by John Buchan
We walked all day on the hills around Ivinghoe, and had a late lunch in the village inn. He spoke very little, but strode over the thymy downs with his eyes abstracted. Once, as we sat on the summit, he seemed to sigh and his face for a moment was very grave.
“What is the highest pleasure?” he asked suddenly. “Attainment? . . . No. Renunciation.”
“So I’ve heard the parsons say,” I observed.
He did not heed me. “To win everything that mankind has ever striven for, and then to cast it aside. To be Emperor of the Earth and then to slip out of the ken of mankind and take up the sandals and begging-bowl. The man who can do that has conquered the world — he is not a king but a god. Only he must be a king first to achieve it.”
I cannot hope to reproduce the atmosphere of that scene, the bare top of the hill in the blue summer weather, and that man, nearing, as he thought, the summit of success, and suddenly questioning all mortal codes of value. In all my dealings with Medina I was obsessed by the sense of my inferiority to him, that I was like a cab horse compared to an Arab stallion, and now I felt it like a blow in the face. That was the kind of thing Napoleon might have said — and done — had his schemes not gone astray. I knew I was contending with a devil, but I know also that it was a great devil.
We returned to town just in time to dress for dinner, and all my nervousness revived a hundredfold. This was the night of crisis, and I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn’t mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.
That evening I shaved, I remember, very carefully, as if I were decking myself out for a sacrifice. I wondered what would be my feelings when I next shaved. I wondered what Mary and Sandy were doing. . . .
What Mary and Sandy were doing at that precise moment I do not know, but I can now unfold certain contemporary happenings which were then hid from me. . . . Mercot and Gaudian were having a late tea in the Midland express, having nearly broken their necks in a furious motor race to catch the train at Hawick. The former was clean and shaven, his hair nicely cut, and his clothes a fairly well-fitting ready-made suit of flannels. He was deeply sunburnt, immensely excited, and constantly breaking in on Gaudian’s study of the works of Sir Walter Scott.
“Newhover is to be let loose to-day. What do you suppose he’ll do?” he asked.
“Nothing — yet awhile,” was the answer. “I said certain things to him. He cannot openly go back to Germany, and I do not think he dare come to England. He fears the vengeance of his employer. He will disappear for a little, and then emerge in some new crime with a new name and a changed face. He is the eternal scoundrel.”
The young man’s face lighted up pleasantly. “If I live to be a hundred,” he said, “I can’t enjoy anything half as much as that clip I gave him on the jaw.”
*****
In a room in a country house on the Middlesex and Bucks borders Turpin was talking to a girl. He was in evening dress, a very point-device young man, and she was wearing a wonderful gown, grass-green in colour and fantastically cut. Her face was heavily made up, and her scarlet lips and stained eyebrows stood out weirdly against the dead white of her skin. But it was a different face from that which I first saw in the dancing-hall. Life had come back to it, the eyes were no longer dull like pebbles, but were again the windows of a soul. There was still fear in those eyes and bewilderment, but they were human again, and shone at this moment with a wild affection.
“I am terrified,” she said. “I have to go to that awful place with that awful man. Please, Antoine, please, do not leave me. You have brought me out of a grave, and you cannot let me slip back again.”
He held her close to him and stroked her hair.
“I think it is — how do you say it? — the last lap. My very dear one, we cannot fail our friends. I follow you soon. The grey man — I do not know his name — he told me so, and he is a friend. A car is ordered for me half an hour after you drive off with that Odell.”
“But what does it all mean?” she asked.
“I do not know, but I think — I am sure — it is the work of our friends. Consider, my little one. I am brought to the house where you are, but those who have charge of you do not know I am here. When Odell comes I am warned and locked in my room. I am not allowed out of it. I have had no exercise except sparring with that solemn English valet. He indeed has been most amiable, and has allowed me to keep myself in form. He boxes well, too, but I have studied under our own Jules and he is no match for me. But when the coast is clear I am permitted to see you, and I have waked you from sleep, my princess. Therefore so far it is good. As to what will happen to-night I do not know, but I fancy it is the end of our troubles. The grey man has told me as much. If you go back to that dance place, I think I follow you, and then we shall see something. Have no fear, little one. You go back as a prisoner no more, but as an actress to play a part, and I know you will play the part well. You will not permit the man Odell to suspect. Presently I come, and I think there will be an éclaircissement — also, please God, a reckoning.”
The wooden-faced valet entered and signed to the young man, who kissed the girl and followed him. A few minutes later Turpin was in his own room, with the door locked behind him. Then came a sound of the wheels of a car outside, and he listened with a smile on his face. As he stood before the glass putting the finishing touches to his smooth hair he was still smiling — an ominous smile.
*****
Other things, which I did not know about, were happening that evening. From a certain modest office near Tower Hill a gentleman emerged to seek his rooms in Mayfair. His car was waiting for him at the street corner, but to his surprise as he got into it someone entered also from the other side, and the address to which the car ultimately drove was not Clarges Street. The office, too, which he had left locked and bolted was presently open, and men were busy there till far into the night — men who did not belong to his staff. An eminent publicist, who was the special patron of the distressed populations of Central Europe, was starting out to dine at his club, when he was unaccountably delayed, and had to postpone his dinner. The Spanish copper company in London Wall had been doing little business of late, except to give luncheons to numerous gentlemen, but that night its rooms were lit, and people who did not look like city clerks were investigating its documents. In Paris a certain French count of royalist proclivities, who had a box that night for the opera and was giving a little dinner beforehand, did not keep his appointment, to the discomfiture of his guests, and a telephone message to his rooms near the Champs Elysées elicited no reply. There was a gruff fellow at the other end who discouraged conversation. A worthy Glasgow accountant, an elder of the kirk and a prospective candidate for Parliament, did not return that evening to his family, and the police, when appealed to, gave curious answers. The office, just off Fleet Street, of the Christian Advocate of Milwaukee, a paper which cannot have had much of a circulation in England, was filled about six o’clock with silent preoccupied people, and the manager, surprised and rather wild of eye, was taken off in a taxi by two large gentlemen who had not had previously the honour of his acquaintance. Odd things seemed to be happening up and down the whole world. More than one ship did not sail at the appointed hour because of the interest of certain people in the passenger lists; a meeting of decorous bankers in Genoa was unexpectedly interrupted by the police; offices of the utmost respectability were occupied and examined by the blundering minions of the law; several fashionable actresses did not appear to gladden their admirers, and more than one pretty dancer was absent from the scene of her usual triumphs; a Senator in Western America, a high official in Rome, and four deputies in France found their movements restricted, and a Prince of the Church, after receiving a telephone message, fell to
his prayers. A mining magnate in Westphalia, visiting Antwerp on business, found that he was not permitted to catch the train he had settled on. Five men, all highly placed, and one woman, for no cause apparent to their relatives, chose to rid themselves of life between the hours of six and seven. There was an unpleasant occurrence in a town on the Loire, where an Englishman, motoring to the south of France — a typical English squire, well known in hunting circles in Shropshire — was visited at his hotel by two ordinary Frenchmen, whose conversation seemed unpalatable to him. He was passing something from his waistcoat pocket to his mouth, when they had the audacity to lay violent hands on him, and to slip something over his wrists.
*****
It was a heavenly clear evening when Medina and I set out to walk the half-mile to Mervyn Street. I had been so cloistered and harassed during the past weeks that I had missed the coming of summer. Suddenly the world seemed to have lighted up, and the streets were filled with that intricate odour of flowers, scent, hot wood pavements and asphalt which is the summer smell of London. Cars were waiting at house-doors, and women in pretty clothes getting into them; men were walking dinner-wards, with some of whom we exchanged greetings; the whole earth seemed full of laughter and happy movement. And it was shut off from me. I seemed to be living on the other side of a veil from this cheerful world, and I could see nothing but a lonely old man with a tragic face waiting for a lost boy. There was one moment at the corner of Berkeley Square when I accidentally jostled Medina, and had to clench my hands and bite my lips to keep myself from throttling him there and then.
The dining-room in Mervyn Street looked west, and the evening light strove with the candles on the table, and made a fairy-like scene of the flowers and silver. It was a full meeting — fifteen, I think — and the divine weather seemed to have put everybody in the best of spirits. I had almost forgotten Medina’s repute with the ordinary man, and was staggered anew at the signs of his popularity. He was in the chair that evening, and a better chairman of such a dinner I have never seen. He had the right word for everybody, and we sat down to table like a party of undergraduates celebrating a successful cricket-match.
I was on the chairman’s right hand, next to Burminster, with Palliser-Yeates opposite me. At first the talk was chiefly about the Derby and Ascot entries, about which Medina proved uncommonly well posted. He had a lot of inside knowledge from the Chilton stables, and showed himself a keen critic of form; also he was a perfect pundit about the pedigree of race-horses, and made Burminster, who fancied himself in the same line, gape with admiration. I suppose a brain like his could get up any subject at lightning speed, and he thought this kind of knowledge useful to him, for I don’t believe he cared more for a horse than for a cat.
Once, during the Somme battle, I went to dine at a French château behind the lines, as the guest of the only son of the house. It was an ancient place, with fishponds and terraces, and there were only two people in it, an old Comtesse and a girl of fifteen called Simone. At dinner, I remember, a decrepit butler filled for me five glasses of different clarets, till I found the one I preferred. Afterwards I walked in the garden with Simone in a wonderful yellow twilight, watching the fat carp in the ponds, and hearing the grumbling of the distant guns. I felt in that hour the poignant contrast of youth and innocence and peace with that hideous world of battle a dozen miles off. To-night I had the same feeling — the jolly party of clean, hard, decent fellows, and the abominable hinterland of mystery and crime of which the man at the head of the table was the master. I must have been poor company, but happily everybody was talkative, and I did my best to grin at Burminster’s fooling.
Presently the talk drifted away from sport. Palliser-Yeates was speaking, and his fresh boyish colour contrasted oddly with his wise eyes and grave voice.
“I can’t make out what is happening,” he said in reply to a remark of Leithen’s. “The City has suddenly become jumpy, and there’s no reason in the facts that I can see for it. There’s been a good deal of realisation of stocks, chiefly by foreign holders, but there are a dozen explanations of that. No, there’s a kind of malaise about, and it’s unpleasantly like what I remember in June 1914. I was in Whittingtons’ then, and we suddenly found the foundations beginning to crumble — oh yes, before the Serajevo murders. You remember Charlie Esmond’s smash — well, that was largely due to the spasm of insecurity that shook the world. People now and then get a feeling in their bones that something bad is going to happen. And probably they are right, and it has begun to happen.”
“Good Lord!” said Leithen. “I don’t like this. Is it another war?”
Palliser-Yeates did not answer at once. “It looks like it. I admit it’s almost unthinkable, but then all wars are really unthinkable, till you’re in the middle of them.”
“Nonsense!” Medina cried. “There’s no nation on the globe fit to go to war, except half-civilised races with whom it is the normal condition. You forget how much we know since 1914. You couldn’t get even France to fight without provoking a revolution — a middle-class revolution, the kind that succeeds.”
Burminster looked relieved. “The next war,” he said, “will be a dashed unpleasant affair. So far as I can see there will be very few soldiers killed, but an enormous number of civilians. The safest place will be the front. There will be such a rush to get into the army that we’ll have to have conscription to make people remain in civil life. The embusqués will be the regulars.”
As he spoke someone entered the room, and to my amazement I saw that it was Sandy.
He was looking extraordinarily fit and as brown as a berry. He murmured an apology to the chairman for being late, patted the bald patch on Burminster’s head, and took a seat at the other end of the table. “I’ll cut in where you’ve got to,” he told the waiters. “No — don’t bother about fish. I want some English roast beef and a tankard of beer.”
There was a chorus of questions.
“Just arrived an hour ago. I’ve been in the East — Egypt and Palestine. Flew most of the way back.”
He nodded to me, and smiled at Medina and raised his tankard to him.
I was not in a good position for watching Medina’s face, but so far as I could see it was unchanged. He hated Sandy, but he didn’t fear him now, when his plans had practically come to fruition. Indeed he was very gracious to him, and asked in his most genial tones what he had been after.
“Civil aviation,” said Sandy. “I’m going to collar the pilgrim traffic to the Holy Places. You’ve been in Mecca?” he asked Pugh, who nodded. “You remember the hamelidari crowd who used to organise the transport from Mespot. Well, I’m a hamelidari on a big scale. I am prepared to bring the rank of hadji within reach of the poorest and feeblest. I’m going to be the great benefactor of the democracy of Islam, by means of a fleet of patched-up ‘planes and a few kindred spirits that know the East. I’ll let you fellows in on the ground-floor when I float my company. John” — he addressed Palliser-Yeates—”I look to you to manage the flotation.”
Sandy was obviously ragging, and no one took him seriously. He sat there with his merry brown face, looking absurdly young and girlish, so that the most suspicious could have seen nothing more in him than the ordinary mad Englishman who lived for adventure and novelty. Me he never addressed, and I was glad of it, for I was utterly at sea. What did he mean by turning up now? What part was he to play in the events of the night? I could not have controlled the anxiety in my voice if I had been forced to speak to him.
A servant brought Medina a note, which he opened at leisure and read. “No answer,” he said, and stuffed it into his pocket. I had a momentary dread that he might have got news of Macgillivray’s round-up, but his manner reassured me.
There were people there who wanted to turn Sandy to other subjects, especially Fulleylove and the young Cambridge don, Nightingale. They wanted to know about South Arabia, of which at the time the world was talking. Some fellow, I forget his name, was trying to raise an expedition to
explore it.
“It’s the last geographical secret left unriddled,” he said, and now he spoke seriously. “Well, perhaps not quite the last. I’m told there’s still something to be done with the southern tributaries of the Amazon. Mornington, you know, believes there’s a chance of finding some of the Inca people still dwelling in the unexplored upper glens. But all the rest have gone. Since the beginning of the century we’ve made a clean sweep of the jolly old mysteries that made the world worth living in. We have been to both the Poles, and to Lhasa, and to the Mountains of the Moon. We haven’t got to the top of Everest yet, but we know what it is like. Mecca and Medina are as stale as Bournemouth. We know that there’s nothing very stupendous in the Brahmaputra gorges. There’s little left for a man’s imagination to play with, and our children will grow up in a dull, shrunken world. Except, of course, the Great Southern Desert of Arabia.”
“Do you think it can be crossed?” Nightingale asked.
“It’s hard to say, and the man who tried it would take almighty risks. I don’t fancy myself pinning my life to milk camels. They’re chancy brutes.”
“I don’t believe there’s anything there,” said Fulleylove, “except eight hundred miles of soft sand.”
“I’m not so sure. I’ve heard strange stories. There was a man I met once in Oman, who went west from the Manah oasis . . .”
He stopped to taste the club madeira, then set down the glass and looked at his watch.
“Great Scott!” he said. “I must be off. I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I felt I must see you all again. You don’t mind my butting in?”
He was half-way to the door, when Burminster asked where he was going.
“To seek the straw in some sequestered grange. . . . Meaning the ten-thirty from King’s Cross. I’m off to Scotland to see my father. Remember, I’m the last prop of an ancient house. Good-bye, all of you. I’ll tell you about my schemes at the next dinner.”