I saw an old green felt hat, and below it lean tweed-clad shoulders.
Then I saw a knapsack with a stick slung through it, as the owner
wriggled his way on to a shelf. Presently he turned his face upward to
judge the remaining distance. It was the face of a young man, a face
sallow and angular, but now a little flushed with the day’s sun and
the work of climbing. It was a face that I had first seen at Fosse
Manor.
I felt suddenly sick and heartsore. I don’t know why, but I had never
really associated the intellectuals of Biggleswick with a business
like this. None of them but Ivery, and he was different. They had been
silly and priggish, but no more—I would have taken my oath on it. Yet
here was one of them engaged in black treason against his native land.
Something began to beat in my temples when I remembered that Mary and
this man had been friends, that he had held her hand, and called her
by her Christian name. My first impulse was to wait till he got up and
then pitch him down among the boulders and let his German accomplices
puzzle over his broken neck.
With difficulty I kept down that tide of fury. I had my duty to do,
and to keep on terms with this man was part of it. I had to convince
him that I was an accomplice, and that might not be easy. I leaned
over the edge, and, as he got to his feet on the ledge above the
boiler-plates, I whistled so that he turned his face to me.
‘Hullo, Wake,’I said.
He started, stared for a second, and recognized me. He did not seem
over-pleased to see me. ‘Brand!’ he cried. ‘How did you get here?’ He swung himself up beside me, straightened his back and unbuckled his
knapsack. ‘I thought this was my own private sanctuary, and that
nobody knew it but me. Have you spotted the cave? It’s the best
bedroom in Skye.’ His tone was, as usual, rather acid.
That little hammer was beating in my head. I longed to get my hands on
his throat and choke the smug treason in him. But I kept my mind fixed
on one purpose—to persuade him that I shared his secret and was on
his side. His off-hand self-possession seemed only the clever screen
of the surprised conspirator who was hunting for a plan.
We entered the cave, and he flung his pack into a corner. ‘Last time I
was here,’ he said, ‘I covered the floor with heather. We must get
some more if we would sleep soft.’ In the twilight he was a dim
figure, but he seemed a new man from the one I had last seen in the
Moot Hall at Biggleswick. There was a wiry vigour in his body and a
purpose in his face. What a fool I had been to set him down as no more
than a conceited flâneur!
He went out to the shelf again and sniffed the fresh evening. There
was a wonderful red sky in the west, but in the crevice the shades had
fallen, and only the bright patches at either end told of the sunset.
‘Wake,’ I said, ‘you and I have to understand each other. I’m a friend
of Ivery and I know the meaning of this place. I discovered it by
accident, but I want you to know that I’m heart and soul with you. You
may trust me in tonight’s job as if I were Ivery himself.’
He swung round and looked at me sharply. His eyes were hot again, as I
remembered them at our first meeting.
‘What do you mean? How much do you know?’
The hammer was going hard in my forehead, and I had to pull myself
together to answer.
‘I know that at the end of this crack a message was left last night,
and that someone came out of the sea and picked it up. That someone is
coming again when darkness falls, and there will be another message.’
He had turned his head away. ‘You are talking nonsense. No submarine
could land on this coast.’
I could see that he was trying me.
‘This morning,’ I said, ‘I swam in the deep-water inlet below us. It
is the most perfect submarine shelter in Britain.’
He still kept his face from me, looking the way he had come. For a
moment he was silent, and then he spoke in the bitter, drawling voice
which had annoyed me at Fosse Manor.
‘How do you reconcile this business with your principles, Mr Brand?
You were always a patriot, I remember, though you didn’t see eye to
eye with the Government.’
It was not quite what I expected and I was unready. I stammered in my
reply. ‘It’s because I am a patriot that I want peace. I think that
. . . I mean . . .’
‘Therefore you are willing to help the enemy to win?’
‘They have already won. I want that recognized and the end hurried
on.’ I was getting my mind clearer and continued fluently. ‘The longer the war lasts, the worse this country is ruined. We must
make the people realize the truth, and——’
But he swung round suddenly, his eyes blazing.
‘You blackguard!’ he cried, ‘you damnable blackguard!’ And he flung
himself on me like a wild-cat.
I had got my answer. He did not believe me, he knew me for a spy, and
he was determined to do me in. We were beyond finesse now, and back at
the old barbaric game. It was his life or mine. The hammer beat
furiously in my head as we closed, and a fierce satisfaction rose in
my heart.
He never had a chance, for though he was in good trim and had the
light, wiry figure of the mountaineer, he hadn’t a quarter of my
muscular strength. Besides, he was wrongly placed, for he had the
outside station. Had he been on the inside he might have toppled me
over the edge by his sudden assault. As it was, I grappled him and
forced him to the ground, squeezing the breath out of his body in the
process. I must have hurt him considerably, but he never gave a cry.
With a good deal of trouble I lashed his hands behind his back with
the belt of my waterproof, carried him inside the cave and laid him in
the dark end of it. Then I tied his feet with the strap of his own
knapsack. I would have to gag him, but that could wait.
I had still to contrive a plan of action for the night, for I did not
know what part he had been meant to play in it. He might be the
messenger instead of the Portuguese Jew, in which case he would have
papers about his person. If he knew of the cave, others might have the
same knowledge, and I had better shift him before they came. I looked
at my wrist-watch, and the luminous dial showed that the hour was half
past nine.
Then I noticed that the bundle in the corner was sobbing.
It was a horrid sound and it worried me. I had a little pocket electric torch
and I flashed it on Wake’s face. If he was crying, it was with dry eyes.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ he asked.
‘That depends,’ I said grimly.
‘Well, I’m ready. I may be a poor creature, but I’m damned if I’m
afraid of you, or anything like you.’ That was a brave thing to say,
for it was a lie; his teeth were chattering.
‘I’m ready for a deal,’ I said.
‘You won’t get it,’ was his answer. ‘Cut my throat if you mean to, but
for God’s sake don’t insult me . . . I choke when I think about you. You
come to us and we welcome you, and receive you in our houses, and tell
you our inmost thoughts, and all the time you’re a bloody traitor. You
want to sell us to Germany. You may win now, but by God! your time
will come! That is my last word to you . . . you swine!’
The hammer stopped beating in my head. I saw myself suddenly as a
blind, preposterous fool. I strode over to Wake, and he shut his eyes
as if he expected a blow. Instead I unbuckled the straps which held
his legs and arms.
‘Wake, old fellow,’ I said, ‘I’m the worst kind of idiot. I’ll eat all
the dirt you want. I’ll give you leave to knock me black and blue, and
I won’t lift a hand. But not now. Now we’ve another job on hand. Man,
we’re on the same side and I never knew it. It’s too bad a case for
apologies, but if it’s any consolation to you I feel the lowest dog in
Europe at this moment.’
He was sitting up rubbing his bruised shoulders. ‘What do you mean?’
he asked hoarsely.
‘I mean that you and I are allies. My name’s not Brand. I’m a
soldier—a general, if you want to know. I went to Biggleswick under
orders, and I came chasing up here on the same job. Ivery’s the
biggest German agent in Britain and I’m after him. I’ve struck his
communication lines, and this very night, please God, we’ll get the
last clue to the riddle. Do you hear? We’re in this business together,
and you’ve got to lend a hand.’
I told him briefly the story of Gresson, and how I had tracked his man
here. As I talked we ate our supper, and I wish I could have watched
Wake’s face. He asked questions, for he wasn’t convinced in a hurry. I
think it was my mention of Mary Lamington that did the trick. I don’t
know why, but that seemed to satisfy him. But he wasn’t going to give
himself away.
‘You may count on me,’ he said, ‘for this is black, blackguardly
treason. But you know my politics, and I don’t change them for this.
I’m more against your accursed war than ever, now that I know what war
involves.’
‘Right-o,’ I said, ‘I’m a pacifist myself. You won’t get any heroics
about war from me. I’m all for peace, but we’ve got to down those
devils first.’
It wasn’t safe for either of us to stick in that cave, so we cleared
away the marks of our occupation, and hid our packs in a deep crevice
on the rock. Wake announced his intention of climbing the tower, while
there was still a faint afterglow of light. ‘It’s broad on the top,
and I can keep a watch out to sea if any light shows. I’ve been up it
before. I found the way two years ago. No, I won’t fall asleep and
tumble off. I slept most of the afternoon on the top of Sgurr
Vhiconnich, and I’m as wakeful as a bat now.’
I watched him shin up the face of the tower, and admired greatly the
speed and neatness with which he climbed. Then I followed the crevice
southward to the hollow just below the platform where I had found the
footmarks. There was a big boulder there, which partly shut off the
view of it from the direction of our cave. The place was perfect for
my purpose, for between the boulder and the wall of the tower was a
narrow gap, through which I could hear all that passed on the
platform. I found a stance where I could rest in comfort and keep an
eye through the crack on what happened beyond.
There was still a faint light on the platform, but soon that
disappeared and black darkness settled down on the hills. It was the
dark of the moon, and, as had happened the night before, a thin wrack
blew over the sky, hiding the stars. The place was very still, though
now and then would come the cry of a bird from the crags that beetled
above me, and from the shore the pipe of a tern or oyster-catcher. An
owl hooted from somewhere up on the tower. That I reckoned was Wake,
so I hooted back and was answered. I unbuckled my wrist-watch and
pocketed it, lest its luminous dial should betray me; and I noticed
that the hour was close on eleven. I had already removed my shoes, and
my jacket was buttoned at the collar so as to show no shirt. I did not
think that the coming visitor would trouble to explore the crevice
beyond the platform, but I wanted to be prepared for emergencies.
Then followed an hour of waiting. I felt wonderfully cheered and
exhilarated, for Wake had restored my confidence in human nature. In
that eerie place we were wrapped round with mystery like a fog. Some
unknown figure was coming out of the sea, the emissary of that Power
we had been at grips with for three years. It was as if the war had
just made contact with our own shores, and never, not even when I was
alone in the South German forest, had I felt so much the sport of a
whimsical fate. I only wished Peter could have been with me. And so my
thoughts fled to Peter in his prison camp, and I longed for another
sight of my old friend as a girl longs for her lover.
Then I heard the hoot of an owl, and presently the sound of careful
steps fell on my ear. I could see nothing, but I guessed it was the
Portuguese Jew, for I could hear the grinding of heavily nailed boots
on the gritty rock.
The figure was very quiet. It appeared to be sitting down, and then it
rose and fumbled with the wall of the tower just beyond the boulder
behind which I sheltered. It seemed to move a stone and to replace it.
After that came silence, and then once more the hoot of an owl. There
were steps on the rock staircase, the steps of a man who did not know
the road well and stumbled a little. Also they were the steps of one
without nails in his boots.
They reached the platform and someone spoke. It was the Portuguese Jew
and he spoke in good German.
‘Die vögelein schweigen im Walde,‘ he said.
The answer came from a clear, authoritative voice.
‘Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch.‘
Clearly some kind of password, for sane men don’t talk about little
birds in that kind of situation. It sounded to me like indifferent
poetry.
Then followed a conversation in low tones, of which I only caught odd
phrases. I heard two names—Chelius and what sounded like a Dutch
word, Bommaerts. Then to my joy I caught Effenbein, and when uttered
it seemed to be followed by a laugh. I heard too a phrase several
times repeated, which seemed to me to be pure gibberish—Die Stubenvögel verstehn. It was spoken by the man from the sea. And then
the word Wildvögel. The pair seemed demented about birds.
For a second an electric torch was flashed in the shelter of the rock,
and I could see a tanned, bearded face looking at some papers. The
light disappeared, and again the Portuguese Jew was fumbling with the
stones at the base of the tower. To my joy he was close to my crack,
and I could hear every word. ‘You cannot come here very often,’ he
said, ‘and it may be hard to arrange a meeting. See, therefore, the
place I have made to put the Vögelfutter. When I get a chance I
will come here, and you will come also when you are able. Often there
will be nothing, but sometimes there will be much.’
My luck was clearly in, and my exultation made me careless. A stone,
on which a foot rested, slipped and though I checked myself at once,
the confounded thing rolled down into the hollow, making a great
clatter. I plastered myself in the embrasure of the rock and waited
with a beating heart. The place was pitch dark, but they had an
electric torch, and if they once flashed it on me I was gone. I heard
them leave the platform and climb down into the hollow. There they
stood listening, while I held my breath. Then I heard ‘Nix, mein freund,‘ and the two went back, the naval officer’s boots slipping on
the gravel.
They did not leave the platform together. The man from the sea bade a
short farewell to the Portuguese Jew, listening, I thought,
impatiently to his final message as if eager to be gone. It was a good
half-hour before the latter took himself off, and I heard the sound of
his nailed boots die away as he reached the heather of the moor.
I waited a little longer, and then crawled back to the cave. The owl
hooted, and presently Wake descended lightly beside me; he must have
known every foothold and handhold by heart to do the job in that inky
blackness. I remember that he asked no question of me, but he used
language rare on the lips of conscientious objectors about the men who
had lately been in the crevice. We, who four hours earlier had been at
death grips, now curled up on the hard floor like two tired dogs, and
fell sound asleep.
I woke to find Wake in a thundering bad temper. The thing he
remembered most about the night before was our scrap and the gross way
I had insulted him. I didn’t blame him, for if any man had taken me
for a German spy I would have been out for his blood, and it was no
good explaining that he had given me grounds for suspicion. He was as
touchy about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age. I
was feeling rather extra buckish myself and that didn’t improve
matters. His face was like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to
bathe, so I held my tongue. He was chewing the cud of his wounded
pride.
But the salt water cleared out the dregs of his distemper. You
couldn’t be peevish swimming in that jolly, shining sea. We raced each
other away beyond the inlet to the outer water, which a brisk morning
breeze was curling. Then back to a promontory of heather, where the
first beams of the sun coming over the Coolin dried our skins. He sat
hunched up staring at the mountains while I prospected the rocks at
the edge. Out in the Minch two destroyers were hurrying southward, and
I wondered where in that waste of blue was the craft which had come
here in the night watches.
I found the spoor of the man from the sea quite fresh on a patch of
gravel above the tide-mark.
‘There’s our friend of the night,’ I said.
‘I believe the whole thing was a whimsy,’ said Wake, his eyes on the
chimneys of Sgurr Dearg. ‘They were only two natives—poachers,
perhaps, or tinkers.’
‘They don’t speak German in these parts.’
‘It was Gaelic probably.’
‘What do you make of this, then?’ and I quoted the stuff about birds with which they had greeted each other. Wake looked interested. ‘That’s Uber allen Gipfeln. Have you ever read Goethe?’
‘Never a word. And what do you make of that?’ I pointed to a flat rock
below tide-mark covered with a tangle of seaweed. It was of a softer
stone than the hard stuff in the hills and somebody had scraped off
half the seaweed and a slice of the side. ‘That wasn’t done yesterday
morning, for I had my bath here.’
Wake got up and examined the place. He nosed about in the crannies of
the rocks lining the inlet, and got into the water again to explore
better. When he joined me he was smiling. ‘I apologize for my
scepticism,’ he said. ‘There’s been some petrol-driven craft here in
the night. I can smell it, for I’ve a nose like a retriever. I daresay
you’re on the right track. Anyhow, though you seem to know a bit about
German, you could scarcely invent immortal poetry.’
We took our belongings to a green crook of the burn, and made a very
good breakfast. Wake had nothing in his pack but plasmon biscuits and
raisins, for that, he said, was his mountaineering provender, but he
was not averse to sampling my tinned stuff. He was a different-sized
fellow out in the hills from the anaemic intellectual of Biggleswick.
He had forgotten his beastly self-consciousness, and spoke of his
hobby with a serious passion. It seemed he had scrambled about
everywhere in Europe, from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees. I could see
he must be good at the job, for he didn’t brag of his exploits. It was
the mountains that he loved, not wriggling his body up hard places.
The Coolin, he said, were his favourites, for on some of them you
could get two thousand feet of good rock. We got our glasses on the
face of Sgurr Alasdair, and he sketched out for me various ways of
getting to its grim summit. The Coolin and the Dolomites for him, for
he had grown tired of the Chamonix aiguilles. I remember he described
with tremendous gusto the joys of early dawn in Tyrol, when you
ascended through acres of flowery meadows to a tooth of clean white
limestone against a clean blue sky. He spoke, too, of the little wild
hills in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge, and of a guide he had picked
up there and trained to the job.
‘They called him Sebastian Buchwieser. He was the jolliest boy you
ever saw, and as clever on crags as a chamois. He is probably dead by
now, dead in a filthy Jäger battalion. That’s you and your accursed
war.’
‘Well, we’ve got to get busy and end it in the right way,’ I said.
‘And you’ve got to help, my lad.’
He was a good draughtsman, and with his assistance I drew a rough map
of the crevice where we had roosted for the night, giving its bearings
carefully in relation to the burn and the sea. Then I wrote down all
the details about Gresson and the Portuguese Jew, and described the
latter in minute detail. I described, too, most precisely the cache
where it had been arranged that the messages should be placed. That
finished my stock of paper, and I left the record of the oddments
overheard of the conversation for a later time. I put the thing in an
old leather cigarette-case I possessed, and handed it to Wake.
‘You’ve got to go straight off to the Kyle and not waste any time on
the way. Nobody suspects you, so you can travel any road you please.
When you get there you ask for Mr Andrew Amos, who has some Government
job in the neighbourhood. Give him that paper from me. He’ll know what
to do with it all right. Tell him I’ll get somehow to the Kyle before
midday the day after tomorrow. I must cover my tracks a bit, so I
can’t come with you, and I want that thing in his hands just as fast
as your legs will take you. If anyone tries to steal it from you, for
God’s sake eat it. You can see for yourself that it’s devilish
important.’
‘I shall be back in England in three days,’ he said. ‘Any message for
your other friends?’
‘Forget all about me. You never saw me here. I’m still Brand, the
amiable colonial studying social movements. If you meet Ivery, say you
heard of me on the Clyde, deep in sedition. But if you see Miss
Lamington you can tell her I’m past the Hill Difficulty. I’m coming
back as soon as God will let me, and I’m going to drop right into the
Biggleswick push. Only this time I’ll be a little more advanced in my
views . . . You needn’t get cross. I’m not saying anything against your
principles. The main point is that we both hate dirty treason.’
He put the case in his waistcoat pocket. ‘I’ll go round Garsbheinn,’
he said, ‘and over by Camasunary. I’ll be at the Kyle long before
evening. I meant anyhow to sleep at Broadford tonight . . . Good-bye,
Brand, for I’ve forgotten your proper name. You’re not a bad fellow,
but you’ve landed me in melodrama for the first time in my sober
existence. I have a grudge against you for mixing up the Coolin with a
shilling shocker. You’ve spoiled their sanctity.’
‘You’ve the wrong notion of romance,’ I said. ‘Why, man, last night
for an hour you were in the front line—the place where the enemy
forces touch our own. You were over the top—you were in
No-man’s-land.’
He laughed. ‘That is one way to look at it’; and then he stalked off
and I watched his lean figure till it was round the turn of the hill.
All that morning I smoked peacefully by the burn, and let my thoughts
wander over the whole business. I had got precisely what Blenkiron
wanted, a post office for the enemy. It would need careful handling,
but I could see the juiciest lies passing that way to the Grosses Haupiquartier. Yet I had an ugly feeling at the back of my head that
it had been all too easy, and that Ivery was not the man to be duped
in this way for long. That set me thinking about the queer talk on the
crevice. The poetry stuff I dismissed as the ordinary password,
probably changed every time. But who were Chelius and Bommaerts, and
what in the name of goodness were the Wild Birds and the Cage Birds?
Twice in the past three years I had had two such riddles to
solve—Scudder’s scribble in his pocket-book, and Harry Bullivant’s
three words. I remembered how it had only been by constant chewing at
them that I had got a sort of meaning, and I wondered if fate would
some day expound this puzzle also.
Meantime I had to get back to London as inconspicuously as I had come.
It might take some doing, for the police who had been active in
Morvern might be still on the track, and it was essential that I
should keep out of trouble and give no hint to Gresson and his friends
that I had been so far north. However, that was for Amos to advise me
on, and about noon I picked up my waterproof with its bursting pockets
and set off on a long detour up the coast. All that blessed day I
scarcely met a soul. I passed a distillery which seemed to have quit
business, and in the evening came to a little town on the sea where I
had a bed and supper in a superior kind of public-house.
Next day I struck southward along the coast, and had two experiences
of interest. I had a good look at Ranna, and observed that the
Tobermory was no longer there. Gresson had only waited to get his
job finished; he could probably twist the old captain any way he
wanted. The second was that at the door of a village smithy I saw the
back of the Portuguese Jew. He was talking Gaelic this time—good
Gaelic it sounded, and in that knot of idlers he would have passed for
the ordinariest kind of gillie.
He did not see me, and I had no desire to give him the chance, for I
had an odd feeling that the day might come when it would be good for
us to meet as strangers.
That night I put up boldly in the inn at Broadford, where they fed me
nobly on fresh sea-trout and I first tasted an excellent liqueur made
of honey and whisky. Next morning I was early afoot, and well before
midday was in sight of the narrows of the Kyle, and the two little
stone clachans which face each other across the strip of sea.
About two miles from the place at a turn of the road I came upon a
farmer’s gig, drawn up by the wayside, with the horse cropping the
moorland grass. A man sat on the bank smoking, with his left arm
hooked in the reins. He was an oldish man, with a short, square
figure, and a woollen comforter enveloped his throat.
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