Bab Bab 3 · Chapter III The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

. Chapter III The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

I had a solemn time travelling north that day. It was fine May weather,

with the hawthorn flowering on every hedge, and I asked myself why,

when I was still a free man, I had stayed on in London and not got the

good of this heavenly country. I didn’t dare face the restaurant car,

but I got a luncheon-basket at Leeds and shared it with the fat woman.

Also I got the morning’s papers, with news about starters for the Derby

and the beginning of the cricket season, and some paragraphs about how

Balkan affairs were settling down and a British squadron was going to

Kiel.

When I had done with them I got out Scudder’s little black pocket-book

and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings, chiefly

figures, though now and then a name was printed in. For example, I

found the words “Hofgaard”, “Luneville”, and “Avocado” pretty often,

and especially the word “Pavia”.

Now I was certain that Scudder never did anything without a reason, and

I was pretty sure that there was a cypher in all this. That is a

subject which has always interested me, and I did a bit at it myself

once as intelligence officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War. I have

a head for things like chess and puzzles, and I used to reckon myself

pretty good at finding out cyphers. This one looked like the numerical

kind where sets of figures correspond to the letters of the alphabet,

but any fairly shrewd man can find the clue to that sort after an hour

or two’s work, and I didn’t think Scudder would have been content with

anything so easy. So I fastened on the printed words, for you can make

a pretty good numerical cypher if you have a key word which gives you

the sequence of the letters.

I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell asleep

and woke at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into the slow

Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn’t

like, but he never glanced at me, and when I caught sight of myself in

the mirror of an automatic machine I didn’t wonder. With my brown face,

my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was the very model of one of the hill

farmers who were crowding into the third-class carriages.

I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes.

They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of

prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and

the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters. Above half the men had

lunched heavily and were highly flavoured with whisky, so they took no

notice of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and

then to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high

blue hills showing northwards.

About five o’clock the carriage had emptied, and I was left alone as I

had hoped. I got out at the next station, a little place whose name I

scarcely noted, set right in the heart of a bog. It reminded me of one

of those forgotten little stations in the Karroo. An old station-master

was digging in his garden, and with his spade over his shoulder

sauntered to the train, took charge of a parcel, and went back to his

potatoes. A child of ten received my ticket, and I emerged on a white

road that straggled over the brown moor.

It was a gorgeous spring evening, with every hill showing as clear as a

cut amethyst. The air had the queer, rooty smell of bogs, but it was as

fresh as mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I

actually felt light-hearted. I might have been a boy out for a spring

holiday tramp, instead of a man of thirty-seven very much wanted by the

police. I felt just as I used to feel when I was starting for a big

trek on a frosty morning on the high veld. If you believe me, I swung

along that road whistling. There was no plan of campaign in my head,

only just to go on and on in this blessed, honest-smelling hill

country, for every mile put me in better humour with myself.

In a roadside planting I cut a walking-stick of hazel, and presently

struck off the highway up a by-path which followed the glen of a

brawling stream. I reckoned that I was still far ahead of any pursuit,

and for that night might please myself. It was some hours since I had

tasted food, and I was getting very hungry when I came to a herd’s

cottage set in a nook beside a waterfall. A brown-faced woman was

standing by the door, and greeted me with the kindly shyness of

moorland places. When I asked for a night’s lodging she said I was

welcome to the “bed in the loft”, and very soon she set before me a

hearty meal of ham and eggs, scones, and thick sweet milk.

At the darkening her man came in from the hills, a lean giant, who in

one step covered as much ground as three paces of ordinary mortals.

They asked me no questions, for they had the perfect breeding of all

dwellers in the wilds, but I could see they set me down as a kind of

dealer, and I took some trouble to confirm their view. I spoke a lot

about cattle, of which my host knew little, and I picked up from him a

good deal about the local Galloway markets, which I tucked away in my

memory for future use. At ten I was nodding in my chair, and the “bed

in the loft” received a weary man who never opened his eyes till five

o’clock set the little homestead a-going once more.

They refused any payment, and by six I had breakfasted and was striding

southwards again. My notion was to return to the railway line a station

or two farther on than the place where I had alighted yesterday and to

double back. I reckoned that that was the safest way, for the police

would naturally assume that I was always making farther from London in

the direction of some western port. I thought I had still a good bit of

a start, for, as I reasoned, it would take some hours to fix the blame

on me, and several more to identify the fellow who got on board the

train at St Pancras.

It was the same jolly, clear spring weather, and I simply could not

contrive to feel careworn. Indeed I was in better spirits than I had

been for months. Over a long ridge of moorland I took my road, skirting

the side of a high hill which the herd had called Cairnsmore of Fleet.

Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere, and the links of

green pasture by the streams were dotted with young lambs. All the

slackness of the past months was slipping from my bones, and I stepped

out like a four-year-old. By-and-by I came to a swell of moorland which

dipped to the vale of a little river, and a mile away in the heather I

saw the smoke of a train.

The station, when I reached it, proved to be ideal for my purpose. The

moor surged up around it and left room only for the single line, the

slender siding, a waiting-room, an office, the station-master’s

cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william. There

seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the desolation the

waves of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach half a mile away. I

waited in the deep heather till I saw the smoke of an east-going train

on the horizon. Then I approached the tiny booking-office and took a

ticket for Dumfries.

The only occupants of the carriage were an old shepherd and his dog—a

wall-eyed brute that I mistrusted. The man was asleep, and on the

cushions beside him was that morning’s _Scotsman_. Eagerly I seized on

it, for I fancied it would tell me something.

There were two columns about the Portland Place Murder, as it was

called. My man Paddock had given the alarm and had the milkman

arrested. Poor devil, it looked as if the latter had earned his

sovereign hardly; but for me he had been cheap at the price, for he

seemed to have occupied the police for the better part of the day. In

the latest news I found a further instalment of the story. The milkman

had been released, I read, and the true criminal, about whose identity

the police were reticent, was believed to have got away from London by

one of the northern lines. There was a short note about me as the owner

of the flat. I guessed the police had stuck that in, as a clumsy

contrivance to persuade me that I was unsuspected.

There was nothing else in the paper, nothing about foreign politics or

Karolides, or the things that had interested Scudder. I laid it down,

and found that we were approaching the station at which I had got out

yesterday. The potato-digging station-master had been gingered up into

some activity, for the west-going train was waiting to let us pass, and

from it had descended three men who were asking him questions. I

supposed that they were the local police, who had been stirred up by

Scotland Yard, and had traced me as far as this one-horse siding.

Sitting well back in the shadow I watched them carefully. One of them

had a book, and took down notes. The old potato-digger seemed to have

turned peevish, but the child who had collected my ticket was talking

volubly. All the party looked out across the moor where the white road

departed. I hoped they were going to take up my tracks there.

As we moved away from that station my companion woke up. He fixed me

with a wandering glance, kicked his dog viciously, and inquired where

he was. Clearly he was very drunk.

“That’s what comes o’ bein’ a teetotaller,” he observed in bitter

regret.

I expressed my surprise that in him I should have met a blue-ribbon

stalwart.

“Ay, but I’m a strong teetotaller,” he said pugnaciously. “I took the

pledge last Martinmas, and I havena touched a drop o’ whisky sinsyne.

Not even at Hogmanay, though I was sair temptit.”

He swung his heels up on the seat, and burrowed a frowsy head into the

cushions.

“And that’s a’ I get,” he moaned. “A heid better than hell fire, and

twae een lookin’ different ways for the Sabbath.”

“What did it?” I asked.

“A drink they ca’ brandy. Bein’ a teetotaller I keepit off the whisky,

but I was nip-nippin’ a’ day at this brandy, and I doubt I’ll no be

weel for a fortnicht.” His voice died away into a splutter, and sleep

once more laid its heavy hand on him.

My plan had been to get out at some station down the line, but the

train suddenly gave me a better chance, for it came to a standstill at

the end of a culvert which spanned a brawling porter-coloured river. I

looked out and saw that every carriage window was closed and no human

figure appeared in the landscape. So I opened the door, and dropped

quickly into the tangle of hazels which edged the line.

It would have been all right but for that infernal dog. Under the

impression that I was decamping with its master’s belongings, it

started to bark, and all but got me by the trousers. This woke up the

herd, who stood bawling at the carriage door in the belief that I had

committed suicide. I crawled through the thicket, reached the edge of

the stream, and in cover of the bushes put a hundred yards or so behind

me. Then from my shelter I peered back, and saw the guard and several

passengers gathered round the open carriage door and staring in my

direction. I could not have made a more public departure if I had left

with a bugler and a brass band.

Happily the drunken herd provided a diversion. He and his dog, which

was attached by a rope to his waist, suddenly cascaded out of the

carriage, landed on their heads on the track, and rolled some way down

the bank towards the water. In the rescue which followed the dog bit

somebody, for I could hear the sound of hard swearing. Presently they

had forgotten me, and when after a quarter of a mile’s crawl I ventured

to look back, the train had started again and was vanishing in the

cutting.

I was in a wide semicircle of moorland, with the brown river as radius,

and the high hills forming the northern circumference. There was not a

sign or sound of a human being, only the plashing water and the

interminable crying of curlews. Yet, oddly enough, for the first time I

felt the terror of the hunted on me. It was not the police that I

thought of, but the other folk, who knew that I knew Scudder’s secret

and dared not let me live. I was certain that they would pursue me with

a keenness and vigilance unknown to the British law, and that once

their grip closed on me I should find no mercy.

I looked back, but there was nothing in the landscape. The sun glinted

on the metals of the line and the wet stones in the stream, and you

could not have found a more peaceful sight in the world. Nevertheless I

started to run. Crouching low in the runnels of the bog, I ran till the

sweat blinded my eyes. The mood did not leave me till I had reached the

rim of mountain and flung myself panting on a ridge high above the

young waters of the brown river.

From my vantage-ground I could scan the whole moor right away to the

railway line and to the south of it where green fields took the place

of heather. I have eyes like a hawk, but I could see nothing moving in

the whole countryside. Then I looked east beyond the ridge and saw a

new kind of landscape—shallow green valleys with plentiful fir

plantations and the faint lines of dust which spoke of highroads. Last

of all I looked into the blue May sky, and there I saw that which set

my pulses racing....

Low down in the south a monoplane was climbing into the heavens. I was

as certain as if I had been told that that aeroplane was looking for

me, and that it did not belong to the police. For an hour or two I

watched it from a pit of heather. It flew low along the hill-tops, and

then in narrow circles over the valley up which I had come. Then it

seemed to change its mind, rose to a great height, and flew away back

to the south.

I did not like this espionage from the air, and I began to think less

well of the countryside I had chosen for a refuge. These heather hills

were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky, and I must find a

different kind of sanctuary. I looked with more satisfaction to the

green country beyond the ridge, for there I should find woods and stone

houses.

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon

of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I

followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and

presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in

the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet

was a young man.

He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled

eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the

place. Slowly he repeated—

As when a Gryphon through the wilderness

With wingèd step, o’er hill and moory dale

Pursues the Arimaspian.

He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant

sunburnt boyish face.

“Good evening to you,” he said gravely. “It’s a fine night for the

road.”

The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from

the house.

“Is that place an inn?” I asked.

“At your service,” he said politely. “I am the landlord, sir, and I

hope you will stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have had no

company for a week.”

I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my pipe. I

began to detect an ally.

“You’re young to be an innkeeper,” I said.

“My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there with

my grandmother. It’s a slow job for a young man, and it wasn’t my

choice of profession.”

“Which was?”

He actually blushed. “I want to write books,” he said.

“And what better chance could you ask?” I cried. “Man, I’ve often

thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in the

world.”

“Not now,” he said eagerly. “Maybe in the old days when you had

pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road.

But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of fat women, who

stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the shooting

tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that. I

want to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling

and Conrad. But the most I’ve done yet is to get some verses printed in

_Chambers’s Journal_.”

I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the brown

hills.

“I’ve knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn’t despise such a

hermitage. D’you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or

among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you’re rubbing shoulders with it at

this moment.”

“That’s what Kipling says,” he said, his eyes brightening, and he

quoted some verse about “Romance brings up the 9.15.”

“Here’s a true tale for you then,” I cried, “and a month from now you

can make a novel out of it.”

Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely

yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor

details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley, who had

had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang. They had

pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and were

now on my tracks.

I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn’t. I pictured a

flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching

days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my

life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the

Portland Place murder. “You’re looking for adventure,” I cried; “well,

you’ve found it here. The devils are after me, and the police are after

them. It’s a race that I mean to win.”

“By God!” he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, “it is all pure

Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.”

“You believe me,” I said gratefully.

“Of course I do,” and he held out his hand. “I believe everything out

of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”

He was very young, but he was the man for my money.

“I think they’re off my track for the moment, but I must lie close for

a couple of days. Can you take me in?”

He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the house. “You

can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I’ll see that

nobody blabs, either. And you’ll give me some more material about your

adventures?”

As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an engine.

There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend, the monoplane.

He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook over

the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was stacked

with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw the

grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called Margit

brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all hours. I

wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He had a motor

bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily paper, which

usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I told him to keep

his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange figures he saw, keeping

a special sharp look-out for motors and aeroplanes. Then I sat down in

real earnest to Scudder’s note-book.

He came back at midday with the _Scotsman_. There was nothing in it,

except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a

repetition of yesterday’s statement that the murderer had gone North.

But there was a long article, reprinted from the _Times_, about

Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no

mention of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the

afternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search for the cypher.

As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elaborate system of

experiments I had pretty well discovered what were the nulls and stops.

The trouble was the key word, and when I thought of the odd million

words he might have used I felt pretty hopeless. But about three

o’clock I had a sudden inspiration.

The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder had said it

was the key to the Karolides business, and it occurred to me to try it

on his cypher.

It worked. The five letters of “Julia” gave me the position of the

vowels. A was J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so represented

by X in the cypher. E was U=XXI, and so on. “Czechenyi’ gave me the

numerals for the principal consonants. I scribbled that scheme on a bit

of paper and sat down to read Scudder’s pages.

In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers that

drummed on the table.

I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming up the

glen towards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was the sound

of people alighting. There seemed to be two of them, men in aquascutums

and tweed caps.

Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes bright

with excitement.

“There’s two chaps below looking for you,” he whispered. “They’re in

the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked about you and

said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they described you jolly

well, down to your boots and shirt. I told them you had been here last

night and had gone off on a motor bicycle this morning, and one of the

chaps swore like a navvy.”

I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed thin

fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and lisped in

his talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my young friend

was positive.

I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they were

part of a letter—

... “Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he could not act for

a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now, especially as Karolides

is uncertain about his plans. But if Mr T. advises I will do the best

I....”

I manufactured it rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page of

a private letter.

“Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask them to

return it to me if they overtake me.”

Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping from

behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was slim, the

other was sleek; that was the most I could make of my reconnaissance.

The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. “Your paper woke them up,”

he said gleefully. “The dark fellow went as white as death and cursed

like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly. They paid for

their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn’t wait for change.”

“Now I’ll tell you what I want you to do,” I said. “Get on your bicycle

and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe the two

men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do with the

London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back, never

fear. Not tonight, for they’ll follow me forty miles along the road,

but first thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here bright and

early.”

He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder’s notes. When

he came back we dined together, and in common decency I had to let him

pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts and the Matabele

War, thinking all the while what tame businesses these were compared to

this I was now engaged in! When he went to bed I sat up and finished

Scudder. I smoked in a chair till daylight, for I could not sleep.

About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two constables and

a sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the innkeeper’s

instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes later I saw from my

window a second car come across the plateau from the opposite

direction. It did not come up to the inn, but stopped two hundred yards

off in the shelter of a patch of wood. I noticed that its occupants

carefully reversed it before leaving it. A minute or two later I heard

their steps on the gravel outside the window.

My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what happened. I had

a notion that, if I could bring the police and my other more dangerous

pursuers together, something might work out of it to my advantage. But

now I had a better idea. I scribbled a line of thanks to my host,

opened the window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush.

Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary

burn, and won the highroad on the far side of the patch of trees. There

stood the car, very spick and span in the morning sunlight, but with

the dust on her which told of a long journey. I started her, jumped

into the chauffeur’s seat, and stole gently out on to the plateau.

Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn, but the

wind seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.