The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  When Ashenden read over the letter he was not altogether satisfied. But it was the best he could do. It had an air of verisimilitude which the words lacked because, knowing little English, she had written phonetically, the spelling was atrocious and the handwriting like a child’s; she had crossed out words and written them over again. Some of the phrases he had put in French. Once or twice tears had fallen on the pages and blurred the ink.

  ‘I leave you now,’ said Ashenden. ‘It may be that when next you see me I shall be able to tell you that you are free to go where you choose. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Spain.’

  ‘Very well, I will have everything prepared.’

  She shrugged her shoulders. He left her.

  There was nothing now for Ashenden to do but wait. He sent a messenger to Lausanne in the afternoon, and next morning went down to the quay to meet the boat. There was a waiting-room next to the ticket-office and here he told the detectives to hold themselves in readiness. When a boat arrived the passengers advanced along the pier in line and their passports were examined before they were allowed to go ashore. If Chandra came and showed his passport, and it was very likely that he was travelling with a false one, issued probably by a neutral nation, he was to be asked to wait and Ashenden was to identify him. Then he would be arrested. It was with some excitement that Ashenden watched the boat come in and the little group of people gathered at the gangway. He scanned them closely but saw no one who looked in the least like an Indian. Chandra had not come. Ashenden did not know what to do. He had played his last card. There were not more than half a dozen passengers for Thonon, and when they had been examined and gone their way he strolled slowly along the pier.

  ‘Well, it’s no go,’ he said to Félix, who had been examining the passports. ‘The gentleman I expected hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘I have a letter for you.’

  He handed Ashenden an envelope addressed to Madame Lazzari on which he immediately recognized the spidery handwriting of Chandra Lal. At that moment the steamer from Geneva which was going to Lausanne and the end of the lake hove in sight. It arrived at Thonon every morning twenty minutes after the steamer going in the opposite direction had left. Ashenden had an inspiration.

  ‘Where is the man who brought it?’

  ‘He’s in the ticket-office.’

  ‘Give him the letter and tell him to return to the person who gave it to him. He is to say that he took it to the lady and she sent it back. If the person asks him to take another letter he is to say that it is not much good as she is packing her trunk and leaving Thonon.’

  He saw the letter handed over and the instructions given and then walked back to his little house in the country.

  The next boat on which Chandra could possibly come arrived about five, and having at that hour an important engagement with an agent working in Germany, he warned Félix that he might be a few minutes late. But if Chandra came he could easily be detained; there was no great hurry since the train in which he was to be taken to Paris did not start till shortly after eight. When Ashenden had finished his business he strolled leisurely down to the lake. It was light still and from the top of the hill he saw the steamer pulling out. It was an anxious moment and instinctively he quickened his steps. Suddenly he saw someone running towards him and recognized the man who had taken the letter.

  ‘Quick, quick,’ he cried. ‘He’s there.’

  Ashenden’s heart gave a great thud against his chest.

  ‘At last.’

  He began to run too and as they ran the man, panting, told him how he had taken back the unopened letter. When he put it in the Indian’s hand he turned frightfully pale (‘I should never have thought an Indian could turn that colour,’ he said), and turned it over and over in his hand as though he could not understand what his own letter was doing there. Tears sprang to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. (‘It was grotesque, he’s fat, you know.’) He said something in a language the man did not understand and then in French asked him when the boat went to Thonon. When he got on board he looked about, but did not see him, then he caught sight of him, huddled up in an ulster with his hat drawn down over his eyes, standing alone in the bows. During the crossing he kept his eyes fixed on Thonon.

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked Ashenden.

  ‘I got off first and Monsieur Félix told me to come for you.’

  ‘I suppose they’re holding him in the waiting-room.’

  Ashenden was out of breath when they reached the pier. He burst into the waiting-room. A group of men, talking at the top of their voices and gesticulating wildly, were clustered round a man lying on the ground.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he cried.

  ‘Look,’ said Monsieur Félix.

  Chandra Lal lay there, his eyes wide open and a thin line of foam on his lips, dead. His body was horribly contorted.

  ‘He’s killed himself. We’ve sent for the doctor. He was too quick for us.’

  A sudden thrill of horror passed through Ashenden.

  When the Indian landed Félix recognized from the description that he was the man they wanted. There were only four passengers. He was the last. Félix took an exaggerated time to examine the passports of the first three, and then took the Indian’s. It was a Spanish one and it was all in order. Félix asked the regulation questions and noted them on the official sheet. Then he looked at him pleasantly and said:

  ‘Just come into the waiting-room for a moment. There are one or two formalities to fulfil.’

  ‘Is my passport not in order?’ the Indian asked.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Chandra hesitated, but then followed the official to the door of the waiting-room. Félix opened it and stood aside.

  ‘Entrez.’

  Chandra went in and the two detectives stood up. He must have suspected at once that they were police-officers and realized that he had fallen into a trap.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Félix. ‘I have one or two questions to put to you.’

  ‘It is hot in here,’ he said, and in point of fact they had a little stove there that kept the place like an oven. ‘I will take off my coat if you permit.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Félix graciously.

  He took off his coat, apparently with some effort, and he turned to put it on a chair, and then before they realized what had happened they were startled to see him stagger and fall heavily to the ground. While taking off his coat Chandra had managed to swallow the contents of a bottle that was still clasped in his hand. Ashenden put his nose to it. There was a very distinct odour of almonds.

  For a little while they looked at the man who lay on the floor. Félix was apologetic.

  ‘Will they be very angry?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘I don’t see that it was your fault,’ said Ashenden. ‘Anyhow, he can do no more harm. For my part I am just as glad he killed himself. The notion of his being executed did not make me very comfortable.’

  In a few minutes the doctor arrived and pronounced life extinct.

  ‘Prussic acid,’ he said to Ashenden.

  Ashenden nodded.

  ‘I will go and see Madame Lazzari,’ he said. ‘If she wants to stay a day or two longer I shall let her. But if she wants to go to-night of course she can. Will you give the agents at the station instructions to let her pass?’

  ‘I shall be at the station myself,’ said Félix.

  Ashenden once more climbed the hill. It was night now, a cold, bright night with an unclouded sky and the sight of the new moon, a white shining thread, made him turn three times the money in his pocket. When he entered the hotel he was seized on a sudden with distaste for its cold banality. It smelled of cabbage and boiled mutton. On the walls of the hall were coloured posters of railway companies advertising Grenoble, Carcassonne and the bathing places of Normandy. He went upstairs and after a brief knock opened the door of Giulia Lazzari’s room. She was sitting in front of her dressing-table, looking at herself in the glass, just idly or despai
ringly, apparently doing nothing, and it was in this that she saw Ashenden as he came in. Her face changed suddenly as she caught sight of his and she sprang up so vehemently that the chair fell over.

  ‘What is it? Why are you so white?’ she cried.

  She turned round and stared at him and her features were gradually twisted to a look of horror.

  ‘Il est pris,’ she gasped.

  ‘Il est mort,’ said Ashenden.

  ‘Dead! He took the poison. He had the time for that. He’s escaped you after all.’

  ‘What do you mean? How did you know about the poison?’

  ‘He always carried it with him. He said that the English should never take him alive.’

  Ashenden reflected for an instant. She had kept that secret well. He supposed the possibility of such a thing should have occurred to him. How was he to anticipate these melodramatic devices?

  ‘Well, now you are free. You can go wherever you like and no obstacle shall be put in your way. Here are your ticket and your passport and here is the money that was in your possession when you were arrested. Do you wish to see Chandra?’

  She started.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘There is no need. I thought you might care to.’

  She did not weep. Ashenden supposed that she had exhausted all her emotion. She seemed apathetic.

  ‘A telegram will be sent to-night to the Spanish frontier to instruct the authorities to put no difficulties in your way. If you will take my advice you will get out of France as soon as you can.’

  She said nothing, and since Ashenden had no more to say he made ready to go.

  ‘I am sorry that I have had to show myself so hard to you. I am glad to think that now the worst of your troubles are over and I hope that time will assuage the grief that I know you must feel for the death of your friend.’

  Ashenden gave her a little bow and turned to the door. But she stopped him.

  ‘One little moment,’ she said. ‘There is one thing I should like to ask. I think you have some heart.’

  ‘Whatever I can do for you, you may be sure I will.’

  ‘What are they going to do with his things?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  Then she said something that confounded Ashenden. It was the last thing he expected.

  ‘He had a wrist-watch that I gave him last Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Can I have it back?’

  JOHN BUCHAN

  THE LOATHLY OPPOSITE

  Burminster had been to a Guildhall dinner the night before, which had been attended by many – to him – unfamiliar celebrities. He had seen for the first time in the flesh people whom he had long known by reputation, and he declared that in every case the picture he had formed of them had been cruelly shattered. An eminent poet, he said, had looked like a starting-price bookmaker, and a financier of world-wide fame had been exactly like the music-master at his preparatory school. Wherefore Burminster made the profound deduction that things were never what they seemed.

  ‘That’s only because you have a feeble imagination,’ said Sandy Arbuthnot. ‘If you had really understood Timson’s poetry you would have realized that it went with close-cropped red hair and a fat body, and you should have known that Macintyre [this was the financier] had the music-and-metaphysics type of mind. That’s why he puzzles the City so. If you understand a man’s work well enough you can guess pretty accurately what he’ll look like. I don’t mean the colour of his eyes and his hair, but the general atmosphere of him.’

  It was Sandy’s agreeable habit to fling an occasional paradox at the table with the view of starting an argument. 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 cheekbones 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 was himself a very good refutation of Sandy’s theory.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ Pugh said. ‘At least not as a general principle. One piece of humanity whose work I studied with the microscope for two aching years upset all my notions when I came to meet it.’

  Then he told us this story.

  ‘When I was brought to England in November ’ 17 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 extraordinarily fine staff that I found provided for me. Not one of them was a regular soldier. They were all 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 an Admiralty Court KC, and I had, besides, a metallurgical chemist, a golf champion, a leader-writer, a popular dramatist, several actuaries, and an East End curate. None of them thought of anything but his job, and at the end of the War, when some ass proposed to make them OBEs, 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.

  ‘To the War in the ordinary sense they scarcely gave a thought. 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 concentrated. After all, our business was only to decode and decipher German messages; we had nothing to do with the use which was made of them. It was a curious little nest, and when the Armistice came my people were flabbergasted – they hadn’t realized that their job was bound up with the War.

  ‘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 recognize you three yards off. 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 E 5 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 a job which 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 heart-breaking subject. Anyhow, you know that secret writing falls under two heads – codes and ciphers, and that codes are combinations of words and ciphers of numerals. I remember how one used to be told that no code or cipher 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 cipher, and that was another pair of shoes. With a code you can build up the interpretation by degrees, but with
a cipher you either know it or you don’t – there are no half-way houses. A cipher, 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 cipher 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 deciphered, 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 ciphers.

  ‘It would take too long to explain. Roughly, you write out a message horizontally in numerals; then you pour it into vertical columns, the number and order of which are determined by a key-word; then you write out the contents of the columns horizontally, following the lines across. 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.’

  Burminster cried out like one in pain. ‘It can’t be done. Don’t tell me that any human brain could solve such an acrostic.’

  ‘It was frequently done,’ said Pugh.

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Lord bless you, not by me. I can’t do a simple cross-word puzzle. By my people.’

  ‘Give me the trenches,’ said Burminster in a hollow voice. ‘Give me the trenches any day. Do you seriously mean to tell me that you could sit down before a muddle of numbers and travel back the way they had been muddled to an original that made sense?’