He produced a flask and a couple of bottles of soda water, lit his pipe, saw that door and windows were safely closed, and leaned over the table.
“Now,” said he, “how the devil did you get to this place? That’s the first question. They told me some yarn about a parachute, which I take it was really a hair net or a lobster pot—”
“It wasn’t,” I interrupted, “it was a parachute and I landed in it. Do you mean to say you hadn’t heard of my disappearance in a runaway balloon?”
“What!” he exclaimed. “Are you the same Merton? I noticed the name of course, but do you mean to tell me they’re giving away R.N.V.R. commissions as promiscuously as all that?”
“They give ’em to the pick of young England’s manhood,” I assured him. “The idea is to make the Navy into a real live force, capable of originality and enterprise.”
He grinned.
“They’ve struck the originality all right,” he admitted, “but, Lord, the time that will be wasted court-martialling you fellows! However, let’s hear the whole yarn from the beginning.”
I began at the snapping of the cable and told him my adventures faithfully down to the moment when he unlocked my bedroom door. He only interrupted once or twice to get some point or other clear, and then when I had finished he leaned back and looked at me hard across the table.
“Roger,” he said, “I’ve known you long enough and well enough to know that you are not a deliberate liar, but I hope you’ll forgive my saying that this is a damned tough bullet to chew.”
“It sounds a tall order,” I admitted, “but it’s true.”
He filled his pipe thoughtfully.
“I may as well tell you,” he said in a moment, “that I am not at present a very credulous person. From the moment this blessed war began and I got this job, I have done little else than investigate spy legends, and I have come to the deliberate conclusion that there is either a lot more imagination in the world than anyone has ever dreamt of, or that mankind are chronic and inveterate liars. I haven’t yet had the luck to find one single true bill in any story I’ve investigated.”
“Your luck has turned now, Jack.”
“Possibly,” he said slowly, “and mind you, Roger, there’s no doubt whatever that a devilish secret service system exists; or that it’s being used against us for all it’s worth. Secret petrol bases for their submarines, secret signallying from the shore, mine-laying by so-called neutral ships; all that sort of thing is going on under our noses. I’ve got several very shrewd suspicions and hope to bring off one or two little discoveries not a thousand miles from this very spot. In fact, if you had pitched on any one of three or four other islands for the scene of your tale, or if what you’d seen had been just a little different I wouldn’t have questioned a word of your story. But Ransay is not one of the suspected islands, and your friend in oilskins doesn’t fit into anything I happen to have heard from other sources.”
“Look here,” I said, “what’s the good of being cousins if we aren’t candid? Do you or don’t you believe me?”
John Whiteclett looked at me very steadily and spoke in his most deliberate accents.
“I believe that you believe every word of it. But I know you’re an imaginative fellow and I can see for myself already that at least three quarters of your yarn can be explained away very easily.”
“Explain it.”
“Well, my dear fellow, just look at things for a moment from the point of view of a perfectly innocent and loyal inhabitant of Ransay—the Rendalls for instance. You appear on their shores absolutely mysteriously in the dead of night, you admit yourself you lay yourself out to behave like a thinly disguised Hun—d⸺d thinly too, apparently! You blow in from nowhere on the doctor and talk with a German accent. You blow in on the laird, begin talking with an accent and then drop it. You pitch him a cock and bull yarn about being landed from a cruiser and wanting to hide your uniform coat and so on. You conduct yourself like a criminal in church and wander out at night. Naturally the Rendalls—and everybody else—eye you strangely to your face and try to find out a little more behind your back. Do you see?”
“There’s something certainly in all this,” I had to admit.
“Then they find your parachute—”
“Who found it?”
“I haven’t asked that yet; but I shall of course. Anyhow it was found, and as evidently you had hid it. One point discovered against you. Then the Rendalls decide on stronger measures—and very rightly too, I think. They open your drawer and find you never had a uniform coat at all. Most wisely they then wire to me, and to keep you from bolting, lock you in your room.”
“Dash it,” said I, “I seem at least to have succeeded in providing them with a devilish good excuse for every blessed thing they did!”
“I don’t honestly think you have left yourself with any grounds whatever for suspecting the Rendalls of anything.”
“On the other hand, sending for you and having me arrested would be an excellent way of getting rid of me when they were certain who I was—or rather, wasn’t.”
“And who did they make apparently certain you were not? A British officer! That was the natural conclusion when they opened that drawer. No, no, the Rendalls come out of it all right. Then let’s take the doctor. He looks at you suspiciously—as well he might.”
“Before I spoke!” I interjected.
“And do you flatter yourself that your appearance, without a cap and in a buttoned-up oilskin on a fine day, was reassuring?”
“But the blind?”
“Did you never see a blind come down with a run by mistake? There’s a blind in my smoking room
