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

Suddenly my prisoner broke from me and flung himself on the wall. There was a click as if a lever had been pulled. Then came a low rumbling far, far below the ground, and through the window I saw a cloud of chalky dust pouring out of the shaft of the stairway.

Someone switched on the light.

The old man was looking at me with blazing eyes.

‘He is safe,’ he cried. ‘You cannot follow in time… He is gone… He has triumphed… Der schwarze Stein ist in der Siegeskrone.’

There was more in those eyes than any common triumph. They had been hooded like a bird of prey, and now they flamed with a hawk’s pride. A white fanatic heat burned in them, and I realized for the first time the terrible thing I had been up against. This man was more than a spy; in his foul way he had been a patriot.

As the handcuffs clinked on his wrists I said my last word to him.

‘I hope Franz will bear his triumph well. I ought to tell you that the Ariadne for the last hour has been in our hands.’

Three weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined the New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience got a captain’s commission straight off. But I had done my best service, I think, before I put on khaki.

THE END

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1. A MISSION IS PROPOSED

CHAPTER 2. THE GATHERING OF THE MISSIONARIES

CHAPTER 3. PETER PIENAAR

CHAPTER 4. ADVENTURES OF TWO DUTCHMEN ON THE LOOSE

CHAPTER 5. FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE SAME

CHAPTER 6. THE INDISCRETIONS OF THE SAME

CHAPTER 7. CHRISTMASTIDE

CHAPTER 8. THE ESSEN BARGES

CHAPTER 9. THE RETURN OF THE STRAGGLER

CHAPTER 10. THE GARDEN-HOUSE OF SULIMAN THE RED

CHAPTER 11. THE COMPANIONS OF THE ROSY HOURS

CHAPTER 12. FOUR MISSIONARIES SEE LIGHT IN THEIR MISSION

CHAPTER 13. I MOVE IN GOOD SOCIETY

CHAPTER 14. THE LADY OF THE MANTILLA

CHAPTER 15. AN EMBARRASSED TOILET

CHAPTER 16. THE BATTERED CARAVANSERAI

CHAPTER 17. TROUBLE BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

CHAPTER 18. SPARROWS ON THE HOUSETOPS

CHAPTER 19. GREENMANTLE

CHAPTER 20. PETER PIENAAR GOES TO THE WARS

CHAPTER 21. THE LITTLE HILL

CHAPTER 22. THE GUNS OF THE NORTH

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During the past year, in the intervals of an active life, I have amused myself with constructing this tale. It has been scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment—in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half-hours between graver tasks; and it bears, I fear, the mark of its gipsy begetting. But it has amused me to write, and I shall be well repaid if it amuses you—and a few others—to read.

Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism. Things unimagined before happen daily to our friends by sea and land. The one chance in a thousand is habitually taken, and as often as not succeeds. Coincidence, like some new Briareus, stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth. Some day, when the full history is written—sober history with ample documents—the poor romancer will give up business and fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.

The characters of the tale, if you think hard, you will recall. Sandy you know well. That great spirit was last heard of at Basra, where he occupies the post that once was Harry Bullivant’s. Richard Hannay is where he longed to be, commanding his battalion on the ugliest bit of front in the West. Mr John S. Blenkiron, full of honour and wholly cured of dyspepsia, has returned to the States, after vainly endeavouring to take Peter with him. As for Peter, he has attained the height of his ambition. He has shaved his beard and joined the Flying Corps.

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I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant’s telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled.

‘Hullo, Dick, you’ve got the battalion. Or maybe it’s a staff billet. You’ll be a blighted brass-hat, coming it heavy over the hard-working regimental officer. And to think of the language you’ve wasted on brass-hats in your time!’

I sat and thought for a bit, for the name ‘Bullivant’ carried me back eighteen months to the hot summer before the war. I had not seen the man since, though I had read about him in the papers. For more than a year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought than to hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers. I had succeeded pretty well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with Bullivant before the war started.

The sight of his name on a telegram form seemed to change all my outlook on life. I had been hoping for the command of the battalion, and looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche. But this message jerked my thoughts on to a new road. There might be other things in the war than straightforward fighting. Why on earth should the Foreign Office want to see an obscure Major of the New Army, and want to see him in double-quick time?

‘I’m going up to town by the ten train,’ I announced; ‘I’ll be back in time for dinner.’

‘Try my tailor,’ said Sandy. ‘He’s got a very nice taste in red tabs. You can use my name.’ An idea struck me. ‘You’re pretty well all right now. If I wire for you, will you pack your own kit and mine and join me?’

‘Right-o! I’ll accept a job on your staff if they give you a corps. If so be as you come down tonight, be a good chap and bring a barrel of oysters from Sweeting’s.’

I travelled up to London in a regular November drizzle, which cleared up about Wimbledon to watery sunshine. I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. I dare say it was all right; but since August 1914 I never spent a day in town without coming home depressed to my boots.

I took a taxi and drove straight to the Foreign Office. Sir Walter did not keep me waiting long. But when his secretary took me to his room I would not have recognized the man I had known eighteen months before.

His big frame seemed to have dropped flesh and there was a stoop in the square shoulders. His face had lost its rosiness and was red in patches, like that of a man who gets too little fresh air. His hair was much greyer and very thin about the temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes. But the eyes were the same as before, keen and kindly and shrewd, and there was no change in the firm set of the jaw.

‘We must on no account be disturbed for the next hour,’ he told his secretary. When the young man had gone he went across to both doors and turned the keys in them.

‘Well, Major Hannay,’ he said, flinging himself into a chair beside the fire. ‘How do you like soldiering?’

‘Right enough,’ I said, ‘though this isn’t just the kind of war I would have picked myself. It’s a comfortless, bloody business. But we’ve got the measure of the old Boche now, and it’s dogged as does it. I count on getting back to the front in a week or two.’