A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

day he began to bestir himself and asked about his next job.

      “Ha!” cried the delighted Lassom. “For this I have been waiting. You are cured now, and we talk business. In your next job you enter Germany with the approbation of her Imperial Government. You will be a Danish commis-voyageur, who is confided in by the authorities. You will give these authorities information, and most of it will be true—but not all. You will likewise gather information, which must all be true. You will not be alone as in Flanders, for I accompany you. But for the purpose it is necessary that we approach the Fatherland by what you call a voluptuous curve. Next week we cross the Skager Rack.

      “You have been happy these last days,” Lassom said that night after supper. “Your eyes bear witness. You have been seeing pretty pictures. Tell me.”

      Then for the first time Adam told another of Eilean Bàn—not much, only a sentence or two about his childhood’s home, and its lonely peace. But Lassom understood.

      “Ah,” he said, “it is as I guessed. We have each our Jerusalem.”

      The two men had a difficult journey, mostly in coasting smacks, whose skippers demanded a great price before they would tempt the infested seas. In the end they reached Gothenburg, where a noted merchant of the place, who had a Scots name, but whose family had been Swedish for three centuries, assisted them to a change in their mode of life. Adam became a high-coloured business man in early middle age, who wore horn spectacles like an American—he professed to have been much in America—dressed carefully, and had a neat blond moustache. He spoke Swedish like a Dane, said his host. He travelled in wood-pulp propositions, and was minutely instructed in the business by the merchant with the Scots name. Presently he knew enough to talk technicalities, and he met at dinner various local citizens in the same line of business, to whom he paraded his experiences in Britain, Canada, and the States. Lassom also was different. He had let his beard grow, and had trimmed it to a point, and he too wore glasses. He was an American citizen of German descent, and of an extreme German patriotism—by profession a lecturer in chemistry at a Middle Western university. His country’s entry into the war on the Allied side had left him without a home, and driven him for comfort to pure science. He had much to say of new processes in the making of chemical wood-pulp, which he hoped to perfect. Altogether a gentle academic figure, who woke up now and then to deliver an impassioned harangue on the wickedness of the world.

      The two went to Stockholm at different times and by different routes. In that city of the isles Adam found himself in a society which was strongly sympathetic to Germany, and he met many unobtrusive folk in whom it was easy to recognise German agents. Presently with some of them he began to have highly confidential conversations, especially when Lassom arrived, for Lassom seemed to have a vast acquaintanceship. One day in an office on the top floor of a fine new apartment-house he had an interview with a thin, grey-bearded man, who spoke openly of his visiting Germany. “It can be arranged,” he was told, “for one who is discreet and well-accredited, such as you, Herr Randers.” He bent his brows on Adam, and his small bright eyes seemed to hold a world of menace and warning. “You are neutral, yes,” he continued, “but neutrality is no protection for the bungler—or the traitor.” He gave him certain provisional instructions with the same heavily charged voice and the same lowering brows.

      Lassom, when he was told of the interview, laughed. “That is according to plan,” he said. “That is he whom we call the Cossack. Formidable, is he not? He has also another name and a number, for he is one of us. He is a Czech, and the Czechs, having no fatherland at present, are the greatest secret agents in this war.”

      Then they went to Copenhagen, a precarious journey, and in Copenhagen Adam spent two weeks of crowded busyness. His Danish was fluent, but, said his friends, the speech of a man who had been much about the world and had picked up uncouth idioms. But oftenest he found himself talking German, for that tongue was favoured by the men—and women—whom he met by appointment at odd hours in back rooms in hotels and suburban tea-houses and private flats. Lassom did not appear at these conferences, but he was always at hand to advise. “It is necessary that you have open communications behind you,” he said, “for you are a channel between an enclosed Germany and the world—one of a thousand channels. You must have a conduit both for your exports and your imports.”

      Adam met, too, many people in Copenhagen who made no secret of their sympathy with the Allies, and with such he had to be on his best behaviour. The florid bagman had no bias one way or another; the war was not his war, and would to Heaven it was over, that honest men might get to work again! “These folk do not like you,” Lassom told him, “but it is necessary that the others should know that you have access to their company… Now, my friend, to work. There is much to talk over between us, for the day after to-morrow you cross the frontier.”

      Adam left Copenhagen alone. But, when five days later he sat in the lounge of a Cologne hotel, he saw Lassom at the other side of the room behind a newspaper.

      Flanders had been lonely enough, but this new life was a howling desert for Adam, because he could not even keep company with himself. For every waking hour he was on the stretch, since he lived in the midst of a crowd and had to maintain a tight clutch on his wits. No more days and nights of wandering when he could forget for a little the anxieties of his task. His existence was passed in a glare like that of an arc-lamp.

      Lassom he saw regularly, but only for hurried moments, for Lassom was constantly on the road. He recrossed the Dutch and Danish frontiers frequently; sometimes the Swiss too, for he was busy in mysterious negotiations with neutrals on the supply of vital chemicals. Adam himself had a double rôle. He was supposed to be engaged in various branches of neutral trade, and carried samples which, with Lassom’s assistance, were periodically renewed. But his main task in the eyes of the authorities was to be the means of bringing them news through neighbouring countries of the Allied plans. This meant that he, too, occasionally passed the borders, and was fed with tit-bits of confidential information by several people in Zurich and Copenhagen. These tit-bits were mostly of small importance, but they were invariably true, and their accuracy was his prime credential. But now and then came pieces of weightier news, which he made a point of offering diffidently, as if not perfectly sure of their source. Yet, on the credit of the many accurate details he had furnished, these other things were as a rule believed—and acted upon—and their falsity did not shake his credit. For example, there was the report of a British attack due at Lens in February, ‘18, which led to a wasteful and futile German concentration.

      That was one side. The other was not known to the stiff soldiers who received him for regular conferences and treated him so condescendingly. All the time he was busy collecting knowledge for export—knowledge of the condition of the people and the state of the popular mind, and word of military operations, which great folk sometimes discussed in highly technical language in his presence, believing them beyond his comprehension. It was Adam’s news that largely filled those desperately secret reports on Germany’s internal condition which circulated among the inner Cabinets of the Allies. Now and then he sent them fateful stuff—the story, for instance, of the exact sector and day of the great German assault of March, ‘18, which the British staff alone believed. Lassom was the principal agency for getting this information out of Germany, but sometimes impersonal means had to be found—sealed Kodak films, the inner packets of chewing-gum, whatever, in the hands of innocent-looking returning nationals, might be trusted to escape the eye of the frontier guards.

      Adam had still another task. There was much ingenious Allied propaganda already circulating in the country, based for the most part on Switzerland. It was not anti-German but anti-war, and its distributors were largely members of the Socialist Left Wing. He had to keep an eye on this, and now and then to direct it. It was a delicate business, for it would have been ruin to one of his antecedents to be seen speaking to the intellectuals of the pavement. Yet this was the only duty from which he extracted any comfort, for each encounter involved a direct personal risk which steadied his nerves.

      For the rest he hated his work bitterly—far more bitterly than at any moment of his years in Flanders. There was no groove to get into where one could move automatically, since every day, almost every hour, demanded a new concentration of his powers. It was work which he loathed, dirty