Mr. Standfast
rather hard to meet....” “I can sympathise with patriotism, and even
with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to this
difficulty.” “Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much as
ill-judging,”—these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in. And
he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had with
every sort of person—including members of the Government. I remember
that he expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.
Of all that talk, I only recalled one thing clearly, and I recalled it
because Blenkiron seemed to collect his wits and try to argue, just as
he had done at the end of his lecture. He was speaking about a story he
had heard from someone, who had heard it from someone else, that
Austria in the last week of July 1914 had accepted Russia’s proposal to
hold her hand and negotiate, and that the Kaiser had sent a message to
the Tsar saying he agreed. According to his story this telegram had
been received in Petrograd, and had been re-written, like Bismarck’s
Ems telegram, before it reached the Emperor. He expressed his disbelief
in the yarn. “I reckon if it had been true,” he said, “we’d have had
the right text out long ago. They’d have kept a copy in Berlin. All the
same I did hear a sort of rumour that some kind of message of that sort
was published in a German paper.”
Mr Ivery looked wise. “You are right,” he said. “I happen to know that
it has been published. You will find it in the _Weser Zeitung_.”
“You don’t say?” he said admiringly. “I wish I could read the old
tombstone language. But if I could they wouldn’t let me have the
papers.”
“Oh yes they would.” Mr Ivery laughed pleasantly. “England has still a
good share of freedom. Any respectable person can get a permit to
import the enemy press. I’m not considered quite respectable, for the
authorities have a narrow definition of patriotism, but happily I have
respectable friends.”
Blenkiron was staying the night, and I took my leave as the clock
struck twelve. They both came into the hall to see me off, and, as I
was helping myself to a drink, and my host was looking for my hat and
stick, I suddenly heard Blenkiron’s whisper in my ear. “London ... the
day after tomorrow,” he said. Then he took a formal farewell. “Mr
Brand, it’s been an honour for me, as an American citizen, to make your
acquaintance, sir. I will consider myself fortunate if we have an early
reunion. I am stopping at Claridge’s Ho-tel, and I hope to be
privileged to receive you there.”
CHAPTER III
The Reflections of a Cured Dyspeptic
Thirty-five hours later I found myself in my rooms in Westminster. I
thought there might be a message for me there, for I didn’t propose to
go and call openly on Blenkiron at Claridge’s till I had his
instructions. But there was no message—only a line from Peter, saying
he had hopes of being sent to Switzerland. That made me realise that he
must be pretty badly broken up.
Presently the telephone bell rang. It was Blenkiron who spoke. “Go down
and have a talk with your brokers about the War Loan. Arrive there
about twelve o’clock and don’t go upstairs till you have met a friend.
You’d better have a quick luncheon at your club, and then come to
Traill’s bookshop in the Haymarket at two. You can get back to
Biggleswick by the 5.16.”
I did as I was bid, and twenty minutes later, having travelled by
Underground, for I couldn’t raise a taxi, I approached the block of
chambers in Leadenhall Street where dwelt the respected firm who
managed my investments. It was still a few minutes before noon, and as
I slowed down a familiar figure came out of the bank next door.
Ivery beamed recognition. “Up for the day, Mr Brand?” he asked. “I have
to see my brokers,” I said, “read the South African papers in my club,
and get back by the 5.16. Any chance of your company?”
“Why, yes—that’s my train. _Au revoir_. We meet at the station.” He
bustled off, looking very smart with his neat clothes and a rose in his
button-hole.
I lunched impatiently, and at two was turning over some new books in
Traill’s shop with an eye on the street-door behind me. It seemed a
public place for an assignation. I had begun to dip into a big
illustrated book on flower-gardens when an assistant came up. “The
manager’s compliments, sir, and he thinks there are some old works of
travel upstairs that might interest you.” I followed him obediently to
an upper floor lined with every kind of volume and with tables littered
with maps and engravings. “This way, sir,” he said, and opened a door
in the wall concealed by bogus book-backs. I found myself in a little
study, and Blenkiron sitting in an armchair smoking.
He got up and seized both my hands. “Why, Dick, this is better than
good noos. I’ve heard all about your exploits since we parted a year
ago on the wharf at Liverpool. We’ve both been busy on our own jobs,
and there was no way of keeping you wise about my doings, for after I
thought I was cured I got worse than hell inside, and, as I told you,
had to get the doctor-men to dig into me. After that I was playing a
pretty dark game, and had to get down and out of decent society. But,
holy Mike! I’m a new man. I used to do my work with a sick heart and a
taste in my mouth like a graveyard, and now I can eat and drink what I
like and frolic round like a colt. I wake up every morning whistling
and thank the good God that I’m alive. It was a bad day for Kaiser when
I got on the cars for White Springs.”
“This is a rum place to meet,” I said, “and you brought me by a
roundabout road.”
He grinned and offered me a cigar.
“There were reasons. It don’t do for you and me to advertise our
acquaintance in the street. As for the shop, I’ve owned it for five
years. I’ve a taste for good reading, though you wouldn’t think it, and
it tickles me to hand it out across the counter.... First, I want to
hear about Biggleswick.”
“There isn’t a great deal to it. A lot of ignorance, a large slice of
vanity, and a pinch or two of wrong-headed honesty—these are the
ingredients of the pie. Not much real harm in it. There’s one or two
dirty literary gents who should be in a navvies’ battalion, but they’re
about as dangerous as yellow Kaffir dogs. I’ve learned a lot and got
all the arguments by heart, but you might plant a Biggleswick in every
shire and it wouldn’t help the Boche. I can see where the danger lies
all the same. These fellows talked academic anarchism, but the genuine
article is somewhere about and to find it you’ve got to look in the big
industrial districts. We had faint echoes of it in Biggleswick. I mean
that the really dangerous fellows are those who want to close up the
war at once and so get on with their blessed class war, which cuts
across nationalities. As for being spies and that sort of thing, the
Biggleswick lads are too callow.”
“Yes,” said Blenkiron reflectively. “They haven’t got as much sense as
God gave to geese. You’re sure you didn’t hit against any heavier
metal?”
“Yes. There’s a man called Launcelot Wake, who came down to speak once.
I had met him before. He has the makings of a fanatic, and he’s the
more dangerous because you can see his conscience is uneasy. I can
fancy him bombing a Prime Minister merely to quiet his own doubts.”
“So,” he said. “Nobody else?”
I reflected. “There’s Mr Ivery, but you know him better than I. I
shouldn’t put much on him, but I’m not precisely certain, for I never
had a chance of getting to know him.”
“Ivery,” said Blenkiron in surprise. “He has a hobby for half-baked
youth, just as another rich man might fancy orchids or fast trotters.
You sure can place him right enough.”
“I dare say. Only I don’t know enough to be positive.”
He sucked at his cigar for a minute or so. “I guess, Dick, if I told
you all I’ve been doing since I reached these shores you would call me
a romancer. I’ve been way down among the toilers. I did a spell as
unskilled dilooted labour in the Barrow shipyards. I was barman in a
hotel on the Portsmouth Road, and I put in a black month driving a
taxicab in the city of London. For a while I was the accredited
correspondent of the _Noo York Sentinel_ and used to go with the rest
of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries of State and War
Office generals. They censored my stuff so cruel that the paper fired
me. Then I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a fortnight
in a little farm in Suffolk. By and by I came back to Claridge’s and
this bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.
“I had learned,” he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes
on me, “that the British working-man is about the soundest piece of
humanity on God’s earth. He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit when he
thinks the Government are giving him a crooked deal, but he’s gotten
the patience of Job and the sand of a gamecock. And he’s gotten humour
too, that tickles me to death. There’s not much trouble in that quarter
for it’s he and his kind that’s beating the Hun.... But I picked up a
thing or two besides that.”
He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. “I reverence the British
Intelligence Service. Flies don’t settle on it to any considerable
extent. It’s got a mighty fine mesh, but there’s one hole in that mesh,
and it’s our job to mend it. There’s a high-powered brain in the game
against us. I struck it a couple of years ago when I was hunting Dumba
and Albert, and I thought it was in Noo York, but it wasn’t. I struck
its working again at home last year and located its head office in
Europe. So I tried Switzerland and Holland, but only bits of it were
there. The centre of the web where the old spider sits is right here in
England, and for six months I’ve been shadowing that spider. There’s a
gang to help, a big gang, and a clever gang, and partly an innocent
gang. But there’s only one brain, and it’s to match that that the
Robson Brothers settled my duodenum.”
I was listening with a quickened pulse, for now at last I was getting
to business.
“What is he—international socialist, or anarchist, or what?” I asked.
“Pure-blooded Boche agent, but the biggest-sized brand in the
catalogue—bigger than Steinmeier or old Bismarck’s Staubier. Thank God
I’ve got him located.... I must put you wise about some things.”
He lay back in his rubbed leather armchair and yarned for twenty
minutes. He told me how at the beginning of the war Scotland Yard had
had a pretty complete register of enemy spies, and without making any
fuss had just tidied them away. After that, the covey having been
broken up, it was a question of picking off stray birds. That had taken
some doing. There had been all kinds of inflammatory stuff around, Red
Masons and international anarchists, and, worst of all, international
finance-touts, but they had mostly been ordinary cranks and rogues, the
tools of the Boche agents rather than agents themselves. However, by
the middle of 1915 most of the stragglers had been gathered in. But
there remained loose ends, and towards the close of last year somebody
was very busy combining these ends into a net. Funny cases cropped up
of the leakage of vital information. They began to be bad about October
1916, when the Hun submarines started on a special racket. The enemy
suddenly appeared possessed of a knowledge which we thought to be
shared only by half a dozen officers. Blenkiron said he was not
surprised at the leakage, for there’s always a lot of people who hear
things they oughtn’t to. What surprised him was that it got so quickly
to the enemy.
Then after last February, when the Hun submarines went in for
frightfulness on a big scale, the thing grew desperate. Leakages
occurred every week, and the business was managed by people who knew
their way about, for they avoided all the traps set for them, and when