Chapter 14: Mr Blenkiron Discourses on Love and War

Three days later I got my orders to report at Paris for special service. They came none too soon, for I chafed at each hour’s delay. Every thought in my head was directed to the game which we were playing against Ivery. He was the big enemy, compared to whom the ordinary Boche in the trenches was innocent and friendly. I had almost lost interest in my division, for I knew that for me the real battle-front was not in Picardy, and that my job was not so easy as holding a length of line. Also I longed to be at the same work as Mary.

I remember waking up in billets the morning after the night at the Chateau with the feeling that I had become extraordinarily rich. I felt very humble, too, and very kindly towards all the world--even to the Boche, though I can’t say I had ever hated him very wildly. You find hate more among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men. I wanted to be quiet and alone to think, and since that was impossible I went about my work in a happy abstraction. I tried not to look ahead, but only to live in the present, remembering that a war was on, and that there was desperate and dangerous business before me, and that my hopes hung on a slender thread. Yet for all that I had sometimes to let my fancies go free, and revel in delicious dreams.

But there was one thought that always brought me back to hard ground, and that was Ivery. I do not think I hated anybody in the world but him. It was his relation to Mary that stung me. He had the insolence with all his toad-like past to make love to that clean and radiant girl. I felt that he and I stood as mortal antagonists, and the thought pleased me, for it helped me to put some honest detestation into my job. Also I was going to win. Twice I had failed, but the third time I should succeed. It had been like ranging shots for a gun--first short, second over, and I vowed that the third should be dead on the mark.

I was summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour’s talk with the greatest British commander. I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature, that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was. I wanted to go on serving under that man. I realized suddenly how much I loved my work, and when I got back to my quarters that night and saw my men swinging in from a route march I could have howled like a dog at leaving them. Though I say it who shouldn’t, there wasn’t a better division in the Army.

One morning a few days later I picked up Mary in Amiens. I always liked the place, for after the dirt of the Somme it was a comfort to go there for a bath and a square meal, and it had the noblest church that the hand of man ever built for God. It was a clear morning when we started from the boulevard beside the railway station; and the air smelt of washed streets and fresh coffee, and women were going marketing and the little trams ran clanking by, just as in any other city far from the sound of guns. There was very little khaki or horizon-blue about, and I remember thinking how completely Amiens had got out of the war-zone. Two months later it was a different story.

To the end I shall count that day as one of the happiest in my life. Spring was in the air, though the trees and fields had still their winter colouring. A thousand good fresh scents came out of the earth, and the larks were busy over the new furrows. I remember that we ran up a little glen, where a stream spread into pools among sallows, and the roadside trees were heavy with mistletoe. On the tableland beyond the Somme valley the sun shone like April. At Beauvais we lunched badly in an inn--badly as to food, but there was an excellent Burgundy at two francs a bottle. Then we slipped down through little flat-chested townships to the Seine, and in the late afternoon passed through St Germains forest. The wide green spaces among the trees set my fancy dwelling on that divine English countryside where Mary and I would one day make our home. She had been in high spirits all the journey, but when I spoke of the Cotswolds her face grew grave.

‘Don’t let us speak of it, Dick,’ she said. ‘It’s too happy a thing and I feel as if it would wither if we touched it. I don’t let myself think of peace and home, for it makes me too homesick ... I think we shall get there some day, you and I ... but it’s a long road to the Delectable Mountains, and Faithful, you know, has to die first ... There is a price to be paid.’

The words sobered me.

‘Who is our Faithful?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. But he was the best of the Pilgrims.’

Then, as if a veil had lifted, her mood changed, and when we came through the suburbs of Paris and swung down the Champs Elysees she was in a holiday humour. The lights were twinkling in the blue January dusk, and the warm breath of the city came to greet us. I knew little of the place, for I had visited it once only on a four days’ Paris leave, but it had seemed to me then the most habitable of cities, and now, coming from the battle-field with Mary by my side, it was like the happy ending of a dream.

I left her at her cousin’s house near the Rue St Honore, and deposited myself, according to instructions, at the Hotel Louis Quinze. There I wallowed in a hot bath, and got into the civilian clothes which had been sent on from London. They made me feel that I had taken leave of my division for good and all this time. Blenkiron had a private room, where we were to dine; and a more wonderful litter of books and cigar boxes I have never seen, for he hadn’t a notion of tidiness. I could hear him grunting at his toilet in the adjacent bedroom, and I noticed that the table was laid for three. I went downstairs to get a paper, and on the way ran into Launcelot Wake.

He was no longer a private in a Labour Battalion. Evening clothes showed beneath his overcoat. ‘Hullo, Wake, are you in this push too?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said, and his manner was not cordial. ‘Anyhow I was ordered down here. My business is to do as I am told.’

‘Coming to dine?’ I asked.

‘No. I’m dining with some friends at the Crillon.’

Then he looked me in the face, and his eyes were hot as I first remembered them. ‘I hear I’ve to congratulate you, Hannay,’ and he held out a limp hand.

I never felt more antagonism in a human being.

‘You don’t like it?’ I said, for I guessed what he meant.

‘How on earth can I like it?’ he cried angrily. ‘Good Lord, man, you’ll murder her soul. You an ordinary, stupid, successful fellow and she--she’s the most precious thing God ever made. You can never understand a fraction of her preciousness, but you’ll clip her wings all right. She can never fly now... ‘

He poured out this hysterical stuff to me at the foot of the staircase within hearing of an elderly French widow with a poodle. I had no impulse to be angry, for I was far too happy.

‘Don’t, Wake,’ I said. ‘We’re all too close together to quarrel. I’m not fit to black Mary’s shoes. You can’t put me too low or her too high. But I’ve at least the sense to know it. You couldn’t want me to be humbler than I felt.’

He shrugged his shoulders, as he went out to the street. ‘Your infernal magnanimity would break any man’s temper.’

I went upstairs to find Blenkiron, washed and shaven, admiring a pair of bright patent-leather shoes.

‘Why, Dick, I’ve been wearying bad to see you. I was nervous you would be blown to glory, for I’ve been reading awful things about your battles in the noospapers. The war correspondents worry me so I can’t take breakfast.’

He mixed cocktails and clinked his glass on mine. ‘Here’s to the young lady. I was trying to write her a pretty little sonnet, but the darned rhymes wouldn’t fit. I’ve gotten a heap of things to say to you when we’ve finished dinner.’

Mary came in, her cheeks bright from the weather, and Blenkiron promptly fell abashed. But she had a way to meet his shyness, for, when he began an embarrassed speech of good wishes, she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. Oddly enough, that set him completely at his ease.

It was pleasant to eat off linen and china again, pleasant to see old Blenkiron’s benignant face and the way he tucked into his food, but it was delicious for me to sit at a meal with Mary across the table. It made me feel that she was really mine, and not a pixie that would vanish at a word. To Blenkiron she bore herself like an affectionate but mischievous daughter, while the desperately refined manners that afflicted him whenever women were concerned mellowed into something like his everyday self. They did most of the talking, and I remember he fetched from some mysterious hiding-place a great box of chocolates, which you could no longer buy in Paris, and the two ate them like spoiled children. I didn’t want to talk, for it was pure happiness for me to look on. I loved to watch her, when the servants had gone, with her elbows on the table like a schoolboy, her crisp gold hair a little rumpled, cracking walnuts with gusto, like some child who has been allowed down from the nursery for dessert and means to make the most of it.

With his first cigar Blenkiron got to business.

‘You want to know about the staff-work we’ve been busy on at home. Well, it’s finished now, thanks to you, Dick. We weren’t getting on very fast till you took to peroosing the press on your sick-bed and dropped us that hint about the “Deep-breathing” ads.’

‘Then there was something in it?’ I asked.

‘There was black hell in it. There wasn’t any Gussiter, but there was a mighty fine little syndicate of crooks with old man Gresson at the back of them. First thing, I started out to get the cipher. It took some looking for, but there’s no cipher on earth can’t be got hold of somehow if you know it’s there, and in this case we were helped a lot by the return messages in the German papers. It was bad stuff when we read it, and explained the darned leakages in important noos we’ve been up against. At first I figured to keep the thing going and turn Gussiter into a corporation with John S. Blenkiron as president. But it wouldn’t do, for at the first hint of tampering with their communications the whole bunch got skeery and sent out SOS signals. So we tenderly plucked the flowers.’

‘Gresson, too?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘I guess your seafaring companion’s now under the sod. We had collected enough evidence to hang him ten times over ... But that was the least of it. For your little old cipher, Dick, gave us a line on Ivery.’

I asked how, and Blenkiron told me the story. He had about a dozen cross-bearings proving that the organization of the ‘Deep-breathing’ game had its headquarters in Switzerland. He suspected Ivery from the first, but the man had vanished out of his ken, so he started working from the other end, and instead of trying to deduce the Swiss business from Ivery he tried to deduce Ivery from the Swiss business. He went to Berne and made a conspicuous public fool of himself for several weeks. He called himself an agent of the American propaganda there, and took some advertising space in the press and put in spread-eagle announcements of his mission, with the result that the Swiss Government threatened to turn him out of the country if he tampered that amount with their neutrality. He also wrote a lot of rot in the Geneva newspapers, which he paid to have printed, explaining how he was a pacifist, and was going to convert Germany to peace by ‘inspirational advertisement of pure-minded war aims’. All this was in keeping with his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.

But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius. That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the Wild Birds. However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of the ‘Deep-breathing’ business. That took some doing and cost a lot of money. His best people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a milliner’s shop in Lyons and a concierge in a big hotel at St Moritz. His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the return messages sent from Switzerland, different from the one that the Gussiter lot used in England. He got this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn’t make anything out of it. He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it ... But he was still a long way from finding out anything that mattered.

Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery. I must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to him to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got an answer. She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezieres. One day he came to see her. That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after him and they never got within sight or sound. Yet here he was coming openly in the afternoon to have tea with an English girl. It showed another thing, which made me blaspheme. A man so resolute and single-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that.

He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G. He was on the staff right enough too. Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down. He was quite frank with her, and she with him. They are both peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness.

He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame de Mezieres. They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon. He spoke of his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness. Presently the pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments with Bullivant on the long-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater’s hospital. She went there to escape from him, but mainly, I think, to have a look--trembling in every limb, mind you--at the Chateau of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.

I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was. No man ever born could have done that kind of thing. It wasn’t recklessness. It was sheer calculating courage.

Then Blenkiron took up the tale. The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Chateau was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds. That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business. But Blenkiron made doubly sure.

‘I considered the time had come,’ he said, ‘to pay high for valuable noos, so I sold the enemy a very pretty de-vice. If you ever gave your mind to ciphers and illicit correspondence, Dick, you would know that the one kind of document you can’t write on in invisible ink is a coated paper, the kind they use in the weeklies to print photographs of leading actresses and the stately homes of England. Anything wet that touches it corrugates the surface a little, and you can tell with a microscope if someone’s been playing at it. Well, we had the good fortune to discover just how to get over that little difficulty--how to write on glazed paper with a quill so as the cutest analyst couldn’t spot it, and likewise how to detect the writing. I decided to sacrifice that invention, casting my bread upon the waters and looking for a good-sized bakery in return ... I had it sold to the enemy. The job wanted delicate handling, but the tenth man from me--he was an Austrian Jew--did the deal and scooped fifty thousand dollars out of it. Then I lay low to watch how my friend would use the de-vice, and I didn’t wait long.’

He took from his pocket a folded sheet of L’Illustration. Over a photogravure plate ran some words in a large sprawling hand, as if written with a brush.

‘That page when I got it yesterday,’ he said, ‘was an unassuming picture of General Petain presenting military medals. There wasn’t a scratch or a ripple on its surface. But I got busy with it, and see there!’

He pointed out two names. The writing was a set of key-words we did not know, but two names stood out which I knew too well. They were ‘Bommaerts’ and ‘Chelius’.

‘My God!’ I cried, ‘that’s uncanny. It only shows that if you chew long enough---’

‘Dick,’ said Mary, ‘you mustn’t say that again. At the best it’s an ugly metaphor, and you’re making it a platitude.’

‘Who is Ivery anyhow?’ I asked. ‘Do you know more about him than we knew in the summer? Mary, what did Bommaerts pretend to be?’

‘An Englishman.’ Mary spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if it were a perfectly usual thing to be made love to by a spy, and that rather soothed my annoyance. ‘When he asked me to marry him he proposed to take me to a country-house in Devonshire. I rather think, too, he had a place in Scotland. But of course he’s a German.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Blenkiron slowly, ‘I’ve got on to his record, and it isn’t a pretty story. It’s taken some working out, but I’ve got all the links tested now ... He’s a Boche and a large-sized nobleman in his own state. Did you ever hear of the Graf von Schwabing?’

I shook my head.

‘I think I have heard Uncle Charlie speak of him,’ said Mary, wrinkling her brows. ‘He used to hunt with the Pytchley.’

‘That’s the man. But he hasn’t troubled the Pytchley for the last eight years. There was a time when he was the last thing in smartness in the German court--officer in the Guards, ancient family, rich, darned clever--all the fixings. Kaiser liked him, and it’s easy to see why. I guess a man who had as many personalities as the Graf was amusing after-dinner company. Specially among the Germans, who in my experience don’t excel in the lighter vein. Anyway, he was William’s white-headed boy, and there wasn’t a mother with a daughter who wasn’t out gunning for Otto von Schwabing. He was about as popular in London and Noo York--and in Paris, too. Ask Sir Walter about him, Dick. He says he had twice the brains of Kuhlmann, and better manners than the Austrian fellow he used to yarn about ... Well, one day there came an almighty court scandal, and the bottom dropped out of the Graf’s World. It was a pretty beastly story, and I don’t gather that Schwabing was as deep in it as some others. But the trouble was that those others had to be shielded at all costs, and Schwabing was made the scapegoat. His name came out in the papers and he had to go.’

‘What was the case called?’ I asked.

Blenkiron mentioned a name, and I knew why the word Schwabing was familiar. I had read the story long ago in Rhodesia.

‘It was some smash,’ Blenkiron went on. ‘He was drummed out of the Guards, out of the clubs, out of the country ... Now, how would you have felt, Dick, if you had been the Graf? Your life and work and happiness crossed out, and all to save a mangy princeling. “Bitter as hell,” you say. Hungering for a chance to put it across the lot that had outed you? You wouldn’t rest till you had William sobbing on his knees asking your pardon, and you not thinking of granting it? That’s the way you’d feel, but that wasn’t the Graf’s way, and what’s more it isn’t the German way. He went into exile hating humanity, and with a heart all poison and snakes, but itching to get back. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because his kind of German hasn’t got any other home on this earth. Oh, yes, I know there’s stacks of good old Teutons come and squat in our little country and turn into fine Americans. You can do a lot with them if you catch them young and teach them the Declaration of Independence and make them study our Sunday papers. But you can’t deny there’s something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you’ve civilized them. They’re a pecooliar people, a darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn’t staff all the menial and indecent occupations on the globe. But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee. Your German aristocracy can’t consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand. They swagger and bluff about the world, but they know very well that the world’s sniggering at them. They’re like a boss from Salt Creek Gully who’s made his pile and bought a dress suit and dropped into a Newport evening party. They don’t know where to put their hands or how to keep their feet still ... Your copper-bottomed English nobleman has got to keep jogging himself to treat them as equals instead of sending them down to the servants’ hall. Their fine fixings are just the high light that reveals the everlasting jay. They can’t be gentlemen, because they aren’t sure of themselves. The world laughs at them, and they know it and it riles them like hell ... That’s why when a Graf is booted out of the Fatherland, he’s got to creep back somehow or be a wandering Jew for the rest of time.’

Blenkiron lit another cigar and fixed me with his steady, ruminating eye.

‘For eight years the man has slaved, body and soul, for the men who degraded him. He’s earned his restoration and I daresay he’s got it in his pocket. If merit was rewarded he should be covered with Iron Crosses and Red Eagles ... He had a pretty good hand to start out with. He knew other countries and he was a dandy at languages. More, he had an uncommon gift for living a part. That is real genius, Dick, however much it gets up against us. Best of all he had a first-class outfit of brains. I can’t say I ever struck a better, and I’ve come across some bright citizens in my time ... And now he’s going to win out, unless we get mighty busy.’

There was a knock at the door and the solid figure of Andrew Amos revealed itself.

‘It’s time ye was home, Miss Mary. It chappit half-eleven as I came up the stairs. It’s comin’ on to rain, so I’ve brought an umbrelly.’

‘One word,’ I said. ‘How old is the man?’

‘Just gone thirty-six,’ Blenkiron replied.

I turned to Mary, who nodded. ‘Younger than you, Dick,’ she said wickedly as she got into her big Jaeger coat.

‘I’m going to see you home,’ I said.

‘Not allowed. You’ve had quite enough of my society for one day. Andrew’s on escort duty tonight.’

Blenkiron looked after her as the door closed.

‘I reckon you’ve got the best girl in the world.’

‘Ivery thinks the same,’ I said grimly, for my detestation of the man who had made love to Mary fairly choked me.

‘You can see why. Here’s this degenerate coming out of his rotten class, all pampered and petted and satiated with the easy pleasures of life. He has seen nothing of women except the bad kind and the overfed specimens of his own country. I hate being impolite about females, but I’ve always considered the German variety uncommon like cows. He has had desperate years of intrigue and danger, and consorting with every kind of scallawag. Remember, he’s a big man and a poet, with a brain and an imagination that takes every grade without changing gears. Suddenly he meets something that is as fresh and lovely as a spring flower, and has wits too, and the steeliest courage, and yet is all youth and gaiety. It’s a new experience for him, a kind of revelation, and he’s big enough to value her as she should be valued ... No, Dick, I can understand you getting cross, but I reckon it an item to the man’s credit.’