 Chapter 1 of the Three Hostages. This is a LiberVox recording. All LiberVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LiberVox.org. The Three Hostages by John Buchan. Chapter 1, Dr. Greenslade, Theorizes. That evening, I remember as it came up through the Mill Meadow. I was feeling particularly happy and contented. It was still mid-March. One of those spring days, when noon is like May, and the only cold, pearly haze at sunset, warns a man that he's not done with winter. The season was absurdly early, where the black thorn was in flower and the hedge roots were full of primroses. The partridges were paired, the rooks were there as well, with their nests, and the meadows were full of shimmering gray flocks of field fares on their way north. I put up a half a dozen snipe on the boggy edge of the stream, and in the bracken in stern wood, I thought I saw a woodcock. It hoped that the birds might nest with us this year, as they used to do so long ago. It was jolly to see the world coming to life again, and to remember that this patch of England was my own, in all these wild things, so to speak, members of my little household. As I say, I was in a very contented mood, for I'd found something I had longed for all my days. I had bought Fosse Manor just after the war as a wedding present for Mary, and after two and a half years, we had been settled there. My son, Peter John, was rising 15 months, a thoughtful infant, as healthy as a young colt, and as comic as a terrier puppy. Even Mary's anxious eye could scarcely detect in him any symptoms of decline, where the place wanted a lot of looking to, or it had run wild during the war, and the woods had to be thinned, gates and fences repaired, new drains laid, a ram put in to supplement the wells, a heap of thatching to be done, and the garden borders to be brought back to cultivation. I had got through the worst of it, and as I came out of the home wood on the lower lawns and saw the old stone gables that the monks had built, I felt that I was anchored at last in the pleasantest kind of arbor. There was a pile of letters on the table in the hall, but I let them be, for I was not in the mood for any communication with the outer world. As I was having a hot bath, Mary kept giving me the news through her bedroom door. Peter John had been raising cane over a first tooth. The new short horned cow was drying off. Old George Wadden had got his granddaughter back from service. There was a new brood of runner ducks, and there was a missile thrush building in the box hedge by the lake. A chronicle of small beer, you will say, but I was by a long chalk more interested in it than in what might be happening in parliament or Russia or the Hindu Kush. In fact, I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers. Many a day, the times would remain unopened, for Mary never looked at anything but the first page to see who was dead or married. Not that I didn't read a lot, for I used to spend my evenings digging into county history and learning all I could about the old fellows that had been my predecessors. I liked to think that I had lived in a place that had been continuously inhabited for a thousand years. Cavalier and Roundhead had fought over the countryside and I was becoming a considerable authority on their tiny battles. That was about the only interest I had left in soldiering. As we went downstairs, I remember we stopped to look out the long staircase window which showed a segment of lawn, a corner of the lake, and through a gap in the woods, a vista of green downland. Mary squeezed my arm. What a blessed country, she said. Dick, did you ever dream of such peace? We're lucky, lucky people. And suddenly her face changed, in that way she has. It grew very grave. I felt a shiver run along her arm. It's too good and beloved to last, she whispered. Sometimes I'm afraid. Nonsense. I laughed. What's going to upset it? I don't believe in being afraid of happiness. I knew very well, of course, that Mary couldn't be afraid of anything. She laughed too. All the same, I've got what the Greek called adepts. You don't know what that means, you old savage. It means that you feel you must walk humbly and delicately to appropriate the fates. I wish I knew how. She walked too delicately, for she missed the last step in our descent and ended in an undignified shuffle right into the arms of Dr. Greenslide. Paddock. I had got Paddock back after the war and he was now my butler, was helping the doctor out of his ussler. And I saw by the satisfied look on the latter's face that he was through his day's work and meant to stay to dinner. Here I had better introduce Tom Greenslade. For all my recent acquaintances, he was one I had most taken to. He was a long, lean fellow with a stoop in his back from bending over the handles of motor bicycles, with reddish hair and greeny blue eyes and freckled skin that often accompanied that of his hair. From his high cheekbones and his coloring, you would have set him down as a Scotsman. But as a matter of fact, he came from Devonshire, Exmor, I think, though he had been so much about the world that he had almost forgotten where he was raised. I had traveled a bit, but nothing to Greenslade. He had started as a doctor in a whaling ship then he had been in South Africa war and afterwards a temporary magistrate of Lindenburg Way. He soon tired of that and was for a long spell in Uganda and Germany East, where he became a rather swell on tropical diseases nearly perished through experimenting on himself with fancy inoculations. Then he was in South America where he had a good practice in Valparacio and then in the melee states where he made a bit of money in the rubber boom. There was a gap of three years after that he was wandering in Central Asia partly with a fellow called Ducklet, exploring through northern Mongolia and partly in Chinese Tibet, hunting for new flowers, for he was mad about botany. He came home in the summer of 1914, meaning to do some laboratory research work, but the war had swept him up and he went to France as M.O. of a territorial battalion. He got wounded of course and after a spell in the hospital went up to Mesopotamia where he stayed till Christmas of 1918 sweating hard at his job but managing to tumble into a lot of varied adventures. For he was at Baku with Dunsterville and he got as far as Tashkin where the Bolsheviks shot him out for a fortnight in a bathhouse. During the war he had every kind of sickness where he missed no experience but nothing seemed to damage permanently his whipcord physique. He told me that his heart and lungs and blood pressure were as good as a lads of 21, though by this time he was on the wrong side of 40, but when the war was over he hankered for a quiet life. So he bought a paractess in the deepest and greatest quarter of England. He said his motive was the same as which in the rackety middle ages made men retire into monasteries. He wanted quiet and leisure to consider his soul quiet he may have found but uncommon little leisure for I never heard of a country doctor that twilled at his job as he did. He would pay three visits a day to a panel patient which showed the kind of fellow he was and he would be out in the small hours the birth of a gypsy child under hedge. He was a first class man in his profession and kept a breast of it but doctoring was only one of a thousand interests. I never met a chap with such an insatiable curiosity about everything in heaven and earth. He lived in two rooms in a farmhouse some four miles from us and I dare say he had several thousand books about him. All day and often half the night he would scour the country in his little runabout car and yet when he would drop in to see me and have a drink after maybe 20 visits he was as full of beans as if he had got just out of bed. Nothing came amiss to him in talk birds, beasts, flowers, books, politics, religion, everything in the world except himself. He was the best sort of company for behind all his quickness and cleverness you felt that he was a solid bar gold. But for him I should have taken root in the soil and put out shoots where I have a fine natural talent for vegetating. Mary strongly approved of him and Peter John adored him. He was in tremendous spirits that evening for once in a way gave us reminiscence of his past. He told us about the people he badly wanted to see again. An Irish Spaniard up north of the Argentine who had for cattlemen a most murderous band of natives from the mountains whom he used to keep in good humor by arranging fights every Sunday. He himself taking on the survivor with his fists and always knocking him out. A Scots traitor from Hancau who had turned Buddhist priest and intoned his prayers with a strong Glasgow accent. Most of all a Malay pirate who he said was sort of Saint Francis with beasts little perfect neuro with his fellow men. That took him to Central Asia and he observed that if he ever left England again he would make for those parts since they were the refuge of all the superior rascality of creation. He had a notion that something very odd might happen there in the long run. Think of it he cried. All the places with names like spells, Wakara, Samarkand, run by seedy little gangs of communist Jews. It won't go on forever. Some day a new Guinness Kong or Timor will be thrown up out of the milestone. Europe is confused enough but Asia is ancient chaos. After dinner we sat around the fire in the library which I had modeled on Sir Walter Bullock Hunt's room in his place on the Kennet as I had promised myself seven years ago. I had meant it for my own room where I could write and read and smoke but Mary would not allow it. She had a jolly paneled sitting room of her own upstairs which she rarely entered. But though I chased her away she was like a hen in a garden. Noise came back so that presently she stopped out to proclaim on the other side of my writing table. I have the old hunter's notion of order but it was useless to strive with Mary. So now my desk was littered with her letters and needlework and Peter John's toys and picture books were stacked in the cabinet where I kept my flybooks. And Peter John himself used to make a crawl every morning inside an upturned stool on a hearth rug. It was a cold night and very pleasant by the fire side where some scented logs from an old pear tree were burning. The doctor picked up a detective novel I had been reading and glanced at the title page. I can read most things, he said, but it beats me how you waste time over such stuff. These shockers are too easy, Dick. You could invent better ones yourself. Not I. I call that a dashed ingenious yarn. I can't think how the fellow does it. Quite simple. The writer writes up the story inductively and the reader follows it deductively. Do you see what I mean? Not a bit, I replied. Look here. I want to write a shocker so I begin by fixing one or two facts which have no sort of obvious connection. For example, well imagine anything you like. Let us take three things in a long way apart. Pause for a second to consider. Say, an old blind woman spinning in the western highlands, a barn with a new region, satyr, and a little curiosity shop in north London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. Not much connection between the three. You invent a connection. Simple enough, if you have any imagination, you weave all three into the yarn. The reader, who knows nothing about the three at the start, is puzzled and intrigued. And if the story is well arranged, finally satisfied. He is pleased with the ingenuity at the solution, or he doesn't realize that the author fixed upon the solution first and then invented a problem to suit it. I see, I said. You've gone and taken the guilt off my favorite light reading. I won't be able anymore to marvel at the writer's cleverness. I've got another objection to the stuff. It's not ingenuous enough, or rather it doesn't take account of the infernal complexity of life. It might have been, alright, 20 years ago when most people argued and behaved fairly logically, but they don't nowadays. Have you ever realized, Dick, the amount of stark craziness that the war has left us in the world? Mary, who was sitting, sewing under a lamp, raised her head and laughed. Green Slade's face had become serious. I can speak about it frankly here, for you two are almost the only completely sane people I know. Well, as a pathologist, I'm fairly staggered. I hardly met a soul who hasn't got some slight kink in his brain as a consequence of the last seven years. With most people, it's a rather pleasant kink. They're less settled in their grooves, and they see the comic side of things quicker and are readier for adventure. But with some, it's puke madness, and that means crime. Now, are you going to write detective stories about that kind of world on old lines? You can take nothing for granted as you once could, and your argous-eyed, lightened brained expert has nothing solid with which to build his foundations. I observed that the poor old war seemed to be getting blamed for a good deal that I was taught in my childhood was due to original sin. Oh, I'm not questioning your Calvinism. Original sin is always there, but the meaning of civilization was that we had got it battered down under hatches, whereas now it's getting its head up. But it isn't only sin. It's a dislocation of the mechanics of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws. Oddly enough, in spite of parrot talk about shell shock, the men who fought suffer less from it than on the whole than other people. The classes that shrink the war are the worst. You see it in Ireland. Every doctor nowadays has got to be a bit of a mental pathologist. As I say, you can hardly take anything for granted, and if you want detective stories that are not childish fantasy, you'll have to invent a new kind. Better try your hand, Dick. Not I. I am the lover of sober facts. But hang it, man. The facts are no longer sober. I could tell you. He paused and I was expecting a yarn, but he changed his mind. Take all this chatter about psychoanalysis. There's nothing very new in the doctrine, but people are beginning to work it out into details and making considerable asses of themselves in the process. It's an awful thing when a scientific truth becomes a quarry of the half-baked, but as I say, the fact of the subconscious self is as certain as the existence of lungs and arteries. I don't believe that Dick has a subconscious self, said Mary. Oh yes he has. Only people who have led this kind of life. How their ordinary self so well-managed and disciplined, they're wit so much about them, as the phrase goes, that the subconscious rarely gets a show. But I bet if Dick took to thinking about his soul, which he never does, he would find some queer corners. Take my own case. He turned towards me so that I had full view of his candid eyes and hungry cheekbones, which looked prodigious in the firelight. I belong more or less to the same totem as you, but I've long been aware that I possessed a more curious kind of subconsciousness. I have a good memory and fair powers of observation, but they're nothing to those of my subconscious self. Take my daily incident. I see and hear about a twentieth part of the details and remember about a hundredth part. That is, assuming that there is nothing special to stimulate my interest. But my subconscious self sees and hears practically everything and remembers most of it. Only I can't use the memory, for I don't know if I've got it and can't call it into being when I wish. But every now and then something happens to turn on the tap of the subconscious, and a thin trickle comes through. I find myself sometimes remembering names I was never aware of having heard. In little incidents and details that I had never consciously noticed, imagination you will say, but it isn't. For everything that the inner memory provided is exactly true. I've tested it. I could only find some way of tapping it at will. I should be an uncommonly efficient fellow. Incidentally, I should become the first scientist of the age. For the trouble with investigation and experiment is that the ordinary brain does not observe sufficiently keenly or remember the data sufficiently accurately. That is interesting, I said. I am not at all certain I have noticed the same thing in myself, but what has that to do with the madness that you say is infecting the world? Simply this, the barriers between the conscious and the subconscious have always been pretty stiff in the average man, but now the general loosening up of screws, they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting mixed. It is like two separate tanks of fluid where the containing walls have worn into holes and one is percolating into the other. The result is confusion and if the fluids are of certain character, explosions. That is why that you can't any longer take the clear psychology of most civilized human beings for granted. Something is welling up from the permeable depths to muddy it. I don't object to that. I said we're overdone civilization and personally I'm all for a little barbarism and I want a simpler world. Then you won't get it, said Glenslite. He had become very serious now and was looking towards Mary as he talked. The civilized is far simpler than the permeable. All history has been in effort to make definitions clear rules of thought, clear rules of conduct, solid sanctions by which we can conduct our life. These are the work of the subconscious self. The subconscious is an elementary and lawless thing. If it intrudes on life, two results may follow. There will be a weakening of the power of reasoning. After all, the only thing that brings men nearest to the Almighty and there will be a failure of nerve. I got up to get a light for I was beginning to feel depressed by the doctor's diagnosis over times. I don't know whether he was altogether serious for he presently started on fishing, which was one of his many hobbies. There was a fair dry fly fishing to be had in a little river, but I had taken a deer forest with Archie Roylands for the season and Greenslite was coming up with me to try his hand at Salmon. There had been no sea trout the year before in the West Highlands and we fell to discussing the cause. He was ready with a dozen theories and we forgot about the psychology of mankind in investigating the uncanny psychology of fish. After that, Mary thanked us for I considered any evening of failure without that and at half past 10 the doctor got into his old uster and departed. As I smoked my last pipe, I found my thoughts going over Greenslite's talk. I had found a snug harbor but how yeasty the water seemed to be outside the bar and how erratic the tides. I wondered if it wasn't shrinking to be so comfortable in a comfortless world. Then I reflected that I was owed a little peace for I had a roughish life, but Mary's words kept coming back to me about walking delicately. I considered that my present conduct failed that bill where I was mightily thankful for my mercies and in no way inclined to tempt province by complacency. Going up to bed, I noticed my neglected letters on the hall table. I turned them over and saw that they were mostly bills and receipts or tradesman circulars. But there was one addressed in handwriting that I knew and I looked at it. I experienced a sudden sinking of the heart. It was from Lord Artenswell, Sir Walter Bullivant, as was who had now retired from the foreign office and was living at his place on Kennett. He and I occasionally corresponded about farming and fishing but I had premonition. This was something different and I waited for a second or two before I opened it. My dear Dick, this note is in the nature of a warning. In the next day or two you will be asked and they pressed to undertake a troublesome piece of business. I am not responsible for the request, but I know of it. If you consent, it will mean the end for a time of your happy vegetable life. I don't want to influence you one way or another. I only give you notice of what is coming in order that you may address to your mind and not be taken by surprise. My love to marry the son, yours. Hey, that was all. I had lost my trepidation and felt very angry. Why couldn't the fools let me alone? As I went upstairs I vowed that not all the cajolery of the world would make me budge an inch from the path I had set myself. I had done enough for the public service and other people's interest and it was jolly well time that I should be allowed to attend my own. End of chapter one. Chapter two of The Three Hostages by John Buchan. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter two, I hear of The Three Hostages. There is an odor about a country house, which I love better than any scent in the world. Mary used to say it was a mixture of lamp and dog and wood smoke. But at Fosse, where there was electric light and no dogs indoors, I fancy it was wood smoke, tobacco, the old walls, and wafts of the country coming in at the windows. I liked it best in the morning, when there was a touch in it of breakfast cooking, and I used to stand at the top of the staircase and sniff it as I went to my bath. But on the morning I write of, I could take no pleasure in it. Indeed it seemed to tantalize me with a vision of country peace, which had somehow got broken. I couldn't get that confounded letter out of my head. When I read it, I had torn it up and discussed, but I found myself going in my dressing gown to the surprise of a housemaid piecing together the fragments from the waste paper basket and reading it again. This time I flung the bits into the newly kindled fire. I was perfectly resolved that I would have nothing to do with boulevant or any of his designs. But all the same I could not recapture the serenity which yesterday had clothed me like a garment. I was down to my breakfast before Mary and had finished before she appeared. Then I lit my pipe and started on my usual tour of my domain. But nothing seemed quite the same. It was a soft fresh morning with no frost, and the skillas along the edge of the lake were like the bits of summer sky. The moor hens were building, and the first daffodils were out in the rough grass before the clump of Scott's furs. An old George Wadden was nailing up a rabid wire and whistling through his two remaining teeth, and generally the world was as clear and jolly as spring could make it. But I didn't feel any more that it was really mine. Only that I was looking on a pretty picture. Something had happened to jar the harmony between it and my mind. And I cursed boulevant in his intrusions. I returned by the front of the house, and there at the door to my surprise stood a big towering Roy's Royce. Paddington met me in the hall and landed me a card. On which I read the name of Mr. Julius Victor. I knew it, of course, for the name of one of the richest men in the world. The American baker, who had done a lot of Britain's financial business in the war, was in New York now at some international conference. I remembered that, Lynn Kiran, who didn't like his race, and once described him to me as the wise Jew since the Apostle Paul. In a library I found a tall man standing by the gray window, looking out at our view. He turned as I entered, and I saw a thin face with neatly trimmed gray beard, and the most worried eyes I have ever seen in a human countenance. Everything about him was spruce and dapper, his beautiful cut gray suit, his black tie and pink pearl pin, his blue and white linen, his exquisitely polished shoes. But the eyes were so vivid and anxious that he looked disheveled. General, he said, and took a step towards me. We shook hands and I made him sit down. I have dropped the general, if you don't mind, I said. What I want to know is, have you had breakfast? He shook his head. I had a coffee on the road. I do not eat in the morning. Where have you come from, sir? I asked. From London. Well, London is 76 miles from us, so he must have started early. I looked curiously at him, and he got out of his chair and began to stride about. Sir Richard, he said, in a low, pleasant voice, which I could imagine convincing any man he tried it on. You are a soldier and a man of the world and will pardon my unconventionality. My business is too urgent to waste time on apologies. I have heard of you from common friends as a man of exceptional resource and courage. I have been told in confidence something of your record. I have come to employ your help in a desperate emergency. I passed him a box of cigars. He took one and let it carefully. I could see his long, slim fingers trembling as he held the match. You may have heard of me, he went on. I am a very rich man, and my wealth has given me power so that governments honour me with their confidence. I am concerned in various important fares, and it would be false modesty to deny that my word is wadier than that of many prime ministers. I am laboring, Sir Richard, to secure peace in the world, and consequently I have enemies. All those who would perpetrate anarchy and war. My life has been more than once attempted, but that is nothing. I am well guarded. I am not, I think, more of a coward than other men. I am prepared to take my chance, but now I have been attacked by a subtler weapon. I confess, I have no defense. I had a son who died ten years ago at college. My only other child is my daughter, Delia, a girl of nineteen. She came to Europe just before Christmas, where she was married in Paris in April. A fortnight ago she was hunting with friends in North Hampshire. The place is called Rushford Court. On the morning of the 8th of March, she went for a walk to Rushford village to send a telegram, and was last seen passing through the large gates at twenty minutes past eleven. She has not been seen since. Good God! I exclaimed, and rose from my chair. Mr. Victor was looking out of the window, so I walked to the other end of the room and fiddled with the books on the shelf. There was a silence, or a second or two, till I broke it. Do you suppose it's a loss of memory, I ask? No, he said, it is not a loss of memory. I know, we have proof, that she has been kidnapped by those whom I call enemies. She is being held as hostage. You know she is alive? He nodded, where his voice was choking again. There is evidence, which points to a very deep and devilish plot. It may be revenge, but I think it is more likely to be policy. Her captors hold her as security for their own fate. Has Scotland Yard done anything? Everything a man could do, but the darkness only grows thicker. Shirley, it has not been in the papers. I don't read them carefully, but I could scarcely miss a thing like that. It has been kept out of the papers, for a reason which you will be told. Mr. Victor, I said, I am deeply sorry for you. Like you, I am just the one child. And if anything of that kind happened to him, I should go mad. But I shouldn't take too gloomy of you. Mesadelia will turn up, alright, and none the worse. Though you may have to pay through the nose for it, I expect it's ordinary blackmail and ransom. No, he said very quietly, it's not blackmail. And if it were, I would not pay the ransom demanded. Believe me, Sir Richard, it is a very desperate affair. More, far more, is involved than the fate of one young girl. I am not going to touch on that side. For the full story will be told to you later by one better equipped to tell it. But the hostage is my daughter, my only child. I have come to beg your assistance in the search of her. But I am no good at looking for things, I stammered. I am most awfully sorry for you. But I don't see how I can help. If Scotland Yard is at a loss, it's not likely that an utter novice like me would succeed. But you have a different kind of imagination, a rare kind of courage. I know what you have done before, Sir Richard. I tell you, you are my last hope. I sat down, heavily, and groaned. I can't begin to explain to you the bottomless fertility of your idea. It is quite true that in the war I had some queer jobs and was luckily enough to bring some of them off. But don't you see, I was a soldier then, under orders. And it didn't greatly signify whether I lost my life from a crump in the trenches or from a private bullet on the back stairs. I was in the mood for any risk, and my wits were strung up and unnaturally keen. But that's all done with. I'm in a different mood now and my mind is weedy and grass-grown. I've settled so deep into the country that I am just an ordinary, hasty farmer. If I took a hand, which I certainly won't, I'd only spoil the game. Mr. Vecker stood looking at me intently. I thought for a moment that he was going to offer me money. And rather, hoped he would. For that would have stiffened me like a ramrod, though it would have spoiled the good notion I had of him. The thought may have crossed his mind, but he was clever enough to reject it. I don't agree with the word you say about yourself, and I am accustomed to size-up men. I appeal to you, as a Christian gentleman, to help me recover my child. I am not going to press that appeal, for I have already taken on enough of your time. My London address is on my card. Goodbye, Sir Richard, and believe me, I am very grateful to you for receiving me so kindly. In five minutes, he and his Royce Royce had gone, and I was left in a miserable mood of shame-faced exasperation. I realized how Mr. Julius Victor had made his fame. He knew how to handle men. For, if he had gone on pleading, he would have riled me, whereas he had somehow managed to leave it all to my honor and thoroughly unsettled my mind. He went for a short walk, cursing the world at large, sometimes feeling horribly sorry for that unfortunate father, sometimes getting angry because he had tried to mix me up in his affairs. Of course I would not, touch the thing. I couldn't. It was manifestively impossible. I had neither the capacity nor the inclination. I was not a professional rescuer of distressed ladies whom I did not know from Eve. As a man, I told myself, must confine his duties to his own circle of friends, except when his country has need of him. I was over forty, and had a wife and a young son to think of. Besides, I had chosen a retired life and had the right to have my choice respected. But I can't pretend that I was comfortable. A hideous, muddy wave from the outer world had come to disturb my little sheltered pool. I found Mary and Peter, John, feeding the swans and couldn't bear to stop and play with them. The gardeners were digging in sulfates about the fig trees on the south wall and wanted direction about the young chestnuts in the nursery. The keeper was lying in wait for me in the stable yard for instructions about a new batch of pheasant eggs, and the groom wanted me to look at the hawks of Mary's cob, but I simply couldn't talk to any of them. These were the things I loved. But for a moment, the guilt was off them. I would let them wait till I felt better. In a very bad temper, I returned to the library. I hadn't been there two minutes when I heard the sound of a car on the gravel. Let them all come, I groaned, and I wasn't surprised when Paddock entered, followed by the spare figure and smooth king face of Medgilvore. I don't think I offered to shake hands. We were pretty good friends, and at that moment there was no one in the world I wanted less to see. Well, you old nuisance, I cried. You're the second visitor from town I had this morning. There'll be a shortage of petrol soon. Have you had the letter from Lord Artenswell? He asked. I have. Worst luck, I said. Then you know what I've come about. But that can keep till after luncheon. Hurry it up, Dick. Like a good fellow, for I'm as hungry as a famous kestrel. He looked rather like one with a sharp nose and lean head. It was impossible to be cross for along with Medgilvore. So he went out to look for Mary. I made as well tell you, I told him, you've come on a fool's errand. I'm not going to be jockeyed by you or anyone into making an ass of myself. Anyhow, don't mention the thing to Mary. I don't want her to be worried by your nonsense. So at luncheon, we talked about Fosse, the Cotswolds, and about the deer forest I had taken. Mackray, they called it, and about Sir Ultra Bald Rulence, my co-tenant, who had just another try at breaking his neck in a steeple chase. Medgilvore was by way of being a great stalker and could tell me a lot about Mackray. The crab of the place was its neighbors, it seems, for for Haripool on the south was too steep for the lessee, a middle-aged manufacturer to do it justice, and the huge forest of Glenisle on the east was too big for any single tenant to shoot, and the Mackray end of it was nearly 30 miles by road from the lodge. The result was, said, that Mackray was surrounded by unauthorized sanctuaries which made the deer easier to shift. He said the best time was early in the season when the stags were on the upper ground, for it seemed that Mackray had uncommonly fine-high pastures. Mary was in good spirits, for somebody had been complimentary about Peter John, and she was satisfied for the moment that he wasn't going to be cut off by early consumption. She was full of housekeeping questions about Mackray and revealed such spacious plans that Mackray said that he thought he would pay us a visit, for it looked as if he wouldn't be poisoned as he usually was in scotch shooting lodges. It was a talk I should have enjoyed if there had not been that uneasy morning behind me and that interview I had still to get over. There was a shower after luncheon, so he and I settled ourselves in the library. I must leave at 3.30, he said, so I have got just a little more than an hour to tell you my business in. Is it worthwhile starting? I asked. I wanted to make it quite plain that under no circumstances am I open to offer to take on any business of any kind. I am having a rest and a holiday. I stay here for the summer and then I go to Mackray. There is nothing to prevent your going to Mackray in August, he said, opening his eyes. The work I am going to suggest to you must be finished long before then. I suppose that surprised me, for I did not stop him, as I had meant to. I let him go on. Before I knew it, I found myself getting interested. I have a boy's weakness for a yarn and Mountain Giloray knew this and played upon it. He began by saying very much what Dr. Greenslade had said the night before. A large part of the Old World had gone mad and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All of the old sanctities had become weakened and the men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command and if he were an able man could mobilize a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral in this ill, he said, had been more or less a sport before the war and now is a terribly common product. A throw of in batches and battalions, cruel, humorless, hard, utterly wanting a sense of proportion but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric. A hideous, untameable breed had been endangered. You found it among the young Bolshevik Jews, among the young gentry of the wilder Communist sects and very notably among the Selen murders hobbledy hoised in Ireland. Poor devils, Mechawrake repeated, it is for their maker to judge them but we who are trying to patch up civilization have to see that they are cleared out of the world. Don't imagine that they are devotees of any movement good or bad. They are what I called them, moral imbeciles who can be swept into any movement by those who understand them. They are the neophytes and hierophants of crime and it is as men who are not degenerates or anything of sort but only evil. There has never been such a chance for a rogue since the world began. Then he told me certain facts which must remain unpublished at any rate during our lifetimes. The main point was that there were sinister brains at work to organize for their own purposes the perilous stuff lying about. All the contemporary anarchisms, he said, were interconnected and out of the misery of decent folks in the agony of wretched tools certain smug entrepreneurs were profiting. He and his men and indeed the whole police force of civilization he mentioned especially the Americans had been on the trail of one of the worst of these combined and by a series of fortunate chances had gotten their hand on it. Now at any moment they could stretch out that hand and gather it in but there was one difficulty. I learned it from him that this particular combine was not aware of the danger in which it stood it was that it must stand in some danger so it had taken precautions since Christmas it had acquired hostages. Here I interrupted for I felt rather incredulous about the whole business. I think since the war we're all too ready to jump at grandiose explanations of simple things. I want a good deal of convincing before I believe in your international clearinghouse for crime. I guarantee the convincing he said gravely you shall see all our evidence and unless you have changed since I first knew you your conclusion won't differ from mine but let us come to the hostages. One I know about I put in I had Mr. Julius Victor here after breakfast. Gible Ray exclaimed poor soul what did you say to him? Deepness sympathy but nothing doing and he took that answer. I won't say he took it but he went away. What about the others? There are two more. One is a young man heir to a considerable estate who was last seen by his friends in Oxford on the 17th day of February just before dinner. He was an undergraduate of the Christchurch and was living out of college in rooms in the high. He had tea at the gridgeron and went into his rooms to dress. Where he was dining that night with the Halcyon club a servant passed him on the stairs of his lodgings going up to his bedroom. He apparently did not come down and since that day has not been seen. You may have heard his name Lord Mercott. I started. I had indeed heard the name and I knew the boy a little having met him occasionally at a local steeple chases. He was the grandson and heir of the old Duke of El Caster the most respected and older statesmen of England. They have picked their bag carefully I said what is the third case? The coolest of all you know Sir Arthur Warcliff. He is a widower lost his wife just before the war and he has an only child a little boy of 10 years old. The child David is his name was the apple of his eye and he was at a preparatory school nearby. The father took a house in the neighborhood to be near him and the boy used to be allowed to come home for lunch and every Sunday. One Sunday he came to the luncheon as usual and started back in the pony trap. The boy was very keen about birds and used to leave the trap and walk the last half mile by a shortcut across the marshes. While he left the groom at the usual gate and like Miss Victor and Lord Mercott walked into black mystery. The story really did horrify me. I remembered Sir Arthur Warcliff the kind worn face of a great soldier and administrator and I could imagine his grief and anxiety. I knew what I should have felt if it had been my Peter John. A much-traveled young woman and an athletic young man were defensible creatures compared to a poor little round-headed boy of 10 and I still felt the whole affair too fantastic for real tragedy. But what right have you to connect the three cases, I ask? Three people disappear within weeks of each other in widely separated parts of England. Miss Victor may have been kidnapped for ransom. Lord Mercott may have lost his memory and David Warcliff may have been stolen by tramps. Why should they be all part of one scheme? Why, for that matter, should any one of them have been the work of your criminal combine? Have you any evidence for the hostage theory? Yes. Matt Giveaway took a moment or two to answer. There is first the general probability if a man of rascals wanted three hostages they could hardly find three better. The daughter of the richest man in the world the heir of our greatest dukedom the only child of a national hero there is also direct evidence. Again he hesitated. Do you mean to say that Scotland Yard has not a single clue to any one of these cases? We have followed up a hundred clues but they have all ended in dead walls. Every detail I assure you has been gone through with a fine tooth comb. No, my dear dick, the trouble is not that we're especially stupid on this side but that there is some superlative cunning on the other. That is why I want you. You have a kind of knack for stumbling on truths which no amount of ordinary reasoning can get at. I have 50 men working day and night and we have mercifully kept all the cases out of the paper so that we are not hampered by the immature but so far it's a blank. Are you going to help? No, I am not but supposing I were I don't see you have a scrap of proof that the three cases are connected or that any one of them is due to the criminal gang that you say you've got your hands on. You've only given me presumptions and precious than at that. Where's your direct evidence? Melchivaray looked a little embarrassed. I've started you at the wrong end. He said, I should have made you understand how big and desperate the thing is that we're out against and then you'd have been in a more receptive mood for the rest of the story. You know as well as I do that cold blood is not always the most useful accompaniment in assessing evidence. I said I had direct evidence of connection and so I have and the proof to my mind is certain. Well, let's see it. It's a poem on Wednesday of last week two days after David Warcliffe disappeared. Mr. Joyce Victor, the Duke of Alkester and Sir Arthur Warcliffe received copies of it by the first post. They were typed on bits of flimsy paper. The Elven Lopes had the addresses typed and they had been posted in the West Central District of London in the afternoon before. He handed me a copy and this is what it read. Seek where under midnight's sun laggard crops are hardly one where the sour cast to seed in furrows of the fields of Eden where beside the sacred tree spins the seer who cannot see. I burst out laughing, for I could not keep it in. The whole thing was too preposterous. These six lines of indifferent dog roll seemed to me to put the coping stone of nonsense on the business but I checked myself when I saw Matt Givray's face. There was a slight flush of annoyance on his cheek but for the rest it was grave. I composed in deadly earnest. Now Matt Givray was not a fool and I was bound to respect his beliefs so I pulled myself together and tried to take things seriously. That's proof the three cases are linked together I said. So much I grant you but where's the proof that they are the work of the great criminal combine you say you got your hands on. Matt Givray rose and walked restlessly about the room. The evidence is mainly presumptive but to my mind it is certain presumption. You know as well as I do Dick that a case may be final and yet very difficult to set out as a series of facts. My view on the matter is made up of a large number of tiny indications and crossbearance and I'm prepared to bet that if you put your mind honestly to the business you will take the same view but I'll give you this much by way of direct proof. In Hunting the Big Show we had several communications of the same nature as this dog grow and utterly unlike anything else I ever struck in criminology there's one of the miscreants who assumes himself with sending useless clues to his adversaries it shows how secure the gang thinks itself. Well you've got that gang anyhow I don't quite see why the hostages should trouble you you'll gather them in when you gather in the male factors. I wonder remember we are dealing with moral imbeciles when they find themselves cornered they won't play for safety they'll use their hostages and when we refuse to bargain they'll take up their last revenge on them. I suppose I stared unbelievably for he went on yes they'll murder them in cold blood three innocent people and then swing themselves with a lighter mind I know the type they've done it before he mentioned one or two recent instances good god I cried it's a horrible thought the only thing for you is to go canny and not strike till you have got the victims out of their clutches we can't he said solemnly this is precisely the tragedy of the business we must strike early in June I won't trouble you with the reasons but believe me they are final there is just a chance of settlement in Ireland and there are certain events of the first importance impending in Italy and America and all depend upon the activities of the gang being at the end of midsummer do you grasp that by midsummer we must stretch out our hand by midsummer unless they are released the three hostages will be doomed it is a ghastly dilemma but in the public interest there is only one way out I ought to say that Victor and the Duke and Warcliffe are aware of this fact and accept the situation they are big men and will do their duty even if it breaks their hearts there was a silence for a minute or two for I did not know what to say the whole story seemed to me incredible and yet I could not doubt a syllable of it when I looked at Matt Guillory's earnest face I felt the horror of the business nonetheless because it seemed also partly unreal they had the fantastic grimness of a nightmare but most of all I realized that I was utterly incompetent to help and as I understood that I could honestly base my refusal on incapacity and not on this inclination I began to feel more comfortable well said Matt Guillory after a pause are you going to help us? there's nothing doing with that Sunday paper anagram you showed me that's the sort of riddle that's not meant to be guessed I suppose you are going to try to work up from the information you have about the Combine towards a clue to the hostages he nodded now look here I said you've got 50 of the quickest brains in Britain working on the job they found out enough to put a lasso around the enemy which you can draw tight whenever you like they're trained to the work and I am not what on earth would be the use of an amateur like me budding in? I wouldn't be half as good as any one of the 50 I am not an expert I am not quick-witted I am a slow patient fellow as you admit is one that has to be done against time if you think it over you'll see that it's sheer nonsense my dear chap you've succeeded before with worse material that was pure luck and it was in the war when as I tell you my mind was morbidly active besides anything I did then I did in the field and what you want me to do now is office work I'm no good at office work Blen Kieran always said so and Boulevent never used me on it it isn't because I don't want to help it's because I can't I believe you can and the thing is so great that I don't leave any chance unexplored won't you come? no because I could do nothing because you haven't a mind for it because I haven't the right kind of mind for it he looked at his watch and got up smiling rather roofly I've had my say and now you will know what I want of you I'm not going to take your answer as final think over what I have said let me hear from you within the next day or two but I had lost all my doubts for it was very clear to me that on every ground I was doing the right thing don't delude yourself with thinking that I'll change my mind I said as I saw him to his car honestly old fellow if I could be an atom of a use I'd join you but for your sake you've got to count me out this time then I went for a walk feeling pretty cheerful I settled the question of the pheasant's eggs with the keeper and went down to the stream to see if there was any hatch of fly it cleared up to a fine evening and I thanked my stars that I was out of a troublesome business with an easy conscious and I could enjoy my peaceful life again I say with an easy conscious for though there were little dregs of disquiet still lurking about the bottom of my mind I had only to review the facts squarely to prove my decision I put the whole thing out of my thoughts and came back with a fine appetite for tea there was a stranger in the drawing room with Mary a slim, oldish man very straight and erect with one of those faces on which life has written so much that to look at them is like reading a good book at first I didn't recognize him when he rose to greet me for the smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and the slow deep voice brought back the two occasions in the past when I had run across Sir Arthur Warcliffe my heart sank as I shook hands the more as I saw how solemn was Mary's face she had been hearing the story which I had hoped she would never hear I thought it breathed to be very frank with him I can guess your Aaron, Sir Arthur, I said and I am extremely sorry that you should have come this long journey to no purpose then I told him of the visits of Mr. Julius Victor and Mount Giveray and what they had said and what had been my answer I think I made it as clear as day that I could do nothing and he seemed to assent Mary, I remember, never lifted her eyes Sir Arthur had looked to the ground while I was speaking and now he turned his old wise face to me and I saw what ravages his new anxiety had made in it he could I have been over sixty and he looked a hundred I do not dispute your decision Sir Richard he said I know that you would have helped me if it had been possible but I confess I am sorely disappointed for you were my last hope you see, you see I had nothing left in the world but Davey if he had died I think I could have born it but to know nothing about him and to imagine terrible things is almost too much for my fortitude I have never seen a more painful experience to hear a voice falter that had been used to command to see tears in the steadfastest eyes that had ever looked on the world made me want to howl like a dog I would have given a thousand pounds to be able to bolt into the library and lock the door Mary appeared to me to be behaving oddly she seemed to have the deliberate purpose of probing the wound was she encouraged Sir Arthur to speak of the boy he showed us a miniature he carried with him an extraordinarily handsome child with wide gray eyes in his head most nobly sat upon his shoulders a grave little boy with a look of utter trust which belongs to children who have never in their lives been unfairly treated Mary said something about the gentleness of his face yes Davey was very gentle his father said I think he was the gentlest thing I've ever known that little boy was the very flower of courtesy but he was curiously stokel too when he was distressed he only shut his lips tight and never cried used often to feel rebuke by him and then he told us about Davey's performances at school where he was not distinguished except as showing a certain talent for cricket I am very much afraid of publicity Sir Arthur said with the ghost of a smile but he was always educating himself in the right way learning to observe and think it seems that the boy was a desperately keen naturalist and would be out all hours watching wild things he was a great fisherman too and had killed a lot of trout with the fly on the hill burns in Galloway and as the father spoke I suddenly began to realize the little chap to think that he was just the kind of boy I wanted Peter John to be like I liked the stories of his love of nature and trout streams it came on me like a thunder clap but if I were at his father's place I should certainly go mad and I was amazed at the old man's courage I think he had a kind of genius for animals Sir Arthur said he knew the habits of birds by instinct and used to talk to them as other people talk to their friends he and I were great cronies and he would tell me long stories in his quiet voice of birds and beasts he had seen on his walks he had odd names for them too the thing was almost too pitiful to endure I felt as if I had known the child all my life I could see him playing I could hear his voice and as for Mary she was unashamedly weeping Sir Arthur's eyes were dry now but there was no catch in his voice as he spoke but suddenly a sharper flash of realization came on him and his words became a strained cry where is he now? what are they doing to him? God my beloved little man my gentle little Davey that fairly finished me Mary's arm was around the old man's neck and I saw he was trying to pull himself together but I didn't see anything clearly I only know I was marching about the room scarcely noticing that our guest was leaving I remember shaking hands with him and hearing him say he had done him good to talk to us it was Mary who escorted him to the car and when she returned it was to find me blaspheming like a Turk at the window I had flung the thing open where I felt suffocated though the evening was cool the mixture of anger and disgust and pity in my heart nearly choked me why the devil can't I be left alone? I cried I don't ask for much only a little peace why in heaven's name should I be dragged into other people's business? why on earth? Mary was standing at my elbow her face rather white and tear stained of course you are going to help she said her words made it clear to me the decision which I must have taken a quarter of an hour before and all the passion went out of me like a wind out of a prickled bladder of course by the way I'd better telegraph to Matt Gilroy in work lift 2 what's his address? you needn't bother about Sir Arthur said Mary before you came in when he told me the story I said he could count on you oh dick think if it had been Peter John end of chapter 2 chapter 3 of the 3 hostages by John Buchan our box recording is in the public domain chapter 3 researches in the subconscious I went to bed in perfect certainty that I wouldn't sleep that happened to me about once a year when my mind was excited or angry and I knew no way of dodging it there was a fine moon and the windows were sheets of opal cut into the dark jade limbs of trees the light winds were stirring the creepers owls hooded like sun trees exchanging passwords and sometimes a rock would talk in its streams the little odd squeaks and rumbles of wildlife came faintly from the woods while I lay staring at the ceiling with my thoughts running around about the futile circus this even breathing tantalized me where I never knew anyone with her perfect gift for slumber I used to say that if her pedigree could be properly traced it would be found that she descended directly from one of the seven sleepers of Ephesus who married one of the foolish virgins what kept me awake was principally the thought of that poor little boy David Warcliffe I was sorry for Miss Victor and Lord Mercott and desperately sorry for the parents of all three but what I could not stand was the notion of the innocent little chap who loved birds and fishing and open air hidden away in some stuffy den by the worst kind of black guards the thing preyed on me till I got to think it had happened to us and that John Peter was missing I rose and proud about the windows looking out at the quiet night wondering how the same world could contain so much trouble and so much peace I laughed my face with cold water and lay down again it was no good letting my thoughts race so I tried to fix them on one point in the hope that I could get drowsy I endeavored to recapitulate the evidence which Matt Gilroy had recited but only made foolishness of it for I simply could not concentrate I saw always the face of a small boy who bit his lips to keep himself from tears and another perfectly hideous face that kept turning into one of the lead figures in the rose garden a ridiculous rhyme too ran in my head something about the midnight sun in the fields of Eden by and by I got it straightened out into the anagram business Matt Gilroy mentioned I have a flypaper memory perverse when there is no reason why I should remember it and I found that I could repeat the six lines of the dog row after that I found the lines mixing themselves up and suggesting all kinds of odd pictures to my brain I took to paraphrasing them under the midnight sun where harvest are poor that was Scandinavian anyhow or maybe Iceland or Greenland or Labrador who on earth was a sower who sowed in the fields of Eden Adam perhaps or Abel was the first farmer or an angel in heaven more like an angel I thought where it sounded like a hymn anyhow it was infernal nonsense the last two lines took to escaping me and that made me force my mind out of the irritable confusion in which it bogged ah I had them again where beside the sacred tree spins the seer who cannot see the sacred tree was probably the idrisle and the spinner was one of the norns I had once taken an interest in Norse mythology but I couldn't remember whether one of the norns was blind a blind woman spinning and where had I heard something like that heard it quite recently too the discomfort of wakefulness is that you are not fully awake but now I was suddenly in full possession of my senses and worrying at that boulder dash like a dog at a bone I had been quite convinced that there was a clue in it but that it would be impossible to hit on the clue but now I had a ray of hope for I seemed to feel a very faint and vague flavor of reminiscence scanned an avian harvest the fields of Eden the blind spinner oh it was maddening every time I repeated them the sense of having recently met with something similar grew stronger the north, Norway, surely it had been there Roy, what was there about Norway? salmon, elk reindeer, midnight sun satyrs the last cried out to me in the blind old woman that spun I had it there were two of the three facts Dr. Greenslade had suggested the night before as a foundation for his imagery, shocker what was the third? a curiosity shop in north London kept by a Jew with a dined beard that had no obvious connection with a sewer in the fields of Eden but at any rate he had got two of them identical with the dog world it was a clue, it must have been a clue Dr. Greenslade had somewhere and somehow heard the jingle or the substance of it and it had sunk into the so-conscious memory he had spoken of without his being aware of it well, I had got to dig it out if I could discover where and how he had heard the thing I had struck a trail when I reached his conclusion I felt curiously easier in my mind almost at once fell asleep I woke to a gorgeous spring morning and ran down to the lake for my bath I felt that I wanted all freshening and screwed up I could get and when I dressed after an icy plunge I was ready for all comers Mary was down in time for breakfast and busy with her letters she spoke little and seemed to be waiting for me to begin but I didn't want to raise the matter which was utmost in her minds till I saw my way clear so I said I was going to take two days to think things over it was Wednesday so I wired to McIlroy to expect me in London on Friday morning and I scribbled a line to Mr. Julius Victor by half past nine I was on the road making for Greenslade's lodgings I caught him in the act of starting on his rounds and made him sit down and listen to me I had to give him the gist of McIlroy's story with extracts from those of Victor and Sir Arthur Before I was halfway through he had flung off his overcoat and before I had finished he had lit a pipe which was a breach of his ritual not to smoke before the evening he had that wildish look in his light eyes which you could see in a Carin Terriers when he is digging out a badger you've taken on this job he asked brusquely I nodded well I shouldn't have had much respect for you if you had refused how can I help count on me if I'm in any use but God I've never heard a more damnable story have you got hold of the rhyme I repeated it and he said it after me now you remember the talk we had after dinner the night before you showed me how a shocker was written you took at random three facts as a foundation they were as you remember a blind old woman spinning in the western highlands a satyr in Norway in a curiosity shop in north London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard well two of your facts are in that six line jingle I have quoted to you that is an odd coincidence but is it anything more I believe it is I don't hold with coincidences there's generally some explanations which we're not clever enough to get at your inventions were so odd that I can't think that they were inventions you must have heard them somehow and somewhere you know what you said about your subconscious memory there's somewhere in it if you can remember just how they got there you'll give me the clue I want that six line rhyme was sent in by people who are so confident they didn't mind giving their enemies a clue a clue which they knew could never be discovered Matt Gilroy and his fellows can make nothing of it never will if I start from the other end I'll get in on their rear do you see what I mean I'm going to make you somehow or another dig it out he shook his head it can't be done dick admitting your premise that I heard the nonsense and didn't invent it the subconscious can't be handled like a business proposition I remember unconsciously and I can't recall consciously but I don't admit your premise I think the whole thing is common coincidence I don't I said stubbornly and even if I did I'm bound to assume the contrary for it's the only card I possess you've got to sit down old chap and do your damnness to remember you've been in every odd show and my belief is that you heard that nonsense dig it out of your memory and we've got a chance to win otherwise I see nothing but tragedy he got up and put on his overcoat I've got a long round of visits which will take me all day of course I'll try but I'll warn you that I haven't a ghost of hope these things don't come by care and searching I'd better sleep at the matter tonight how long can you give me two days I go up to town on Friday morning yes you must take up your quarters with us Mary insist on it there was a crying of young lambs from the meadow and through the open window came the sound of farm carts jolting the stack yard into the lane Greenslade screwed up his face and laughed a nasty breach in your country pee stick you know I'm with you if there's any trouble going let's get this thing clear where there's a lot of searching ahead of me my three were an old blind woman spinning in the western highlands western highlands was it a satyr barn in a Jew curiosity shop the other three were a blind spinner under a sacred tree a satyr of sorts in a sewer in the fields of Eden Lord I'm such rot two pairs seem to coincidence the other pair looks hopeless well here goes for fortune I'm going to break my roll and take my pipe with me for this business demands tobacco I spent a busy day writing letters and making arrangements about the manner where it looked as if I might be a little later at home for the next month oddly enough I felt no restlessness for any particular anxiety that would come later for the moment I seemed to be waiting on Providence in the person of Tom Greenslade I was trusting my instinct which told me that in those random words of his there was more than coincidence and that with luck I might get from them a line of our problem Greenslade turned up about seven in the evening rather glum and preoccupied at dinner he ate nothing and when we sat afterwards in the library he seemed to be truthfully interested in reading advertisements in the times when I asked what luck he turned on me a disconsolate face it was the most futile job I had ever looked on he groaned so far it's an absolute blank and anyhow I've been taking a worse line I've been trying to think myself into recollection and as I said the thing comes not by searching but by prayer and fasting it occurred to me that I might get at something by following up the differences between the three pairs it's a familiar method in inductive logic for differences are often more suggestive than resemblances so I worried away at the sacred tree as contrasted with the western highlands and the fields of Eden as I sat against the curiosity shop no earthly good I gave myself a headache and I dare say I poisoned half my patience it's no eustic but I'll peg away for the rest of the prescribed two days I'm letting my mind lie fallow now interesting to inspiration I've got two faint glimmerings of notions first I don't believe I said western highland I'm positive those were your words what did you say then I figured if I know but I'm pretty certain it wasn't that I can't explain properly what you get an atmosphere about certain things in your mind and that phrase somehow jars with the atmosphere different key wrong tone second I've got a hazy intuition about the thing if it's really in my memory it's somehow mixed up with him I don't know what tune my personal impression is as vague as smoke but I'll tell you for what it's worth if I could get the right tune I might remember something you've stopped thinking utterly I'm an aloean harp to be played on by any wandering wind you see if I did hear these three things there is no conscious rational clue to it there were never parts of my work day mind my chance is that some material phenomenon may come along in the link itself with them and so rebuild the scene where I heard them ascent would be best but a tune might do our one hope it's about as strong as a single thread of gossip here on the grass is that that tune may drift into my head you see the point dick thought won't do but the problem mind but some tiny physical sensations of nose, ears, or eyes might press the button now it might be hallucination but I have a feeling that the three facts I thought I invented were in some infinitely recondent way connected with a hymn tune he went to bed early while I sat up till nearly midnight writing letters as I went upstairs I had a strong sense of judgment it seemed the mirrors trifling to be groping among the spectral unrealities while tragedy as big and indisputable as a mountain were overhanging us I had to remind myself how often the trivial was the vital before I got rid of the prick in my conscious I was tired and sleepy and I forced myself to think of the immediate problem were all blurred while I undressed I tried to repeat them then I could not give the fourth to scan it came out as Fields of Aaron after that the green fields of Aaron then it became the green fields of Eden I found myself humming a tune it was an old hymn which the Salvation Army used to play in Cape Town streets when I was a schoolboy I hadn't heard it or thought of it for 30 years but I remember the tune very clearly a pretty catchy thing like an early Victorian drawing room ballad I remember the words of the chorus on the other side of Jordan in the green fields of Eden where the tree of life is blooming there is rest for you I marched off to Green Slade's room and found him lying awake staring at the ceiling with the lamp by his bedside lit I must have broken in on some train of thought for you looked at me crossly I've got your tune I said and I whistled it and then quoted the words I remembered tune be blowed he said I've never heard it before but he hummed it after me and made me repeat the word several times no good I'm afraid it doesn't seem to hank on anything Lord this is a fool's game I'm off to sleep but three minutes later came I knocked at my dressing room door and Green Slade entered I saw by his eyes that he was excited it's the tune all right I can't explain why but those three blessed facts of mind fit into it like wands in an espic I'm feeling my way towards the light now I thought I'd just tell you for you might sleep better hearing it I slept like a log and went to breakfast feeling more cheerful than I had for several days I came to have a poor night his eyes looked gummy and heavy and he had ruffled his hair out of all hope of order I knew that trick of his when his hair began to stick up at the back he was out of sorts either of mind or body I noticed that he got himself up in the knickerbockers in thick shoes after breakfast he showed no inclination to smoke I feel as if I were going to be beaten up on the post he groaned I'm a complete convert to your view dig I heard my three facts and I didn't invent them what's more my three are indefinitely linked with the three in those miscreants dog row that tune proves it for it talks about the fields of Eden and yet is identified in my memory with my three which didn't mention Eden that's a tremendous point and proves we're on the right road but I'm hanged if I can't get a step farther wherever I heard these facts I heard the tune but I'm no near finding out that place I've got one bearing and I need a second to give me the point of intersection I want and how deduce I'm to get it if I don't know Greenslade was now Keener even then I was on the chase and indeed his lean anxious face was uncommonly like old hounds I asked him what he was going to do at 10 o'clock precisely I start on a walk right round the head of the wind rush and home by the forest it's going to be a 30 miles stride at a steady four and a half miles an hour which with half an hour for lunch will get me back here before six I'm going to drudge my body and mind into apathy by hard exercise then I shall have a hot bath and a good dinner and after that when I'm properly fallow I may get the revelation the mistake I made yesterday was trying to think it was a gleamy lustering the very weather for a walk and I would have liked to accompany him as it was I watched his long legs starting up the field we call big pasture and then we gave up the day to the job of putting lock 11 fry into one of the ponds a task so supremely muddy and wet that I had very little leisure to think a lot of things in the afternoon I rode over to the market town to see my builder and had got back just before dinner to learn the green slate had returned he was now wallowing in his hot bath according to his program at dinner he seemed to be in better spirits the wind had heightened his color giving him a ferocious appetite and the 1906 light which I regard as the proper drink after a hard day gave him the stimulus he needed as he had talked three nights ago before the business got us in its clutches Mary had disappeared after dinner and we sat ourselves in the big chairs before the fire like two drowsy men who had a busy day in the open air I thought I had better say nothing till he chose to speak he was silent for a long time and then he laughed not very mercilessly I am as far off as ever all day I've been letting my mind wander and measuring off miles with my two legs like a pair of compasses but nothing has come to me no word yet of that confounded cross bearing I need I might have heard that tune in any one of the thousand parts of the globe you see my rackety life is a disadvantage I've had too many different sorts of experience if I'd been a curate on my days in one village it would have been easier I waited and he went on speaking not to me but to the fire I've got an impression so strong that it mounts to certainty that I never heard the words western highlands it was something like it but not that western islands I suggested what could they be I think I've heard the phrase used about the islands off the west coast of Ireland does that help you he shook his head no good I've never been in Ireland after that he was silent again searing at the fire while I smoked opposite him feeling pretty blank and dispirited I realized I had banked more than I knew on this line of inquiry which seemed to be coming to nothing then suddenly there happened one of those trivial things which looked like accidents but I believed they were part of the reasoned government of the universe I leaned forward to knock out the ashes of my pipe against the stone edge of the hearth I hammered harder than I intended and the pipe which was an old one broke off at the bowl I exclaimed irritably where I hate to lose an old pipe but then pulled up sharp at the sight of Greenslade he stared open mouth at the fragments in my hand and his eyes were those of a man whose thoughts were far away he held up one hand while I froze into silence then the tension relaxed and he dropped back into his chair with a sigh the cross bearing he said I've got it Medina he laughed at my puzzled face I'm not mad dick I once talked to a man and as we talked he broke the bowl of his pipe as you just have done he was the man who hummed the hymn tune and though I haven't the remotest recollection of what he said I am as certain as I am alive that he gave me the three facts which sunk into the abyss of my subconscious memory wait a minute yes I see it as plain as I see you who broke the pipe just as you have done and sometime or another he hummed that tune who was he I ask but Greenslade disregarded the question he was telling his story in his own way with his eyes still abstracted as if he were looking down a long quarter of memory I was staying at the bowl at Danham shooting wildfowl on the sea marches I had the place to myself for it wasn't weather for a country pub but late one night his car broke down outside and the owner and his chauffeur had to pull up at the bowl oddly enough I knew the man he had been one of the big shoots at Roche Tram so our end was on his way back to London we had a lot to say to each other and sat into the small hours we talked about sport in the upper glens of the Yarkland river where I first met him I remember quite a lot of our talk but not the three facts or the tune which made no appeal to my conscious memory only of course they must have been there when did this happen early last December the time we had the black frost you remember how I took a week's holiday and went down to Norfolk after duck you haven't told me the man's name I have Medina who on earth is Medina lord dick you're overdoing the rustic you've heard of Dominic Medina I had of course when he mentioned the Christian name you couldn't open a paper without saying something about Dominic Medina but whether he was a poet or a politician or an actor manager I hadn't troubled to acquire there was a pile of picture papers on a side table and I touched him and began to turn over very soon I found what I wanted it was a photograph of a group at the country house party for some steeplechase the usual reading from left to right business and there between a Duchess and a foreign princess was Mr. Dominic Medina the poverty of the photograph could not conceal the extraordinary good looks of a man in his head I fancy Byron had and seemed to discern to a fine clean athletic figure if you would happen to look at that rag you might have the short circuited your inquiry he shook his head no it doesn't happen that way I had to get your broken pipe in the tune or I would have been stuck then I suppose I have to get in touch with this chap and find where he picked up the three facts in that tune but how if he turns out to be like you another babbler from the subconscious that is the rescue run of course he may be able to help you or more likely he may prove another dead wall I felt suddenly an acute sense of the difficulty of the job I had taken on in something very near hopelessness tell me about this Medina is he a decent fellow I suppose so yes I should think so but he moves in higher circles than I'm accustomed to so I can't judge but I'll tell you what he is beyond doubt he is a rather great man hang it dick you must have heard of him he's one of the finest shots living and he's done some tall things in the exploration way and he was the devil of a fellow as a partisan leader in South Russia also though it may not interest you he is an uncommon fine poet I suppose he's some sort of doggo not a bit of it old Spanish family settled here for three centuries one of them rode with Rupert hold on, I rather believe I've heard that his people live in Ireland or did live till life there became impossible what age, young-ish not more than 35 oh and the hands-miss thing in mine kind since the Greeks I'm not a flapper I said impatiently good looks in a man are no sort of recommendation to me I shall probably take to dislike his face you won't from what I know of him you will fall under his charm at first sight I never heard of a man that didn't he's a curious musical voice in eyes that warm you like sunlight not that I know him well but I own and found him extraordinarily attractive and you see from the papers what the world thinks of him all the same I'm not much near my goal I've got to find out where he heard those three blessed facts in that idiot tune who probably sent me two blazes and even if he's civil he'll very likely be helpless your chances that he's a real clever man not an old bludgeoner like me you'll get the help of first-class mind and that means a lot shall I write you a line of introduction he sat down at my desk and wrote I'm saying nothing about your errands simply that I'd like you to know each other common interest in sport travel that sort of thing you're going to be in London so I better give you an address next morning Greenslade went back to his duties and I caught the early train to town I was not very happy about Mr. Dominic Medina for I didn't seem to be able to get hold of him who's who's only gave his age his residence he'll straight his club and the fact that he was MP for South London Division Mary had never met him he had appeared in London after she had stopped going about but she remembered that her windman hand ants raved about him and that she'd read somewhere an article about his poetry as I sat in the express I tried to reconstruct what kind of fellow he must be a mixture of Byron and Sir Richard Burton and the young political highbrow the picture wouldn't compose where I saw only a figure like a waxwork like a cooing voice and a shop walker's suavity also his name kept confusing me where I mixed him up with an old ruffian of Portuguese I once knew at Maria I was walking down St. James Street on my way to Whitehall pretty much occupied with my own thoughts when I was brought up by a hand placed on my chest and lo and behold Sandy our boot the knot End of Chapter 3