Mr. Standfast
are still in the intelligence stage of the affair. The time hasn’t yet
come for a plan of campaign, and still less for action.”
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Is it a really big thing we’re after?”
“A—really—big—thing,” she said slowly and very gravely. “You and I and
some hundred others are hunting the most dangerous man in all the
world. Till we succeed everything that Britain does is crippled. If we
fail or succeed too late the Allies may never win the victory which is
their right. I will tell you one thing to cheer you. It is in some sort
a race against time, so your purgatory won’t endure too long.”
I was bound to obey, and she knew it, for she took my willingness for
granted.
From a little gold satchel she selected a tiny box, and opening it
extracted a thing like a purple wafer with a white St Andrew’s Cross on
it.
“What kind of watch have you? Ah, a hunter. Paste that inside the lid.
Some day you may be called on to show it.... One other thing. Buy
tomorrow a copy of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and get it by heart. You
will receive letters and messages some day and the style of our friends
is apt to be reminiscent of John Bunyan.... The car will be at the door
tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give you the address of
the rooms that have been taken for you.... Beyond that I have nothing
to say, except to beg you to play the part well and keep your temper.
You behaved very nicely at dinner.”
I asked one last question as we said good night in the hall. “Shall I
see you again?”
“Soon, and often,” was the answer. “Remember we are colleagues.”
I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly
beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured
with the thought of the girl who had sung “Cherry Ripe” in the garden.
I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in the choice of
his intermediary, for I’m hanged if I would have taken such orders from
anyone else.
CHAPTER II
“The Village Named Morality”
Up on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked by
muddy trickles—the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would look for
in a day’s journey. But presently they reach the edge of the plateau
and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll
thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea. So with the story
I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet
the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless
from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control. But for the
present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of
Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman
visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage
of Mr Tancred Jimson.
The house—or “home” as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick—was one
of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common. It
was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the windows
did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean as soap
and water and scrubbing could make it. The three-quarters of an acre of
garden were mainly devoted to the culture of potatoes, though under the
parlour window Mrs Jimson had a plot of sweet-smelling herbs, and lines
of lank sunflowers fringed the path that led to the front door. It was
Mrs Jimson who received me as I descended from the station fly—a large
red woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in a
gown which, both in shape and material, seemed to have been modelled on
a chintz curtain. She was a good kindly soul, and as proud as Punch of
her house.
“We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,” she said. “You must take us
as you find us.”
I assured her that I asked for nothing better, and as I unpacked in my
fresh little bedroom with a west wind blowing in at the window I
considered that I had seen worse quarters.
I had bought in London a considerable number of books, for I thought
that, as I would have time on my hands, I might as well do something
about my education. They were mostly English classics, whose names I
knew but which I had never read, and they were all in a little
flat-backed series at a shilling apiece. I arranged them on top of a
chest of drawers, but I kept the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ beside my bed,
for that was one of my working tools and I had to get it by heart.
Mrs Jimson, who came in while I was unpacking to see if the room was to
my liking, approved my taste. At our midday dinner she wanted to
discuss books with me, and was so full of her own knowledge that I was
able to conceal my ignorance.
“We are all labouring to express our personalities,” she informed me.
“Have you found your medium, Mr Brand? is it to be the pen or the
pencil? Or perhaps it is music? You have the brow of an artist, the
frontal ‘bar of Michelangelo’, you remember!”
I told her that I concluded I would try literature, but before writing
anything I would read a bit more.
It was a Saturday, so Jimson came back from town in the early
afternoon. He was a managing clerk in some shipping office, but you
wouldn’t have guessed it from his appearance. His city clothes were
loose dark-grey flannels, a soft collar, an orange tie, and a soft
black hat. His wife went down the road to meet him, and they returned
hand-in-hand, swinging their arms like a couple of schoolchildren. He
had a skimpy red beard streaked with grey, and mild blue eyes behind
strong glasses. He was the most friendly creature in the world, full of
rapid questions, and eager to make me feel one of the family. Presently
he got into a tweed Norfolk jacket, and started to cultivate his
garden. I took off my coat and lent him a hand, and when he stopped to
rest from his labours—which was every five minutes, for he had no kind
of physique—he would mop his brow and rub his spectacles and declaim
about the good smell of the earth and the joy of getting close to
Nature.
Once he looked at my big brown hands and muscular arms with a kind of
wistfulness. “You are one of the _doers_, Mr Brand,” he said, “and I
could find it in my heart to envy you. You have seen Nature in wild
forms in far countries. Some day I hope you will tell us about your
life. I must be content with my little corner, but happily there are no
territorial limits for the mind. This modest dwelling is a watch-tower
from which I look over all the world.”
After that he took me for a walk. We met parties of returning
tennis-players and here and there a golfer. There seemed to be an
abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or
two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The names of some of
them Jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the
great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was
Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the _Critic_. Several were
pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else,
and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new
Orientalism in England. I noticed that these people, according to
Jimson, were all “great”, and that they all dabbled in something “new”.
There were quantities of young women, too, most of them rather badly
dressed and inclining to untidy hair. And there were several decent
couples taking the air like house-holders of an evening all the world
over. Most of these last were Jimson’s friends, to whom he introduced
me. They were his own class—modest folk, who sought for a coloured
background to their prosaic city lives and found it in this odd
settlement.
At supper I was initiated into the peculiar merits of Biggleswick.
“It is one great laboratory of thought,” said Mrs Jimson. “It is
glorious to feel that you are living among the eager, vital people who
are at the head of all the newest movements, and that the intellectual
history of England is being made in our studies and gardens. The war to
us seems a remote and secondary affair. As someone has said, the great
fights of the world are all fought in the mind.”
A spasm of pain crossed her husband’s face. “I wish I could feel it far
away. After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that gives
people like us leisure and peace to think. Our duty is to do the best
which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing compared with
what our young soldiers are giving! I may be quite wrong about the
war.... I know I can’t argue with Letchford. But I will not pretend to
a superiority I do not feel.”
I went to bed feeling that in Jimson I had struck a pretty sound
fellow. As I lit the candles on my dressing-table I observed that the
stack of silver which I had taken out of my pockets when I washed
before supper was top-heavy. It had two big coins at the top and
sixpences and shillings beneath. Now it is one of my oddities that ever
since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins symmetrically,
with the smallest uppermost. That made me observant and led me to
notice a second point. The English classics on the top of the chest of
drawers were not in the order I had left them. Izaak Walton had got to
the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns was wedged
disconsolately between two volumes of Hazlitt. Moreover a receipted
bill which I had stuck in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ to mark my place had
been moved. Someone had been going through my belongings.
A moment’s reflection convinced me that it couldn’t have been Mrs
Jimson. She had no servant and did the housework herself, but my things
had been untouched when I left the room before supper, for she had come
to tidy up before I had gone downstairs. Someone had been here while we
were at supper, and had examined elaborately everything I possessed.
Happily I had little luggage, and no papers save the new books and a
bill or two in the name of Cornelius Brand. The inquisitor, whoever he
was, had found nothing.... The incident gave me a good deal of comfort.
It had been hard to believe that any mystery could exist in this public
place, where people lived brazenly in the open, and wore their hearts
on their sleeves and proclaimed their opinions from the rooftops. Yet
mystery there must be, or an inoffensive stranger with a kit-bag would
not have received these strange attentions. I made a practice after
that of sleeping with my watch below my pillow, for inside the case was
Mary Lamington’s label.
Now began a period of pleasant idle receptiveness. Once a week it was
my custom to go up to London for the day to receive letters and
instructions, if any should come. I had moved from my chambers in Park
Lane, which I leased under my proper name, to a small flat in
Westminster taken in the name of Cornelius Brand. The letters addressed
to Park Lane were forwarded to Sir Walter, who sent them round under
cover to my new address. For the rest I used to spend my mornings
reading in the garden, and I discovered for the first time what a
pleasure was to be got from old books. They recalled and amplified that
vision I had seen from the Cotswold ridge, the revelation of the
priceless heritage which is England. I imbibed a mighty quantity of
history, but especially I liked the writers, like Walton, who got at
the very heart of the English countryside. Soon, too, I found the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ not a duty but a delight. I discovered new jewels
daily in the honest old story, and my letters to Peter began to be as
full of it as Peter’s own epistles. I loved, also, the songs of the
Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had sung to me in
the June night.
In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good
dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a
plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The