‘For example,’ said Don Perez, ‘there is this Pantelli whom Properjohn has been expecting tonight. We have to work in with him, although I cannot approve his trade. Hiding all over Europe, as you know, are men stained with the most abominable crimes. They have taken booty of one sort or another with them – including works of art – and Pantelli makes a business of negotiating these for them in order to build up funds abroad. It is not a nice profession.’
‘Decidedly not.’ Meredith sniffed at his brandy. ‘One would be very unhappy at conniving at the escape of murderers.’
‘Precisely so.’ Don Perez nodded gravely. ‘By the way, Mr Meredith, I suppose it is quite certain that we shall not see Vogelsang – the real Vogelsang – again?’
As a quick home thrust this was not at all bad. ‘No,’ said Meredith. ‘Nor Bubear either.’
Don Perez sighed. ‘These necessities are sometimes imposed upon one out of sheer pressure of brute fact. Necessitas non habet legem, as Sallust observes.’
‘Publilius Syrus,’ said Meredith mildly. And even as he made this donnish correction there came upon him one of those obscure promptings to which he had been intermittently subject ever since his adventures began. ‘This Pantelli’, he said, ‘appears to be concerned at the moment with a couple of reputed Giorgiones. Just how is he going about it?’
‘Very sensibly.’ Don Perez spoke without hesitation – and this made Meredith feel that the sack or coffin must by now be in the next room. ‘Very sensibly, indeed. He has paid us a substantial commission in advance and we have agreed to take him straight to Neff’s man – who is at present, I believe, in Tampico – and he will then make his own deal. Neff, as you may have gathered, is the biggest collector we have contacted so far.’
‘And the Giorgiones themselves?’
‘We ferried them some time ago and they are waiting at Depot 10. Pantelli has only to send a cable, Herbert ill expect George only, and we will have them forwarded on to Neff’s own place.’
‘I see. And did you think of George only – and all those passwords about London and Berlin – yourself?’
‘As a matter of fact, I did.’ Don Perez Sierra y Campo looked faintly abashed. ‘Properjohn, I know, disapproved. But Properjohn has gone – only, I assure you, to make boxes and crates – and the passwords remain. A little romantic mystification suits my taste. And now I think I shall make coffee.’
It must, Meredith felt, be getting uncommonly late. What was happening at the castle? Was it not likely that Don Perez, even before he sat down to dinner with the man he pretended to accept as Vogelsang, had ordered some assault upon it for the purpose of seizing a girl who now knew far too much about his organization? Jean had already narrowly escaped the Firth of Forth. Meredith was determined that she should escape the Sound of Moila. So he must either get clear at once from the headquarters of the International Society or continue to play for time and occasion by affecting to be drawn towards its President’s outrageous proposal. ‘I cannot see’, he said, with an irony which he tried to make sound uncertain, ‘that I am at all fitted to discharge the responsible office you suggest for me. It would appear chiefly to require a first-hand acquaintance with low life and criminal practice.’
But Don Perez, after pausing to look slightly pained, brushed this aside. ‘I design’, he said, ‘a radical change in the scope of the duties. You must not take Properjohn as a criterion. Indeed, I think we must have you called Secretary-General, with several men like Properjohn (although more efficient, of course) working under you. The fact is that our superior clients like to feel that they are in contact with an organization characterized by a little polish, erudition, scholarship – that sort of thing. Hitherto I have been obliged to carry all that myself. But you…’
And Don Perez talked on. He must, Meredith reflected, have a thoroughly stupid side to him or he would scarcely imagine that a middle-aged man with whom orderly living had become second nature was to be won over by a little blarney and a little wine. There was, of course, the further point that it was acquiescence or death, but this only made the man’s proposal the stranger. For what reliance could he propose to place upon an associate who had entered his organization under duress?
And suddenly Meredith saw that the answer to this was simple. The first job the new Secretary-General would be given would be of the kind from which no turning back was possible. It would not be some bit of minor organizing from which he could bolt with his denunciations to the police. It would be the perpetration of an absolute crime which would put him in the power of the Society for ever. Likely enough, he would be required to seek out his predecessor Properjohn amid his blameless crates and boxes and murder him, like an incoming priest or king performing his unholy ritual in The Golden Bough. Yes, that would suit Don Perez’s taste even more than the passwords. And all this decidedly made the prospect no more encouraging. If he were invited to liquidate Properjohn, the game would be at an end.
Meredith looked at his host and found him still at a full tide of easy eloquence. He was talking so eloquently that it was reasonable to suppose that at the moment he had nothing important to say, and here then was a good opportunity to take fleeting stock of the situation, particularly in its physical and topographical aspects. Don Perez’s dining-room (since he was, after all, the invalid uncle of the Laird of Carron) was in a separate group of rooms on the first floor. Which meant that liberty lay not merely outside its windows, but some twenty feet below them. Or perhaps – for the whole building, Meredith remembered, had little elevation – no more than fifteen feet. And although underneath these particular windows there might lie a flagged path, or a rockery, or even some sort of area or basement, the reasonable chance was that there would be a flowerbed or grass. Once landed there – and the drop should hold no terrors for one who had graduated from Bubear’s warehouse – there was a whole moorland into which to vanish. If necessary, one could go right over Ben Carron and find the fairly sizeable town which lay somewhere on the other side. But it would be better to take the risk of making straight for Moila, of somehow getting across the Sound, and of endeavouring to hold the castle until help was summoned.
There was the wretch Higbed, of course – but Meredith no longer considered that his first duty lay in endeavouring to rescue him. The man could scarcely have been dogged by furniture vans and brought all the way to Carron Lodge or its environs simply to have his throat cut; and Properjohn’s little plan for him, whatever it was, must be reckoning on the live man and not a corpse. Higbed therefore, though conceivably uncomfortable, was presumably safe for the time. Meredith looked at the windows.
Or rather he looked at the curtains – not here of Hunting Stuart – which concealed them. It was conceivable that the windows themselves were heavily barred or even that armed retainers lurked in their recesses ready to jump out and aid their employer.
Meredith looked at the doors, of which there was one at each end of the room. That through which he had come gave upon a tolerably long corridor and a flight of stairs leading down to a hall. As a means of escape, he distrusted this altogether. The other, through which an elaborate dinner had been brought, presumably led to a servants’ staircase, a hatch or perhaps a lift, and then to sundry offices. And this, too, Meredith did not care for. In fact, a window was the thing.
At this point he became aware that Don Perez was pouring out more brandy – which Meredith by no means proposed to drink – and had returned to the particularly idiotic theme of those enchantments of the flesh which were to open up before the new Secretary-General. How, Meredith wondered, could a clever scoundrel be so absurd? But it would be well to display himself as a little moved by these seductions. ‘Well, I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a bit old for that sort of thing.’ And Meredith looked at Don Perez glumly enough, since he felt that a particularly nasty piece of play-acting lay in front of him. He remembered his embarrassed spe
culations as he first walked down Bubear’s whitewashed corridor, and the extremely disconcerting quality of his confused encounter with the Horton Venus. Perhaps Don Perez, in his Mephistophelean role, was going to draw a curtain and reveal some modern Helen of Troy who should stand as bonus to his first year’s wages. For was anything too fantastic to be conceived of in this bizarre retreat?
But Don Perez, it seemed, had no exhibits. He simply talked. He talked women. He kept on talking women with all the freedom and erudition of an Aretino. And presently Meredith was wondering whether there was not something in this absurd-seeming technique after all. Might it not be like the apparently crude repetitiveness of modern advertising – in other words a scientifically valid means of penetrating to and influencing the subliminal operations of the will, the very depths of the mind? Might not this sort of sustained talk, suitably compounded with old brandy, not merely seduce but permanently condition even a mature personality? For it was a sort of suggestion therapy which had the hidden ape and tiger on its side. As in the skilled indoctrination of cruelty to the abominable possibilities of which the world had recently awakened, a little would go a long way.
And here Meredith found he had hit upon a very interesting speculation, and one to which he was able to give an altogether objective regard. For the simple truth was that not even the Aretino of the Sonnets – and certainly not Don Perez Sierra y Campo himself – could hold a candle in all this to Meredith’s virtuous old Romans once they were in their slippered and smoking-room vein. Meredith therefore (who had thought he might be obliged, like Dr Johnson on a substantially different occasion, to remove his mind and think of Tom Thumb) found himself listening to Don Perez with substantial, if academic, interest. It was like watching a slightly inferior examination candidate cover familiar ground – not an absorbing activity, but one offering reasonable scope for the exercise of the judgement.
Don Perez seemed presently to feel that this Temptation of St Anthony was not going too well. Imperceptibly, he abandoned the more curious and esoteric aspects of his subject. It was as if the chambering and perverse whispering, the little lurid fires of a score of deviant lusts, faded on the air and left it warm and golden: Giorgione’s or Titian’s or Palma Vecchio’s air – that or the air of Arcady. And now the theme was pagan – carnal and innocent at once – and the evocation all of the eternal pursuit of beauty through the groves. Here, said Don Perez, was the archetypal and sovereign activity of the male, immortally enshrined in the exquisite mythology of Greece. Apollo hunting Daphne, Syrinx fleeing from Pan: here is the basic pattern of human life, where all pleasure lies in man’s triumphant pursuit and capture of the loath and trembling maid.
Don Perez had got so far when Meredith became aware of some altogether untoward disturbance in his host’s well-regulated house. A moment later the door from the offices burst open and there bounded into the room his late companion Shamus – a Shamus juvenile, dishevelled, panic-stricken, disrobed. And behind in hot pursuit, blind as if through some maened frenzy to all propriety of demeanour and place, poured the so-lately decorous maidservants of the Laird of Carron.
Not Apollo and Daphne, not Zeus and Semele, not the Rape of the Sabines, Meredith thought. Not this but the rout of Thracian women about to rend their Orpheus limb from limb and send his gory visage down the burn, down the swift Carron to the Moila shore. Here was that with which the Celtic eye of Shamus had conversed, here was the riddle of his disappearance solved, and here was tumultuous evidence that the precocious lad, dispersedly amorous, had mixed his dates or bitten off more than he could chew. The archetypal male, thought Meredith – and was aware of himself as adding to the uproar his own largest laughter. Shamus made for the farther door, the Bacchantes streamed behind with rumpled aprons and flying hair. And Meredith realized that by this outrageous intrusion of fact upon phantasy Don Perez Sierra y Campo was for the moment utterly distracted. The opportunity, then, had come. He ran for a window, tore aside its curtains, thrust up a sash, and leapt over into darkness below.
XI
Since he knew that Don Perez’s dining-room was on the first floor, and had indeed made careful calculations as to its height from the ground, this leap – Meredith thought as he fell through space – was a sadly amateur affair. Presently he would be picked up with a broken leg. And because he had rejected the allurements of the living Aphrodite he would be put in a sack and consigned to the waves from which the offended goddess sprang.
This classical thought (which was certainly the result of Don Perez’s table-talk) had scarcely run its course when Meredith discovered with some surprise that he was running too. Over his right hand there was trickling what he guessed to be blood; his right knee hurt; in his right side there was an uncomfortable sensation of twist or sprain. These inconveniences were the price of having forgotten to lower himself at full length before dropping: an elementary art which he had been taught (he now remembered) when commencing fire-fighting not many years ago. But he could get along fast enough – faster than in pitch darkness, it was at all judicious to go. But then if Macbeth’s physician did, in fact, ever get from Dunsinane away and clear he most assuredly made for cover in the remains of Birnam Wood with a haste which little regarded the chances of taking a tumble in the heather.
Meredith ran. Remembering what he had been taught by games masters at his private school, he ran without looking over his shoulder. His speed was the better because he was going downhill, and because he derived from this an elementary sense of direction. A downward slope must lead him to the burn. And the burn, he knew, headed for the sea in what was roughly the neighbourhood of Moila.
There was no moon, and in a wide deep arc to the west the sky was overcast; only behind him, and trailing southwards from the Great Square of Pegasus, ran a broad river of stars unimpeded by cloud. Don Perez’s dining-room had been brightly lit; for a time the darkness seemed absolute; and Meredith was brought up hard and painfully by what must be the stone wall bounding the garden of Carron Lodge. He scaled this and was among larches. The soft carpeting of their needles felt beneath his feet and their dark mass overhead gave him a momentary sense of security. Then their trunks gathered round him like the bars of some maze-like cage traversed in dream; at first so many stationary presences dimly discerned, they seemed to take motion to themselves as he zigzagged gropingly among them; soon they were a nightmare machine of obliquely gliding perpendicular bars, designed to advance, to buffet and to withdraw. The larches hit out at him and hit again. He dodged one only to find another coming up in flank or from behind. For a bewildering space he was both Meredith and the lad Shamus – Shamus with the maenad women menacingly about him. By an immense effort of the will he stopped dead and considered the fact – which somehow seemed altogether surprising – that he had momentarily lost his head. He could not recall that this had ever happened to him before, even in childhood. But had he not embarked on this mad adventure on the theory that a man does well at fifty to find what new worlds of experience he can? Provided, of course, that he is capable or coping with them in a reasonably efficient way. Which meant, for the present, eschewing reflection in favour of a precise use of the senses. Meredith listened.
The burn could not be far away. Beneath its dominant monotonous flow it harboured a myriad tiny accidents of sound, of varying ripple and eddy, and these were like an urgent whispering pitched just beyond the range of an anxious ear. To imagine in this nocturnal murmuring a sinister purposefulness, a network of menacing dispositions stealthily made, was easy enough. It is only civilization and security that rob the face of nature of an abundant and fearsome animism: demons yelling in the storm, slumbering giants in the swelling contours that ring a familiar plain. Meredith listened once more. A man’s voice called out somewhere behind him and there was an answering shout from farther back. The pursuit had begun.
Carron Lodge (as had been startlingly evident) held several women servants. These, although not wit
hout well-developed hunting instincts of their own, were unlikely to join effectively in a chase over the heather, or to be at all in the confidence of the International Society. Of menservants Meredith had seen only one, and there was a limit to the number that Don Perez (or Properjohn) could colourably maintain in an establishment of so moderate a size. And the night was dark and the moors were wide. Unless the headquarters of the Society ran to bloodhounds – and to bloodhounds altogether more pertinacious than Bubear’s had been – it seemed to Meredith that he had a chance of getting clean away. And the chance would be strongest if he moved inland. By turning away from any sustained ascent, he could avoid going dangerously high on Ben Carron; and by walking through the remainder of the night he could make himself into a mere needle in a haystack so far as any immediate power of search could extend.
And yet Meredith felt he had better aim for Moila. It was true that the enemy, by a swift deployment of part of his forces, could easily enough cut his own uncertain route to the coast. But, even so, the Sound was long, the island beyond it sizeable, and there seemed no reason to regard a successful return to the castle as hopeless. How, then, should he proceed? The burn was his only guide, and this the enemy knew. Assuredly, then, they would press down it with all the speed they could contrive. This meant that there were two feasible plans.
He could follow. That was to say, he could go off downstream with sufficient disturbance and definiteness to set his pursuers well on that track, and then he could double back and become the cautious pursuer himself. Or he could keep up, moving away from the burn on one side or the other until almost out of earshot, and guiding himself by its murmur or by whatever noise the enemy made. Meredith decided on this second course. And he decided – this with some idea of bloodhounds in his mind – that he would begin by crossing the burn. He would then move westward at whatever seemed the best distance from its southern bank.
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