Mr. Standfast
short of the bridge, and took the road which would bring me to the
terraced front of the house.
Once I turned the corner of the Château and saw the long ghostly façade
white in the moonlight, I felt less confident. The eeriness of the
place smote me. In that still, snowy world it loomed up immense and
mysterious with its rows of shuttered windows, each with that air which
empty houses have of concealing some wild story. I longed to have old
Peter with me, for he was the man for this kind of escapade. I had
heard that he had been removed to Switzerland and I pictured him now in
some mountain village where the snow lay deep. I would have given
anything to have had Peter with a whole leg by my side.
I stepped on the terrace and listened. There was not a sound in the
world, not even the distant rumble of a cart. The pile towered above me
like a mausoleum, and I reflected that it must take some nerve to
burgle an empty house. It would be good enough fun to break into a
bustling dwelling and pinch the plate when the folk were at dinner, but
to burgle emptiness and silence meant a fight with the terrors in a
man’s soul. It was worse in my case, for I wasn’t cheered with
prospects of loot. I wanted to get inside chiefly to soothe my
conscience.
I hadn’t much doubt I would find a way, for three years of war and the
frequent presence of untidy headquarters’ staffs have loosened the
joints of most Picardy houses. There’s generally a window that doesn’t
latch or a door that doesn’t bar. But I tried window after window on
the terrace without result. The heavy green sun-shutters were down over
each, and when I broke the hinges of one there was a long bar within to
hold it firm. I was beginning to think of shinning up a rain-pipe and
trying the second floor, when a shutter I had laid hold on swung back
in my hand. It had been left unfastened, and, kicking the snow from my
boots, I entered a room.
A gleam of moonlight followed me and I saw I was in a big salon with a
polished wood floor and dark lumps of furniture swathed in sheets. I
clicked the bulb at my belt, and the little circle of light showed a
place which had not been dwelt in for years. At the far end was another
door, and as I tiptoed towards it something caught my eye on the
parquet. It was a piece of fresh snow like that which clumps on the
heel of a boot. I had not brought it there. Some other visitor had
passed this way, and not long before me.
Very gently I opened the door and slipped in. In front of me was a pile
of furniture which made a kind of screen, and behind that I halted and
listened. There was somebody in the room. I heard the sound of human
breathing and soft movements; the man, whoever he was, was at the far
end from me, and though there was a dim glow of Moon through a broken
shutter I could see nothing of what he was after. I was beginning to
enjoy myself now. I knew of his presence and he did not know of mine,
and that is the sport of stalking.
An unwary movement of my hand caused the screen to creak. Instantly the
movements ceased and there was utter silence. I held my breath, and
after a second or two the tiny sounds began again. I had a feeling,
though my eyes could not assure me, that the man before me was at work,
and was using a very small shaded torch. There was just the faintest
moving shimmer on the wall beyond, though that might come from the
crack of moonlight.
Apparently he was reassured, for his movements became more distinct.
There was a jar as if a table had been pushed back. Once more there was
silence, and I heard only the intake of breath. I have very quick ears,
and to me it sounded as if the man was rattled. The breathing was quick
and anxious.
Suddenly it changed and became the ghost of a whistle—the kind of sound
one makes with the lips and teeth without ever letting the tune break
out clear. We all do it when we are preoccupied with something—shaving,
or writing letters, or reading the newspaper. But I did not think my
man was preoccupied. He was whistling to quiet fluttering nerves.
Then I caught the air. It was “Cherry Ripe”.
In a moment, from being hugely at my ease, I became the nervous one. I
had been playing peep-bo with the unseen, and the tables were turned.
My heart beat against my ribs like a hammer. I shuffled my feet, and
again there fell the tense silence.
“Mary,” I said—and the word seemed to explode like a bomb in the
stillness—“Mary! It’s me—Dick Hannay.”
There was no answer but a sob and the sound of a timid step.
I took four paces into the darkness and caught in my arms a trembling
girl....
Often in the last months I had pictured the kind of scene which would
be the culminating point of my life. When our work was over and war had
been forgotten, somewhere—perhaps in a green Cotswold meadow or in a
room of an old manor—I would talk with Mary. By that time we should
know each other well and I would have lost my shyness. I would try to
tell her that I loved her, but whenever I thought of what I should say
my heart sank, for I knew I would make a fool of myself. You can’t live
my kind of life for forty years wholly among men and be of any use at
pretty speeches to women. I knew I should stutter and blunder, and I
used despairingly to invent impossible situations where I might make my
love plain to her without words by some piece of melodramatic
sacrifice.
But the kind Fates had saved me the trouble. Without a syllable save
Christian names stammered in that eerie darkness we had come to
complete understanding. The fairies had been at work unseen, and the
thoughts of each of us had been moving towards the other, till love had
germinated like a seed in the dark. As I held her in my arms I stroked
her hair and murmured things which seemed to spring out of some
ancestral memory. Certainly my tongue had never used them before, nor
my mind imagined them.... By and by she slipped her arms round my neck
and with a half sob strained towards me. She was still trembling.
“Dick,” she said, and to hear that name on her lips was the sweetest
thing I had ever known. “Dick, is it really you? Tell me I’m not
dreaming.”
“It’s me, sure enough, Mary dear. And now I have found you I will never
let you go again. But, my precious child, how on earth did you get
here?”
She disengaged herself and let her little electric torch wander over my
rough habiliments.
“You look a tremendous warrior, Dick. I have never seen you like this
before. I was in Doubting Castle and very much afraid of Giant Despair,
till you came.”
“I think I call it the Interpreter’s House,” I said.
“It’s the house of somebody we both know,” she went on. “He calls
himself Bommaerts here. That was one of the two names, you remember. I
have seen him since in Paris. Oh, it is a long story and you shall hear
it all soon. I knew he came here sometimes, so I came here too. I have
been nursing for the last fortnight at the Douvecourt Hospital only
four miles away.”
“But what brought you alone at night?”
“Madness, I think. Vanity, too. You see I had found out a good deal,
and I wanted to find out the one vital thing which had puzzled Mr
Blenkiron. I told myself it was foolish, but I couldn’t keep away. And
then my courage broke down, and before you came I would have screamed
at the sound of a mouse. If I hadn’t whistled I would have cried.”
“But why alone and at this hour?”
“I couldn’t get off in the day. And it was safest to come alone. You
see he is in love with me, and when he heard I was coming to Douvecourt
forgot his caution and proposed to meet me here. He said he was going
on a long journey and wanted to say goodbye. If he had found me
alone—well, he would have said goodbye. If there had been anyone with
me, he would have suspected, and he mustn’t suspect _me_. Mr Blenkiron
says that would be fatal to his great plan. He believes I am like my
aunts, and that I think him an apostle of peace working by his own
methods against the stupidity and wickedness of all the Governments. He
talks more bitterly about Germany than about England. He had told me
how he had to disguise himself and play many parts on his mission, and
of course I have applauded him. Oh, I have had a difficult autumn.”
“Mary,” I cried, “tell me you hate him.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I do not hate him. I am keeping that for
later. I fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly
I will hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an
unclean thing. But till then I won’t waste energy on hate. We want to
hoard every atom of our strength for the work of beating him.”
She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at
her. She was in nurses’ outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed
tired. The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out
all recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a
would-be lover of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had
rented his house for the partridge-shooting. “And you, Dick,” she
asked; “is it part of a general’s duties to pay visits at night to
empty houses?”
“I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track
from another angle, but that story must wait.”
“You observe that he has been here today?”
She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a
space on its surface cleared from dust. “In a place like this the dust
would settle again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should
say he has been here just after luncheon.”
“Great Scott!” I cried, “what a close shave! I’m in the mood at this
moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his
lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.”
She shook her head. “Mr Blenkiron—he’s in Paris too—wouldn’t hear of
it. He hasn’t just figured the thing out yet, he says. We’ve identified
one of your names, but we’re still in doubt about Chelius.”
“Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete
before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?”
“Your guess about the ‘Deep-breathing’ advertisement was very clever,
Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr
Blenkiron to tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something
of the doings of someone who may be Chelius, but we can’t link them
with Ivery. We know that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link
Bommaerts with Chelius. That’s why I came here. I was trying to burgle
this escritoire in an amateur way. It’s a bad piece of fake Empire and
deserves smashing.”
I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and
with some difficulty I clambered down from the exultant heights. The
intoxication of the thing was on me—the winter night, the circle of
light in that dreary room, the sudden coming together of two souls from
the ends of the earth, the realisation of my wildest hopes, the gilding
and glorifying of all the future. But she had always twice as much
wisdom as me, and we were in the midst of a campaign which had no use
for day-dreaming. I turned my attention to the desk.
It was a flat table with drawers, and at the back a half-circle of more
drawers with a central cupboard. I tilted it up and most of the drawers
slid out, empty of anything but dust. I forced two open with my knife
and they held empty cigar boxes. Only the cupboard remained, and that
appeared to be locked. I wedged a key from my pocket into its keyhole,
but the thing would not budge.
“It’s no good,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave anything he valued in a
place like this. That sort of fellow doesn’t take risks. If he wanted
to hide something there are a hundred holes in this Château which would
puzzle the best detective.”
“Can’t you open it?” she asked. “I’ve a fancy about that table. He was