20
With the passage or loss of time, old books are no longer text and binding alone but also what their former readers have left in them over the years, marks, comments, exclamations, profanities, photographs, dedications or ex libris, a letter, sheet of paper or signature, a waterspot, burn or stain or simply their names, as the books’ owners. Just as the books by Ewart and Graham and Gawsworth spoke of their own short history, one of the two copies of Cardboard Crucifix that were obtained had something between its pages, two or three old newspaper clippings. It must have been Benet’s copy, since I have only photocopies and not the yellow and crumbling newsprint itself. So not only did I conduct myself honorably in the grave matter of the intercepted comb, but I also resisted the understandable temptation to keep what belonged to the second copy which was intended for him, and was not found in my own, more silent copy. I almost always behave well and sometimes I’m even taken advantage of, it can happen. But I’m no saint.
Someone had kept the clippings since 1941—the advertisement even before that — though none of them includes a date or the name of the publication it appeared in. But the size of the largest of them indicates that the De Wet case was in its day and its protagonist’s country as widely known and written about as Wilfrid Ewart’s famous novel had been twenty years earlier. And likewise forgotten shortly thereafter, even more quickly, I imagine, if that’s possible: De Wet was sentenced to death in the middle of a World War, when any news had to be ephemeral, one moment’s news drowned out by the next moment’s, that from one part of the globe by that from another, the same thing happens in our own day, lived as fleetingly as if each second were wartime, I don’t know if this book has a place in its time, it may require patience and slowness; or perhaps it does have a place and belongs to its time alone, for everything in it also passes fleetingly by as it’s told, and if the reader should wonder what on earth is being recounted here or where this text is heading, the only proper answer, I fear, would be that it is simply running its course and heading toward its ending, just like anything else that passes through or happens in the world. But I don’t believe anyone who has reached this point would still ask such a question.
The first and principal clipping was less a news article than a profile signed by one Graham Stanford who, to judge from his comments, had known De Wet personally, though he doesn’t seem any too pained or enraged by his impending appointment with the guillotine. The two headlines are: “MAD DEVIL DE WET” and “Gestapo Thought He Was ‘Crazy’.” And the rest of the evocation or portrait goes on to say:
They called Percy William Olaf de Wet [again the new name, or perhaps it was the name he was using at that time] a brave and curious man before they sentenced him to death in the German People’s Court for spying for the French Secret Service.
Percy de Wet would enjoy that description. I can imagine his lips curling sardonically as he heard the words. For no soldier of fortune that ever left England lived a more lurid, fantastic life than this tall, handsome devil-may-care.
He was known in the hotels and bars of every capital in Europe. He was known in the world’s strange places and among the world’s strange people. He sought adventure and he always found it.
Now his latest and greatest adventure has ended in disaster. But I doubt whether De Wet cares much, for he had the fatalism of all soldiers of fortune. It is reported that he accepted the verdict calmly, and De Wet’s strange friends will be glad of that.
I do not know much about the boyhood of De Wet. His mother, Mrs. P.W. de Wet, who lives in St. Albans, would not talk about it when I spoke to her last night.
This restlessness sent him chasing across the European and Eastern stage in later years — Abyssinia, Spain and Europe when it became the seething melting-pot for the present war.
Where all the trouble was, there was De Wet — a rather swaggering figure with a flowing moustache and a black shade over one eye. No one ever knew quite what he was doing. But he always lived well, was always giving parties, and telling the most extraordinary stories of his adventures.
Just after the Munich Agreement in 1938 De Wet was in Prague. Those were feverish days in Central Europe. Spies clustered around every bar, and no one knew whether to trust his neighbour. [This paragraph seems to imply that perhaps De Wet’s much-rebuked “bouts of drunkenness” merely resulted from the uncompromising fulfilment of certain indispensable prerequisites of his profession as a spy, since his profiler Stanford could have said “around every hotel” or “every café” or “every nightclub” or even “every brothel,” but he says clearly “around every bar.”]
Prague quickly learned of De Wet’s presence. He took a suite of rooms and gave champagne parties which were attended by beautiful women and a strange group of men.
Some say that the Gestapo investigated the activities of De Wet, but came to the conclusion that he was just another “crazy Englishman.”
He got to know a beautiful Russian woman. It is reported that he married her, and that she was arrested as his accomplice when the Gestapo got on his trail. It is also reported that she afterwards committed suicide. [Here we have a Russian woman with whom he may have contracted matrimony; this may have been the legitimate proprietress of the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, but if she “committed suicide” during the Gestapo’s interrogation, then there are two possibilities: either she didn’t commit suicide and hadn’t died and was still alive in 1951, or else De Wet was married twice, both times to Russian women. Neither of these two things seems at all likely, and still less likely is the possibility that he aspired to possess and preside over the Moscow Metropol in his capacity as bona fide heir and widower.]
He was familiar to newspaper men. To some of us he offered information—“inside information.”
He was proud to say that he was “on the inside.” But you could not always take this man too seriously.
He had a fine time in Abyssinia.
He went to Addis to fly for the Emperor — he and that world-famous figure Herbert Fauntleroy Julian (“The Black Eagle of Harlem”) who was a strapping African Negro who enjoyed putting seven sorts of fear into the hearts of the natives. [To tell the truth, the absurdities assembled by the German reporter from the Vôlkischer Beobachter seem like the height of good sense next to this English portrayal, especially after the stellar and aerial appearance of the Black Eagle of Harlem, whose true name could not possibly sound any more false or novelistic, so much so that it was undoubtedly authentic; keep in mind that in 1941 there weren’t yet many movies about the war to cause dementia in tabloid newsmen. But Herbert Fauntleroy Julian: who could dream that up?]
My colleague Noel Monks met him at the Hotel Imperial — surely the most cosmopolitan war hotel of all time. Then De Wet and “The Black Eagle of Harlem” were apparently rivals for the favours of the Emperor. Both of them had gone there to fly. But apparently the Emperor had only one communicating plane and most of their time was spent on the ground.
Yes — De Wet enjoyed the Abyssinian scene. It had all the things he loved — colour, adventure, uncertainty.
The Germans say that he had to leave Abyssinia because he fought a duel. I cannot substantiate that story, but I can well imagine that it is true, for De Wet ran into “scrapes” wherever he went.
He was in Spain, too, along with the rest of that brave and laughing crowd of men who will follow a fight to the ends of the earth. He flew against Franco. He used to say that he lost an eye in an air fight.