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- Herausgeber: Polygon
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: The Richard Hannay Adventures
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
November 1915. Richard Hannay is tasked to undertake a top-secret mission to investigate rumours of a plot to create a holy war throughout the Muslim world and draw troops and resources from the Western Front. Hannay must journey to Constantinople through war-torn Europe, recruiting three loyal friends – Peter Pienaar, John S Blenkiron and Sandy Arbuthnot – to help him as he unravels coded messages, escapes murderous mobs and tracks down the mysterious prophet who holds the key to the plot, known as 'Greenmantle'. Greenmantle is a gripping reflection on the power of political Islam (to the extent that it was pulled from Radio 4's schedule at the time of the 7 July bombings) and demonstrates Buchan's exemplary storytelling ability and political insight. With an introduction by Allan Massie.
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GREENMANTLE
In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George's Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.
Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan's literary output was remarkable – thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers – 'shockers' as he called them – were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.
John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.
JOHN BUCHAN
Greenmantle
Introduction
Splendid opening. Breakfast and the pipe, with Sandy Arbuthnot in the next sentence 'hunting for the marmalade', give us the taste of the normality from which Richard Hannay is going to be dragged and launched into an adventure even more perilous and demanding than that which he had recounted in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Buchan wrote Greenmantle between February and June 1916; it was published that October. It was still, in the months before the Battle of the Somme revealed the full horror of modern war, possible to have a hero ready to declare he liked soldiering 'right enough' even though it was 'a comfortless, bloody business'. Buchan knew it was grim enough; since the outbreak of the war he had been writing its history for the Edinburgh publishing firm Nelson, of which he was a director, the work being serialised in The Times. Many of his close friends were killed in the war, as was a much loved younger brother. The adventure stories he wrote were a form of escapism for himself as well as his readers, among them those he described as 'my friends in the trenches'.
From childhood he had always been telling himself stories:
or rather, being told stories, for they seemed to work themselves out independently. I generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents, and the question was how my people would behave. They had the knack of just squeezing out of unpleasant places, and of bringing their doings to a rousing climax.
This is a fair description of the novel of adventure, which always has an air of improvisation, although Buchan wrote that the story was complete in his mind before he began to write it. I suppose he meant the outline of the story.
Greenmantle is a fuller and richer novel than its predecessor. That was essentially a 'chase novel; Greenmantle is a 'quest' one, with a mystery to be unravelled. The scene is set – brilliantly and unforgettably – in Hannay's conversation with Sir Walter Bullivant at the Foreign Office. The war is being fought on the Western Front, but it may be lost in the East. 'There is,' Sir Walter tells him, 'a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?'
This departure from the language of official diplomacy is also splendid, as is Hannay's perceptive reply: 'It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought. I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.'
Indeed, yes. 'There is a Jehad [Buchan's spelling] preparing. The question is, How?'
This makes Greenmantle a novel of our time too. After years of hearing about Arab Nationalism and Arab Socialism, we have grown accustomed again to the idea of an Islamic jihad. Hannay's task will be to find the Osama bin Laden figure, and put a spoke in the German plans to let loose a Holy War. We can be quite confident that he will do so.
Pointless – and wrong – in an introduction to follow the narrative: those who are reading the novel for the first time are entitled to be granted the undiluted pleasure of discovery. They will read it as Buchan wrote it, at the gallop. Those of us for whom it is an old friend recognise that the plot exists only, as Scott put it, 'to bring in fine things', and that the novel offers many other varied and comfortable delights. For this is one of Buchan's many merits; he is a reassuring writer. That fine, if eccentric, novelist Peter Vansittart thought there were few things more satisfying than to settle on a winter evening with a bottle of whisky and The Three Hostages or Greenmantle.
One of the pleasures Buchan offers is, admittedly, that, as John Gross wrote he is often 'so preposterous'. The plots are far-fetched. Buchan himself called these novels 'shockers', and said that his 'master' in this kind of fiction was the now all-but forgotten Edwardian writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, whom, no doubt with tongue in cheek, he described as 'the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah'. Buchan followed Oppenheim in devising plots which were highly improbable, but stopped just short of the impossible. In this respect Ian Fleming may be regarded as his disciple, but not Eric Ambler or John le Carré.
Buchan's characters are incapable of development. Hannay, like James Bond, is the same man from start to finish; he merely becomes more respectable as he is admitted to membership of the British Establishment. Long before he made that at most half-serious acknowledgement of his debt to Oppenheim, Buchan's master had been Stevenson, whose influence is evident in his first novel, John Burnet of Barns, and can be detected again in Buchan's masterpiece Witch Wood. Stevenson wrote that 'drama is the poetry of conduct; romance the poetry of circumstance'. He himself provided both. Kidnapped is a tale of adventure, a marvellous romance, which is also a drama, for David Balfour is changed as a result of his experience and his association with Alan Breck, but nothing changes in Buchan's 'shockers'. They are pure romance, books in which, to quote Stevenson again, 'the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life'. This is a fair description of Greenmantle and the other Hannay books. They offer pure enjoyment, partly because they pose no disturbing questions.
If Greenmantle is a richer book than its predecessor, though no more gripping, it is partly because Hannay is not acting alone. He has been given companions. I don't know if Buchan had Dumas' musketeers in mind, but it is quite possible.
Writing about his youthful reading in his autobiography Memory-Hold-The-Door, he says: 'While I revelled in Alexandre Dumas I could not rank him high.' Perhaps not, but just as D'Artagnan is given Athos, Porthos and Aramis as brothers-in-arms, each with his distinct personality, so now Hannay is joined in his quest by Sandy Arbuthnot, son of a Scottish peer, the American engineer John S. Blenkiron and the Boer hunter and tracker Peter Pienaar. Each has his particular qualities. Each is, we are told, remarkable in his way. Yet, just as the young D'Artagnan is wiser and more resourceful than the musketeers who are his elders, so Hannay, the plain, uncomplicated Scots-South African engineer, remains the man in charge. The brilliance of his colleagues serves to add lustre to him.
Greenmantle is a generous book, remarkably so, given that it was written in wartime. Though Blenkiron justifies his adherence to the British cause, despite America's neutrality, on the grounds that 'there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away', Buchan does not demonise the Germans. There are honourable Germans like the engineer Gaudian (who will reappear to help Hannay in The Three Hostages) and the poor woman who shelters Hannay when he is suffering from an attack of fever. More striking still is the sympathetic portrait of the Kaiser to whom Hannay is introduced as he travels through Germany:
He was no common man, for in his presence I felt an attraction which was not merely the mastery of one used to command. That would not have impressed me, for I had never owned a master. But here was a human being who . . . had the power of laying himself alongside other men . . . [He] . . . paid the price in war for the gifts that had made him successful in peace, he had imagination and nerves, and the one was white hot and the others were quivering. I would not have been in his shoes for the throne of the Universe.
This is a long way from the 'Hang the Kaiser' hysteria of 1918, and, if the portrait does him more credit than most historians would allow, it is evidence of Buchan's sympathetic imagination, though I wonder what his first readers made of it.
Buchan's villains are rarely convincing. Moxon Ivery, the master of disguise, who appears in both The Thirty-Nine Steps and Mr Standfast is a mere convenience, made out of cardboard. Medina, the villain in The Three Hostages, is way over the top, and his motivation does not stand up to examination. Here in Greenmantle, Hilda von Einem with 'her strange potent eyes . . . like a burning searchlight which showed up every cranny and crack of the soul' is a figure of melodrama, capable of tushery like 'What came you forth to seek?' Buchan was never much good at portraying women (unless they were old, hard-working or humble), and Hilda is no exception. She is necessary to the plot, but incredible.
Colonel von Stumm, however, is another matter. Stumm is splendid and truly formidable. He is a brute and a bully, but one who may command respect, for Buchan grants him courage. In his fine Buchan biography, The Presbyterian Cavalier, Andrew Lownie strangely calls Stumm 'effeminate'. He is anything but that, despite the hint of sexual perversion which Buchan delicately drops into his description of the room in his castle, which at first sight seems like a woman's drawing room.
But it wasn't . . . There had never been a woman's hand in the place. It was the room of a man who . . . had a perverted taste for soft delicate things . . . I began to see the queer other side of my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and I was more than ever afraid of Stumm.
The passage hints at the homosexual scandals surrounding the Kaiser's friend Philip von Eulenberg and others in his coterie. But I doubt if Stumm had any designs on Hannay's virtue.
Part of the charm of Buchan lies in incidentals. He is a master of the throwaway line. Introducing us, for instance, to Peter Pienaar, Hannay tells us 'he was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means'. Actually we don't, for this is the only mention of Bon Macnab in the novel, and we never learn what he and Peter got up to in Swaziland. We don't need to. The offhand man-of-the-world remark has done its work, hinting at Peter's not always reputable past. It is indeed one of my favourite lines in the canon, almost as good as Sandy's observation in The Three Hostages that 'nothing wastes so much time as dodging assassins'.
Buchan is wise enough to know that the most vivid tale benefits from pauses in the action. His characters don't forget to stop to eat – meals are usually good in Buchan, partly no doubt because his own wretched state of health confined him to a diet. Blenkiron, like his creator, suffers from a duodenal ulcer, and when we think of him we are most likely to remember his diet of boiled fish, dry toast and a glass of hot milk; also the games of Patience he plays to aid digestion and the cigars he smokes – the 'long black abominations' he prefers to the Havanas Hannay offers him. Food is comforting, because food represents normality – the normality that will be disturbed by the demands of the quest. So, when Hannay goes to report the result of his visit to the Foreign Office, he finds Sandy tucking into tea-cakes and muffins.
Not everything works, or continues to work. When as a boy of twelve or thirteen I first read Greenmantle, I found the Garden-House of Suleyman the Red wonderfully exotic and sinister, and Sandy, as the man in skins leading the Companions of the Rosy Hours in their mad dervish dance, genuinely frightening. This magic has faded, and now seems tawdry. Indeed for me now the novel falls away once we reach Constantinople even though the pace quickens and the final battle at Erzerum is a wonderfully fine piece of bravura writing.
Those who come to the novel for the first time are not likely to agree, for they will be caught up in the excitement of the narrative, but, whether on account of advancing years or simply familiarity – one knows the story – I now find that the first half of a Buchan novel, where he is setting the scene and preparing to get the action underway, is always more satisfying than the second half where the narrative quickens and action predominates. But the same may be said of other writers of adventure fiction such as Ian Fleming again and Dick Francis. Once you know the story it is the mood and atmosphere which the author evokes in his own distinctive manner that offer the deepest pleasure – a purring self-indulgent pleasure like that of a cat lying in front of a log fire.
Buchan's continuing popularity raises interesting questions, which like most such questions are not easily answered. Why is he still widely read when most of his contemporaries working in a comparable vein are forgotten? E. Phillips Oppenheim is one example; Edgar Wallace, a sensational bestseller in his day, another. It is easy to say that Buchan wrote better than they did, and certainly some popular authors, then as now, wrote abominably, William Le Queux being a good example, if one painful to read. Yet there were others – E. W. Horning (Raffles) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda) who wrote well enough, yet now lag far behind Buchan in popularity. One can only suggest that, though Buchan is a period piece – and this of course is one of his charms – there is something timeless about his books. He has outlasted popular writers of the inter-war and even post-1945 period such as 'Sapper' ('Bulldog Drummond'), Dornford Yates, Peter Cheney and Dennis Wheatley. The world Buchan invites the reader to share is a welcoming place, notably free from brutality and sadism. There is violence, of course, but Buchan never describes it in detail and with relish.
More curiously still, his work remains fresh while the books of serious literary novelists, popular, even bestsellers, in their own time, such as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy and, a generation later, J. B. Priestley, have dated. In 1940 Graham Greene, reviewing Buchan's last novel Sick Heart River, praised him for having shown us 'how thin is the protection of civilisation'. 'Buchan in his thrillers prepared better than he knew for the death that may come to any of us, as it nearly came to Leithen by the railings of the Park or the doorway of a mews.'
Perhaps so. Greene's praise, to some extent explicable as the expression of the feeling of the Blitz, has often been quoted. This awareness is certainly present in Buchan's work. His Calvinism, however diluted by his material success in the long journey from the manse to the Governor-General's mansion in Canada, gave him an awareness of both the power and attraction of evil. He knew that civilisation has been built by effort and with difficulty and must be defended against the forces of destruction. Its survival could not be taken for granted.
All this is true. Greene also wrote that 'Buchan was the first to realise the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of parliament and members of the Athenaeum lawyers and barristers, business men and minor peers.' There is something in this, and it is a device that others such as Ambler, Francis and Geoffrey Household have successfully employed since. Yet, as an explanation of Buchan's popularity, it doesn't really satisfy – and not only because Richard Hannay can't accurately be described as an unadventurous man, no matter how conventional his moral and social attitudes are. It doesn't satisfy because I don't think people read Buchan for thrills – certainly this is not why they re-read him – any more than they read and re-read Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories for this reason. What attracts is rather the completeness of the world these writers create, a completeness that is delightful because it is reassuring. There are moments which may give you a frisson. There is much that is exciting, but chiefly the Hannay novels, like the Holmes stories, are comforting. They offer us an escape into a world which is apparently dangerous but is really safe. And Greenmantle is my favourite among them because it does this without ever striking a wrong note.
Buchan and Conan Doyle have this too in common. They both achieved their greatest success and won enduring popularity with works that they threw off lightly, that they seem even to have written first for their own amusement, rather than with those on which they laboured more diligently. Conan Doyle seems to have resented the public's preference for Sherlock Holmes rather than for his certainly very fine historical novels, Sir Nigel, The White Company and Micah Clarke, all the fruit of deep research and hard writing. Buchan likewise set a higher store on his historical novels and his biographies than on his 'shockers', but he had the good sense not to complain and instead to be happy that books he had written with enjoyment gave pleasure to so many.
Pleasure is the word one comes back to, for it is what Greenmantle and its fellows offer the reader. These books are in the best sense of the word escapist. They invite you to lay aside your cares and troubles and escape into a happy dream. We should be grateful. So: roll on Hannay's interrupted breakfast and his visit to the Foreign Office that sets him on his travels . . .
Contents
ONE
A Mission is Proposed
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 that 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 a 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.'
'Will you get the battalion?' he asked. He seemed to have followed my doings pretty closely.
'I believe I've a good chance. I'm not in this show for honour and glory, though. I want to do the best I can, but I wish to Heaven it was over. All I think of is coming out of it with a whole skin.'
He laughed. 'You do yourself an injustice. What about the forward observation post at the Lone Tree? You forgot about the whole skin then.'
I felt myself getting red. 'That was all rot,' I said, 'and I can't think who told you about it. I hated the job, but I had to do it to prevent my subalterns going to glory. They were a lot of fire-eating young lunatics. If I had sent one of them he'd have gone on his knees to Providence and asked for trouble.'
Sir Walter was still grinning. 'I'm not questioning your caution. You have the rudiments of it, or our friends of the Black Stone would have gathered you in at our last merry meeting. I would question it as little as your courage. What exercises my mind is whether it is best employed in the trenches.'
'Is the War office dissatisfied with me?' I asked sharply. 'They are profoundly satisfied. They propose to give you command of your battalion. Presently, if you escape a stray bullet, you will no doubt be a Brigadier. It is a wonderful war for youth and brains. But . . . I take it you are in this business to serve your country, Hannay?'
'I reckon I am,' I said. 'I am certainly not in it for my health.'
He looked at my leg where the doctors had dug out the shrapnel fragments, and smiled quizzically. 'Pretty fit again?' he asked.
'Tough as a sjambok. I thrive on the racket and eat and sleep like a schoolboy.'
He got up and stood with his back to the fire, his eyes staring abstractedly out of the window at the wintry park.
'It is a great game, and you are the man for it, no doubt. But there are others who can play it, for soldiering today asks for the average rather than the exception in human nature. It is like a big machine where the parts are standardized. You are fighting, not because you are short of a job, but because you want to help England. How if you could help her better than by commanding a battalion – or a brigade – or, if it comes to that, a division? How if there is a thing which you alone can do? Not some embusqué business in an office, but a thing compared to which your fight at Loos was a Sunday-school picnic. You are not afraid of danger? Well, in this job you would not be fighting with an army around you, but alone. You are fond of tackling difficulties? Well, I can give you a task which will try all your powers. Have you anything to say?'
My heart was beginning to thump uncomfortably. Sir Walter was not the man to pitch a case too high.
'I am a soldier,' I said, 'and under orders.'
'True; but what I am about to propose does not come by any conceivable stretch within the scope of a soldier's duties. I shall perfectly understand if you decline. You will be acting as I should act myself – as any sane man would. I would not press you for worlds. If you wish it, I will not even make the proposal, but let you go here and now, and wish you good luck with your battalion. I do not wish to perplex a good soldier with impossible decisions.'
This piqued me and put me on my mettle.
'I am not going to run away before the guns fire. Let me hear what you propose.'
Sir Walter crossed to a cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his chain, and took a piece of paper from a drawer. It looked like an ordinary half-sheet of notepaper.
'I take it,' he said, 'that your travels have not extended to the East.'
'No,' I said, 'barring a shooting trip in East Africa.'
'Have you by any chance been following the present campaign there?'
'I've read the newspapers pretty regularly since I went to hospital. I've got some pals in the Mesopotamia show, and of course I'm keen to know what is going to happen at Gallipoli and Salonika. I gather that Egypt is pretty safe.'
'If you will give me your attention for ten minutes I will supplement your newspaper reading.'
Sir Walter lay back in an arm-chair and spoke to the ceiling. It was the best story, the clearest and the fullest, I had ever got of any bit of the war. He told me just how and why and when Turkey had left the rails. I heard about her grievances over our seizure of her ironclads, of the mischief the coming of the Goeben had wrought, of Enver and his precious Committee and the way they had got a cinch on the old Turk. When he had spoken for a bit, he began to question me.
'You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gipsies should have got control of a proud race. The ordinary man will tell you that it was German organization backed up with German money and German arms. You will inquire again how, since Turkey is primarily a religious power, Islam has played so small a part in it all. The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet – I don't know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.
'Look at it in another way,' he went on. 'If it were Enver and Germany alone dragging Turkey into a European war for purposes that no Turk cared a rush about, we might expect to find the regular army obedient, and Constantinople. But in the provinces, where Islam is strong, there would be trouble. Many of us counted on that. But we have been disappointed. The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the Mahdi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Moslems are threatening trouble. There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?'
Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of taxis in Whitehall.
'Have you an explanation, Hannay?' he asked again.
'It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,' I said. 'I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.'
'You are right,' he said. 'You must be right. We have laughed at the Holy War, the Jehad that old Von der Goltz prophesied. But I believe that stupid old man with the big spectacles was right. There is a Jehad preparing. The question is, How?'
'I'm hanged if I know,' I said; 'but I'll bet it won't be done by a pack of stout German officers in pickelhaubes. I fancy you can't manufacture Holy Wars out of Krupp guns alone and a few staff officers and a battle-cruiser with her boilers burst.'
'Agreed. They are not fools, however much we try to persuade ourselves of the contrary. But supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction – some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then, my friend?'
'Then there will be hell let loose in those parts pretty soon.'
'Hell which may spread. Beyond Persia you remember, lies India.'
'You keep to suppositions. How much do you know?' I asked.
'Very little, except the fact. But the fact remains beyond dispute. I have reports from agents everywhere – pedlars in South Russia, Afghanistan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable consuls who use cyphers. They tell the same story. The East is waiting for a revelation. It has been promised one. Some star – man, prophecy, or trinket – is coming out of the West. The Germans know, and that is the card with which they are going to astonish the world.'
'And the mission you spoke of for me is to go and find out?'
He nodded gravely. 'That is the crazy and impossible mission.'
'Tell me one thing, Sir Walter,' I said. 'I know it is the fashion in this country if a man has special knowledge to set him to some job exactly the opposite. I know all about Damaraland, but instead of being put on Botha's staff, as I applied to be, I was kept in Hampshire mud till the campaign in German South-West Africa was over. I know a man who could pass as an Arab, but do you think they would send him to the coast? They left him in my battalion – a lucky thing for me, for he saved my life at Loos. I follow the fashion, but isn't this just carrying it a bit too far? There must be thousands of men who have spent years in the East and talk any language. They're the fellows for this job. I never saw a Turk in my life except a chap who had wrestling turns in a show at Kimberley. You've picked about the most useless man on earth.'
'You've been a mining-engineer, Hannay,' Sir Walter said. 'If you wanted a man to prospect for gold in Barotseland you would of course like to get one who knew the country and the people and the language. But the first thing you would require in him would be that he had a nose for finding gold and knew his business. That is the position now. I believe that you have a nose for finding out what our enemies try to hide. I know that you are brave and cool and resourceful. That is why I tell you the story. Besides. . . .'
He unrolled a big map of Europe on the wall. 'I can't tell you where you'll get on the track of the secret, but I can put a limit to the quest. You won't find it east of the Bosphorus – not yet. It is still in Europe. It may be in Constantinople, or in Thrace. It may be farther west. But it is moving eastwards. If you are in time you may cut into its march to Constantinople. That much I can tell you. The secret is known in Germany, too, to those whom it concerns. It is in Europe that the seeker must search – at present.'
'Tell me more,' I said. 'You can give me no details and no instructions. Obviously you can give me no help if I come to grief.'
He nodded. 'You would be beyond the pale.'
'You give me a free hand.'
'Absolutely. You can have what money you like, and you can get what help you like. You can follow any plan you fancy, and go anywhere you think fruitful. We can give no directions.'
'One last question. You say it is important. Tell me just how important.'
'It is life and death,' he said solemnly. 'I can put it no higher and no lower. Once we know what is the menace we can meet it. As long as we are in the dark it works unchecked and we may be too late. The war must be won or lost in Europe. Yes; but if the East blazes up, our effort will be distracted from Europe and the great coup may fail. The stakes are no less than victory and defeat, Hannay.'
I got out of my chair and walked to the window. It was a diffi-cult moment in my life. I was happy in my soldiering; above all, happy in the company of my brother officers. I was asked to go off into the enemy's lands on a quest for which I believed I was manifestly unfitted – a business of lonely days and nights, of nerve-racking strain, of deadly peril shrouding me like a garment. Looking out on the bleak weather I shivered. It was too grim a business, too inhuman for flesh and blood. But Sir Walter had called it a matter of life and death, and I had told him that I was out to serve my country. He could not give me orders, but was I not under orders – higher orders than my Brigadier's? I thought myself incompetent, but cleverer men than me thought me competent, or at least competent enough for a sporting chance. I knew in my soul that if I declined I should never be quite at peace in the world again. And yet Sir Walter had called the scheme madness, and said that he himself would never have accepted.
How does one make a great decision? I swear that when I turned round to speak I meant to refuse. But my answer was Yes, and I had crossed the Rubicon. My voice sounded cracked and far away.
Sir Walter shook hands with me and his eyes blinked a little.
'I may be sending you to your death, Hannay. – Good God, what a damned task-mistress duty is! – If so, I shall be haunted with regrets, but you will never repent. Have no fear of that. You have chosen the roughest road, but it goes straight to the hill-tops.'
He handed me the half-sheet of notepaper. On it were written three words – 'Kasredin,' 'cancer,' and 'v. I.'
'That is the only clue we possess,' he said. 'I cannot construe it, but I can tell you the story. We have had our agents working in Persia and Mesopotamia for years – mostly young officers of the Indian Army. They carry their lives in their hand, and now and then one disappears, and the cellars of Bagdad might tell a tale. But they find out many things, and they count the game worth the candle. They have told us of the star rising in the West, but they could give us no details. All but one – the best of them. He had been working between Mosul and the Persian frontier as a muleteer, and had been south into the Bakhtiari hills. He found out something, but his enemies knew that he knew and he was pursued. Three months ago, just before Kut, he staggered into Delamain's camp with ten bullet holes in him and a knife slash on his forehead. He mumbled his name, but beyond that and the fact that there was a Something coming from the west he told them nothing. He died in ten minutes.
They found this paper on him, and since he cried out the word "Kasredin" in his last moments, it must have had something to do with his quest. It is for you to find out if it has any meaning.'
I folded it up and placed it in my pocket-book.
'What a great fellow! What was his name?' I asked.
Sir Walter did not answer at once. He was looking out of the window. 'His name,' he said at last, 'was Harry Bullivant. He was my son. God rest his brave soul!'
*Major Hannay's narrative of this affair has been published under the title of The Thirty-Nine Steps.
TWO
The Gathering of the Missionaries
I wrote out a wire to Sandy, asking him to come up by the two-fifteen train and meet me at my flat.
'I have chosen my colleague,' I said.
'Eddy Arbuthnot's boy? His father was at Harrow with me. I know the fellow – Harry used to bring him down to fish – tallish, with a lean, high-boned face and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's. I know his record too. There's a good deal about him in this office. He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was heavy enough on him without their efforts. He's blood-brother to every kind of Albanian bandit. Also he used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation. Some Englishman was once complaining to old Mahmoud Shevkat about the scarcity of statesmen in Western Europe, and Mahmoud broke in with, "Have you not the Honourable Arbuthnot?" You say he's in your battalion. I was wondering what had become of him, for we tried to get hold of him here, but he had left no address. Ludovick Arbuthnot – yes, that's the man. Buried deep in the commissioned ranks of the New Army? Well, we'll get him out pretty quick!'
'I knew he had knocked about the East, but I didn't know he was that kind of swell. Sandy's not the chap to buck about himself.'
'He wouldn't,' said Sir Walter. 'He had always a more than Oriental reticence. I've got another colleague for you, if you like him.'
He looked at his watch. 'You can get to the Savoy Grill Room in five minutes in a taxi-cab. Go in from the Strand, turn to your left, and you will see in the alcove on the right-hand side a table with one large American gentleman sitting at it. They know him there, so he will have the table to himself. I want you to go and sit down beside him. Say you come from me. His name is Mr John Scantlebury Blenkiron, now a citizen of Boston, Mass., but born and raised in Indiana. Put this envelope in your pocket, but don't read its contents till you have talked to him. I want you to form your own opinion about Mr. Blenkiron.'
I went out of the Foreign Office in as muddled a frame of mind as any diplomatist who ever left its portals. I was most desperately depressed. To begin with, I was in a complete funk. I had always thought I was about as brave as the average man, but there's courage and courage, and mine was certainly not of the impassive kind. Stick me down in a trench, and I could stand being shot at as well as most people, and my blood could get hot if it were given a chance. But I think I had too much imagination. I couldn't shake off the beastly forecasts that kept crowding my mind.
In about a fortnight, I calculated, I would be dead. Shot as a spy – a rotten sort of ending! At the moment I was quite safe, looking for a taxi in the middle of Whitehall, but the sweat broke on my forehead. I felt as I had felt in my adventure before the war. But this was far worse, for it was more cold-blooded and premeditated, and I didn't seem to have even a sporting chance. I watched the figures in khaki passing on the pavement, and thought what a nice safe prospect they had compared to mine. Yes, even if next week they were in the Hohenzollern, or the Hairpin trench at the Quarries, or that ugly angle at Hooge. I wondered why I had not been happier that morning before I got that infernal wire. Suddenly all the trivialities of English life seemed to me inexpressibly dear and terribly far away. I was very angry with Bullivant, till I remembered how fair he had been. My fate was my own choosing.
When I was hunting the Black Stone the interest of the problem had helped to keep me going. But now I could see no problem. My mind had nothing to work on but three words of gibberish on a sheet of paper and a mystery of which Sir Walter had been convinced, but to which he couldn't give a name. It was like a story I had read of St Theresa setting off at the age of ten with her small brother to convert the Moors. I sat huddled in the taxi with my chin on my breast, wishing that I had lost a leg at Loos and been comfortably tucked away for the rest of the war.
Sure enough I found my man in the Grill Room. There he was, feeding solemnly, with a napkin tucked under his chin. He was a big fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face. I disregarded the hovering waiter and pulled up a chair beside the American at the little table. He turned on me a pair of full sleepy eyes, like a ruminating ox.
'Mr Blenkiron?' I asked.
'You have my name, sir,' he said. 'Mr John Scantlebury
Blenkiron. I would wish you good morning if I saw anything good in this darned British weather.'
'I come from Sir Walter Bullivant,' I said, speaking low.
'So?' said he. 'Sir Walter is a very good friend of mine. Pleased to meet you, Mr – or I guess it's Colonel –'
'Hannay,' I said; 'Major Hannay.' I was wondering what this sleepy Yankee could do to help me.
'Allow me to offer you luncheon, Major. Here, waiter, bring the carte. I regret that I cannot join you in sampling the efforts of the management of this hotel. I suffer, sir, from dyspepsia – duodenal dyspepsia. It gets me two hours after a meal and gives me hell just below the breast-bone. So I am obliged to adopt a diet. My nourishment is fish, sir, and boiled milk and a little dry toast. It's a melancholy descent from the days when I could do justice to a lunch at Sherry's and sup off oyster-crabs and devilled bones.' He sighed from the depths of his capacious frame.
I ordered an omelette and a chop, and took another look at him. The large eyes seemed to be gazing steadily at me without seeing me. They were as vacant as an abstracted child's; but I had an uncomfortable feeling that they saw more than mine.
'You have been fighting, Major? The Battle of Loos? Well, I guess that must have been some battle. We in America respect the fighting of the British soldier, but we don't quite catch on to the devices of the British generals. We opine that there is more bellicosity than science among your highbrows. That is so? My father fought at Chattanooga, but these eyes have seen nothing gorier than a Presidential election. Say, is there any way I could be let in to a scene of real bloodshed?'
His serious tone made me laugh. 'There are plenty of your countrymen in the present show,' I said. 'The French Foreign Legion is full of young Americans, and so is our Army Service Corps. Half the chauffeurs you strike in France seem to come from the States.'
He sighed. 'I did think of some belligerent stunt a year back. But I reflected that the good God had not given John S. Blenkiron the kind of martial figure that would do credit to the tented field. Also I recollected that we Americans were nootrals – benevolent nootrals – and that it did not become me to be butting into the struggles of the effete monarchies of Europe. So I stopped at home. It was a big renunciation, Major, for I was lying sick during the Philippines business, and I have never seen the lawless passions of men let loose on a battlefield. And, as a stoodent of humanity, I hankered for the experience.'
'What have you been doing?' I asked. The calm gentleman had begun to interest me.
'Waal,' he said, 'I just waited. The Lord has blessed me with money to burn, so I didn't need to go scrambling like a wild cat for war contracts. But I reckoned I would get let into the game somehow, and I was. Being a nootral, I was in an advantageous position to take a hand. I had a pretty hectic time for a while and then I reckoned I would leave God's country and see what was doing in Europe. I have counted myself out of the bloodshed business, but, as your poet sings, peace has its victories not less renowned than war, and I reckon that means that a nootral can have a share in a scrap as well as a belligerent.'
'That's the best kind of neutrality I've ever heard of,' I said. 'It's the right kind,' he replied solemnly. 'Say, Major, what are your lot fighting for? For your own skins and your Empire and the peace of Europe. Waal, those ideals don't concern us one cent. We're not Europeans, and there aren't any German trenches on Long Island yet. You've made the ring in Europe, and if we came butting in it wouldn't be the rules of the game. You wouldn't welcome us, and I guess you'd be right. We're that delicate-minded we can't interfere, and that was what my friend, President Wilson, meant when he opined that America was too proud to fight. So we're nootrals. But likewise we're benevolent nootrals. As I follow events, there's a skunk been let loose in the world, and the odour of it is going to make life none too sweet till it is cleared away. It wasn't us that stirred up that skunk, but we've got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet. See? We can't fight, but, by God! some of us are going to sweat blood to sweep the mess up. Officially we do nothing except give off notes like a leaky boiler gives off steam. But as individooal citizens we're in it up to the neck. So, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, I'm going to be the nootralist kind of nootral till Kaiser will be sorry he didn't declare war on America at the beginning.'
I was completely recovering my temper. This fellow was a perfect jewel, and his spirit put purpose into me.
'I guess you British were the same kind of nootral when your Admiral warned off the German fleet from interfering with Dewey in Manila Bay in '98.' Mr. Blenkiron drank up the last drop of his boiled milk, and lit a thin black cigar.
I leaned forward. 'Have you talked to Sir Walter?' I asked.
'I have talked to him, and he has given me to understand that there's a deal ahead which you're going to boss. There are no flies on that big man, and if he says it's good business then you can count me in.'
'You know that it's uncommonly dangerous?'
'I judged so. But it won't do to begin counting risks. I believe in an all-wise and beneficent Providence, but you have got to trust Him and give Him a chance. What's life anyhow? For me, it's living on a strict diet and having frequent pains in my stomach. It isn't such an almighty lot to give up, provided you get a good price on the deal. Besides, how big is the risk? About one o'clock in the morning, when you can't sleep, it will be the size of Mount Everest, but if you run out to meet it, it will be a hillock you can jump over. The grizzly looks very fierce when you're taking your ticket for the Rockies and wondering if you'll come back, but he's just an ordinary bear when you've got the sight of your rifle on him. I won't think about risks till I'm up to my neck in them and don't see the road out.'
I scribbled my address on a piece of paper and handed it to the stout philosopher. 'Come to dinner tonight at eight,' I said.
'I thank you, Major. A little fish, please, plain-boiled, and some hot milk. You will forgive me if I borrow your couch after the meal and spend the evening on my back. That is the advice of my noo doctor.'
I got a taxi and drove to my club. On the way I opened the envelope Sir Walter had given me. It contained a number of jottings, the dossier of Mr Blenkiron. He had done wonders for the Allies in the States. He had nosed out the Dumba plot, and had been instrumental in getting the portfolio of Dr Albert. Von Papen's spies had tried to murder him, after he had defeated an attempt to blow up one of the big gun factories. Sir Walter had written at the end: 'The best man we ever had. Better than Scudder. He would go through hell with a box of bismuth tablets and a pack of Patience cards.'
I went into the little back smoking-room, borrowed an atlas from the library, poked up the fire, and sat down to think. Mr Blenkiron had given me the fillip I needed. My mind was beginning to work now, and was running wide over the whole business. Not that I hoped to find anything by my cogitations. It wasn't thinking in an arm-chair that would solve the mystery. But I was getting a sort of grip on a plan of operations. And to my relief I had stopped thinking about the risks. Blenkiron had shamed me out of that. If a sedentary dyspeptic could show that kind of nerve, I wasn't going to be behind him.
I went back to my flat about five o'clock. My man Paddock had gone to the wars long ago, so I had shifted to one of the new blocks in Park Lane where they provide food and service. I kept the place on to have a home to go to when I got leave. It's a miserable business holidaying in an hotel.
Sandy was devouring tea-cakes with the serious resolution of a convalescent.
'Well, Dick, what's the news? Is it a brass-hat or the boot?'
'Neither,' I said. 'But you and I are going to disappear from His Majesty's forces. Seconded for special service.'
'O my sainted aunt!' said Sandy. 'What is it? For Heaven's sake put me out of pain. Have we to tout deputations of suspicious neutrals over munition works or take the shivering journalist in a motor car where he can imagine he sees a Boche?'
'The news will keep. But I can tell you this much. It's about as safe and easy as to go through the German lines with a walking-stick.'
'Come, that's not so dusty,' said Sandy, and began cheerfully on the muffins.
I must spare a moment to introduce Sandy to the reader, for he cannot be allowed to slip into this tale by a side-door. If you will consult the Peerage you will find that to Edward Cospatrick, fifteenth Baron Clanroyden, there was, born in the year 1882, as his second son, Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot, commonly called the Honourable, etc. The said son was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, was a captain in the Tweeddale Yeomanry, and served for some years as honorary attaché at various embassies. The Peerage will stop short at this point, but that is by no means the end of the story. For the rest you must consult very different authorities. Lean brown men from the ends of the earth may be seen on the London pavements now and then in creased clothes, walking with the light outland step, slinking into clubs as if they could not remember whether or not they belonged to them. From them you may get news of Sandy. Better still, you will hear of him at little forgotten fishing ports where the Albanian mountains dip to the Adriatic. If you struck a Mecca pilgrimage the odds are you would meet a dozen of Sandy's friends in it. In shepherds' huts in the Caucasus you will find bits of his cast-off clothing, for he has a knack of shedding garments as he goes. In the caravanserais of Bokhara and Samarkand he is known, and there are shikaris in the Pamirs who still speak of him round their fires. If you were going to visit Petrograd or Rome or Cairo it would be no use asking him for introductions; if he gave them, they would lead you into strange haunts. But if Fate compelled you to go to Llasa or Yarkand or Seistan he could map out your road for you and pass the word to potent friends. We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else. Sandy was the wandering Scot carried to the pitch of genius. In old days he would have led a crusade or discovered a new road to the Indies. Today he merely roamed as the spirit moved him, till the war swept him up and dumped him down in my battalion.
I got out Sir Walter's half-sheet of notepaper. It was not the original – naturally he wanted to keep that – but it was a careful tracing. I took it that Harry Bullivant had not written down the words as a memo for his own use. People who follow his career have good memories. He must have written them in order that, if he perished and his body was found, his friends might get a clue. Wherefore, I argued, the words must be intelligible to somebody or other of our persuasion, and likewise they must be pretty well gibberish to any Turk or German that found them.
The first, 'Kasredin,' I could make nothing of.
I asked Sandy.
'You mean Nasr-ed-din,' he said, still munching crumpets.
'What's that?' I asked sharply.
'He's the General believed to be commanding against us in Mesopotamia. I remember him years ago in Aleppo. He talked bad French and drank the sweetest of sweet champagne.'
