The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  “We all ate our midday meal together and in the evening, before going home, we had coffee and cakes in one or other of the farms. The party was an odd mixture, big farmers and small squires, an hotel-keeper or two, a local doctor, and a couple of lawyers from the town. At first they were a little shy of me, but presently they thawed, and after the first day we were good friends. They spoke quite frankly about the war, in which every one of them had had a share, and with a great deal of dignity and good sense.

  “I learned to walk in Sikkim, and the little Saxon hills seemed to me inconsiderable. But they were too much for most of the guns, and instead of going straight up or down a slope they always chose a circuit, which gave them an easy gradient. One evening, when we were separating as usual, the beaters taking a short cut and the guns a circuit, I felt that I wanted exercise, so I raced the beaters downhill, beat them soundly, and had the better part of an hour to wait for my companions, before we adjourned to the farm for refreshment. The beaters must have talked about my pace, for as we walked away one of the guns, a lawyer called Meissen, asked me why I was visiting Rosensee at a time of year when few foreigners came. I said I was staying with Dr. Christoph.

  “ ‘Is he then a private friend of yours?’ he asked.

  “I told him No, that I had come to his Kurhaus for treatment, being sick. His eyes expressed polite scepticism. He was not prepared to regard as an invalid a man who went down a hill like an avalanche.

  “But, as we walked in the frosty dusk, he was led to speak of Dr. Christoph, of whom he had no personal knowledge, and I learned how little honour a prophet may have in his own country. Rosensee scarcely knew him, except as a doctor who had an inexplicable attraction for foreign patients. Meissen was curious about his methods and the exact diseases in which he specialised. ‘Perhaps he may yet save me a journey to Homburg?’ he laughed. ‘It is well to have a skilled physician at one’s doorstep. The doctor is something of a hermit, and except for his patients does not appear to welcome his kind. Yet he is a good man, beyond doubt, and there are those who say that in the war he was a hero.’

  “This surprised me, for I could not imagine Dr. Christoph in any fighting capacity, apart from the fact that he must have been too old. I thought that Meissen might refer to work in the base hospitals. But he was positive; Dr. Christoph had been in the trenches; the limping leg was a war wound.

  “I had had very little talk with the doctor, owing to my case being free from nervous complications. He would say a word to me morning and evening about my diet, and pass the time of day when we met, but it was not till the very eve of my departure that we had anything like a real conversation. He sent a message that he wanted to see me for not less than one hour, and he arrived with a batch of notes from which he delivered a kind of lecture on my case. Then I realised what an immense amount of care and solid thought he had expended on me. He had decided that his diagnosis was right—my rapid improvement suggested that—but it was necessary for some time to observe a simple regime, and to keep an eye on certain symptoms. So he took a sheet of notepaper from the table and in his small precise hand wrote down for me a few plain commandments.

  “There was something about him, the honest eyes, the mouth which looked as if it had been often compressed in suffering, the air of grave goodwill, which I found curiously attractive. I wished that I had been a mental case like Channell, and had had more of his society. I detained him in talk, and he seemed not unwilling. By and by we drifted to the war and it turned out that Meissen was right.

  “Dr. Christoph had gone as medical officer in November ’14 to the Ypres Salient with a Saxon regiment, and had spent the winter there. In ’15 he had been in Champagne, and in the early months of ’16 at Verdun, till he was invalided with rheumatic fever. That is to say, he had had about seventeen months of consecutive fighting in the worst areas with scarcely a holiday. A pretty good record for a frail little middle-aged man!

  “His family was then at Stuttgart, his wife and one little boy. He took a long time to recover from the fever, and after that was put on home duty. ‘Till the war was almost over,’ he said, ‘almost over, but not quite. There was just time for me to go back to the front and get my foolish leg hurt.’ I must tell you that whenever he mentioned his war experience it was with a comical deprecating smile, as if he agreed with anyone who might think that gravity like this should have remained in bed.

  “I assumed that this home duty was medical, until he said something about getting rusty in his professional work. Then it appeared that it had been some job connected with Intelligence. ‘I am reputed to have a little talent for mathematics,’ he said. ‘No. I am no mathematical scholar, but, if you understand me, I have a certain mathematical aptitude. My mind has always moved happily among numbers. Therefore I was set to construct and to interpret cyphers, a strange interlude in the noise of war. I sat in a little room and excluded the world, and for a little I was happy.’

  “He went on to speak of the enclave of peace in which he had found himself, and as I listened to his gentle monotonous voice, I had a sudden inspiration.

  “I took a sheet of notepaper from the stand, scribbled the word Reinmar on it, and shoved it towards him. I had a notion, you see, that I might surprise him into helping Channell’s researches.

  “But it was I who got the big surprise. He stopped thunderstruck, as soon as his eye caught the word, blushed scarlet over every inch of face and bald forehead, seemed to have difficulty in swallowing, and then gasped. ‘How did you know?’

  “I hadn’t known, and now that I did, the knowledge left me speechless. This was the loathly opposite for which Channell and I had nursed our hatred. When I came out of my stupefaction I found that he had recovered his balance and was speaking slowly and distinctly, as if he were making a formal confession.

  “ ‘You were among my opponents…that interests me deeply….I often wondered….You beat me in the end. You are aware of that?’

  “I nodded. ‘Only because you made a slip,’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes, I made a slip. I was to blame—very gravely to blame for I let my private grief cloud my mind.’

  “He seemed to hesitate, as if he were loath to stir something very tragic in his memory.

  “ ‘I think I will tell you,’ he said at last. ‘I have often wished—it is a childish wish—to justify my failure to those who profited by it. My chiefs understood, of course, but my opponents could not. In that month when I failed I was in deep sorrow. I had a little son—his name was Reinmar—you remember that I took that name for my code signature?’

  “His eyes were looking beyond me into some vision of the past.

  “ ‘He was, as you say, my mascot. He was all my family, and I adored him. But in those days food was not plentiful. We were no worse off than many million Germans, but the child was frail. In the last summer of the war he developed phthisis due to malnutrition, and in September he died. Then I failed my country, for with him some virtue seemed to depart from my mind. You see, my work was, so to speak, his also, as my name was his, and when he left me he took my power with him….So I stumbled. The rest is known to you.’

  “He sat staring beyond me, so small and lonely, that I could have howled. I remember putting my hand on his shoulder, and stammering some platitude about being sorry. We sat quite still for a minute or two, and then I remembered Channell. Channell must have poured his views of Reinmar into Dr. Christoph’s ear. I asked him if Channell knew.

  “A flicker of a smile crossed his face.

  “ ‘Indeed no. And I will exact from you a promise never to breathe to him what I have told you. He is my patient, and I must first consider his case. At present he thinks that Reinmar is a wicked and beautiful lady whom he may some day meet. That is romance, and it is good for him to think so….If he were told the truth, he would be pitiful, and in Herr Channell’s condition it is important that he should not be vexe
d with such emotions as pity.’ ”

  A SOURCE OF IRRITATION

  STACY AUMONIER

  THE LARGELY FORGOTTEN Stacy Aumonier (1877–1928) had success in several careers before his death from tuberculosis. Born in London, he was a highly regarded landscape painter, his work being exhibited at the Royal Academy. Unusually, he also was the subject of numerous works by other artists with several portraits of him (generally dressed in elegant evening clothes) hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. He also was well known as an entertainer, appearing at the Criterion and other distinguished theaters, and was lauded for one-man shows that he wrote as well as performed. The Observer noted “he could walk out alone before any audience, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, and make it laugh or cry at will.”

  This remarkable skill on the stage translated well to the page, especially his short stories. While his six novels are not particularly distinguished, many of his nearly one hundred short stories were regarded as masterpieces by some of his contemporaries, including the Nobel laureate John Galsworthy, who averred that Aumonier was “one of the best short-story writers of all time” and that he would “outlive all the writers of his day.” James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Random Harvest, and other massive bestsellers, selected Aumonier’s “The Octave of Jealousy” as his favorite story of all time.

  “Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty,” collected in Miss Bracegirdle and Others (1923), is probably his best-known story. A shy, conservative woman closes the door to her room and sees a man on her bed, apparently asleep but actually dead. Realizing she is in the wrong room, she seeks to escape but the door handle has broken and she winds up hiding beneath his bed. It served as the basis for a short film of the same title, released in 1926 with Janet Alexander starring as Millicent Bracegirdle. It was made again in 1936 with Elsa Lanchester. Finally, it was filmed as an episode on the third season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, airing on February 2, 1958, with Mildred Natwick as the unfortunate Miss Bracegirdle.

  The 1940 motion picture Spy for a Day (also released as The White Flower of a Blameless Life) was inspired by “A Source of Irritation,” but largely reimagined as a comedy, starring Douglas Wakefield, Paddy Browne, and Jack Allen. It also was produced as an episode of Studio 57 in 1958, with Joel Aldrich, John Banner, and Helmut Dantine.

  “A Source of Irritation” was originally published in the January 1918 issue of The Century Magazine; it was first collected in The Love-a-Duck and Other Stories (London, Hutchinson, 1921).

  A SOURCE OF IRRITATION

  STACY AUMONIER

  TO LOOK AT old Sam Gates you would never suspect him of having nerves. His sixty-nine years of close application to the needs of the soil had given him a certain earthy stolidity. To observe him hoeing, or thinning out a broad field of turnips, hardly attracted one’s attention, he seemed so much part and parcel of the whole scheme. He blended into the soil like a glorified swede. Nevertheless, the half-dozen people who claimed his acquaintance knew him to be a man who suffered from little moods of irritability.

  And on this glorious morning a little incident annoyed him unreasonably. It concerned his niece Aggie. She was a plump girl with clear, blue eyes, and a face as round and inexpressive as the dumplings for which the county was famous. She came slowly across the long sweep of the downland and, putting down the bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief which contained his breakfast and dinner, she said:

  “Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

  Now, this may not appear to the casual reader to be a remark likely to cause irritation, but it affected old Sam Gates as a very silly and unnecessary question. It was, moreover, the constant repetition of it which was beginning to anger him. He met his niece twice a day. In the morning she brought his bundle of food at seven, and when he passed his sister’s cottage on the way home to tea at five she was invariably hanging about the gate, and she always said in the same voice:

  “Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

  Noos! What noos should there be? For sixty-nine years he had never lived farther than five miles from Halvesham. For nearly sixty of those years he had bent his back above the soil. There were, indeed, historic occasions. Once, for instance, when he had married Annie Hachet. And there was the birth of his daughter. There was also a famous occasion when he had visited London. Once he had been to a flowershow at Market Roughborough. He either went or didn’t go to church on Sundays. He had many interesting chats with Mr. James at the Cowman, and three years ago had sold a pig to Mrs. Way. But he couldn’t always have interesting noos of this sort up his sleeve. Didn’t the silly zany know that for the last three weeks he had been hoeing and thinning out turnips for Mr. Hodge on this very same field? What noos could there be?

  He blinked at his niece, and didn’t answer. She undid the parcel and said:

  “Mrs. Goping’s fowl got out again last night.”

  “Ah,” he replied in a non-committal manner and began to munch his bread and bacon. His niece picked up the handkerchief and, humming to herself, walked back across the field.

  It was a glorious morning, and a white sea mist added to the promise of a hot day. He sat there munching, thinking of nothing in particular, but gradually subsiding into a mood of placid content. He noticed the back of Aggie disappear in the distance. It was a mile to the cottage and a mile and a half to Halvesham. Silly things, girls. They were all alike. One had to make allowances. He dismissed her from his thoughts, and took a long swig of tea out of a bottle. Insects buzzed lazily. He tapped his pocket to assure himself that his pouch of shag was there, and then he continued munching. When he had finished, he lighted his pipe and stretched himself comfortably. He looked along the line of turnips he had thinned and then across the adjoining field of swedes, Silver streaks appeared on the sea below the mist. In some dim way he felt happy in his solitude amidst this sweeping immensity of earth and sea and sky.

  And then something else came to irritate him: it was one of “these dratted airyplanes.” “Airyplanes” were his pet aversion. He could find nothing to be said in their favor. Nasty, noisy, disfiguring things that seared the heavens and made the earth dangerous. And every day there seemed to be more and more of them. Of course “this old war” was responsible for a lot of them, he knew. The war was a “plaguy noosance.” They were short-handed on the farm, beer and tobacco were dear, and Mrs. Steven’s nephew had been and got wounded in the foot.

  He turned his attention once more to the turnips; but an “airyplane” has an annoying genius for gripping one’s attention. When it appears on the scene, however much we dislike it, it has a way of taking the stage-center. We cannot help constantly looking at it. And so it was with old Sam Gates. He spat on his hands and blinked up at the sky. And suddenly the aeroplane behaved in a very extraordinary manner. It was well over the sea when it seemed to lurch drunkenly and skimmed the water. Then it shot up at a dangerous angle and zig-zagged. It started to go farther out, and then turned and made for the land. The engines were making a curious grating noise. It rose once more, and then suddenly dived downward, and came plump down right in the middle of Mr. Hodge’s field of swedes.

  And then, as if not content with this desecration, it ran along the ground, ripping and tearing up twenty-five yards of good swedes, and then came to a stop.

  Old Sam Gates was in a terrible state. The aeroplane was more than a hundred yards away, but he waved his arms and called out:

  “Hi, you there, you mustn’t land in they swedes! They’re Mister Hodge’s.”

  The instant the aeroplane stopped, a man leaped out and gazed quickly round. He glanced at Sam Gates, and seemed uncertain whether to address him or whether to concentrate his attention on the flying-machine. The latter arrangement appeared to be his ultimate decision. He dived under the engine and became frantically busy. Sam had never seen any one work with such furious energy; but all the same it was not to be tolerate
d. It was disgraceful. Sam started out across the field, almost hurrying in his indignation. When he appeared within earshot of the aviator he cried out again:

  “Hi! you mustn’t rest your old airyplane here! You’ve kicked up all Mr. Hodge’s swedes. A noice thing you’ve done!”

  He was within five yards when suddenly the aviator turned and covered him with a revolver! And speaking in a sharp, staccato voice, he said:

  “Old Grandfather, you must sit down. I am very much occupied. If you interfere or attempt to go away, I shoot you. So!”

  Sam gazed at the horrid, glittering little barrel and gasped. Well, he never! To be threatened with murder when you’re doing your duty in your employer’s private property! But, still, perhaps the man was mad. A man must be more or less mad to go up in one of those crazy things. And life was very sweet on that summer morning despite sixty-nine years. He sat down among the swedes.

  The aviator was so busy with his cranks and machinery that he hardly deigned to pay him any attention except to keep the revolver handy. He worked feverishly, and Sam sat watching him. At the end of ten minutes he appeared to have solved his troubles with the machine, but he still seemed very scared. He kept on glancing around and out to sea. When his repairs were complete he straightened his back and wiped the perspiration from his brow. He was apparently on the point of springing back into the machine and going off when a sudden mood of facetiousness, caused by relief from the strain he had endured, came to him. He turned to old Sam and smiled, at the same time remarking:

  “Well, old Grandfather, and now we shall be all right, isn’t it?”

  He came close up to Sam, and then suddenly started back.

  “Gott!” he cried, “Paul Jouperts!”

  Bewildered, Sam gazed at him, and the madman started talking to him in some foreign tongue. Sam shook his head.

  “You no right,” he remarked, “to come bargin’ through they swedes of Mr. Hodge’s.”