The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (10 page)

             
" '
Mmh
, well thank you, Traheal,' I said. So this was to be the pattern was it? 'I suppose, James, they were all down below? No hope of rescue? This awful weather of late, no doubt, loosened the cliff, eh?' No one can say
I
can't pick up a cue! I went on. 'Sorry as the devil about your brother. Hardly knew him, of course. Still wish to express regrets and all that.'

             
"But now the ball had moved to another court
.
It was Isobel who fixed her gaze on me.

             
" 'Such a pity. Lionel was a very peculiar man, there's
no denying it, but he was family. I've always said that all this digging about in odd places must make one morbid. I understand they often use dynamite or some awful explosive in these excavations. They must have been careless, that's all.' She paused, her blue orbs politely holding mine. 'At least, that's what the police think, isn't it, James?'

             
" 'Ah, well, yes, I expect so,' mumbled her spouse. He turned to me, as if in appeal. 'You know, Donald, I honestly couldn't stand him, I mean frankly, but I do feel bad about all this. I should never have let him dig down there. The whole cliff must have been as rotten as cheese.' He sighed. 'At least that bloody old castle is gone with the slip up there, and that's a blessing.' He looked thoughtful, then turned to me again. 'Isobel thinks I must have had a premonition or something the other night when we rushed out there. I'll be
blowed
if I can recall it, but that's what she says and she's usually right about these things. But, I'll say this. Ever since I was a kid, I've had that old pile of slag on my mind, sort of hanging over me, what? I used to go miles to even avoid looking at it
.
At least that's gone for good, eh, my dear?'

             
" 'Yes,' she replied very softly, 'that's gone for good. It's all gone and it won't be back. Why even that most unpleasant smell has left the cellars. And the weather is perfect again.' Cornflower-blue fixed me with the same level gaze."

             
Ffellowes paused and we all drew a long breath. He lit a cigar and I leaned back in my chair for the first time in half an hour. But another figure bounced up across from me. It was this guy Simmons, and if the signs were right, he was mad as hell.

             
"General Ffellowes!" he exploded. "I have never heard in my life a more preposterous
farrago of fables! Do you expect me to believe this absolute tissue of fabrications? Are we all expected to believe that this monstrous
mélange
of Tennyson, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory
happened to you? In person?" He turned on his heel. "I believe, sir, that you have done your best to ridicule me, to make me a figure of fun for some obscure purpose of your own! This piece of senseless vulgarity is beyond belief! I shall never set foot in this institution again! Never!" He stormed out, leaving the rest of us flabbergasted.

             
"Well, for Pete's sake," said someone. "Who was that nut, anyway? And why did he blow up like that? I sure hope he keeps his word about not coming back!"

             
"I don't get it," remarked Bryce. "He was the one who brought up ghost stories in the first place. Brigadier, that's one of the best stories I ever heard, and if you say it happened, it happened, at least in my book. But what got that character so stirred up? Any ideas?"

             
"Well," said Ffellowes, "yes, I rather think I do. His name is Simmons. I have been hearing for the past year or so about one Professor
Elwyn
Simmons at Columbia or somewhere who is about to release the definitive work on the psychosis of witchcraft. It's supposed to be the latest word in debunking any belief in things nonmaterial, you know." He pulled on his cigar.

             
Bryce chuckled. "No wonder he got steamed up. Think he'll revise the book, sir?"

             
"I doubt it," said Ffellowes, "but I wish he'd stayed for the list of my friend's names. Like many very old families, the heir always gets handed a bundle."

             
"Such as?" I cut in.

             
"In James' case, aside from James, of course, he drew the following: Arthur, Geraint, Percival,
Bedivere
and Tristram." The ruddy face smiled at us.

             
For once my brain worked and back came a school English class on poetry. "And Lionel had only one initial, which might just have been M, right?" I asked.

             
"You have just won the coconut, as we say in Merry England," said the brigadier.

-

             
We had a scientist at the club on this particular evening. One of the members had brought him as a guest, and he joined us after dinner in the library. He was a museum biologist, from the American Museum of Natural History, I think, but it may have been the Smithsonian. He had a beard, but a neat one, and was civilized in all ways. I forget his name, but he was a reptile expert, a herpetologist, and he was one of those men who are not really happy unless wading in a tropical marsh somewhere, up to the neck in mud and malaria. He spoke with great enthusiasm of his last trip, to some appalling swamp in West Africa, where he had found out that the local crocodiles dug
holes rather than building nest mounds, as did some close relatives elsewhere. I never fully grasped the exact importance of this discovery, but it obviously meant a lot to him. He told the story well, too, and could laugh at himself, over his difficulties with the local people, who thought all crocodiles ought to be killed on sight. They could never grasp what he was trying to do, that is, in simply watching them dig nests. A very interesting fellow, and the talk was only marred by Mason Williams commenting loudly "that it was a relief to hear from a real expert for a change and not have to listen to more of Ffellowes' baloney!"

             
Ffellowes, our British brigadier (I sometimes think of him as the grenadier, but he always says his commission was in the artillery), was not in the room, at least at the beginning of the story, but I suddenly looked up and saw him standing outside the circle, smoking a cigar. He had just appeared, in that way he has, one minute absent, the next present
.
He said nothing, but listened quietly, until the visitor happened to get on the subject of turtles. Then, in the next break in the conversation, when Professor Jones, or whatever his name was, had finished a story about sea turtles mating, he asked, "Did you ever know a man named Strudwick? A specialist in your field, I believe." (The name, by the way, was not anything like Strudwick, but some relative might read this account, and I have no desire to be sued for libel.)

             
Our visitor grew pretty excited. "I knew him very well; as a matter of fact, I did some of my graduate work under him. A real genius, but a strange man. He vanished in the Pacific, I believe, some years back, though I forget the details."

             
"I knew him slightly," said Ffellowes quietly. "And he was certainly strange." He did not elaborate on his remarks, and Williams snorted audibly.

             
Eventually whoever had brought the scientist took him away and a number of others left also. Williams, alas, was not one of them. He had grown to know Ffellowes well enough to scent a story as well as the rest of us regulars, and though he never tires of denouncing the brigadier's tales as total fabrications, he never missed one if he could manage to get into the circle. As usual, Ffellowes ignored him, or treated him rather with the scrupulous courtesy used for unusually aged and stupid waiters and doormen. Williams, I think, would have disliked him less if he had walked up and belted him with a straight left
.
But, Ffellowes being Ffellowes, this was impossible.

             
Ffellowes smiled when we asked if there were a story concerning the missing scientist he had inquired about.

             
"Indeed there is. I don't mind telling it
.
But I warn you it is
quite
odd. There are a number of things about the whole thing that were, so to speak, left hanging, loose ends. A very peculiar business, from beginning to end." I settled back to listen with an audible, or almost audible, sigh of satisfaction, and I noticed others do the same.

             
"I was on leave from a job in Singapore. Let's see, that would have been in 1940. Things were on fire in Europe; London was burning night and day; the
Jerries
had France, the Low Countries, Norway and what all. I kept trying for active duty, and kept being shoved back into one odd job after another, like that thing in Kenya that I told you about
.
(*See "
His Only Safari
")
"At any rate, I was due for a spot of leave, and it was decided by a rather intelligent superior of mine, that
one could have some fun and still do some work. He knew I liked poking about in the world's backwaters
.

             
"We were not too happy then about the situation in some of the Dutch islands below us. They had Java and Sumatra under firm political control all right, but we kept hearing about trouble in the smaller, less well-patrolled places, some of the old Somerset Maugham settings, you know. It was obvious that Brother Jap, whom I had already met in other areas, was only waiting for a chance to jump us, and we felt that our Dutch neighbors might be neglecting some of the classic soft underbelly. There were reported meetings of
Bajau
pirates, of whom plenty existed then, and probably still do, with dissident petty rajahs, Moro bandits from up in the Philippines and so on. Our intelligence people in north Borneo and Sarawak were getting edgy, feeling that there might be a widespread uprising at a time when we all needed to concentrate on a northern invasion. It seemed to want looking into.

             
"When you consider," he added, his smooth, ruddy face putting on a rueful appearance, "how badly we ourselves messed up the actual Jap invasion when
did
come
, it seems we were a bit silly to worry about this other and, as it turned out, minor matter. Still, I make no apologies for my mission. Hindsight makes things only too evident that are invisible at the time. Half or more of any given intelligence mission is ridiculous to begin with, becomes more so as it goes on
and usually ends up totally irrelevant. Still, as I say, one never knows, not in advance.

             
"The scheme we worked out was for me to hire a large
prau
, a native sailboat, in Sandakan, and then noodle down the islands on a poor man's yachting cruise, picking up what scraps I could from natives, informers, our local agents (mostly worthless, I may say, the latter), and generally trying to find out what was what
.
We briefed our Dutch opposite numbers, and they didn't care for it; but since their government and queen were now pensioners in England, they had to agree, like it or not, and keep hands off, too.

             
"It was a lovely trip, if one doesn't mind trading sunsets for bedbugs and the loveliest seas in the world for appalling grub. Bad Malay cooking is even worse than bad English cooking, but fortunately in those days I had a stomach of proof steel."

             
"Who said there was any
good
English cooking," mumbled Williams, but he might as well not have spoken for all the attention Ffellowes paid.

             
"We called at Manado, in the north of Celebes, and then sailed on down through the
Molucca
Passage. In the middle of the
Molucca
Sea lie the Sula Islands, lovely places or were then, quite unspoiled and full of white beaches, coco palms and pleasant folk. I used to mourn them privately when the Jap fleet made the waters blood-red later on. And it was there, from a most charming man, a self-exiled Norwegian who had settled as a trader years before, that I heard first of Pulau Tuntong, the Island of the Turtle, and also,
incidently
, of Dr. and Mrs. Strudwick.

             
"I shall not attempt to give you my Norwegian chum's accent, but under it, he spoke fairly intelligible if 'American' English, as well as fluent Malay
Buginese
, the local talk, into which he would switch when seeking a hard word. I used to speak fairish Malay myself, so we got along well enough.