The Three Hostages E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Richard Hannay Adventures
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 582

Beschreibung

After distinguished service in the First World War, Richard Hannay settles into peaceful domesticity with his wife Mary and their young son. However, news comes to him of three kidnappings. With no more than a few tantalisingly cryptic lines of verse as clues, he is soon on the trail of Dominick Medina – a charismatic polymath but a man 'utterly and consumedly wicked'. As Hannay uncovers an international plot to twist innocent minds through hypnotism and blackmail, it appears that he has met his match in one of Buchan's most memorable villains. With an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. This edition is authorised by the John Buchan Society.

Leseprobe

The Three Hostages

JOHN BUCHAN

Introduced by Christopher Hitchens

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 1924 by Hodder & Stoughton This edition published in Great Britain in 2008 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Lord Tweedsmuir and Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir Introduction copyright©Christopher Hitchens, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84697-157-0

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-509-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Introduction

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twenty-one

John buchan led a truly extraordinary life:he was a diplomat, soldier, barrister, journalist, historian, politician,publisher, poet and novelist. He was born in Perthin 1875, the eldest son of a Free Church of Scotlandminister, and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School inGlasgow. He graduated from Glasgow University then took ascholarship to Oxford. During his time there—‘spent peacefully in an enclave like a monastery’—he wrote two historical novels.

In 1901 he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and a private secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa. In 1907 he married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor; they had three sons and a daughter. After spells as a war correspondent, Lloyd George’s Director of Information and a Conservative MP, Buchan moved to Canada in 1935 where he became the first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.

Despite poor health throughout his life, Buchan’s literary output was remarkable—thirty novels, over sixty non-fiction books, including biographies of Sir Walter Scott and Oliver Cromwell, and seven collections of short stories. His distinctive thrillers—‘shockers’ as he called them—were characterised by suspenseful atmosphere, conspiracy theories and romantic heroes, notably Richard Hannay (based on the real-life military spy William Ironside) and Sir Edward Leithen. Buchan was a favourite writer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose screen adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps was phenomenally successful.

John Buchan served as Governor-General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940, the year his autobiography Memory Hold-the-door was published.

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor in liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, including an autobiography Hitch 22: A Memoir (2010) and works on Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. His international bestseller god Is Not Great was a National Book Award finalist. He has written for many American and UK magazines, including The Nation, London Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The Washington Post, and is a regular television and radio commentator. He lives in Washington D.C.

Introduction

Ibegan to read John Buchan half acentury ago and I still return at intervals to take up hiswork again. If I ask myself why I do this Ifind myself asking (and being asked) many other questionsas well. Isn’t Buchan really a Boy’s Own author, replete with pluck and derring-do and husky Scout-like sincerity? Wasn’t he a bit of a bigot and even ananti-Semite? Don’t his values represent the vanished Empire in whose service he toiled until his death as a Governor-General?

I think one can mount a reasoned defence of sorts on all these fronts. First, Buchan’s heroes are not Baden-Powell types or ‘children ardent for some desperate glory’, as Wilfred Owen phrased it. They are very much grown men, as often as not with a serious and continuing consciousness of their own mortality. (And also of their bodily frailty: one sometimes thinks that Buchan would have given half his royalties to be more physically robust.)

Second, although it is true that Buchan betrays some marked ‘race and class’ prejudices that were common in his time—and one must not make that into a plea, since there were many contemporaries who did not share such an outlook—it is quite impossible to imagine him doing somebody an injury or an injustice on grounds of their social or ethnic origin. (Contrast Richard Hannay, for example, with the appalling bully and sadist and racist Bulldog Drummond). He greatly admired E. Phillips Oppenheim as a writer, and disliked and distrusted Britain’s leading anti-Semite A.J. Balfour.

Third, Buchan’s sense of the British Empire may have been quixotic and old-fashioned even for its time, but the virtues he thought he admired in it—of thrift and courage and modesty and self-sacrifice—are by no means exclusively imperial ones. I am reminded of what Lionel Trilling wrote about George Orwell:

He clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues . . .

Now think of Buchan and his respect for the Red Clydesiders, or the Gorbals Die-Hards. (Of course, Orwell tended to dislike and suspect the Scots and their commercial role in the Empire, so he would have been at odds with Buchan from the first. Yet I think the point stands.)

But it is precisely because of an element of Scottishness—or rather because of contrasting elements of Scottishness—that Buchan retains his grip on readers. What are these contrasts? Well, the Scots are famed simultaneously for their dourness, stoicism and economy, and for their passionate, rebellious romanticism. (Robert Burns was an exciseman, if you want to put it another way. If you want to put it still another way, bear in mind that it was Buchan as a wartime propaganda bureaucrat who suggested to the American reporter Lowell Thomas that he might take a look at the irregular warfare being waged against the Turks by T.E. Lawrence.) In Buchan himself and in his characters, this duality was permanent. His heroes take a good bit of dislodging from the settled habits of their ‘wee bit hill and glen’ but, once mustered or induced into action, will not sheath the sword until the battle or quest or pilgrimage has been thoroughly finished.

Finally there is the quality in Buchan which was noticed by Graham Greene in his review of Sick Heart River: the ‘completeness’ in his tales of ‘the world they describe’ and the ‘enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men . . . the death that may come to us by the railings of the Park’. Conspicuously this is true of the reticent Richard Hannay, hero and narrator of The Three Hostages. In this story, all of Buchan’s strengths and weaknesses are on show. Hannay himself is a kind of Cincinnatus, retired to his farm and no longer desirous of serving the nation unless summonsed to the task. Within the first few pages he is being told of ‘seedy little gangs of communist Jews’ who threaten civilisation. But then he is approached by a highly sophisticated and sympathetic Jew named Julius Victor, whose daughter is among the three kidnapped young people who give the book its title. Victor appeals to Hannay as a ‘Christian gentleman’. It becomes obvious that the latter’s protestations about seeking a quiet life are only stated in order to be overcome.

The police show Hannay a riddle or ‘key’, not unlike the one that opens Greenmantle, which contains the clue to the plot and has apparently been devised as a taunt or torture by the kidnapper. Thus far, then, the strengths. We are drawn in. However, the dark mystery and the railings of the Park are perhaps too swiftly interwoven. In only a few moments Hannay’s local hunting-and-shooting friend has proposed that he meet Dominick Medina: poet and intellectual as well as warrior—‘in southern Russia’—and MP. A mention of him being sighted on ‘the Yarkand’, a remote river on the Chinese border, at once promotes him to the company of Sandy Arbuthnot and the other adventurers and explorers: men who, as Saki once phrased it, ‘wolves have sniffed at’.

Medina is one of Buchan’smore considerable villains, possessed of a very strong attraction-repulsion quotient. Atfirst acquaintance a polymath and paragon, he is awarded two fatalflaws, one of which I give nothing away by mentioning: hehas a head as round as a cannonball and thevanity to comb his hair so as to conceal the fact.This grotesquerie is a nice touch. His second flaw,on which I will not elaborate, involvesan almost flabbergasting hubris, amounting at times to a virtual indifferenceto self-preservation.

One no more objects to the early resurfacing of old Sandy, and of the trusty Archie Roylance, than one would to the obligatory consultation with Dr Watson. (One does not object, if it comes to that, to ‘Medina’ as a name to follow Moriarty or even Macavity as the Napoleon of Crime.) It can be comforting to see the old cast being reassembled—not overlooking Hannay’s absolute brick of a wife, Mary. The slight difficulty here is with motive. The villains of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast had clear enough objectives—the destruction of British power from within and without—even if they used occult measures to pursue them. Dominick Medina’s aims and motives go unexplained, and if he really wishes to encompass the victory of Bolshevism and anarchy then it is perhaps surprising that he should have fought so hard against it with the White Russian forces.

In a way, the plot is a play-within-a-play, since Hannay’s friend Dr Greenslade opens the action by suggesting the formula for what used to be called a ‘shocker’. In essence, all that is required is a set of wildly discrepant characters and locales, chosen at random and then woven together retrospectively by the teller. It might be objected that Buchan/Hannay follow this prompting too literally. But at least two of the familiar Buchan tropes are given a serious workout: the lure of the pure, cold, true North, always so much preferable to him than the exotic and scented East or South, and the reassurance of integrity and soundness that is provided by Clubland. Thus armoured, Sir Richard is proof against the sinuous and seductive Medina—but only just proof. There are moments in the story when he has to pretend to be under a spell, and moments when he seems actually to be enchanted, bewitched and robbed of all volition.

Mention of witchcraft brings one to the subject of Buchan and women. His refusal of sexuality as a theme is a very large sacrifice for a thriller-writer, but he compensates in more than one book by a very strong invocation of what one might call the feminine principle, or effect. One remembers Hilda von Einem in Greenmantle, while in The Three Hostages the most powerful invocation of magic and mystery is in the mother on whom Medina is fixated, a woman whose hands, ‘delicate and shapely’ as they were, ‘had also the suggestion of a furious power, like the talons of a bird of prey’. Through the fog of his quasi-hypnotised condition, Hannay realises that Medina, too, is in thrall to a still-greater guru from the wilds of the Khyber Pass. A huge clue to the real identity of this shaman or prophet is furnished very early on, but not everybody ‘gets’ it, and I shall not spoil it for you.

Without the Club, where would Hannay be? In Chapter XIV he has a reunion, after a long and arduous separation, with his young and vivacious wife Mary. At the end of the evening he asks her to keep him informed of any further news from Sandy and then without loss of time walks straight back to his Club. A few pages later he tells her that ‘the only chance is the Club’—the only chance being the leaving of any telephone messages with the Club’s head porter. This is asexuality raised almost to the level of art. (There are, as usual with Hannay, a number of manly shudders even at the idea of homosexuality.)

In a fashion, though, The Three Hostages is more ‘modern’ than its narrator. It is true that post-World War I Britain was infected with a number of neuroses, spiritualist cults and manifestations of a disordered unconscious: an atmosphere of anomie and alienation on which demagogues tried to feed. There were also premonitions of another war that would make the first one seem like what it was—a dress-rehearsal. The decent German who Hannay meets on the Norwegian leg of his quest is full of prescience:

He said that Germany was no place for a moderate man, and that the power lay with the bloated industrials, who were piling up fortunes abroad while they were wrecking their country at home. The only opposition, he said, came from the communists, who were half-witted, and the monarchists, who wanted the impossible. ‘Reason is not listened to, and I fear there is no salvation until my poor people have passed through the last extremity. You foreign powers have hastened our destruction, when you had it in your hands to save us.’

Not bad for 1924, and it avoids any race-theory or paranoia.

On at least twooccasions Hannay quite unironically employs the famous phrase from SirHenry Newbolt’s 1897 poem Vitai Lampada, about the moralimperative of ‘playing the game’. And this is another thingthat marks Buchan off from other practitioners of the ‘shocker’ genre. He never takes any undue interest in revenge, letalone in cruelty. The most the young hostage in Norwaywants to do, after an especially vile imprisonment, is to delivera single clean uppercut to his captor. The most thatHannay wants to do, after unmasking and thwarting Medina, isto go back to his family and his estates. He almost feels pity for the man he has beaten. The mostthe police can do—this is something that the thrillermode has depended upon ever since Conan Doyle—is confesstheir impotence. Thus there must be a denouement, and it mustshift the scene to the wild and lonely places north of theborder, where the game can be properly and fairly played,right to the end.

So this, perhaps, is why one continues to read John Buchan. Remember the subtitle of Andrew Lownie’s 2004 biography of him? It was ‘The Presbyterian Cavalier’—a nicely paradoxical phrasing that had attached itself to Buchan’s hero James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose. Never more than in The Three Hostages does Richard Hannay exemplify the stoic, cautious, prosaic Protestant virtues while managing to combine them with the life of a gallant and chivalrous loner. The day will probably not come when we quite cease to be stirred by this.

Christopher Hitchens

Washington DC

Dedication to

A Young Gentleman of

Eton College

Honoured sir,

On your last birthday a well-meaning godfather presented you with a volume of mine, since you had been heard on occasion to express approval of my works. The book dealt with a somewhat arid branch of historical research, and it did not please you. You wrote to me, I remember, complaining that I had ‘let you down’, and summoning me, as I valued your respect, to ‘pull myself together’. In particular you demanded to hear more of the doings of Richard Hannay, a gentleman for whom you professed a liking. I, too, have a liking for Sir Richard, and when I met him the other day (he is now a country neighbour) I observed that his left hand had been considerably mauled, an injury which I knew had not been due to the War. He was so good as to tell me the tale of an unpleasant business in which he had recently been engaged, and to give me permission to retell it for your benefit. Sir Richard took a modest pride in the affair, because from first to last it had been a pure contest of wits, without recourse to those more obvious methods of strife with which he is familiar. So I herewith present it to you, in the hope that in the eyes of you and your friends it may atone for certain other writings of mine with which you have been afflicted by those in authority.

J.B.

June 1924

one

Doctor Greenslade Theorizes

That evening, I remember, as I cameup through the Mill Meadow, I was feeling peculiarlyhappy and contented. It was still mid-March, one of thosespring days when noon is like May, and only thecold pearly haze at sunset warns a man that he isnot done with winter. The season was absurdly early, for the blackthorn was in flower and the hedge rootswere full of primroses. The partridges were paired, the rooks werewell on with their nests, and the meadows were full ofshimmering grey flocks of fieldfares on their way north. I putup half a dozen snipe on the boggy edge of the stream,and in the bracken in Stern Wood I thought Isaw a woodcock, and hoped that the birds might nest withus this year, as they used to do long ago.It was jolly to see the world coming to life again,and to remember that this patch of England was my own,and all these wild things, so to speak, members of my little household.

As I say, I was in a very contented mood, for I had found something I had longed for all my days. I had bought Fosse Manor just after the War as a wedding present for Mary, and for two and a half years we had been settled there. My son, Peter John, was rising fifteen months, a thoughtful infant, as healthy as a young colt and as comic as a terrier puppy. Even Mary’s anxious eye could scarcely detect in him any symptoms of decline. But the place wanted a lot of looking to, for it had run wild during the War, and the woods had to be thinned, gates and fences repaired, new drains laid, a ram put in to supplement the wells, a heap of thatching to be done, and the garden borders to be brought back to cultivation. I had got through the worst of it, and as I came out of the Home Wood on to the lower lawns and saw the old stone gables that the monks had built, I felt that I was anchored at last in the pleasantest kind of harbour.

There was a pile of letters on the table in the hall, but I let them be, for I was not in the mood for any communication with the outer world. As I was having a hot bath Mary kept giving me the news through her bedroom door. Peter John had been raising Cain over a first tooth; the new shorthorn cow was drying off; old George Whaddon had got his grand-daughter back from service; there was a new brood of runner-ducks; there was a missel- thrush building in the box hedge by the lake. A chronicle of small beer, you will say, but I was by a long chalk more interested in it than in what might be happening in Parliament or Russia or the Hindu Kush. The fact is I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers. Many a day The Times would remain unopened, for Mary never looked at anything but the first page to see who was dead or married. Not that I didn’t read a lot, for I used to spend my evenings digging into county history, and learning all I could about the old fellows who had been my predecessors. I liked to think that I lived in a place that had been continuously inhabited for a thousand years. Cavalier and Round-head had fought over the countryside, and I was becoming a considerable authority on their tiny battles. That was about the only interest I had left in soldiering.

As we went downstairs, I remember we stopped to look out of the long staircase window which showed a segment of lawn, a corner of the lake, and through a gap in the woods a vista of green downland. Mary squeezed my arm. ‘What a blessed country,’ she said. ‘Dick, did you ever dream of such peace? We’re lucky, lucky people.’

Then suddenly her face changed in that way she has and grew very grave. I felt a little shiver run along her arm.

‘It’s too good and beloved to last,’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes I am afraid.’

‘Nonsense,’ I laughed. ‘What’s going to upset it? I don’t believe in being afraid of happiness.’ I knew very well, of course, that Mary couldn’t be afraid of anything.

She laughed too. ‘All the same I’ve got what the Greeks called aidos. You don’t know what that means, you old savage. It means that you feel you must walk humbly and delicately to propitiate the Fates. I wish I knew how.’

She walked too delicately, for she missed the last step and our descent ended in an undignified shuffle right into the arms of Dr Greenslade.

Paddock—I had got Paddock back after the War, and he was now my butler—was helping the doctor out of his ulster, and I saw by the satisfied look on the latter’s face that he was through with his day’s work and meant to stay to dinner. Here I had better introduce Tom Greenslade, for of all my recent acquaintances he was the one I had most taken to. He was a long lean fellow with a stoop in his back from bending over the handles of motor- bicycles, with reddish hair, and the greeny-blue eyes and freckled skin that often accompany that kind of hair. From his high cheek-bones and his colouring you would have set him down as a Scotsman, but as a matter of fact he came from Devonshire—Exmoor, I think, though he had been so much about the world that he had almost forgotten where he was raised. I have travelled a bit, but nothing to Greenslade. He had started as a doctor in a whaling ship. Then he had been in the South African War and afterwards a temporary magistrate up Lydenburg way. He soon tired of that, and was for a long spell in Uganda and German East, where he became rather a swell on tropical diseases, and nearly perished through experimenting on himself with fancy inoculations. Then he was in South America, where he had a good practice in Valparaiso, and then in the Malay States, where he made a bit of money in the rubber boom. There was a gap of three years after that when he was wandering about Central Asia, partly with a fellow called Duckett exploring Northern Mongolia, and partly in Chinese Tibet hunting for new flowers, for he was mad about botany. He came home in the summer of 1914, meaning to do some laboratory research work, but the War swept him up and he went to France as M.O. of a territorial battalion. He got wounded of course, and after a spell in hospital went out to Mesopotamia, where he stayed till the Christmas of 1918, sweating hard at his job but managing to tumble into a lot of varied adventures, for he was at Baku with Dunsterville and got as far as Tashkent, where the Bolsheviks shut him up for a fortnight in a bath-house. During the War he had every kind of sickness, for he missed no experience, but nothing seemed to damage permanently his whipcord physique. He told me that his heart and lungs and blood pressure were as good as a lad’s of twenty-one, though by this time he was on the wrong side of forty.

But when the War was over he hankered for a quiet life, so he bought a practice in the deepest and greenest corner of England. He said his motive was the same as that which in the rackety Middle Ages made men retire into monasteries; he wanted quiet and leisure to consider his soul. Quiet he may have found, but uncommon little leisure, for I never heard of a country doctor that toiled at his job as he did. He would pay three visits a day to a panel patient, which shows the kind of fellow he was; and he would be out in the small hours at the birth of a gipsy child under a hedge. He was a first-class man in his profession, and kept abreast of it, but doctoring was only one of a thousand interests. I never met a chap with such an insatiable curiosity about everything in heaven and earth. He lived in two rooms in a farmhouse some four miles from us, and I dare say he had several thousand books about him. All day, and often half the night, he would scour the country in his little run-about car, and yet, when he would drop in to see me and have a drink after maybe twenty visits, he was as full of beans as if he had just got out of bed. Nothing came amiss to him in talk—birds, beasts, flowers, books, politics, religion—everything in the world except himself. He was the best sort of company, for behind all his quickness and cleverness you felt that he was solid bar-gold. But for him I should have taken root in the soil and put out shoots, for I have a fine natural talent for vegetating. Mary strongly approved of him and Peter John adored him.

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.

two

I Hear of the Three Hostages

There isan odour about a country-house which I love better than anyscent in the world. Mary used to say itwas a mixture of lamp and dog and wood-smoke, but atFosse, where there was electric light and no dogs indoors, Ifancy it was wood-smoke, tobacco, the old walls, and wafts ofthe country coming in at the windows. I liked it bestin the morning, when there was a touch in it ofbreakfast cooking, and I used to stand at the top ofthe staircase and sniff it as I went to mybath. But on the morning I write of I couldtake no pleasure in it; indeed it seemed to tantalize mewith 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 indisgust, but I found myself going down in my dressing-gown, tothe surprise of a housemaid, piecing together the fragments from thewaste- 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 that 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.’

‘You know she is alive?’

He nodded, for his voice was choking again. ‘There is evidence which points to a very deep and devilish plot. It may be revenge, but I think it more likely to be policy. Her captors hold her as security for their own fate.’

‘Has Scotland Yard done nothing?’

‘Everything that man could do, but the darkness only grows thicker.’

‘Surely it has not been in the papers. I don’t read them carefully but I could scarcely miss a thing like that.’

‘It has been kept out of the papers—fora reason which you will be told.’

‘Mr Victor,’ I said, ‘I’m most deeply sorry for you. Like you, I’ve just the one child, and if anything of that kind happened to him I should go mad. But I shouldn’t take too gloomy a view. Miss Adela will turn up all right, and none the worse, though you may have to pay through the nose for it. I expect it’s ordinary blackmail and ransom.’

‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘It is not blackmail, and if it were, I would not pay the ransom demanded. Believe me, Sir Richard, it is a very desperate affair. More, far more is involved than the fate of one young girl. I am not going to touch on that side, for the full story will be told you later by one better equipped to tell it. But the hostage is my daughter, my only child. I have come to beg your assistance in the search for her.’

‘But I’m no good at looking for things,’ I stammered. ‘I’m most awfully sorry for you, but I don’t see how I can help. If Scotland Yard is at a loss, it’s not likely that an utter novice like me would succeed.’

‘But you have a different kind of imagination and a rarer kind of courage. I know what you have done before, Sir Richard. I tell you, you are my last hope.’

I sat down heavily and groaned. ‘I can’t begin to explain to you the bottomless futility of your idea. It is quite true that in the War I had some queer jobs and was lucky enough to bring some of them off. But, don’t you see, I was a soldier then, under orders, and it didn’t greatly signify whether I lost my life from a crump in the trenches or from a private bullet on the back- stairs. I was in the mood for any risk, and my wits were strung up and unnaturally keen. But that’s all done with. I’m in a different mood now and my mind is weedy and grass-grown. I’ve settled so deep into the country that I’m just an ordinary hayseed farmer. If I took a hand—which I certainly won’t—I’d only spoil the game.’

Mr Victor stood looking at me intently. I thought for a moment he was going to offer me money, and rather hoped he would, for that would have stiffened me like a ramrod, though it would have spoiled the good notion I had of him. The thought may have crossed his mind, but he was clever enough to reject it.

‘I don’t agree with a word you say about yourself, and I’m accustomed to size up men. I appeal to you as a Christian gentleman to help me to recover my child. I am not going to press that appeal, for I have already taken up enough of your time. My London address is on my card. Goodbye, Sir Richard, and believe me, I am very grateful to you for receiving me so kindly.’

In five minutes he and his Rolls-Royce had gone, and I was left in a miserable mood of shame-faced exasperation. I realized how Mr Julius Victor had made his fame. He knew how to handle men, for if he had gone on pleading he would only have riled me, whereas he had somehow managed to leave it all to my honour, and thoroughly unsettled my mind.

I went for a short walk, cursing the world at large, sometimes feeling horribly sorry for that unfortunate father, sometimes getting angry because he had tried to mix me up in his affairs. Of course I would not touch the thing; I couldn’t; it was manifestly impossible; I had neither the capacity nor the inclination. I was not a professional rescuer of distressed ladies whom I did not know from Eve.

A man, I told myself, must confine his duties to his own circle of friends, except when his country has need of him. I was over forty, and had a wife and a young son to think of; besides, I had chosen a retired life, and had the right to have my choice respected. But I can’t pretend that I was comfortable. A hideous muddy wave from the outer world had come to disturb my little sheltered pool. I found Mary and Peter John feeding the swans, and couldn’t bear to stop and play with them. The gardeners were digging in sulphates about the fig trees on the south wall, and wanted directions about the young chestnuts in the nursery; the keeper was lying in wait for me in the stable-yard for instructions about a new batch of pheasant eggs, and the groom wanted me to look at the hocks of Mary’s cob. But I simply couldn’t talk to any of them. These were the things I loved, but for a moment the gilt was off them, and I would let them wait till I felt better. In a very bad temper I returned to the library.

I hadn’t been there two minutes when I heard the sound of a car on the gravel. ‘Let ’em all come,’ I groaned, and I wasn’t surprised when Paddock entered, followed by the spare figure and smooth keen face of Macgillivray.

I don’t think I offered to shake hands. We were pretty good friends, but at the moment there was no one in the world I wanted less to see.

‘Well, you old nuisance,’ I cried, ‘you’re the second visitor from town I’ve had this morning. There’ll be a shortage of petrol soon.’

‘Have you had a letter from Lord Artinswell?’ he asked.

‘I have, worse luck,’ I said.

‘Then you know what I’ve come about. But that can keep till after luncheon. Hurry it up, Dick, like a good fellow, for I’m as hungry as a famished kestrel.’

He looked rather like one, with his sharp nose and lean head. It was impossible to be cross for long with Macgillivray, so we went out to look for Mary. ‘I may as well tell you,’ I told him, ‘that you’ve come on a fool’s errand. I’m not going to be jockeyed by you or anyone into making an ass of myself. Anyhow, don’t mention the thing to Mary. I don’t want her to be worried by your nonsense.’

So at luncheon we talked about Fosse and the Cotswolds, and about the deer-forest I had taken—Machray they called it—and about Sir Archibald Roylance, my co-tenant, who had just had another try at breaking his neck in a steeplechase. Macgillivray was by way of being a great stalker and could tell me a lot about Machray. The crab of the place was its neighbours, it seemed; for Haripol on the south was too steep for the lessee, a middle-aged manufacturer, to do justice to it, and the huge forest of Glenaicill on the east was too big for any single tenant to shoot, and the Machray end of it was nearly thirty miles by road from the lodge. The result was, said Macgillivray, that Machray was surrounded by unauthorized sanctuaries, which made the deer easy to shift. He said the best time was early in the season when the stags were on the upper ground, for it seemed that Machray had uncommonly fine high pastures . . . Mary was in good spirits, for somebody had been complimentary about Peter John, and she was satisfied for the moment that he wasn’t going to be cut off by an early consumption. She was full of housekeeping questions about Machray and revealed such spacious plans that Macgillivray said that he thought he would pay us a visit, for it looked as if he wouldn’t be poisoned, as he usually was in Scotch shooting- lodges. It was a talk I should have enjoyed if there had not been that uneasy morning behind me and that interview I had still to get over.

There was a shower after luncheon, so he and I settled ourselves in the library. ‘I must leave at three-thirty,’ he said, ‘so I have got just a little more than an hour to tell you my business in.’

‘Is it worthwhile starting?’ I asked. ‘I want to make it quite plain that under no circumstances am I open to any offer to take on any business of any kind. I’m having a rest and a holiday. I stay here for the summer and then I go to Machray.’

‘There’s nothing to prevent your going to Machray in August,’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘The work I am going to suggest to you must be finished long before then.’

I suppose that surprised me, for I did not stop him as I had meant to. I let him go on, and before I knew I found myself getting interested. I have a boy’s weakness for a yarn, and Macgillivray knew this and played on it.

He began by saying very much what Dr Greenslade had said the night before. A large part of the world had gone mad, and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All the old sanctities had become weakened, and men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command, and, if he were an able man, could mobilize a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral imbecile, he said, had been more or less a sport before the War; now he was a terribly common product, and throve in batches and battalions. Cruel, humourless, hard, utterly wanting in sense of proportion, but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric—a hideous, untameable breed had been engendered. You found it among the young Bolshevik Jews, among the young gentry of the wilder Communist sects and very notably among the sullen murderous hobbledehoys in Ireland.

‘Poor devils,’ Macgillivray repeated. ‘It is for their Maker to judge them, but we who are trying to patch up civilization have to see that they are cleared out of the world. Don’t imagine that they are devotees of any movement, good or bad. They are what I have called them, moral imbeciles, who can be swept into any movement by those who understand them. They are the neophytes and hierophants of crime, and it is as criminals that I have to do with them. Well, all this desperate degenerate stuff is being used by a few clever men who are not degenerates or anything of the sort, but only evil. There has never been such a chance for a rogue since the world began.’

Then he told me certain facts, which must remain unpublished, at any rate during our life-times. The main point was that there were sinister brains at work to organize for their own purposes the perilous stuff lying about. All the contemporary anarchisms, he said, were interconnected, and out of the misery of decent folks and the agony of the wretched tools certain smug entrepreneurs were profiting. He and his men, and indeed the whole police force of civilization—he mentioned especially the Americans—had been on the trail of one of the worst of these combines and by a series of fortunate chances had got their hand on it. Now at any moment they could stretch out that hand and gather it in.

But there was one difficulty. I learned from him that this particular combine was not aware of the danger in which it stood, but that it realized that it must stand in some danger, so it had taken precautions. Since Christmas it had acquired hostages.

Here I interrupted, for I felt rather incredulous about the whole business. ‘I think since the War we’re all too ready to jump at grandiose explanations of simple things. I’ll want a good deal of convincing before I believe in your international clearing-house for crime.’

‘I guarantee the convincing,’ he said gravely. ‘You shall see all our evidence, and, unless you have changed since I first knew you, your conclusion won’t differ from mine. But let us come to the hostages.’

‘One I know about,’ I put in. ‘I had Mr Julius Victor here after breakfast.’

Macgillivray exclaimed. ‘Poor soul! What did you say to him?’

‘Deepest sympathy, but nothing doing.’

‘And he took that answer?’

‘I won’t say he took it. But he went away. What about the others?’

‘There are two more. One is a young man, the heir to a considerable estate, who was last seen by his friends in Oxford on the 17th day of February, just before dinner. He was an undergraduate of Christ Church, and was living out of college in rooms in the High. He had tea at the Gridiron and went to his rooms to dress, for he was dining that night with the Halcyon Club. A servant passed him on the stairs of his lodgings, going up to his bedroom. He apparently did not come down, and since that day has not been seen. You may have heard his name—Lord Mercot.’

I started. I had indeed heard the name, and knew the boy a little, having met him occasionally at our local steeplechases. He was the grandson and heir of the old Duke of Alcester, the most respected of the older statesmen of England.

‘They have picked their bag carefully,’ I said. ‘What is the third case?’

‘The cruellest of all. You know Sir Arthur Warcliff. He is a widower—lost his wife just before the War and he has an only child, a little boy about ten years old. The child—David is his name—was the apple of his eye, and was at a preparatory school near Rye. The father took a house in the neighbourhood to be near him, and the boy used to be allowed to come home for luncheon every Sunday. One Sunday he came to luncheon as usual, and started back in the pony-trap. The boy was very keen about birds, and used to leave the trap and walk the last half- mile by a short cut across the marshes. Well, he left the groom at the usual gate, and, like Miss Victor and Lord Mercot, walked into black mystery.’