by John Buchan
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 Bàn. 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 Bàn 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 Bàn — 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 rôle. 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 mount
ain 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 rôle 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.