by John Buchan
“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 Würtemberg, 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 rôle 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 Wandervögel, 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 protégé 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 Wandervögel 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 café was filling up as the hour of apéritifs 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.