He was in tremendous spirits that evening, and for once in a way gave us reminiscences of his past. He told us about the people he badly wanted to see again; an Irish Spaniard up in the north of the Argentine who had for cattle-men a most murderous brand of native from the mountains, whom he used to keep in good humour by arranging fights every Sunday, he himself taking on the survivor with his fists and always knocking him out; a Scots trader from Hankow who had turned Buddhist priest and intoned his prayers with a strong Glasgow accent; and most of all a Malay pirate, who, he said, was a sort of St Francis with beasts, though a perfect Nero with his fellow-men. That took him to Central Asia, and he observed that if ever he left England again he would make for those parts, since they were the refuge of all the superior rascality of creation. He had a notion that something very odd might happen there in the long run. ‘Think of it!’ he cried. ‘All the places with names like spells – Bokhara, Samarkand – run by seedy little gangs of communist Jews. It won’t go on for ever. Some day a new Genghis Khan or a Timour will be thrown up out of the maelstrom. Europe is confused enough, but Asia is ancient Chaos.’
After dinner we sat round the fire in the library, which I had modelled on Sir Walter Bullivant’s room in his place on the Kennet, as I had promised myself seven years ago. I had meant it for my own room where I could write and read and smoke, but Mary would not allow it. She had a jolly panelled sitting-room of her own upstairs, which she rarely entered; but though I chased her away, she was like a hen in a garden and always came back, so that presently she had staked out a claim on the other side of my writing-table. I have the old hunter’s notion of order, but it was useless to strive with Mary, so now my desk was littered with her letters and needlework, and Peter John’s toys and picture-books were stacked in the cabinet where I kept my fly-books, and Peter John himself used to make a kraal every morning inside an upturned stool on the hearth-rug.
It was a cold night and very pleasant by the fireside, where some scented logs from an old pear-tree were burning. The doctor picked up a detective novel I had been reading, and glanced at the title-page.
‘I can read most things,’ he said, ‘but it beats me how you waste time over such stuff. These shockers are too easy, Dick. You could invent better ones for yourself.’
‘Not I. I call that a dashed ingenious yarn. I can’t think how the fellow does it.’
‘Quite simple. The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Not a bit,’ I replied.
‘Look here. I want to write a shocker, so I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no sort of obvious connection.’
‘For example?’
‘Well, imagine anything you like. Let us take three things a long way apart –’ He paused for a second to consider – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. Not much connection between the three? You invent a connection – simple enough if you have any imagination, and you weave all three into the yarn. The reader, who knows nothing about the three at the start, is puzzled and intrigued and, if the story is well arranged, finally satisfied. He is pleased with the ingenuity of the solution, for he doesn’t realize that the author fixed upon the solution first, and then invented a problem to suit it.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘You’ve gone and taken the gilt off my favourite light reading. I won’t be able any more to marvel at the writer’s cleverness.’
‘I’ve another objection to the stuff – it’s not ingenious enough, or rather it doesn’t take account of the infernal complexity of life. It might have been all right twenty years ago, when most people argued and behaved fairly logically. But they don’t nowadays. Have you ever realized, Dick, the amount of stark craziness that the War has left in the world?’
Mary, who was sitting sewing under a lamp, raised her head and laughed.
Greenslade’s face had become serious. ‘I can speak about it frankly here, for you two are almost the only completely sane people I know. Well, as a pathologist, I’m fairly staggered. I hardly meet a soul who hasn’t got some slight kink in his brain as a consequence of the last seven years. With most people it’s rather a pleasant kink – they’re less settled in their grooves, and they see the comic side of things quicker, and are readier for adventure. But with some it’s pukka madness, and that means crime. Now, how are you going to write detective stories about that kind of world on the old lines? You can take nothing for granted, as you once could, and your argus-eyed lightning-brained expert has nothing solid with which to build his foundations.’
I observed that the poor old War seemed to be getting blamed for a good deal that I was taught in my childhood was due to original sin.
‘Oh, I’m not questioning your Calvinism. Original sin is always there, but the meaning of civilization was that we had got it battened down under hatches, whereas now it’s getting its head up. But it isn’t only sin. It’s a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws. Oddly enough, in spite of parrot-talk about shell-shock, the men who fought suffer less from it on the whole than other people. The classes that shirked the War are the worst – you see it in Ireland. Every doctor nowadays has got to be a bit of a mental pathologist. As I say, you can hardly take anything for granted, and if you want detective stories that are not childish fantasy, you’ll have to invent a new kind. Better try your hand, Dick.’
‘Not I. I’m a lover of sober facts.’
‘But, hang it, man, the facts are no longer sober. I could tell you –’ He paused and I was expecting a yarn, but he changed his mind.
‘Take all this chatter about psycho-analysis. There’s nothing very new in the doctrine, but people are beginning to work it out into details, and making considerable asses of themselves in the process. It’s an awful thing when a scientific truth becomes the quarry of the half-baked. But as I say, the fact of the subconscious self is as certain as the existence of lungs and arteries.’
‘I don’t believe that Dick has any subconscious self,’ said Mary.
‘Oh yes, he has. Only, people who have led his kind of life have their ordinary self so well managed and disciplined – their wits so much about them, as the phrase goes – that the subconscious rarely gets a show. But I bet if Dick took to thinking about his soul, which he never does, he would find some queer corners. Take my own case.’ He turned towards me so that I had a full view of his candid eyes and hungry cheek-bones which looked prodigious in the firelight. ‘I belong more or less to the same totem as you, but I’ve long been aware that I possessed a most curious kind of subconsciousness. I’ve a good memory and fair powers of observation, but they’re nothing to those of my subconscious self. Take any daily incident. I see and hear, say, about a twentieth part of the details and remember about a hundredth part – that is, assuming that there is nothing special to stimulate my interest. But my subconscious self sees and hears practically everything, and remembers most of it. Only I can’t use the memory for I don’t know that I’ve got it, and can’t call it into being when I wish. But every now and then something happens to turn on the tap of the subconscious, and a thin trickle comes through. I find myself sometimes remembering names I was never aware of having heard, and little incidents and details I had never consciously noticed. Imagination, you will say; but it isn’t, for everything that that inner memory provides is exactly true. I’ve tested it. If I could only find some way of tapping it at will, I should be an uncommonly efficient fellow. Incidentally I should become the first scientist of the age, for the trouble with investigation and experiment is that the ordinary brain does not observe sufficiently keenly or remember the data sufficiently accurately.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I said. ‘I’m not at all certain I haven’t noticed the same thing in myself. But what has that to do with the madness that you say is infecting the world?’
/> ‘Simply this. The barriers between the conscious and the subconscious have always been pretty stiff in the average man. But now with the general loosening of screws they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting mixed. It is like two separate tanks of fluid, where the containing wall has worn into holes, and one is percolating into the other. The result is confusion, and, if the fluids are of a certain character, explosions. That is why I say that you can’t any longer take the clear psychology of most civilized human beings for granted. Something is welling up from primeval deeps to muddy it.’
‘I don’t object to that,’ I said. ‘We’ve overdone civilization, and personally I’m all for a little barbarism. I want a simpler world.’
‘Then you won’t get it,’ said Greenslade. He had become very serious now, and was looking towards Mary as he talked. ‘The civilized is far simpler than the primeval. All history has been an effort to make definitions, clear rules of thought, clear rules of conduct, solid sanctions, by which we can conduct our life. These are the work of the conscious self. The subconscious is an elementary and lawless thing. If it intrudes on life two results must follow. There will be a weakening of the power of reasoning, which after all is the thing that brings men nearest to the Almighty. And there will be a failure of nerve.’
I got up to get a light, for I was beginning to feel depressed by the doctor’s diagnosis of our times. I don’t know whether he was altogether serious, for he presently started on fishing, which was one of his many hobbies. There was very fair dry-fly fishing to be had in our little river, but I had taken a deer-forest with Archie Roylance for the season, and Greenslade was coming up with me to try his hand at salmon. There had been no sea-trout the year before in the West Highlands, and we fell to discussing the cause. He was ready with a dozen theories, and we forgot about the psychology of mankind in investigating the uncanny psychology of fish. After that Mary sang to us, for I considered any evening a failure without that, and at half-past ten the doctor got into his old ulster and departed.
As I smoked my last pipe I found my thoughts going over Greenslade’s talk. I had found a snug harbour, but how yeasty the waters seemed to be outside the bar and how erratic the tides! I wondered if it wasn’t shirking to be so comfortable in a comfortless world. Then I reflected that I was owed a little peace, for I had had a roughish life. But Mary’s words kept coming back to me about ‘walking delicately’. I considered that my present conduct filled that bill, for I was mighty thankful for my mercies and in no way inclined to tempt Providence by complacency.
Going up to bed, I noticed my neglected letters on the hall table. I turned them over and saw that they were mostly bills and receipts or tradesmen’s circulars. But there was one addressed in a handwriting that I knew, and as I looked at it I experienced a sudden sinking of the heart. It was from Lord Artinswell – Sir Walter Bullivant, as was – who had now retired from the Foreign Office, and was living at his place on the Kennet. He and I occasionally corresponded about farming and fishing, but I had a premonition that this was something different. I waited for a second or two before I opened it.
MY DEAR DICK,
This note is in the nature of a warning. In the next day or two you will be asked, nay pressed, to undertake a troublesome piece of business. I am not responsible for the request, but I know of it. If you consent, it will mean the end for a time of your happy vegetable life. I don’t want to influence you one way or another; I only give you notice of what is coming in order that you may adjust your mind and not be taken by surprise. My love to Mary and the son.
Yours ever,
A.
That was all. I had lost my trepidation and felt very angry. Why couldn’t the fools let me alone? As I went upstairs I vowed that not all the cajolery in the world would make me budge an inch from the path I had set myself. I had done enough for the public service and other people’s interests, and it was jolly well time that I should be allowed to attend to my own.
CHAPTER TWO
I Hear of the Three Hostages
There is an odour about a country-house which I love better than any scent in the world. Mary used to say it was a mixture of lamp and dog and wood-smoke, but at Fosse, where there was electric light and no dogs indoors, I fancy it was wood-smoke, tobacco, the old walls, and wafts of the country coming in at the windows. I liked it best in the morning, when there was a touch in it of breakfast cooking, and I used to stand at the top of the staircase and sniff it as I went to my bath. But on the morning I write of I could take no pleasure in it; indeed it seemed to tantalize me with a vision of country peace which had somehow got broken. I couldn’t get that confounded letter out of my head. When I read it I had torn it up in disgust, but I found myself going down in my dressing-gown, to the surprise of a housemaid, piecing together the fragments from the waste-paper basket, and reading it again. This time I flung the bits into the new-kindled fire.
I was perfectly resolved that I would have nothing to do with Bullivant or any of his designs, but all the same I could not recapture the serenity which yesterday had clothed me like a garment. I was down to breakfast before Mary, and had finished before she appeared. Then I lit my pipe and started on my usual tour of my domain, but nothing seemed quite the same. It was a soft fresh morning with no frost, and the scillas along the edge of the lake were like bits of summer sky. The moor-hens were building, and the first daffodils were out in the round grass below the clump of Scots firs, and old George Whaddon was nailing up rabbit wire and whistling through his two remaining teeth, and generally the world was as clear and jolly as spring could make it. But I didn’t feel any more that it was really mine, only that I was looking on at a pretty picture. Something had happened to jar the harmony between it and my mind, and I cursed Bullivant and his intrusions.
I returned by the front of the house, and there at the door to my surprise stood a big touring Rolls-Royce. Paddock met me in the hall and handed me a card, on which I read the name of Mr Julius Victor.
I knew it, of course, for the name of one of the richest men in the world, the American banker who had done a lot of Britain’s financial business in the War, and was in Europe now at some international conference. I remembered that Blenkiron, who didn’t like his race, had once described him to me as ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’.
In the library I found a tall man standing by the window looking out at our view. He turned as I entered, and I saw a thin face with a neatly trimmed grey beard, and the most worried eyes I have ever seen in a human countenance. Everything about him was spruce and dapper – his beautifully-cut grey suit, his black tie and pink pearl pin, his blue-and-white linen, his exquisitely polished shoes. But the eyes were so wild and anxious that he looked dishevelled.
‘General,’ he said, and took a step towards me.
We shook hands and I made him sit down.
‘I have dropped the “General”, if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘What I want to know is, have you had breakfast?’
He shook his head. ‘I had a cup of coffee on the road. I do not eat in the morning.’
‘Where have you come from, sir?’ I asked.
‘From London.’
Well, London is seventy-six miles from us, so he must have started early. I looked curiously at him, and he got out of his chair and began to stride about.
‘Sir Richard,’ he said, in a low pleasant voice which I could imagine convincing any man he tried it on, ‘you are a soldier and a man of the world and will pardon my unconventionality. My business is too urgent to waste time on apologies. I have heard of you from common friends as a man of exceptional resource and courage. I have been told in confidence something of your record. I have come to implore your help in a desperate emergency.’
I passed him a box of cigars, and he took one and lit it carefully. I could see his long slim fingers trembling as he held the match.
‘You may have heard of me,’ he went on. ‘I am a very rich man, and my wealth has given me power, so th
at Governments honour me with their confidence. I am concerned in various important affairs, and it would be false modesty to deny that my word is weightier than that of many Prime Ministers. I am labouring, Sir Richard, to secure peace in the world, and consequently I have enemies, all those who would perpetuate anarchy and war. My life has been more than once attempted, but that is nothing. I am well guarded. I am not, I think, more of a coward than other men, and I am prepared to take my chance. But now I have been attacked by a subtler weapon, and I confess I have no defence. I had a son, who died ten years ago at college. My only child is my daughter, Adela, a girl of nineteen. She came to Europe just before Christmas, for she was to be married in Paris in April. A fortnight ago she was hunting with friends in Northamptonshire – the place is called Rushford Court. On the morning of the 8th of March she went for a walk to Rushford village to send a telegram, and was last seen passing through the lodge gates at twenty minutes past eleven. She has not been seen since.’
‘Good God!’ I exclaimed, and rose from my chair. Mr Victor was looking out of the window, so I walked to the other end of the room and fiddled with the books on a shelf. There was silence for a second or two, till I broke it.
‘Do you suppose it is loss of memory?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is not loss of memory. I know – we have proof – that she has been kidnapped by those whom I call my enemies. She is being held as a hostage.’