‘I haven’t made up my mind about you, Brandt,’ he announced. ‘You may be a fool or a knave or a good man. If you are a knave, we will shoot you.’
‘And if I am a fool?’ I asked.
‘Send you to the Yser or the Dvina. You will be respectable cannon-fodder.’
‘You cannot do that unless I consent,’ I said.
‘Can’t we?’ he said, smiling wickedly. ‘Remember you are a citizen of nowhere. Technically, you are a rebel, and the British, if you go to them, will hang you, supposing they have any sense. You are in our power, my friend, to do precisely what we like with you.’
He was silent for a second, and then he said, meditatively:
‘But I don’t think you are a fool. You may be a scoundrel. Some kinds of scoundrel are useful enough. Other kinds are strung up with a rope. Of that we shall know more soon.’
‘And if I am a good man?’
‘You will be given a chance to serve Germany, the proudest privilege a mortal man can have.’ The strange man said this with a ringing sincerity in his voice that impressed me.
The car swung out from the trees into a park lined with saplings, and in the twilight I saw before me a biggish house like an overgrown Swiss chalet. There was a kind of archway, with a sham portcullis, and a terrace with battlements which looked as if they were made of stucco. We drew up at a Gothic front door, where a thin middle-aged man in a shooting-jacket was waiting.
As we moved into the lighted hall I got a good look at our host. He was very lean and brown, with the stoop in the shoulder that one gets from being constantly on horseback. He had untidy grizzled hair and a ragged beard, and a pair of pleasant, short-sighted brown eyes.
‘Welcome, my Colonel,’ he said. ‘Is this the friend you spoke of ?’
‘This is the Dutchman,’ said Stumm. ‘His name is Brandt. Brandt, you see before you Herr Gaudian.’
I knew the name, of course; there weren’t many in my profession that didn’t. He was one of the biggest railway engineers in the world, the man who had built the Baghdad and Syrian railways, and the new lines in German East. I suppose he was about the greatest living authority on tropical construction. He knew the East and he knew Africa; clearly I had been brought down for him to put me through my paces.
A blonde maidservant took me to my room, which had a bare polished floor, a stove, and windows that, unlike most of the German kind I had sampled, seemed made to open. When I had washed I descended to the hall, which was hung round with trophies of travel, like Dervish jibbahs and Masai shields and one or two good buffalo heads. Presently a bell was rung. Stumm appeared with his host, and we went in to supper.
I was jolly hungry and would have made a good meal if I hadn’t constantly had to keep jogging my wits. The other two talked in German, and when a question was put to me Stumm translated. The first thing I had to do was to pretend I didn’t know German and look listlessly round the room while they were talking. The second was to miss not a word, for there lay my chance. The third was to be ready to answer questions at any moment, and to show in the answering that I had not followed the previous conversation. Likewise, I must not prove myself a fool in these answers, for I had to convince them that I was useful. It took some doing, and I felt like a witness in the box under a stiff cross-examination, or a man trying to play three games of chess at once.
I heard Stumm telling Gaudian the gist of my plan. The engineer shook his head.
‘Too late,’ he said. ‘It should have been done at the beginning. We neglected Africa. You know the reason why.’
Stumm laughed. ‘The von Einem! Perhaps, but her charm works well enough.’
Gaudian glanced towards me while I was busy with an orange salad. ‘I have much to tell you of that. But it can wait. Your friend is right in one thing. Uganda is a vital spot for the English, and a blow there will make their whole fabric shiver. But how can we strike? They have still the coast, and our supplies grow daily smaller.’
‘We can send no reinforcements, but have we used all the local resources? That is what I cannot satisfy myself about. Zimmerman says we have, but Tressler thinks differently, and now we have this fellow coming out of the void with a story which confirms my doubt. He seems to know his job. You try him.’
Thereupon Gaudian set about questioning me, and his questions were very thorough. I knew just enough and no more to get through, but I think I came out with credit. You see I have a capacious memory, and in my time I had met scores of hunters and pioneers and listened to their yarns, so I could pretend to knowledge of a place even when I hadn’t been there. Besides, I had once been on the point of undertaking a job up Tanganyika way, and I had got up that countryside pretty accurately.
‘You say that with our help you can make trouble for the British on the three borders?’ Gaudian asked at length.
‘I can spread the fire if some one else will kindle it,’ I said.
‘But there are thousands of tribes with no affinities.’
‘They are all African. You can bear me out. All African peoples are alike in one thing - they can go mad, and the madness of one infects the others. The English know this well enough.’
‘Where would you start the fire?’ he asked.
‘Where the fuel is dryest. Up in the North among the Mussulman peoples. But there you must help me. I know nothing about Islam, and I gather that you do.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because of what you have done already,’ I answered.
Stumm had translated all this time, and had given the sense of my words very fairly. But with my last answer he took liberties. What he gave was: ‘Because the Dutchman thinks that we have some big card in dealing with the Moslem world.’ Then, lowering his voice and raising his eyebrows, he said some word like ‘uhnmantl’.
The other looked with a quick glance of apprehension at me. ‘We had better continue our talk in private, Herr Colonel,’ he said. ‘If Herr Brandt will forgive us, we will leave him for a little to entertain himself.’ He pushed the cigar-box towards me and the two got up and left the room.
I pulled my chair up to the stove, and would have liked to drop off to sleep. The tension of the talk at supper had made me very tired. I was accepted by these men for exactly what I professed to be. Stumm might suspect me of being a rascal, but it was a Dutch rascal. But all the same I was skating on thin ice. I could not sink myself utterly in the part, for if I did I would get no good out of being there. I had to keep my wits going all the time, and join the appearance and manners of a backveld Boer with the mentality of a British intelligence-officer. Any moment the two parts might clash and I would be faced with the most alert and deadly suspicion.
There would be no mercy from Stumm. That large man was beginning to fascinate me, even though I hated him. Gaudian was clearly a good fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for he belonged to my own totem. But the other was an incarnation of all that makes Germany detested, and yet he wasn’t altogether the ordinary German, and I couldn’t help admiring him. I noticed he neither smoked nor drank. His grossness was apparently not in the way of fleshly appetites. Cruelty, from all I had heard of him in German South West, was his hobby; but there were other things in him, some of them good, and he had that kind of crazy patriotism which becomes a religion. I wondered why he had not some high command in the field, for he had had the name of a good soldier. But probably he was a big man in his own line, whatever it was, for the Under-Secretary fellow had talked small in his presence, and so great a man as Gaudian clearly respected him. There must be no lack of brains inside that funny pyramidal head.
As I sat beside the stove I was casting back to think if I had got the slightest clue to my real job. There seemed to be nothing so far. Stumm had talked of a von Einem woman who was interested in his department, perhaps the same woman as the Hilda he had mentioned the day before to the Under-Secretary. There was not much in that. She was probably some minister’s or ambassador’s wife who had a finger in high politics. If I could have caught the word Stumm had whispered to Gaudian which made him start and look askance at me! But I had only heard a gurgle of something like ‘uhnmantl’, which wasn’t any German word that I knew.
The heat put me into a half-doze and I began dreamily to wonder what other people were doing. Where had Blenkiron been posting to in that train, and what was he up to at this moment? He had been hobnobbing with ambassadors and swells - I wondered if he had found out anything. What was Peter doing? I fervently hoped he was behaving himself, for I doubted if Peter had really tumbled to the delicacy of our job. Where was Sandy, too? As like as not bucketing in the hold of some Greek coaster in the Aegean. Then I thought of my battalion somewhere on the line between Hulluch and La Bassee, hammering at the Boche, while I was five hundred miles or so inside the Boche frontier.
