A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ where are you bound for?”

      “To join up.”

      “As a private?”

      “Of course. I’m no longer a soldier.”

      “Nonsense, man. That can’t be allowed. We’re running this business like a pack of crazy amateurs, but there’s a limit to the things we can waste. Brains is one.”

      “I must fight,” said Adam. “You’re doing the same.”

      “Not I. I’m stuck at home in this damned department store. I want to go out to-morrow, for I’ve been in the Yeomanry for years and know something about the job, but they won’t let me—yet. They told me I must do the thing I’m best fitted for. I pass that on to you.”

      Adam shook his head.

      “I’m fit for nothing but cannon-fodder. You know that well enough, Kit. And I’m quite content. I’ll find some way of making myself useful, never fear.”

      “I daresay you will, but not the best way. This wants perpending. Promise me on your honour that you’ll do nothing to-day, and lunch with me tomorrow. By that time I may have a plan.”

      Adam protested, but the other was so urgent that at last he agreed.

      Next day they lunched together and Stannix wore an anxious face.

      “I’ve seen Ritson and Marlake,” he said, “and they think as I do. If you join up as a private, you’ll presently get your stripes, and pretty soon you’ll be offered a commission. But in a battalion you’ll be no better than a hundred thousand others. I want you to have a show. Well, it can’t be in the open, so it must be in the half-light or the dark. That means risks, far bigger risks than the ordinary fellow is now facing in Flanders, but it also means an opportunity for big service. How do you feel about it?”

      Adam’s face brightened.

      “I haven’t much capital left, and I want to spend it. I don’t mind risks—I covet them. And I don’t mind working in the dark, for that is where I must live now.”

      Stannix wrinkled his brows.

      “I was certain you’d take that view, and I told Ritson so. But Adam, old man, I feel pretty miserable about it. For a chance of work for you means a certainty of danger—the most colossal danger.”

      “I know, I know,” said Adam cheerfully. “That’s what I’m looking for. Hang it, Kit, I must squeeze some advantage out of my troubles, and one is that my chiefs should not concern themselves about what happens to me. I’m a volunteer for any lost hope.”

      “I may be helping to send my best friend to his death,” said Stannix gloomily.

      “Everybody is doing that for everybody. You’ll be doing the kindest thing in the world if you give me a run for my money. I’ve counted the cost.”

      The result of this talk was that during the following week Adam had various interviews. The first was with Ritson at the War Office, a man who had been one of his instructors at the Staff College. Ritson, grey with overwork, looked shyly at his former pupil. “This is a queer business, Melfort,” he said. “I think you are right. You’re the man I would have picked above all others—only of course I couldn’t have got you if certain things hadn’t happened… You know what’s expected of you and what you’re up against. Good-bye and God bless you! I’ll be like a man looking down into deep water and now and then getting a glimpse of you moving at the bottom.”

      Thereafter Adam entered upon a varied life. First he made a journey into the City, to a little street in the neighbourhood of Leadenhall Market. On the door of every narrow, flat-chested house were a score of names, mostly attorneys and notaries public. At the foot of one such list he found J. N. Macandrew, who professed to follow the calling of an average-adjuster. Mr Macandrew was hard to come at. Adam was received in a dingy slip of an office by a pallid boy, who took his card and disappeared. He returned and led the way up a maze of wooden stairs and murky passages, till he left him in a room where sunlight was pouring through a dirty window. There for half an hour Adam kicked his heels. The place had all the cheerful features of an attorney’s waiting-room. On the walls, where the paper was dark with grime, hung an ancient almanac, a bad print of Lord Chancellor Cairns, and a faded photograph of the court of some livery company in the year 1889. On a rickety table stood three venerable Law Lists, an antediluvian Burke, a London directory and a pile of shipping journals. There was a leather arm-chair which looked as if it had seen service, and a pile of cigarette ends in the empty grate, which suggested that the room was much in use.

      Adam examined the scanty properties, and then stared out of the window at the jumble of roofs and house-backs. The place was oddly depressing. Here in this rabbit-warren life seemed to shrink to an infinite pettiness. What part could it have in the storm which was scourging the world?… He turned, to find that Mr Macandrew had entered the room, though he had heard no door open.

      Mr Macandrew’s name was misleading, for he was clearly a Jew, a small man with a nervous mouth and eyes that preferred to look downward. He seemed to have been expecting Adam, for he cut short his explanation. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Please take a seat. Yes, I know all about you. We can have a little talk, can’t we? Will you smoke?”

      Adam sat in the rubbed arm-chair, while the other perched himself on the table. It was a curious interview, of which the purpose only gradually became clear. Macandrew asked a few questions about a corner of Belgium which Adam had often visited. Ritson knew about those visits, and might have told him. Then he suddenly broke into the guttural French which is talked in the Meuse valley. “You understand that?” he snapped. “Every word?” Adam replied in the same patois, and was corrected on a point or two. “Pretty good,” said Macandrew. “Good enough, perhaps. You have the right gurgle, but not all the idioms.”

      Then he spoke Flemish, which Adam translated after him. “That is good—very good. You do not need to speak it, but it is well to understand it.” He drawled a few sentences in some tongue which sounded mere gibberish. “You do not follow? No matter. That is the speech of the hill people in the high Ardennes—peasant people only, you understand. There are gipsy words in it.”

      There followed a series of interrogatories. Adam was asked to describe the daily life on a farm in southeast Belgium. “You have stayed in such a place. Now, give me the duties of the farmer’s son, beginning with the first daylight.” Adam ransacked his memory and did his best, but the catalogue was sketchy. He pleased his interlocutor better with his account of a wayside estaminet, a cattle-fair, and a Sunday pilgrimage. “You can observe,” said Macandrew. “Not yet with sufficient nicety. Yet you have eyes in your head.”

      He was suddenly dismissed. The pallid boy appeared, and Macandrew held out his hand. “Goodbye, Mr More. Perhaps we shall meet again soon.”

      As Adam re-threaded the labyrinth of stair and passage, he wondered why he had been addressed as More. That must have been Ritson’s arrangement, and he had not been told of it because his chiefs assumed that he knew enough to be passive in their hands.

      A few days later he found himself a guest in a country house which lay under the Hampshire Downs. The invitation had been sent to him by Ritson, and in it he figured as Mr John More. His host was called Warriner, a fine, old, high-coloured sportsman, who looked as if his winters had been spent in the hunting-field, and his summers in tramping his paternal acres. There was a son, in his early twenties, who had come over from a neighbouring training- camp. It appeared that young СКАЧАТЬ