Greenmantle - John Buchan

'Uhnmantl'.
The other looked with a quick glance of apprehension at me. 'We had better
continue our talk in private, Herr Colonel,' he said. 'If Herr Brandt will forgive
us, we will leave him for a little to entertain himself.' He pushed the cigar-box
towards me and the two got up and left the room.
I pulled my chair up to the stove, and would have liked to drop off to sleep.
The tension of the talk at supper had made me very tired. I was accepted by
these men for exactly what I professed to be. Stumm might suspect me of being
a rascal, but it was a Dutch rascal. But all the same I was skating on thin ice. I
could not sink myself utterly in the part, for if I did I would get no good out of
being there. I had to keep my wits going all the time, and join the appearance
and manners of a backveld Boer with the mentality of a British intelligenceofficer.
Any moment the two parts might clash and I would be faced with the
most alert and deadly suspicion.
There would be no mercy from Stumm. That large man was beginning to
fascinate me, even though I hated him. Gaudian was clearly a good fellow, a
white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for he belonged to
my own totem. But the other was an incarnation of all that makes Germany
detested, and yet he wasn't altogether the ordinary German, and I couldn't help
admiring him. I noticed he neither smoked nor drank. His grossness was
apparently not in the way of fleshly appetites. Cruelty, from all I had heard of
him in German South West, was his hobby; but there were other things in him,
some of them good, and he had that kind of crazy patriotism which becomes a
religion. I wondered why he had not some high command in the field, for he had
had the name of a good soldier. But probably he was a big man in his own line,
whatever it was, for the Under-Secretary fellow had talked small in his presence,
and so great a man as Gaudian clearly respected him. There must be no lack of
brains inside that funny pyramidal head.
As I sat beside the stove I was casting back to think if I had got the slightest
clue to my real job. There seemed to be nothing so far. Stumm had talked of a
von Einem woman who was interested in his department, perhaps the same
woman as the Hilda he had mentioned the day before to the Under-Secretary.
There was not much in that. She was probably some minister's or ambassador's
wife who had a finger in high politics. If I could have caught the word Stumm
had whispered to Gaudian which made him start and look askance at me! But I