A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

Jules the simpleton had, it appeared, been a spy—some said an Englishman—and a confederate had betrayed him. A damning message from him had been found, for it seemed he could write, and he had been drawn into rash talk by a woman in the German pay. Much of the leakage to the Allies of vital secrets had been traced to him. He would be taken soon, of course, and set up against a wall—there was no hope of escape from the fine-meshed net which enveloped the land. But the bravery of it! Many a villager wished he had been kinder to the angel they had entertained unawares, and dolefully awaited the news of his end.

      It did not come, for Jules seemed to have slipped out of the world. “He has been taken,” said one rumour. “He will be taken,” said all. But the best-informed knew nothing for certain. Only the discipline was uncomfortably tightened in the countryside, and the German officers looked darkly on every peasant they met. “Curse that Jules!” some began to say. “He has only made our bondage more burdensome.”

      Meantime Jules was far away. He had made his plans with care, and began by drawing the hunt northward as if he were making for Brussels. The first day he took pains to show himself at places from which the news could be carried. Then he doubled back to the Meuse valley, and in the dark, in a miller’s cellar, shaved his beard, and was transformed into a young woodcutter who spoke the patois of the hills and was tramping to Liège, with papers all complete, to a job in a timber yard. His plan was to change his appearance again in Liège, and, having muddied the trail, to get to Antwerp, where certain preparations had been made in advance.

      But on one point he had miscalculated. The chase became far closer than he had foreseen, for Belgium was suddenly stirred to a fury of spy-hunting. The real Jules had been lost sight of somewhere in the beet-fields of Gembloux, but every stranger was a possible Jules, and a man had to be well-accredited indeed before he could move a step without suspicion. He realised that he simply could not afford to be arrested, or even detained, so he was compelled to run desperate risks.

      The story of his month’s wanderings was never fully told, but these are the main points in it.

      In Liège the woodcutter only escaped arrest on suspicion by slipping into a little civilian hospital where he knew the matron, and being in bed with the blankets up to his chin and bandages round his forehead when the military police arrived in quest of him… He travelled by rail to Malines as a young doctor who had taken a Berlin degree, and was ready to discourse in excellent German on the superior medical science of the exalted country where he had had his training. At Malines there was danger, for his permit was not strictly in order, and he realised that five minutes’ cross-examination by a genuine doctor would expose the nakedness of the land. So he had to sink again into the gutter, and had a wretched week in a downpour of rain doing odd jobs among the market gardens, where there was a demand for labour. He was now a Dutch subject, speaking abominable French, and had been provided with papers by a little man who wore a skull-cap, was rarely sober, kept a disreputable pawnshop, and was known to certain people by a letter and a numeral…

      He tramped his way to Antwerp, and there suffered so severe an interrogation that he did not return for his permission de séjour. Instead he found lodging in a street near the docks, where his appearance was considerably improved by the attentions of a lady of doubtful fame who had many friends. He was still a Dutchman, but of a higher class, for he had now a good black coat and a white collar, and his papers showed that he was a clerk in a Rotterdam office, who had come to Antwerp on his firm’s business. He had permission to return to Holland, a permission which expired two days ahead.

      Then, as bad luck would have it, he fell ill—the first time in two years. The drenchings in the rain and the scanty food had reduced his vitality, and he caught some infection in his squalid lodgings. For twenty-four hours he was in a high fever, and when he rose he could scarcely stagger. He dared not delay. If he stayed he must go to hospital, and there he would suffer a stern inquisition. As it was, before he had the strength to move, he had outstayed by one day the limits of his permit… There was nothing for it but to take the risk. With a blinding headache, and legs that gave at the knees, and a deadly oppression on his chest, he took the tramway which jolted him to the frontier. There he was examined by the German post.

      “Back you go,” said the sergeant. “You have outstayed your permitted time. This permit must be corrected at the office of the Military Governor.”

      “Let him pass,” said another, who seemed to have more authority. “The Dutchman is sick—mortally sick. We have no use for another bloody consumptive.”

      The Dutch sentries did no more than glance at his papers. That afternoon he took the train for Rotterdam, drove to a good hotel, and sent a message to a man he knew. Then for the next month he descended into the pit of pneumonia and very slowly climbed up the farther side.

      Chapter 8

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      Adam took a long time to recover his strength. There were friends who came to sit with him when he was permitted to receive visitors, one especially who was of a family long settled in Java, and whose dark colouring and yellow-tinged eyeballs suggested a dash of native blood. He called himself Lassom, and seemed to be a man of influence, for he managed to procure little comforts which were hard to come by in that difficult time. On his watch-chain he wore a little amulet of ebony and silver. From him the convalescent got the first news of the progress of the war on all fronts, for hitherto he had been shut up in a narrow enclave. Lassom, whose name had been Macandrew in the office near Leadenhall Street, required an exact report of all that had happened during the past two years in the neighbourhood of Villers l’Evêque.

      Once an Englishman came to see Adam as he sat in a corner of the hotel balcony in the sunshine of early summer. “In the Army List,” he told him, “you still figure as a second-lieutenant on the Special List. That, however, may not be for long. By the way, they have given you a bar to your D.S.O. for your last performance. I take it that for some time you have been shooting at your limit, as the gunners say. Well, you won’t have anything so arduous for a bit—anyhow, till you’re fit again. Lassom will give you your instructions when you are ready, and will make all arrangements.”

      The Englishman was a friendly person, and showed himself ready to gossip, but the man whom he called John More seemed curiously uninterested. The news about the bar to his D.S.O. left him cold. The truth was that he was suffering from a heavy drop in mental vitality. He had been like a squirrel going steadily round a cage, and he found it hard to realise the world outside the bars, or to think of any other form of motion but the treadmill. The fact that so far he had succeeded gave him no satisfaction. Lassom divined his mood and took the best way of doctoring it. Having got the information he wanted, he strove to draw the convalescent out of the abyss of the immediate past and to wash from his memory the Raus farm and all it stood for. There were bigger duties before him, he said, and he tried to divert his thoughts, so to speak, from minor tactics to major strategy, thereby giving his mind new subjects to play with. But above all he looked after his body, and in the beginning of June carried him off to a village on the Texel coast.

      There, in a little painted wooden inn above the salty dunes, the invalid became whole again in mind and body. But it was not the wholesome food and the tonic sea winds that worked the cure, but the fact that he had recovered Eilean Bàn. Something in the tang of the air, the scents, and the crying of curlews along the shore did the trick, and Adam, who had long been excluded from the happy isle, found that once more his dreams and his waking visions carried him swiftly to its greenery… Nigel was there unchanged; it was two years since he had been able to see the child clearly, but now he heard his voice, felt the firm cool clutch of his hand, saw the grey eyes light up with recognition… The boy accompanied him in his rambles, a docile little figure trotting at his heels. It was to the west side of Sgurr Bàn that they went most often, where the magical western ocean always sounded in their ears. But they never came within actual sight of its waters, so he could not show Nigel the far skerries, the black ribs of wave-scourged basalt where the grey seals lived. There was always a ridge of hill or a thicket which shut off the view. But Adam felt no impatience. Some day he would cross