Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Of what we talked about I have not the least recollection, for my eyes were quite captivated by a strange being who sat alone fairly close to Slingsby, at one side and a little behind him. This was a man of middle age, with reddish hair, a red, square, inflamed face and a bristly moustache. He was dressed in a dirty suit of grey flannel; he wore a battered Panama pressed down upon his head; he carried pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, and he sat with a big bock of German beer In front of him. But I never saw him touch the beer. He sat in a studied attitude of ferocity, his elbow on the table, his chin propped on the palm of his hand, his head pushed aggressively forward, and he glared at Slingsby through his glasses with the fixed stare of hatred and fury which a master workman in wax might give to a figure in a Chamber of Horrors. Indeed, it seemed to me that he must have rehearsed his bearing in some such quarter, for there was nothing natural or convinced in him from the brim of his Panama to the black patent leather tips of his white canvas shoes.

  I touched Slingsby on the arm.

  “Who is that man, and what have you done to him?”

  Slingsby looked round unconcernedly.

  “Oh, that’s only Peiffer,” he replied. “Peiffer making frightfulness.”

  “Peiffer?”

  The name was quite strange to me.

  “Yes. Don’t you know him? He’s a product of 1914,” and Slingsby leaned towards me a little. “Peiffer is an officer in the German Navy. You would hardly guess it, but he is. Now that their country is at war, officers in the German Navy have a marked amount of spare time which they never had before. So Peiffer went to a wonderful Government school in Hamburg, where in twenty lessons they teach the gentle art of espionage, a sort of Berlitz school. Peiffer ate his dinners and got his degrees, so to speak, and now he’s at Lisbon putting obi on me.”

  “It seems rather infantile, and must be annoying,” I said; but Slingsby would only accept half the statement. “Infantile, yes. Annoying, not at all. For so long as Peiffer is near me, being frightful, I know he’s not up to mischief.”

  “Mischief!” I cried. “That fellow? What mischief can he do?”

  Slingsby viciously crushed the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “A deuce of a lot, my friend. Don’t make any mistake. Peiffer’s methods are infantile and barbaric, but he has a low and fertile cunning in the matter of ideas. I know. I have had some.”

  And Slingsby was to have more, very much more: in the shape of a great many sleepless nights, during which he wrestled with a dreadful uncertainty to get behind that square red face and those shining pince-nez, and reach the dark places of Peiffer’s mind.

  The first faint wisp of cloud began to show six weeks later, when Slingsby happened to be in Spain.

  “Something’s up,” he said, scratching his head. “But I’m hanged if I can guess what it is. See what you can make of it”; and here is the story which he told.

  Three Germans dressed in the black velvet corduroy, the white stockings and the rope-soled white shoes of the Spanish peasant, arrived suddenly in the town of Cartagena, and put up at an inn in a side-street near the harbour. Cartagena, for all that it is one of the chief naval ports of Spain, is a small place, and the life of it ebbs and flows in one narrow street, the Calle Mayor; so that very little can happen which is not immediately known and discussed. The arrival of the three mysterious Germans provoked, consequently, a deal of gossip and curiosity, and the curiosity was increased when the German Consul sitting in front of the Casino loudly professed complete ignorance of these very doubtful compatriots of his, and an exceeding great contempt for them. The next morning, however, brought a new development. The three Germans complained publicly to the Alcalde. They had walked through Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia in search of work, and everywhere they had been pestered and shadowed by the police.

  “Our Consul will do nothing for us,” they protested indignantly. “He will not receive us, nor will any German in Cartagena. We are poor people.” And having protested, they disappeared in the night.

  But a few days later the three had emerged again at Almeria, and at a mean café in one of the narrow, blue-washed Moorish streets of the old town. Peiffer was identified as one of the three — not the Peiffer who had practised frightfulness in Lisbon, but a new and wonderful Peiffer, who inveighed against the shamelessness of German officials on the coasts of Spain. At Almeria, in fact, Peiffer made a scene at the German Vice-Consulate, and, having been handed over to the police, was fined and threatened with imprisonment. At this point the story ended.

  “What do you make of it?” asked Slingsby.

  “First, that Peiffer is working south; and, secondly, that he is quarrelling with his own officials.”

  “Yes, but quarrelling with marked publicity,” said Slingsby. “That, I think we shall find, is the point of real importance. Peiffer’s methods are not merely infantile; they are elaborate. He is working down South. I think that I will go to Gibraltar. I have always wished to see it.”

  Whether Slingsby was speaking the truth, I had not an idea. But he went to Gibraltar, and there an astonishing thing happened to him. He received a letter, and the letter came from Peiffer. Peiffer was at Algeciras, just across the bay in Spain, and he wanted an interview. He wrote for it with the most brazen impertinence.

  “I cannot, owing to this with-wisdom-so-easily-to-have-been-avoided war, come myself to Gibraltar, but I will remain at your disposition here.”

  “That,” said Slingsby, “from the man who was making frightfulness at me a few weeks ago, is a proof of some nerve. We will go and see Peiffer. We will stay at Algeciras from Saturday to Monday, and we will hear what he has to say.”

  A polite note was accordingly dispatched, and on Sunday morning Peiffer, decently clothed in a suit of serge, was shown into Slingsby’s private sitting-room. He plunged at once into the story of his wanderings. We listened to it without a sign that we knew anything about it.

  “So?” from time to time said Slingsby, with inflections of increasing surprise, but that was all. Then Peiffer went on to his grievances.

  “Perhaps you have heard how I was treated by the Consuls?” he interrupted himself to ask suddenly.

  “No,” Slingsby replied calmly. “Continue!”

  Peiffer wiped his forehead and his glasses. We were each one, in his way, all working for our respective countries. The work was honourable. But there were limits to endurance. All his fatigue and perils went for nothing in the eyes of comfortable officials sure of their salary. He had been fined; he had been threatened with imprisonment. It was unverschämt the way he had been treated.

  “So?” said Slingsby firmly. There are fine inflections by which that simple word may be made to express most of the emotions. Slingsby’s “So?” expressed a passionate agreement with the downtrodden Peiffer.

  “Flesh and blood can stand it no longer,” cried Peiffer, “and my heart is flesh. No, I have had enough.”

  Throughout the whole violent tirade, in his eyes, in his voice, in his gestures, there ran an eager, wistful plea that we should take him at his face value and believe every word he said.

  “So I came to you,” he said at last, slapping his knee and throwing out his hand afterwards like a man who has taken a mighty resolution. “Yes. I have no money, nothing. And they will give me none. It is unverschämt. So,” and he screwed up his little eyes and wagged a podgy forefinger— “so the service I had begun for my Government I will now finish for you.”

  Slingsby examined the carpet curiously.

  “Well, there are possibly some shillings to be had if the service is good enough. I do not know. But I cannot deal in the dark. What sort of a service is it?”

  “Ah!”

  Peiffer hitched his chair nearer.

  “It is a question of rifles — rifles for over there,” and, looking out through the window, he nodded towards Gibel Musa and the coast of Morocco.

  Slingsby did not so much as flinch. I almost groaned aloud. We w
ere to be treated to the stock legend of the ports, the new edition of the Spanish prisoner story. I, the mere tourist in search of health, could have gone on with Peiffer’s story myself, even to the exact number of the rifles.

  “It was a great plan,” Peiffer continued. “Fifty thousand rifles, no less.” There always were fifty-thousand rifles. “They are buried — near the sea.” They always were buried either near the sea or on the frontier of Portugal. “With ammunition. They are to be landed outside Melilla, where I have been about this very affair, and distributed amongst the Moors in the unsubdued country on the edge of the French zone.”

  “So?” exclaimed Slingsby with the most admirable imitation of consternation.

  “Yes, but you need not fear. You shall have the rifles — when I know exactly where they are buried.”

  “Ah!” said Slingsby.

  He had listened to the familiar rigmarole, certain that behind it there was something real and sinister which he did not know — something which he was desperately anxious to find out.

  “Then you do not know where they are buried?”

  “No, but I shall know if — I am allowed to go into Gibraltar. Yes, there is someone there. I must put myself into relations with him. Then I shall know, and so shall you.”

  So here was some part of the truth, at all events. Peiffer wanted to get into Gibraltar. His disappearance from Lisbon, his reappearance in corduroys, his quarrelsome progress down the east coast, his letter to Slingsby, and his story, were all just the items of an elaborate piece of machinery invented to open the gates of that fortress to him. Slingsby’s only movement was to take his cigarette-case lazily from his pocket.

  “But why in the world,” he asked, “can’t you get your man in Gibraltar to come out here and see you?”

  Peiffer shook his head.

  “He would not come. He has been told to expect me, and I shall give him certain tokens from which he can guess my trustworthiness. If I write to him, ‘Come to me,’ he will say ‘This is a trap.’”

  Slingsby raised another objection:

  “But I shouldn’t think that you can expect the authorities to give you a safe conduct into Gibraltar upon your story.”

  Peiffer swept that argument aside with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

  “I have a Danish passport. See!” and he took the document from his breast pocket. It was complete, to his photograph.

  “Yes, you can certainly come in on that,” said Slingsby. He reflected for a moment before he added: “I have no power, of course. But I have some friends. I think you may reasonably reckon that you won’t be molested.”

  I saw Peiffer’s eyes glitter behind his glasses.

  “But there’s a condition,” Slingsby continued sharply. “You must not leave Gibraltar without coming personally to me and giving me twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  Peiffer was all smiles and agreement.

  “But of course. We shall have matters to talk over — terms to arrange. I must see you.”

  “Exactly. Cross by the nine-fifty steamer tomorrow morning. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” And suddenly Peiffer stood up and actually saluted, as though he had now taken service under Slingsby’s command.

  The unexpected movement almost made me vomit. Slingsby himself moved quickly away, and his face lost for a second the mask of impassivity. He stood at the window and looked across the water to the city of Gibraltar.

  Slingsby had been wounded in the early days of the war, and ever since he had been greatly troubled because he was not still in the trenches in Flanders. The casualty lists filled him with shame and discontent. So many of his friends, the men who had trained and marched with him, were laying down their gallant lives. He should have been with them. But during the last few days a new knowledge and inspiration had come to him. Gibraltar! A tedious, little, unlovely town of yellow houses and coal sheds, with an undesirable climate. Yes. But above it was the rock, the heart of a thousand memories and traditions which made it beautiful. He looked at it now with its steep wooded slopes, scarred by roads and catchments and the emplacements of guns. How much of England was recorded there! To how many British sailing on great ships from far dominions this huge buttress towering to its needle-ridge was the first outpost of the homeland! And for the moment he seemed to be its particular guardian, the ear which must listen night and day lest harm come to it. Harm the Rock, and all the Empire, built with such proud and arduous labour, would stagger under the blow, from St. Kilda to distant Lyttelton. He looked across the water and imagined Gibraltar as it looked at night, its houselights twinkling like a crowded zone of stars, and its great search-beams turning the ships in the harbour and the stone of the moles into gleaming silver, and travelling far over the dark waters. No harm must come to Gibraltar. His honour was all bound up in that. This was his service, and as he thought upon it he was filled with a cold fury against the traitor who thought it so easy to make him fail. But every hint of his anger had passed from his face as he turned back into the room.

  “If you bring me good information, why, we can do business,” he said; and Peiffer went away.

  I was extremely irritated by the whole interview, and could hardly wait for the door to close.

  “What knocks me over,” I cried, “is the impertinence of the man. Does he really think that any old yarn like the fifty thousand rifles is going to deceive you?”

  Slingsby lit a cigarette.

  “Peiffer’s true to type, that’s all,” he answered imperturbably. “They are vain, and vanity makes them think that you will at once believe what they want you to believe. So their deceits are a little crude.” Then a smile broke over his face, and to some tune with which I was unfamiliar he sang softly: “But he’s coming to Gibraltar in the morning.”

  “You think he will?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  “And,” I added doubtfully — it was not my business to criticise— “on conditions he can walk out again?”

  Slingsby’s smile became a broad grin.

  “His business in Gibraltar, my friend, is not with me. He will not want to meet us any more; as soon as he has done what he came for he will go — or try to go. He thinks we are fools, you see.”

  And in the end it seemed almost as though Peiffer was justified of his belief. He crossed the next morning. He went to a hotel of the second class; he slept in the hotel, and next morning he vanished. Suddenly there was no more Peiffer. Peiffer was not. For six hours Peiffer was not; and then at half-past five in the afternoon the telephone bell rang in an office where Slingsby was waiting. He rushed to the instrument.

  “Who is it?” he cried, and I saw a wave of relief surge into his face. Peiffer had been caught outside the gates and within a hundred yards of the neutral zone. He had strolled out in the thick of the dockyard workmen going home to Linea in Spain.

  “Search him and bring him up here at once,” said Slingsby, and he dropped into his chair and wiped his forehead. “Phew! Thirty seconds more and he might have snapped his fingers at us.” He turned to me. “I shall want a prisoner’s escort here in half an hour.”

  I went about that business and returned in time to see Slingsby giving an admirable imitation of a Prussian police official.

  “So, Peiffer,” he cried sternly, “you broke your word. Do not deny it. It will be useless.”

  The habit of a lifetime asserted itself in Peiffer. He quailed before authority when authority began to bully.

  “I did not know I was outside the walls,” he faltered. “I was taking a walk. No one stopped me.”

  “So!” Slingsby snorted. “And these, Peiffer — what have you to say of these?”

  There were four separate passports which had been found in Peiffer’s pockets. He could be a Dane of Esbjerg, a Swede of Stockholm, a Norwegian of Christiania, or a Dutchman from Amsterdam. All four nationalities were open to Peiffer to select from.

  “They provide you with these, no doubt, in your school at Hamb
urg,” and Slingsby paused to collect his best German. “You are a prisoner of war. Das ist genug,” he cried, and Peiffer climbed to the internment camp.

  So far so good. Slingsby had annexed Peiffer, but more important than Peiffer was Peiffer’s little plot, and that he had not got. Nor did the most careful inquiry disclose what Peiffer had done and where he had been during the time when he was not. For six hours Peiffer had been loose in Gibraltar, and Slingsby began to get troubled. He tried to assume the mentality of Peiffer, and so reach his intention, but that did not help. He got out all the reports in which Peiffer’s name was mentioned and read them over again.

  I saw him sit back in his chair and remain looking straight in front of him.

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, and he turned over the report to me, pointing to a passage. It was written some months before, at Melilla, on the African side of the Mediterranean, and it ran like this:

  “Peiffer frequents the low houses and cafés, where he spends a good deal of money and sometimes gets drunk. When drunk he gets very arrogant, and has been known to boast that he has been three times in Bordeaux since the war began, and, thanks to his passports, can travel as easily as if the world were at peace. On such occasions he expresses the utmost contempt for neutral nations. I myself have heard him burst out: ‘Wait until we have settled with our enemies. Then we will deal properly with the neutral nations. They shall explain to us on their knees. Meanwhile,’ and he thumped the table, making the glasses rattle, ‘let them keep quiet and hold their tongues. We shall do what we like in neutral countries.’”

  I read the passage.