“Well, but what about—oh, sod being a gentleman! Sorry to be sordid, Uncle Jack, but—am I paid anything?”
“As I told you, this is something of a sideline, and we haven’t any appropriation for it. But I think you may count on something eventually. Anyhow, you needn’t pretend to me that you need money. I’ve heard about your grandfather’s will. Your father mentioned it in a letter.”
“I see. I’m in training, as it were?”
“No; it’s a real job. But take my advice, Frank, don’t fuss about money. The profession is run on a shoestring, and there are lots of people fighting for a quarter-inch of the string already. When there’s anything for you, you can rely on me to let you know. But if there’s no money, I can at least offer you some information. We know where Charlie Fremantle is.”
“Is she with him?”
“I suppose so. He’s in a very hot place to be at the moment. If those two are counting on a peaceful old age, they’re out of their minds. Oh, and your friend Buys-Bozzaris is dead.”
“What? How?”
“Carelessness. Actually he was a futile agent, and his recruiting was a joke; Charlie Fremantle was the only fish he caught, and even Charlie—who is an idiot—managed to cheat him about some gambling money. So Basil found himself in what we might call an untenable position, and it looks as if he shot himself.”
“I don’t believe it. I doubt if he could hit himself—on purpose, anyhow.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps he had expert assistance—Well, anything more?”
“Just a matter of curiosity, Uncle Jack. These goods vans—these freight cars—what’s in them?”
“People.”
Your man was lucky to be quit of Ismay, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–My man was lucky to have known her, said the Daimon Maimas. She doesn’t show up well in Francis’s story: an unscrupulous little sexual teaser and a crook about money; if she had stayed with him, what sort of cat-and-dog life would they have had? They would have torn one another apart and quite soon she would have betrayed him with somebody. But she thought herself a free agent, and that always leads to trouble.
–Oh quite. She was really an adjunct of Charlie Fremantle; one aspect of his fate. Odd, isn’t it, that these adventurous, feather-brained fools like Charlie always have some woman who is ready to put up with anything to serve him and his folly? My records show it again and again.
–What lies before her in Spain? Scampering around from one squalid, endangered hovel to another, always under threat, often under gunfire, imagining she is serving the people’s cause—which neither she nor Charlie could have defined—but really just Charlie’s woman and slave. If pity lay in my sphere, said the Daimon, I think I should pity her.
–But pity is not in your sphere, brother. You don’t even pity poor Francis, who broke his heart over her.
–Certainly not. A heart is never really stout until it has broken and mended at least once. Francis might be grateful to me for finding him such an interesting heart-breaker. Lots of men break their hearts over women who are no more interesting than turnips.
–Yet he knew she was no good. Not to him, anyway. What was she to him?
–Surely you remember how, in his bedroom at Blairlogie, he used to posture in front of his mirror, rigged up as a sort of woman? Searching for the Mystical Marriage, though he didn’t know it; looking for the woman in himself, for the completion of himself, and he thought he had found it in Ismay. And he most certainly did find part of it in Ismay, for she was what he was not, she had qualities he would never possess, and she had the beauty and the sluttish irresistible charm to make him love her whatever she did, and whatever he knew about her. I think I did rather well in enlarging his life with Ismay.
–As when she told him he was the kind of man things happened to, and not the kind that made them happen?
–Oh, come, brother, you were not taken in by that old chestnut, were you? You know as well as I that people often make the most astonishing reversals of what seems to be their basic nature, when they are compelled to do it. Really, my dear colleague, you astonish me! I don’t wish to be offensive, but here we are, a couple of Minor Immortals, watching Francis’s life unfold before us, as you have it filed away in your archive, and yet sometimes you talk as if we were no wiser than a pair of human beings watching television, where the unexpected, the unpredictable is rigorously forbidden to happen. The laws of such melodrama are not binding on us, brother. You have typed Francis, and you talk of Ismay as if she were vanished forever. As for me, you seem to degrade me to the level of that detestable theological fraud, a Guardian Angel! Come, come!
–Don’t scold, brother. I am sorry if I have appeared to underestimate your daimonic role in this affair. But I have so much to do with mortals that sometimes I think a little of their sentimentality is rubbing off on me.
–Don’t be distracted by trivialities, said the Daimon Maimas. What do the theologians say? Circumcise yourself as to the heart and not as to the foreskin. And never neglect what is bred in the bone. Do you think it was bred in Francis to be a victim all his life? How would that reflect on me? As a rather superior mortal once said to a sentimental friend, Clear your mind of cant! Shall we continue?
Part Five
Click-clack… click-clack… twenty-four repetitions of the sound, and a melancholy toot as if from an entirely innocent Bummelzug passing over a switch-point. But why would an innocent Bummelzug be rumbling through the Bavarian countryside at half past eleven at night, when all decent freight-trains were at rest on their sidings? Twenty-four click-clacks meant twelve vans. Twelve vans, loaded, perhaps, with people, were being hauled to the internment camp that lay obscurely in a nearby valley.
Francis made a note in the book he carried always in his breast pocket. Tomorrow he would write to Sir Owen Williams-Owen in Harley Street, to report on the condition of his heartbeat under particular conditions of stress. This was the first such observation he had made during his first week at Schloss Düsterstein. It was providential that his bedroom lay on the side of the great house that was nearest to the railway line.
The great house had been a surprise—was still a surprise, after a week’s exploration. To begin, in spite of its name it was not particularly suggestive of melancholy. Old it unquestionably was, and large even as country houses go, but its chief quality was that of the centre of a large farming district, and on its own lands and tenant-farms adjacent the Gräfin von Ingelheim conducted a big agricultural industry with exemplary efficiency. Motor trucks took vegetables, fowls, and veal or pork every week to the railway that carried them on to Munich, where wholesale dealers awaited them, and distributed them to a number of hotels, restaurants, and butchers. In a wine of the castle was an office from which the farms were managed and the dispatching of the foodstuffs was arranged, probably in some of the goods vans that now and then visited the camp in the hills. Schloss Düsterstein was, as agricultural matters go, big business.
Castle it was called, but there was nothing of the medieval fortress about it. There were reminders of the seventeenth century and a large square tower that was considerably earlier, but its appearance and plan were of the latter part of the eighteenth century; if shabby in some of its details and furnishings—the sort of shabbiness that suggests an aristocratic indifference to newfangledness rather than poverty—it was comfortable and as pleasant as a decidedly grand house could be. It was not domestic in the English sense, but it was not a comfortless imitation of a French chateau, either. Francis’s bedroom, for instance: a heavily furnished room so large that the big bed seemed accidental rather than central, with armchairs and a desk and plenty of room for all his artist’s equipment, and in one corner a large and fine porcelain stove. True, he washed in a little closet concealed in one of the walls, to which hot water was brought through an inner passage, so that he never saw the servant who carried it; but the ewer and basin, the two large chamber-pots, and the slop-pail were of an expensive eighteenth-century china, marked with the crest of Ingelheim. Slops were spirited away every day by means of the same inner passage. Baths were to be taken in a large chamber set out with Empire furniture and a marble tub of almost Roman aspect, into which rather rusty water gushed through huge brass taps; it was a long walk from the bedroom, but as an Oxford man Francis was accustomed to distant baths.