by John Buchan
I knew that it was simply incredible that Andrew could have committed the crime. Men are queer cattle, and I wouldn’t have put even murder past certain fairly decent fellows I knew, but this boy was emphatically not one of them. Unless he had gone stark mad I was positive that he could never have taken human life. I knew him intimately, in the way you know a fellow you have lived alone with for months, and that was one of the things I could bank on. All the same it seemed clear that he had shot Smit... I sent the longest telegram I ever sent in my life to a Scotch lawyer in Johannesburg called Dalgleish whom I believed in, telling him to move heaven and earth to get a reprieve. He was to see Andrew and wire me details about his state of mind. I thought then that temporary madness was probably our best line, and I believed myself that that was the explanation. I longed to take the train forthwith to Pretoria, but I was tied by the heels till the rest of my outfit came in. I was tortured by the thought that the hanging might have already taken place, for that wretched newspaper was a week old.
In two days I got Dalgleish’s reply. He had seen the condemned man, and had told him that he came from me. He reported that Andrew was curiously peaceful and apathetic, and not very willing to talk about the business except to declare his innocence. Dalgleish thought him not quite right in his mind, but he had been already examined, and the court had rejected the plea of insanity. He sent his love to me and told me not to worry.
I stirred up Dalgleish again, and got a further reply. Andrew admitted that he had fired the rifle, but not at Smit. He had killed something, but what it was he would not say. He did not seem to be in the least keen to save his neck.
When I reached Bulawayo, on my way south, I had a brain-wave, but the thing seemed so preposterous that I could hardly take it seriously. Still I daren’t neglect any chance, so I wired again to Dalgleish to try to have the execution postponed, until he got hold of the priest who lived in the berg above the Pufuri. I gave him full directions how to find him. I said that the old man had laid some curse on Andrew, and that that might explain his state of mind. After all demoniacal possession must be equivalent in law to insanity. But by this time I had become rather hopeless. It seemed a futile thing to be wiring this rigmarole when every hour was bringing the gallows nearer.
I left the railroad at Mafeking, for I thought I could save the long circuit by De Aar by trekking across country. I would have done better to stick to the train, for everything went wrong with me. I had a breakdown at the drift of the Selous river and had to wait a day in Rustenburg, and I had trouble again at Commando Nek, so that it was the evening of the third day before I reached Pretoria... As I feared, it was all over. They told me in the hotel that Andrew had been hanged that morning.
I went back to Johannesburg to see Dalgleish with a cold horror at my heart and complete mystification in my head. The Devil had taken an active hand in things and caused a hideous miscarriage of justice. If there had been anybody I could blame I would have felt better, but the fault seemed to lie only with the crookedness of fate. Dalgleish could tell me little. Smit had been the ordinary scallywag, not much of a fellow and no great loss to the world; the puzzle was why Andrew wanted to go with him. The boy in his last days had been utterly apathetic — bore no grudge against anybody — appeared at peace with the world, but didn’t seem to want to live. The predikant who visited him daily could make nothing of him. He appeared to be sane enough, but, beyond declaring his innocence, was not inclined to talk, and gave no assistance to those who were trying to get a reprieve... scarcely took any interest in it... He had asked repeatedly for me, and had occupied his last days in writing me a long letter, which was to be delivered unopened into my hand. Dalgleish gave me the thing, seven pages in Andrew’s neat caligraphy, and in the evening on his stoep I read it.
It was like a voice speaking to me out of the grave, but it was not the voice I knew. Gone was the enlightened commercially-minded young man, who had shed all superstition, and had a dapper explanation for everything in heaven and earth. It was a crude boy who had written those pages, a boy in whose soul old Calvinistic terrors had been awakened, and terrors older still out of primordial African shadows.
He had committed a great sin — that was the point he insisted upon, and by this sin he had set free something awful to prey on the world... At first it seemed sheer raving mania to me, but as I mused on it I remembered my own feelings in that empty grove. I had been solemnised, and this boy, with that in his blood which was not in mine, had suffered a cataclysmic spiritual experience. He did not dwell on it, but his few sentences were eloquent in their harsh intensity. He had struggled, he had tried to make light of it, to forget it, to despise it; but it rode him like a nightmare. He thought he was going mad. I had been right about that touch of brain fever.
As far as I could make it out, he believed that from that outraged sanctuary something real and living had gone forth, something at any rate of flesh and blood. But this idea may not have come to him till later, when his mind had been for several months in torture, and he had lost the power of sleep. At first, I think, his trouble was only an indefinite haunting, a sense of sin and impending retribution. But in Johannesburg the malaise had taken concrete form. He believed that through his act something awful was at large, with infinite power for evil — evil not only against the wrongdoer himself but against the world. And he believed that it might still be stopped, that it was still in the eastern bush. So crude a fancy showed how his normal intelligence had gone to bits. He had tumbled again into the blackveld world of his childhood.
He decided to go and look for it. That was where the tough white strain in him came out. He might have a Kaffir’s blind terrors, but he had the frontier Boer’s cast-iron courage. If you think of it, it needed a pretty stout heart to set out to find a thing the thought of which set every nerve quivering. I confess I didn’t like to contemplate that lonely, white-faced, tormented boy. I think he knew that tragedy must be the end of it, but he had to face up to that and take the consequences.
He heard of Smit’s expedition, and took a half share in it. Perhaps the fact that Smit had a baddish reputation was part of the attraction. He didn’t want as companion a man with whom he had anything in common, for he had to think his own thoughts and follow his own course.
Well, you know the end of it. In his letter he said nothing about the journey, except that he had found what he sought. I can readily believe that the two did not agree very well — the one hungry for mythical treasure, the other with a problem which all the gold in Africa could not solve... Somewhere, somehow, down in the Selati bushveld his incubus took bodily form, and he met - or thought he met - the thing which his impiety had released. I suppose we must call it madness. He shot his comrade, and thought he had killed an animal. ‘If they had looked next morning they would have found the spoor,’ he wrote. Smit’s death didn’t seem to trouble him at all -1 don’t think he quite realised it. The thing that mattered for him was that he had put an end to a terror and in some way made atonement. ‘Good-bye, and don’t worry about me,’ were the last words, ‘I am quite content.’
I sat a long time thinking, while the sun went down over the Magaliesberg. A gramophone was grinding away on an adjacent stoep, and the noise of the stamps on the Rand came like far-away drums. People at that time used to quote some Latin phrase about a new thing always coming out of Africa. I thought that it was not the new things in Africa that mattered so much as the old things.
I proposed to revisit that berg above the Pufuri and have a word with the priest, but I did not get a chance till the following summer, when I trekked down the Limpopo from Main Drift. I didn’t like the job, but I felt bound to have it out with that old man for Andrew’s sake. You see, I wanted something more to convince the Wakkerstroom household that the boy had not been guilty, as his father thought, of the sin of Cain.
I came round the corner of the berg one January evening after a day of blistering heat, and looked down on the cup of green pasture. One glanc
e showed me that there was not going to be any explanation with the priest... A bit of the cliff had broken away, and the rock fall had simply blotted out the grove and the rondavel. A huge mass of debris sloped down from half-way up the hill, and buried under it were the tall trees through which I had peered up at the sky. Already it was feathered with thorn-bush and grasses. There were no patches of crops on the sides of the cup, and crumbling mud walls were all that remained of the kraal. The jungle had flowed over the village, and, when I entered it, great moon flowers sprawled on the rubble, looking in the dusk like ghosts of a vanished race.
There was one new feature in the place. The landslip must have released the underground water, for a stream now flowed down the hollow. Beside it, in a meadow full of agapanthus and arum lilies, I found two Australian prospectors. One of them — he had been a Melbourne bank-clerk - had a poetic soul. ‘Nice little place,’ he said. ‘Not littered up with black fellows. If I were on a homesteading job, I reckon I’d squat here.’
The Post
Major Oliver Pugh’s Story
IT WAS THE day after the Lincolnshire, where there had been a close finish, and the talk at dinner wandered to historic neck-and-neck races of the past. It presently degenerated into a highly technical discussion between Burminster and Collatt, till Sandy Arbuthnot declared that it was like a Newmarket public-house.
‘If close finishes are common in racing,’ he said, ‘it only shows what a bad parallel the Turf makes with human life. I don’t know anything about the silly subject, but we English draw most of our ordinary metaphors from it and I believe it has a malign effect on our character. It gives us a false romanticism. The great contests of the world were all won with a wide margin. The true and lasting victories came triumphantly. You remember what Nietzsche said: “The divine always walks on light feet.” For your information, Tommy, I may say that Nietzsche was not a trainer.’
It was Sandy’s agreeable habit to fling an occasional paradox at the table with a view to starting an argument. He was the genuine sophist. This time he stirred up Pugh, who had come to the War Office from the Indian Staff Corps. Pugh had been a great figure in Secret Service work in the East, but he did not look the part, for he had the air of a polo-playing cavalry subaltern. The skin was stretched as tight over his cheek-bones as over the knuckles of a clenched fist, and was so dark that it had the appearance of beaten bronze. He had black hair, rather beady black eyes, and the hooky nose which in the Celt often goes with that colouring. He looked as if he had spent his life in tents, but as a matter of fact he had made his name in the office rather than in the field. Sandy, who knew his work, used to say Pugh had a positive genius for organising means of getting difficult knowledge, but that he himself could not discover why a child was crying. He could make the scheme: a very different type of man carried it out.
‘I don’t agree,’ Pugh said. ‘I think most victories are won by a short head — at any rate the victories worth having. When luck has come my way I’ve generally won on the post.’
‘That’s because you think of luck and not of form,’ said Sandy.
‘Nine times out of ten you need luck for form to win. The real value of form is that it can use the luck when it comes.’
Then he told us this story.
‘When I was brought to Europe in March 1918 and given a “hush” department on three floors of an eighteenth-century house in a back street, I had a good deal to learn about my business. That I learned it in reasonable time was due to the extraordinary fine staff that I found provided for me. Not one of them was a regular soldier. They were all gentlemen and educated men — they had to be in that job — but they came out of every sort of environment. One of the best was a Shetland laird, another was a Chancery K.C., and I had besides a metallurgical chemist, a golf champion, a leader-writer, a popular dramatist, several actuaries, and a curate. None of them thought of anything but his job, and at the end of the war, when some ass proposed to make them OBE’s, there was a very fair imitation of a riot. A more loyal crowd never existed, and they accepted me as their chief as unquestioningly as if I had been with them since 1914. All they asked was to be allowed to get on with their work.
‘The one who most interested me was my second-in-command, Philip Channell. He was a man of forty-three, about five foot four in height, weighing, I fancy, under nine stone, and almost as blind as an owl. He was good enough at papers with his double glasses, but he could hardly recognise you three yards off. I never met anybody quite like him. He had been a professor at some Midland college — mathematics or physics, I think — and as soon as the war began he had tried to enlist. Of course they wouldn’t have him — he was about E5 in any physical classification, besides being well over age — but he would take no refusal, and presently he worried his way into the Government service. Fortunately he found the very job he could do superlatively well, for I do not believe there was a man alive with more natural genius for cryptography.
‘I don’t know if any of you have ever given your mind to that heartbreaking subject. Anyhow you know that secret writing falls under two heads — codes and cyphers; and that codes are combinations of words and cyphers of numerals. I remember how one used to be told that no code or cypher which was practically useful was really undiscoverable, and in a sense that is true, especially of codes. A system of communication which is in constant use must obviously not be too intricate, and a working code, if you get long enough for the job, can generally be read. That is why a code is periodically changed by the users. There are rules in worrying out the permutations and combinations of letters in most codes, for human ingenuity seems to run in certain channels, and a man who has been a long time at the business gets surprisingly clever at it. You begin by finding out a little bit, and then empirically building up the rules of decoding, till in a week or two you get the whole thing. Then, when you are happily engaged in reading enemy messages, the code is changed suddenly, and you have to start again from the beginning... You can make a code, of course, that it is simply impossible to read except by accident —— the key to which is a page of some book, for example — but fortunately that kind is not of much general use.
‘Well, we got on pretty well with the codes, and read the intercepted enemy messages, cables and wireless, with considerable ease and precision. It was mostly diplomatic stuff, and not very important. The more valuable stuff was in cypher, and that was another pair of shoes. With a code you can build up the interpretation by degrees, but with a cypher you either know it or you don’t — there are no half-way houses. A cypher, since it deals with numbers, is a horrible field for mathematical ingenuity. Once you have written out the letters of a message in numerals there are many means by which you can lock it and double-lock it. The two main devices, as you know, are transposition and substitution, and there is no limit to the ways one or other or both can be used. There is nothing to prevent a cypher having a double meaning, produced by two different methods, and, as a practical question, you have to decide which meaning is intended. By way of an extra complication, too, the message, when decyphered, may turn out to be itself in a difficult code. I can tell you our job wasn’t exactly a rest cure...’
Burminster, looking puzzled, inquired as to the locking of cyphers, and Pugh explained.
‘You take a message and write it out in numerals — a group of two say, representing each letter — a — 21, b — 39 and so on. When you have got it written out horizontally, you draw, say, five vertical columns, and choose a word of five letters, which you write above them. Say the word is “Sandy”. You divide the numerical groups in your message by five, and the result is, say, 15. Then you take the groups and pour them into the vertical columns, following the alphabetical order of the letters in the key word — the first 15 into the second column headed by A, the second fifteen into the fourth column which is headed D, the last fifteen into the last column which is Y. That means that you have put your first cypher into a frame composed of five vertical columns. Then y
ou lock it. — You write out the contents of the columns horizontally, following the lines across. That is a locked message. To unlock it you have to have the key word, so as to put it back into the vertical columns, and then into the original horizontal form.’
‘He wasn’t quite like the others,’ said Pugh. ‘Most of my fellows were intent on their job for its own sake, and scarcely gave a thought to the war. You found the same thing in a lot of other behind-the-lines departments, and I daresay it was a good thing — it kept their nerves quiet and their minds undisturbed. After all our business was only to decode and decypher German messages — we had nothing to do with what use was made of them. When the Armistice came some of my people were flabbergasted - they hadn’t realised that their job was bound up with the war.
‘But Channell was different. He had started out by wanting to fight, and he always regarded himself as an active belligerent. He was there to beat the Boche, and he would have vastly preferred doing it with a machine-gun. Every phase of the campaign in every area was anxiously followed by him, and he used to pester me with questions and schemes. There was something very boyish, almost childlike, about the little man. He had a great brain packed in ice, but his heart was always on the flutter. I think he dreamed of doing something himself, something big, to help on victory, bringing off some great sensational coup which would matter tremendously. It was not that he wanted glory, for he was as shy as a woodcock, but he had cherished a picture of his duty and he wanted to live up to it. He was the kind of chap that leads forlorn hopes, for he simply pined to sacrifice himself. He was romantic, too. He used to listen to my yarns with wistful eyes and get terribly excited about things like the Canadians at Passchendaele and the tanks at Cambrai. I used to try and cheer him by telling him that he was doing priceless work, far better than if he were a second-lieutenant in the line, but I could see that he wasn’t convinced. He wanted something with more colour in it than puzzling through double spectacles over a mess of figures.