John Buchan - The Collected Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

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 recognized him?’

‘Absolutely. As sure as that he knew I recognized 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 realized 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 realize 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 organization it might be managed, for an organization 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.’