Greenmantle - John Buchan (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📗

the best we can. I can spare one man from the deck hands, and you must give up one from the engine-room.”

That was arranged, and we were tearing back rather short in the wind when I espied a figure sitting on a bench beside the booking-office on the pier. It was a slim figure, in an old suit of khaki: some cast-off duds which had long lost the semblance of a uniform. It had a gentle face, and was smoking peacefully, looking out upon the river and the boats and us noisy fellows with meek philosophical eyes. If I had seen General French sitting there and looking like nothing on earth I couldn’t have been more surprised.

The man stared at me without recognition. He was waiting for his cue.

I spoke rapidly in Sesutu, for I was afraid the captain might know Dutch.

“Where have you come from?” I asked.

“They shut me up in tronk,” said Peter, “and I ran away. I am tired, Cornelis, and want to continue the journey by boat.”

“Remember you have worked for me in Africa,” I said. “You are just home from Damaraland. You are a German who has lived thirty years away from home. You can tend a furnace and have worked in mines.”

Then I spoke to the captain.

“Here is a fellow who used to be in my employ, Captain Schenk. It’s almighty luck we’ve struck him. He’s old, and not very strong in the head, but I’ll go bail he’s a good worker. He says he’ll come with us and I can use him in the engine-room.”

“Stand up,” said the Captain.

Peter stood up, light and slim and wiry as a leopard. A sailor does not judge men by girth and weight.

“He’ll do,” said Schenk, and the next minute he was readjusting his crews and giving the strayed revellers the rough side of his tongue. As it chanced, I couldn’t keep Peter with me, but had to send him to one of the barges, and I had time for no more than five words with him, when I told him to hold his tongue and live up to his reputation as a half-wit. That accursed Sylvesterabend had played havoc with the whole outfit, and the captain and I were weary men before we got things straight.

In one way it turned out well. That afternoon we passed the frontier and I never knew it till I saw a man in a strange uniform come aboard, who copied some figures on a schedule, and brought us a mail. With my dirty face and general air of absorption in duty, I must have been an unsuspicious figure. He took down the names of the men in the barges, and Peter’s name was given as it appeared on the ship’s roll⁠—Anton Blum.

“You must feel it strange, Herr Brandt,” said the captain, “to be scrutinized by a policeman, you who give orders, I doubt not, to many policemen.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It is my profession. It is my business to go unrecognized often by my own servants.” I could see that I was becoming rather a figure in the captain’s eyes. He liked the way I kept the men up to their work, for I hadn’t been a nigger-driver for nothing.

Late on that Sunday night we passed through a great city which the captain told me was Vienna. It seemed to last for miles and miles, and to be as brightly lit as a circus. After that, we were in big plains and the air grew perishing cold. Peter had come aboard once for his rations, but usually he left it to his partner, for he was lying very low. But one morning⁠—I think it was the 5th of January, when we had passed Buda and were moving through great sodden flats just sprinkled with snow⁠—the captain took it into his head to get me to overhaul the barge loads. Armed with a mighty typewritten list, I made a tour of the barges, beginning with the hindmost. There was a fine old stock of deadly weapons⁠—mostly machine-guns and some field-pieces, and enough shells to blow up the Gallipoli peninsula. All kinds of shell were there, from the big 14-inch crumps to rifle grenades and trench-mortars. It made me fairly sick to see all these good things preparing for our own fellows, and I wondered whether I would not be doing my best service if I engineered a big explosion. Happily I had the common sense to remember my job and my duty and to stick to it.

Peter was in the middle of the convoy, and I found him pretty unhappy, principally through not being allowed to smoke. His companion was an ox-eyed lad, whom I ordered to the lookout while Peter and I went over the lists.

“Cornelis, my old friend,” he said, “there are some pretty toys here. With a spanner and a couple of clear hours I could make these maxims about as deadly as bicycles. What do you say to a try?”

“I’ve considered that,” I said, “but it won’t do. We’re on a bigger business than wrecking munition convoys. I want to know how you got here.”

He smiled with that extraordinary Sunday-school docility of his.

“It was very simple, Cornelis. I was foolish in the café⁠—but they have told you of that. You see I was angry and did not reflect. They had separated us, and I could see would treat me as dirt. Therefore, my bad temper came out, for, as I have told you, I do not like Germans.”

Peter gazed lovingly at the little bleak farms which dotted the Hungarian plain.

“All night I lay in tronk with no food. In the morning they fed me, and took me hundreds of miles in a train to a place which I think is called Neuburg. It was a great prison, full of English officers⁠ ⁠… I asked myself many times on the journey what was the reason of this treatment, for I could see no