Mr. Standfast
a beastly noise.”
He was right. The form of an Army Service Corps private emerged from
the mist, his cap on the back of his head, his hands in his pockets,
and his walk the walk of a free man. I never saw a welcomer sight than
that jam-merchant.
We stood up and greeted him. “What’s this place?” I shouted.
He raised a grubby hand to his forelock.
“Ockott Saint Anny, sir,” he said. “Beg pardon, sir, but you ain’t
whurt, sir?”
Ten minutes later I was having tea in the mess of an M.T. workshop
while Archie had gone to the nearest Signals to telephone for a car and
give instructions about his precious bus. It was almost dark, but I
gulped my tea and hastened out into the thick dusk. For I wanted to
have a look at the Château.
I found a big entrance with high stone pillars, but the iron gates were
locked and looked as if they had not been opened in the memory of man.
Knowing the way of such places, I hunted for the side entrance and
found a muddy road which led to the back of the house. The front was
evidently towards a kind of park; at the back was a nest of
outbuildings and a section of moat which looked very deep and black in
the winter twilight. This was crossed by a stone bridge with a door at
the end of it.
Clearly the Château was not being used for billets. There was no sign
of the British soldier; there was no sign of anything human. I crept
through the fog as noiselessly as if I trod on velvet, and I hadn’t
even the company of my own footsteps. I remembered the Canadian’s ghost
story, and concluded I would be imagining the same sort of thing if I
lived in such a place.
The door was bolted and padlocked. I turned along the side of the moat,
hoping to reach the house front, which was probably modern and boasted
a civilised entrance. There must be somebody in the place, for one
chimney was smoking. Presently the moat petered out, and gave place to
a cobbled causeway, but a wall, running at right angles with the house,
blocked my way. I had half a mind to go back and hammer at the door,
but I reflected that major-generals don’t pay visits to deserted
châteaux at night without a reasonable errand. I should look a fool in
the eyes of some old concierge. The daylight was almost gone, and I
didn’t wish to go groping about the house with a candle.
But I wanted to see what was beyond the wall—one of those whims that
beset the soberest men. I rolled a dissolute water-butt to the foot of
it, and gingerly balanced myself on its rotten staves. This gave me a
grip on the flat brick top, and I pulled myself up.
I looked down on a little courtyard with another wall beyond it, which
shut off any view of the park. On the right was the Château, on the
left more outbuildings; the whole place was not more than twenty yards
each way. I was just about to retire by the road I had come, for in
spite of my fur coat it was uncommon chilly on that perch, when I heard
a key turn in the door in the Château wall beneath me.
A lantern made a blur of light in the misty darkness. I saw that the
bearer was a woman, an oldish woman, round-shouldered like most French
peasants. In one hand she carried a leather bag, and she moved so
silently that she must have worn rubber boots. The light was held level
with her head and illumined her face. It was the evillest thing I have
ever beheld, for a horrible scar had puckered the skin of the forehead
and drawn up the eyebrows so that it looked like some diabolical
Chinese mask.
Slowly she padded across the yard, carrying the bag as gingerly as if
it had been an infant. She stopped at the door of one of the outhouses
and set down the lantern and her burden on the ground. From her apron
she drew something which looked like a gas-mask, and put it over her
head. She also put on a pair of long gauntlets. Then she unlocked the
door, picked up the lantern and went in. I heard the key turn behind
her.
Crouching on that wall, I felt a very ugly tremor run down my spine. I
had a glimpse of what the Canadian’s ghost might have been. That hag,
hooded like some venomous snake, was too much for my stomach. I dropped
off the wall and ran—yes, ran till I reached the highroad and saw the
cheery headlights of a transport wagon, and heard the honest speech of
the British soldier. That restored me to my senses, and made me feel
every kind of a fool.
As I drove back to the line with Archie, I was black ashamed of my
funk. I told myself that I had seen only an old countrywoman going to
feed her hens. I convinced my reason, but I did not convince the whole
of me. An insensate dread of the place hung around me, and I could only
retrieve my self-respect by resolving to return and explore every nook
of it.
CHAPTER XIII
The Adventure of the Picardy Château
I looked up Eaucourt Sainte-Anne on the map, and the more I studied its
position the less I liked it. It was the knot from which sprang all the
main routes to our Picardy front. If the Boche ever broke us, it was
the place for which old Hindenburg would make. At all hours troops and
transport trains were moving through that insignificant hamlet. Eminent
generals and their staffs passed daily within sight of the Château. It
was a convenient halting-place for battalions coming back to rest.
Supposing, I argued, our enemies wanted a key-spot for some assault
upon the _morale_ or the discipline or health of the British Army, they
couldn’t find a better than Eaucourt Sainte-Anne. It was the ideal
centre of espionage. But when I guardedly sounded my friends of the
Intelligence they didn’t seem to be worrying about it.
From them I got a chit to the local French authorities, and, as soon as
we came out of the line, towards the end of December, I made straight
for the country town of Douvecourt. By a bit of luck our divisional
quarters were almost next door. I interviewed a tremendous swell in a
black uniform and black kid gloves, who received me affably and put his
archives and registers at my disposal. By this time I talked French
fairly well, having a natural turn for languages, but half the rapid
speech of the _sous-prefet_ was lost on me. By and by he left me with
the papers and a clerk, and I proceeded to grub up the history of the
Château.
It had belonged since long before Agincourt to the noble house of the
D’Eaucourts, now represented by an ancient Marquise who dwelt at
Biarritz. She had never lived in the place, which a dozen years before
had been falling to ruins, when a rich American leased it and partially
restored it. He had soon got sick of it—his daughter had married a
blackguard French cavalry officer with whom he quarrelled, said the
clerk—and since then there had been several tenants. I wondered why a
house so unattractive should have let so readily, but the clerk
explained that the cause was the partridge-shooting. It was about the
best in France, and in 1912 had shown the record bag.
The list of the tenants was before me. There was a second American, an
Englishman called Halford, a Paris Jew-banker, and an Egyptian prince.
But the space for 1913 was blank, and I asked the clerk about it. He
told me that it had been taken by a woollen manufacturer from Lille,
but he had never shot the partridges, though he had spent occasional
nights in the house. He had a five years’ lease, and was still paying
rent to the Marquise. I asked the name, but the clerk had forgotten.
“It will be written there,” he said.
“But, no,” I said. “Somebody must have been asleep over this register.
There’s nothing after 1912.”
He examined the page and blinked his eyes. “Someone indeed must have
slept. No doubt it was young Louis who is now with the guns in
Champagne. But the name will be on the Commissary’s list. It is, as I
remember, a sort of Flemish.”
He hobbled off and returned in five minutes.
“Bommaerts,” he said, “Jacques Bommaerts. A young man with no wife but
with money—_Dieu de Dieu_, what oceans of it!”
That clerk got twenty-five francs, and he was cheap at the price. I
went back to my division with a sense of awe on me. It was a marvellous
fate that had brought me by odd routes to this out-of-the-way corner.
First, the accident of Hamilton’s seeing Gresson; then the night in the
Clearing Station; last the mishap of Archie’s plane getting lost in the
fog. I had three grounds of suspicion—Gresson’s sudden illness, the
Canadian’s ghost, and that horrid old woman in the dusk. And now I had
one tremendous fact. The place was leased by a man called Bommaerts,
and that was one of the two names I had heard whispered in that
far-away cleft in the Coolin by the stranger from the sea.
A sensible man would have gone off to the _contre-espionage_ people and
told them his story. I couldn’t do this; I felt that it was my own
private find and I was going to do the prospecting myself. Every moment
of leisure I had I was puzzling over the thing. I rode round by the
Château one frosty morning and examined all the entrances. The main one
was the grand avenue with the locked gates. That led straight to the
front of the house where the terrace was—or you might call it the back,
for the main door was on the other side. Anyhow the drive came up to
the edge of the terrace and then split into two, one branch going to
the stables by way of the outbuildings where I had seen the old woman,
the other circling round the house, skirting the moat, and joining the
back road just before the bridge. If I had gone to the right instead of
the left that first evening with Archie, I should have circumnavigated
the place without any trouble.
Seen in the fresh morning light the house looked commonplace enough.
Part of it was as old as Noah, but most was newish and jerry-built, the
kind of flat-chested, thin French Château, all front and no depth, and
full of draughts and smoky chimneys. I might have gone in and ransacked
the place, but I knew I should find nothing. It was borne in on me that
it was only when evening fell that that house was interesting and that
I must come, like Nicodemus, by night. Besides I had a private account
to settle with my conscience. I had funked the place in the foggy
twilight, and it does not do to let a matter like that slide. A man’s
courage is like a horse that refuses a fence; you have got to take him
by the head and cram him at it again. If you don’t, he will funk worse
next time. I hadn’t enough courage to be able to take chances with it,
though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally
was being afraid.
I did not get a chance till Christmas Eve. The day before there had
been a fall of snow, but the frost set in and the afternoon ended in a
green sunset with the earth crisp and crackling like a shark’s skin. I
dined early, and took with me Geordie Hamilton, who added to his many
accomplishments that of driving a car. He was the only man in the
B.E.F. who guessed anything of the game I was after, and I knew that he
was as discreet as a tombstone. I put on my oldest trench cap, slacks,
and a pair of scaife-soled boots, that I used to change into in the
evening. I had a useful little electric torch, which lived in my
pocket, and from which a cord led to a small bulb of light that worked
with a switch and could be hung on my belt. That left my arms free in
case of emergencies. Likewise I strapped on my pistol.
There was little traffic in the hamlet of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne that
night. Few cars were on the road, and the M.T. detachment, judging from
the din, seemed to be busy on a private spree. It was about nine
o’clock when we turned into the side road, and at the entrance to it I
saw a solid figure in khaki mounting guard beside two bicycles.
Something in the man’s gesture, as he saluted, struck me as familiar,
but I had no time to hunt for casual memories. I left the car just