The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes

by Sterling E. Lanier

  "With that, he swung the door open and went marching down the steps. I half shut it behind him and settled down to watch and listen.

  "The sound of his footsteps receded into the distance, but I could still hear them in the utter silence for a long time. His family vault, which I was sure connected somehow with the sea, was a long way down. I crouched, tense, wondering if I would ever see him again. The whole business was utterly mad, and I believed every word of it. I still do.

  "The steps finally faded into silence. I checked my watch and found ten minutes had gone by.

  "Suddenly, as if out of an indefinite distance, I heard his voice. I recognized it instantly, for it was a long quavering call, sonorous and bell-like, very similar to what I had heard when he rescued me in the afternoon. The sound came from far down in the earth, echoing faintly up the dank stairs and died into silence. Then it came again, and when it died, yet again.

  "My heart seemed to stop. I knew that this brave man was summoning something no man had a right to see and calling a council in which no one with human blood in his veins should sit.

  "Silence, utter and complete, followed. 1 could hear nothing, save for an occasional faint drop of water falling somewhere out of my range of vision.

  "I glanced at my watch. Twenty-one minutes had gone by. The minutes seemed to crawl endlessly, meaninglessly. I felt alone and in a strange dream, unable to move, frozen, an atom caught in a mesh beyond my comprehension.

  "Then far away, I heard it, a faint sound. It was faint but regular, and increasing in volume, measured and remorseless. It was a tread, and it was coming up the stair in my direction.

  "I glanced at my watch, thirty-four minutes. It could be my friend, still within his self-appointed limits of time. The step came nearer, nearer still. It was, so far as my straining ear could judge, a single step. It progressed further, and suddenly into the circle of light stepped Nyderstrom.

  "He was alone and as he came up he waved in greeting. He was dripping wet and the light gleamed on his shining body. I threw the door wide and he stepped through.

  "As his head emerged into the light, I stepped back, almost involuntarily. There was a look of exhaltation and wonder on it, such as I have never seen on a human face. The strange green eyes flashed, and there was a faint flush on the high cheekbones. He looked like a man who has seen a vision of Paradise.

  "He walked rather wearily, but firmly, over to the switch box, which he closed and locked. Then he turned to me, still with that blaze of radiance on his face.

  " 'All is well, my friend. They are again at peace with men. They have accepted me and the story of what has happened. All will be well now, with my house, and with me.

  "I stared at him hard, but he said no more and began to divest himself of his incredible regalia. He had one more thing to say, and I can hear it still as if it were yesterday, spoken almost as an afterthought.

  " 'They say the blood of the guardians is getting too thin again. But that also is settled. I have seen my bride.' "

  -

  HIS COAT SO GAY

  There had been a big spread in the newspapers about a British duke going through bankruptcy proceedings and his third divorce simultaneously. The divorce was contested, the evidence was sordid and those giving it equally so. The nobleman in question came out of the whole thing very badly, it being proved, among other things, that he had run up huge debts to tradesmen, knowing damn well he couldn't hope to pay. There was lots more, though, including secret orgies, which seem to have been dirty parties of the sort to have passed quite unnoticed in Los Angeles.

  One of the members tapped his newspaper. A few of us were sitting upstairs in the library after dinner. It was a hot night in New York, but the club was air-conditioned and very pleasant.

  "Good thing," said the man with the paper, "that Mason Williams isn't here to shout about this. He'd love to give General Ffellowes a hard time. Can't you hear him? 'Rotten bunch of degenerates! Lousy overbearing crooks and cadgers! Long line of aristocratic bums and swindlers!' It would be the best opportunity he's had in years for trying to annoy the Brigadier."

  "I notice you were smart enough to say 'trying,' " said some one else. "He's never managed to annoy Ffellowes yet. I doubt if this would do it either."

  "Who wants to annoy me, eh?" came the easy, clipped tones of our favorite English member. He had come up the narrow back stairs at the other end of the room and was now standing behind me. He always moved silently; not, I feel certain, out of a desire to be stealthy, but from a lifetime's training. Ffellowes' years in (apparently) every secret as well as public branch of Her Majesty's service had given him the ability to walk like a cat, and a quiet one at that.

  I jumped and so did a couple of the others and then there was a moment of embarrassed silence.

  Ffellowes is very quick. He saw the newspaper headline in my neighbor's lap and began to chuckle.

  "Good heavens, is that supposed to offend me? What a hope! I suppose someone thought our friend Williams might make use of it to savage the British Lion, eh?" He moved from behind my chair and sat in a vacant seat, his eyes twinkling.

  "Item," he said, "the man in question's a Scot, not English. Most important distinction. A lesser and unstable breed." This was said with such dead-pan emphasis that we all started to laugh at once. Ffellowes' smooth, ruddy face remained immobile, but his blue eyes danced.

  "If you won't be serious," he said, when the laughter died away, "I shall have to explain why Chattan's little peccadilloes are unlikely to move me to wrath. Or anyone else with any real knowledge, for that matter.

  "You know, Richard the Lion Heart was a bad debtor on a scale that makes anyone modern look silly. All the Plantagenets were, for that matter. Richard seems to have been a quite unabashed queer as well, of course, and likewise William the Second, called Rufus. When, at any rate, one asked those lads for monies due, one had better have a fast horse and a waiting ship ready. They cancelled debts rather abruptly. There are thousands more examples, but I mention the kings as quite a fairish sample.

  Now Chattan's an ass and his sexual troubles are purely squalid, fit only for headlines in a cheap paper. But there are other cases no paper ever got to print. Not so long ago, one of your splashier magazines ran a purely fictional piece about an aged nobleman, Scots again, who was sentenced never to leave his family castle, as a result of an atrocious crime, not quite provable. The story happens to be quite true and the verdict was approved by the Lords in a closed session. The last Pope but two had a South Italian cardinal locked up in his own palace for the remainder of his life on various charges not susceptible of public utterance. The old man died only ten years ago. So it goes, and there are dozens more cases of a similar nature.

  The fact is, persons in positions of power often abuse that power in the oddest and most unpleasant ways. The extent of caprice in the human mind is infinite. Whenever public gaze, so to speak, is withdrawn, oddities occur, and far worse than illicit sex is involved in these pockets of infection. Once off the highways of humanity, if you care for analogies, one finds the oddest byways. All that's needed is isolation, that and power, economic or physical." He seemed to brood for a moment.

  Outside the windows, the haze and smog kept even the blaze of Manhattan at night dim and sultry-looking. The garish electricity of New York took on something of the appearance of patches of torch and fire light in the heat and murk.

  "Haven't you left out one qualification, Sir?" said a younger member. "What about time? Surely, to get these Dracula castle effects and so on, you have to have centuries to play with a complaisant bunch of peasants, hereditary aristocrats, the whole bit. In other words a really old country, right?"

  Ffellowes stared at the opposite wall for a bit before answering. Finally he seemed to shrug, as if he had come to a decision.

  "Gilles de Rais," he said, "is perhaps the best example known of your Dracula syndrome, so I admit I must agree with you. In general, however, only in general. The wors
t case of this sort of thing which ever came to my personal—and very personal it was—knowledge took place in the early 1930's in one of your larger Eastern states. So that while time is certainly needed, as indeed for the formation of any disease, the so-called modern age is not so much of a protection as one might think. And yet there was great age, too."

  He raised his hand and the hum of startled comment which had begun to rise died at once.

  "I'll tell you the story. But I'll tell it my way. No questions of any sort whatsoever. There are still people alive who could be injured. I shall cheerfully disguise and alter any detail I can which might lead to identification of the family or place concerned. Beyond that, you will simply have to accept my word. If you're interested on that basis ...?"

  The circle of faces, mine included, was so eager that his iron countenance damned near cracked into a grin, but he held it back and began.

  "In the early days of your, and indeed everyone's, Great Depression, I was the most junior military attaché of our Washington embassy. It was an agreeable part of my duties to mix socially as much as I could with Americans of my own age. One way of doing this was hunting, fox-hunting to be more explicit. I used to go out with the Middleburg Hunt and while enjoying the exercise, I made a number of friends as well.

  "One of them was a man whom I shall call Canler Waldron. That's not even an anagram, but sounds vaguely like his real name. He was my own age and very good company. He was supposed to be putting in time as a junior member of your State Department.

  "It was immediately obvious that he was extremely well off. Most people of course, had been at least affected a trifle by the Crash, if not a whole lot, but it was plain that whatever Can's financial basis was, it had hardly been shaken. Small comments were revealing,' especially his puzzlement when, as often happened, others pleaded lack of funds to explain some inability to do a trip or to purchase something. He was, I may add, the most generous of men financially, and without being what you'd call a 'sucker,' he was very easy to leave with the cheque, so much so one had to guard against it.

  "He was pleasant-looking; black-haired, narrow-faced, dark brown eyes, a generalized North European type and as I said about my own age, barely twenty-six. And what a magnificent rider! I'm not bad, or wasn't then, but I've never seen anyone to match Canler Waldron. No fence ever bothered him and he always led the field, riding so easily that he hardly appeared to be conscious of what he was doing. It got so that he became embarrassed by the attention and used to pull his horse in order to stay back. Of course he was magnificently mounted; he had a whole string of big black hunters, his own private breed he said. But there were others out who had fine 'cattle' too: no, he was simply a superb rider.

  "We were chatting one fall morning after a very dull run and I asked him why he always wore a black hunting coat of a non-hunt member. I knew he belonged to some hunt or other and didn't understand why he never used their colors.

  " 'Highly embarrassing to explain to you, Donald, of all people,' he said, but he was smiling. 'My family were Irish and very patriotic during our Revolution. No pink coats ('pink' being the term for hunting red) for us. Too close to the hated Redcoat Army in looks, see? So we wear light green and I frankly get damned tired of being asked what it is. That's all.'

  "I was amused for several reasons and said, 'Of course I understand. Some of our own hunts wear other colors, you know. But I thought green coats were for foot hounds, beagles, bassetts and such?'

  " 'Ours is much lighter, like grass, with buff lapels,' he said. He seemed a little ill at ease for some reason, as our horses shifted and stamped under the hot Virginia sun. 'It's a family hunt, you see. No non-Waldron can wear the coat. This sounds pretty snobby, so again, I avoid questions by not wearing it except at home. Betty feels the same way and she hates black. Here she comes now. What did you think of the ride, Sis?'

  " 'Not very exciting,' she said quietly, looking around so that she should not be convicted of rudeness to our hosts. I haven't mentioned Betty Waldron, have I? Even after all these years, it's still painful.

  "She was nineteen years old, very pale and no sun ever raised so much as a freckle. Her eyes were almost black, her hair midnight and her voice very gentle and sad. She was quiet, seldom smiled and when she did my heart turned over. Usually, her thoughts were miles away and she seemed to walk in a dream. She also rode superbly, almost absent-mindedly, to look at her."

  Ffellowes sighed and arched his hands together in his lap, his gaze fixed on the rug before him.

  "I was a poor devil of an artillery subaltern, few prospects save for my pay, but I could dream, as long as I kept my mouth shut. She seemed to like me as much, or even more, than the gaudy lads who were always flocking about and I felt I had a tiny, the smallest grain of hope. I'd never said a thing. I knew already the family must be staggeringly rich and I had my pride. But also, as I say, my dreams.

  " 'Let's ask Donald home and give him some real sport,' I suddenly heard Can say to her.

  " 'When?' she asked sharply, looking hard at him.

  " 'How about the end of cubbing season? Last week in October. Get the best of both sports, adult and young. Hounds will be in good condition and it's our best time of year.' He smiled at me and patted his horse. 'What say, Limey? Like some real hunting, eight hours sometimes?'

  "I was delighted and surprised, because I'd heard several people fishing rather obviously for invitations to the Waldron place at one time or another and all being politely choked off. I had made up my mind never to place myself where such a rebuff could strike me. There was a goodish number of fortune-hunting Europeans about just then, some of them English, and they made me a trifle ill. But I was surprised and hurt too, by Betty's reaction.

  " 'Not this fall, Can,' she said, her face even whiter than usual. 'Not—this—fall!' The words were stressed separately and came out with an intensity I can't convey.

  " 'As the head of the family, I'm afraid what I say goes,' said Canler in a voice I'd certainly never heard him use before. It was heavy and dominating, even domineering. As I watched, quite baffled, she choked back a sob and urged her horse away from us. In a moment her slender black back and shining topper were lost in the milling sea of the main body of the hunt. I was really hurt badly.

  " 'Now look here, old boy,' I said. 'I don't know what's going on, but I can't possibly accept your invitation under these circumstances. Betty obviously loathes the idea and I wouldn't dream of coming against her slightest wish.'

  He urged his horse over until we were only a yard apart. 'You must, Donald. You don't understand. I don't like letting out family secrets, but I'm going to have to in this case. Betty was very roughly treated by a man last year, in the fall. A guy who seemed to like her and then just walked out, without a word, and disappeared. I know you'll never speak of this to her and she'd rather die than say anything to you. But I haven't been able to get her interested in things ever since. You're the first man she's liked from that time to this and you've got to help me pull her out of this depression. Surely you've noticed how vague and dreamy she is? She's living in a world of unreality, trying to shut out unhappiness. I can't get her to see a doctor and even if I could, it probably wouldn't do any good. What she needs is some decent man being kind to her in the same surroundings she was made unhappy in. Can you see why I need you as a friend so badly?' He was damned earnest and it was impossible not to be touched.

  " 'Well, that's all very well,' I mumbled, 'but she's still dead set against my coming, you know. I simply can't come in the face of such opposition. You mentioned yourself as head of the family. Do I take it that your parents are dead? Because if so, then Betty is my hostess. It won't do, damn it all.'

  " 'Now look,' he said. 'Don't turn me down. By tomorrow morning she'll ask you herself, I swear. I promise that if she doesn't the whole thing's off. Will you come if she does and give me a hand at cheering her up? And we are orphans, by the way, just us two.'

  Of course I agreed. I was
wild to come. To get leave would be easy. There was nothing much but routine at the embassy anyway and mixing with people like the Waldrons was as much a part of my duties as going to any Fort Leavenworth maneuvers.

  "And sure enough, Betty rang me up at my Washington flat the next morning and apologized for her behavior the previous day. She sounded very dim and tired but perfectly all right. I asked her twice if she was sure she wanted my company and she repeated that she did, still apologizing for the day before. She said she had felt feverish and didn't know why she'd spoken as she had. This was good enough for me and so it was settled.

  "Thus, in the last week in October, I found myself hunting the coverts of—well, call it the valley of Waldrondale. What a glorious, mad time it was! The late Indian summer lingered and each cold night gave way to a lovely misty dawn. The main Waldron lands lay in the hollow of a spur of the Appalachian range. Apparently some early Waldron, an emigrant from Ireland during the 1600's, I gathered, had gone straight west into Indian territory and somehow laid claim to a perfectly immense tract of country. What is really odd is that the red men seemed to feel it was all fine, that he should do so.