The Three Hostages

'I see,' he said, and was silent for a little. 'Have you anything more to tell me?'

I ransacked my memory and remembered about Odell. He wrote down the name of the dancing club where I had seen that unprepossessing butler. I mentioned that I had asked Macgillivray to get on to his dossier.

'You haven't told Macgillivray too much?' he inquired anxiously and seemed relieved when I replied that I had never mentioned the Medina business.

'Well, here's the position,' he said at last. 'You go off for a week hunting Number Two. We are pretty certain that we have got Number One. Number Three—that nonsense about the fields of Eden and the Jew with a dyed beard in a curiosity shop in Marylebone—still eludes us. And of course we have as yet no word of any of the three hostages. There's a terrible lot still to do. How do you envisage the thing, Dick? Do you think of the three, the girl, the young man, and the boy, shut up somewhere and guarded by Medina's minions? Do you imagine that if we find their places of concealment we shall have done the job?'

'That was my idea.'

He shook his head. 'It is far subtler than that. Did no one ever tell you that the best way of hiding a person is to strip him of his memory? Why is it that when a man loses his memory he is so hard to find? You see it constantly in the newspapers. Even a well-known figure, if he loses his memory and wanders away, is only discovered by accident. The reason is that the human personality is identified far less by appearance than by its habits and mind. Loss of memory means the loss of all true marks of identification, and the physical look alters to correspond. Medina has stolen these three poor souls' memories and set them adrift like waifs. David Warcliff may at this moment be playing in a London gutter along with a dozen guttersnipes and his own father could scarcely pick him out from the rest. Mercot may be a dock labourer or a deck hand, whom you wouldn't recognise if you met him, though you had sat opposite him in a college hall every night for a year. And Miss Victor may be in a gaiety chorus or a milliner's assistant or a girl in a dancing saloon… . Wait a minute. You saw Odell at a dance-club? There may be something in that.' I could see his eyes abstracted in thought.

'There's another thing I forgot to mention,' I said. 'Miss Victor's fiance is over here, staying in Carlton House Terrace. He is old Turpin, who used to be with the division—the Marquis de la Tour du Pin.'

Sandy wrote the name down. 'Her fiance. He may come in useful. What sort of fellow?'

'Brave as a lion, but he'll want watching, for he's a bit of a Gascon.'

We went out after breakfast and sat in an arbour looking down a shallow side-valley to the upper streams of the Windrush. The sounds of morning were beginning to rise from the little village far away in the bottom, the jolt of a wagon, the 'clink-clenk' from the smithy, the babble of children at play. In a fortnight the may-fly would be here, and every laburnum and guelder rose in bloom. Sandy, who had been away from England for years, did not speak for a long time, but drank in the sweet-scented peace of it. 'Poor devil,' he said at last. 'He has nothing like this to love. He can only hate.'

I asked whom he was talking about, and he said 'Medina.'

'I'm trying to understand him. You can't fight a man unless you understand him, and in a way sympathise with him.'

'Well, I can't say I sympathise with him, and I most certainly don't understand him.'

'Do you remember once telling me that he had no vanity? You were badly out there. He has a vanity which amounts to delirium.

'This is how I read him,' he went on. 'To begin with, there's a far-away streak of the Latin in him, but he is mainly Irish, and that never makes a good cross. He's the deracine Irish, such as you find in America. I take it that he imbibed from that terrible old woman—I've never met her, but I see her plainly and I know that she is terrible—he imbibed that venomous hatred of imaginary things—an imaginary England, an imaginary civilisation, which they call love of country. There is no love in it. They think there is, and sentimentalise about an old simplicity, and spinning wheels and turf fires and an uncouth language, but it's all hollow. There's plenty of decent plain folk in Ireland, but his kind of deracine is a ghastly throw-back to something you find in the dawn of history, hollow and cruel like the fantastic gods of their own myths. Well, you start with this ingrained hate.'

'I agree about the old lady. She looked like Lady Macbeth.'

'But hate soon becomes conceit. If you hate, you despise, and when you despise you esteem inordinately the self which despises. This is how I look at it, but remember, I'm still in the dark and only feeling my way to an understanding. I see Medina growing up—I don't know in what environment—conscious of great talents and immense good looks, flattered by those around him till he thinks himself a god. His hatred does not die, but it is transformed into a colossal egotism and vanity, which, of course, is a form of hate. He discovers quite early that he has this remarkable hypnotic power—Oh, you may laugh at it, because you happen to be immune from it, but it is a big thing in the world for all that. He discovers another thing—that he has an extraordinary gift of attracting people and making them believe in him. Some of the worst scoundrels in history have had it. Now, remember his vanity. It makes him want to play the biggest game. He does not want to be a king among pariahs; he wants to be the ruler of what is most strange to him, what he hates and in an unwilling bitter way admires. So he aims at conquering the very heart, the very soundest part of our society. Above all he wants to be admired by men and admitted into the innermost circle.'

'He has succeeded all right,' I said.

'He has succeeded, and that is the greatest possible tribute to his huge cleverness. Everything about him is dead right—clothes, manner, modesty, accomplishments. He has made himself an excellent sportsman. Do you know why he shoots so well, Dick? By faith—or fatalism, if you like. His vanity doesn't allow him to believe that he could miss… . But he governs himself strictly. In his life he is practically an ascetic, and though he is adored by women he doesn't care a straw for them. There are no lusts of the flesh in that kind of character. He has one absorbing passion which subdues all others—what our friend Michael Scott called 'hominum dominatus.''

'I see that. But how do you explain the other side?'

'It is all the ancestral hate. First of all, of course, he has got to have money, so he gets it in the way Macgillivray knows about. Second, he wants to build up a regiment of faithful slaves. That's where you come in, Dick. There is always that inhuman hate at the back of his egotism. He wants to conquer in order to destroy, for destruction is the finest meat for his vanity. You'll find the same thing in the lives of Eastern tyrants, for when a man aspires to be like God he becomes an incarnate devil.'

'It is a tough proposition,' I observed dismally.

'It would be an impossible proposition, but for one thing. He is always in danger of giving himself away out of sheer arrogance. Did you ever read the old Irish folk-lore? Very beautiful it is, but there is always something fantastic and silly which mars the finest stories. They lack the grave good-sense which you find in the Norse sagas and, of course, in the Greek. Well, he has this freakish element in his blood. That is why he sent out that rhyme about the three hostages, which by an amazing concatenation of chances put you on to his trail. Our hope is—and, mind you, I think it is a slender hope—that his vanity may urge him to further indiscretions.'

'I don't know how you feel about it,' I said, 'but I've got a pretty healthy hatred for that lad. I'm longing for a quiet life, but I swear I won't settle down again till I've got even with him.'

'You never will,' said Sandy solemnly. 'Don't let's flatter ourselves that you and I are going to down Medina. We are not. A very wise man once said to me that in this life you could often get success, if you didn't want victory. In this case we're out for success only. We want to release the hostages. Victory we can never hope for. Why, man, supposing we succeed fully, we'll never be able to connect Medina with the thing. His tools are faithful, because he has stolen their souls and they work blindly under him. Supposing Macgillivray rounds up all the big gang and puts the halter round their necks. There will be none of them to turn King's evidence and give Medina away. Why? Because none of them know anything against him. They're his unconscious agents, and very likely most have never seen him. And you may be pretty sure that his banking accounts are too skilfully arranged to show anything.'

'All the same,' I said stubbornly, 'I have a notion that I'll be able to put a spoke in his wheel.'

'Oh, I dare say we can sow suspicion, but I believe he'll be too strong for us. He'll advance in his glorious career, and may become Prime Minister—or Viceroy of India—what a chance the second would be for him!—and publish exquisite little poetry books, as finished and melancholy as The Shropshire Lad. Pessimism, you know, is often a form of vanity.'

At midday it was time for me to be off, if I was to be at Hull by six o'clock. I asked Sandy what he proposed