The Four Corners of the World Part 34

PEIFFER

For a moment I was surprised to see the stout and rubicund Slingsby in Lisbon. He was drinking a vermouth and seltzer at five o'clock in the afternoon at a cafe close to the big hotel. But at that time Portugal was still a neutral country and a happy hunting ground for a good many thousand Germans. Slingsby was lolling in his chair with such exceeding indolence that I could not doubt his business was pressing and serious. I accordingly pa.s.sed him by as if I had never seen him in my life before. But he called out to me. So I took a seat at his table.

Of what we talked about I have not the least recollection, for my eyes were quite captivated by a strange being who sat alone fairly close to Slingsby, at one side and a little behind him. This was a man of middle age, with reddish hair, a red, square, inflamed face and a bristly moustache. He was dressed in a dirty suit of grey flannel; he wore a battered Panama pressed down upon his head; he carried pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, and he sat with a big bock of German beer In front of him. But I never saw him touch the beer. He sat in a studied att.i.tude of ferocity, his elbow on the table, his chin propped on the palm of his hand, his head pushed aggressively forward, and he glared at Slingsby through his gla.s.ses with the fixed stare of hatred and fury which a master workman in wax might give to a figure in a Chamber of Horrors. Indeed, it seemed to me that he must have rehea.r.s.ed his bearing in some such quarter, for there was nothing natural or convinced in him from the brim of his Panama to the black patent leather tips of his white canvas shoes.

I touched Slingsby on the arm.

"Who is that man, and what have you done to him?"

Slingsby looked round unconcernedly.

"Oh, that's only Peiffer," he replied. "Peiffer making frightfulness."

"Peiffer?"

The name was quite strange to me.

"Yes. Don't you know him? He's a product of 1914," and Slingsby leaned towards me a little. "Peiffer is an officer in the German Navy. You would hardly guess it, but he is. Now that their country is at war, officers in the German Navy have a marked amount of spare time which they never had before. So Peiffer went to a wonderful Government school in Hamburg, where in twenty lessons they teach the gentle art of espionage, a sort of Berlitz school. Peiffer ate his dinners and got his degrees, so to speak, and now he's at Lisbon putting obi on me."

"It seems rather infantile, and must be annoying," I said; but Slingsby would only accept half the statement. "Infantile, yes.

Annoying, not at all. For so long as Peiffer is near me, being frightful, I know he's not up to mischief."

"Mischief!" I cried. "That fellow? What mischief can he do?"

Slingsby viciously crushed the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray.

"A deuce of a lot, my friend. Don't make any mistake. Peiffer's methods are infantile and barbaric, but he has a low and fertile cunning in the matter of ideas. I know. I have had some."

And Slingsby was to have more, very much more: in the shape of a great many sleepless nights, during which he wrestled with a dreadful uncertainty to get behind that square red face and those shining pince-nez, and reach the dark places of Peiffer's mind.

The first faint wisp of cloud began to show six weeks later, when Slingsby happened to be in Spain.

"Something's up," he said, scratching his head. "But I'm hanged if I can guess what it is. See what you can make of it"; and here is the story which he told.

Three Germans dressed in the black velvet corduroy, the white stockings and the rope-soled white shoes of the Spanish peasant, arrived suddenly in the town of Cartagena, and put up at an inn in a side-street near the harbour. Cartagena, for all that it is one of the chief naval ports of Spain, is a small place, and the life of it ebbs and flows in one narrow street, the Calle Mayor; so that very little can happen which is not immediately known and discussed. The arrival of the three mysterious Germans provoked, consequently, a deal of gossip and curiosity, and the curiosity was increased when the German Consul sitting in front of the Casino loudly professed complete ignorance of these very doubtful compatriots of his, and an exceeding great contempt for them. The next morning, however, brought a new development. The three Germans complained publicly to the Alcalde.

They had walked through Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia in search of work, and everywhere they had been pestered and shadowed by the police.

"Our Consul will do nothing for us," they protested indignantly. "He will not receive us, nor will any German in Cartagena. We are poor people." And having protested, they disappeared in the night.

But a few days later the three had emerged again at Almeria, and at a mean cafe in one of the narrow, blue-washed Moorish streets of the old town. Peiffer was identified as one of the three--not the Peiffer who had practised frightfulness in Lisbon, but a new and wonderful Peiffer, who inveighed against the shamelessness of German officials on the coasts of Spain. At Almeria, in fact, Peiffer made a scene at the German Vice-Consulate, and, having been handed over to the police, was fined and threatened with imprisonment. At this point the story ended.

"What do you make of it?" asked Slingsby.

"First, that Peiffer is working south; and, secondly, that he is quarrelling with his own officials."

"Yes, but quarrelling with marked publicity," said Slingsby. "That, I think we shall find, is the point of real importance. Peiffer's methods are not merely infantile; they are elaborate. He is working down South. I think that I will go to Gibraltar. I have always wished to see it."

Whether Slingsby was speaking the truth, I had not an idea. But he went to Gibraltar, and there an astonishing thing happened to him. He received a letter, and the letter came from Peiffer. Peiffer was at Algeciras, just across the bay in Spain, and he wanted an interview.

He wrote for it with the most brazen impertinence.

"I cannot, owing to this with-wisdom-so-easily-to-have-been-avoided war, come myself to Gibraltar, but I will remain at your disposition here."

"_That_," said Slingsby, "from the man who was making frightfulness at me a few weeks ago, is a proof of some nerve. We will go and see Peiffer. We will stay at Algeciras from Sat.u.r.day to Monday, and we will hear what he has to say."

A polite note was accordingly dispatched, and on Sunday morning Peiffer, decently clothed in a suit of serge, was shown into Slingsby's private sitting-room. He plunged at once into the story of his wanderings. We listened to it without a sign that we knew anything about it.

"So?" from time to time said Slingsby, with inflections of increasing surprise, but that was all. Then Peiffer went on to his grievances.

"Perhaps you have heard how I was treated by the Consuls?" he interrupted himself to ask suddenly.

"No," Slingsby replied calmly. "Continue!"

Peiffer wiped his forehead and his gla.s.ses. We were each one, in his way, all working for our respective countries. The work was honourable. But there were limits to endurance. All his fatigue and perils went for nothing in the eyes of comfortable officials sure of their salary. He had been fined; he had been threatened with imprisonment. It was _unverschamt_ the way he had been treated.

"So?" said Slingsby firmly. There are fine inflections by which that simple word may be made to express most of the emotions. Slingsby's "So?" expressed a pa.s.sionate agreement with the downtrodden Peiffer.

"Flesh and blood can stand it no longer," cried Peiffer, "and my heart is flesh. No, I have had enough."

Throughout the whole violent tirade, in his eyes, in his voice, in his gestures, there ran an eager, wistful plea that we should take him at his face value and believe every word he said.

"So I came to you," he said at last, slapping his knee and throwing out his hand afterwards like a man who has taken a mighty resolution.

"Yes. I have no money, nothing. And they will give me none. It is _unverschamt_. So," and he screwed up his little eyes and wagged a podgy forefinger--"so the service I had begun for my Government I will now finish for you."

Slingsby examined the carpet curiously.

"Well, there are possibly some shillings to be had if the service is good enough. I do not know. But I cannot deal in the dark. What sort of a service is it?"

"Ah!"

Peiffer hitched his chair nearer.

"It is a question of rifles--rifles for over there," and, looking out through the window, he nodded towards Gibel Musa and the coast of Morocco.

Slingsby did not so much as flinch. I almost groaned aloud. We were to be treated to the stock legend of the ports, the new edition of the Spanish prisoner story. I, the mere tourist in search of health, could have gone on with Peiffer's story myself, even to the exact number of the rifles.

"It was a great plan," Peiffer continued. "Fifty thousand rifles, no less." There always were fifty-thousand rifles. "They are buried--near the sea." They always were buried either near the sea or on the frontier of Portugal. "With ammunition. They are to be landed outside Melilla, where I have been about this very affair, and distributed amongst the Moors in the unsubdued country on the edge of the French zone."

"So?" exclaimed Slingsby with the most admirable imitation of consternation.

"Yes, but you need not fear. You shall have the rifles--when I know exactly where they are buried."

"Ah!" said Slingsby.

He had listened to the familiar rigmarole, certain that behind it there was something real and sinister which he did not know--something which he was desperately anxious to find out.

"Then you do not know where they are buried?"