A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.
he made a journey into the City, to a little street in the neighbourhood of Leadenhall Market. On the door of every narrow, flat-chested house were a score of names, mostly attorneys and notaries public. At the foot of one such list he found J. N. Macandrew, who professed to follow the calling of an average-adjuster. Mr Macandrew was hard to come at. Adam was received in a dingy slip of an office by a pallid boy, who took his card and disappeared. He returned and led the way up a maze of wooden stairs and murky passages, till he left him in a room where sunlight was pouring through a dirty window. There for half an hour Adam kicked his heels. The place had all the cheerful features of an attorney’s waiting-room. On the walls, where the paper was dark with grime, hung an ancient almanac, a bad print of Lord Chancellor Cairns, and a faded photograph of the court of some livery company in the year 1889. On a rickety table stood three venerable Law Lists, an antediluvian Burke, a London directory and a pile of shipping journals. There was a leather arm-chair which looked as if it had seen service, and a pile of cigarette ends in the empty grate, which suggested that the room was much in use.
Adam examined the scanty properties, and then stared out of the window at the jumble of roofs and house-backs. The place was oddly depressing. Here in this rabbit-warren life seemed to shrink to an infinite pettiness. What part could it have in the storm which was scourging the world?… He turned, to find that Mr Macandrew had entered the room, though he had heard no door open.
Mr Macandrew’s name was misleading, for he was clearly a Jew, a small man with a nervous mouth and eyes that preferred to look downward. He seemed to have been expecting Adam, for he cut short his explanation. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Please take a seat. Yes, I know all about you. We can have a little talk, can’t we? Will you smoke?”
Adam sat in the rubbed arm-chair, while the other perched himself on the table. It was a curious interview, of which the purpose only gradually became clear. Macandrew asked a few questions about a corner of Belgium which Adam had often visited. Ritson knew about those visits, and might have told him. Then he suddenly broke into the guttural French which is talked in the Meuse valley. “You understand that?” he snapped. “Every word?” Adam replied in the same patois, and was corrected on a point or two. “Pretty good,” said Macandrew. “Good enough, perhaps. You have the right gurgle, but not all the idioms.”
Then he spoke Flemish, which Adam translated after him. “That is good—very good. You do not need to speak it, but it is well to understand it.” He drawled a few sentences in some tongue which sounded mere gibberish. “You do not follow? No matter. That is the speech of the hill people in the high Ardennes—peasant people only, you understand. There are gipsy words in it.”
There followed a series of interrogatories. Adam was asked to describe the daily life on a farm in southeast Belgium. “You have stayed in such a place. Now, give me the duties of the farmer’s son, beginning with the first daylight.” Adam ransacked his memory and did his best, but the catalogue was sketchy. He pleased his interlocutor better with his account of a wayside estaminet, a cattle-fair, and a Sunday pilgrimage. “You can observe,” said Macandrew. “Not yet with sufficient nicety. Yet you have eyes in your head.”
He was suddenly dismissed. The pallid boy appeared, and Macandrew held out his hand. “Goodbye, Mr More. Perhaps we shall meet again soon.”
As Adam re-threaded the labyrinth of stair and passage, he wondered why he had been addressed as More. That must have been Ritson’s arrangement, and he had not been told of it because his chiefs assumed that he knew enough to be passive in their hands.
A few days later he found himself a guest in a country house which lay under the Hampshire Downs. The invitation had been sent to him by Ritson, and in it he figured as Mr John More. His host was called Warriner, a fine, old, high-coloured sportsman, who looked as if his winters had been spent in the hunting-field, and his summers in tramping his paternal acres. There was a son, in his early twenties, who had come over from a neighbouring training- camp. It appeared that young Warriner was a noted mountaineer, and Adam remembered his name in connection with ascents in the Caucasus. At dinner the talk was very little of the war, and there was no hint of any knowledge of Adam’s past. The father and son, with all the courtesy in the world, seemed to be bent on discovering his tastes in sport and his prowess in games, so that he set them down as the type of Englishman who never outgrows the standards of his public school.
“You look uncommonly fit,” said the son, as they left the smoking-room.
“I try to be,” said Adam. “I haven’t got many things to my credit, but one of them is a hard body.”
“Good,” was the answer. “We’ll have a long day to-morrow. You’ll be called at five. Put on something old and light—flannel bags will do— and strong shoes. We have a bit of striding before us.”
It was a clear cool morning when they started, and Adam thought that he had never seen such a light-foot walker as Frank Warriner. He led him out of the vale up on to the Downs at a steady pace of nearly five miles an hour. Presently the sun grew hot, but there was no slackening of their speed. Adam’s spirits rose, for he understood that his endurance was being tested, and he had little fear of the result. To his surprise their first halt was at a country rectory, where a parson in slippers gave them a tankard of home-brewed beer. He was a fantastic old gentleman, for he directed all his conversation to Adam, and engaged him in a discussion on Norse remains in Britain which appeared to be his hobby. Adam thought it strange that he should have hit on a subject which had always been one of his private interests, and for the half-hour of their visit he did his best to live up to the parson’s enthusiasm. “Good,” said Frank Warriner, as they left the house. “You managed that quite well.”
In the early afternoon they came to a stone wall bounding a great estate. Frank led the way over the wall. “Follow me,” he said. “Colonel Ambridge is a devil about his pheasants. We’ll have some fun getting through this place.” They found themselves in a park studded with coppices, and bordered by a large wood full of thick undergrowth. Frank took an odd way of crossing prohibited ground, for he began by making himself conspicuous, walking boldly across the open in full view of a keeper’s cottage. Presently a man’s voice was heard uplifted, and the two became fugitives. They doubled back behind a group of trees, and Frank made for the big wood. They were followed, for as Adam looked behind him he saw two excited men running to cut them off.
In the wood Frank led him through gaps in the undergrowth, stopping now and then to listen like a stag at pause. There was no doubt about the pursuit, for the noise of heavy feet and crackling twigs was loud behind them. Frank seemed to know the place well, and he had an uncanny gift of locating sound, for he twisted backward and forward like a rabbit. Adam found running bent double and eel-like crawling through bracken a far harder trial than the speed of the morning, but he managed to keep close to his companion. At last Frank straightened himself and laughed. “Now for a sprint,” he said, and he led the way at a good pace down a woodland path, which ended in an alley of rhododendrons.
To Adam’s surprise, instead of avoiding the house they made for it. Frank slowed down at the edge of a carriage drive and walked boldly across the lawn to a stone terrace, and through French windows into a library where a man was sitting. “Hullo, Colonel Ambridge,” he said. “We’re out for a walk and looked in to pass the time of day. May I introduce my friend Mr More?”
The Colonel, a lean dark man of about sixty, behaved like the parson. He gave them drinks, and plunged into military talk, most of it directed to Adam. This was no somnolent retired soldier, but a man remarkably up-to-date in his calling. He spoke of the French generals whose names were becoming familiar in Britain—of Joffre’s colonial service and of Foch’s Principes de la Guerre, and he was critical of the French concentration in Lorraine. France he maintained had departed from the true interpretation of the “war of manoeuvre,” and he was contemptuous of false parallels drawn from Napoleon’s bataillon carrée at Jena. He seemed to have an exact knowledge of the terrain of the war, maps were produced, and Adam, the sweat on his brow and the marks of brier scratches on his cheek, found himself debating closely on points of strategy. There was something sharp and appraising in their host’s eye as they took their leave. “Good,” said Frank again. “You handled old Ambridge