Chapter Fifteen. St Anton

Mr. Standfast

by John Buchan

Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the
tough and shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old
velveteen shooting-coat bequeathed to him by a former German master -
speaking the guttural tongue of the Grisons, and with all his
belongings in one massive rucksack, came out of the little station of
St Anton and blinked in the frosty sunshine. He looked down upon the
little old village beside its icebound lake, but his business was
with the new village of hotels and villas which had sprung up in the
last ten years south of the station. He made some halting inquiries
of the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him
to the place he sought - the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where
resided an English intern, one Peter Pienaar.

The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey.
A fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British
major-general. As such he had been the inmate of an expensive Paris
hotel, till one morning, in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he
had taken the Paris-Mediterranean Express with a ticket for an
officers' convalescent home at Cannes. Thereafter he had declined in
the social scale. At Dijon he had been still an Englishman, but at
Pontarlier he had become an American bagman of Swiss parentage,
returning to wind up his father's estate. At Berne he limped
excessively, and at Zurich, at a little back-street hotel, he became
frankly the peasant. For he met a friend there from whom he acquired
clothes with that odd rank smell, far stronger than Harris tweed,
which marks the raiment of most Swiss guides and all Swiss porters.
He also acquired a new name and an old aunt, who a little later
received him with open arms and explained to her friends that he was
her brother's son from Arosa who three winters ago had hurt his leg
wood-cutting and had been discharged from the levy.

A kindly Swiss gentleman, as it chanced, had heard of the
deserving Joseph and interested himself to find him employment. The
said philanthropist made a hobby of the French and British prisoners
returned from Germany, and had in mind an officer, a crabbed South
African with a bad leg, who needed a servant. He was, it seemed, an
ill-tempered old fellow who had to be billeted alone, and since he
could speak German, he would be happier with a Swiss native. Joseph
haggled somewhat over the wages, but on his aunt's advice he accepted
the job, and, with a very complete set of papers and a store of
ready-made reminiscences (it took him some time to swot up the names
of the peaks and passes he had traversed) set out for St Anton,
having dispatched beforehand a monstrously ill-spelt letter
announcing his coming. He could barely read and write, but he was
good at maps, which he had studied carefully, and he noticed with
satisfaction that the valley of St Anton gave easy access to
Italy.

As he journeyed south the reflections of that porter would have
surprised his fellow travellers in the stuffy third-class carriage.
He was thinking of a conversation he had had some days before in a
cafe at Dijon with a young Englishman bound for Modane ...

We had bumped up against each other by chance in that strange
flitting when all went to different places at different times, asking
nothing of each other's business. Wake had greeted me rather
shamefacedly and had proposed dinner together.

I am not good at receiving apologies, and Wake's embarrassed me
more than they embarrassed him. 'I'm a bit of a cad sometimes,'he
said. 'You know I'm a better fellow than I sounded that night,
Hannay.'

I mumbled something about not talking rot - the conventional
phrase. What worried me was that the man was suffering. You could
see it in his eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than ever
before, and he and I became true friends, for he laid bare his soul
before me. That was his trouble, that he could lay bare his soul,
for ordinary healthy folk don't analyse their feelings. Wake did,
and I think it brought him relief.

'Don't think I was ever your rival. I would no more have
proposed to Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She was
so sure of herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she
terrified me. My type of man is not meant for marriage, for women
must be in the centre of life, and we must always be standing aside
and looking on. It is a damnable thing to be left-handed.'

'The trouble about you, my dear chap,' I said, 'is that you're
too hard to please.'

'That's one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I
hate more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have
hatred as our mainspring. Odd, isn't it, for people who preach
brotherly love? But it's the truth. We're full of hate towards
everything that doesn't square in with our ideas, everything that
jars on our lady- like nerves. Fellows like you are so in love with
their cause that they've no time or inclination to detest what
thwarts them. We've no cause - only negatives, and that means
hatred, and self-torture, and a beastly jaundice of soul.'

Then I knew that Wake's fault was not spiritual pride, as I had
diagnosed it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.

'I see more than other people see,' he went on, 'and I feel
more. That's the curse on me. You're a happy man and you get things
done, because you only see one side of a case, one thing at a time.
How would you like it if a thousand strings were always tugging at
you, if you saw that every course meant the sacrifice of lovely and
desirable things, or even the shattering of what you know to be
unreplaceable? I'm the kind of stuff poets are made of, but I haven't
the poet's gift, so I stagger about the world left-handed and
game-legged ... Take the war. For me to fight would be worse than
for another man to run away. From the bottom of my heart I believe
that it needn't have happened, and that all war is a blistering
iniquity. And yet belief has got very little to do with virtue. I'm
not as good a man as you, Hannay, who have never thought out anything
in your life. My time in the Labour battalion taught me something.
I knew that with all my fine aspirations I wasn't as true a man as
fellows whose talk was silly oaths and who didn't care a tinker's
curse about their soul.'

I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. 'I
think I know you. You're the sort of chap who won't fight for his
country because he can't be sure that she's altogether in the right.
But he'd cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.'

His face relaxed in a slow smile. 'Queer that you should say
that. I think it's pretty near the truth. Men like me aren't afraid
to die, but they haven't quite the courage to live. Every man should
be happy in a service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn't get
on in any service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can't swallow
things merely because I'm told to. My sort are always talking about
"service", but we haven't the temperament to serve. I'd give all I
have to be an ordinary cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded
outsider who finds fault with the machinery ... Take a great violent
high-handed fellow like you. You can sink yourself till you become
only a name and a number. I couldn't if I tried. I'm not sure if I
want to either. I cling to the odds and ends that are my own.'

'I wish I had had you in my battalion a year ago,' I said.

'No, you don't. I'd only have been a nuisance. I've been a
Fabian since Oxford, but you're a better socialist than me. I'm a
rancid individualist.'

'But you must be feeling better about the war?' I asked.

'Not a bit of it. I'm still lusting for the heads of the
politicians that made it and continue it. But I want to help my
country. Honestly, Hannay, I love the old place. More, I think, than
I love myself, and that's saying a devilish lot. Short of fighting -
which would be the sin against the Holy Spirit for me - I'll do my
damnedest. But you'll remember I'm not used to team work. If I'm a
jealous player, beat me over the head.'

His voice was almost wistful, and I liked him enormously.

'Blenkiron will see to that,' I said. 'We're going to break you
to harness, Wake, and then you'll be a happy man. You keep your mind
on the game and forget about yourself. That's the cure for
jibbers.'

As I journeyed to St Anton I thought a lot about that talk. He
was quite right about Mary, who would never have married him. A man
with such an angular soul couldn't fit into another's. And then I
thought that the chief thing about Mary was just her serene
certainty. Her eyes had that settled happy look that I remembered to
have seen only in one other human face, and that was Peter's ... But
I wondered if Peter's eyes were still the same.

I found the cottage, a little wooden thing which had been left
perched on its knoll when the big hotels grew around it. It had a
fence in front, but behind it was open to the hillside. At the gate
stood a bent old woman with a face like a pippin. My make-up must
have been good, for she accepted me before I introduced myself.

'God be thanked you are come,' she cried. 'The poor lieutenant
needed a man to keep him company. He sleeps now, as he does always
in the afternoon, for his leg wearies him in the night ... But he is
brave, like a soldier ... Come, I will show you the house, for you
two will be alone now.'

Stepping softly she led me indoors, pointing with a warning
finger to the little bedroom where Peter slept. I found a kitchen
with a big stove and a rough floor of planking, on which lay some
badly cured skins. Off it was a sort of pantry with a bed for me.
She showed me the pots and pans for cooking and the stores she had
laid in, and where to find water and fuel. 'I will do the marketing
daily,' she said, 'and if you need me, my dwelling is half a mile up
the road beyond the new church. God be with you, young man, and be
kind to that wounded one.'

When the Widow Summermatter had departed I sat down in Peter's
arm-chair and took stock of the place. It was quiet and simple and
homely, and through the window came the gleam of snow on the diamond
hills. On the table beside the stove were Peter's cherished
belongings - his buck-skin pouch and the pipe which Jannie Grobelaar
had carved for him in St Helena, an aluminium field match-box I had
given him, a cheap large-print Bible such as padres present to
well-disposed privates, and an old battered Pilgrim's Progress with
gaudy pictures. The illustration at which I opened showed Faithful
going up to Heaven from the fire of Vanity Fair like a woodcock that
has just been flushed. Everything in the room was exquisitely neat,
and I knew that that was Peter and not the Widow Summermatter. On a
peg behind the door hung his much-mended coat, and sticking out of a
pocket I recognized a sheaf of my own letters. In one corner stood
something which I had forgotten about - an invalid chair.

The sight of Peter's plain little oddments made me feel solemn.
I wondered if his eyes would be like Mary's now, for I could not
conceive what life would be for him as a cripple. Very silently I
opened the bedroom door and slipped inside.

He was lying on a camp bedstead with one of those striped Swiss
blankets pulled up round his ears, and he was asleep. It was the old
Peter beyond doubt. He had the hunter's gift of breathing evenly
through his nose, and the white scar on the deep brown of his
forehead was what I had always remembered. The only change since I
last saw him was that he had let his beard grow again, and it was
grey.

As I looked at him the remembrance of all we had been through
together flooded back upon me, and I could have cried with joy at
being beside him. Women, bless their hearts! can never know what
long comradeship means to men; it is something not in their lives -
something that belongs only to that wild, undomesticated world which
we forswear when we find our mates. Even Mary understood only a bit
of it. I had just won her love, which was the greatest thing that
ever came my way, but if she had entered at that moment I would
scarcely have turned my head. I was back again in the old life and
was not thinking of the new.

Suddenly I saw that Peter was awake and was looking at me.

'Dick,' he said in a whisper, 'Dick, my old friend.'

The blanket was tossed off, and his long, lean arms were
stretched out to me. I gripped his hands, and for a little we did
not speak. Then I saw how woefully he had changed. His left leg had
shrunk, and from the knee down was like a pipe stem. His face, when
awake, showed the lines of hard suffering and he seemed shorter by
half a foot. But his eyes were still like Mary's. Indeed they
seemed to be more patient and peaceful than in the days when he sat
beside me on the buck-waggon and peered over the hunting-veld.

I picked him up - he was no heavier than Mary - and carried him
to his chair beside the stove. Then I boiled water and made tea, as
we had so often done together.

'Peter, old man,' I said, 'we're on trek again, and this is a
very snug little rondavel. We've had many good yarns, but this is
going to be the best. First of all, how about your health?'

'Good, I'm a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow. I
have been lonely sometimes, but that is all by now. Tell me of the
big battles.'

But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case.
He had no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like
Germans. The doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and
had done their best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones
had been so wrecked that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had
all the Boer's dislike of amputation. One doctor had been in
Damaraland and talked to him of those baked sunny places and made him
homesick. But he returned always to his dislike of Germans. He had
seen them herding our soldiers like brute beasts, and the commandant
had a face like Stumm and a chin that stuck out and wanted hitting.
He made an exception for the great airman Lensch, who had downed
him.

'He is a white man, that one,' he said. 'He came to see me in
hospital and told me a lot of things. I think he made them treat me
well. He is a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he has a
round, merry face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who could put a
bullet through a pauw's head at two hundred yards. He said he was
sorry I was lame, for he hoped to have more fights with me. Some
woman that tells fortunes had said that I would be the end of him,
but he reckoned she had got the thing the wrong way on. I hope he
will come through this war, for he is a good man, though a German ...
But the others! They are like the fool in the Bible, fat and ugly in
good fortune and proud and vicious when their luck goes. They are
not a people to be happy with.'

Then he told me that to keep up his spirits he had amused
himself with playing a game. He had prided himself on being a Boer,
and spoken coldly of the British. He had also, I gathered, imparted
many things calculated to deceive. So he left Germany with good
marks, and in Switzerland had held himself aloof from the other
British wounded, on the advice of Blenkiron, who had met him as soon
as he crossed the frontier. I gathered it was Blenkiron who had had
him sent to St Anton, and in his time there, as a disgruntled Boer,
he had mixed a good deal with Germans. They had pumped him about our
air service, and Peter had told them many ingenious lies and heard
curious things in return.

'They are working hard, Dick,' he said. 'Never forget that.
The German is a stout enemy, and when we beat him with a machine he
sweats till he has invented a new one. They have great pilots, but
never so many good ones as we, and I do not think in ordinary
fighting they can ever beat us. But you must watch Lensch, for I
fear him. He has a new machine, I hear, with great engines and a
short wingspread, but the wings so cambered that he can climb fast.
That will be a surprise to spring upon us. You will say that we'll
soon better it. So we shall, but if it was used at a time when we
were pushing hard it might make the little difference that loses
battles.'

'You mean,' I said, 'that if we had a great attack ready and had
driven all the Boche planes back from our front, Lensch and his
circus might get over in spite of us and blow the gaff?'

'Yes,' he said solemnly. 'Or if we were attacked, and had a
weak spot, Lensch might show the Germans where to get through. I do
not think we are going to attack for a long time; but I am pretty
sure that Germany is going to fling every man against us. That is
the talk of my friends, and it is not bluff.'

That night I cooked our modest dinner, and we smoked our pipes
with the stove door open and the good smell of woodsmoke in our
nostrils. I told him of all my doings and of the Wild Birds and
Ivery and the job we were engaged on. Blenkiron's instructions were
that we two should live humbly and keep our eyes and ears open, for
we were outside suspicion - the cantankerous lame Boer and his
loutish servant from Arosa. Somewhere in the place was a rendezvous
of our enemies, and thither came Chelius on his dark errands.

Peter nodded his head sagely, 'I think I have guessed the place.
The daughter of the old woman used to pull my chair sometimes down to
the village, and I have sat in cheap inns and talked to servants.
There is a fresh-water pan there, it is all covered with snow now,
and beside it there is a big house that they call the Pink Chalet. I
do not know much about it, except that rich folk live in it, for I
know the other houses and they are harmless. Also the big hotels,
which are too cold and public for strangers to meet in.'

I put Peter to bed, and it was a joy to me to look after him, to
give him his tonic and prepare the hot water bottle that comforted
his neuralgia. His behaviour was like a docile child's, and he never
lapsed from his sunny temper, though I could see how his leg gave him
hell. They had tried massage for it and given it up, and there was
nothing for him but to endure till nature and his tough constitution
deadened the tortured nerves again. I shifted my bed out of the
pantry and slept in the room with him, and when I woke in the night,
as one does the first time in a strange place, I could tell by his
breathing that he was wakeful and suffering.

Next day a bath chair containing a grizzled cripple and pushed
by a limping peasant might have been seen descending the long hill to
the village. It was clear frosty weather which makes the cheeks
tingle, and I felt so full of beans that it was hard to remember my
game leg. The valley was shut in on the east by a great mass of
rocks and glaciers, belonging to a mountain whose top could not be
seen. But on the south, above the snowy fir-woods, there was a most
delicate lace-like peak with a point like a needle. I looked at it
with interest, for beyond it lay the valley which led to the Staub
pass, and beyond that was Italy - and Mary.

The old village of St Anton had one long, narrow street which
bent at right angles to a bridge which spanned the river flowing from
the lake. Thence the road climbed steeply, but at the other end of
the street it ran on the level by the water's edge, lined with
gimcrack boarding-houses, now shuttered to the world, and a few
villas in patches of garden. At the far end, just before it plunged
into a pine-wood, a promontory jutted into the lake, leaving a broad
space between the road and the water. Here were the grounds of a
more considerable dwelling - snow-covered laurels and rhododendrons
with one or two bigger trees - and just on the water-edge stood the
house itself, called the Pink Chalet.

I wheeled Peter past the entrance on the crackling snow of the
highway. Seen through the gaps of the trees the front looked new,
but the back part seemed to be of some age, for I could see high
walls, broken by few windows, hanging over the water. The place was
no more a chalet than a donjon, but I suppose the name was given in
honour of a wooden gallery above the front door. The whole thing was
washed in an ugly pink. There were outhouses - garage or stables
among the trees - and at the entrance there were fairly recent tracks
of an automobile.

On our way back we had some very bad beer in a cafe and made
friends with the woman who kept it. Peter had to tell her his story,
and I trotted out my aunt in Zurich, and in the end we heard her
grievances. She was a true Swiss, angry at all the belligerents who
had spoiled her livelihood, hating Germany most but also fearing her
most. Coffee, tea, fuel, bread, even milk and cheese were hard to
get and cost a ransom. It would take the land years to recover, and
there would be no more tourists, for there was little money left in
the world. I dropped a question about the Pink Chalet, and was told
that it belonged to one Schweigler, a professor of Berne, an old man
who came sometimes for a few days in the summer. It was often let,
but not now. Asked if it was occupied, she remarked that some
friends of the Schweiglers - rich people from Basle - had been there
for the winter. 'They come and go in great cars,' she said bitterly,
'and they bring their food from the cities. They spend no money in
this poor place.'

Presently Peter and I fell into a routine of life, as if we had
always kept house together. In the morning he went abroad in his
chair, in the afternoon I would hobble about on my own errands. We
sank into the background and took its colour, and a less conspicuous
pair never faced the eye of suspicion. Once a week a young Swiss
officer, whose business it was to look after British wounded, paid us
a hurried visit. I used to get letters from my aunt in Zurich,
Sometimes with the postmark of Arosa, and now and then these letters
would contain curiously worded advice or instructions from him whom
my aunt called 'the kind patron'. Generally I was told to be
patient. Sometimes I had word about the health of 'my little cousin
across the mountains'. Once I was bidden expect a friend of the
patron's, the wise doctor of whom he had often spoken, but though
after that I shadowed the Pink Chalet for two days no doctor
appeared.

My investigations were a barren business. I used to go down to
the village in the afternoon and sit in an out-of-the-way cafe,
talking slow German with peasants and hotel porters, but there was
little to learn. I knew all there was to hear about the Pink Chalet,
and that was nothing. A young man who ski-ed stayed for three nights
and spent his days on the alps above the fir-woods. A party of four,
including two women, was reported to have been there for a night -
all ramifications of the rich family of Basle. I studied the house
from the lake, which should have been nicely swept into ice-rinks,
but from lack of visitors was a heap of blown snow. The high old
walls of the back part were built straight from the water's edge. I
remember I tried a short cut through the grounds to the high-road and
was given 'Good afternoon' by a smiling German manservant. One way
and another I gathered there were a good many serving- men about the
place - too many for the infrequent guests. But beyond this I
discovered nothing.

Not that I was bored, for I had always Peter to turn to. He was
thinking a lot about South Africa, and the thing he liked best was to
go over with me every detail of our old expeditions. They belonged
to a life which he could think about without pain, whereas the war
was too near and bitter for him. He liked to hobble out-of-doors
after the darkness came and look at his old friends, the stars. He
called them by the words they use on the veld, and the first star of
morning he called the voorlooper - the little boy who inspans the
oxen - a name I had not heard for twenty years. Many a great yarn we
spun in the long evenings, but I always went to bed with a sore
heart. The longing in his eyes was too urgent, longing not for old
days or far countries, but for the health and strength which had once
been his pride.

One night I told him about Mary. 'She will be a happy mysie,' he
said, 'but you will need to be very clever with her, for women are
queer cattle and you and I don't know their ways. They tell me
English women do not cook and make clothes like our vrouws, so what
will she find to do? I doubt an idle woman will be like a mealie-fed
horse.'

It was no good explaining to him the kind of girl Mary was, for
that was a world entirely beyond his ken. But I could see that he
felt lonelier than ever at my news. So I told him of the house I
meant to have in England when the war was over - an old house in a
green hilly country, with fields that would carry four head of cattle
to the Morgan and furrows of clear water, and orchards of plums and
apples. 'And you will stay with us all the time,' I said. 'You will
have your own rooms and your own boy to look after you, and you will
help me to farm, and we will catch fish together, and shoot the wild
ducks when they come up from the pans in the evening. I have found a
better countryside than the Houtbosch, where you and I planned to
have a farm. It is a blessed and happy place, England.'

He shook his head. 'You are a kind man, Dick, but your pretty
mysie won't want an ugly old fellow like me hobbling about her house
... I do not think I will go back to Africa, for I should be sad
there in the sun. I will find a little place in England, and some
day I will visit you, old friend.'

That night his stoicism seemed for the first time to fail him.
He was silent for a long time and went early to bed, where I can
vouch for it he did not sleep. But he must have thought a lot in the
night time, for in the morning he had got himself in hand and was as
cheerful as a sandboy.

I watched his philosophy with amazement. It was far beyond
anything I could have compassed myself. He was so frail and so poor,
for he had never had anything in the world but his bodily fitness,
and he had lost that now. And remember, he had lost it after some
months of glittering happiness, for in the air he had found the
element for which he had been born. Sometimes he dropped a hint of
those days when he lived in the clouds and invented a new kind of
battle, and his voice always grew hoarse. I could see that he ached
with longing for their return. And yet he never had a word of
complaint. That was the ritual he had set himself, his point of
honour, and he faced the future with the same kind of courage as that
with which he had tackled a wild beast or Lensch himself. Only it
needed a far bigger brand of fortitude.

Another thing was that he had found religion. I doubt if that
is the right way to put it, for he had always had it. Men who live
in the wilds know they are in the hands of God. But his old kind had
been a tattered thing, more like heathen superstition, though it had
always kept him humble. But now he had taken to reading the Bible
and to thinking in his lonely nights, and he had got a creed of his
own. I dare say it was crude enough, I am sure it was unorthodox;
but if the proof of religion is that it gives a man a prop in bad
days, then Peter's was the real thing. He used to ferret about in
the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress - they were both equally
inspired in his eyes - and find texts which he interpreted in his own
way to meet his case. He took everything quite literally. What
happened three thousand years ago in Palestine might, for all he
minded, have been going on next door. I used to chaff him and tell
him that he was like the Kaiser, very good at fitting the Bible to
his purpose, but his sincerity was so complete that he only smiled.
I remember one night, when he had been thinking about his flying
days, he found a passage in Thessalonians about the dead rising to
meet their Lord in the air, and that cheered him a lot. Peter, I
could see, had the notion that his time here wouldn't be very long,
and he liked to think that when he got his release he would find once
more the old rapture.

Once, when I said something about his patience, he said he had
got to try to live up to Mr Standfast. He had fixed on that
character to follow, though he would have preferred Mr
Valiant-for-Truth if he had thought himself good enough. He used to
talk about Mr Standfast in his queer way as if he were a friend of us
both, like Blenkiron ... I tell you I was humbled out of all my
pride by the Sight of Peter, so uncomplaining and gentle and wise.
The Almighty Himself couldn't have made a prig out of him, and he
never would have thought of preaching. Only once did he give me
advice. I had always a liking for short cuts, and I was getting a
bit restive under the long inaction. One day when I expressed my
feelings on the matter, Peter upped and read from the Pilgrim's
Progress: 'Some also have wished that the next way to their Father's
house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either
hills or mountains to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there is
an end.'

All the same when we got into March and nothing happened I grew
pretty anxious. Blenkiron had said we were fighting against time,
and here were the weeks slipping away. His letters came
occasionally, always in the shape of communications from my aunt. One
told me that I would soon be out of a job, for Peter's repatriation
was just about through, and he might get his movement order any day.
Another spoke of my little cousin over the hills, and said that she
hoped soon to be going to a place called Santa Chiara in the Val
Saluzzana. I got out the map in a hurry and measured the distance
from there to St Anton and pored over the two roads thither - the
short one by the Staub Pass and the long one by the Marjolana. These
letters made me think that things were nearing a climax, but still no
instructions came. I had nothing to report in my own messages, I had
discovered nothing in the Pink Chalet but idle servants, I was not
even sure if the Pink Chalet were not a harmless villa, and I hadn't
come within a thousand miles of finding Chelius. All my desire to
imitate Peter's stoicism didn't prevent me from getting occasionally
rattled and despondent.

The one thing I could do was to keep fit, for I had a notion I
might soon want all my bodily strength. I had to keep up my pretence
of lameness in the daytime, so I used to take my exercise at night.
I would sleep in the afternoon, when Peter had his siesta, and then
about ten in the evening, after putting him to bed, I would slip
out-of-doors and go for a four or five hours' tramp. Wonderful were
those midnight wanderings. I pushed up through the snow-laden pines
to the ridges where the snow lay in great wreaths and scallops, till
I stood on a crest with a frozen world at my feet and above me a host
of glittering stars. Once on a night of full moon I reached the
glacier at the valley head, scrambled up the moraine to where the ice
began, and peered fearfully into the spectral crevasses. At such
hours I had the earth to myself, for there was not a sound except the
slipping of a burden of snow from the trees or the crack and rustle
which reminded me that a glacier was a moving river. The war seemed
very far away, and I felt the littleness of our human struggles, till
I thought of Peter turning from side to side to find ease in the
cottage far below me. Then I realized that the spirit of man was the
greatest thing in this spacious world ... I would get back about
three or four, have a bath in the water which had been warming in my
absence, and creep into bed, almost ashamed of having two sound legs,
when a better man a yard away had but one.

Oddly enough at these hours there seemed more life in the Pink
Chalet than by day. Once, tramping across the lake long after
midnight, I saw lights in the lake-front in windows which for
ordinary were blank and shuttered. Several times I cut across the
grounds, when the moon was dark. On one such occasion a great car
with no lights swept up the drive, and I heard low voices at the
door. Another time a man ran hastily past me, and entered the house
by a little door on the eastern side, which I had not before noticed
... Slowly the conviction began to grow on me that we were not wrong
in marking down this place, that things went on within it which it
deeply concerned us to discover. But I was puzzled to think of a
way. I might butt inside, but for all I knew it would be upsetting
Blenkiron's plans, for he had given me no instructions about
housebreaking. All this unsettled me worse than ever. I began to
lie awake planning some means of entrance ... I would be a peasant
from the next valley who had twisted his ankle ... I would go seeking
an imaginary cousin among the servants ... I would start a fire in
the place and have the doors flung open to zealous neighbours ...

And then suddenly I got instructions in a letter from
Blenkiron.

It came inside a parcel of warm socks that arrived from my kind
aunt. But the letter for me was not from her. It was in Blenkiron's
large sprawling hand and the style of it was all his own. He told me
that he had about finished his job. He had got his line on Chelius,
who was the bird he expected, and that bird would soon wing its way
southward across the mountains for the reason I knew of.

'We've got an almighty move on,' he wrote, 'and please God
you're going to hustle some in the next week. It's going better than
I ever hoped.' But something was still to be done. He had struck a
countryman, one Clarence Donne, a journalist of Kansas City, whom he
had taken into the business. Him he described as a 'crackerjack' and
commended to my esteem. He was coming to St Anton, for there was a
game afoot at the Pink Chalet, which he would give me news of. I was
to meet him next evening at nine- fifteen at the little door in the
east end of the house. 'For the love of Mike, Dick,' he concluded,
'be on time and do everything Clarence tells you as if he was me.
It's a mighty complex affair, but you and he have sand enough to pull
through. Don't worry about your little cousin. She's safe and out
of the job now.'

My first feeling was one of immense relief, especially at the
last words. I read the letter a dozen times to make sure I had its
meaning. A flash of suspicion crossed my mind that it might be a
fake, principally because there was no mention of Peter, who had
figured large in the other missives. But why should Peter be
mentioned when he wasn't on in this piece? The signature convinced
me. Ordinarily Blenkiron signed himself in full with a fine
commercial flourish. But when I was at the Front he had got into the
habit of making a kind of hieroglyphic of his surname to me and
sticking J.S. after it in a bracket. That was how this letter was
signed, and it was sure proof it was all right. I spent that day and
the next in wild spirits. Peter spotted what was on, though I did
not tell him for fear of making him envious. I had to be extra kind
to him, for I could see that he ached to have a hand in the business.
Indeed he asked shyly if I couldn't fit him in, and I had to lie
about it and say it was only another of my aimless circumnavigations
of the Pink Chalet.

'Try and find something where I can help,' he pleaded. 'I'm
pretty strong still, though I'm lame, and I can shoot a bit.'

I declared that he would be used in time, that Blenkiron had
promised he would be used, but for the life of me I couldn't see
how.

At nine o'clock on the evening appointed I was on the lake
opposite the house, close in under the shore, making my way to the
rendezvous. It was a coal-black night, for though the air was clear
the stars were shining with little light, and the moon had not yet
risen. With a premonition that I might be long away from food, I had
brought some slabs of chocolate, and my pistol and torch were in my
pocket. It was bitter cold, but I had ceased to mind weather, and I
wore my one suit and no overcoat.

The house was like a tomb for silence. There was no crack of
light anywhere, and none of those smells of smoke and food which
proclaim habitation. It was an eerie job scrambling up the steep
bank east of the place, to where the flat of the garden started, in a
darkness so great that I had to grope my way like a blind man.

I found the little door by feeling along the edge of the
building. Then I stepped into an adjacent clump of laurels to wait on
my companion. He was there before me.

'Say,' I heard a rich Middle West voice whisper, 'are you Joseph
Zimmer? I'm not shouting any names, but I guess you are the guy I was
told to meet here.'

'Mr Donne?' I whispered back.

'The same,'he replied. 'Shake.'

I gripped a gloved and mittened hand which drew me towards the
door.