An unwary movement of my hand caused the screen to creak. Instantly the movements ceased and there was utter silence. I held my breath, and after a second or two the tiny sounds began again. I had a feeling, though my eyes could not assure me, that the man before me was at work, and was using a very small shaded torch. There was just the faintest moving shimmer on the wall beyond, though that might come from the crack of moonlight. Apparently he was reassured, for his movements became more distinct. There was a jar as if a table had been pushed back. Once more there was silence, and I heard only the intake of breath. I have very quick ears, and to me it sounded as if the man was rattled. The breathing was quick and anxious.
Suddenly it changed and became the ghost of a whistle—the kind of sound one makes with the lips and teeth without ever letting the tune break out clear. We all do it when we are preoccupied with something— shaving, or writing letters, or reading the newspaper. But I did not think my man was preoccupied. He was whistling to quiet fluttering nerves.
Then I caught the air. It was ‘Cherry Ripe’.
In a moment, from being hugely at my ease, I became the nervous one. I had been playing peep-bo with the unseen, and the tables were turned. My heart beat against my ribs like a hammer. I shuffled my feet, and again there fell the tense silence.
‘Mary,’ I said—and the word seemed to explode like a bomb in the stillness—’Mary! It’s me—Dick Hannay.’
There was no answer but a sob and the sound of a timid step.
I took four paces into the darkness and caught in my arms a trembling girl …
Often in the last months I had pictured the kind of scene which would be the culminating point of my life. When our work was over and war had been forgotten, somewhere—perhaps in a green Cotswold meadow or in a room of an old manor—I would talk with Mary. By that time we should know each other well and I would have lost my shyness. I would try to tell her that I loved her, but whenever I thought of what I should say my heart sank, for I knew I would make a fool of myself. You can’t live my kind of life for forty years wholly among men and be of any use at pretty speeches to women. I knew I should stutter and blunder, and I used despairingly to invent impossible situations where I might make my love plain to her without words by some piece of melodramatic sacrifice.
But the kind Fates had saved me the trouble. Without a syllable save Christian names stammered in that eerie darkness we had come to complete understanding. The fairies had been at work unseen, and the thoughts of each of us had been moving towards the other, till love had germinated like a seed in the dark. As I held her in my arms I stroked her hair and murmured things which seemed to spring out of some ancestral memory. Certainly my tongue had never used them before, nor my mind imagined them… By and by she slipped her arms round my neck and with a half sob strained towards me. She was still trembling.
‘Dick,’ she said, and to hear that name on her lips was the sweetest thing I had ever known. ‘Dick, is it really you? Tell me I’m not dreaming.’
‘It’s me, sure enough, Mary dear. And now I have found you I will never let you go again. But, my precious child, how on earth did you get here?’
She disengaged herself and let her little electric torch wander over my rough habiliments.
‘You look a tremendous warrior, Dick. I have never seen you like this before. I was in Doubting Castle and very much afraid of Giant Despair, till you came.’
‘I think I call it the Interpreter’s House,’ I said.
‘It’s the house of somebody we both know,’ she went on. ‘He calls himself Bommaerts here. That was one of the two names, you remember. I have seen him since in Paris. Oh, it is a long story and you shall hear it all soon. I knew he came here sometimes, so I came here too. I have been nursing for the last fortnight at the Douvecourt Hospital only four miles away.’
‘But what brought you alone at night?’
‘Madness, I think. Vanity, too. You see I had found out a good deal, and I wanted to find out the one vital thing which had puzzled Mr Blenkiron. I told myself it was foolish, but I couldn’t keep away. And then my courage broke down, and before you came I would have screamed at the sound of a mouse. If I hadn’t whistled I would have cried.’
‘But why alone and at this hour?’
‘I couldn’t get off in the day. And it was safest to come alone. You see he is in love with me, and when he heard I was coming to Douvecourt forgot his caution and proposed to meet me here. He said he was going on a long journey and wanted to say goodbye. If he had found me alone—well, he would have said goodbye. If there had been anyone with me, he would have suspected, and he mustn’t suspect me. Mr Blenkiron says that would be fatal to his great plan. He believes I am like my aunts, and that I think him an apostle of peace working by his own methods against the stupidity and wickedness of all the Governments. He talks more bitterly about Germany than about England. He had told me how he had to disguise himself and play many parts on his mission, and of course I have applauded him. Oh, I have had a difficult autumn.’
‘Mary,’ I cried, ‘tell me you hate him.’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I do not hate him. I am keeping that for later. I fear him desperately. Some day when we have broken him utterly I will hate him, and drive all likeness of him out of my memory like an unclean thing. But till then I won’t waste energy on hate. We want to hoard every atom of our strength for the work of beating him.’
She had won back her composure, and I turned on my light to look at her. She was in nurses’ outdoor uniform, and I thought her eyes seemed tired. The priceless gift that had suddenly come to me had driven out all recollection of my own errand. I thought of Ivery only as a would-be lover of Mary, and forgot the manufacturer from Lille who had rented his house for the partridge-shooting. ‘And you, Dick,’ she asked; ‘is it part of a general’s duties to pay visits at night to empty houses?’
‘I came to look for traces of M. Bommaerts. I, too, got on his track from another angle, but that story must wait.’
‘You observe that he has been here today?’
She pointed to some cigarette ash spilled on the table edge, and a space on its surface cleared from dust. ‘In a place like this the dust would settle again in a few hours, and that is quite clean. I should say he has been here just after luncheon.’
‘Great Scott!’ I cried, ‘what a close shave! I’m in the mood at this moment to shoot him at sight. You say you saw him in Paris and knew his lair. Surely you had a good enough case to have him collared.’
She shook her head. ‘Mr Blenkiron—he’s in Paris too— wouldn’t hear of it. He hasn’t just figured the thing out yet, he says. We’ve identified one of your names, but we’re still in doubt about Chelius.’
‘Ah, Chelius! Yes, I see. We must get the whole business complete before we strike. Has old Blenkiron had any luck?’
‘Your guess about the “Deep-breathing” advertisement was very clever, Dick. It was true, and it may give us Chelius. I must leave Mr Blenkiron to tell you how. But the trouble is this. We know something of the doings of someone who may be Chelius, but we can’t link them with Ivery. We know that Ivery is Bommaerts, and our hope is to link Bommaerts with Chelius. That’s why I came here. I was trying to burgle this escritoire in an amateur way. It’s a bad piece of fake Empire and deserves smashing.’
I could see that Mary was eager to get my mind back to business, and with some difficulty I clambered down from the exultant heights. The intoxication of the thing was on me—the winter night, the circle of light in that dreary room, the sudden coming together of two souls from the ends of the earth, the realization of my wildest hopes, the gilding and glorifying of all the future. But she had always twice as much wisdom as me, and we were in the midst of a campaign which had no use for day-dreaming. I turned my attention to the desk.
It