone wolf in the pack."

Kenneth in his new mood was contemptuous of social customs. He was so
full of his cause that he overflowed with it on all occasions. Now,
long before coffee was served and cigars were lit, he was expounding
his emigration ideas.

"Ken is the new Rhodes," said Stannix. "Can't you see him leading out a
colony in the ancient Greek fashion? What will you call it? Warmestria?
No, Arminia would be better. Did you see Creevey in _The Times_ on your
figures?"

"I can answer that blighter. You'll see me in the paper to-morrow. And
Linaker says his talk about inflation is all moonshine. He is going to
write a letter to the press on the subject. No, my trouble is not
Creevey or any of his kind. It's the black, blank apathy of your
Government crowd, Kit. I can't get a move on with them. They'll neither
bless nor ban, only shilly and shally. . . . I've sweated hard for a
year and what's the result? I've stirred up Birkpool, but whether or
not it settles down again into a mud-hole depends upon one man."

"You mean Utlaw, and the strike," Stannix put in.

"What strike? I haven't heard of it. I mean Utlaw." And he looked
across the table at Adam.

"Then there's this emigration racket. That depends upon the dozen
fatted calves who call themselves a Cabinet. Well, I've had my try. If
they won't play then I chuck the game. Back to the land I go and breed
'chasers."

"Not you," said Adam.

"Why not me?" But his truculent voice and the firm set of his jaw did
not suggest an easy surrender.


Falconet accompanied Adam a little way on his homeward walk along the
Embankment.

"I like your Marquis," he said. "He's a fighting man all right. He's
got the eye of an old-time marshal in the Bad Lands. But I wouldn't put
it past him to fling in his hand. Seems as if he were up against too
many pikers."



III

Andrew Amos one morning found Adam at breakfast in Charity Row. It was
dark February weather, with a swirling east wind that stirred up the
dust of Birkpool and made the streets a torment. Andrew had a cold, and
a red-spotted handkerchief was constantly at his snuffy nose.

"I've come to report," he said. "I was at the meeting last night. Joe
Utlaw is in bigger danger the day from himsel' than he ever was from
Davie Marrish. He has come out against the strike."

Amos fixed Adam with a fierce and rheumy eye.

"Aye, and he'll get awa' wi' it. That's my judgment. Seventy per cent
of the men will vote his way. Joe will be the biggest strike-breaker in
history. For, mind you, if Birkpool stands out the metal-workers will
stand out, and the strike is broke afore it's begun.

"It was a most re-markable occasion," he went on. "Ye might ca' it a
triumph o' personality. Joe was arguin' against a' the instincts o' his
folk, and what's more, he was goin' back on a' he had been preachin'
for five years. And yet, ma God! he kept the upper hand. He had four
mortal hours o' it, and the questions cam like machine-gun fire, some
o' them gey nesty yins. Man, he never turned a hair. He had a grand
grip on his temper, too, for the mair impident a question was the mair
ceevil his answer."

Adam asked what line he had taken.

"The cleverest. He wasna arguin' the employers' case. If he had, he wad
hae been doomed from the start. He put it to them that they were up
against the granite o' economic facts. If they chose to kick against
the pricks, says he, the pricks wad be ower muckle for them. They
couldna win, says he, and at the end o' three months or six months they
wad be where they were--only their belts wad be drawn tighter and their
wives and weans wad be thinner, and the country wad have gotten anither
shog doun the brae. . . . Man, it was an extraordinary performance, and
though ye kent that every man in his audience was girnin' in his soul,
he got the majority on his side. In my judgment he has done the job.
There'll be nae strike."

"What about himself?" Adam asked.

"Oh, he's done. Joe is done. He has won this ae time, but he'll never
win again. A' the purchase he has gotten will be exhausted by this
effort. Besides, he has defied his Union, and there will be nae mercy
for sic a blackleg. I'm inclined to think----"

Amos stopped abruptly, for Utlaw himself had entered the room. He
crossed and stood by the fire behind Adam's chair.

"I heard your last words, Amos," he said. "You think I have done wrong?"

Andrew was on his feet.

"I think ye've done black wrong, though maybe your conscience is clear
and ye think it is right. I'm no here to judge ye--I leave that to
whatever Power sums up in the hinder end. Ye're a Union man and ye've
gone back on the ae thing on which the Unions have never weakened.
Ye've betrayed the men's wages. No doubt ye have put up a great
argument--I heard ye last nicht--but you havena convinced me, for to my
mind there's a thing ayont logic, and that's a man's freedom, and if ye
take that from him ye'd better far wind up the concern. Ye've relapsed
on the fosy Socialism that a' parties dabble in the day, Tory and
Labour alike. Ye'll be for makin' it up to a worker wi' mair education
and widows' pensions and a bigger dole, as if onything on God's earth
could make up to a man for the loss of the right to guide his life in
his ain way! . . . But I'm no gaun to argue wi' ye. I've ower bad a
cauld. I just cam here to report to Mr Milford. Guid day to ye." Amos
departed in a tornado of sneezing.

Utlaw sat himself in a vacant chair.

"Do you agree with Amos?" he asked Adam.

"I haven't heard your case. I gather you can carry the men with you."

"I think so. The big majority. . . . My case? It's simply common sense.
When we have wasting assets, it's folly to waste them farther. In a
crisis we must sink legitimate interests and--and revise principles."
He looked at Adam a little shyly.

"I've been going pretty deep into the facts," he went on. "Creevey--you
know him?--Warren Creevey--has been helping me. Half our troubles are
due to ignorance. Well, I've been sweating at the facts of the case.
Our whole industrial fabric needs remaking--on that I agree--but
meantime the storm is coming and we can't start rebuilding in the thick
of it. Also we have to take precautions against the storm, and one of
them may be shoring up the walls which we intend later to pull down.
That's how I have come to look at it. It is pretty nearly the case of
all the intelligence of the country arrayed against the obstinacy of
the Unions."

"Your power has been in the Unions?"

"I know. And all my loyalty has been with them. That's what has made
this step a bitter one for me. It would have been far easier to go on
thumping the tub with Potter and Judson. It takes some nerve to break
with old associations."

"Did I ever deny your courage?"

Utlaw, who had been speaking to the tablecloth, looked up sharply.

"But you think I am wrong? You agree with old Amos?"

"It doesn't matter what I think. The question is, what at the bottom of
your heart do you believe yourself?"

"I don't know what I believe. My creed is a collection of layers, and I
don't know which is deepest. You think I may find that I have been
mistaken. I don't know. God, life is an awful muddle! But if I
disregard one truth for the moment it is only because there are other
and more urgent truths which have to be attended to. I haven't
forgotten what I stand for, and I'll return to it."

"But can you? You have lost your hold on the men's instincts, and that
is not compensated for by a temporary grip on their minds."

Into Utlaw's eyes came an expression of sheer misery.

"That's maybe true. I've given up a good deal. The Union will spew me
out. You think I have wrecked my career?"

"I think you are going to be a very successful man. You'll be in the
Cabinet in a year or two, if you want that. Only the poor devils who
believed in you will have to find another leader. . . . I'm sorry. . .
. They won't find it too easy, and a man to lead them is the most
important thing in life."


The Birkpool metal-workers broke the strike and Utlaw became a figure
of public importance. What was said about him in Labour circles did not
reach print except in a bowdlerised form, but to nine out of ten
newspapers he was a national hero. He had had the grit to defy his
class, his Union and his party, and he had won; a hundred leading
articles descanted on the scarcity and the potency of such courage.
Speculations about his future were for a time the favourite pursuit of
the gossip-writers. The East Flackington election was treated as a
chance of testifying to a rare virtue. He was not yet disowned by his
party, but at the last moment an Independent Labour candidate had
appeared, so the fight was triangular.

Presently the rumour spread that things were not going smoothly there.
One afternoon at Euston Adam met Florrie Utlaw, just returned from the
North and looking rather weary and battered. She would not admit the
possibility of defeat, but her confident words seemed to lack
conviction. It was a horrible election, she said, of personalities and
mud-slinging. The Tory candidate was behaving like a gentleman, and
seemed to wish Joe to win, but Latta, the Independent, was a scurrilous
savage. Joe was marvellous, but he had to fight against organised
interruptions, and Judson and Potter and even Gray were up there doing
mischief. "He will have his revenge on them," she said, with a
tightening of her determined little mouth. "He will show up Judson for
the noisy fool he is."

Three days later Kenneth Warmestre found Adam in the vestibule of the
club and drew him towards the tape. "East Flackington is coming out,"
he said, and edged his way to the front of the little crowd. He
returned with a grin on his face.

"Utlaw is bottom of the poll," he said. "Serve him dam' well right. He
should have stuck to his crowd, even if they had the wrong end of this
particular stick, if he believed them right on the main point. I don't
like fellows that run out. I see he has resigned his Union job. He'll
have to get his friend Creevey to find him something else."



IV

On an afternoon in May, when the London streets were bright with the
baskets of flower-girls, and the smell of petrol and wood-paving could
not altogether drown the vagrant scents of summer, Adam went to see Mrs
Pomfrey at her great house in Curzon Street. He went by appointment. He
had been summoned that morning by an urgent telephone message from Mrs
Pomfrey herself. "I want to see you so badly," she had said, "and we
have much to talk over. Things have become extraordinarily interesting,
haven't they?"

Adam had a conviction as to whom he should meet in the big sunny
drawing-room. Mrs Pomfrey was making tea, seated in a straight-backed
chair with something of the look of a wise Buddha, and beside her was
Frank Alban. Frank had abandoned his shapeless grey flannels and wore
the ordinary garb of his profession. The clothes accentuated his
leanness, but somehow they also gave him an air of greater solidity. He
was no longer the lone wolf, but a member of a pack--perhaps of a
hierarchy.

His eyes met Adam's with some embarrassment, for that morning he had
had a curious talk about him with his brother-in-law. He had found
himself slipping into criticism, and that had roused Kenneth to a
vigorous defence. He had called Adam self-centred, and had been roughly
contradicted.

"You don't understand what I mean, Ken," he had said. "Not selfish.
There isn't a scrap of selfishness in him. But he has this mission of
his, and it narrows him. He is like a wind forced through a funnel,
terrific in its force, but limited in its area of impact, and that
funnel is himself, remember. He couldn't, if he tried, get outside
himself."

"Rot," said Kenneth. "Adam's power is just that he wants to be only a
funnel. How can you call a man self-centred if he looks on himself as a
tool to be used and then scrapped. He has the self-forgetfulness of a
saint."

"I don't agree," Frank had argued. "A saint is not only a servant of
God, but a son. Adam is a bondman. He obeys, but without fellowship. He
lacks what I call religion."

"Your kind, anyhow," Kenneth had answered rudely.

"We wanted you to be the first to hear our news," said Mrs Pomfrey.
"Dr Colledge has got his deanery at last--it will be in the papers in
the morning, and Frank is coming back to St Chad's to take his place.
Isn't it wonderful? Now he will have a platform from which his voice
can really carry. Mr Geraldine says he will very soon be the most
important figure in the Church.

"Of course it is a terrible wrench for him," she Went on. "He hates
leaving Birkpool and all the poor people who have come to love him. But
it was his duty, don't you think? He has to do the work he can do best.
It would not have been right for him to bury his talent in a napkin,
and Birkpool was a napkin. One oughtn't to use a razor to peel
potatoes."

Frank spoke.

"No, Lilah, that's not what I feel. My trouble is that I have only the
one talent, and it is no use for peeling potatoes. If it were I'd be
happy to peel them for the rest of my days, for I should be doing
honest work. . . . But all I have got is a brittle thing and I must use
it for the only job it is fit for."

"Nonsense, my dear," said Mrs Pomfrey. "You have ten talents and you
must use them all for the good of the world. It would be sinful waste
if you didn't. Do you call vision a small thing? Or the gift of
awakening people. Or poetry? Or the power of thought? What we need is a
new revelation and you can give it us. All the battles of the world,
you know, are first won in the mind."

Frank looked a little shyly at Adam.

"Don't believe her. She rates me far higher than I rate myself. I want
something very humble. I'm the preaching friar going back to his cell.
I told you, you know, that I was coming to feel that it was my only
course--to find a cell."

"Or a papal throne." Adam remembered Scrope's words.

A flicker which may have been pain shot across Frank's eyes.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Only that your kind of cell may easily become a papal throne."

Mrs Pomfrey clapped her hands.

"He is right. That is the way to put it. A papal throne. A new and
better Vatican. The Power of the Keys to unlock men's hearts. . . ."

At that moment Lord Warmestre was announced. At the sight of Adam he
seemed for a moment put out. "Hullo! I didn't expect to find you. . . .
I'm looking for Jackie, and thought I might run her to earth here. She
must have gone back to the flat. Yes, please, I'd like some tea. I'm
going to Warmestre to-night. You heard that we are going to live there
and let the Court if we can. We are pretty well pinched by the death
duties."

"Surely you are not crying poverty," said Mrs Pomfrey.

"No. We'll be right enough presently. But Warmestre wants a deal of
looking after. My father was old, and the agent was old, and things
were allowed to slide. It's wonderful farming land, and I'm going to
try out some notions of mine."

"And your 'chasers?"

Kenneth glanced at Adam.

"Perhaps. It's the right place for a training stable. Perfect downland
without a stone in it. But that's for the future. Meantime Jackie and I
will have our work cut out getting the house habitable. It's an immense
barrack, and we shall have to begin by camping in a corner."

The conversation passed to other topics. Mrs Pomfrey discoursed of
Utlaw.

"He has come over to us. Oh yes, complete allegiance. Ours is the only
party for him, for with us a man is given liberty to use his brains. He
has behaved magnificently and has been abominably treated. Mr Creevey
has found him a post in Addison's--he is to look after the labour side
of the business, and he is on the board of the new evening paper. He
ought to be quite well off soon. A seat in the House? Yes, of course we
want him there as soon as possible. There may be a vacancy in
Birmingham, if Mr Platt gets a peerage in the Birthday Honours. Why do
you smile like that, Kenneth?"

"I don't like it. I wish Utlaw had gone the other way, for I fancied
the chap. A man should stick to a half-truth, if it is his own, rather
than swallow the truths of other people. . . . Not that I have any
right to judge him." And again he looked at Adam.

The two walked away from the house together. There seemed to be some
constraint in Kenneth's mind, for his manner lacked its customary
exuberance.

"The may-fly will be on in another week," he said. "You'll be coming
down to the Court. What about Friday week? I won't be there, for I must
stay on at Warmestre, but you'll find Jackie when you go in for tea.
Oh, by the way, I had a message to you from her. She specially wants to
see you. Told me to tell you if I saw you that she had to have it out
with you. Have you been getting into her black books?"

In Berkeley Square they met Florrie Utlaw, a very different being from
the drab little woman whom Adam had first known. She had a new gown, a
new hat, and what seemed to be a new complexion. Also she had acquired
a new manner, vivacious, confident, pleasantly and audaciously youthful.

"I can't stop," she said, "for I'm late already. Yes, we've got a flat
in Westminster. You must come and have tea with us. I saw Lady
Warmestre last night at Jean Rimington's dance. Were you there? Jos is
very well, thank you." (She had dropped "Joe" as too painfully
reminiscent.) "He is desperately busy, but very happy. You see, he is
working with white men now. But he has so much to do that I don't know
how he will manage the House. You've heard about that? Yes, it is
practically certain."

She cried them a gay good-bye, and tripped off in the direction of
Mount Street.

The meeting unloosed Kenneth's tongue.

"Ye gods, it's a crazy world!" he said. "Utlaw in Creevey's pocket and
destined to be a Tory silver-tongue! . . . His wife Jean Rimington's
latest find! . . . Brother Frank returned from the styes to the fatted
calf and soon to be a fashionable Pope! . . . It is a nice thing, Adam,
to see virtue rewarded. All the same, they have left a lot of poor
disappointed devils behind them."

They stopped at the corner of Berkeley Street and Piccadilly. Kenneth
looked round him at the motley throng on the pavement and the congested
stream of traffic, and up to the blue May sky.

"It's a crazy world," he said, "but it's a busy one. An amusing one,
too. I'm going back to my corner of it. Yes, I'm chucking my work, for
it wasn't mine. I'm not man enough to knock the heads of a thousand
idiots together and teach them sense, and for all I'm concerned they
can go on with their jabbering. What's the thing in the Bible? 'Ephraim
is joined to his idols--let him alone.' I've had my run and I've
failed, and I'm going back to my paddock."

He put his hand on Adam's shoulder.

"I'm sorry for you, old man. Sorry--and rather ashamed. You have backed
three bad 'uns, and two have gone soft and one has gone sour."




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      IV


Adam had in his bag the three brace of trout which were the recognised
limit of the water, the rise was over, and now he was amusing himself
with idle casting, dropping his fly by the edge of a water-lily or a
snag at the far side of the stream. It had been a day of gentle
sunshine and light western breezes, the day of an angler's dream. The
hay in the meadows was already high, and the wind tossed it into eddies
of grey and green, but by the riverside the turf was short and starry
with flowers.

His fishing had had many interludes. He stopped to watch a kingfisher
dart from a bole, and a young brood of moorhens scuttling under the
shadow of the bank, and a diving dabchick. He sniffed the rich rooty
scents of the water's edge, moist and sweet, the fragrance of the
summer midlands--and wondered why it seemed to change to something salt
and fresh, as the terrestrial scene faded from his eyes and he looked
inward at a very different landscape.

Disappointment had not troubled him. He had no sense of failure. These
things were ordained and it was not for him to question the ordering.
The long monotonous grind behind him, the struggle with imponderables,
the effort to keep his grip on what in his hands became slippery and
evasive, the anxious thoughts and the baffled plans--the memory of
these did not oppress him. That had been his task and it was finished;
he was waiting for fresh marching orders. He was only a subaltern
obeying a command: the setting of the battle was with the
general-in-chief. He was in a mood of passivity which was almost peace.
He had aimed too high; now he waited for a humbler task.

As always in such moods his fancy ranged, and he was back in his secret
world. As the vigour of mid-day declined to the mellowness of
afternoon, his rod fell idle. He was not looking at the deep midland
pastures or the green waters fringed with white ranunculus. He was on
the western side of Sgurr Bn, on the thymy downlands with their
hollows full of wild-wood, their shallow glens and their singing
streams. Nigel was with him, babbling happily, his small firm hand
clutching one of his fingers, except when it was loosed to permit him
to dart aside after a nest or a flower. This was their favourite
afternoon ramble, when they could watch the sun moving down to the
horizon and bask in its magic. The horizon should have been the sea,
but Adam knew that it was not yet permitted to come within sight of it.
He was aware of it--somewhere just a little ahead beyond the ridges of
down and the hazel coverts--they could even hear the beat of the green
waves on the white sands. Nigel was full of it, always asking questions
about the wonderful pink and pearl-grey shells, and the strange nuts
carried by the tides from remote lands, and the skerries where the grey
seals lived, and far out the little isle called the Island of Sheep
where had dwelt the last saint of the Great Ages. But Nigel was not
impatient. They were going there of a surety, but perhaps not that
afternoon. Meantime there were the blue rock-doves and the merlins and
the furry rabbits in their burrows and an occasional loping hare--and
his father's hand which he sometimes pressed against his cool cheek. .
. .

About five o'clock Adam woke from his absorption, and remembered his
engagement at the Court. He crossed the stream by a plank bridge and
turned up through a fir-wood over the intervening ridge of hill. He had
regard and loyalty for his friends, but he was aware that it was not
the fierce rapturous thing which it had been in the old days. For him
the world had now sharper and harder lines and dimmer colours. But
Jacqueline was a little different. She reminded him somehow of Nigel,
and he felt for her just a little of the same wondering affection.
Besides, she understood him best. When he was with her he had the
comfortable feeling of being with one who comprehended him without the
need of explanation--comprehended him, sympathised with him, humoured
him a little, perhaps, as she humoured her small Jeremy. Those bright
eyes of hers saw very far.

He reached the Court on the garden side and entered the house by the
open window of the library. There was no one in the room, so he passed
through the big drawing-room out on to the terrace. He found a
tea-table set where a great magnolia made a forest in the angle of the
east wing. Below was the Dutch garden, and the view was to the west
through a glade in the park to far-away blue hills.

Jacqueline appeared on the terrace steps. She had been gardening among
the lily ponds, and wore Newmarket boots a little splashed and stained.
Her long limbs, her slimness, and her retinue of dogs gave her more
than ever the air of the huntress.

The kettle was boiling, so she at once made tea. Then she flung herself
into a chair, took off her gauntlets, and tossed them into another.

"Had a good day?" she asked. "You must have, for you're late. When Ken
has no luck he is back clamouring for tea by four o'clock. I hope
you're as hungry as I am." She was busy cutting slices from a wheaten
loaf and buttering them.

To Adam she seemed a little nervous. She talked fast and busied herself
about giving him tea, all with a certain air of preoccupation. She had
much to say about Jeremy, and she was not in the habit of talking about
her son. Also of Warmestre--regret at leaving the Court, complaints of
the magnitude of the task that awaited them in Devonshire. Adam
listened with half an ear. Jacqueline's presence always gave him a
sense of well-being and ease, but now she was notably restless.

"Kenneth told me that you specially wanted to see me," he said.

"Yes, of course." She did not look at him, and was busy taking shots at
a thrush on the terrace with bits of crust. "I always want to see you.
I wanted to talk over our friends with you."

"Which ones?"

She laughed. "Well, let's begin with Mr Creevey."

"Why Creevey?"

"Isn't he the rock on which you have shipwrecked, Adam dear?"

"You think I have shipwrecked?"

"Haven't you? I'm desperately sorry for you. But of course I don't pity
you. I would as soon think of pitying God."

She sat upright and for the first time looked straight at him.

"You and I are too close friends to have secrets. What do you make of
Mr Creevey?"

"I don't know him well."

"You don't. No one does. But you can feel him. . . . Shall I tell you
what I think about him? First of all, I don't like him. His manners to
women are atrocious. Not to Lilah Pomfrey, who is too old, or to Sally
Flambard, who is too ethereal. But with anyone like myself whom he
thinks good-looking he has a horrid streak of the common philanderer.
But let that pass. We all know that he takes his pleasures rather in
the farm-yard way. . . . Apart from that there's nothing much against
him. He has made a lot of money, but no one ever suggested that he was
a crook. I took the trouble to ask a lot of questions about that. He is
not supposed to go back on his friends. Lastly, he is amazingly,
superhumanly clever. Everyone admits that. It's the chief thing about
him, and his chief passion. He lives for the exercise of his splendid
brain and cares for nothing much else. Kit Stannix says that he is the
perfect sophist, and I think I know what he means. Life is for him a
very difficult and absorbing game of chess.

"Well, you have come hard up against him," she continued. "The apostle
against the sophist! And the sophist has won the first round. If you
had any human failings, Adam, you ought to hate him. For he hates you."

"He scarcely knows me."

"But he _feels_ you and you feel him. And he hates you like sin. Trust
a woman's instinct. Perhaps he fears you a little too. You don't fear
him? No, you wouldn't, because you're scarcely human. . . . Don't you
realise what he has done?"

"He has taken Utlaw away from me."

"Yes. Utlaw was clay in his hands, and Mr Creevey succeeded just
because he was mostly clay, not gold. I like the shaggy Jos--Jos,
remember, for the future, not Joe. I prophesy that he will be a
prodigious success--the one honest working man, the darling of the
gentlemen of England. I like little Florrie too. In a year she will be
so smart she will scarcely be able to see out of her eyes. She will
drop me as too dowdy. Jean Rimington is a fool, but she always backs
the right mare for those particular stakes. But the Utlaws were easy
fruit. Mr Creevey made a bigger _coup_ than that."

"Your brother?"

She nodded.

"Brother Frank. Make no mistake about it--Frank is a saint. You're not.
You're an apostle, which is something very different. Frank has a
wonderful soul, which he is going to cosset and polish and perfect. You
don't care a rush about your soul. You'd sacrifice it to-morrow if you
thought the cause was big enough. . . . How was it done? Through Lilah
Pomfrey of course. Lilah was born to be a nursing mother to saints. She
is full of all kinds of wonderful emotions and ideals, and she has the
supreme worldliness which can make them all fit in nicely with each
other. No, no. She won't marry him. Frank is incapable of marrying, and
she knows very well that Frank's wife would never be more than a
morganatic one. She'll be his mother and his confidante and his good
genius and--his impresario. I adore my Frank and want him to have a
pleasant life. He'll get it, I think. He will be a tremendous figure
before he is done. He will be the greatest preacher in England, and
there will be scores of little birthday-books with his comforting
sayings, and little manuals about his teaching. He'll do a lot of good
too. All kinds of dingy beings will warm themselves at the fires he
lights. And he'll die in the odour of sanctity, and people will say
that a prophet has fallen in Israel, and it will be quite true.
Only--you see Frank is not a fool, and at the end I think that he may
have some rather bad thoughts about it all."

Jacqueline got up.

"Let's walk," she said. "A cigarette? Not for me, thank you. I give up
smoking in summer because it spoils my nose for the flowers."

They crossed the terrace, and descended into the Dutch garden, which
with lupins and the first delphiniums was all a mist of blue.
Jacqueline linked her arm in Adam's, for she had the habits of a
friendly boy.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked. "I'm anxious about you, Adam
dear. You've been slaving--oh, I've watched you--slaving at what was no
job for a man like you. You have been a bottle-holder to champions that
won't fight. What next?"

"I shall find champions who will."

She withdrew her arm.

"Why will you be so absurdly modest? You say you are trying to find
leaders. But you have more grit than anybody. Why won't you do the
leading yourself?"

Adam shook his head.

"You don't understand. I could never make you understand. I am only a
servant--a bottle-holder if you like. I can never lead. It isn't the
task I have been given."

"Stuff and nonsense!" she said. "I have prophesied about Mr Utlaw and
brother Frank, and now I'll prophesy about you. You'll be forced to
come into the open and take charge. If you don't you'll go on being
beaten. By people like Mr Creevey and Lilah Pomfrey. . . . And by me."

Jacqueline moved away from him and stood with one foot on a low
parapet--a defiant huntress.

"I have a confession to make, Adam," she said. "It was I that took Ken
away from you. He is far the best of them--far more grit and fire. He
has the makings of an apostle. He would have followed you in sandals
and a hair shirt. It was I that stopped him."

She stood up, very slim and golden in the light of the westering sun,
and if there was defiance in her pose there was also a sudden shyness.

"You couldn't compete with me, you know. I often felt rather a cad
about it, but I had a right to fight for my own. . . . How shall I
explain? Four years ago I married Ken. I wasn't madly in love with
him--perhaps I wasn't in love with him at all. But I greatly admired
and liked him. There was no glamour about him, but he was the best man
I knew, the most really good and reliable. A woman, you know, generally
marries for safety. She may fall in love for all kinds of reasons, but
when she marries she takes the long view. Ken stood for something in
England which I wanted to see continue, and as his wife I could help to
keep it going. Marrying him gave me a career. I knew that if I had a
son he would have a career also--he would be born to all kinds of fine
sturdy obligations--with a niche ready from the start. So I married Ken
partly for himself--quite a lot for himself--and partly for the great
system behind him. Do you understand me?"

Adam nodded. He remembered his feelings the first night when he had
descended the broad oaken staircase at the Court.

"Well, since our marriage I have come to like him enormously--the solid
affection into which people grow when they live together. And there's
Jeremy, too. Jeremy is Ken and Ken is Jeremy. . . . And I have found
out things I never guessed before. When I married I thought that if Ken
had a fault it was that he was commonplace, the ordinary banal
Christian gentleman. I was a blind little fool. There are queer things
in the Armine blood. I'm half Highland and therefore half daft, but my
daftness is like summer wild-fire, and Ken's might be a steady
devouring flame. He has it in him to fling everything to the winds and
tramp the world. . . . And I did not marry to be a beggar-wife."

Jacqueline's singing voice sunk to a whisper.

"I hadn't the courage. I wasn't good enough. Besides, it was all
against reason. I saw his restlessness and at first I encouraged him,
for I didn't want him to sink into a rustic clod. That's another side
of the Armines. If they don't happen to go crusading they will relapse
into the perfect chaw-bacon. I encouraged him to become Mayor of
Birkpool because that was a family job. But his doings there opened my
eyes--and frightened me. And then I saw the power you had over him and
that frightened me more. I realised that I had to fight for my rights.
Not my rights only--it wasn't altogether selfish. I was fighting for
Jeremy and for all the old things--for the Court here and for
Warmestre, and for the people who lie carved in stone in the chapel,
and for all the kind, peaceful life that depended on him. I was
fighting for Ken, too--for his peace of mind, for if he had gone
crusading there would have been no more peace for him. He's not a
saint, you see, and he is only part of an apostle--the other strain in
him would have been pulling hard and a good deal of his life would have
been hell. . . . Do you blame me?"

"I don't blame you."

She sighed.

"It was a stiff fight and I only won on the post. I had all the
chances, of course. I had Jeremy and I had Ken's affection for us both
to help me. I knew him much better than he knew himself and I could
play on all kinds of secret strings. His love of country life and
horses. His laziness--he has plenty of it. His sentiment--he is a mass
of it. His feeling for the past and for his family--he is no respecter
of persons, but he has a big bump of veneration. But I could not have
won, I think, if Mr Utlaw had not run out--and brother Frank. That gave
Ken a kind of nausea about the whole concern, and I worked on that. . .
. So I have got him back to me and to Jeremy and to all the Armines
that ever were. But sometimes I feel as if I had sinned against the
Holy Ghost, the sin my old nurse used to frighten me with. I'm not sure
that I mind that--I'll face up to the Holy Ghost when my time
comes--but I mind horribly having fought against _you_. I have beaten
you, and I hate myself for it."

She looked at him timidly, as if much hung on his words. He did not
speak, and she continued, her voice low and rapid, as of one making a
difficult confession.

"You see--you see I could have been madly in love with someone--you,
perhaps--someone like you. I think you are the only one in the world
who could have made me feel like that, and then I would have flung
everything behind me. My grandmother used to say that the women of her
family would either sell their shift for a man, or make a packman's
bargain with him. Nobody wanted my shift, so I have made my bargain. Do
you blame me for fighting for my share in it? . . . I would like you to
say that you forgive me."

Jacqueline's eyes had become solemn, like a wise child's.

"There is nothing to forgive," Adam said. "I think you did
right--entirely right."

She came towards him and put her hands on his shoulders. Her lips were
trembling.

"I believe you mean that," she said. "God bless you for it. . . . If I
were a man I should wring your hand and wish you well. But I am going
to kiss you. . . ."

Adam was scarcely conscious of her kiss. But there was something novel
in his heart, which he recognised as tenderness. As he walked across
the park the light touch of her lips seemed in the recollection like
the clutch of Nigel's hand.


A week later he had a letter from Jacqueline, who was in London.


"Last night," she wrote, "I went to a wonderful little party at Lilah
Pomfrey's. Ken was asked but wouldn't go--said he was sick of
monkey-tricks. The Utlaws were there, and Mr Creevey was in great form,
and Frank of course, and one or two young men and several yearning
women. Lilah has a regular group now and this was their second meeting.
The invitation card may amuse you."


The card she enclosed had Mrs Pomfrey's name in the centre, and neatly
printed in the left-hand top corner _The Seekers_.




_BOOK III_




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      I


The little low-roofed caf in the Rue des Clestins in which Falconet
sat on a certain October afternoon was flooded with the hazy golden
light which is the glory of Paris in a fine autumn. The patron was busy
in a corner with his own avocations; a party of four stout citizens
were drinking bocks and disputing vivaciously; but otherwise the place
was empty, for it was the slack period when _djeuner_ is over and the
hour of _apritifs_ has not arrived. Falconet was waiting for Adam,
and as he smoked a delayed after-luncheon cigar he let his mind run
over the events of the past week, since he had landed in England.

In the retrospect the chief was a talk with Christopher Stannix, for
whom he had acquired a puzzled respect. Falconet loved politics and
their practitioners no more than the rest of his countrymen, but
Stannix was unlike any politician he had ever met. He seemed to stand
aside, intervening now and then to put his weight into the scales to
adjust the balance. He was a noted pricker of bladders, and had
deflated some of Falconet's pet ones, but he was as much in earnest as
Falconet himself. He called himself a "trimmer," and had justified the
name from a period of English history with which Falconet was not
familiar. But above all he was Adam's friend.

For Adam Falconet had come to entertain one of the passionate
friendships which were as much a feature in his character as his
passionate dislikes. At first Adam's ways had seemed to him inertia and
his fastidiousness mere pedantry. But his disillusionment with his own
bustling methods across the Atlantic had made him revise his views. The
breakdown of Adam's plans the summer before had been to him less of a
disappointment than a relief. His friend was free to start again, and
to start again with him as an ally. For Falconet was at heart an
artist, and could never be content with the second-rate. His own
complex organisation in America he regarded without pride, as a useful
nursery of talent. But it would not produce genius, the rare quality
which was needed to heal the world's ills. Now as ever he was a pioneer
in quest of the major secrets.

Adam was a hard man to know, and Falconet, in spite of their months of
close companionship in the Arctic ice, felt that he had only penetrated
the outer fringe. His explorer's instinct was aroused, and he sought
enlightenment from Stannix; and Stannix, detecting an honest affection,
opened his heart to him.

"Melfort," he had told Falconet, "is a religious genius. I don't know
how to define that, for it is a thing which you can feel better than
you can explain. I don't know what his religion is--never talked to him
about it--it's sure to be very different from any orthodox brand. But
whatever it is it is a living fire in him. . . . Yes, I have known him
since he was a boy. As a young man he was, I think, the most remarkable
fellow I knew--'remarkable' is the word--you couldn't help noticing
him, for he was unlike anybody else. We used to put him in a class by
himself, not for what he had done but for what he was. He had an odd
spiritual distinction, and an extraordinary fineness--fine as a slim,
tempered sword. Then the crash came and he went under. After that I can
only guess, but some time eight or nine years ago--yes, in prison--he
had a great visionary experience. Like Dante's, and much about the same
age as Dante. He has never breathed a word to me about it, but the
results are there for anyone to see. Everything about him is
devoted--dedicated--consecrated--whatever you choose to call it."

Falconet had nodded. That much he had long been aware of. He asked
further questions.

Stannix puckered his brow.

"Oh yes, there are flaws in him. One is that he is--just a
little--inhuman, and he used to be the jolliest of mortals. I wonder if
I can make you understand me, for it is not ordinary inhumanity. My old
tutor, I remember, used to define Platonism as the love of the unseen
and the eternal cherished by those who rejoice in the seen and the
temporal. Adam rather lacks the second part. He thinks about God a
great deal more than he thinks about the things and the creatures He
has made. He is a little too much aloof from the world, and that
weakens his power. If he could only be in love with a woman again!--but
of course that's all past and done with. I wonder how much he really
cares about his friends. Not a great deal for them in themselves, only
as instruments in his purpose. He might have made a better job of Utlaw
and Frank Alban if he had got really close to them. There must have
been something a little chilly about those friendships. Kenneth
Warmestre was different perhaps--I believe there was a sort of
affection there--but, then, Warmestre was hopeless from the start."

Falconet had dissented. "I know what you mean, but I don't think I
agree. My grouch with Adam is that he is too infernally modest. He
rates himself too low and the other fellows too high."

"You haven't got it quite right," Stannix had replied. "He doesn't rate
other people too high. He rates them too low--he's bound to do that
considering the sort of standard he has--and they are bound
subconsciously to recognise it, and perhaps resent it. That is one bar
to the proper sort of friendship. But you are right on one thing--he is
too modest about himself. He's always contrasting himself with
perfection and feeling a worm. He has made up his mind that his
business is only to serve--not to serve God only, but to serve other
men who are the agents of God's purpose, and the trouble is that there
is nobody big enough for him to serve. He wants to untie our
shoe-latchets, and none of us is worthy of it. He has the opposite of
_folie des grandeurs_--the folly of humility, I suppose you might call
it. But he hasn't found the Moses whose hands he can hold up, and I
don't think he ever will."

Falconet had agreed, but with a cheerful air. For he believed that he
was on the track of a Moses.


An hour slipped away in the sunny caf and Falconet still waited. The
party of four finished their bocks and their argument and went out. A
man in a blue blouse came in and talked to the patron. The patron
himself came over to Falconet's table and spoke of the weather,
politics and the manners of travelling Americans, thereby showing that
he took Falconet for an Englishman. Then a great peace fell on the
empty place, and a white cat, who had been sunning herself outside on
the pavement beyond the green awning, came in and slept on the top of
the patron's little desk.

A man entered, a typical French bourgeois, wearing a bowler hat, a
tightly buttoned grey coat, a stiff white collar and a flamboyant tie.
He ordered a vermouth, and after a glance at the empty table came
towards Falconet. He took off his hat with a flourish, revealing a head
of close-clipped fair hair--the familiar Normandy type.

"I await a friend, Monsieur," said Falconet. "But pray take the seat
till my friend arrives."

The stranger sat down and sipped his vermouth. He summoned the patron,
and commented on the quality of the beverage, a friendly comment with
much advice as to how to secure the best brands.

"Monsieur is a connoisseur," said the patron. "He travels much?"

"I go up and down the land," was the answer, "and I find out things,
and I share my knowledge with my friends." He spoke a rapid guttural
French, with a curious flatness in his voice.

"You come from the East," said the patron. "Lille, I should say at a
guess."

"But no. I am out of Lorraine. As are you, my friend."

He proved to be right, and for a few minutes there was a quick exchange
of questions and recollections. Then the patron was called away and the
stranger turned to Falconet.

"It delights me to detect the origins of those whom I meet by chance.
You, Monsieur, I take to be American. Your eyes are quicker and
hungrier than the English, and your mouth is shaped to the smoking of
thin cigars. Is it not so?"

"You've got it in one," said Falconet. "Now, I'll guess about you.
You're a Lorrainer, but you live in Paris. You're in some kind of
trade--high-class _commis-voyageur_, I presume. What exactly do you
sell?"

"I do not sell. I am looking for something to buy, but what I want is
not easily bought."

"Meaning?"

"A man," was the surprising answer given in English. "But I think I
have found one."

Falconet stared. Then he burst out laughing, and leaned forward with
outstretched hand.

"You fooled me properly, Adam. I'm mighty glad to see you, but how in
thunder did you get into the skin of a French bourgeois? You're the
dead spit of one, and even now I've got to rub my eyes to recognise
you. You've a face one doesn't forget in a hurry, but you've managed to
camouflage it out of creation. I've been sitting opposite you for five
minutes, and, though I was expecting you, I wasn't within a thousand
miles of spotting you. How d'you do it?"

"I had four years' practice," was the answer. "Well, I have got
alongside your great man. Tell me, what was there about him that first
took your fancy?"

Falconet considered. "I think it was his old-fashioned face. That was a
phrase of my grandmother's, and it means just what it says. Loeffler
looks like the good old tough New England stock I remember as a boy. A
plain face with nothing showy about it, but all the horse-sense and
sand in the world. Like Abraham Lincoln--only not so darned ugly. Then
I had some talk with him and I liked him better still. He wasn't like
my friend Creevey, who between drinks will sketch out a dozen plans of
salvation for everything and everybody. Loeffler don't talk much, but
what he says counts a hell of a lot. He sees the next job and sits down
to it--stays still and saws wood, as Lincoln said. I've gotten to be
suspicious of all showy fellows, for what glitters isn't often gold.
It's the plain people that are going to pull us out of the mess. That
little Cosgrave man in Ireland is one, and I'll bet my last dollar that
Hermann Loeffler is another. What do you say?"

Adam nodded.

"Well, let's hear what you make of him. You started from London
twenty-seven days ago. How often have you seen him?"

"Only three times. But they were pretty useful occasions. First, I
started in at the top. I got the right kind of introductions from the
Foreign Office and the City, and I sat down at the Adler as an
enquiring cosmopolitan with a liking for Germany. I had my pedigree
arranged--aunt married in Wrtemberg, school-days in Heidelberg, a
year in Munich under Luigi Brentano--all the proper credentials."

"Did my man Blakiston help you?" Falconet asked.

"Tremendously. I could have done nothing without him. He had your
millions behind him, and I shared in their reflected glory. . . . It's
a long story and it falls into three parts. First, there was the week
in Berlin. Then the scene changes to the Black Forest. Last I spent
three days in the Rhineland, and had a little trouble in getting away.
Yesterday I wasn't sure that I would be able to meet you here. It
looked as if I mightn't be alive many hours longer."

Falconet lit a fresh cigar. "Go on. I'm listening. You start off at the
Adler all nicely dressed up."

Adam told his story slowly and drily. He seemed more interested in his
evidence than in the way he had collected it.

His introductions had given him ready access to Loeffler, now for two
months the German Chancellor. The meeting at Lamancha's dinner-table
had been recalled, and Loeffler, who forgot nothing, was intrigued at
the transformation of the former British staff-officer into the amateur
publicist, with Blakiston and the American millions in the background.
Adam played his part carefully, his rle being that of an honest
enquirer, and something in his face or his manner must have attracted
Loeffler, for he talked freely. The little man was drabber and leaner
than ever, for he was engaged in the thankless job of demonetising the
old mark, and getting his country's finances straight by a colossal act
of sacrifice. He talked finance to Adam, but, when the latter
disclaimed expert knowledge, he turned to the things behind
finance--the national temper, the attitude of other Powers, the forces
in the world which made for stability or chaos.

"He doesn't deceive himself," said Adam. "He knows what he is up
against down to the last decimal. When he has stated the odds against
him, he has a trick of smiling ruefully, just like a plucky child who
has to face up to something he hates. I wanted to pat him on the
back--like a good dog."

That was the first meeting in Loeffler's flat, late one night, over
several tankards of beer. The second was a grander occasion. It was at
a private dinner given by a great banker, a dinner at which the guests
sat on into the small hours and at which momentous things were spoken
of. Loeffler was there and two of his colleagues in the Government;
several bankers and financiers, one of them a noted figure in Paris; a
general who had had to face the supply question of the armies in the
last year of war, and who was now grappling with difficult questions of
public order; a Swedish economist, Blakiston and Creevey.

"That yellow dog!" Falconet exclaimed at the mention of the last.

"He behaved well enough," said Adam. "You see, his intellectual
interest was aroused and he tackled the thing like a problem in
mathematics. He's honest in one thing, you know--he'll never be false
to his mind."

The atmosphere had been tense, since destiny hung on that talk. It had
been tense in another way, for the guests were shepherded in and out of
the house as if they had been visitors to a gun factory. Everywhere
there were solid, quiet-faced watchers.

At this point Adam became more expansive. Loeffler, he said, had
dominated the talk, a solemn, pale little man in a badly-cut dinner
jacket among people starched, trim and resplendent. They had talked of
the London Conference fixed for the beginning of November, and of the
burden of war debts and reparations which was to be the staple of the
discussion there. The General was inclined to be explosive and
melodramatic, and the German bankers to make a poor mouth about it, but
Loeffler was as steadfast as a rock. He was a loyal nationalist, but he
was also a citizen of the world, and to him Germany's interests and
world interests could not be separated. Again and again he brought the
debate down to the test of the practicable, but his conception of the
practicable was generous. Clearly he was speaking against the
prepossessions of his colleagues, but they could not gainsay his
stubborn good sense. It was, said Adam, like a masterful chairman at a
company meeting comforting and soothing recalcitrant shareholders, and
sometimes like a wise old sheep-farmer pricking the bubbles of
agricultural theorists.

But it was on the question of Germany's internal finance that he rose
to the heights.

"He put the grim facts before them and what seemed to him the only road
out. Here he had the others with him--all but the General, who hadn't
much to say. You could see that Loeffler hated the job--hated those
glossy people who did not need to look beyond the figures. There was
one of them, a fellow with a big fat face and small eyes--I needn't
tell you his name--who talked as if he controlled the flow of money in
the world. I daresay he did. He was almost insolent with his air of
cold dictation. They were all insolent, even Creevey, though he was
better than some. It was the dictation of masters who were thinking
only of their bank balances to a poor devil who was responsible for
millions of suffering human beings. Yet Loeffler was on their side. He
took their view, because he thought it was right, though his instinct
was to beat them about the head. That wanted grit, you know, and he
never betrayed his feelings except that he half closed his eyes, and
sank his voice to a flatter level. There was another side to it, too.
He knew that in the interests of his country he was sacrificing his own
class--the professional people with their small savings, the tradesman
with his scanty reserves--all the decent humble folk who are the best
stuff in Germany. They had trusted him, they had put him in power, and
now he was sacrificing them. He was in hell, but he went through with
it and never winced. I don't think I have often respected a man so
much."

Falconet nodded. "I see you've gotten my notion of Loeffler. I'm glad
about that. What next?"

"Next I took a holiday because he took one. He was pretty nearly all
out, as anyone could see, and I discovered that he was going off for a
few days to the country. I had a hint about what he meant to do. He was
determined to give his bodyguard the slip, and be alone for a bit. I
decided to follow him, for you can get a good line on a man when he is
on holiday."

"Did you find him?"

"It took some doing. Blakiston was useful, for he has a graft with the
police, and the police of course had to keep an eye more or less on his
whereabouts, though I fancy he must have gone several times clean out
of their ken. Anyhow, I was lucky. I got into tramping kit and I came
up with him at a little inn in the Black Forest at a place called
Andersbach. He had come north from Freiburg way, following the course
of a stream that makes a long glen in the pine-woods. He was tired and
dusty, wearing an old suit of _loden_ and carrying an ancient rucksack,
and he was alone.

"The inn as it happened was packed--it was a small place with cellars
on the ground-floor and a dining-hall up wooden steps which was pure
Middle Ages. The place was like a bee-hive with trampers--the
_Wandervgel_, you know--boys and girls holidaying on twopence a day.
A queer crowd, but a merry one--shorts and open shirts--determined to
enjoy life though the ground was cracking under them. They overflowed
into the meadows round the stream and into the clearings among the
pines, and slept anywhere, and ate sausage and rye bread and made
coffee round little bivouacs. Innocent jolly folk, ready to talk the
hind-leg off a donkey. I was swallowed up in them at once, for my rig
was much the same as theirs, and they were not inquisitive. Loeffler,
too. That was what he wanted. None of them had a guess who he
was--probably took him for a small provincial professor. But he and I
were the elders of the party, so we naturally came together. That was
when I had my real talk with him."

"Didn't he spot you?" Falconet asked. "He had been seeing you a few
days before."

"No. You see I was a different man--a chemist from Freiburg talking
with a Breisgau accent. I learned long ago that disguise doesn't
consist in changing your face and sticking on a beard, but in having a
different personality. There was nothing about me to link me up with
the Englishman who had been Blakiston's protg and had been greeted
as an acquaintance by Creevey. We were in a different world of mind and
body."

"What did he pretend to be?"

"Nobody in particular. I think that he meant to let me imagine he was
of the professor class. He is a bit of a scholar, you know, and we
talked a lot about books. It was that that made him take to me, when he
found that I had read Augustine and could recognise a tag from Plato.
Loeffler's an extraordinary being to have the job he has. He has to
work twelve hours a day at stony facts and figures, and yet all the
time he is thinking of a little house in the Jura where he can look
across at the Alps and botanise and read his books. He is uncommonly
well read--even in English, though he talks it badly. You won't guess
who his favourite authors are--Landor and Sir Thomas Browne! He was
meant for the contemplative life, but he won't get it in this world. An
exile from the cloister."

Falconet grinned. "Same as you, maybe. Did he talk politics?"

"Yes--the abstract kind--as if he were looking down at Germany from a
great height. He seemed to enjoy that, for I fancy he doesn't get many
chances of letting his mind run free. He was very illuminating. I
suppose you would call him a common-sense Nationalist. One thing he
said that struck me, that Communism and Capitalism were growths from
the same root, both involving a servile state. He hates both as the
spawn of hell, and he thinks that Germany is near the edge of the first
and can only be saved by curbing the second. He would go a long way in
that direction, by limiting rates of interest and striking at the
sanctity of free contract. You see, he doesn't mind going back a step
or two to get a run for his leap. But it's freedom that he cares
about--he has the sound bourgeois clutch on the individual. One felt
all the time that this fellow might have dreams but had no liking for
theories. Always the practical man stuck out, but the kind of practical
man who is ready for anything that will take him one step forward.
That's how he struck me, since I knew who he was, and could read
between the lines. To a stranger he might have seemed a windy
provincial who talked boldly about things he was never likely to have
much to do with."

"What did the _Wandervgel_ make of him?"

"Only a friendly elderly chap who wasn't accustomed to being in the sun
and had got all the skin peeled off his nose. He had a lot of trouble
with that nose of his, and was always doctoring it with lanoline. . . .
He talked to the hobbledehoys and joined in their games--he's a useful
man still on a hill walk--and we all shouted songs after supper. They
chaffed him and romped with him and called him uncle."

"Did they call you uncle?"

Adam laughed. "No. I don't know why, but they didn't. I'm not as good a
mixer as Loeffler. We were there three days, for it was a kind of
base-camp for the trampers, and it did Loeffler a world of good. He got
hill air into his lungs, and the sun comforted him, and the sight of
youth cheered him. I had a walk with him one night after a blistering
day, up on a ridge of the forest, where we could look down upon the
meadows with their twinkling fires, and the noise of speech and singing
came up to us in a queer disembodied way as if it were a sound of wild
nature. There was a moon and I could see his face clearly, and for the
first time he looked happy. I remember he linked his arm in mine and
his voice had a thrill in it, as if he were repeating poetry. 'See,
_mein Herr_' he said, 'yonder is the hope of the world. These children
have fallen heir to a heritage of troubles, but they have the spirit
that makes light of them. They are very poor, and sweat all the year in
dismal places for a pittance, but their youth will not be denied.
Comfort is the foe of enthusiasm--and enthusiasm is everything, if only
we can keep it from becoming madness. That is our good German folk.
They have the patience of God, but their slow blood can kindle to noble
things.' Then he gripped my shoulder and almost cried, 'What does it
matter about the old men--you and me and our like? We have the stain of
blood and folly, but these young ones are innocent. Can we ask for
anything better than to be the manure for the fields from which will
spring a better grain?' He went off next morning before I was awake,
without saying good-bye. Four days later I read in the papers that he
was in Berlin."

"Where did you go next?"

"I thought I had better look into the question of Loeffler's becoming
manure too soon. That can't be allowed to happen. I knew that he was in
constant danger. Blakiston told me as much, and that frozen-faced
bodyguard of his was proof of it. So I went back to Berlin, and after
certain preparations descended into the shadows. I knew the road, you
see, for I had spent three years among those particular shadows. I had
confirmation of my fears. Loeffler's life is not a thing an insurance
company would look at if it knew a quarter of the facts."

The caf was filling up as the hour of _apritifs_ approached. "This
isn't quite the place for the rest of my story," Adam said. "We'll
adjourn till after dinner."

That night in the hotel Adam resumed.

"The danger lay in two directions--the Iron Hands and the Communists,
the two groups that hanker after short cuts. The second was the easier
job, for in the war I had laid down my lines there. But the first
promised to be difficult, and I had to get the help of a queer fellow.
His name was La Cecilia, an Italian by descent, but through his mother
the owner of a little estate in Pomerania. He had English relations,
and his parents died young, so he was sent to school in England. One of
the smaller schools--I can't remember which. He was an under-sized,
dirty, ill-conditioned boy, but the most daring young devil I ever
knew. I met him several times in the holidays when he was staying in
the same neighbourhood, and we rather made friends. You see, I was the
elder and he took it into his head to believe in me.

"I lost sight of him till after I joined the regiment. Then we met at a
deer-forest in Scotland. He had been asked there because he was a
wonderful shot with a rifle, but he didn't mix well with the other
guests. He was in the German Army by that time and had more than the
average conceit of the old-fashioned Prussian officer. His manners were
good enough, but they had lapses. He and I got on fairly well, for he
hadn't quite forgotten his boyish respect for me. . . . There was a
regrettable incident during the visit. He lost his temper with one of
the stalkers and struck him, and the stalker knocked him down and,
since he looked nasty, confiscated his rifle. Cecilia went raving mad
about it and made a scene at the lodge, and--well, public opinion was
pretty hot against him. I helped to smooth things over, and got him
quietly off the place. He handed me a good deal of abuse, but I
suppose, when he came to think it over, he was grateful.

"Anyhow, the next time I ran across him he was friendly. It was at a
little mountain inn in the Vosges, where I had turned up on a push-bike
in one of my private explorations. I was then at the Staff College.
Cecilia was on the same errand, I think--for the other side. He was
using a different name, and was got up like a clerk on holiday. We both
knew what the other was doing, and we didn't refer to it. But we had a
great evening's talk about things in general. At first he was cold to
me--you see, I had been a witness of his humiliation at Glenfargie, and
the man was as proud as Lucifer. But he thawed in the end, and gave me
about a quarter of his confidence. He had grown into a tough, lean,
sallow little fellow, with a quiet manner hiding the embanked fires. A
real volcano, for he was the complete dare-devil, with a passion for
all that was desperate and spectacular and incalculable, and at the
same time as cunning as a monkey, and with shrewdness behind his
grandiose imagination. A sort of d'Annunzio. I remember thinking that,
if war came, he would be killed in the first month.

"But he wasn't. I had a letter from him in 1920. He did not know what I
had been after in the war, but somehow or other he had heard that I had
done something, so he assumed that I must be a fire-eater like himself.
It was a long, crazy epistle. He complained that the world was no
longer fit for a gentleman, but that there was still hope if the
gentlemen would only get together. National hatreds, he said, were
over, the battle was now between the gentlemen and the rabble, and it
was for all men of breeding and courage to work together. I gathered
that he was in the inner circle of the Iron Hands, and he wanted to
connect up with those who were fighting the same battle elsewhere, for,
as he saw it, it was a world conflict. . . . I took some pains in
replying to his nonsense. I didn't choke him off, but told him that
just at present I was out of action and lying low. I was interested in
the Iron Hand business and wanted to keep in touch with Cecilia.

"Well, I succeeded in doing that, and I found out a good deal. The Iron
Hand movement was on the face of it just an organisation of
ex-soldiers, like the American Legion, partly benevolent and partly
nationalist. There were thousands of members who only joined to keep up
the fellowship of the trenches. But there was an inner circle to it
which was playing a big part in politics, and an innermost circle which
meant real mischief. This last cherished the old idea of iron
discipline and class supremacy, and meant to win or perish. Peace in
the world was the last thing they sought, for their only hope lay in a
new and bigger ferment. They were violent German nationalists, but they
were cosmopolitan too in their outlook--they wanted to brigade all the
elements in every land that would help to restore the old world. They
were true storm-troops, ready for any forlorn hope and prepared to use
any means however devilish, and Cecilia was one of their brains.

"As soon as I left the Black Forest I went to Cecilia--I had been
keeping track of him, you see. I didn't say much, but he believed that
I was ready for the field again. Anyhow, he welcomed me. He sat and
stared at me for a minute or two, and seemed to be satisfied."

Falconet laughed.

"I judge he was," he said. "If I was looking for a confederate in a
desperate job, your face would be enough for me. Go on, Adam."

"He told me that if he took me among his friends there would be no
going back, and he fixed me with his solemn mad eyes. I said that I
perfectly understood that. Then my doings became like a crude detective
yarn, and I needn't trouble you with the details. He gave me passports
to the inner circle, but I had to find my way there alone--that was
part of the ritual. I had to pass through layers and layers of
vedettes--all kinds of people you wouldn't suspect--bagmen, and small
officials, and tradesmen, and peasants, each doing his appointed job in
the dark. In the end I landed in the upper room of a squalid little
eating-house in--never mind where. And there I became an honorary
member of a fairly mischievous brotherhood.

"Cecilia was there, but he wasn't the most important member. There was
a small plump man with the thick rings on his hands that people wear
for rheumatism, and a face all puckered into grey bags. He only spoke
in grunts, but he seemed to be the final court of appeal. They called
him Gratias--Dr Gratias. And there was one wonderful fellow, with a
neck like the busts of Julius Csar and atop of it a small round head.
He looked the pure human animal, one-idea'd, with the force and fury of
a bull. He was a noble of sorts--the Baron von Hilderling. There were
others too. . . . No, there was no melodrama. No signature in blood, no
swearing of oaths--those gentry are beyond the inhibitions of oaths.
They treated me with immense civility, but rather as if I was a
criminal whose _dossier_ was wanted by the police. They most politely
took down every detail about my appearance, every measurement--even my
finger-prints. You see, they were determined never to lose sight of me
again, and if I turned traitor to make certain of a reckoning."

Falconet looked grave. "That's bad. They've gotten a tight cinch on
you."

"It was the only way. I had to put myself in their hands. It adds to
the odds in the game, but only a little. . . . After that was done they
were perfectly frank with me, and Cecilia was almost affectionate. They
took it for granted that I was heart and soul on their side, but they
didn't ask me to do anything--not yet. I was only a friendly foreign
associate. But I learned a good deal about their plans."

"Loeffler?" Falconet asked sharply.

"Yes, he is the enemy. Partly because he is Chancellor, and therefore
the prop of a system which they detest. Partly because he is Loeffler.
They are black afraid of him, for they are clever men, and recognise
that he is the greatest force to-day making for peace. They have the
wits to see that he is utterly honest and utterly courageous, and
therefore they fear him more than anyone else. . . . But they are not
yet quite sure, and that is the hope. He has always been a Nationalist,
remember--he had a first-class war record--he's not a Jew--and he's not
a Socialist. They are waiting and watching him. As soon as he declares
himself the thumbs go down."

"How do you mean?"

"They may let him attend the London Conference if his policy is still
in doubt. But if in order to prepare the ground he thinks it necessary
to make some preliminary declaration--some gesture to France or to
America--then they will do their best to see that he doesn't cross the
Channel."

Falconet whistled.

"But he means to say something. I heard that from Blakiston."

"Yes, he means to. I gathered that in Berlin. . . . Well, so much for
the Iron Hands. The Communists were an easier proposition. I dropped
back into the underworld in which I moved in '17 and '18, and I had no
trouble in picking up the threads. With the Iron Hands I was Melfort,
formerly a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, but among the
anarchs I was somebody very different--a shabby Munich journalist
called Brasser--Hannus Brasser. Some of them remembered me--one of them
had actually hidden me for twelve hours in his wood-cellar.

"I met the Iron Hands in a room in a slum public-house, but the other
lot were gathered in a castle! It was a great empty, shuttered
_schloss_ in a park of a thousand acres, and it belonged to one of them
who bore a name more famous in history than Hohenzollern. What a mad
turn-up the world is--gutter-blood out to restore aristocracy and blue
blood eager to blast it! . . . It was a funny party, but not as
impressive as the Iron Hands. You see, the Iron Hands are a new thing,
idiomatically national, with a single definite purpose, while the
others are only cogs in an international machine. Active cogs, of
course. The last word in cold deadly fanaticism. They accepted me in my
old rle of fellow-worker, and didn't trouble to ask what I had been
doing since we met in cellars in '17. I noticed changes in them--they
were wilder, less confident, a little more desperate. There was a woman
among them called Probus--Netta Probus--who struck me as nearly the
evillest thing I had ever set eyes on."

"How do they look at Loeffler?" Falconet asked.

"With respect--and utter hatred. He is the triumphant bourgeois who may
just pull Germany out of the mire, which is the last thing they want.
They don't underrate his abilities--if anything they overrate them.
They are as afraid as the Iron Hands of the London Conference, and will
do their best to keep him away from it. Oh yes, murder is their usual
card, and no doubt they will have a try at it--they are an
unimaginative lot with a monotonous preference for the crude. But they
are less to be feared than the Iron Hands, for they have been trying
that game for years, and the police have a line on most of them. I had
some difficulty in getting away from that cheerful party, for it broke
up in confusion. Yes, a police raid. It was piquant to be hunted by
Loeffler's own watch dogs, when I was trying my hand at the same game."

Falconet demanded the full story, but he got little of it, for Adam
seemed to regard it as a thing of minor importance.

"Two, I think, were caught. The woman Probus got away unfortunately. I
had a bit of a cross-country run, with several automatics behind me to
improve my speed. A good thing that I was in pretty hard condition!
Lucky for me too that I had kept my communications open. I had rather a
difficult twelve hours till I reached one of my hidy-holes. After that
it was easy, and I emerged the spruce Parisian _commis-voyageur_ you
saw this afternoon. Flew into France with a water-tight passport and a
valise full of samples."

Adam yawned. "I'm for bed. To-night I am a Christian gentleman, but
Heaven knows what I shall be to-morrow. You and I must part for a week
or two, for I'm going to be rather busy. My job is to see Loeffler safe
in England. There we can leave him to the best police in the world."

"And after that?" Falconet asked.

"One stage at a time. The London Conference is the thing that matters
most to the world at this moment. After it I stand back. I leave
Loeffler to have it out with Creevey and his friends. By the way,
Creevey has a bigger international reputation than I thought. The Iron
Hands know all about him, and don't approve of him. Same with the
Communist lot. He's their pet mystery man, and they have built a
wonderful bogy out of him, something which they can fear and hate to
their heart's content. He may find some day that his life isn't as
healthy as he would like."

Adam stretched his arms like a tired boy. For one of his years his
movements were curiously young. Falconet dragged his long limbs from
his arm-chair and complained of stiffness.

"I'm growing old," he said. "I get rheumatism if I sit long in the same
position. How in thunder do you manage to keep so spry, Adam? You look
happy, too."

The other laughed.

"I have an active job to look forward to. And I haven't had much of
that since you and I left the Polar ice. . . . Also, I now know where I
am. I have been flying too high and my pinions won't carry me. I have
been trying to work on the stage, when my proper job is in the wings.
Loeffler has the right word for it. I'm content to be the manure to
make the corn spring."




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      II


I

On the 23rd of October the Chancellor spent a busy day in the important
city of Rottenburg. He arrived in the morning by special train from
Berlin, and drove to the apartments taken for him at the Kaiserhof,
which stands near the middle of the Koenigplatz, the famous street
which divides the new industrial and residential city from the older
quarter of Altdorf. In the forenoon, attended by the burgomaster and
councillors, he opened the new Handelshochschule, one of the
extravagant public buildings which Germany had indulged in since the
war, and made a speech on his country's industrial future. After
luncheon he fulfilled many engagements, including visits to the new
technical museum and to several schools, at each of which he had
something pleasant to say, for the Chancellor had a gift for apposite
occasional speeches. Thereafter he had long interviews with certain
steel magnates, and then retired to deal with his papers. It was
understood that he proposed to himself dinner in his rooms with his
secretaries and a quiet evening, leaving early next morning for Cologne.

But this programme was only for the public. The Chancellor did not dine
at the Kaiserhof, and the dinner ordered for him was eaten by his
secretaries alone. As the October dusk fell he descended, wrapped up in
a heavy ulster with a white muffler round his neck, and, emerging from
a side door in a narrow street which ran at right angles from the
Koenigplatz, entered a waiting motor-car. Outside the town he stopped
the car, and took his seat beside the driver, for the evening was fine
and he was a glutton for fresh air.

Twenty miles from Rottenburg is the important railway junction of
Neumarkt, on the main line between Paris and eastern Europe. It is the
junction from which travellers branch off to Switzerland and the south.
The main day express from Paris arrives there at seven o'clock, but the
night express which crosses the Alps does not leave till nine-thirty,
having to wait for the connection with the Rhineland and the north.
Passengers for the south have consequently two hours and a half at
their disposal, which they usually spend in dining at the excellent
table of the Htel Splendide, adjacent to the railway station.

A certain French Minister of State left Paris that morning, his
destination, as the press announced, being a well-known holiday resort
on the Italian lakes, where he proposed to take a week's rest before
the toil of the London Conference. But the Minister did not dine at the
Htel Splendide. He left his secretary to see to his baggage, and
hurried into the street, where a car awaited him by arrangement. After
that he was driven rapidly through the pleasant woodland country to the
north of Neumarkt to a village called Neustadt, where a little inn
stood apart in a rose garden. There he found a modest dinner awaiting
him, and he ate it in the company of a small man with a peaked beard to
whom he had much to say. At a quarter to nine he left the inn, rejoined
his car, which was waiting in a retired place, duly caught the
south-bound express, and next morning was among the pines and vineyards
of the Italian foothills.

A quarter of an hour later his companion paid the bill, and ordered his
car. Night had fallen, but it was the luminous dark of a fine autumn.
As on the outward journey he sat beside the driver, partly for fresh
air, and partly for another reason. He wore a white scarf round his
neck, a dark ulster, and a soft black hat.

A mile from Neustadt the road was under repair for several hundred
yards, and there was passage only for a single car at a time. Traffic
had to wait at each end at the dictation of a man with a red lamp, who
blocked ingress till the other end was clear. At the Rottenburg end
several men with motor bicycles might have been seen, lounging and
smoking. They were men with unsmiling faces and broad shoulders that
had once been drilled, and, though in ordinary civilian dress, they had
the air of being on duty. They had inconspicuously accompanied the
Chancellor from the Kaiserhof as his bodyguard, and now awaited his
return, for their orders had been to stop short of Neustadt.

A car came out of the alley-way which they recognised. It was a big
Mercds, and beside the driver sat a small man in a dark coat with a
white muffler. That white muffler was their cue. They mounted their
bicycles, and two preceded the car, and two followed it. They attended
it till it stopped in the side street running up from the Koenigplatz,
and they saw the passenger descend and enter the hotel, after which
they dispersed for supper. But one of them had stopped for a moment and
rubbed his eyes. "His Excellency has dined well," he said. "He trips
like a young 'un."

Five minutes or so after the cyclists had started, another car passed
the road-mending operations. It was exactly the same as its
predecessor--a Mercds limousine, and beside the driver sat a small
man in a dark greatcoat and a white scarf. There were no cyclists to
accompany this car, which made its best speed along the fine broad
highway towards Rottenburg.

Presently the speed slackened, and the driver stopped to examine his
engine.

"She pulls badly, _mein Herr_," he said. "I do not know why, for she
was overhauled but yesterday."

The journey continued, but it was a limping business, scarcely ten
miles an hour. Loeffler looked at his watch, and compared it with the
far-off chiming of the half-hour from the Rottenburg clocks. He was in
no hurry, for he had nothing more to do that night, and he was enjoying
the mild autumn weather.

But when the Rottenburg lights were near and lamp-posts had begun to
dot the country road, the car came to a dead stop. The chauffeur
descended, and, after examination, shook his head.

"As I thought. It is the big end which has had some mischief done to
it. Somehow it has not been getting its oil. We cannot continue. I must
wait here in the hope of a tow, and you, I fear, must go on on foot. We
are almost in Rottenburg. That is Altdorf before you, and in half an
hour you will be in the Koenigplatz."

Loeffler was not unwilling. He had had too little exercise of late, and
he was glad to stretch his legs. He took off his ulster and bade the
driver leave it at his hotel when he reached the city. But he retained
his white neckerchief, for his throat was weak, and he had a good deal
of public speaking before him in the near future.

"You will continue till you meet the tram-lines," said the driver.
"See, there is their terminus just ahead. But stop, there is a better
road, I think." He removed his cap and scratched his head. "I am a
newcomer to this place, but it sticks in my mind that the tram-lines
fetch a circuit. Here, friend," he cried to a man who stood on the
side-path. "What's the nearest way to the Kaiserhof hotel?"

The man, who looked like a workman, took his pipe from his mouth and
came forward.

"The Kaiserhof?" he said. "Through Altdorf undoubtedly. It will save
the gentleman a mile at least. By the Ganzstrasse which enters the
Koenigplatz almost at the hotel door. See, _mein Herr_. After the
tramway terminus you take the second street on your left and continue.
That is the Ganzstrasse. You cannot miss it."

Loeffler thanked him, gave some final orders to his driver, and stepped
out briskly. He had many things to think about and was glad of this
chance, for he thought best when he was alone and using his legs. He
looked back once and saw his driver sitting on the kerb, lighting his
pipe. He did not notice the workman, who had crossed the road and was
following him.

The Chancellor had had for many months to submit to the perpetual
surveillance of a bodyguard from the secret police. He submitted, for
he knew that it was wise, since his life was not his own, but he did
not like it, and he welcomed a chance to escape from tutelage. He felt
happier mixing freely with his own people than set on a guarded
pinnacle. He liked, too, the spectacle of the evening life of the
streets--it was not yet ten o'clock and they would be thronged--and he
enjoyed the soft dry air into which was creeping the first chill of the
coming winter. He strode vigorously along, and had soon reached the
entrance to the Ganzstrasse.

This was a narrower street with no tram-lines. At the beginning it ran
through a new workman's quarter of small houses interspersed with
timber-yards. Here it was open and well-lit, and there were few people
about. But presently it entered the old quarter of Altdorf, for it had
been the principal street when Altdorf was a fortified town, whose
inhabitants kept geese on the wide adjoining pasturelands. A good many
new tenements had been erected, but between these rookeries were the
bowed fronts of old buildings, and there were many narrow lanes running
into mazes of slums. Loeffler remembered that Altdorf did not bear the
best of reputations. There had been bread riots and other disorders in
recent years, and he had a vague recollection of reports in which
certain notorious suspects were said to have harboured here. The street
certainly did not look too respectable. The broken pavement was crowded
with people, sauntering youths and shop-girls, workmen, seedy-looking
flotsam and jetsam, and the cafs seemed of a low type. He glanced in
at a window now and then, and saw ugly heads bent over beer-mugs. But
the crowd was orderly enough, and he noticed a policeman here and
there. Somewhere, too, must be the watchful figures of his bodyguard.
He had to abate his pace, and keep close to the wall to avoid being
uncomfortably jostled. Several loutish-looking fellows had pushed
against him, and one or two had peered suspiciously into his face. The
height of the houses made the lighting bad. Between the lamps there
were patches which were almost dark.

In one of these dark patches he found himself suddenly addressed. It
was by a man in rough clothes, who had a cap with a broken peak and a
knitted scarf knotted about his throat. The fellow rubbed shoulders
with him and spoke low in his ear, and the voice and speech were not
those of a workman.

"Excellency," he said, "do not look at me, but listen. You are in
danger--grave danger. You must do as I tell you if you would save your
life."

Loeffler in the war and ever since had lived in crises and had been
forced to take swift decisions. Now he did not look at the speaker. In
a level voice he asked: "What are your credentials? Why should I trust
you?"

The man sidled away from him as they passed a lamp-post, and drew near
again as the street darkened.

"I am the man Buerger who walked with you in the woods at Andersbach a
month ago. We talked of St Augustine."

"Good," said Loeffler. "I remember. Tell me, what must I do?"

"Your bodyguard have been decoyed away," was the answer. "There are men
close to you who seek your life. In three and a half minutes, when you
have passed the third lamp-post from here, shooting will begin farther
up the street, and the police whistles will be blown, and the few
people here will hurry to the sound. But the shooting will be a blind,
for it is you--here--that matters. Your enemies will seize you. They
may kill you now, if they are hustled, but anyhow they will kill you
soon."

"So!" Loeffler's voice was unchanged. The news only made him slow down
his pace a little. "And you propose?"

"When the shots are fired we shall be abreast a little slit of a
passage. It is called the Ganzallee, and is very ancient. It turns
south from this street and then runs parallel to it and debouches just
where it meets the Koenigplatz. It is narrow, so that two men can
scarcely walk abreast. You must turn down it and run--run for your
life. If you reach the Koenigplatz you are safe, and within fifty yards
of your hotel."

"But they may catch me. I am not a young man."

"Your Excellency is not slow with your legs, for I have seen you. But I
will lead the pursuit--and shepherd it. The others will not be allowed
to pass me, and the place is so dark and narrow that they cannot shoot
ahead. . . . Are you ready, Excellency? We are almost there."

"I am ready," said Loeffler. Under the last lamppost he had glanced at
the dirty, white face of his companion, and seen there that which he
had recognised--something he believed he could trust.

The man slowed down a little, and Loeffler fell into step. It seemed to
him that figures were crowding in on him on the pavement, all keeping
pace with him. But he did not turn his head, though his eyes shifted to
the left to look out for the crack in the masonry which was the
Ganzallee.

Then suddenly a hundred yards up the street shots rang out, and at the
same moment his companion hustled him. "There!" he whispered. "Run for
your life and do not look back. Straight on. There is no turning."

Loeffler cannoned against an iron post in the entrance of the alley,
bruising his thigh. Then he charged into a slit of darkness, while
behind him he heard a sudden babble like a baying of hounds.

Things moved fast in that minute. The shots up the street were followed
by a tumult of shouting, out of which rang shrilly the whistles of the
police. The crowd at the mouth of the Ganzallee thinned, for some fled
back down the street, and others ran towards the tumult. One or two
policemen with drawn batons passed at the double. But half a dozen
figures remained and drew quickly towards the man who had warned
Loeffler.

This man behaved oddly. He whistled on his fingers, and waved his hand.
Then he shouted something which may have been a password. Then he
turned down the Ganzallee with the half-dozen at his heels. Each man of
them had a pistol drawn.

The place was as dark as a tunnel, but now and then it was pricked with
light from some window far up in the ravine of old masonry. The men
behind saw nothing of the fugitive, but it was quiet in there, away
from the noise of the street, and they could hear him slipping and
stumbling ahead. The ground was cobbled and uneven, but the soft-soled
shoes of the pursuit did not slip, while those of the quarry were
clearly giving him trouble. The contest looked to be unequal in another
way, for the seven men ran confidently in the dark as if the ground was
familiar to them, while the man they sought could not put forth his
best speed, in case of colliding with the wall at the many windings.

The chase was mute, except for laboured breathing. The man who led the
pack may not have been the slowest, but he was far the clumsiest.
Unlike the rest he wore nailed boots, which scrawled on the cobbles and
made him often stumble. Yet none of the others succeeded in passing
him, for he had the trick--learned long ago on an English football
field--of edging off a competitor.

Once they were nearly up to the fugitive--he could not have been more
than five yards ahead--but at that moment the leader tripped and
staggered, causing the next two men to cannon into him and thereby
delaying the chase for at least ten seconds. A second time success
seemed to be within their grasp, at a point where the alley turned to
the right and sloped steeply towards the Koenigplatz. They could see
the glow of an arc lamp dimly reflected, and in it the figure of the
man they sought, twisting like a hare, as his nails slipped on the
greasy stones.

Undoubtedly the pursuit would have caught him, for he was making bad
time, had it not been for the mishap to its leader. For his feet seemed
suddenly to go from under him, and he came down with a crash, blocking
the narrow road. The next three men cascaded over him on to their
heads, and the last three sat down violently in their attempt to pull
up. For a minute there was a struggling heap of humanity in the alley,
and when it had sorted itself out the fugitive was in the bright light
of the alley's debouchment.

"Our bird has escaped us," said one of them after a mouthful of oaths.
"God's curse on you, Hannus, for a clumsy fool."

The leader, whom they called Hannus, sat on the ground nursing a
bruised shoulder.

"God's curse on the cobbler that nailed my boots," he groaned. "Who was
to guess that he would turn in to this rabbit-run! Had I known I would
have come barefoot!"


Loeffler had some anxious moments when he almost felt the breath of his
pursuers on his neck. Even at the sound of the final cataclysm he dared
not turn his head, and he did not slacken pace till he emerged,
breathless and very warm, in the Koenigplatz, with the lights of the
Kaiserhof just across the street. He had a glimpse of the upper end of
the Ganzstrasse, where the row seemed to be over. He went straight to
his rooms, and informed his secretaries that he was ready for bed.

"And by the way, Karl," he said, "you might have up the police escort
that Goertz insists on, and give them a wigging. They lost me to-night
for the better part of an hour. Bad staff-work somewhere."



II

The packet boat had scarcely passed the end of the breakwater which
outlined the river channel when it encountered the heavy swell of the
Channel, tormented by a north-easter. The tourist season was over, and
it no longer ferried backwards and forwards crowds of cheerful
trippers. Very few passengers had come on board, and those few were
composing themselves in the cabins or in corners of the lower deck for
several hours of misery.

But the steamer carried a good deal of cargo, and in the loading of it
had fallen behind her scheduled time of starting. There were several
touring-cars the owners of which had crossed by the quicker route, and
left their cars to follow by the cheaper. There was also a certain
amount of perishable fruit from the Normandy orchards. So the French
harbour had witnessed a busy scene before the boat's departure. On the
quay there had been none of the usual sellers of picture-postcards and
chocolates and cherries, but there had been more than the usual
complement of stevedores and dock-labourers to assist with the cargo.

There had indeed been a bustle opposite the after-part of the steamer
which contrasted with the meagre traffic at the passengers' entry. The
gangways to the hold had been crowded, and when the whistle blew for
departure there was a scurrying ashore of blue-breeched dockers. One
man, who had been fussing about the position of a motor-car and giving
instructions in excellent French, did not leave with the rest, though
he did not seem to be a passenger. He remained inconspicuously on the
side farthest from the quay where a ladder led to the middle deck, and,
when the ship was leaving the river and the bustle in the hold had
subsided, he ascended the ladder, and found a seat in a place which the
spindrift did not reach. He was dressed in a worn trench-waterproof,
and he wore a soft green hat well pulled down over his brows.

Loeffler had come aboard early and had sat himself in a corner of the
smoking-room with a novel. After much thought he had chosen this route
across the Channel. It was of extreme importance that he should be in
England before the other delegates to the London Conference, for he had
many preliminary matters to discuss. Had he crossed from Calais or
Ostend his journey would have been conspicuous, and would have been
broadcast throughout the world, thereby raising suspicion when
suspicion must at all costs be avoided.

There was another reason. In a speech at Bonn three days earlier he had
said things which had been nicely calculated to prepare the atmosphere
for the Conference, but which, as he well knew, meant a declaration of
war against certain potent forces in his own country. He had repeated
them in a statement to an international news agency. He was perfectly
aware of the danger he ran, and understood that these words of his
would make certain people determined that he should not sit at the
London council-board. He was dealing, he knew, with enemies to whom
human life meant little. His colleagues would have had him travel by
some way where he could be securely guarded. An aeroplane had been
suggested, but by air he could not preserve his incognito, since it was
the most public of all methods of conveyance, and his arrival would
immediately be known. The same argument applied against the ordinary
routes. There, indeed, he could have been well guarded, but it meant
publicity and that must be shunned.

So he had chosen the long sea-route from a western French port at a
season when few people were travelling. It fitted in with his plans,
for he had to have certain conversations in Paris which could not be
missed. Instead of an escort he had decided to trust in the protection
of obscurity. He had reached Paris inconspicuously, and there had been
no official greetings at the station. He had met the man to whom he
wished to talk in an obscure caf on the Rive Gauche. His hotel had
been humble, and he had driven to the coast in an ordinary hired car.
His passport did not bear his own name. On the English side all had
been arranged. There he would be met by his host and driven to a
country house. Once in England he believed that any risk would be past,
for he would have the guardianship of the famous English police till
the Conference was over. Beyond that he did not look, for it was his
habit, so far as he himself was concerned, to live for the day. If the
Conference succeeded much of his task was done, and the rest was in the
lap of the gods.

Loeffler was a good sailor, and did not mind the violent pitching of
the vessel. His novel did not interest him, and he relapsed into those
complex reflections from which he was never for long free. Much of his
power lay in the fact that he really thought. He gave less time to
official papers than do most men, for he had the gift of plucking the
heart swiftly from them, but he gave many hours to thought.

There was only one other man in the smoking-room, a plump gentleman in
knickerbockers who was trying to write at a table, and finding it
difficult. He was smoking a rank cigar and was bespattering himself
with ash and ink. Loeffler lit his pipe to counteract the cigar, and
half shut his eyes. But he found the place ill suited for his
meditations. It was stuffy and smelly; each minute it seemed to hurl
itself into the air and settle back with a disquieting wriggle, while
the spray lashed at the closed windows. He took off his short overcoat,
and laid it beside his big white waterproof. Then he changed his mind,
put on his waterproof and went out.

He sought the upper deck, from which a bridge led across the hold to
the after-part of the ship. All morning he had sped along the French
roads amid scurries of rain, but now the skies had cleared and a cold
blue heaven looked down upon the tormented seas. But from stem to stern
the vessel was swept with salt water--stinging spray, and on the
starboard side great grey-green surges. Loeffler had always loved wild
weather, and his spirits rose as he inhaled the keen air and felt the
drive of spindrift on his cheek. He put his thoughts back under lock
and key and prepared to enjoy an hour or two of sanctuary.

Sanctuary--yes, that was the right word. He was enclosed between sea
and sky in a little cosmos of his own. There was no sign of human life
about, sailor or passenger; the vessel seemed to be impelled by no
human power, like the ship in the strange English poem which he
admired. Loeffler had been a mountaineer from his youth, because of his
love of deep solitude. He was far from that nowadays, in a life which
was all heat and sound and movement, but the gods had sent him a taste
of it this afternoon. He strode the deck, his mackintosh collar
buttoned round his throat. The seas were breaking heavily over the
after-deck. He would like to go there and get wet, as he had often done
when a boy.

There was another figure on the deck, and he saw that it was the
knickerbockered gentleman of the smoking-room. He had finished his
cigar, and had put on oilskins. A hat with the brim turned down almost
met the oilskin collar, so that only a nose and eyes were visible.
Loeffler realised that he had been wrong in thinking the man plump, for
as he moved he gave the impression of immense strength. Those shoulders
were overlaid not with fat but with muscle.

The man seemed to be in the same mood as Loeffler. He cried out in
French about the weather, not in malediction but in praise.

"Here is the wind to blow away megrims! Like me, I see, you are fond of
a buffeting."

He fell into step and paced the deck beside him, laughing loudly when a
wave more insolent than the rest topped the bulwarks and sent its wash
swirling round their feet.

They covered the length of the deck twice, and then came to a halt
above the hold, where there was some little shelter from the wind. The
capstan and anchors in the stern were almost continually awash, and
waves seemed to strike the place obliquely and half submerge the staff
from which the red ensign fluttered.

"We are well defended both of us," the man cried in a jolly voice. "Let
us adventure there. We can dodge the bigger waves. My God, that is the
spectacle!"

Loeffler followed him across the bridge, bending to the buffets of the
gale. A man in a trench-waterproof, ensconced in a corner of the deck
below, watched the two and smiled. He had been getting uneasy about
Loeffler's sojourn in the cabin. He knew that if he did not leave it he
would die there, since those who sought his life were determined to
have it at all costs, but that they preferred another plan, with which
Loeffler had now obligingly fallen in.

The starboard side of the after-deck was running like a river, but on
the port side there was a thin strip which the waves did not reach.
There were no bulwarks here, only a low rail; in quiet summer passages
travellers would sun themselves here in deck-chairs and watch the track
behind them outlined in white foam amid the green. There had been some
carelessness, for several of the stanchions of the starboard railing
had been removed and not replaced. For a yard or two there was no
defence between the planking and the sea.

"What a spectacle!" repeated the large man in knickerbockers. "It is a
parable of life, Monsieur. A line, a hair, a sheet of glass alone
separates man at all times from death." He was looking at the sea, but
now and then he glanced forward over the empty ship ploughing steadily
through the waste. Not a soul was visible. He did not see the man in
the trench-waterproof, who had scrambled half-way up the iron ladder
from the hold, and was now flattening himself under the edge of the
after-deck. Nor could the man see him, though he could hear his voice.

Loeffler, awed by the majesty of the scene, and thinking his own
thoughts, found his arm taken by the other.

"See, that big surge is past. Now we may look over the other side and
be back before the next one."

Obediently he took three steps amid the back-wash of the last wave, and
looked into a trough of green darkness over which the little vessel was
slightly heeling.

Then suddenly he found himself grasped in arms like a bear's, grasped
so firmly that the breath went from him. The big man was bracing
himself for some effort against which he was powerless to struggle. He
felt his feet leave the deck. . . .

The grip slackened. A sharp voice had cried out behind them. It cried a
single word, but that word was enough to check Loeffler's assailant.

Then it spoke in fierce German.

"You fool, Kurbin. You have got the wrong man."

The giant let his arms relax, and Loeffler found himself switched from
his grasp by a man in a trench-waterproof. The ship was heeling again
to port, and a shove sent him reeling against the port rails.

"Back," a voice shouted. "Run, man, run for your life."

Loeffler had heard that voice before. When the next surge broke over
the stern he was already halfway across the bridge over the hold. He
glanced back once and saw the after-part of the ship blotted out in a
shroud of spray.

Loeffler's going seemed to rouse the knickerbockered man to a berserk
fury. He flung himself upon the other, and the two swung against the
port rails. But the man in the trench-waterproof was equal to the
occasion. The giant was wearing rubber-soled shoes which had a poor
purchase on the swimming deck. He slipped, and the other wriggled out
of his clutch and managed to clasp him round the middle from behind.
Then, while his balance had gone, he swung him in his arms against the
low rail which defended the place from the hold. The rail gave under
the weight and the big man pitched down among the motor-cars. His head
hit the bonnet of one, and he rolled over and lay quiet.

The man in the trench-waterproof glanced forward and saw that no one
was in sight. He slipped down into the hold and had a look at his
adversary. The man was bleeding from a gash on the head, and was
doubtless concussed, but his neck was unbroken.

Then he went forward and found a sailor. "There has been an accident,"
he said. "A gentleman has fallen into the hold from the after-deck. He
is unconscious, but not, I think, badly hurt. Get him moved to a cabin.
Meantime I will see the captain."

He showed the captain certain papers, and told him a story which caused
that honest seaman to rub his eyes.

"There need be no fuss," he said. "There must be no fuss, since no harm
has been done. You know Lord Lamancha by sight? He will meet the small
gentleman in the white mackintosh and take charge of him. Never mind
who the gentleman is. He travels incognito, but he is a person of some
importance. As for the other, the doctor had better attend to him. He
has no baggage, but he has plenty of money--he will probably wish to
return to France with you to-morrow. Only, till we reach England, his
cabin door must be kept locked."



III

As Lamancha drove Loeffler through the dusk from the coast, by way of a
broad river valley into wooded uplands, he did not talk politics.

"You'll have five days of peace here," he told him, "peace very
slightly interrupted by discussion. Geraldine is coming down, and
Stannix, and that is the party. It is a jolly place and the weather
looks to be mending. Don't you call this time the 'Old Wives' Summer'
in Germany? You don't shoot, I know, but I will take you for some long
rides on the Moor. One doesn't often get the chance of entertaining a
man like you in our simple country way. The last European celebrity who
came here had three secretaries with him and Scotland Yard sent down a
couple of men."

Loeffler observed that it was a pleasure to get away from the
surveillance of detectives, and Lamancha laughed.

"Well, as it happens, you won't quite escape that. The fact is, we had
a burglary two night ago. Oh no, nothing serious. It was very much the
usual business--my wife's room while we were at dinner, open windows, a
ladder from the garden. The burglars were scared away by the return of
her maid, and had no time to pinch anything. But the police have chosen
to take it seriously, and there are London men in the village making
enquiries. It has nothing to do with you, of course, for nobody knows
that you are here. But I thought I'd let you know about it, in case you
are surprised by the sight of sharp-faced fellows looking on at our
doings."

The weather mellowed, as Lamancha had hoped, into a St Luke's summer,
and for five days Loeffler enjoyed a leisure the existence of which he
had almost forgotten. The old house, set among meadows of hill turf and
flanked by russet woods, seemed a sanctuary remote from a fevered
world. The hostess was the only woman in the party, and Mildred
Lamancha's slow, sweet, drawling voice gave the appropriate key of
peace. Geraldine, the Prime Minister, shot all day with Stannix, while
Lamancha and his guest, mounted on hill ponies, quartered the uplands,
and Loeffler's face took on a wholesome colour from wind and sun. At
night they talked, and their talk ranged far. In such company Loeffler
felt at his ease, and threw off much of his habit of caution. Through
his dogged matter-of-factness there came glimpses of enthusiasms and
dreams. Geraldine, who of the three ministers knew him least well, was
moved to confide to his host that he had got a new notion of the little
man.

On the evening before they were due to leave for London there was a
small party. "Old Jocelyn is coming to dine," Lamancha told Loeffler;
"asked himself and I didn't like to refuse. He used to be our
Ambassador at Vienna, and he speaks good German--not the limping affair
of the rest of us. You'll like the old fellow. He's uncommonly
knowledgeable, and he'll be thrilled to meet you. There's no more need
for secrecy, for to-morrow evening the papers will announce your
arrival. I hope you have had a pleasant time here. It has been a very
educative time for all of us, especially for the P.M. I don't mind
telling you that I have been rather anxious about him. He sees a little
too much of Creevey and his lot."

"I have learned much," Loeffler replied with his slow smile, "and I
have seen many beautiful things. Also my English has improved, is it
not so?"

To his wife later in the day Lamancha brought a message.

"Jocelyn wants to know if he can bring a friend to dinner to-night. He
has a man staying with him, an American doctor. Upcott's the name.
Trust Jocelyn to have an assortment of odd friends. He collects them up
and down the world like rare postage stamps. I suppose it's all right,
for Jocelyn thinks it's only a country dinner-party. Anyhow, it's too
late to matter. Things have gone well so far, I think."

"I have loved it," said Lady Lamancha. "I have completely lost my heart
to the Chancellor. He is like one of the old wise collie dogs at
Leriot. I don't suppose he realised he was being so closely looked
after. He has been, you know. Kit spoke to me about it. He asked what
dark secret we were hiding. The police have been simply squatting round
the place. You didn't notice it perhaps, for you were out most of the
day, but there's always been somebody hanging about each of the gates.
And then there's the absurd old Scotsman that Adam Melfort insisted on
our having in the house. I believe he is the life and soul of the
housekeeper's room, but he is an odd figure for a servant. I am sure
that he is wearing his best Sunday blacks."

Lamancha laughed.

"Amos is a wonderful graven image, but you couldn't get a better
watch-dog. There's a new ghost haunting the west corridor, the wraith
of an elder of the kirk. . . . By the way, you remember that Adam
himself is coming to-night. He'll arrive late, and will have dined
already."

Sir Francis Jocelyn was a stately old gentleman verging upon eighty
whose gout made him lean heavily upon two sticks. He was a little
surprised at finding himself in what looked like a committee of the
Cabinet, and his eyes opened wide when he was presented to Loeffler.
Retirement from the world had not dimmed his interest in the world's
affairs. Mr Upcott, the American doctor, proved to be a youngish man
with a cheerful clean-shaven face and a mop of fair hair brushed back
from his forehead. He spoke almost with an English intonation, for it
seemed that he was a Bostonian, though now a professor at Baltimore.
Jocelyn introduced him with a short sketch of his attainments, and he
gravely informed each member of the party that he was pleased to meet
them.

On a side table in the hall stood the materials for making cocktails.

"I told Upcott that he would find here what he was accustomed to," said
Jocelyn. "Better let him mix the drinks. He has already turned my
butler into an artist."

Mr Upcott announced his willingness, and set to work at the side table
with a professional air. Lamancha, who detested cocktails, drank
sherry, but the others accepted an agreeable mixture which appeared to
be known as a "Maryland side-car." Loeffler raised his glass to the
health of the compounder.

It was a pleasant meal. Jocelyn was too skilled a talker to steer near
the shoals of current politics. His memory dallied with old days in
pre-war Vienna, and Geraldine, who had many continental friendships,
kept up the ball of reminiscence. It was a world which Loeffler knew
only by hearsay, but he was eager in his questions, and the Maryland
side-car seemed to have thawed his gentle taciturnity. But the success
of the dinner was Mr Upcott, who showed that medical science had not
monopolised his interests. He seemed to know everybody and to have been
everywhere in the civilised world. He was enlightening in his comments
on his own land, and he had the lovable solemnity on public questions
which characterises one type of young American. But he had also a
wealth of idiomatic slang and curious metaphors which introduced an
agreeable spice of comedy. He had often to be explained to Loeffler,
generally by Jocelyn, who professed to specialise in American idioms,
and the explanations produced that rare thing in the Chancellor, hearty
laughter.

After dinner Jocelyn, Lamancha, Stannix and Geraldine made a four at
bridge. Loeffler and Mr Upcott did not play, and sat with Lady Lamancha
round the library hearth, for the autumn frosts had begun. Their talk
was desultory, for the Chancellor had relapsed into his customary
silence, and sat with his eyes on the fire, as if he were seeing
pictures in the flames. Mr Upcott was as sparkling as before, and
entertained his hostess with an account of the last St Cecilia's ball
at Charleston which he had attended, and which he said was the ultimate
outpost of the well-born South against a vulgar world. He was very
amusing, and the third in the group was forgotten.

Suddenly Loeffler raised himself from his chair.

"I think if you will permit me, gracious lady," he said, "I will go to
bed. I am feeling weary, and I have much to do to-morrow."

He spoke in a small, strained voice, and his face was very white. Lady
Lamancha was full of kindly anxiety.

"No. I am quite well," he said. "Only tired. Pray do not disturb
yourself. I will have a long sleep."

He swayed a little as he passed the bridge-table.

"What! Off already!" Lamancha cried. "Well, perhaps it's wise."

Loeffler shook hands ceremoniously with Jocelyn and left the room.
Lamancha rose and came over to the fire.

"Anything wrong, Mildred? Can his food have upset him? He had the
complexion of a deerstalker when he came down to dinner. Perhaps it was
your cocktail, Mr Upcott!"

The young American looked grave.

"He certainly doesn't look good. Say, Lord Lamancha, hadn't I better go
up to him? It's my job, after all. We oughtn't to take chances with so
big a man."

"That's a good idea. It would ease my mind. I'll show you his room."

He said something to the bridge-players, and led the young doctor up
the main staircase to where the west corridor turned off from the upper
hall. In the dim light at the end of it stood the rock-like figure of
Andrew Amos. Lamancha knocked at the door of Loeffler's bedroom, and
opened it for Mr Upcott to enter. "You'll find your way down again all
right," he said. As he turned away he noticed that Amos was no longer
in the corridor.

Loeffler had taken off his coat and waistcoat and was lying on his bed.
He opened his eyes languidly as the young doctor entered, and made an
effort to sit up.

"You stay still, Excellency," said Mr Upcott. "Lord Lamancha thought I
might as well have a look at you, for I'm a doctor by profession. Just
keep as you are."

He felt his patient's pulse, looked at his tongue, and listened to the
beating of his heart.

"Nothing much the matter, Excellency," he said. "But I'm going to fix
you so that you'll have a good night and wake in the morning as jolly
as a bird. We doctors don't work with coarse medicines now. Just a
prick of a needle and a spot of the right kind of dope. Give me your
arm."

Mr Upcott took from the pocket of his dinner jacket a small flat
leather case, from which he selected a tiny syringe. He did not fill
it, so it appeared that it had been already prepared. He was about to
take Loeffler's arm, when suddenly his right hand was seized from
behind and the syringe was forced from his grasp.

Mr Upcott turned to find that two men had entered from the adjacent
sitting-room. One was the grotesque figure in black that he had noticed
in the corridor. The other was a tallish man in tweeds.

"No," said the latter. "You do nothing more, Mr Upcott."

He balanced the syringe in his palm, and then picked up the leather
case from the bed.

"You have made your preparations well," he said. "One touch of this and
your job would have been done. It's the new stuff, hamaline, isn't it?
Doesn't kill, but atrophies the mind and drugs the body for a week or
two. I congratulate you on your ingenuity."

Mr Upcott had been transformed from the bland doctor into something
alert and formidable. He looked as if he were going to strike, but
there was that in the air of the two men that made him think better of
it.

The man who had spoken handed him back his case.

"I take it there's nothing much wrong with Herr Loeffler," he said.
"Something in your cocktail, perhaps. They tell me you are very adroit
at that game. . . . You will go quietly downstairs and tell Lord
Lamancha that everything is well. Then you will go home with Sir
Francis Jocelyn. You had better leave England to-morrow or there may be
trouble. Do you understand me?"

Mr Upcott lifted the bedside lamp and looked at the other's face. Then
he put it down and shrugged his shoulders. He laughed and his laugh was
not pleasant.

"I've got you now," he said. "Colonel Melfort, isn't it? One of us too,
by God! Well, we shan't forget this evening."


Adam appeared in the library about eleven o'clock after Jocelyn and his
friend had departed.

"Just arrived," he explained. He glanced at the array of glasses around
the siphons and decanters. "Hullo, have you had a party?" he said.
"Where is the great man?"

"Gone to bed," said Lamancha. "He wasn't feeling his best, but a man
that old Jocelyn brought to dinner, a young American doctor, had a look
at him and reported him all right. Amusing chap, that doctor. Mildred
went upstairs whooping at some jape of his on the doorstep. I must get
her to tell it me in the morning."



IV

After breakfast next day Adam sat in Loeffler's sitting-room. The
Chancellor had breakfasted in bed, but had sent word to his host that
he was wholly recovered. Lamancha had interviewed him, and then Adam
had been sent for.

"I have to thank you, Colonel Melfort, for a great service," Loeffler
said in his shy, deprecating voice. "How great a service I do not know,
but I can guess. That man last night--he would have drugged me? Would
the drug have killed?"

Adam shook his head.

"I do not think so--from what I know of hamaline. But it would have
made you useless in the Conference. The Iron Hands are artists, and do
not take stronger measures than the case requires."

"What do you know of the Iron Hands?"

"A good deal. I am by way of being one of their inner brotherhood--the
extremists who stick at nothing. You cannot defeat such people unless
you are of them. For three weeks, Excellency, you have been leading a
dangerous life, but now for a little you are safe. Since you are now
officially in England you are in the keeping of the English police. As
a matter of fact, you have been in their charge for the last five days,
but your anonymity made it difficult to take full precautions."

Loeffler had been staring at him, and suddenly recognition awoke in his
eyes.

"You were the man on the boat," he said, "the man who saved me from
being flung into the sea? Am I right?"

"I was the man. Do not blame the Iron Hands for that. That was the work
of another branch of your enemies who are clumsier and more desperate."

Loeffler's puzzled face broke into a smile.

"It is a world of marvels," he said. "I did not think when we sat at
dinner in August in Berlin that at our next meeting you would save my
life. You have been my good angel."

"We met in between," said Adam. "Consider, Excellency, search your
memory. What of the Freiburg chemist at Andersbach and the
_Wandervgel_?"

Loeffler sprang to his feet.

"Then you were the man at Rottenburg that plucked me out of the
Ganzstrasse business? Him I recognised. God in Heaven, who and what are
you? Can you change your person like a wizard? You are
miraculous--beyond belief. I can observe and my memory is good, but you
have vanquished me utterly."

"I served a long apprenticeship to the job," said Adam. "You think we
first met at dinner with Lord Lamancha in London eighteen months ago.
But you are wrong. We met before that."

"It cannot be."

"It is true. Do you remember a day in February '18 at Bodenheim? You
were then Major Loeffler, a convalescent recovering from wounds. You
had before you for examination a neutral commercial agent, a Dane
called Randers, with whose doings you were not altogether satisfied.
You and your colleagues--you especially--gave Randers a pretty hot
time. More than once you nearly broke through his defences. Had you
succeeded Randers would have died, and I think that you yourself would
not be alive this morning."

Loeffler passed his hand over his eyes.

"It comes back to me. A middle-aged man with a high colour and a blond
moustache. Rather a vulgar fellow? I suspected him, but I had not
enough to act upon. But I was right, you say?"

"You were right. I was a British officer, and for three years of the
war I was behind your front. Thank God I was able to do your country a
fair amount of harm."

"And now you would atone for it by doing my country much good. No, not
atone. There was no need of atonement, for you were doing your rightful
duty. But you are chivalrous, and now you would do an old enemy a
kindness."

"May I put it differently? I want to help to build up the world. You
are at the moment the chief builder, so my services are at your
disposal. I cannot direct--I cannot even carry a hod--but I may be able
to keep wreckers away."

"I thank you." Loeffler spoke gravely and held out his hand. He seemed
to be under the influence either of some emotion or some sudden
thought, for he walked to the window and stood there in silence looking
out at the morning landscape.

"Come here," he said, and Adam took his place beside him.

The view was over the terraced garden to the park, which rose to a low
wooded ridge. The early hours had been clear and sparkling with frost,
but now banks of vapour were drifting athwart the landscape. The garden
was plain in every detail, with its urns and parapets and statues, its
rose-beds and grass-plots drenched in dew. But the park was dim, and
the trees were wreathed in mist, and the ridge was only a shadow. But,
far beyond, some trick of light revealed a distant swell of moorland,
dark as a sapphire against the pale sky.

"Look!" said Loeffler. "That is how I see the world. The foreground is
plain--and the horizon--but the middle distance is veiled. So it is
with me. I see the next stage very clear, but all beyond that is hidden
from me. But I see also the horizon to which I would move. . . . Let us
sit down, Colonel Melfort, and talk a little. I can lay open my heart
to my preserver. You are a friend of Germany, but still more you are a
friend of the world. I, likewise--for Germany cannot be safe until the
world is safe. Nor, I would add, can the world be safe until Germany is
at peace. These things are a circle, which the pessimist will call
vicious and the optimist virtuous."

He held his head low, and dropped his clasped hands between his knees,
looking, thought Adam, much as Ulysses Grant might have looked at some
difficult hour of the Wilderness Campaign.

"This Conference," he said, "I now think that it will succeed. But its
success will only carry us a little way. We shall have a breathing
space, no more--not yet a place to rest. After it there will come for
Germany the slow business of waiting and toiling and suffering. She
will face it, I think, and she will go through with it, but she must
have some streak of light on her horizon. If that light is denied, she
will despair and sink into the slough of anarchy, from which it will be
hard to raise her. Then she will suffer most, but all the world will
suffer much, and all our dreams of peace will have gone. We shall be
back in the old cruel world--crueller than before, because there will
be deeper poverty and no hope. Do you understand me, Colonel Melfort?"

Adam nodded. "You look to the Conference to give you the streak of
light?"

"Assuredly. Your country will not deny it us. Nor will America, I
think. Nor France, if she is wisely handled. Such a promise of an
ultimate dawn will be much. After that my task, if God permits me, is
to keep my people steady. That will not be easy, for there are many who
are impatient and would cut the knot. Some of them--your friends of the
past week--think that my life is the barrier to prosperity, and that
with me out of the way the road will be clear. They are foolish, for I
matter little. I am only the housemaid sweeping the floor and opening
the windows. If I were gone the dust would be thicker, for I do not
make dust. But most of my opponents are not violent or criminal, but
they are obstinate and short-sighted. They cannot endure to wait.
Therefore they will try other ways, and unless they are held there will
be disaster."

Adam looked at Loeffler as he sat with his head poked forward, his
voice grave and level, and his eyes abstracted as if in an inward
vision.

"I think you can hold your people," he said.

"I think I can," was the answer. "But on one condition only--that the
streak of light is not allowed to die out of their sky."

He got to his feet and stood in front of the fire.

"I will be wholly candid with you, Colonel Melfort. It is your right,
since you have made yourself my friend. . . . That streak of light does
not depend upon Germany, but upon the world outside. It does not
altogether depend upon the Governments. They may be difficult at times,
but I think they will be reasonable, for after all they understand
their own interest. As for the press it does not greatly matter, since
the press is not an independent power. But there is a great and potent
world which the Governments do not control. That is the world of
finance, the men who guide the ebb and flow of money. With them rests
the decision whether they will make that river a beneficent flood to
quicken life, or a dead glacier which freezes wherever it moves, or a
torrent of burning lava to submerge and destroy. The men who control
that river have the ultimate word. Now most of them mean well, but they
do not see far, and they are not very clever; therefore they are at the
bidding of any man who is long-sighted and a master of strategy. Such a
man has the future of the world--the immediate future--in his hands."

"Is there such a man?" Adam asked.

"I am coming to believe that there is. And I think you know him. He can
command money, and he can dictate its use, for he is clever--no, not
clever--he has genius, a persuasive genius. If he wished, he could
move--what? Not the State treasuries, which are difficult things. Those
responsible for them have to give strict account and carry with them in
their policy millions of uninstructed voters. No, he could move the
private hoards of which the world is full, and apply them wisely to
sowing here and irrigating there in the certainty of a rich harvest.
The Rothschilds, you remember, made their great fortunes by helping a
bankrupt Europe through the Napoleonic wars, by moving money to the
point where it was needed. Such a man as I speak of could do more
to-day, for he could move money not to pay bills for war material and
war damages but to nurse throughout the globe the new life which is
waiting to break forth. The world is richer to-day than it has ever
been, but the communications are choked, so that one half of it is
water-logged and the other half a parched desert."

"The man you speak of is not doing what you want?"

Loeffler shook his head.

"He is moving money but capriciously, without any wise purpose. I do
not think that he cares greatly for wealth, but he is scornfully
amassing it--nothing more. He has persuaded finance to trust him--in
America, in France, to some extent in Britain--and the trust is not
misplaced, for he will earn for it big dividends. He provides loans for
many lands but at too high a price, for he exacts in return a control
over certain things which in no land should be under foreign control.
He has his pound of flesh, and the flesh is taken from vital parts of
the body. Therefore his loans do not benefit. They tide over a
momentary difficulty, but in the end they cripple recovery--and they
may kill it."

"That is not all," he went on. "They foster a bitter nationalism which
I would fain see die. A people is not grateful when it sees its
choicest possessions go in payment for this foreign help. Such a man
may create violent antagonisms--dangerous for himself, more dangerous
for the world."

"Let's get down to names," said Adam. "There would be more hope for
things if Creevey were out of the way?"

"Yes," said Loeffler. "And also No. You open your eyes, but I will tell
you what I mean. Mr Creevey has genius beyond question, but it is a
misdirected genius. Misdirected, not in its essence malevolent. As I
read him he is still immature. You may laugh, but I am very serious. He
has immense abilities, but he uses them like a clever child. His fault
is an arrogance of intellect. He is so wrapped up in the use of a
superb intelligence that he does not permit himself to look to ultimate
things. He is, if you please, not awakened. Now there is so little
genius in the world that I cannot wish for its disappearance, even if
it stands in my way. Mr Creevey is no common man; he is no mere
money-spinner. He is no doubt very rich, but I do not think that he
pays much heed to his private bank account. He seeks nobler game--the
satisfaction to be won from the use of a great mind. But it is not the
noblest, and in its results it may be disastrous. He is at present a
dark angel in the world, but could his power be orientated otherwise he
might be an angel of light."

"Why do you tell me this?" Adam asked. "I cannot help you."

Loeffler smiled.

"I tell it you because you are my friend, and I want my friend to
understand me."

There was a knock at the door and Lamancha entered.

"The cars will be ready in half an hour," he said. "You're coming with
us, Adam, aren't you?"

"If I may. I'm by way of dining with Falconet to-night."



V

Adam and Falconet dined in the latter's rooms in St James's Street.
Another man joined them after dinner, whose name was Blakiston, an
Englishman who had been for thirty years in New York and was Falconet's
partner in many enterprises. He was small, grizzled and clean-shaven,
and when he spoke he had the habit of dangling tortoiseshell eyeglasses
at the end of a black ribbon. He looked the conventional banker, and he
had a note-book which was seldom out of his hand.

He gave a list of businesses which sounded like an extract from the
speech of the chairman of an investment company.

"Which of them are going to raise questions in the next few months?"
Falconet asked.

Blakiston considered. There was a group of wood-pulp propositions in
East Prussia which might be difficult--an attempt to combine several
had been blocked by the local boards. An Italian artificial silk
concern was at loggerheads with the Government over certain labour
questions. Then there were the michelite mines in Rhodesia--something
had to be done there in the way of a working agreement with the Swedish
and American interests. The financial arrangements, too, with Leigh and
O'Malley of New York were due for revision, for some of that group were
kicking about the German municipalities loan. Blakiston had a list of
other activities--a coffee combine in Brazil, the vast estates of a
Westphalian syndicate in the Argentine, the proposed match monopoly in
Turkey, and a new harbour on the Adriatic.

"All of them boiling up to be nasty, you think?" Falconet asked. "And
with a little trouble you reckon you could make them boil faster?"

Blakiston did not consult his note-book.

"Sure," he said, smiling. "Up to a point, that is. Our interests are so
widely scattered that we can bring some kind of pressure to bear in
most parts of the globe."

"Enough to make it necessary for Mr Creevey to give the business his
personal attention? I mean, go out and look at things for himself?"

Blakiston considered.

"Yes, I think so. He won't go to Rhodesia--couldn't be spared that long
from England. But we could so fix it that he would have to visit New
York."

"Mr Melfort wants the chance of a long private talk with him, and that
can't be got in London. What do you recommend?"

"Why not an Atlantic crossing? We could arrange that they had adjacent
cabins."

Adam shook his head. "I'm afraid that wouldn't do. I want rather more
than Mr Creevey's company. We must set the stage a little."

Presently Blakiston had to leave for an appointment, and the two others
sat on till Big Ben tolled midnight.

"I don't quite get you," said Falconet. "You want Creevey to yourself
for a bit. What do you hope to do with him? Convert him?"

"No," said Adam. "I couldn't live with him in argument for ten minutes.
I don't talk his language. If Kit Stannix can do nothing with him it's
not likely that I should succeed."

"Agreed. Then, what do you mean to do?"

"Put myself alongside him--and keep there."

"In the hope that fate will shuffle the cards for you?"

"In the certainty," said Adam simply. "My job is sharpened to a point
now, and that point is Creevey. He is the grit in the machine, and the
grit has to be removed."

Falconet whistled.

"Pity we don't live in simpler times. Or that you were something of a
ruffian. It would be so easy to knock him on the head. . . . I don't
say you're not right. There are other kinds of appeals than argument,
and you're an impressive fellow when you get alongside a man. You say
you want to set the stage? How d'you mean?"

"I want to isolate him--get him out of his padded life into a rougher
one. I want to put him outside all the fortifications he has built and
make him feel naked. The Arctic ice would be the place--or the
desert--but, since these are impossible, I must find a substitute."

Falconet grunted.

"I see. You want to reason with him as man to man--not as the amateur
and the big professional."

"I want to make facts reason with him."

"And you believe that they will? It's a great thing to have your grip
on predestination. Well, I daresay something could be managed.
Blakiston will have to get busy. Our job is to shepherd Mister Creevey
out of board-rooms and special trains and big hotels into the
wilderness. It might be done, for, though we are darned civilised, the
wilderness is still only across the road. Count me in. I'm going to get
a lot of quiet amusement out of this stunt. But it's a large-size job.
You're right to look solemn."

As Adam walked home along the Embankment, he stopped to lean over the
parapet and watch the river bubbling with the up-running tide. He had
shown a grave face to Falconet, and gravity was the key of his mood, a
grave expectancy. His mind ran back to the first sight of Creevey, when
he had dined with Scrope at the restaurant and Scrope had spoken
significant words about the man with the big forward-thrusting head and
the ardent eyes. He remembered his first meeting with him in Falconet's
room, and his own puzzled antagonism. Later meetings were telescoped
into one clear impression--of something formidable, infinitely
formidable, perverse and dangerous. He had no personal feeling in the
matter; he neither liked nor disliked him, but regarded him as he would
have regarded a thunderstorm or a cyclone, a perilous natural force
against which the world must be protected.

And yet--was this man only an angel of destruction? In the talk in
Berlin in August he had detected in him a fiery honesty; to one thing
he would never be false, the power of reason with which he had been so
nobly endowed. Loeffler, too, believed that if fortune were kind this
capricious disintegrating force might be harnessed for the world's
salvation. . . . Adam had one of those moments of revelation in which
he saw life narrowed to a single road moving resolutely to a goal. His
mission had been to find quality, and he had found it. His task was now
to release that quality for the service of mankind--or to clip its
wings and render it impotent for ever.

He had a passing moment of nervousness. His opponent was now not the
perversity of the world, but a single man, and that man a genius. He
mistrusted his powers, till he remembered that he was only a servant of
great allies. A servant--the humblest of servants. He was not architect
or builder, not even a labourer with a hod, but something lowlier
still, and in his lowliness was strength. As he let himself into his
rooms on the quiet Temple staircase, he was in the same mood which had
sent him to his knees years before in his prison cell. The sign he had
asked for had been given him.




_BOOK IV_




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      I


Mr Warren Creevey took his seat in the reserved compartment of the
boat-train, and, as the whistle sounded, unfolded his _Times_ and
settled down to a slightly cynical study of the foreign page. It was
his custom to travel in a modest state, with the best reservations; his
private secretary was in an adjoining carriage, and somewhere in the
train his assiduous valet; he travelled so much that he was
respectfully greeted by the railway company's servants, and could count
on the way being made smooth for him. The weather was sharp, so he wore
a heavy fur coat, which he removed in the warm compartment. As he
regarded the luxurious garment he smiled, for it reminded him of a
thought which had crossed his mind as the train was starting.

A secretary and two clerks had seen him off, bringing him papers to
sign and receiving his final instructions. This hasty visit to Italy
was a nuisance. What had caused the Brieg-Suffati people to get
suddenly at loggerheads with the authorities, when hitherto they had
pulled so well together? He had a great deal of work on his hands in
London and resented this interruption, even if it were only for a few
days. . . . Yet, as he waved a farewell to his secretary and tipped the
guard, he realised that he was not altogether displeased. Mr Creevey
was not a vain man--the lack of vanity was part of his strength--but he
could not but be conscious that he mattered a good deal in the world.
The sable-lined coat on the seat beside him was an emblem of the place
he had won.

Old General Ansell, who sat on one of his boards, had a metaphor which
he was never tired of using. It was drawn from the Western Front in the
war. He said it had been like a great pyramid with its point directed
to the enemy. Behind the lines was a vast activity--factories like
Birmingham, a network of railway lines like Crewe, camps, aviation
grounds, square miles of dumps, hospitals, research laboratories,
headquarters full of anxious staff officers. But as one went forward,
the busy area narrowed, and the resources of civilisation grew more
slender. And then at the apex of the pyramid you were back in
barbarism, a few weary human beings struggling in mire and blood to
assert the physical superiority which had been the pride of the
cave-dweller.

The General had usually applied his parable in a far-fetched way, for
he was a little sceptical of the plenary power of science and harped on
human quality. But Mr Creevey gave it a different application. He, so
to speak, inverted the pyramid. All great human activities expanded
from a single point. Their ultimate front might be as wide as the
globe, but it drew its power from the brain at the apex. His was such a
brain, and it amused him to reflect how much depended on him. He was
not the soldier in the trenches, but the directing mind in the
impressive hinterland, from which both hinterland and trenches drew
their life. . . . While the train flashed past deserted hop-fields and
pastures dim under a November sky, Mr Creevey smiled as he lit a cigar.
How far was old Ansell's world of mud and blood from the guarded ritual
of his life!

In Paris he drove to the Meurice, dined in a private room, and then,
having no work on hand, decided to pay his respects to an old friend,
the Duchesse de Rochambeau, in her flat near the Champs Elyses. The
day was Tuesday, and it was her custom to receive on Tuesday. Mr
Creevey had a vast acquaintance, which he carefully tended, for he was
a student of humanity. He had a weakness for a certain type of
aristocratic relic-worshipper, especially in France; their
sentimentality did not appeal to him, but they cherished wit, a rarity
in these days, and he liked the free play of their minds. Their
illusions were kept apart in a modish shrine, and did not, like the
illusions of democracy, taint and muddy the springs of thought. It
pleased him to share in the delicate sword-play of a world without
seriousness or passion. . . . But the Duchesse had a cold in her head,
and her _salon_ that evening was dull. There was a contentious old
gentleman who buttonholed him and discoursed of Loeffler with the
dismal platitudes of the Nationalist press. Mr Creevey left early and
retired to bed.

The long journey next day bored him. He was fond of a day journey, for
it enabled him to make up arrears of reading, and this one he had
marked out for the study of a new Swedish work on currency. But he
found the arguments of Professor Broester so ill-coordinated, that he
turned to a couple of sensational romances which he had brought from
England. These did not please him more--indeed, they exasperated him
with their pictures of a world where strange things happened at every
street-corner. Heavy-footed nonsense, he reflected; strange things
happened, but not in this mode of childish melodrama. Life was
conducted nowadays by great standardised machines, as exact and
ruthless as the processes of nature, and no casual accident could
deflect them. Adventure lay in designing, altering, regulating this
cosmic mechanism, and not in inserting a foolish spoke in the wheels.
The spoke would be as futile as a child's beating of the dome of St
Paul's to annoy the Dean.

The train was very empty. In the restaurant car that night at dinner he
sat opposite a lachrymose German who harped on the sins of France, much
as the old gentleman at the Duchesse de Rochambeau's had harped on the
misdeeds of Loeffler. He was a youngish man with fair hair who chose to
talk English. Mr Creevey, always impatient of amateur politics, did not
linger over his meal. He felt irritated, almost--a rare thing for
him--depressed, so he summoned his private secretary and bent his mind
to business. His spirits did not recover till next morning when they
ran into sunlight in the Lombard plain.

In Rome he had two days of warm blue weather which was almost
oppressive in his over-heated hotel. He had never greatly cared for the
Italian capital, and, for a man of his multitudinous acquaintance, knew
comparatively few of its citizens. He had luncheon with a few business
associates, at which the affairs of the Brieg-Suffati company were
discussed, and a long afternoon with various departments of State. He
was received with the civility to which he was accustomed, and realised
that the difficulties which had arisen would not be hard to settle. But
he found that his necessary interview with the head of the Government
must be postponed till the morrow, and he had the prospect of some
hours of idleness, unpleasing to a man who chessboarded his life
between strenuous work and strenuous play. He called at the British
Embassy, and was promptly bidden that evening to dinner.

Before dressing he sat for a little in the hall of his hotel, watching
the guests. Many were foreigners on their way home, but there was a
considerable sprinkling of Roman residents, for the hotel had a
reputation for its _apritifs_. It was rare for Mr Creevey to be in a
place where he did not know by sight many of the people. Here he saw
only two faces that he recognised. One was the lachrymose German whom
he had met in the train; he sat by himself in a corner, and seemed to
be waiting for someone, for his pale eyes scanned with expectation
every newcomer. Mr Creevey was thankful that he escaped his eye, for he
had no wish for more international politics. The other was Falconet,
who entered, cast about for a seat, thought better of it, and went out.
Falconet, of course, was to be looked for anywhere and at any time; he
was the most notorious globe-trotter of the day.

But if Mr Creevey saw few acquaintances, he was conscious that several
people looked at him, as if they recognised him. He was not vain, and
did not set this down to his celebrity, for he was not the kind of man
whose portraits filled the press. Nor was there anything sensational in
his appearance; he dressed quietly, and looked the ordinary travelling
Englishman. But he was aware that he was being covertly studied by
several men and one woman, who hastened to avert their eyes when he
looked in their direction. He was a little puzzled, for this habit
seemed to have been growing in the last few months. Wherever he went he
was aware that somebody in his neighbourhood was acutely interested in
him. He considered the matter for a minute or two and then dismissed it
from his mind. He had no time to spare for the minor inexplicables of
life.

The dinner at the Embassy passed the evening pleasantly. Falconet was
the only other guest at the meal, and Falconet was in an urbane mood
and on his best behaviour. Mr Creevey rarely asked himself whether or
not he liked a man; his criterion was whether he respected him, and he
was not disposed to underrate the American. At their first meeting he
had thought that he had discovered one with whom he could work, and,
detecting Falconet's imaginative side, had set himself to cultivate it.
But presently he had found him intractable, the type of American whose
mind had two compartments, realistic business and _schwrmerisch_
dreams, and who let the one spill into the other. But Falconet was
formidable, for he had immense wealth, and, when roused, could return
to the predatory brilliance of the grandfather who had made the
fortune. So he had tried to avoid antagonising him, and, though they
had differed often, they had never quarrelled.

To-night he found him polite and unassertive. Falconet gave no
information about his own doings, and was incurious about Creevey's. He
was full of Rome, of which he talked with the enthusiasm of a
school-marm on her first visit. He asked the ordinary questions about
Mussolini, and showed himself grossly ignorant of the machinery of the
Catholic Church. Indeed, there was a pleasant touch of the schoolboy
about him.

Mr Creevey, whose father and the Ambassador had been at school
together, did most of the talking, and did it very well. For example,
he gave an amusing account of his talk with the lachrymose German in
the train, to point an argument about the confusion in the popular mind
of Europe. He quoted several of his phrases, and one of them seemed to
impress Falconet--an odd and rather forcible metaphor. Falconet asked
to have the speaker described and Mr Creevey did his best. "I saw him
in my hotel this evening," he said, and Falconet for some reason
knitted his heavy dark brows. Mr Creevey observed this, as he observed
most things.

Falconet was anxious to know his plans for the return journey. "I'd
like to join you," he said. "Leaving to-morrow night? Not stopping off
anywhere?"

Mr Creevey answered that he was going straight through to London,
having wasted enough time already.

He was just about to take his leave when, to his surprise, Jacqueline
Warmestre appeared. He had a great admiration for Lady Warmestre, the
greater because she was one of the few women with whom he made no
progress. She had never made any secret of her dislike of him, and in
his eyes her frankness increased her charm. Her beauty was of the kind
which fascinated him most, and to-night she seemed especially lovely,
for she had been dining with some Roman friends, and her long
white-furred cloak contrasted exquisitely with her delicate colouring
and her brilliant hair. Mr Creevey felt a patriotic thrill; after all,
English women had a poise and a freshness which no other nation could
match. She had been in Italy for the vintage, staying at the country
house of some Italian connections, and was spending a night at the
Embassy on her way home. She seemed to have something to say to
Falconet, and carried him off downstairs to the Ambassador's library.

Next day Mr Creevey duly had his interview with the head of the State,
and found it satisfactory. What he did not find so satisfactory was a
telegram which awaited him at his hotel on his return. It was from the
general manager of the Brieg-Suffati, announcing that the local board
desired a meeting with Mr Creevey, and suggesting an hour the following
day. Mr Creevey almost wired consigning the local board to the devil.
But he reflected that he could not afford to antagonise them, for they
had it in their power to make infinite mischief. He remembered the
trouble he was having over his wood-pulp concern in East Prussia
because the local people had got out of hand. So he replied consenting.
It would mean leaving the main line at Arsignano, and motoring to the
works, which were situated in a little town which bore the odd name of
Grandezza. That would involve a couple of days' delay. Why could the
fools not have fixed the meeting in Milan or Turin? It was too late to
arrange that now, so he must make the best of the stupid business.

Mr Creevey left Rome that night in a bad temper and, since he was of an
equable humour, this departure from his normal condition lessened his
self-respect. He felt himself needlessly irritable, and the sport of
petty annoyances. He saw the lachrymose German in the train, and for
some reason the sight displeased him--he had come to dislike the man.
Also the Italian railway people were less careful of his comforts than
usual. His secretary was many coaches off, and his valet had
difficulties with his baggage. Twice he found strangers entering his
reserved compartment--withdrawing, to be sure, with apologies, but
looking at him with inquisitive eyes. Was he being subjected to some
ridiculous espionage? The notion was so ludicrous that it amused him,
and almost restored his good humour. It reminded him of his power. That
very morning a great man had quite humbly asked him to do certain
things as a kindness to Italy.

Falconet was on the train. He came out on the platform at Arsignano,
and wanted to hear the reason of the change in Mr Creevey's plans. "Too
bad!" he exclaimed. "I was looking forward to having a talk with you on
the road. I've got some notions I'd like to put up to you, but I'll be
in London for a week, and I'll call you up when you get back."

The board meeting at Grandezza proved, as Mr Creevey half expected, a
farce. There was nothing before the directors which could not have been
settled by correspondence. The whole affair was fussiness. But there
must be some reason for his colleagues' disquiet, and he ascertained
that, besides the labour troubles, there had been a certain pressure
from unexpected quarters and rumours of more coming. He allayed their
fears, for he was an adept at conciliation, but he was not quite easy
in his own mind. Some hostile influence was at work which he must seek
out and crush, for he was not accustomed to sit down under threats--at
any rate not till he had uncovered them and assessed their importance.

Then a telegram was handed to him. He had kept London informed of his
movements, and this was from his London office, from his most
confidential manager. It urged his return at once without an hour's
delay, for certain difficulties with New York had come to a head, and
O'Malley himself had arrived on his way to Berlin, and must be seen at
once.

This was a matter of real urgency, and he cursed the fate which had
brought him on a false errand to Grandezza. Mr Creevey was instant in
an emergency. He liked his comfort, but he was aware that the game must
be played according to its rigour. The board meeting was summarily
wound up, and he had some private talk with the general manager, in
whose competence he believed. His secretary and his servant could
travel to England by train, but he himself must fly part of the way
home, and that at once. He ought to be in Paris that evening, and in
London by ten o'clock the following morning. Could it be done?

The manager thought that it could. An aeroplane could be obtained from
Arsignano--he himself had flown several times to Paris, and the service
was to be trusted. Mr Creevey disliked travel by air, for he was
generally sick, and especially he disliked long-distance travel. He
remembered with disgust a flight from London to Vienna the year before.
But he bowed to the inevitable, and bade his servant put a few
necessaries in a small suit-case, while the manager telephoned to the
Air Company at Arsignano. The reply was that a good machine was
available and an experienced pilot. Two hours later Mr Creevey was
clambering into the aeroplane, which had landed in the sports ground of
the factory.

He settled himself down to some hours of boredom or discomfort. Chiefly
the latter, he thought, for he did not like the look of the weather. It
had become colder, and a wind from the north-east was moving up masses
of cloud over the Grandezza foothills. The wind would be behind him at
the start, for they would make a wide circuit towards the coast so as
to turn the butt-end of the Alps and follow the Rhne valley. The
first stage would probably be the worst, he reflected, as he buttoned
the collar of his fur coat round his ears. He was not interested in the
champaign spread far beneath him, and by a conscious effort of will he
switched his thoughts to certain startling theories of Professor
Broester's, expounded in the book which had bored him in the train.

The movement was so smooth that he must have dozed, for he woke to find
that they were among clouds and that it had become much colder. He
looked at his watch. By this time the sea should have been crawling
beneath them, but, when there came a gap in the brume, he saw what
seemed to be wooded hills. Then came a spell of bumping which stirred
his nausea, and then a swift flurry of snow. This was getting very
unpleasant, but things might improve when they turned into the Rhne
valley. He drank a little sherry from his flask and ate two biscuits.
He spoke to the pilot, who could not be made to hear. Then he scribbled
him a note in his indifferent Italian, and the man glanced at it,
nodded and grinned.

After that they came into more snow, with a wind behind it which made
the machine tilt and rock. Mr Creevey became very sick, so sick that he
was no longer interested in his whereabouts, or the journey, or
anything but his miserable qualms. In a stupor of discomfort the time
dragged on. The pilot was no doubt steering a compass-course, for
nothing was visible beneath them but a surging plain of cloud.

Then it seemed that they were dropping. Mr Creevey felt the wind abate
as if it were cut off by some cover on his right hand. No doubt the
flank of the mountains above Nice. Lower still they went, till they
were out of the clouds and saw the ground. The pilot exclaimed, and
examined the big compass. He said something which Mr Creevey could not
understand. Had the fellow missed the road? He seemed to be uncertain,
for he cast his eyes round him as if looking for a landmark. What Mr
Creevey saw was a valley bottom in which a stream tumbled among rocks
and trees, and on each side what looked like the rise of steep hills.

At the same moment the machine began to behave oddly, as if it were not
answering to the helm. Mr Creevey found himself pitched from side to
side, and there were strange noises coming from the engine. Then the
bumping ceased and they began to glide down at a long angle. The pilot
was about to make a landing. There was a grassy meadow making a kind of
mantelpiece in the valley and this was his objective. Mr Creevey held
his breath, for he had no experience of forced landings, and he was
relieved when the aeroplane made gentle contact with the earth, taxi-ed
for fifty yards, and came to a standstill.

The pilot climbed out of his machine and, turning a deaf ear to his
passenger's excited questions, began an elaborate inspection of his
engine. Mr Creevey also got out and stretched his cramped legs, on
which his nausea had made him a little shaky.

The pilot finished his researches, straightened himself and saluted. He
spoke excellent English.

"I am very sorry, sir. We have come out of our course, for something
has gone wrong with the compass."

"Where the devil are we?" Mr Creevey shouted.

"I cannot tell. We have come too far north and are in a valley of the
mountains. We were in luck to strike this valley, for it was very
thick. We must retrace our course. But meantime my engine must be seen
to." And he added some technical details which Mr Creevey did not
understand.

Mr Creevey was very angry.

"What an infernal muddle!" he cried. "How long will you take to get it
right? I should be in London to-morrow and now I'll be lucky if I'm in
Paris."

"An hour," said the man. "Not more, I think. Perhaps less. See, there
is an hotel above us. Perhaps your Excellency would prefer to wait
there. It will be warmer, and no doubt there will be food." He was a
youngish man, and the removal of his cap revealed fair hair brushed
back from his forehead. He had an impassive, rather sullen face.

"Then for God's sake hurry up," said Mr Creevey. He was choking with
irritation, but he put a check on his utterance, for the situation was
beyond words. A little, pink, square hotel was perched on the hillside
a few hundred yards above him, and he started out towards it. It had
become very cold and the powdery snow was beginning again.

In his thin shoes, and cumbered with his massive coat, he plodded up
through the coarse grass and scrub, till he reached a road. It was an
indifferent road, but it was just possible for wheeled traffic. There
he halted, for he heard a sound below him.

The aeroplane was rising. It left the ground, climbed steadily, and
curved round till it headed the way it had come. Then it flew steadily
down the valley.

Mr Creevey's voice died in his throat from sheer amazement. He stood
staring at the departing machine and saw the pilot turn his head and
wave his hand. . . . The thing was beyond him, but his predominant
feeling was anger, and anger with him always meant action. He gathered
up the skirts of his fur coat and ran towards the hotel door.

He pushed it open and entered. He shouted for the landlord, but there
was no answer. The place was fairly warm, and ashes were still red in
the stove. But the hotel was empty.


In the library of the Embassy Jacqueline Warmestre had much to say to
Falconet. He knew this imperious lady as one of Adam Melfort's
friends--a closer friend, he thought, than any other; but he had met
her only a few times, and had never had more than a few words with her.
He was a little surprised therefore at her cross-examination, but it
fell in with his own mood. She was anxious about Adam, and so was
he--acutely.

"I want the latest news," she said. "You can give it me, I think. Where
is Adam? In the summer we had--well, a difference of opinion--but we
did not quarrel. We are good friends and we write to each other. I will
tell you all I know. He has been acting as a kind of bodyguard for the
German Chancellor. I got that from Mildred Lamancha. But now? . . . I
am afraid for him. You see, he failed in what he was working at--other
people let him down--but he will never give up. He is trying some other
way, and it is sure to be very difficult and desperate. Can you help
me, Mr Falconet? We both love him?"

Falconet was shy with beautiful women, but as he looked at Jacqueline's
face he saw something behind the beauty. There was a fierce loyalty in
her eyes, and gallantry in the tilt of her small chin. This was an ally
about whom he need have no fear.

"I will tell you all I know," he said. "Adam is stalking Creevey."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. He was shadowing Loeffler in the early fall, and by all
accounts had a tough job of it. He put it through and got the
Chancellor safe to the London Conference. But of course that couldn't
be the end. Loeffler put him wise about the real trouble. To pull out
he has got to have certain forces on his side that just at present are
fighting against him. The biggest of them is Creevey. Well, you know
Adam. When he sees where the mischief is he makes straight for it,
though it's as big as a mountain and as tough as hell. He is out to
immobilise Creevey."

"But how?" Jacqueline's eyes were wide and perplexed.

"God knows. The old way, and maybe the right way, would have been to
knock him on the head. But that isn't allowed to-day, and Adam's a
gentle fellow, so he is trying another line. He wants to get alongside
him, and have him to himself, and he thinks that the Almighty will do
the rest. That's his philosophy, I reckon. The Almighty is on his side,
and all he has got to do is to give the Almighty a fair chance."

"But it's lunacy. He can't argue Mr Creevey round--no one can, they
say--he is the cleverest man alive."

"Adam has allowed for that. He's not trusting to his own power of
argument. He is looking to what he calls facts, by which he means the
Almighty. He wants to get Mr Creevey and himself away out of his
familiar world, and he believes that something may happen then. It
isn't sense, I know, Lady Warmestre. But it's Adam's way, and I'm not
going to say it isn't the right way. He's like an old-time prophet and
has inspirations."

"But how can he get him to himself? Mr Creevey is the busiest man going
and he is surrounded by hordes of secretaries."

Falconet grinned.

"There are ways--and means, and that's where I can help a bit. We're
shepherding Creevey out of the flock into our own little fold. We
brought him to Rome when he didn't want to come, and, please God,
before he gets back to England we're going to shepherd him to other
places where he doesn't want to go. I would have you know that I'm not
in big business for nothing, and I've got a considerable graft up and
down Europe."

Jacqueline put a hand on his arm.

"I want to know everything, Mr Falconet. Please tell me."

"I don't mind giving you the lay-out. First of all, way up in the north
there is a valley in the mountains called the Val d'Arras."

Jacqueline nodded. "I know. My father was a great mountaineer, and
preferred the Italian side of the Alps, and he used to take me with him
when I was a girl. The Val d'Arras runs up from Colavella. At the top
is the Saluzzana pass leading to the Staubthal. An easy pass, except in
bad weather."

"Right. Way up the Val d'Arras is a little summer hotel where there's
nobody at this time of year. Well, Adam's notion is to get Creevey
there. That has all been arranged, and it ought to work to plan."

"But after that?"

"After that I don't know. Adam may have his own notion, or he may be
leaving it to the Almighty. I guess he means to get him over the
Saluzzana, for my orders are to be waiting at Grunewald in the
Staubthal. If Adam has gotten Creevey into the right frame of mind I
might be able to put in my word."

Jacqueline wrinkled her brows. "It sounds the wildest nonsense. That
sort of thing isn't done nowadays. Mr Creevey will either have the law
of Adam for kidnapping, or he will get pneumonia and die. Perhaps you
want the second."

"No. Adam doesn't and Loeffler doesn't. They think Creevey is too
valuable to the world to lose, if only his head could be turned in
another direction. Still, that may be the solution the Almighty
fancies."

"Then Adam is in Italy?"

"Yep. And that is where my own private worry comes in. You see, Lady
Warmestre, Adam has just lately been wading in deepish waters. To look
after Loeffler he had to go way down into the underworld, and as a
consequence I've an idea that some of those gentry are out gunning for
him. I've seen one of them to-day, and I've heard of another. It don't
look good to me that they should be in Italy when Adam is here, and,
besides, it shows that they have a pretty correct line on his
movements. Now, if Adam is stalking Creevey, it will cramp his style if
other fellows are stalking him. I'm going right back to my hotel to
call up my man Blakiston in Milan, and put him wise to it."

Jacqueline leaned forward with her chin in her hand and looked her
companion in the face.

"I'm coming into this show, Mr Falconet," she said. "I did Adam a great
disservice, and yet all the time I was on his side, and now I'm going
to atone for it. I think his scheme is raving madness, but he is the
only great man I have ever known, and I want to help. I believe I could
be of some use with Mr Creevey. When do you plant him in the Val
d'Arras?"

"According to schedule about the evening of the day after to-morrow."

"Well, I'm going to the little pink hotel. I needn't hurry home. I have
my car here and I meant to go back by easy stages. I'll start out
to-morrow morning and with any luck I'll be in time. It's a Lancia and
can face the mountain roads. I'll bring a friend with me--Andrew Amos."

Falconet exclaimed. "The old Scotsman with the chin whiskers! He's a
crackerjack."

"He is Adam's watch-dog. Ken--my husband--adores him. I found out that
the dream of his life was to see Italy, so I brought him with me as my
courier. He doesn't know a word of any language but his own, but you
can't defeat him. He can drive a car too."

Falconet protested.

"It's no place for a lady."

"I'm not a lady. I'm a woman."

"But Adam wants to be alone with Creevey."

"We won't interfere with their privacy. . . . If Adam is in danger, as
you think he is, I'm going to plant Amos beside him, and if the good
God is going to work a miracle a woman and an old Scotsman won't be in
the way."

Jacqueline spent the night regretting her rashness. As she lay awake in
the small hours she seemed to herself only a foolish child who had
forced itself into a game where it was not wanted. She half-resolved to
ring up Falconet in the morning and cry off. Falconet would be
relieved, for he had not welcomed her intervention. In the end she fell
asleep without having come to any decision, and when she woke she
discovered that her mood had changed.

As she dressed she found it difficult to disentangle her thoughts, but
one thing was clear. She was wholly resolved on this adventure. At the
worst she could do no harm, and if Adam did not want her she could go
back. A clear recollection of the Val d'Arras came back to her. The
road was bad after Colavella, but it was possible for a car as far as
the little pink inn which she remembered well; after that there was
only the mule track across the Saluzzana. She would leave her maid and
chauffeur at Chiavagno, and Amos would drive the car; he was a
first-rate mechanic and a cautious, resourceful driver. No one would
know of the escapade but Amos and Falconet, and her hosts at the
Embassy would believe that she was starting decorously on her journey
home.

By and by her thoughts arranged themselves and she realised the
subconscious purpose which was moving her. . . . She had made her
choice with open eyes and did not regret it. She had done the right
thing for Ken and her child and all the long-descended world built up
around them. She had played for peace and had won it for them. Ken was
settling down into the life where he would be useful and happy. But for
herself? She had had a glimpse of greater things and had turned her
back on them, but they had left a void in her heart. She had chosen the
second-rate--for others and for herself, but she was paying for her
choice in an aching wistfulness. . . . She was not in love with Adam,
for love did not belong to that austere world of his, but he had come
to represent for her all the dreams and longings which made up her
religion. She felt like some fisherman of Galilee who had heard the
divine call and turned instead to his boats and nets.

Yet the cause from which she had held back others she might embrace
herself--for a little only--for one small moment of restitution.
Jacqueline had fatalism in her blood, and Falconet's talk had given her
an eery sense of some strange foreordering. She had come to Italy on a
sudden impulse, for she had felt restless at Warmestre before the
hunting began. In coming here she had thought that she was leaving
behind the world which had perplexed her, and lo and behold! it had
moved itself across the sea to meet her. This was destiny which could
not be shirked. She had always guided her life with a high hand, for no
man or woman or beast had so far made her afraid, and she had welcomed
risks as the natural spice of living. But this was different. This was
no light-hearted extravagance of youth and health, but an inexorable
summons to some mysterious duty. Jacqueline felt strangely keyed up,
but also at peace.

The mood lasted during the day while the car sped up the Tuscan coast
and through the Apennines into the Lombard plain. It was still, bright
weather, and as mild as an English June. But when Jacqueline and Amos
left Chiavagno the following morning the skies had clouded and a sharp
wind was blowing from the mountains. They stopped for lunch at
Colavella, at the mouth of the Val d'Arras, and the little town set
amid its steep woody hills bore the aspect of winter. The hotels were
mostly shuttered, the vine trellises leafless, and the Arcio, foaming
under the Roman bridge, looked like molten snow. Snow-covered peaks
showed through gaps in the hills; these were not the high mountains, so
there must have been a recent snowfall.

Their troubles began when they left Colavella. The first part of the
road, which wound among pines, had been vilely rutted by wood-cutters'
waggons. When they climbed to the higher and barer stages of the
valley, the going became worse. It was a lonely place, where few came
except mountaineers seeking an easy road to the west face of the
Pomagognon, or occasional botanists and walkers bound for the
Staubthal. Now it seemed utterly deserted, for there were no farms on
its shaly slopes. Moreover, the road was far worse than Jacqueline
remembered it. There were places where landslips had almost obliterated
it and Amos had much ado to pass. Jacqueline was puzzled. This might
have been expected in the spring after a bad winter; but it must have
been set right in the summer, and since then there had been no weather
to account for the damage. It almost looked as if it had been wrecked
by the hand of man.

They made slow progress, and presently ran into snow-showers which
blotted out the environs. In one of these Amos violently put on his
brakes. Ahead of them was what had once been a wooden bridge over the
deep-cut gorge of a winter torrent. It had been destroyed, and the road
came to an end at a brink of raw red earth and a forty-foot drop.

Amos hove himself out of the car and examined the broken timbers of the
bridge.

"Queer!" he observed. "This brig has been cut down wi' an aixe, and
that no mony hours back."

The sense of fatality had been weighing all day upon Jacqueline,
intensified by the lowering sky, the cold, and the frowning hills. She
had been like a child feeling its way into a dark corridor where
fearsome things might lurk. But the sight of the broken bridge
comforted her. Adam had staged the business well.

"Back the car into the trees," she told Amos. "We can't be far off. We
must walk the rest of the road."

Amos, laden with baggage, including some provisions which Jacqueline in
a moment of forethought had added to the equipment, led the way down
the side of the ravine, across a trickle of water, and up the farther
bank to where the road began again. As they reached it, the snow
ceased, and there came a long rift in the mist. It revealed a small
square hotel about a mile ahead. In half an hour the dark would have
fallen.


Shortly after noon on that same day Adam Melfort sat in a little
restaurant near the aerodrome at Arsignano. He must snatch a meal, for
he had much to do that afternoon. So far all had gone according to
plan. The aeroplane which Creevey had ordered by telephone had just
started for Grandezza. It had been a delicate business, depending on
many minute arrangements, but, with the help of Blakiston's
organisation and his own network of queer contacts, it seemed to have
so far succeeded. There was only one plane at the moment in the
aerodrome suitable for a long-distance journey, and one pilot who could
be selected--it had taken some doing to arrange that. This pilot, a
veteran of the Alpini, had had dealings with Adam before, and had been
brought into the conspiracy. His fidelity was beyond question, and his
part was simple. He was to have a breakdown in the Val d'Arras and
leave Creevey at the inn, while he flew back for certain repairs; he
would lie low for such time as was necessary to complete the journey to
England and back, and then present himself at the aerodrome in the
usual course of business. Creevey had paid the fare before leaving.
That afternoon Adam proposed to go by car to the Val Saluzzana, and
cross the intervening ridge to the Val d'Arras by a col which he knew
of. Creevey would be at the little inn in the care of a friendly
innkeeper, an old acquaintance of his, and some time in the late
evening Adam would join him, arriving casually as if on a walking tour.
There would be a moon that night, though it might be obscured by the
weather, but he knew the col well and had no fears for his journey.
Then he would have Creevey to himself. The man would be in a fever to
get home, and, when no aeroplane appeared, and the alternative was to
tramp the long road back down the valley, Adam would persuade him to
cross the Saluzzana with him to the Staubthal, from which return to
England would be simple. Somewhere and at some time, at the inn or
during the crossing of the pass, he hoped to bring him to another mind.
He did not attempt to forecast the method of conversion--in that task
he felt himself like a boy with a sling before a fortress--but he
believed that behind him destiny might range great artillery.

The restaurant was a dim little place and at that hour almost deserted.
Two waiters and an elderly man of the shopkeeper type were the only
occupants when Adam sat down. His meal had been brought him, and he ate
it greedily, for he had had no food that day save a cup of coffee. . . .

Suddenly, as he lifted his eyes from his plate, he saw that two men had
taken their seats at the other end of the room. They still wore their
ulsters, and seemed to have entered merely for a glass of wine. The one
with his back to him had thick dark hair, and something in the shape of
his head seemed familiar. About the one who faced him there could be no
mistake. He saw a big man with a small bullet head on a strong neck,
and a flat face as hard as hammered steel. He knew him for that von
Hilderling whom he had last seen in the upper room of a shabby
eating-house in a Rhineland slum.

The two men were talking low to each other and did not look his way.
Then the one with his back to him rose and came towards him. He
recognized the trim figure, the fine oval face, and the deep mad eyes
of La Cecilia.

Cecilia smiled and took a chair beside him, and his smile was not
pleasant.

"Well met, Colonel Melfort," he said. "May I have the honour of a word
with you?" The Baron von Hilderling had poured himself out a glass of
wine, and seemed to be absorbed in the contents of a small note-book.

"It would appear that we are on the same errand," Cecilia said. "You
have something to say to Mr Warren Creevey, I understand. So also have
we. My instructions are to order you to drop out. We will deal with the
rest of the business ourselves."

"I wonder what you are talking about," said Adam.

"Oh no, you don't. You know very well. You have a grudge against Mr
Creevey, for which we commend you, for we share it. You have been
stalking him for some days and are very ingeniously manoeuvring him
into a position where you can have him to yourself. I won't ask what
you propose to do with him, but I can guess. We know what we propose.
We have been following his trail--and yours--for it is easy to stalk a
stalker, and we have taken over your arrangements, of which we approve.
This evening Mr Creevey will find himself in an empty inn in a remote
Alpine valley. There will be no one in the inn--that we have seen to.
The inn-keeper has gone to see a sick father in Turin, and will not
return for a while, and the two servants have been dismissed on
holiday. The plane which takes Mr Creevey there will proceed by the
ordinary route to Paris, but will have an unfortunate accident on the
coast, in which the world will regret to learn that Mr Creevey has
perished. Meantime, up in the Val d'Arras we shall deal with him at our
discretion. The pilot is not the man you selected, but one of
ourselves--that is the only serious change we have made in your
otherwise admirable arrangements."

Adam had learned to wear an impassive face in any crisis, but his brain
was working busily. "I see," he said. "Will you have a drink? I would
like to hear more of your plans."

"I'm afraid I have no time," said Cecilia. "I came only to bring you
the thanks of our brotherhood for what you have done. . . . Also to say
one little thing. In this matter you have unconsciously been working
with us, and we approve. But there was a certain incident some weeks
ago in an English country house when you opposed us, and frustrated an
important policy. That we do not forget--or forgive. You may have had
reasons to justify you--that we do not yet know. But I bring you this
message from Gratias. According to our laws you will be judged for that
act--and if necessary you will be punished. You are one of us, and
cannot escape us, though you took the wings of a bird and flew into the
uttermost parts of the earth."

Adam smiled. "I don't quite follow you, but you have the same old
rhetorical tricks, my dear Cecilia. Well, you know where to find me."

The full mad eyes regarded him unwinkingly.

"We shall always know where to find you. Meantime you will please to go
home--at once. There is a train this evening. You understand. _Auf
wiedersehen_, my friend."

Cecilia went back to his companion, and a minute later the two left the
restaurant.

Adam finished his meal and drank a cup of coffee, while he made certain
calculations on the back of an envelope. His plans still held, but now
there had entered into them an element of desperate haste. He felt
curiously at ease. The game was out of his hands, for destiny had taken
hold of it.




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY      II


Mr Creevey looked at the dying ashes in the stove, and, though he was
warm with walking and the weight of his fur coat, he shivered. He
opened the door of the _salle--manger_, and saw that the table was
bare and the chairs stacked in a corner. Several times he shouted, and
his voice echoed eerily in an empty house.

The thing was utterly beyond his comprehension. The breakdown of an
aeroplane he could understand, but how in Heaven's name could the pilot
have blundered so far out of his course? And why without a word had he
righted his machine and flown away? He was accustomed to an orderly
world where all things were explicable, but this folly was beyond
explanation. Unreason always exasperated him, and for a little his
anger blanketed all other thoughts. Some fool would be made to pay
heavily for this. It was a blunder--it could only be a blunder--he
refused to admit that there could be any purpose behind it. To whose
interest could it be to play so infantile a trick on him?

But the chill of the place and the silence cooled his temper. He began
to sum up his situation. He was marooned in an empty inn in a remote
valley, and he had not the dimmest notion of his whereabouts. He had no
food except the remains of a little packet of biscuits and half a flask
of sherry. There was no fire, and probably no bed--the place was empty
as a shell. But it was less the immediate prospect that perplexed him
than the next step. How was he to get out of this hole? The aeroplane
might return for him; or he might make his way down the valley to some
place where he could hire a conveyance; he remembered a little town
many miles back of which he had had a glimpse through the fog. But he
was not dressed for walking, with his modish clothes and his thin
shoes, and anyhow he had never been much of a pedestrian. With a
feeling which was almost panic he realised that he had been pitchforked
out of civilisation into a barbaric world, and that he was ill-adapted
to cope with barbarism. With all his power and brains the commonest
day-labourer was better fitted for this situation than he.

He forced himself to be calm, for he had a great gift of self-command.
But he was desperately uneasy, for the mystery tormented him. . . .
Clearly he must spend the night here, for nothing could be done till
the morning. The aeroplane might return--must return--that was his best
hope. He liked the comforts of life, but he was man enough to forgo
them if need be; the prospect of a miserable night dismayed him less
than the intolerable inexplicableness of the whole situation. . . . And
something more weighed on him. He was not a nervous or a hypersensitive
man, but there was that in this accursed place which sent a chill to
his heart. Its loneliness weighed on him like a pall, for it was not
the solitude of wild nature, but of a deserted human habitation.
Deserted, and why? Could there be some malignant purpose somewhere?

He had left the door open, and he noticed that the twilight had begun.
He went out and looked at the dismal scene. The valley was perhaps a
mile wide, filled with coarse grass and big boulders, and with the
narrow gorge of a stream in the centre. He could hear the water
churning among its pot-holes, but for the rest there was deep silence.
There was a sprinkling of snow on the ground, but the snow-scurries had
ceased, as had the wind. Across the valley he saw the steep rise of the
mountains--raw scars of winter torrents, cliffs of shale with stunted
pines perched insecurely on their face. There was a little square
mantelpiece of gravel before the door, and a number of green wooden
seats from which summer visitors no doubt admired the prospect, and
little iron tables where they had their meals. This sight seemed to put
the last edge on his sense of desolation. He looked down the valley
where the road, rough as a river channel, was presently lost in mist.

Then suddenly out of the mist came two figures. In a moment his mood
changed. This infernal desert had after all its inhabitants. He
hastened towards them, and saw that one was a short, square man heavily
laden with baggage, and the other a woman. Peasants no doubt; perhaps
the people of the inn returning.

He halted and stared. The man was an odd figure in a heavy chauffeur's
coat. But the woman he had seen before. She was wearing a tweed ulster
with a collar of fur, and her light walk was not that of a peasant.

A minute later he had recognised her as Jacqueline Warmestre. He forgot
all his dismal vaticinations, for he had now made contact with his old
world.

She was the first to speak.

"Mr Creevey! I didn't expect to meet you again so soon. Where have you
come from, and what are you doing here?"

He felt at ease, indeed, he was pleasurably excited. The appearance of
Jacqueline had taken all the unpleasantness out of the situation. It
was less of a mischance now than an adventure.

"A ridiculous accident," he explained, and briskly and humorously he
described his recent doings. "The half-wit of a pilot left me--God know
whether he means to return--and here am I stuck like Robinson Crusoe."
He felt obliged to speak lightly, for he knew that Jacqueline was not
apt to make much of the rubs of life.

"What atrocious bad luck!" she cried. "Well, we are companions in
misfortune. I was motoring home and took a fancy to spend a night in
this place. I used to come here with my father ten years ago. But my
Lancia broke down some way back, and we've had to hump our swag and
foot it. My ankles are aching from this terrible road."

"A car!" He remembered his urgent business in London. "Can't we get it
going? I was flying back because of cables from home."

"To-morrow morning we'll have a look at it and see what can be done.
Meantime I want food and fire. I'm rather cold and perfectly ravenous."

"But the hotel is empty--deserted."

Jacqueline stopped short. "Is there nobody staying there?" she asked.
She had expected to hear of Adam.

"No guests, no innkeeper, no servants. Silent as the grave!"

She was puzzled. This was not quite the scene she had gathered from
Falconet that Adam meant to stage.

"That's odd. It used to be the snuggest little place. Antonio Menardi
the landlord was a great friend of mine, and his wife made the most
wonderful omelets. Do you mean to say that there's not a soul there? Is
it shut up? It used to be open all winter, for people came for the
bouquetin shooting?"

"It isn't shut up, for the door is open. But it is empty, though it
can't have been empty long. Here we are, so you can see for yourself."

Amos dropped his packs on the floor of the little hall, while
Jacqueline sat herself on a stool and proceeded to remove gravel from
her shoes. "Go and forage, Andrew," she said. "You must find a lamp. It
will be dark in half an hour."

Amos's heavy step could be heard pounding through the rooms and
penetrating to the back regions. Presently he returned to report,
carrying a lit paraffin lamp.

"There's lamps," he said, "and plenty o' wud, so we can hae a fire.
There's bedding in some of the rooms, but no muckle. Otherwise it's
like the bit in the auld sang, 'Neither man's meat, nor dowgs' meat,
nor a place to sit doun.'"

Jacqueline laughed merrily. Her spirits were beginning to rise. No
doubt Adam had a plan of his own, and he must soon arrive.

"Then thank Heaven we brought some food," she said. "Andrew, get the
stove going, please, and prepare some kind of supper.' We are orphans
of the storm, Mr Creevey, and must camp here and make the best of it. I
hope you are grateful, for if I hadn't turned up you would have
starved."

Soon a roaring stove and three lamps gave an air of comfort to the
bleak little hall. Amos fetched a table from the salle--manger, and
set out on it a variety of cold food.

"Wait on," he said, "and I'll boil ye eggs. I've fund some in a press
in the back-kitchen. I'm nae hand at coffee, but I'll get ye a cup o'
tea."

Mr Creevey made his toilet in icy water, and borrowed a comb from
Amos's pack. At supper he was a brisk companion, for he was beginning
to see merit in this adventure. Somehow, by plane or by car, he would
get off next morning, and, though the delay was a nuisance, it was not
disastrous. His position was too solidly established for petty
set-backs. Meantime he had the luck to have as companion one of the
most beautiful women in England, one who had always piqued him by her
undisguised aversion. He was not accustomed to such treatment from
women, and it did his reputation no good, for Lady Warmestre, though
she concerned herself little with the ordinary social game, had a
supreme distinction of her own and a host of admirers. To-night she had
been very gracious to him and had treated him like a playfellow and an
ally. Mr Creevey felt a slight quickening of the blood. This was a real
adventure.

So at supper he exerted himself to be both discreet and agreeable. He
spoke of common friends, of the humours of certain negotiations in
which he had been recently engaged, of politics high and low. He spoke
of Lord Warmestre. "Cincinnatus, they tell me, has gone back to the
plough," he said. "I am rather glad of it. Publicists and politicians
are as common as blackberries, but we have too few capable landowners.
You approved, I think?"

"Yes, I approved," Jacqueline answered. She had lost her vivacity and
her attention wandered. She had an odd air of expectancy, too, and
seemed to be listening for something.

After supper Mr Creevey lit a cigar. The meal had been satisfying, and
Amos's strong tea had not poisoned but fortified him. Jacqueline was
rather silent, but he was exhilarated by her presence. He had never
seen her look lovelier, for Mr Creevey, while paying due homage to the
voluptuous charms of Aphrodite, had a secret respect for Artemis. Her
figure, now--there was no woman or girl in London who could compete
with her there--every movement was a thing of precision and grace. She
was wearing just the right shade of blue to go with her hair. Then her
voice. That of course was famous for its caressing beauty. He wished
that she would talk more and he laboured to draw her out. But she
remained rather silent and _distraite_.

Twice she sent Amos out to look at the weather. The first time he
reported that it was "black dark, gey cauld, but nae wund." The second
time he announced that the moon was up, a moon nearly full. "It'll
freeze the nicht, but there's cluds bankin' up north and there'll be
mair snaw or morn."

"Is there no one about?" she asked. "On the road?"

"Not a mortal soul."

"I thought that the inn people might be coming back," she explained. "I
simply can't imagine why this place is empty."

Mr Creevey had a sudden idea. It was not the weather or the return of
the inn people that she had sent out Amos to investigate. She must be
expecting someone. Had she chosen this lonely place for an assignation?
He searched his memory for gossip about Lady Warmestre and could find
none. She had always been a pillar of decorum, devoted to husband,
child and home; free-spoken of course, and sometimes startling in her
frankness, but that was only proof of her innocence. No one had ever
credited her with a lover. The thing was unthinkable. And yet----

Mr Creevey made it his business to chatter freely, and to bring in the
names of her friends. He did not want his suspicion to be
confirmed--Jacqueline was too rare a being to have the foibles of many
women of his acquaintance--but something puck-like in him made him itch
to discover secrets. He had no luck. Her face did not change from its
brooding expectancy.

Still he gossiped on. It was partly good manners, for long silences
would be awkward, partly a desire to stand well in her eyes. He must
appear to take misfortune airily, as she did. . . . Then he said
something that roused her interest. He was describing his visit to
Berlin in August, and giving, after his fashion, admirably clean-cut
sketches of his associates. He mentioned Adam Melfort.

"You know Colonel Melfort?" she asked. "How well?"

"I know him as other people know him. The surface only, but I guess at
what is behind. I believe him to be that uncomfortable thing which
Lilah Pomfrey calls an apostle, and to understand an apostle you must
be a disciple."

She awoke to attention. Her eyes had a sudden light in them.

"That is true," she said; "but even if you refuse his evangel you can
recognise the apostle."

"I remember now. Of course you and Lord Warmestre are friends of his.
You admire him?"

"I believe in him," she said.

There was a movement as if someone were coming from the back quarters,
and he looked up, expecting to see Amos. Instead he saw a tall man in
soiled tweeds, whom he recognised. Jacqueline had sprung to her feet.

Mr Creevey smiled, but a little ruefully. He was sorry that his guess
about an assignation had proved right.


Adam finished his coffee in the restaurant and then walked leisurely to
his hotel. It was important that he should be observed, for it was
certain that Cecilia and his friends would be on the watch. At his
hotel he gave instructions for his things to be packed in readiness for
the evening train. Then he telephoned to the garage where his car had
been ordered, and directed that it should meet him at a point on the
east side of the town. He left the hotel by a back entrance, wearing an
old waterproof coat and a tweed cap, and made his way by unfrequented
streets to the place where the car awaited him. By ten minutes past one
he was on the road, driving in a heavy drizzle of rain due east from
Arsignano.

He was in no wise excited or perturbed. This was the way that fate had
chosen to arrange the cards, and he must shape his game accordingly.
His plan had always been to strike in on the Val d'Arras by the col
from the Val Saluzzana, which would give him the appearance of arriving
accidentally from a tramp in the hills. To have flown to the Val
d'Arras, even had an aeroplane been obtainable, would have aroused
Creevey's suspicions, and the way thither by road was rough and
roundabout. . . . Now everything was changed. Creevey was at the pink
hotel--or would be there before the evening--and his enemies were
drawing in upon him. He would be left alone for a little--but how long?
Some time that evening or during the early night Cecilia and his gang
would be upon him. How would they travel? Not, he thought, by air. They
had already used the air so far as it was needed, and soon the plane in
which Creevey had started would crash in its appointed place, and the
passenger would officially pass out of the world. They would probably
travel by road. All the more reason why he should avoid the direct
route to the Val d'Arras.

His immediate business was to be in time. As to what he should do when
he arrived at the inn he had no plans, and did not attempt to make one.
If the enemies were there, his task would be rescue; if they had not
arrived, the task would be escape. For ways and means he had no
care--these he knew would be provided when the moment came. Somehow or
other he and Creevey would be enclosed in a lonely world of their own,
and his mission would be accomplished. It might be that Creevey would
die; that was one solution; but it must come only after he had done his
utmost to keep him in life, for he felt himself in a strict sense this
man's keeper. If Creevey lived he was assured that he would live to a
different purpose. . . . One precaution only he had taken. Years ago he
had made himself a fine marksman, but he had never in all his life
fired a shot at a man in offence or defence. Now he had brought a
pistol with him. It was in the right-hand pocket of his coat, pressing
comfortably against his side as he drove.

He was forced to make a wide circuit, for he dare not risk meeting
Cecilia on the road, so it was half-past three before he had threaded
the foothills and climbed to the skirts of the great mountains and
entered the Val Saluzzana. The road had been almost deserted, for the
weather, as he ascended, had changed from rain to sleet and from sleet
to a powder of snow. But the surface was magnificent, for it was one of
the great through-roads of the Alps. As every traveller knows, it
ascends the Val Saluzzana to the hamlet of Santa Chiara, and then turns
up a subsidiary vale and crosses the Staub pass to the Staubthal and
Switzerland. The main stream descends from a trackless glen, at the
head of which is the famous Colle delle Rondini, a route attempted only
by expert mountaineers. The Saluzzana pass, threaded by a mule track
and not by a highway, is not in the vale of that name, but in the
parallel Val d'Arras, and why the name should have been transferred no
geographer has yet explained. A little north of Santa Chiara the
containing ridge is indented by a saddle, which is reached from the Val
Saluzzana by a long tortuous cleft, and offers towards the Val d'Arras
a descent by a series of steep but practicable shelves. There is a
track over the col once used by smugglers in wintertime, and long ago,
when Adam had been on manoeuvres with the Alpini, he had played the
war-game, and this col had been the key of his plan. By it he had led a
force concealed in the Val d'Arras to attack in flank the invaders
coming over the Staub. He remembered the details as if it had been
yesterday. Twice he had himself made the crossing, and he had no doubt
about his ability to do it again in any weather. He could do it in
darkness, he thought, and anyhow there would be a moon. But time was
the problem. He dared not delay one unnecessary minute, for fate was
busy beyond the hills.

Never in his life had he driven a car at such breakneck speed. Twice he
was held up by wood-cutters' waggons, and once in a village he had to
back out and make a round to avoid a wedding procession. But when he
reached the great Saluzzana road there was good going, and he was at
Santa Chiara by a little after four. The inn was shuttered, but he
drove the car into a farm shed, and gave the farmer money to keep an
eye on it till his return. In two miles he was at the mouth of the
gorge which led to the col, and turned up the track by the stream side.
Twilight had fallen, and he looked up the cleft into a pit of dark
vapour, out of which loomed menacingly a black sentinel crag.

A great peace was on his spirit, peace which was more than the absence
of care, and was almost happiness. He felt as if a burden had fallen
from his shoulders. For one thing he was drawing again upon the
strength of that body which for years he had so scrupulously tended.
Not since the Arctic ice had he used his muscles to the full, and they
responded like a young horse at the first feel of turf. Also he felt as
if he were in some sense in sight of his goal. His duty had narrowed to
a strait road which he could not miss, and the very fact that he could
have no prospect but must wait for light increased his certainty. He
was being led, and he rejoiced to follow. But indeed there was no room
for self-examination, for his first purpose must be speed. He went up
the steep track among the boulders and pine-boles like a hunter running
to cut off a deer.

Above a waterfall the gorge flattened out into an upland glen strewn
with the debris of old rock-falls. This made slow travelling, for the
bigger rocks had to be circumvented, the track had disappeared, and
sometimes there was scarcely room for passage between the cliffs and
the gorge of the torrent. Beyond that the ravine bent to the right, and
a long steep had to be scaled, down which the stream fell in a chain of
cascades. It was dark now, though the white water was still plain, and
bits of old snowdrifts. There was one point where the only passage was
between the gorge of the stream and a rock which seemed perilously
poised. He felt it shake as he passed, and he realised that at any
minute it might fall and block the road, since there was no possibility
of a circuit on either hand among the sheer crags. He passed in safety
and then had the main slope to breast. The rocks were glazed by the
recent snowstorms, and even his nailed boots bit on them with
difficulty. This was the most arduous part of the road, but he did not
slacken his pace. Often he slipped and fell, and there were parts where
it took all his skill and strength to surmount some icy boiler-plates.
When he reached the top his watch told him that it was nearly seven. He
was not yet half-way across.

After that for a little it was easier going. The slope was less violent
and the road was mostly across shaly screes and patches of snow. He was
far above the pines now, above even the coarsest herbage. The wind
which had been drifting intermittent snow-showers had dropped, and the
air seemed to be sharpening to frost. He still strode furiously, but
the lack of the need for the severer kind of exertion left him leisure
for his thoughts. . . .

He was back in Eilean Bn, and the time was afternoon. Just of late it
had always been afternoon; still, golden weather, when the ardours of
day were beginning to melt into the peace of evening. He was on the
west side of Sgurr Bn, his favourite place, a long way to the west,
for he was conscious that he was very near the sea. Hitherto the sea
had always eluded him, however far he rambled, though he was never out
of sound of its murmuring. But now two strange things had happened. One
was that he knew--though how he knew it he could not tell--that never
before in all his dreams had he been so close to the sea. Surely a very
few steps more must take him to the white sands, where the tides were
never silent. The other was that Nigel had escaped him. It was a long
time since Nigel had gone off to play by himself; usually he stuck very
close to his side, clutching his hand, and babbling like a brook. He
could still hear him only a little distance away shouting among the
hazels. But he wondered what fancy had taken Nigel off by himself. . . .

The pale bright skies of the isle disappeared, and he was looking at a
narrow saddle between rocks. It was light now, for the moon was rising.
He was at the col, and a freer air blew in his face.

Far below him the Val d'Arras lay in a deep olive gloom. The hotel was
out of his sight, blocked by a shoulder of hill, but there was enough
light to see the valley narrowing northward towards the pass. He felt
quickened and braced and utterly tireless. He had made good time, and
unless he were hung up on the descent he must reach the inn before the
others. Eilean Bn vanished from his thoughts, and he addressed
himself to the precipitous screes that led to the first shelf.

It was a wild descent, now in the darkness of a cleft, now in open
moonshine when he was forced on to the face. He did not trouble to look
for the track, for in his head he had a general picture of the route.
Often he would slip for yards, and once on a patch of snow he had a
furious glissade which ended miraculously at a rock above an ugly drop.
A little stream began, and at one time he had to take to its channel
and got soaked to the skin. The first flat shelf was a slower business,
for the way had to be picked among ankle-twisting boulders. With the
second shelf the trees began, gnarled old relics, with ugly pitfalls in
the shape of rotting trunks. But the moist smell of vegetation cheered
him, for it told him that he was nearing the valley. At one corner he
caught a glimpse of the hotel. There was a light in a window. Who were
assembled behind that light?

Almost before he knew it, he had reached the valley floor. He
straightened himself, and wrung out the wet from his sopping trousers.
He looked at his watch, and had a moment of pride. In five hours he had
finished a course to which most mountaineers would have allotted ten,
and he was as fresh as when he had started. He forded the stream at a
shallow, and ran towards the light which twinkled a mile down the
valley.

He must move carefully, for he was now on enemy's ground. He left the
track, and approached the hotel from behind, where the hill rose
steeply. He vaulted the wall of the little garden and tip-toed
stealthily towards the back-door.

As he approached it it opened, and a man emerged and looked up,
yawning, at the sky as if to prospect the weather. He was an oldish
man, very square and stocky, and he had in his hand a frying-pan. He
dropped it as the stranger came out of the earth and stood before him.

"Great God, Amos," Adam cried, "what are you doing here?"

The old man peered and blinked.

"Losh, it's the Colonel," he whispered. "I cam here wi' her
leddyship--the Marchioness, ye ken. We've been ryngin' about Italy."

"Who are here?"

"Just Mr Creevey and her leddyship and masel'."

Adam pushed past him through the kitchen and into the little hall,
where before a cheerful stove sat a man and a woman beside the remains
of supper. He had not grasped Amos's information, for the sight of
Jacqueline made him stand and gasp. He had no eye for Creevey's
surprised face or his outstretched hand.

"Are you mad?" he asked her. "Do you know that you have come into a
place of death?"




A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY    III


I

The three made a strange group around the glowing ashes of the
stove--Creevey and Jacqueline as neat as if they had been denizens of a
common summer hotel, and Adam wet and dishevelled and about him the
tang of wild weather.

Jacqueline, under the spell of his demanding eyes, felt her wits
wandering. What had happened? What was his purpose? Why did he talk
fiercely of death? She had to make some kind of answer.

"I came by accident," she stammered. "I have been motoring in Italy. .
. . I used to come to this inn long ago. . . . I wanted to see the
place again."

"And I," said Creevey, "am here by misfortune. I have been left
stranded by an infernal aeroplane which should have taken me to Paris."
He spoke cheerfully, for indeed he was relieved in mind. There had been
no assignation, for Melfort's surprise at the sight of the lady was too
real to be assumed. At the meaning of his words he could make no guess,
but apostles must be permitted a little melodrama.

Adam strode to the door. It was a heavy thing, which could be fastened
by a thick bar let down from the adjacent wall. He dropped the bar and
called for Amos.

"Go out," he said, "and look down the valley. There's a moon. See if
anyone is coming up the road. By car or on foot."

"They'll hae to be on foot," said Amos, "for somebody has broke doun
the brig a mile back."

"So much the better. If anyone appears in that last mile, come back and
warn us at once. It is now half-past ten. If they don't come by
midnight we may assume we are safe for the night."

He cut himself a wedge of cold pie.

"Forgive me," he said, "but I've had no food since midday. I have come
over the col from the Val Saluzzana, and I didn't take it easy. Thank
God I'm in time."

"Time for what?" Creevey asked a little sharply. He disliked mysteries,
and Adam's peremptoriness offended him.

"Time to warn you. And, I hope, to save your life."

He seemed to be about to explain further when Amos appeared again from
the back part of the house.

"There's no muckle prospect doun the road," he announced. "The mune's
ahint the hill noo and the clouds are comin' up. It looks as if they
were bankin' for mair snaw. There's naebody to be seen."

A light broke in on Adam.

"Of course. Fool that I am! They are not coming up the valley. That
would leave too obvious traces. They are crossing the mountains by the
Marjolana pass and are coming in here from the north. From the
Staubthal. They can't arrive till morning. They have isolated this
place on the south, and to-morrow they will complete the cordon. Well,
that gives us some hours' grace."

He flung wood on the stove, and sat himself in a wicker chair. He took
from his knapsack a pair of stout nailed boots and thick socks. "I
brought these for you," he said to Creevey. "I think you may need them."

"For God's sake have done with mystifications, Melfort," Creevey cried.
"What is all this fuss about? For the last ten hours I seem to have
been in a lunatic world!"

Adam smiled.

"You have been in a lunatic world much longer than that, and perhaps
you are a little responsible for its lunacy. That is what the fuss is
about."

"You are in danger, Adam," Jacqueline put in. "Mr Falconet told me."

"I? Oh, no doubt. But I am not the one that matters. I will tell you
what I know, but half of it is guess-work."

He turned to Creevey.

"You remember Berlin in August? You saw how Loeffler was guarded and
you thought it natural, for he was head of a nation and therefore the
chief mark for the discontented. He was in greater danger than you
thought, and he ran some heavy risks before he got to the London
Conference. But have you never considered that others may be in the
same position? Not such conspicuous public figures as Loeffler, but men
who have aroused as deep antagonisms. Remember that the desperate
to-day have good information and look below the surface of things. They
have organised themselves like an army."

"Do you mean me?" Creevey asked.

"Why not you? Everyone who knows anything is aware that you have more
power to-day than most Governments. You use it, shall we say, in a
certain way. To you that way is natural and reasonable, but to other
people it may seem an infamous way, the way of the wrecker. Madness,
you think? Yes, but an effective kind of madness. A disintegrated world
lets loose strange forces which do not bother about the conventions."

Creevey did not answer, for he recalled some curious things that had
been happening lately, words casually dropped, cryptic warnings,
inexplicable little hindrances. He had set them down to a perverse
chance, but he remembered that the notion had flitted over his mind
that there might be purpose behind them.

"Do you know a man called La Cecilia?" Adam asked.

Creevey shook his head.

"Or a Baron von Kilderling?"

The name seemed familiar to Creevey, but he could not place it.

"Or a Dr Gratias?"

This stirred his memory. He had met Gratias, who had been the head of a
big German industrial combine which crashed in the inflation period.
The man had once had a great reputation, not without its sinister
element, and he had marked him down as one to be watched. Lately he had
disappeared from view, and he had sometimes wondered a little uneasily
what had become of him. Not a month ago he had instructed his people to
try to get news of Dr Gratias.

Adam saw that he had moved him. He told in detail what he knew of the
inner circle of the Iron Hands, of the meeting at the Rhineland
eating-house, of what happened during Loeffler's visit to Lamancha.
Then he told of his sight of Cecilia and von Kilderling that very day
in Arsignano, and his talk with the former. He said nothing of his own
plan to get Creevey to himself; that had failed and might be forgotten.

At first Creevey did not speak. He sat with his big head sunk on his
chest and his eyes half closed. That which he had believed impossible
had come to pass. The world of reason, on which he had so firm a hold,
had dissolved into a chaos of crude passions. His alert intelligence
told him that this hideous transformation had always been a
possibility. As for Adam's tale he must credit every word, for he had
too strong a respect for Adam's acumen to think that he could be
mistaken. He was a brave man, but this sudden crumbling of foundations
sent a chill to his heart.

"What do they want with me?" he asked hoarsely.

"I do not think that you will live long in their hands," was Adam's
reply. "Some time to-night the aeroplane in which you are supposed to
be travelling will be wrecked and your death will appear in the evening
papers to-morrow. That report will not be contradicted if our friends
can help it."

"You are in danger, too? You risk your life in coming to warn me? Why
do you do it? We have never been friends. I was under the impression
that my doings were not so fortunate as to have your approval."

Again Adam smiled, and there was that in his smile, in his fine-drawn
face, and the steady friendliness of his eyes, which stirred in Creevey
a feeling which no human being had ever evoked before. So novel it was
that he scarcely listened to Adam's words.

"I didn't approve of you. But I have always admired you, and thought
that some day you would awake. I have a notion that this may be the
awakening. For you are going to escape--make no mistake about that. You
will escape, though we have to climb the Pomagognon."

"But how?" Jacqueline had been roused out of her first stupefaction,
and was struggling to grasp a situation which she had never forecast.
Her first thought had been that her mad escapade had added to Adam's
burden. Then she remembered her car, the only means of transport at
their disposal. If danger was coming from the north, might they not
escape by the south?

"My car is all right," she said. "I lied about it to you, Mr Creevey.
It is in perfect order, backed in among the trees beyond the broken
bridge. Let us go off by it at once. It's the only way."

Adam shook his head.

"Not a ghost of a chance. If our friends are coming up the valley they
will meet us. If they are coming down the valley, as I am certain they
are, the route to the south will be picketed. Those gentry leave
nothing to luck. They have already made the road difficult and broken
the bridge. Amos says it had been hewn down with axes and that the cuts
were fresh. I am afraid there is no hope in that direction."

"Then we are caught. We cannot get into Switzerland."

"We must get into Switzerland. Once there we are safe. Falconet is at
Grunewald--and more than Falconet. Once in the Staubthal we are out of
their net."

"Can't we get away from the inn and hide in the mountains?"

"How long could we keep hidden? It is going to be wild weather and we
should starve. Besides, the men we have to deal with are old hands at
the game. They won't be plump sedentary folk like Gratias, but the real
Iron Hands, like Cecilia and Kilderling, men who will take any risk and
can endure any fatigue. They have the best mountaineers in Europe at
their command. It would be a lost game to play hide-and-seek among the
hills with the people who will come over the pass to-morrow."

Jacqueline dropped her hands on her knees with a gesture of despair.
But the sight of Adam's face gave her hope.

"Our chance," he said, "lies in our start. I know the Marjolana route
and I know the Saluzzana, and I do not believe that they can be here
before eight o'clock to-morrow. If the roads forward and backward are
shut to us we must take to the flank. We must try the col by which I
crossed to-night from the Val Saluzzana. At Santa Chiara you strike the
main road over the Staub."

"Then let's start at once." Jacqueline's anxiety had made her eager for
instant movement.

"Impossible. The moon is down, and the road is not easy. If I were
alone I might do it in the darkness, but I could not take another with
me. We must have daylight--and a little sleep first. Remember that we
are dealing with athletes and trained mountaineers."

Creevey had gone white, but by an obvious effort he kept his composure.

"Won't they have men on the col?" he asked.

"They may--in which case we are done. But I don't think so. Few people
know it and fewer use it. It was my own discovery, and was shared with
about half a dozen Italian officers, most of whom are now dead. . . .
But we may be followed, and must allow for that. They will have men
with them who are experts at winter hunting and can follow spoor. That
means that we shall be in rather a hurry."

Creevey got himself out of his chair, and stood up, an incongruous
figure in his neat blue suit, his coloured linen, and his dark tie with
its pearl pin. He stretched out his arms as if to assess his bodily
strength, and he shivered as if he felt it to be small at the best.
Certainly as compared with Adam's lean virility he looked heavy and
feeble.

"Do you think I can do it?" he asked. "I never climbed a mountain in
all my days. I am not in good training--I never am--I live too well and
too much indoors."

"I think you can do it," said Adam gently. "You must do it. You see,
the stake is your life. Much more than that, I think, but first and
foremost your life."

"What about Lady Warmestre? Hadn't she and her servant better get off
at once, if her car is in order? She, anyhow, won't be stopped by
whoever is on the watch down the valley."

"Nonsense," said Jacqueline, "I'm coming with you. I'm as active as a
cat--I've climbed the Pomagognon by the west ridge. My father said----"

She stopped, for Adam's eyes were on her, and she read in them a
knowledge of all the things that she had left unsaid. He knew for what
purpose she had come here--her mention of Falconet had enlightened him.
He knew that she had come to make restitution, to settle an account
between two souls predestined to a strange community. He knew, and the
knowledge had awakened in him something which she had not seen before
in his face. He was looking at her in a passion of tenderness.

"I am going to ask more from Lady Warmestre than that," he said. "She
is our chief hope. I am going to ask her to stay here and receive our
guests from over the mountains. If she can delay them for an hour she
may save your life."

Then Creevey did that which surprised at least one of the other two,
and may have surprised himself. The pallor left his face, and his voice
came out clear and masterful.

"I won't have it," he cried. "Damn you, Melfort, do you think I'm so
little of a man as to take shelter behind a woman? God knows what those
devils might not do to her! It's the most infamous proposal I ever
heard in my life."

"She will be in no danger," said Adam. "Our enemies are no doubt
devils, but in their own eyes they are gentlemen, rather punctilious
gentlemen. They won't harm her----"

"I refuse to allow it. Lady Warmestre must start off at once in her car
and by to-morrow morning she will be out of danger. I'm in the hell of
a fix, but if I can help it it won't be anybody's funeral but my own.
Except yours, of course, and you asked for it----"

He said no more, for Jacqueline's face silenced him. It had a new
strange beauty, the like of which he had never seen before. He felt
suddenly that here was a woman in relation to whom it was merely
foolish to talk of danger or fear.

"Thank you, Mr Creevey," she said. "You are very kind and I am very
grateful. But I wouldn't miss doing what Adam wants for anything in the
world. It will be the greatest thing in my life. I'm not in the least
afraid--except of not succeeding. I'm . . . but I'm going to do more
than delay the enemy. Have you thought of the next step, Adam?"

It was her turn to rise. She had put her travelling cloak about her
shoulders and now dropped it and stood up to her full height, a head
taller than Creevey, almost tall enough to look from the level into
Adam's eyes.

"They are bound to let me go," she went on. "I think they will try to
speed my going. Very well. Somehow or other I will get the car round to
the Val Saluzzana--to Santa Chiara--and meet you there. It's a long
road over the Staub . . . and you will be very tired . . . and you may
be pursued. I will be there to pick you up and we will finish the run
together. Do you understand, both of you? That is my final decision,
and nothing will shake me."

Her face was flushed and gay, her voice had a ringing gallantry. To
Creevey in his confused dejection it was like a sudden irradiation of
the sun. But Adam did not lift his eyes.

"It's about time we found somewhere to sleep," she said, and she called
to Amos.

That worthy presently brought candles. "I've been outbye again," he
announced, "and it's snawing hard. The auld wife is pluckin' her geese
for Christmas."


Creevey slept little, for his will could not subdue his insurgent
thoughts. He had moments almost of panic, which he struggled to
repress, but his chief preoccupation was to adjust his mind to a world
of new values. Oddly enough, in all his confusion the dominant feeling
was surprise mingled with something that was almost pride. This man
Melfort was ready to risk his life for him. He had been a leader of
men, but what disciples had he ever made who would have been prepared
for such a sacrifice? And Melfort was no follower, but a stark
antagonist. He had hated him and been hated in turn. Something very
novel crept into his mind--a boyish shame. He could not allow himself
to be outdone in this contest of generosity.

Adam and Jacqueline slept like children, for the one was physically
weary, and both had suffered a new and profound emotion.

Amos woke the party an hour before dawn. It was very cold and the storm
of the night had covered the ground with two inches of snow. He gave
them hot chocolate in the little hall, where he had lit the stove.
Creevey looked pinched and haggard in the candlelight. He had put on
the nailed boots which Adam had given him, and tucked the bottoms of
his trousers into the heavy socks. He drank his chocolate but could eat
no food.

But Jacqueline was a radiant figure. From the baggage which Amos had
brought she had extricated a thick jumper and a short jacket of russet
leather, and the lack of a maid had imparted a gracious disorder to her
hair. Even so she had often appeared to Adam's eyes on winter mornings
at Armine Court, a little late after a big day's hunting.

Adam gave his last instructions. He was still yawning like a sleepy
child. They went out of doors, where the skies were beginning to
lighten over the Val Saluzzana peaks, and a small wind, which would
probably grow to a gale, was whimpering down the valley.

"Confound the snow," Adam said. "It won't melt before midday, and it
shows footsteps. Amos, you follow us and blur our tracks. We'll get off
the road a hundred yards down, for on that long spit of rock we'll be
harder to trace. There's a shallow place in the gorge where we can
cross. We must be inside the big ravine before daybreak."

He took Jacqueline's hand, as she stood in the snow at the doorstep.
There was no word spoken, and the manner of each was cheerful, almost
casual--_au revoir_, not good-bye. But in the candlelight which escaped
from the hall Creevey saw her face, and it was a sight which he was
never to forget. For her eyes were the lit eyes of the bride.



II

Amos was busy indoors removing all signs of occupation, other than that
of himself and Jacqueline. The relics of breakfast for two remained in
the hall, and only two beds upstairs showed signs of use. He repacked
the hold-all, which had carried Jacqueline's baggage, and the
provisions. As he worked, he repeated to himself the instructions he
had been given by Adam and his mistress, and his gnarled face wore a
contented smile. "It's like auld times," he muttered. "Man, Andrew,
this is the proper job for you. Ye're ower young to sit back on your
hunkers. But it beats me how the Colonel is to get yon Creevey ower
thae fearsome hills."

Jacqueline put on her hat and her fur-lined coat, and stood in front of
the inn watching the shadows break up in the valley. The dawn-wind blew
sharper, but she did not feel cold, for her whole being was aglow. Adam
had trusted her, and had asked of her a great thing--asked it as an
equal. She fired with pride, and pride drove out all fear. She did not
attempt to forecast what would happen at the inn in the next few hours,
for her thoughts were with the two men now entering the long ravine
which led by difficult shelves to the col. They would succeed--they
must succeed--and in the evening she herself would carry them to
sanctuary. It was the hour of miracles--she had witnessed them. She had
seen a man emerge from Creevey's husk, a man who with white lips was
prepared to forget his own interests and sacrifice himself for a whim
of honour. She did not forget his stubbornness about her own safety.
Could he ever return to his old world? Had not a new man been born, the
leader of Adam's dream? And there was still before him a long day of
trial and revelation. Of Adam she did not allow herself to think; she
had fallen in with his code, and kept her thoughts firm on that purpose
which was his life.

The eastern slopes of the valley were still dark, but the inn and its
environs were flooded now with a cold pure light. She looked up at the
sky, and saw that the growing wind was drifting clouds from the north,
clouds contoured and coloured like ice-floes in a Polar sea. Snow would
fall again before midday. She occupied herself in recalling the road to
the Val Saluzzana--down the Val d'Arras to Colavella, and then east in
a detour among the foothills to the great Staub highway. She remembered
it vividly; it would be open even in rough weather, and the Staub pass
was low and rarely blocked by snow-falls. What about their stock of
petrol? She turned to look for Amos, and saw him in the doorway. . . .

He was held by two men, and was spluttering in well-simulated wrath.
She was aware of other men. . . . One was advancing to her from the
north side of the inn. He was a slim youngish man, rather below the
middle height, dressed like a mountaineer in breeches and puttees, with
a waterproof cape about his shoulders. He had been in deep snow, for he
seemed to be wet to the middle.

Jacqueline cried out to Amos.

"What is wrong, Andrew? What do these men want?"

"I dinna ken. They grippit me when I was tyin' up the poke. I don't
understand what they're sayin'." Then to his warders: "I'll be obliged
if ye'll let me get at my pipe. I havena had my mornin's smoke." He
spat philosophically.

The young man addressed her. He had a finely cut face, dark level brows
and sombre eyes.

"We want to know who you are, madam, and what you are doing here?" His
tone was civil, but peremptory.

"What business have you with me? This is an inn."

"It was. But for a little it has been the private dwelling-house of
myself and my friends. By what right have you entered it?"

Jacqueline laughed merrily. "Have I made a _gaffe_? It is like the
story of the Three Bears. I'm so sorry. Have I been trespassing? You
see, I had a fancy to come here again--I've been motoring in Italy--and
I thought I would like to have a look at the place for auld lang syne.
Antonio Menardi used to be a friend of mine, and I came here often with
my father. He was a famous mountaineer. Hubert Alban. Perhaps you have
heard of him?"

There were now four men on the snow by the inn door, besides the two
who still held Amos in custody. One was tall, with massive bull
shoulders and a curiously small head. All six looked preternaturally
alert and vigorous, just such as she remembered among the Alpine heroes
of her youth. But in their faces there was a sullen secrecy which she
did not remember, and in their eyes a mad concentration.

One spoke, not to her, but to the others. "I have heard of Herr Alban.
Yes, I have seen him. He did many famous courses in the mountains."

Her first inquisitor spoke again.

"Will you tell us your name, please?"

"I am married. My husband is Lord Warmestre."

Recognition stirred in the big man.

"I did not think I could be mistaken," he said. "She is the Marchioness
of Warmestre, a very famous lady in England. I have seen her at the
Court balls, and elsewhere."

"Will you tell us how you came here?" the young man asked. He seemed to
be bridling a deep impatience, though his voice was still polite.

"I motored here. The road was bad, and a little way down the valley a
bridge was broken. But I was determined not to be beaten, so my servant
and I left the car and walked the rest of the way."

"And you found here?"

"An empty house. No Antonio, no servants. No food, but thank goodness I
had the sense to bring some of my own. . . . Oh, and I found something
else. Another unfortunate guest. A man I have met occasionally in
London. A Mr Creevey."

They were masters at their game, for no flicker of interest moved their
faces.

"Will you tell us about this other guest?"

"Oh, he was a dreadful little cross-patch. He was so angry that he
could not explain properly, but I gathered that he had had a mishap in
an aeroplane, though I can't for the life of me see how he got here. He
was in a desperate hurry to be gone, and after my servant had given him
a cup of tea he started off down the valley. He must have had a rotten
night of it."

The faces were still impassive.

"You did not offer to take him away in your car?"

Jacqueline laughed. "No. I didn't tell him about the car--or rather, I
said it had broken down hopelessly. You see, I am not very fond of Mr
Creevey. I didn't see why I should help him out of his troubles when he
was as uncivil as a bear, and I certainly didn't want his company. I
was very glad when he decided to go away."

"And now--you propose?"

"To go home. We camped the night here, but I can't say it was very
comfortable. I was just about to start when you turned up. My maid and
my luggage are in the hotel at Chiavagno."

The young man bowed. "Will you please to go indoors, Lady Warmestre? My
friends and I must talk together."

Jacqueline sat down in the inn hall, where Amos's fire had almost
burned itself out. Amos a little way off puffed stolidly at his pipe.

So far she had managed well, she decided. Her tone had been right, the
natural tone of a crazy Englishwoman, and by a great stroke of luck her
father's name had been known to them and she herself had been
recognised. Now they were trying to verify her story. She could hear
the tramping of heavy boots upstairs, and twice a weather-beaten face
looked in from the back parts. The others would be outside ranging the
environs.

Presently the young man entered.

"When did Mr Creevey depart last night?" he asked.

Jacqueline considered. "Just when it was growing dark and I got my
servant to light a lamp. I think it would be about five o'clock."

"There are footprints in the new snow."

"Aye," said Amos, "they're mine. I gaed out for a daunder afore it was
licht to prospect the weather."

When he had gone Jacqueline had a sudden disquieting reflection. She
had thought it very clever to bring in Creevey, but had it not been the
wildest folly? Could they let her go? Had she not fatally compromised
their plans? Creevey was supposed to have perished in an aeroplane
accident the night before somewhere on the coast, and here was she, a
witness to his presence in a remote Alpine valley no earlier than five
o'clock. For the first time she knew acute fear. If she was permitted
to go away, permitted even to live, their story was exploded and their
schemes brought to naught. They had failed to manoeuvre their victim
out of the ken of the world. Even if they found his trail and caught
him on the col, she and Amos would share his fate. Those mad eyes were
capable of the last barbarity.

She told herself that it was impossible. They could not cumber
themselves with her as a prisoner. They would not dare to silence her
in the old crude way. An English great lady--it would be too dangerous.
They were cunning people and would somehow adapt their policy to the
changed circumstances. She must carry off things with a high air. . . .
And meantime, thank God, she was holding them up. Every minute that she
sat shivering in that wretched inn was bringing Adam and Creevey nearer
to their goal.

At last the door opened and the young man appeared.

"You can take up your baggage," he told Amos. Then to Jacqueline: "Are
you ready, Lady Warmestre? We have inspected your car, and it is in
good order. We wish you to leave--now."

Outside she found four men waiting like terriers about an earth.

"You will take one of us with you as a guide," said the young man.

"To Chiavagno?" Jacqueline asked, with a new fear in her heart.

"To Chiavagno--perhaps. At any rate he will guide you. I will accompany
you to your car."

The others bowed ceremoniously as the three set off down the road. The
clouds were no longer floes, but pack-ice almost covering the sky, and
a dull leaden light filtered through them, while the wind volleyed in
bitter gusts. Jacqueline did not turn her head towards the eastern
wall, lest it might wake suspicion, but she wondered if from any
vantage-ground on the lip of the ravine Adam could see the party. He
had, she knew, his field-glasses. . . . One thing she did not like. Two
of the men were busy looking for prints beside the road, and they were
dangerously near the long rib of rock down which Adam had gone. Would
the enemy after all hit the trail?

They scrambled across the gully of the broken bridge, and Amos with a
good deal of trouble started the engine and ran the car into the road.

"I will drive, please," said Jacqueline. "I am more used to difficult
roads than my servant. Will your friend sit beside me?" The rudiments
of a wild plan were forming in her brain.

"My friend will sit behind you. Get in, Franz." The young man said
something in German to the other which Jacqueline did not catch, but
his face interpreted his words. The sullen figure behind was there as a
guard--she saw the bulge made by the pistol in his coat pocket. What
were his orders, she wondered dismally. Was it Chiavagno, or some
darker goal?

"_Bon voyage_," said the young man. "Remember my instructions, Franz,"
and he turned to re-cross the ravine.

On a rough piece of road a mile farther on the car gave so much trouble
that no one heard a whistle blown behind them. Had he heard it, Franz
might have insisted on turning back. That whistle meant portentous
things. For the trackers by the roadside had found the spoor on the rib
of rock, spoor leading down to the stream, and five minutes later the
pack were following it.

Jacqueline was surprised at her own coolness. She was certain in her
mind what orders had been given to Franz--that their goal was not
Chiavagno. And even if they went to Chiavagno her plan would fail, for
then she could not pick up Adam and Creevey at Santa Chiara, and she
had a premonition that if she failed them they were doomed. But not a
shadow of personal fear lurked in her heart. Her whole being was keyed
up to the highest pitch of active purpose.

Sometimes she turned round and nodded friendlily to the man behind. He
sat rigid and expectant, his sullen eyes watchful, and one hand in his
coat pocket.

It was a great thing to have Amos beside her. She talked to him in a
loud voice about the road and the weather, so that Franz might hear,
but interpolated in her remarks some words in a lower tone. Amos
responded. He modulated his great voice to a whisper and that whisper
was in the broadest Scots.

"We maun find the richt kind o' place," he crooned, "and then I'll
pretend to be no weel. I'll gie ye the word when I see a likely bit.
You leave the rest to me, mem. . . . Dinna you stop the engine. . . .
This cawr is a fine starter, and it accelerates brawly. . . . Watch me
and play up till me, and God be kind to His ain." When Amos, a bigoted
unbeliever, dropped into the speech of piety, there was trouble
awaiting somebody.

Before they were out of the Val d'Arras the wind dropped and the snow
began, a steady resolute fall. There were people on the vile road--one
or two men who might have been wood-cutters, and Jacqueline observed
that they stared not at her but at Franz, and that some signal seemed
to be exchanged. Once a fellow who looked like a gamekeeper dropped
from the hillside, and the car was halted while he whispered to Franz
over the back of it. Jacqueline preserved an air of aloof inattention,
as if such a meeting were the most natural thing in the world.

After Colavella Franz proposed to drive. "Please let me go on,"
Jacqueline protested. "I'm not in the least tired, and we shall be on
better roads now. It is only driving that keeps me warm." Franz
consented with an ill grace, but he shifted his station so that he sat
directly behind her.

Half an hour after leaving Colavella they came to a fork where the road
to Chiavagno branched to the left.

"Straight on," Franz commanded.

"But we are going to Chiavagno."

"We are going where I direct. Do as I bid you, or I will take the
wheel."

The snow was thickening, and already it lay an inch or two on the
highway. "We'll have to do something soon," Jacqueline whispered to
Amos.

"Aye," came grimly through closed teeth.

Soon after that he began to groan. He huddled himself into the
left-hand corner and sat with shut eyes, so that Franz could see his
profile. He had the appearance of a man in extreme distress.

Presently they turned down the side of a mountain torrent flowing in a
deep-cut wooded ravine. Only a low wall protected the road from the
gorge, and in parts the wall had crumbled into stone heaps.

Suddenly Amos cried out. He pawed feebly at Jacqueline's arm. "Stop,"
he groaned. "I've an awfu' pain. Let me oot--let me oot."

Jacqueline brought the car to a standstill. "What is it?" she asked
anxiously.

Amos's voice came small and weak between his gasps.

"Colic," he answered. "It's the cauld. Let me straughten mysel' on the
roadside. Oh, mem, for God's sake!"

Franz was standing up, and demanding angrily the reason of the delay.

"My servant has been taken ill. He says he must be laid flat. Will you
help him, please?"

Franz leaped from the car, and hauled out the groaning Amos, who
staggered a step or two to the edge of the gorge and then fell flat
among the snow. It was at a point where there was a gap in the
protecting wall.

He bent over the prostrate figure and his face was wrathful.

"A nip o' brandy," Amos whined. "There's a flask at the bottom o' the
big green poke."

Franz addressed Jacqueline fiercely. "There is no time for doctoring.
The fellow must lie here till he recovers. People will pass . . . he
will be seen to. . . . Give me the wheel, madam. I now will drive. . .
."

His back was to the stricken man, and he was about to re-enter the car,
when a strange thing happened. Amos drew his legs up with astonishing
agility, and in a second was crouching like a broody fowl. Then he
flung his enormous arms round Franz's knees. To Jacqueline it seemed as
if the body of the latter suddenly rose from the ground and described a
curve backward in the air over Amos's shoulder. It disappeared into the
ravine, and could be heard crashing among the snow-laden undergrowth.

In an instant Amos was beside her, and the car was in motion. Amos
dusted the snow from his disreputable breeks.

"That's settled him," he said complacently. "A dodge I learnt lang syne
at the fit-ba'."

After that there was no delay. Jacqueline swung to the left, cut across
the road to Chiavagno and, after being at fault once or twice among the
valleys of the foothills and consulting her map, struck the main road
which led to the Val Saluzzana. There the snow lightened, but much had
fallen, and the pine-woods were white like the mountain tops. But on
the broad highway it was little hindrance to speed, and by four o'clock
they had passed Santa Chiara. The temporary clearness of the air
enabled her without difficulty to follow Adam's directions, and
presently she had drawn up at the mouth of the gorge which led to the
col and to the Val d'Arras. She could see the faint outline of the
track which followed the stream.

Amos descended, stamped his feet, and swung his arms. "I'll gang a wee
bit up the burn to meet them," he said. "Losh, it's a fearsome-lookin'
glen! Yon puir Creevey will hae an ill journey."

Jacqueline watched his gnome-like figure stumping up the track till it
disappeared among the draggled pines. . . . The place was hushed and
solitary. She saw the highway bearing to the right for the Staub pass,
the road that was to carry them to safety. In front was the sword-cut
of the upper Val Saluzzana, and she could make out dimly the gap which
was the Colle delle Rondini and the famous ice-ridge of the Pomagognon.
. . . But her eyes were chiefly on the cleft which led to the col. The
twilight was falling, and above the pines and the fitful gleams of
white water she saw nothing but a pit of shade across which blew thin
streamers of mist. That was the way of salvation. Out of that darkness
would presently come two men on whom the fate of the world depended.
They must come--they could not fail--not if there was hope on earth or
mercy in heaven. But as she peered up into that savage wilderness she
shivered.

Suddenly she caught sight of Amos. He was far up on a jut of crag and
he was looking towards her. He was waving his hand. He had seen them.

Relief made her choke and filled her eyes with happy tears. She started
the engine.



III

Scarcely a word was spoken between Adam and Creevey for the first
half-hour. With difficulty they crossed the torrent at a place where
the gorge flattened out and the water ran wide and shallow before
plunging into a new abyss. After that the way lay along the east slope
of the valley in a chaos of fallen rocks and straggling pines. Creevey,
like all novices, forced the pace, but Adam made him fall back into a
slow, steady stride. "We have a long road before us," he said. "You
must keep your breath for the hills."

Under the lee of the slope it was still very dark, and Adam had to take
the other's arm at many points to help him over clefts hidden by scrub.
He was straining his ears for sounds from the other side of the stream,
from the track that led to the pass, something that would tell him that
their enemies had crossed the mountains. That route was easy even in
the darkness for hardened mountaineers. But the noise of furious water
and the soughing of the dawn wind blanketed all other sounds. The light
in the inn was soon hidden from them, and they moved in a shell of
loneliness.

Adam was in such a mood as he had not known before. He was supremely
confident. He felt that his task was nearing fulfilment, like a runner
who has entered the straight with the tape clear before him. He had no
fear of failure, so that he did not attempt to forecast the next
difficult stages. These would be surmounted--somehow or other Creevey
that night would be beyond the reach of danger. A new Creevey, too, for
the gods would not leave their work half done. . . . But to this
assurance happiness had been added, and in recent years he had known
peace, but not happiness. Now something jubilant and ecstatic seemed to
have been re-born in him, and he was aware of the reason. He had
discovered tenderness, for Jacqueline had taught him. She had thawed
his chilly, dutiful soul. He was no longer content to pity humanity,
for he had come to love it. Creevey, stumbling along at his side, was
not merely a pawn in the game to be guarded, but a friend and a fellow.
The aching affection which had once been confined to Nigel was now
given to Jacqueline, and through her to all mankind. "I am a full man
and a free man again," he told himself. "I have come out of the
shadows."

The slopes on which they moved bent inward, and down the cleft in the
mountains there came the first grey light of dawn. "Thank God," said
Adam. "We are now in cover. We must take it quietly, for we have four
thousand feet to climb to the col."

Adam led at a slow even pace up a track which was only a deeper shadow
among the shadowy fern. Here the wind was cut off, and the snow, warded
off by the pines, lay thinly on the ground, but it was damply cold, as
if the trees still held the chill of midnight. It was steep going, but
not difficult, though Creevey's heavy breathing soon proved the poverty
of his training. It was Adam's business to keep him cheerful, for he
knew the potent effect of the mind on the body. "You are doing
famously," he told him. "After the trees we have the first shelf where
the slope eases off. Then there comes a bit of a scramble, and then a
second shelf. After that we must hug the stream till it stops, and the
last bit is slabs and screes. The snow should be lying there fairly
deep and that will help us. Then we are at the col and there's no more
climbing. The descent into the Val Saluzzana is longer, but far less
stiff. In two hours from the col we should be in the valley."

"You think that Lady Warmestre will be there?"

"I am certain of it."

"You're a queer fellow," said Creevey. "You go a good deal by instinct.
. . . Perhaps you are right. . . . I'm not built that way."

They came out of the trees to the lip of the first shelf. There the
track, to avoid an out-jutting crag, bent to the right, and reached a
vantage point from which the valley beneath could be seen. It was here
that the night before Adam had first caught the lights of the inn. He
made Creevey keep low in cover, and wriggled forward to where he could
rake the trough of the Val d'Arras.

There was no one on the road which led to the pass, nor on the road
below the inn, as far as he could see it. Outside the inn itself stood
a solitary figure. The glass told him that it was neither Jacqueline
nor Amos. It was a tall man, and he had the air of being on guard. As
Adam watched him, he shaded his eyes and seemed to be watching
something to the east in the valley bottom.

The enemy had come. More, some of them were now down by the stream.
They might be only casting about for the fugitives; on the other hand,
they might have found the spoor down the rib of rock which would show
up in the snow. They were bound to have skilled trackers with them, men
accustomed to the winter trails of bouquetin and chamois.

Adam snapped his glasses back into their case. "We must push on," he
said. "Our friends are below at the inn. They may pick up our trail."

"Are they faster than us?"

"Than us two? Perhaps twice as fast. But we have a long start. Never
fear, we shall beat them."

Creevey seemed to have exhausted his strength on the first steeps. He
had not the mountaineer's gift of walking delicately in difficult
places, and he slipped and stumbled among the boulder-strewn herbage
and several times fell heavily. Adam took his arm and forced the pace,
so that when they reached the place where the stream fell in great
leaps down a broken rock-wall he was puffing hard and limping.

In summer there was a faint track up this wall, but there was no sign
of it now in the waste of glazed rock, snowy cracks and boggy ledges.
Creevey was most of the time on his knees, for he retched with vertigo
whenever he rose to his feet. Over most of the ground Adam simply
dragged him, blaming himself bitterly for not having brought a rope.
Sometimes they came to an _impasse_ up which Creevey had to be lifted
like baggage. His crawling soaked him to the skin, and it was a limp
and sodden figure that dropped on the ground when the second shelf was
reached.

"Get your breath," Adam told him. Creevey lay flat on his back looking
up to the sky from which occasional flakes fell, while Adam made a
short detour to the right, to a point where from a steep overhang he
believed that a view could be got of the foot of the ravine where it
debouched on the valley.

He got the view and something more, something which sent him racing
back to Creevey. For on the spit of open sward below the trees, on the
track by which they had come, he saw four figures, their heads bent
like dogs following a trail.

He plucked Creevey to his feet. "On," he cried, "the hounds are out. At
the speed they go they are less than an hour behind us."

The words woke the other's drugged mind to life. Never before had he
known what it was to be in physical danger. He, the assured and
authoritative, was being hunted like a fox, and the price of failure
was death. He felt a cold clutch at his heart, but a new nervous power
in his limbs. This shelf was more difficult than the first, but there
was no drag on Adam's arm. Creevey covered the ground at a shamble
which was almost running. "Don't strain yourself," said Adam's quiet
voice in his ear. "We shall win all right"; but the sense of the words
hardly penetrated to a brain obsessed with the passion of flight.

They were now at the last tier of the ascent, where at points, to avoid
knuckles of sheer cliff, it was necessary to take to the bed of the
infant stream. A round of the clock before Adam had descended the place
like a falling stone, leaping in the strong moonlight from boulder to
boulder. But now the rocks were more glazed and treacherous, and the
snow, which was falling thickly, made the route harder to prospect.
There were points where Adam simply took Creevey in his arms and jumped
with him; others where he forced him up the tiny couloirs on his
shoulders. It was a toil which few men could have compassed, but he
scarcely felt it--at long last he was finding use for that physical
strength which he had so jealously conserved. As he clutched the
dripping, inert body of his companion, he felt a strange affection.
This sodden thing, so feeble and yet so precious!

The stream ceased, a few hundred yards of snowy screes followed, and
then they stood in the throat of the col. Adam let Creevey drop on the
ground, and looked at his watch. It was a little after one o'clock.


The consciousness of having reached the summit seemed to rouse Creevey
to a new vigour. He swallowed some brandy from Adam's flask and found
his voice.

"Will the snow help us?" The words came from blue lips. "Will it hide
us? What about leaving the road?"

"There is no route but the one, and these men could follow tracks in
any weather."

"Then for God's sake let us get on." He started down-hill at a
stumbling run. So far the wind, which was from the north, had been shut
off by a wall of mountain, but the ravine on the Val Saluzzana side
took a northward turn, and they had now the drift in their faces. Adam
caught the other's arm, for the way down the long broken moraine was
not easy, but his help was scarcely needed. Creevey had got a new
reserve of vigour with the downward slope, his foothold was surer, and
his face, plastered with the drift, was human again. On the last stage
it had been washed clean of life like a sick animal's.

"How much longer?" he gasped.

"Two hours--not more. If the snow lasts we shall be safe, for it will
prevent them shooting."

Then the wind seemed to be shut off again, and they moved in a soft
feathery blanket. Creevey spoke.

"I did not know the world was so savage," he muttered, and it sounded
like an apology.

"It is very near the edge," said Adam.

"You think I have helped to bring it to the edge? . . . That is what
Loeffler believes. . . . I thought it hysteria--he has a good many
blind patches in his mind. . . . But he was right. . . . If we come
through, you and I . . . I will go to Loeffler."

"Don't try to talk," Adam said. "You will want all your strength." The
snow muffled sounds, and they moved in a world of deathly stillness,
but he had the sense of proximity which wild things have, and it told
him that the enemy had passed the col and were on the moraine. The
hunters were faster by far than the hunted.

The snow was thinning. Presently they struck the torrent which came
down from a tributary ravine, and the road now was in a narrow gully.
The wind caught them again, and their immediate environs were blown
clear--the beetling cliffs on their left, like chocolate dusted with
sugar, the leaping white water, the icy ledge lipped by it where the
track lay. . . .

Adam looked back, and saw that the moraine by which they had come was
visible almost as far as the col. There were figures on it, moving fast
like plover in a spring plough. Half a mile behind--less. Within the
next half-hour they must be overtaken.

A dozen plans flitted through his brain as he dragged Creevey down the
gully. The latter had gone numb again, and was maintained only by the
other's resolution. They were taking crazy chances, and again and again
Adam's arm saved him from disaster. But no audacity could avail them,
for the relentless trackers behind were their masters in pace, and the
trail was for a child to read. Creevey's breath was labouring and he
was stumbling drunkenly. Where was a hope, for hope there must be? They
could not fail on the brink of success.

Suddenly they came to a point which Adam remembered. A huge boulder on
the right was delicately poised above the track. He recollected it
clearly, for here he had had to walk warily, since a very little would
have sent it crashing down to block the route for ever. A man could
dislodge it--a man on the upper side--and bar any further descent. But
that man must remain on the near side of the chasm which he had
created. He would be shut off himself from reaching the valley.

It was the sign which he had awaited, and a solemn gladness filled his
heart. He had not been wrong in his hope, and his purpose was now
certain of fulfilment. Creevey saw that his face was smiling, and
wondered.

"You must go on alone for a bit." Adam's arm pulled him to a
standstill. "We are almost over the bad patch. After this the road is
easy. The snow has stopped, and you will see where the track runs. Soon
you will be among the trees."

"What do you mean? . . . Are you going to stay and fight? . . . I'll be
damned if I leave you." Creevey was nearly at the end of his tether,
but the weakness of his body was not reflected in his angry eyes.

"There will be no fighting. But I see a chance of blocking the road. On
with you, for it is our only hope--a certain hope."

There was that in Adam's voice which could not be gainsaid.

"You will follow me? Promise that, or I won't stir. I must have you
with me--always. . . ."

"I will follow you. I will be with you always." Creevey heard the
words, but he did not see the look on the other's face.


Adam circumvented the boulder and reached a point on the cliff above
it, where its shallow roots clung to the mountain. His vantage ground
gave him a view of Creevey stumbling downward towards the easier slopes
where the first pines began. Very small he looked as his figure grew
dim in the brume.

Then Adam put forth his strength. He found a stance where, with his
feet against living rock, he thought he could prise the boulder from
its hold. . . . It quivered and moved, but at first it seemed as if it
were too deep-rooted to fall. Desperation gave him the little extra
force which was needed, and suddenly the foreground heaved, slipped,
and with a sickening hollow sigh dropped into nothingness. Thunder
awoke in the narrow glen, and the solid flank of the mountain seemed to
shudder. The air was thick with dust and snow, and Adam, perched above
the abyss, was for a moment blinded. Presently it cleared, and he saw
that the side of the ravine had been planed smooth, smooth as the
glassy rock-wall of the torrent. Only a bird could reach the Val
Saluzzana. . . .

Creevey was safe. He would be alarmed at the earthquake, and might
totter back to look for his friend, but sooner or later he would reach
the valley. It did not matter how long he took, for he was now beyond
the reach of his enemies. . . . Presently he would be restored to a
world which had sore need of him. Loeffler would have a potent ally.
The rock-fall was a curtain which cut him off from his foes and
inaugurated a new epoch in his life. He would be the same man, hungry,
masterful, audacious, infinitely resourceful, still striding with long
quick steps, but his face would be turned to another goal. The gods did
not stop half-way when they wrought miracles.

Adam looked into the chasm which was filled with a fine dust like
spindrift. That way lay the long road he had travelled since boyhood.
Did his eyes deceive him, or was there some brightening of the mist, as
if somewhere behind it there were the fires of sunset? Pleasant things
were there--all his youth with its hopes, and all the tense striving of
the last years--the grim things forgotten and only the sunshine hours
remaining. His friends, too, and Jacqueline above all. He felt a warm
uprush of affection, but it was an affection without longing or regret.
He had seen life and beauty and honour, and these things did not die;
they would endure to warm the world he was leaving.

He turned his face up the ravine whence he had come, and there the air
had the bitter clearness of an interval between snow-showers. His range
of vision was small, but every detail stood out hard and bleak. It was
like the world he had seen from the Greenland ice-cap, a world barren
of life, the ante-chamber of death. It was motionless as the grave, for
the wind had fallen. But there was movement in his ears. He could hear
the rasp of nailed boots on stone, and what sounded like human speech.
The pack was closing in on him.

* * * * * * *

Then suddenly he saw beyond it. His eyes were no longer looking at
clammy rock and lowering clouds, or the icy shoulder of the Pomagognon
lifting through a gap of cliff. . . . They were on blue water running
out to where the afternoon sun made a great dazzle of gold. He knew
that he had found the sea which had eluded him in all his dreams. He
was in a bay of white sand, and in front, crested with light foam, were
the skerries where the grey seals lived. The scents of thyme and
heather and salt were blent in a divine elemental freshness. Nigel had
come back to him--he saw him skipping by the edge of the tide--he saw
him running towards him--he felt his hand in his--he looked into eyes
bright with trust and love. From those eyes he seemed to draw youth and
peace and immortality.

* * * * * * *

A voice which was not Nigel's broke into his dream, but it did not mar
his peace. There only remained the trivial business of dying.




THE END




  BOOKS BY
  JOHN BUCHAN

  _The Thirty-Nine Steps_
  _Greenmantle_
  _Mr Standfast_
  _The Path of the King_
  _Huntingtower_
  _Midwinter_
  _The Three Hostages_
  _John Macnab_
  _The Dancing Floor_
  _Witch Wood_
  _The Runagates Club_
  _The Courts of the Morning_
  _Castle Gay_
  _The Blanket of the Dark_
  _The Gap in the Curtain_
  _A Prince of the Captivity_
  _The Free Fishers_
  _also_
  _The Half-hearted_
  _The Moon Endureth_
  _and_
  _Oliver Cromwell_


  HODDER AND
  STOUGHTON
  LTD., LONDON






[End of A Prince of the Captivity, by John Buchan]
