“I could not take them from a more welcome source,” I said.
“Very prettily put. If you want further credentials I can tell you much about your own doings in the past three years. I can explain to you who don’t need the explanation, every step in the business of the Black Stone. I think I could draw a pretty accurate map of your journey to Erzerum. You have a letter from Peter Pienaar in your pocket—I can tell you its contents. Are you willing to trust me?”
“With all my heart,” I said.
“Good. Then my first order will try you pretty hard. For I have no orders to give you except to bid you go and steep yourself in a particular kind of life. Your first duty is to get ‘atmosphere’, as your friend Peter used to say. Oh, I will tell you where to go and how to behave. But I can’t bid you do anything, only live idly with open eyes and ears till you have got the ‘feel’ of the situation.”
She stopped and laid a hand on my arm.
“It won’t be easy. It would madden me, and it will be a far heavier burden for a man like you. You have got to sink down deep into the life of the half-baked, the people whom this war hasn’t touched or has touched in the wrong way, the people who split hairs all day and are engrossed in what you and I would call selfish little fads. Yes. People like my aunts and Launcelot, only for the most part in a different social grade. You won’t live in an old manor like this, but among gimcrack little ‘arty’ houses. You will hear everything you regard as sacred laughed at and condemned, and every kind of nauseous folly acclaimed, and you must hold your tongue and pretend to agree. You will have nothing in the world to do except to let the life soak into you, and, as I have said, keep your eyes and ears open.”
“But you must give me some clue as to what I should be looking for?”
“My orders are to give you none. Our chiefs—yours and mine—want you to go where you are going without any kind of parti pris. Remember we are still in the intelligence stage of the affair. The time hasn’t yet come for a plan of campaign, and still less for action.”
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Is it a really big thing we’re after?”
“A—really—big—thing,” she said slowly and very gravely. “You and I and some hundred others are hunting the most dangerous man in all the world. Till we succeed everything that Britain does is crippled. If we fail or succeed too late the Allies may never win the victory which is their right. I will tell you one thing to cheer you. It is in some sort a race against time, so your purgatory won’t endure too long.”