Four Missionaries See Light in their Mission
A spasm of incredulity, a vast relief, and that sharp joy which comes
of reaction chased each other across my mind. I had come suddenly out
of very black waters into an unbelievable calm. I dropped into the
nearest chair and tried to grapple with something far beyond words.
“Sandy,” I said, as soon as I got my breath, “you’re an incarnate
devil. You’ve given Peter and me the fright of our lives.”
“It was the only way, Dick. If I hadn’t come mewing like a tom-cat at
your heels yesterday, Rasta would have had you long before you got to
your hotel. You two have given me a pretty anxious time, and it took
some doing to get you safe here. However, that is all over now. Make
yourselves at home, my children.”
“Over!” I cried incredulously, for my wits were still wool-gathering.
“What place is this?”
“You may call it my humble home”—it was Blenkiron’s sleek voice that
spoke. “We’ve been preparing for you, Major, but it was only yesterday
I heard of your friend.”
I introduced Peter.
“Mr Pienaar,” said Blenkiron, “pleased to meet you. Well, as I was
observing, you’re safe enough here, but you’ve cut it mighty fine.
Officially, a Dutchman called Brandt was to be arrested this afternoon
and handed over to the German authorities. When Germany begins to
trouble about that Dutchman she will find difficulty in getting the
body; but such are the languid ways of an Oriental despotism. Meantime
the Dutchman will be no more. He will have ceased upon the midnight
without pain, as your poet sings.”
“But I don’t understand,” I stammered. “Who arrested us?”
“My men,” said Sandy. “We have a bit of a graft here, and it wasn’t
difficult to manage it. Old Moellendorff will be nosing after the
business tomorrow, but he will find the mystery too deep for him. That
is the advantage of a Government run by a pack of adventurers. But, by
Jove, Dick, we hadn’t any time to spare. If Rasta had got you, or the
Germans had had the job of lifting you, your goose would have been
jolly well cooked. I had some unquiet hours this morning.”
The thing was too deep for me. I looked at Blenkiron, shuffling his
Patience cards with his old sleepy smile, and Sandy, dressed like some
bandit in melodrama, his lean face as brown as a nut, his bare arms all
tattooed with crimson rings, and the fox pelt drawn tight over brow and
ears. It was still a nightmare world, but the dream was getting
pleasanter. Peter said not a word, but I could see his eyes heavy with
his own thoughts.
Blenkiron hove himself from the sofa and waddled to a cupboard.
“You boys must be hungry,” he said. “My duo-denum has been giving me
hell as usual, and I don’t eat no more than a squirrel. But I laid in
some stores, for I guessed you would want to stoke up some after your
travels.”
He brought out a couple of Strassburg pies, a cheese, a cold chicken, a
loaf, and three bottles of champagne.
“Fizz,” said Sandy rapturously. “And a dry Heidsieck too! We’re in
luck, Dick, old man.”
I never ate a more welcome meal, for we had starved in that dirty
hotel. But I had still the old feeling of the hunted, and before I
began I asked about the door.
“That’s all right,” said Sandy. “My fellows are on the stair and at the
gate. If the _Metreb_ are in possession, you may bet that other people
will keep off. Your past is blotted out, clean vanished away, and you
begin tomorrow morning with a new sheet. Blenkiron’s the man you’ve got
to thank for that. He was pretty certain you’d get here, but he was
also certain that you’d arrive in a hurry with a good many inquirers
behind you. So he arranged that you should leak away and start fresh.”
“Your name is Richard Hanau,” Blenkiron said, “born in Cleveland, Ohio,
of German parentage on both sides. One of our brightest
mining-engineers, and the apple of Guggenheim’s eye. You arrived this
afternoon from Constanza, and I met you at the packet. The clothes for
the part are in your bedroom next door. But I guess all that can wait,
for I’m anxious to get to business. We’re not here on a joy-ride,
Major, so I reckon we’ll leave out the dime-novel adventures. I’m just
dying to hear them, but they’ll keep. I want to know how our mutual
inquiries have prospered.”
He gave Peter and me cigars, and we sat ourselves in armchairs in front
of the blaze. Sandy squatted cross-legged on the hearthrug and lit a
foul old briar pipe, which he extricated from some pouch among his
skins. And so began that conversation which had never been out of my
thoughts for four hectic weeks.
“If I presume to begin,” said Blenkiron, “it’s because I reckon my
story is the shortest. I have to confess to you, gentlemen, that I have
failed.”
He drew down the corners of his mouth till he looked a cross between a
music-hall comedian and a sick child.
“If you were looking for something in the root of the hedge, you
wouldn’t want to scour the road in a high-speed automobile. And still
less would you want to get a bird’s-eye view in an aeroplane. That
parable about fits my case. I have been in the clouds and I’ve been
scorching on the pikes, but what I was wanting was in the ditch all the
time, and I naturally missed it ... I had the wrong stunt, Major. I was
too high up and refined. I’ve been processing through Europe like
Barnum’s Circus, and living with generals and transparencies. Not that
I haven’t picked up a lot of noos, and got some very interesting
sidelights on high politics. But the thing I was after wasn’t to be
found on my beat, for those that knew it weren’t going to tell. In that
kind of society they don’t get drunk and blab after their tenth
cocktail. So I guess I’ve no contribution to make to quieting Sir
Walter Bullivant’s mind, except that he’s dead right. Yes, Sir, he has
hit the spot and rung the bell. There is a mighty miracle-working
proposition being floated in these parts, but the promoters are keeping
it to themselves. They aren’t taking in more than they can help on the
ground-floor.”
Blenkiron stopped to light a fresh cigar. He was leaner than when he
left London and there were pouches below his eyes. I fancy his journey
had not been as fur-lined as he made out. “I’ve found out one thing,
and that is, that the last dream Germany will part with is the control
of the Near East. That is what your statesmen don’t figure enough on.
She’ll give up Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine and Poland, but by God!
she’ll never give up the road to Mesopotamia till you have her by the
throat and make her drop it. Sir Walter is a pretty bright-eyed
citizen, and he sees it right enough. If the worst happens, Kaiser will
fling overboard a lot of ballast in Europe, and it will look like a big
victory for the Allies, but he won’t be beaten if he has the road to
the East safe. Germany’s like a scorpion: her sting’s in her tail, and
that tail stretches way down into Asia.
“I got that clear, and I also made out that it wasn’t going to be dead
easy for her to keep that tail healthy. Turkey’s a bit of an anxiety,
as you’ll soon discover. But Germany thinks she can manage it, and I
won’t say she can’t. It depends on the hand she holds, and she reckons
it a good one. I tried to find out, but they gave me nothing but
eyewash. I had to pretend to be satisfied, for the position of John S.
wasn’t so strong as to allow him to take liberties. If I asked one of
the highbrows he looked wise and spoke of the might of German arms and
German organization and German staff-work. I used to nod my head and
get enthusiastic about these stunts, but it was all soft soap. She has
a trick in hand—that much I know, but I’m darned if I can put a name to
it. I pray to God you boys have been cleverer.”
His tone was quite melancholy, and I was mean enough to feel rather
glad. He had been the professional with the best chance. It would be a
good joke if the amateur succeeded where the expert failed.
I looked at Sandy. He filled his pipe again, and pushed back his skin
cap from his brows. What with his long dishevelled hair, his high-boned
face, and stained eyebrows he had the appearance of some mad mullah.
“I went straight to Smyrna,” he said. “It wasn’t difficult, for you see
I had laid down a good many lines in former travels. I reached the town
as a Greek money-lender from the Fayum, but I had friends there I could
count on, and the same evening I was a Turkish gipsy, a member of the
most famous fraternity in Western Asia. I had long been a member, and
I’m blood-brother of the chief boss, so I stepped into the part ready
made. But I found out that the Company of the Rosy Hours was not what I
had known it in 1910. Then it had been all for the Young Turks and
reform; now it hankered after the old regime and was the last hope of
the Orthodox. It had no use for Enver and his friends, and it did not
regard with pleasure the _beaux yeux_ of the Teuton. It stood for Islam
and the old ways, and might be described as a Conservative-Nationalist
caucus. But it was uncommon powerful in the provinces, and Enver and
Talaat daren’t meddle with it. The dangerous thing about it was that it
said nothing and apparently did nothing. It just bided its time and
took notes.
“You can imagine that this was the very kind of crowd for my purpose. I
knew of old its little ways, for with all its orthodoxy it dabbled a
good deal in magic, and owed half its power to its atmosphere of the
uncanny. The Companions could dance the heart out of the ordinary Turk.
You saw a bit of one of our dances this afternoon, Dick—pretty good,
wasn’t it? They could go anywhere, and no questions asked. They knew
what the ordinary man was thinking, for they were the best intelligence
department in the Ottoman Empire—far better than Enver’s _Khafiyeh_.
And they were popular, too, for they had never bowed the knee to the
_Nemseh_—the Germans who are squeezing out the life-blood of the
Osmanli for their own ends. It would have been as much as the life of
the Committee or its German masters was worth to lay a hand on us, for
we clung together like leeches and we were not in the habit of sticking
at trifles.
“Well, you may imagine it wasn’t difficult for me to move where I
wanted. My dress and the pass-word franked me anywhere. I travelled
from Smyrna by the new railway to Panderma on the Marmora, and got
there just before Christmas. That was after Anzac and Suvla had been
evacuated, but I could hear the guns going hard at Cape Helles. From
Panderma I started to cross to Thrace in a coasting steamer. And there
an uncommon funny thing happened—I got torpedoed.
“It must have been about the last effort of a British submarine in
those waters. But she got us all right. She gave us ten minutes to take
to the boats, and then sent the blighted old packet and a fine cargo of
6-inch shells to the bottom. There weren’t many passengers, so it was
easy enough to get ashore in the ship’s boats. The submarine sat on the
surface watching us, as we wailed and howled in the true Oriental way,
and I saw the captain quite close in the conning-tower. Who do you
think it was? Tommy Elliot, who lives on the other side of the hill
from me at home.
“I gave Tommy the surprise of his life. As we bumped past him, I
started the ‘Flowers of the Forest’—the old version—on the antique
stringed instrument I carried, and I sang the words very plain. Tommy’s
eyes bulged out of his head, and he shouted at me in English to know
who the devil I was. I replied in the broadest Scots, which no man in
the submarine or in our boat could have understood a word of. ‘Maister
Tammy,’ I cried, ‘what for wad ye skail a dacent tinkler lad intil a
cauld sea? I’ll gie ye your kail through the reek for this ploy the
next time I forgaither wi’ ye on the tap o’ Caerdon.’
“Tommy spotted me in a second. He laughed till he cried, and as we
moved off shouted to me in the same language to ‘pit a stoot hert tae a
stey brae’. I hope to Heaven he had the sense not to tell my father, or
the old man will have had a fit. He never much approved of my
wanderings, and thought I was safely anchored in the battalion.
“Well, to make a long story short, I got to Constantinople, and pretty
soon found touch with Blenkiron. The rest you know. And now for
business. I have been fairly lucky—but no more, for I haven’t got to
the bottom of the thing nor anything like it. But I’ve solved the first
of Harry Bullivant’s riddles. I know the meaning of _Kasredin_.
“Sir Walter was right, as Blenkiron has told us. There’s a great
stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters. They
make no secret of it. Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one
was due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer
has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate
to its old glories and Islam to its old purity. His sayings are
everywhere in the Moslem world. All the orthodox believers have them by
heart. That is why they are enduring grinding poverty and preposterous
taxation, and that is why their young men are rolling up to the armies
and dying without complaint in Gallipoli and Transcaucasia. They
believe they are on the eve of a great deliverance.
“Now the first thing I found out was that the Young Turks had nothing
to do with this. They are unpopular and unorthodox, and no true Turks.
But Germany has. How, I don’t know, but I could see quite plainly that
in some subtle way Germany was regarded as a collaborator in the
movement. It is that belief that is keeping the present regime going.
The ordinary Turk loathes the Committee, but he has some queer
perverted expectation from Germany. It is not a case of Enver and the
rest carrying on their shoulders the unpopular Teuton; it is a case of
the Teuton carrying the unpopular Committee. And Germany’s graft is
just this and nothing more—that she has some hand in the coming of the
new deliverer.
“They talk about the thing quite openly. It is called the
_Kaába-i-hurriyeh_, the Palladium of Liberty. The prophet himself is
known as Zimrud—‘the Emerald’—and his four ministers are called also
after jewels—Sapphire, Ruby, Pearl, and Topaz. You will hear their
names as often in the talk of the towns and villages as you will hear
the names of generals in England. But no one knew where Zimrud was or
when he would reveal himself, though every week came his messages to
the faithful. All that I could learn was that he and his followers were
coming from the West.
“You will say, what about _Kasredin_? That puzzled me dreadfully, for
no one used the phrase. The Home of the Spirit! It is an obvious
cliche, just as in England some new sect might call itself the Church
of Christ. Only no one seemed to use it.
“But by and by I discovered that there was an inner and an outer circle
in this mystery. Every creed has an esoteric side which is kept from
the common herd. I struck this side in Constantinople. Now there is a
very famous Turkish _shaka_ called _Kasredin_, one of those old
half-comic miracle plays with an allegorical meaning which they call
_orta oyun_, and which take a week to read. That tale tells of the
coming of a prophet, and I found that the select of the faith spoke of
the new revelation in terms of it. The curious thing is that in that
tale the prophet is aided by one of the few women who play much part in
the hagiology of Islam. That is the point of the tale, and it is partly
a jest, but mainly a religious mystery. The prophet, too, is not called
Emerald.”
“I know,” I said; “he is called Greenmantle.”
Sandy scrambled to his feet, letting his pipe drop in the fireplace.
“Now how on earth did you find out that?” he cried.
Then I told them of Stumm and Gaudian and the whispered words I had not
been meant to hear. Blenkiron was giving me the benefit of a steady
stare, unusual from one who seemed always to have his eyes abstracted,
and Sandy had taken to ranging up and down the room.
“Germany’s in the heart of the plan. That is what I always thought. If
we’re to find the _Kaába-i-hurriyeh_ it is no good fossicking among the
Committee or in the Turkish provinces. The secret’s in Germany. Dick,
you should not have crossed the Danube.”
“That’s what I half feared,” I said. “But on the other hand it is
obvious that the thing must come east, and sooner rather than later. I
take it they can’t afford to delay too long before they deliver the
goods. If we can stick it out here we must hit the trail ... I’ve got
another bit of evidence. I have solved Harry Bullivant’s third puzzle.”
Sandy’s eyes were very bright and I had an audience on wires.
“Did you say that in the tale of _Kasredin_ a woman is the ally of the
prophet?”
“Yes,” said Sandy; “what of that?”
“Only that the same thing is true of Greenmantle. I can give you her
name.”
I fetched a piece of paper and a pencil from Blenkiron’s desk and
handed it to Sandy.
“Write down Harry Bullivant’s third word.”
He promptly wrote down “_v. I._”
Then I told them of the other name Stumm and Gaudian had spoken. I told
of my discovery as I lay in the woodman’s cottage.
“The ‘I’ is not the letter of the alphabet, but the numeral. The name
is Von Einem—Hilda von Einem.”
“Good old Harry,” said Sandy softly. “He was a dashed clever chap.
Hilda von Einem? Who and where is she? for if we find her we have done
the trick.”
Then Blenkiron spoke. “I reckon I can put you wise on that, gentlemen,”
he said. “I saw her no later than yesterday. She is a lovely lady. She
happens also to be the owner of this house.”
Both Sandy and I began to laugh. It was too comic to have stumbled
across Europe and lighted on the very headquarters of the puzzle we had
set out to unriddle.
But Blenkiron did not laugh. At the mention of Hilda von Einem he had
suddenly become very solemn, and the sight of his face pulled me up
short.
“I don’t like it, gentlemen,” he said. “I would rather you had
mentioned any other name on God’s earth. I haven’t been long in this
city, but I have been long enough to size up the various political
bosses. They haven’t much to them. I reckon they wouldn’t stand up
against what we could show them in the U-nited States. But I have met
the Frau von Einem, and that lady’s a very different proposition. The
man that will understand her has got to take a biggish size in hats.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Why, that is just what I can’t tell you. She was a great excavator of
Babylonish and Hittite ruins, and she married a diplomat who went to
glory three years back. It isn’t what she has been, but what she is,
and that’s a mighty clever woman.”
Blenkiron’s respect did not depress me. I felt as if at last we had got
our job narrowed to a decent compass, for I had hated casting about in
the dark. I asked where she lived.
“That I don’t know,” said Blenkiron. “You won’t find people unduly
anxious to gratify your natural curiosity about Frau von Einem.”
“I can find that out,” said Sandy. “That’s the advantage of having a
push like mine. Meantime, I’ve got to clear, for my day’s work isn’t
finished. Dick, you and Peter must go to bed at once.”
“Why?” I asked in amazement. Sandy spoke like a medical adviser.
“Because I want your clothes—the
things you’ve got on now. I’ll take them off with me and you’ll never
see them again.”
“You’ve a queer taste in souvenirs,” I said.
“Say rather the Turkish police. The current in the Bosporus is pretty
strong, and these sad relics of two misguided Dutchmen will be washed
up tomorrow about Seraglio Point. In this game you must drop the
curtain neat and pat at the end of each Scene, if you don’t want
trouble later with the missing heir and the family lawyer.”