Mr. Standfast
there’s no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble’s not over
in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here
was speaking about that kind, and he called it “Fortitude”. I reckon
fortitude’s the biggest thing a man can have—just to go on enduring
when there’s no guts or heart left in you. Billy had it when he trekked
solitary from Garungoze to the Limpopo with fever and a broken arm just
to show the Portugooses that he wouldn’t be downed by them. But the
head man at the job was the Apostle Paul ..._
Peter was writing for his own comfort, for fortitude was all that was
left to him now. But his words came pretty straight to me, and I read
them again and again, for I needed the lesson. Here was I losing heart
just because I had failed in the first round and my pride had taken a
knock. I felt honestly ashamed of myself, and that made me a far
happier man. There could be no question of dropping the business,
whatever its difficulties. I had a queer religious feeling that Ivery
and I had our fortunes intertwined, and that no will of mine could keep
us apart. I had faced him before the war and won; I had faced him again
and lost; the third time or the twentieth time we would reach a final
decision. The whole business had hitherto appeared to me a trifle
unreal, at any rate my own connection with it. I had been docilely
obeying orders, but my real self had been standing aside and watching
my doings with a certain aloofness. But that hour in the Tube station
had brought me into the serum, and I saw the affair not as Bullivant’s
or even Blenkiron’s, but as my own. Before I had been itching to get
back to the Front; now I wanted to get on to Ivery’s trail, though it
should take me through the nether pit. Peter was right; fortitude was
the thing a man must possess if he would save his soul.
The hours passed, and, as I expected, there came no word from
Macgillivray. I had some dinner sent up to me at seven o’clock, and
about eight I was thinking of looking up Blenkiron. Just then came a
telephone call asking me to go round to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in
Queen Anne’s Gate.
Ten minutes later I was ringing the bell, and the door was opened to me
by the same impassive butler who had admitted me on that famous night
three years before. Nothing had changed in the pleasant green-panelled
hall; the alcove was the same as when I had watched from it the
departure of the man who now called himself Ivery; the telephone book
lay in the very place from which I had snatched it in order to ring up
the First Sea Lord. And in the back room, where that night five anxious
officials had conferred, I found Sir Walter and Blenkiron.
Both looked worried, the American feverishly so. He walked up and down
the hearthrug, sucking an unlit black cigar.
“Say, Dick,” he said, “this is a bad business. It wasn’t no fault of
yours. You did fine. It was us—me and Sir Walter and Mr Macgillivray
that were the quitters.”
“Any news?” I asked.
“So far the cover’s drawn blank,” Sir Walter replied. “It was the
devil’s own work that our friend looked your way today. You’re pretty
certain he saw that you recognised him?”
“Absolutely. As sure as that he knew I recognised him in your hall
three years ago when he was swaggering as Lord Alloa.”
“No,” said Blenkiron dolefully, “that little flicker of recognition is
just the one thing you can’t be wrong about. Land alive! I wish Mr
Macgillivray would come.”
The bell rang, and the door opened, but it was not Macgillivray. It was
a young girl in a white ball-gown, with a cluster of blue cornflowers
at her breast. The sight of her fetched Sir Walter out of his chair so
suddenly that he upset his coffee cup.
“Mary, my dear, how did you manage it? I didn’t expect you till the
late train.”
“I was in London, you see, and they telephoned on your telegram. I’m
staying with Aunt Doria, and I cut her theatre party. She thinks I’m at
the Shandwick’s dance, so I needn’t go home till morning.... Good
evening, General Hannay. You got over the Hill Difficulty.”
“The next stage is the Valley of Humiliation,” I answered.
“So it would appear,” she said gravely, and sat very quietly on the
edge of Sir Walter’s chair with her small, cool hand upon his.
I had been picturing her in my recollection as very young and
glimmering, a dancing, exquisite child. But now I revised that picture.
The crystal freshness of morning was still there, but I saw how deep
the waters were. It was the clean fineness and strength of her that
entranced me. I didn’t even think of her as pretty, any more than a man
thinks of the good looks of the friend he worships.
We waited, hardly speaking a word, till Macgillivray came. The first
sight of his face told his story.
“Gone?” asked Blenkiron sharply. The man’s lethargic calm seemed to
have wholly deserted him.
“Gone,” repeated the newcomer. “We have just tracked him down. Oh, he
managed it cleverly. Never a sign of disturbance in any of his lairs.
His dinner ordered at Biggleswick and several people invited to stay
with him for the weekend—one a member of the Government. Two meetings
at which he was to speak arranged for next week. Early this afternoon
he flew over to France as a passenger in one of the new planes. He had
been mixed up with the Air Board people for months—of course as another
man with another face. Miss Lamington discovered that just too late.
The bus went out of its course and came down in Normandy. By this time
our man’s in Paris or beyond it.”
Sir Walter took off his big tortoiseshell spectacles and laid them
carefully on the table.
“Roll up the map of Europe,” he said. “This is our Austerlitz. Mary, my
dear, I am feeling very old.”
Macgillivray had the sharpened face of a bitterly disappointed man.
Blenkiron had got very red, and I could see that he was blaspheming
violently under his breath. Mary’s eyes were quiet and solemn. She kept
on patting Sir Walter’s hand. The sense of some great impending
disaster hung heavily on me, and to break the spell I asked for
details.
“Tell me just the extent of the damage,” I asked. “Our neat plan for
deceiving the Boche has failed. That is bad. A dangerous spy has got
beyond our power. That’s worse. Tell me, is there still a worst? What’s
the limit of mischief he can do?”
Sir Walter had risen and joined Blenkiron on the hearthrug. His brows
were furrowed and his mouth hard as if he were suffering pain.
“There is no limit,” he said. “None that I can see, except the
long-suffering of God. You know the man as Ivery, and you knew him as
that other whom you believed to have been shot one summer morning and
decently buried. You feared the second—at least if you didn’t, I
did—most mortally. You realised that we feared Ivery, and you knew
enough about him to see his fiendish cleverness. Well, you have the two
men combined in one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I
ever encountered, the most cunning and patient and long-sighted.
Combine him with the other, the chameleon who can blend himself with
his environment, and has as many personalities as there are types and
traits on the earth. What kind of enemy is that to have to fight?”
“I admit it’s a steep proposition. But after all how much ill can he
do? There are pretty strict limits to the activity of even the
cleverest spy.”
“I agree. But this man is not a spy who buys a few wretched
subordinates and steals a dozen private letters. He’s a genius who has
been living as part of our English life. There’s nothing he hasn’t
seen. He’s been on terms of intimacy with all kinds of politicians. We
know that. He did it as Ivery. They rather liked him, for he was clever
and flattered them, and they told him things. But God knows what he saw
and heard in his other personalities. For all I know he may have
breakfasted at Downing Street with letters of introduction from
President Wilson, or visited the Grand Fleet as a distinguished
neutral. Then think of the women; how they talk. We’re the leakiest
society on earth, and we safeguard ourselves by keeping dangerous
people out of it. We trust to our outer barrage. But anyone who has
really slipped inside has a million chances. And this, remember, is one
man in ten millions, a man whose brain never sleeps for a moment, who
is quick to seize the slightest hint, who can piece a plan together out
of a dozen bits of gossip. It’s like—it’s as if the Chief of the
Intelligence Department were suddenly to desert to the enemy.... The
ordinary spy knows only bits of unconnected facts. This man knows our
life and our way of thinking and everything about us.”
“Well, but a treatise on English life in time of war won’t do much good
to the Boche.”
Sir Walter shook his head. “Don’t you realise the explosive stuff that
is lying about? Ivery knows enough to make the next German peace
offensive really deadly—not the blundering thing which it has been up
to now, but something which gets our weak spots on the raw. He knows
enough to wreck our campaign in the field. And the awful thing is that
we don’t know just what he knows or what he is aiming for. This war’s a
packet of surprises. Both sides are struggling for the margin, the
little fraction of advantage, and between evenly matched enemies it’s
just the extra atom of foreknowledge that tells.”
“Then we’ve got to push off and get after him,” I said cheerfully.
“But what are you going to do?” asked Macgillivray. “If it were merely
a question of destroying an organisation it might be managed, for an
organisation presents a big front. But it’s a question of destroying
this one man, and his front is a razor edge. How are you going to find
him? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and such a needle! A
needle which can become a piece of straw or a tin-tack when it
chooses!”
“All the same we’ve got to do it,” I said, remembering old Peter’s
lesson on fortitude, though I can’t say I was feeling very
stout-hearted.
Sir Walter flung himself wearily into an arm-chair. “I wish I could be
an optimist,” he said, “but it looks as if we must own defeat. I’ve
been at this work for twenty years, and, though I’ve been often beaten,
I’ve always held certain cards in the game. Now I’m hanged if I’ve any.
It looks like a knock-out, Hannay. It’s no good deluding ourselves.
We’re men enough to look facts in the face and tell ourselves the
truth. I don’t see any ray of light in the business. We’ve missed our
shot by a hairsbreadth and that’s the same as missing by miles.”
I remember he looked at Mary as if for confirmation, but she did not
smile or nod. Her face was very grave and her eyes looked steadily at
him. Then they moved and met mine, and they seemed to give me my
marching orders.
“Sir Walter,” I said, “three years ago you and I sat in this very room.
We thought we were done to the world, as we think now. We had just that
one miserable little clue to hang on to—a dozen words scribbled in a
notebook by a dead man. You thought I was mad when I asked for
Scudder’s book, but we put our backs into the job and in twenty-four
hours we had won out. Remember that then we were fighting against time.
Now we have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then we had nothing but a
sentence of gibberish. Now we have a great body of knowledge, for
Blenkiron has been brooding over Ivery like an old hen, and he knows
his ways of working and his breed of confederate. You’ve got something
to work on now. Do you mean to tell me that, when the stakes are so
big, you’re going to chuck in your hand?”
Macgillivray raised his head. “We know a good deal about Ivery, but
Ivery’s dead. We know nothing of the man who was gloriously resurrected
this evening in Normandy.”
“Oh, yes we do. There are many faces to the man, but only one mind, and