Mr. Standfast - John Buchan (autobiographies to read TXT) 📗

pure-minded war aims.” All this was in keeping with his English reputation, and he wanted to make himself a bait for Ivery.

But Ivery did not rise to the fly, and though he had a dozen agents working for him on the quiet he could never hear of the name Chelius. That was, he reckoned, a very private and particular name among the Wild Birds. However, he got to know a good deal about the Swiss end of the “Deep-breathing” business. That took some doing and cost a lot of money. His best people were a girl who posed as a mannequin in a milliner’s shop in Lyons and a concierge in a big hotel at St. Moritz. His most important discovery was that there was a second cipher in the return messages sent from Switzerland, different from the one that the Gussiter lot used in England. He got this cipher, but though he could read it he couldn’t make anything out of it. He concluded that it was a very secret means of communication between the inner circle of the Wild Birds, and that Ivery must be at the back of it⁠ ⁠… But he was still a long way from finding out anything that mattered.

Then the whole situation changed, for Mary got in touch with Ivery. I must say she behaved like a shameless minx, for she kept on writing to him to an address he had once given her in Paris, and suddenly she got an answer. She was in Paris herself, helping to run one of the railway canteens, and staying with her French cousins, the de Mezieres. One day he came to see her. That showed the boldness of the man, and his cleverness, for the whole secret police of France were after him and they never got within sight or sound. Yet here he was coming openly in the afternoon to have tea with an English girl. It showed another thing, which made me blaspheme. A man so resolute and single-hearted in his job must have been pretty badly in love to take a risk like that.

He came, and he called himself the Capitaine Bommaerts, with a transport job on the staff of the French G.Q.G. He was on the staff right enough too. Mary said that when she heard that name she nearly fell down. He was quite frank with her, and she with him. They are both peacemakers, ready to break the laws of any land for the sake of a great ideal. Goodness knows what stuff they talked together. Mary said she would blush to think of it till her dying day, and I gathered that on her side it was a mixture of Launcelot Wake at his most pedantic and schoolgirl silliness.

He came again, and they met often, unbeknown to the decorous Madame de Mezieres. They walked together in the Bois de Boulogne, and once, with a beating heart, she motored with him to Auteuil for luncheon. He spoke of his house in Picardy, and there were moments, I gathered, when he became the declared lover, to be rebuffed with a hoydenish shyness. Presently the pace became too hot, and after some anguished arguments with Bullivant on the long-distance telephone she went off to Douvecourt to Lady Manorwater’s hospital. She went there to escape from him, but mainly, I think, to have a look⁠—trembling in every limb, mind you⁠—at the Château of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.

I had only to think of Mary to know just what Joan of Arc was. No man ever born could have done that kind of thing. It wasn’t recklessness. It was sheer calculating courage.

Then Blenkiron took up the tale. The newspaper we found that Christmas Eve in the Château was of tremendous importance, for Bommaerts had pricked out in the advertisement the very special second cipher of the Wild Birds. That proved that Ivery was at the back of the Swiss business. But Blenkiron made doubly sure.

“I considered the time had come,” he said, “to pay high for valuable noos, so I sold the enemy a very pretty de-vice. If you ever gave your mind to ciphers and illicit correspondence, Dick, you would know that the one kind of document you can’t write on in invisible ink is a coated paper, the kind they use in the weeklies to print photographs of leading actresses and the stately homes of England. Anything wet that touches it corrugates the surface a little, and you can tell with a microscope if someone’s been playing at it. Well, we had the good fortune to discover just how to get over that little difficulty⁠—how to write on glazed paper with a quill so as the cutest analyst couldn’t spot it, and likewise how to detect the writing. I decided to sacrifice that invention, casting my bread upon the waters and looking for a good-sized bakery in return⁠ ⁠… I had it sold to the enemy. The job wanted delicate handling, but the tenth man from me⁠—he was an Austrian Jew⁠—did the deal and scooped fifty thousand dollars out of it. Then I lay low to watch how my friend would use the de-vice, and I didn’t wait long.”

He took from his pocket a folded sheet of L’Illustration. Over a photogravure plate ran some words in a large sprawling hand, as if written with a brush.

“That page when I got it yesterday,” he said, “was an unassuming picture of General Petain presenting military medals. There wasn’t a scratch or a ripple on its surface. But I got busy with it, and see there!”

He pointed out two names. The writing was a set of key-words we did not know, but two names stood out which I knew too well. They were “Bommaerts” and “Chelius.”

“My God!” I cried, “that’s uncanny. It only shows that if you chew long enough⁠—”

“Dick,” said Mary, “you mustn’t say that again. At the best it’s an ugly metaphor, and you’re making it a platitude.”

“Who is Ivery anyhow?” I asked. “Do you