he was not grammatical.
__It’s easy enough to be brave if you’re feeling well and have food inside you. And it’s not so difficult even if you’re short of a meal and seedy, for that makes you inclined to gamble. I mean by being brave playing the game by the right rules without letting it worry you that you may very likely get knocked on the head. It’s the wisest way to save your skin. It doesn’t do to think about death if you’re facing a charging lion or trying to bluff a lot of savages. If you think about it you’ll get it; if you don’t, the odds are you won’t. That kind of courage is only good nerves and experience … Most courage is experience. Most people are a little scared at new things …
__You want a bigger heart to face danger which you go out to look for, and which doesn’t come to you in the ordinary way of business. Still, that’s Pretty much the same thing - good nerves and good health, and a natural liking for rows. You see, Dick, in all that game there’s a lot Of fun. There’s excitement and the fun of using your wits and skill, and you know that the bad bits can’t last long. When Arcoll sent me to Makapan’s kraal I didn’t altogether fancy the job, but at the worst it was three parts sport, and I got so excited that I never thought of the risk till it was over …
__But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you’re feeling empty inside, and your blood’s thin, and there’s no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble’s not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind, and he called it ‘Fortitude’. I reckon fortitude’s the biggest thing a man can have - just to go on enduring when there’s no guts or heart left in you. Billy had it when he trekked solitary from Garungoze to the Limpopo with fever and a broken arm just to show the Portugooses that he wouldn’t be downed by them. But the head man at the job was the Apostle _Paul …
Peter was writing for his own comfort, for fortitude was all that was left to him now. But his words came pretty straight to me, and I read them again and again, for I needed the lesson. Here was I losing heart just because I had failed in the first round and my pride had taken a knock. I felt honestly ashamed of myself, and that made me a far happier man. There could be no question of dropping the business, whatever its difficulties. I had a queer religious feeling that Ivery and I had our fortunes intertwined, and that no will of mine could keep us apart. I had faced him before the war and won; I had faced him again and lost; the third time or the twentieth time we would reach a final decision. The whole business had hitherto appeared to me a trifle unreal, at any rate my own connection with it. I had been docilely obeying orders, but my real self had been standing aside and watching my doings with a certain aloofness. But that hour in the Tube station had brought me into the serum, and I saw the affair not as Bullivant’s or even Blenkiron’s, but as my own. Before I had been itching to get back to the Front; now I wanted to get on to Ivery’s trail, though it should take me through the nether pit. Peter was right; fortitude was the thing a man must possess if he would save his soul.
The hours passed, and, as I expected, there came no word from Macgillivray. I had some dinner sent up to me at seven o’clock, and about eight I was thinking of looking up Blenkiron. just then came a telephone call asking me to go round to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate.
Ten minutes later I was ringing the bell, and the door was opened to me by the same impassive butler who had admitted me on that famous night three years before. Nothing had changed in the pleasant green-panelled hall; the alcove was the same as when I had watched from it the departure of the man who now called himself Ivery; the telephone book lay in the very place from which I had snatched it in order to ring up the First Sea Lord. And in the back room, where that night five anxious officials had conferred, I found Sir Walter and Blenkiron.
Both looked worried, the American feverishly so. He walked up and down the hearthrug, sucking an unlit black cigar.
‘Say, Dick,’ he said, this is a bad business. It wasn’t no fault of yours. You did fine. It was us - me and Sir Walter and Mr Macgillivray that were the quitters.’
‘Any news?’ I asked.
‘So far the cover’s drawn blank,’ Sir Walter replied. ‘It was the devil’s own work that our friend looked your way today. You’re pretty certain he saw that you recognized him?’
‘Absolutely. As sure as that he knew I recognized him in your hall three years ago when he was swaggering as Lord Alloa.’
‘No,’ said Blenkiron dolefully, that little flicker of recognition is just the one thing you can’t be wrong about. Land alive! I wish Mr Macgillivray would come.’
The bell rang, and the door opened, but it was not Macgillivray. It was a young girl in a white ball-gown, with a cluster of blue cornflowers at her breast. The sight of her fetched Sir Walter out of his chair so suddenly that he upset his coffee cup. ‘Mary, my dear, how did you manage it? I didn’t expect you till the late train.’ ‘I was in London, you see, and they telephoned on your telegram. I’m staying with Aunt Doria, and I cut her theatre party. She thinks I’m at the Shandwick’s dance, so I needn’t go home till morning … Good evening, General Hannay. You got over the Hill Difficulty.’
‘The next stage is the Valley of Humiliation,’ I answered.
‘So it would appear,’ she said gravely, and sat very quietly on the edge of Sir Walter’s chair with her small, cool hand upon his.
I had been picturing her in my recollection as very young and glimmering, a dancing, exquisite child. But now I revised that picture. The crystal freshness of morning was still there, but I saw how deep the waters were. It was the clean fineness and strength of her that entranced me. I didn’t even think of her as pretty, any more than a man thinks of the good looks of the friend he worships.
We waited, hardly speaking a word, till Macgillivray came. The first sight of his face told his story.
‘Gone?’ asked Blenkiron sharply. The man’s lethargic calm seemed to have wholly deserted him.
‘Gone,’ repeated the newcomer. ‘We have just tracked him down. Oh, he managed it cleverly. Never a sign of disturbance in any of his lairs. His dinner ordered at Biggleswick and several people invited to stay with him for the weekend - one a member of the Government. Two meetings at which he was to speak arranged for next week. Early this afternoon he flew over to France as a passenger in one of the new planes. He had been mixed up with the Air Board people for months - of course as another man with another face. Miss Lamington discovered that just too late. The bus went out of its course and came down in Normandy. By this time our man’s in Paris or beyond it.’
Sir Walter took off his big tortoiseshell spectacles and laid them carefully on the table.
‘Roll up the map of Europe,’ he said. ‘This is our Austerlitz. Mary, my dear, I am feeling very old.’
Macgillivray had the sharpened face of a bitterly disappointed man. Blenkiron had got very red, and I could see that he was blaspheming violently under his breath. Mary’s eyes were quiet and solemn. She kept on patting Sir Walter’s hand. The sense of some great impending disaster hung heavily on me, and to break the spell I asked for details.
‘Tell me just the extent of the damage,’ I asked. ‘Our neat plan for deceiving the Boche has failed. That is bad. A dangerous spy has got beyond our power. That’s worse. Tell me, is there still a worst? What’s the limit of mischief he can do?’ Sir Walter had risen and joined Blenkiron on the hearthrug. His brows were furrowed and his mouth hard as if he were suffering Pain.
‘There is no limit,’ he said. ‘None that I can see, except the long-suffering of God. You know the man as Ivery, and you knew him as that other whom you believed to have been shot one summer morning and decently buried. You feared the second - at least if you didn’t, I did - most mortally. You realized that we feared Ivery, and you knew enough about him to see his fiendish cleverness. Well, you have the two men combined in one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I ever encountered, the most cunning and patient and long-sighted. Combine him with the other, the chameleon who can blend himself with his environment, and has as many personalities as there are types and traits on the earth. What kind of enemy is that to have to fight?’
‘I admit it’s a steep proposition. But after all how much ill can he do? There are pretty strict limits to the activity of even the cleverest spy.’
‘I agree. But this man is not a spy who buys a few wretched subordinates and steals a dozen private letters. He’s a genius who has been living as part of our English life. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen. He’s been on terms of intimacy with all kinds of politicians. We know that. He did it as Ivery. They rather liked him, for he was clever and flattered them, and they told him things. But God knows what he saw and heard in his other personalities. For all I know he may have breakfasted at Downing Street with letters of introduction from President Wilson, or visited the Grand Fleet as a distinguished neutral. Then think of the women; how they talk. We’re the leakiest society on earth, and we safeguard ourselves by keeping dangerous people out of it. We trust to our outer barrage. But anyone who
