CHAPTER XLIVPATRINE REMEMBERSPatrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted—and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess.The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped—was it lobster Américaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?—when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases ofSamson et Dalila, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments."Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm."Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is verychic! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!""How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet mob,—and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.To the strange barbaric music of the dance from São Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily—or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere—out of the pillared dancing-hall....She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:"So, Isis, you are mine now!""I suppose so!""I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall we go back—or would you prefer——"She said with her face turned from him sullenly:"I should prefer to go—to where I live!"He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....And then—the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of one of them—could the man have been the German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?—and then he had put her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her morning mail.Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just when his attitude had become formidable and menacing—there might yet be pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to, suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own voice say to von Herrnung:"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood."Under no—possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not prudent at all!"And later:"You give me to understand that whatever happens—whatever happens—you will have nothing more to do with me?"Idiot!—besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain. Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes, negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine. Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if—that happened? And—Sherbrand! A blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked, and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned—to meet the look of Lynette.And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief like this!"And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and quivering nerves down to the living bone."I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him not to go—you begged Owen not to allow——"There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me.""Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of passionate, remorseful tenderness:"Here is my place!—here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing women since the beginning of the Great War?It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer. Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her dead beech-leaf hair. She did not—how could she?—fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and took it to her bosom, saying:"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring the heavy tresses:"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:"No! At least!—It is hideous now and he hated it! I—I had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris air!"Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks so much of you, always!""I don't deserve that any one should!""Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you start?"For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall."I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But—if somebody like you had been my mother—perhaps there'd have been something to show for it to-day."Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain—the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes."You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You're going—for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's, and Bawne's—and Mother's and Irma's and your own—don't pretend you're a victim!—to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her neighbour—the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity—had not as yet awakened in Patrine.She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not thecachetof one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four hundredper annum—as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive male.Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of that question. How many sleepless nights—they were horribly unbecoming!—lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.CHAPTER XLVFLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEAOn Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval Goody Two Shoes and aëroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of all professions—who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing theultimatumexpected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering in Berlin that night forKrieg mit Russland."It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to his crony. "Why then should it not happen now?""War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in the same key."And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked—good! If the French—good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!""Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second liqueur-glass of Kümmel—"that it will not be this time as at the affair of Agadir!""We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for shell—one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed with super-explosive. No, no!Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!"He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:"What are theseGottverfluchtjackasses braying about?"The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet—now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously into "God save the King!"The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed...."'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you—I am!""He hissed.... The —— hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me——""No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in theDaily Telleror theMorning Wire, but it was crowded out by the report—in leaded type—of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian Field Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of the German Imperial Foreign Office, and hero of the two days' flight from Hanover to Paris in the previous April,—to essay the crossing to Germany at a late hour, and in the face of a threatening gale. Another paragraph recorded how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"), "had been found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg Line, bound for Newcastle, floating derelict in the North Sea."A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the stroke of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of Saxham's. He answered it through the roaring in his ears of the North Sea waters that had drowned the boy."Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so toughly tried, so faithfully trusted. "You have heard the report? Your voice tells me you have! Hope, man!—hope!—against everything go on hoping!"The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:"Have I—grounds for hope?"Came the prompt reply:"I say yes! Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!""God bless you, General!""Have you—you have not told her?"Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips:"No!—I thought I should like to keep my wife for another hour or two!"There was a crisp, sharp order:"Go to her now, and steel her with this from me—that the aëroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted. The First Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears positively to this. The 'Gnome' engine had been taken out of the stirrups, and the gyroscopic hovering-gear removed wholesale. Do you comprehend that this means—a pre-arranged thing? Listen!—I'll pound it into you, confound you! Once—they have been picked up! Twice—they have been picked up! Three times—they have been picked up! Go to your wife and tell her so from me!"The speaker rang off.But he knew discouragement. The rapid march of events across the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung's flight from Hendon had elicited a check from Official Headquarters.Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and cooling your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted to the private sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the presence of Britain's Secretary of State for War. See him, seated square and upright in a high-backed leather-covered arm-chair behind a big green cloth covered mahogany desk, a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a nose of the beaky type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey receding from tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue eyes, a little weakened by much recent poring over State documents by electric-light.The British Government found it incompatible with its present line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the recovery of the Foulis Papers. For forty-five years their duplicates had lain in safe-keeping at the War Office. They were there now. That was the Minister's chief point.The Foulis War Engine had never been patented—never acquired by the British War Office. Such distinction or favour as the tenth Earl had received from Government had been conferred in recognition of the dead man's gallant services to his country, not as the reward of his inventive gift.Ergo, the British Government could not concern itself with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll Castle. To pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of the Clanronald family. If his lordship chose to drop the matter!—the Colonel's celebrated Parliamentary shrug and smile conveyed the rest.There was another point still. If the Plans of the War Engine of Clanronald had once been seen by—alien eyes, the possession of the formulas did not matter two pence. The cat that had grown grey in the bag was out of it for good. In the Colonel's opinion—a priceless asset in the highly delicate condition of International Politics—a more formidable document than the Foulis Plan was the Note which was even then being placed by Austria's Representative at Belgrade before the Serbian Council of Ministers. This, in conjunction with Germany's deferred answer to our proposal of a Conference of Representatives of the Great Powers, and the sudden, secret return of the Emperor of Germany to Berlin—"justifies Admiralty orders that have been issued," said the Minister, "directing our First—ahem!—-Battle Fleet, concentrated—as it happens!—at Portland, not to disperse for Manoeuvre Leave."The speaker, who had pushed back his chair and crossed his legs, looked very steadily at Sir Roland as this last sentence very quietly left his thin lips. Not a muscle twitched in the other's lean, keen face. The Minister went on:"Thus I may hope I have made clear to you my view of the situation. As for the Flying-officer, Count von Herrnung—we may presume him to have been—for no doubt he is drowned—a military spy. The German General Staff have a preference for employing men belonging to the higher social circles for work of this kind. Wonderfully organised, their system of strategical and political investigation!"Sir Roland agreed:"Wonderfully organised, when one goes closely into its ramifications—tracing and following them to their Headquarters in a certain underground office at the Wilhelmstrasse! But they fail in one thing. The kind of operations they contemplate can usually be deduced from the line of their reconnaissance!""And yet in the instance under consideration," hinted the Minister, "Count von Herrnung's intention of commandeering a machine from the Hendon Flying Ground seems to have been fairly well disguised!""Pardon me!" opposed Sir Roland, with quiet assurance. "He had no such intention when he arrived at Hendon. His orders were conveyed to him on the ground! And the haste with which he was got out of England with the brown satchel proves that his superiors did not dare to delay even for the precautionary measures, and that no copies nor photographs have been made of the Foulis MSS. and plans! Take it from me that the cat, if she has not already got to Germany, remains in the brown bag!""And the bag is somewhere in the North Sea. But it may be recovered," said the Minister, "with the body of von Herrnung."The General returned, with a deepening of the lines upon his forehead, and at the angles of his mobile nostrils:"It may be recovered, as you say. Butifso, it will be found upon the body of the boy." He added, meeting the question in the tired eyes of the other man: "Some objection was made by Mr. Sherbrand—the owner of the now wrecked aëroplane—to von Herrnung's taking the satchel with him in the pilot's pit. So—Mr. Sherbrand informs me—von Herrnung strapped it to the safety-belt that secured Saxham in his seat."A gleam of interest warmed the frostiness of the Ministerial countenance:"The boy ... Ah! yes, as I think I mentioned before, I sympathise deeply with the boy's parents. He is a son of a personal friend of your own, I understand?""Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at Gueldersdorp.""Saxham—that is the name—and the child is the only one? Most sad and regrettable. And I think the paragraph in theWirementioned—one of your Boy Scouts?""One of my Scouts!" The Chief's bright eyes snapped as he added, "Very much to the honour of his troop. Very greatly to the credit of the Organisation—as I mean to prove to him should he happily survive to return!""Indeed? You interest me! Pray tell the story."It was told, succinctly and crisply. He said quite warmly:"I could hardly have credited! What pluck and energy! And to dare the thing—on the strength of a second flight! A boy like that should have lived! Good-bye, my dear General!"He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in London! A shower or so—and one could do a great deal of execution with the White Coachman on our Hampshire trout-rivers, sir!"He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of the sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass of a barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to the writing-table littered with State papers, in defiance of the thin, shrill summons of the telephone-bell....So the General went away, owning to himself that the thing looked desperate. It was better for England that the Plans of the Foulis War Engine should lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but what of his friend, what of his friend's wife?The keen eyes were unwontedly dim as he reached the wide Turkey-carpeted landing, and the messenger caught a snatch ofThe Flowers o' the Forestwhistled in slow time as his hurrying footsteps overtook the General. Would Sir Roland please to go back, was the gist of the message. The Minister had something further to communicate.The War Minister was not alone. Two persons were with him—a tall man in civilian clothes who stood looking out of the window as one who had temporarily removed himself out of earshot, the other a slim and dapper Naval Secretary.The "something further" proved to be the pith of an Admiralty communication just imparted. Early that morning a British Submarine on North Sea Patrol duty (we will call her E-131), upon returning to the surface to ascertain the cause of defective submergence, had discovered a brown leather lock-strap to be entangled with her aft diving-plane on the starboard side. A leather satchel firmly attached to the other end of the strap was jammed under the plane, and subsequently extricated by one of the men, from the collapsible.Perhaps you can imagine the Lieutenant Commander stooping over the retrieved bit of flotsam, lying under the shaded electric light hanging over the narrow sliding table that pulled out from under his bunk in the officer's cabin—a place of privacy again, the steel bulkhead-doors being shut. For when you submerge they are all thrown wide so that the Commander's eye may traverse the whole length of an elongated engine-room, and see what every man is doing at his particular post, in a single flash.The Commander's eye was screwed up in the vain endeavour to see under the flap of the locked satchel. He took up the thing and turned it in his hands, while the strap, soaked and twisted by sea-water and engine-power, flapped upon his knees like a long frond of wet seaweed."Wonder who cut the strap?" Clumsily, as though by a blunt knife wielded by a numb hand—it had been hacked through, and the satchel scratched badly in the process. He went on: "Looks like some rich American globe-trotter's travelling-satchel. No picking these locks! One might negotiate 'em with the oxygen flame-puff—if it wasn't for the risk of damaging the wads of dollar bills that might possibly be inside. Nothing to be done but rip or cut the leather—and that seems to be made strengthy with metal, somehow!" He slipped the lean blade of a penknife between the strongly stitched edges. The satchel proved to be lined with thin plates of aluminium. "As easy to get inside as the Bank of England!" he grumbled, and so it proved, if the Bank of England has ever been negotiated with a bull-head tin-opener.Inside the leather case lined with aluminium, a little sea-water had penetrated, patching with damp a small antique portfolio of pearly, bossy shark-skin exquisitely painted with birds and foliage by some old-world Japanese master of Art. The quaintly feeble lock, and corner-guards were of bronze, gold-inlaid with scowling fox-masks, and the inevitable chrysanthemum.The Japanese lock gave at a twist of the penknife-blade and then the portfolio disgorged its loose sheaf of yellowed papers strung together by a clew of faded silken twist. Drawings to scale and plans: sheets of manuscript and pages covered with the symbols used in chemical formulas, scribed in a clear small rounded hand."Great Scott!—what's this?"The ash from the Commander's neglected cigarette fell upon the topside of the precious manuscript. He blew it reverently off, and dug himself into the pile:"H'm, hum!""By Me, Robert Foulis, Seaman, Tenth Earl of Clanronald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the British Fleet, and Marquis of Araman, etc., etc. Invented & Conceived Not in Hatred of Mankind, but in Defence of my Country and the Rights Beloved by Every True Briton——""Marvellous old cock! And in 1854, when he was eighty if a day, he offers it for the fifth time to the British Government!""Busy, Owner? See you've got inside the prize-packet! My Christmas! what is it? Miss Araminta's Diary; 'FOUND AFTER FORTY YEARS!' or 'HOW I BROKE MY ENGAGEMENT WITH THE CURATE!'"This from a young, exceedingly wet, and dirty Engineer Lieutenant, fresh from an interview with the damaged diving-plane, and smelling potently of castor-oil.The Commander looked up, and strange things were in his eyes."You're pretty wide!" He added, speaking partly to the other man inside the Commander: "Jolly good thing we're on the Home trip. That main motor gives a lot o' trouble, and—suppose some purblind sailing ship crashed into us—and sent us to the bottom with THIS aboard. Great Sea Boots! It makes me crawl all down my back to think of it!"The Second clattered down the steel ladder and filled the doorway with his burly personality."What makes you crawl? Don't say the leg o' mutton we bought Saturday from the skipper of that Grimsby trawler has gone back on us! Is that what the liar means by fresh meat?""If I told you, you'd crawl too. Or you'd think it a case of sunstroke—or D.T. of the deferred kind." The Commander stowed the papers back in the sharkskin case with gingerly carefulness that provoked the query whether he thought he had got hold of a new kind of floating mine, and elicited the retort:"I don't think!—I know it!"No one got anything more out of the speaker, who, presently, declining stewed mutton, whose wholesome savour amply certified to the moral character of the trawler's skipper, went to the Wireless and dispatched a pithy message to the Commander of E-131's particular Coast Defence station, and the news was flashed to Whitehall, to go forth ere long from thence over the world.Sir Roland said, with that unwonted cloud dulling his bright eyes, and a certain huskiness of utterance:"There's no other solution of the puzzle. Remembering that I had said to him, 'In an emergency, you might do good service to your country by destroying this!' my Scout took the only course open to him—and dumped the satchel into the sea!"The Minister admitted with characteristic reticence:"Whether I concur with your theory or not, I must admit to you that the report received specifies that the strap had been cut. 'Hacked through' is the actual expression—and the back of the leather outer case scratched as though by a knife.""It is vital that I should examine the strap and see those scratches!"The Minister answered:"To-morrow morning by twelve o'clock—I can obtain you an opportunity. The recovered valise, or wallet, or satchel, will be brought up to the Admiralty by the officer commanding E-131. She has not yet arrived in harbour. But the Commander will doubtless receive instructions as soon as he reports himself." He continued, gracefully ignoring his previous statement that the Government had decided not to interfere: "In the absence of the Earl of Clanronald, now yachting in Northern waters, it is obligatory that the War Office should take the matter in hand."The very tall stranger had wheeled, and advanced to Sir Roland with a smile and an outstretched hand of greeting. We know how great a heart beat in its pulses. Its short, hard grip spoke sympathy and understanding, though the voice was harsh and the light grey eyes stared out of the brick-burned, heavily-moustached face with the old sagacious, indomitable regard. He said after a word or two had passed, the Admiralty Secretary temporarily occupying the attention of the War Minister:"By the way, you will be interested to hear something I have at first-hand from Clanronald. He has been, as perhaps you know, cruising with two ancient cronies, Lord Gaynor and Colonel Kaye, in his steam-yachtHelga, along the Danish West Coast of Jutland. He returns the richer by—what I may term a unique experience!"Sir Roland said, meeting the Sirdar's eyes with great certainty:"If I may guess at the nature of the experience, I should hazard that it was—an attempt in the kidnapping line?"The other gave his short, gruff laugh:"You have hit it. They carry a Wireless installation on theHelga, and sparked the storyviaCullercoats to Bredingley, who was stopping a week-end at Doome. The yacht was at anchorage in the outer harbour of Esbjorg, some twenty-eight kilometres from the frontier of Danish-Germany. It was midnight. Everybody on board, including the watch, seems to have been asleep except Clanronald, who was roused by something scraping the side of the yacht. Presently he heard stealthy footsteps on deck, and whispering. He was squatting on his bunk with a brace of loaded revolvers and a Winchester repeating-rifle, when the intruders opened his cabin door!""Did any of them survive the intrusion? If so, Clanronald has—very much changed!"The Sirdar returned, with the quirk of a smile lurking under the heavy moustache whose brown was getting flecked with grey:"Well—theHelgahas recently been re-enamelled, and Clanronald is faddy on the point of his new paint. Besides"—the quirk deepened into a laugh—"he thought it would be more useful to take them as live specimens of the kind of material that goes to make up the crew of a German submarine."They looked at each other, laughing. Sir Roland inquired:"I venture to hope that while Clanronald was about it—he collected the submarine?""Unfortunately, no! And, very regrettably, the collapsible boat in which the raiders had made their midnight visit was swamped when the two others—there had been four of them!—jumped into her to make off. Presumably they could swim and were picked up by the submarine—Undersea Boat No. 14—according to the testimony of one of the prisoners. The other of whom—an officer and leader of the foray—took poison, and was found dead in the cabin that served for his prison-cell. The other, a mere seaman, is too dazed with terror to be intelligible—according to Clanronald. But the whole thing is interesting!""Hugely and instructively. As shedding," said the General, "a certain light upon a mystery that baffled the wiseacres in 1913. I refer to the mysterious disappearance of the engineer-inventor Riesl from his cabin aboard a Hamburg Line, Leith-bound steamer. With a contract in his pocket for the supply of crude-oil-consuming marine motor-engines to the Navy of a Power—other than the German Government!""Possibly!—possibly! One never knows what forces are working beneath the surface." The set, brick-dust face and grave sagacious eyes of the great soldier seemed to testify to his complete innocence of anything like adouble-entendre.He ended as the War Minister dismissed the secretary from the Admiralty, and turned again to Sir Roland, saying in his most pompous tones:"Twelve o'clock to-morrow, then, General. Meanwhile, pray convey to his parents my admiration—in which I feel the First Lord will concur—of the remarkable qualities manifested by young Saxham! Astonishing devotion to duty, and courageous self-reliance! He should have lived!—he would have made a noble man!"Came the curt reply:"He is alive now! I am convinced of it!"The Minister gave the speaker a glance of incredulity. It was so very clear to the War Secretary's logical mind that the child and the man were drowned. But the harsh voice of the great Field Marshal, England's most faithful friend, who was to succeed him in his place of power, answered for him:"One would expect you to stick to your guns, General. Should you prove right before I sail for Egypt, bring him to see me!""I promise that, faithfully, my lord."They shook hands and parted. It seemed a long week until the morrow when the secret of Robert Foulis came home to roost at Whitehall. But it ended, and twelve o'clock brought that keenly-desired opportunity of examining the cut lock-strap and the empty, knife-scored satchel in the official sanctum of the First Lord Commissioner for the Admiralty, and in the presence of that functionary."There seems—ah!" the First Lord mounted a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, "to be something in the nature of an address scratched upon the leather!"Sir Roland corroborated, after a brief inspection:"There is, most undoubtedly. And the address is that of the London Headquarters of our Organisation, No. 1000, Victoria Street.""Dear me—dear me! Most remarkable! Now here," said the Right Hon. gentleman, breathing asthmatically and twinkling through the gold-framed pebbles, "is something not so easily deciphered. A rude symbol, something like afleur-de-liswith letters at either side, and a few other meaningless scrawls!""It is not afleur-de-lis," Sir Roland answered, "but a fox-mask, with the number and signature of my Scout. He belonged to the Fox Patrol, 331st London. Here is his troop-number, 22, and here are his initials, B.M.S.—Bawne Mildare Saxham. It is perfectly in order! In this way he would be expected to sign a communication to his fellow-Scout. And the marks below, I can assure you, are not meaningless. They convey that there is trouble of a very definite kind. In addition the arrow, here, taking the top of the satchel for the North as in a map—signifies, 'Road to be followed East.'" He added with a stiffening of the facial muscles that made the keen face as hard as a mask carved in boxwood:"And followed it shall be!"
CHAPTER XLIV
PATRINE REMEMBERS
Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had boasted—and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.
She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.
In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.
On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.
After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess.
The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped—was it lobster Américaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?—when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases ofSamson et Dalila, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.
"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.
Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.
"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is verychic! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"
"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.
Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet mob,—and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.
To the strange barbaric music of the dance from São Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily—or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere—out of the pillared dancing-hall....
She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:
"So, Isis, you are mine now!"
"I suppose so!"
"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall we go back—or would you prefer——"
She said with her face turned from him sullenly:
"I should prefer to go—to where I live!"
He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....
And then—the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of one of them—could the man have been the German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?—and then he had put her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....
It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her morning mail.
Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just when his attitude had become formidable and menacing—there might yet be pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.
Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to, suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own voice say to von Herrnung:
"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"
He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood.
"Under no—possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not prudent at all!"
And later:
"You give me to understand that whatever happens—whatever happens—you will have nothing more to do with me?"
Idiot!—besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain. Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....
Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes, negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine. Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if—that happened? And—Sherbrand! A blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.
So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked, and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned—to meet the look of Lynette.
And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:
"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief like this!"
And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and quivering nerves down to the living bone.
"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:
"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him not to go—you begged Owen not to allow——"
There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."
"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of passionate, remorseful tenderness:
"Here is my place!—here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.
Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing women since the beginning of the Great War?
It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer. Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her dead beech-leaf hair. She did not—how could she?—fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and took it to her bosom, saying:
"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"
They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring the heavy tresses:
"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"
Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:
"No! At least!—It is hideous now and he hated it! I—I had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris air!"
Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"
"I don't deserve that any one should!"
"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you start?"
For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall.
"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But—if somebody like you had been my mother—perhaps there'd have been something to show for it to-day."
Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain—the figure that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.
"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You're going—for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's, and Bawne's—and Mother's and Irma's and your own—don't pretend you're a victim!—to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"
Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her neighbour—the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity—had not as yet awakened in Patrine.
She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not thecachetof one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four hundredper annum—as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive male.
Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of that question. How many sleepless nights—they were horribly unbecoming!—lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.
CHAPTER XLV
FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA
On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval Goody Two Shoes and aëroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of all professions—who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.
The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing theultimatumexpected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering in Berlin that night forKrieg mit Russland.
"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to his crony. "Why then should it not happen now?"
"War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in the same key.
"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked—good! If the French—good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!"
"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second liqueur-glass of Kümmel—"that it will not be this time as at the affair of Agadir!"
"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for shell—one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed with super-explosive. No, no!Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!"
He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:
"What are theseGottverfluchtjackasses braying about?"
The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet—now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously into "God save the King!"
The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed....
"'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you—I am!"
"He hissed.... The —— hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me——"
"No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in theDaily Telleror theMorning Wire, but it was crowded out by the report—in leaded type—of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.
A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian Field Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of the German Imperial Foreign Office, and hero of the two days' flight from Hanover to Paris in the previous April,—to essay the crossing to Germany at a late hour, and in the face of a threatening gale. Another paragraph recorded how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"), "had been found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg Line, bound for Newcastle, floating derelict in the North Sea."
A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the stroke of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of Saxham's. He answered it through the roaring in his ears of the North Sea waters that had drowned the boy.
"Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so toughly tried, so faithfully trusted. "You have heard the report? Your voice tells me you have! Hope, man!—hope!—against everything go on hoping!"
The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:
"Have I—grounds for hope?"
Came the prompt reply:
"I say yes! Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!"
"God bless you, General!"
"Have you—you have not told her?"
Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips:
"No!—I thought I should like to keep my wife for another hour or two!"
There was a crisp, sharp order:
"Go to her now, and steel her with this from me—that the aëroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted. The First Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears positively to this. The 'Gnome' engine had been taken out of the stirrups, and the gyroscopic hovering-gear removed wholesale. Do you comprehend that this means—a pre-arranged thing? Listen!—I'll pound it into you, confound you! Once—they have been picked up! Twice—they have been picked up! Three times—they have been picked up! Go to your wife and tell her so from me!"
The speaker rang off.
But he knew discouragement. The rapid march of events across the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung's flight from Hendon had elicited a check from Official Headquarters.
Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and cooling your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted to the private sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the presence of Britain's Secretary of State for War. See him, seated square and upright in a high-backed leather-covered arm-chair behind a big green cloth covered mahogany desk, a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a nose of the beaky type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey receding from tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue eyes, a little weakened by much recent poring over State documents by electric-light.
The British Government found it incompatible with its present line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the recovery of the Foulis Papers. For forty-five years their duplicates had lain in safe-keeping at the War Office. They were there now. That was the Minister's chief point.
The Foulis War Engine had never been patented—never acquired by the British War Office. Such distinction or favour as the tenth Earl had received from Government had been conferred in recognition of the dead man's gallant services to his country, not as the reward of his inventive gift.Ergo, the British Government could not concern itself with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll Castle. To pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of the Clanronald family. If his lordship chose to drop the matter!—the Colonel's celebrated Parliamentary shrug and smile conveyed the rest.
There was another point still. If the Plans of the War Engine of Clanronald had once been seen by—alien eyes, the possession of the formulas did not matter two pence. The cat that had grown grey in the bag was out of it for good. In the Colonel's opinion—a priceless asset in the highly delicate condition of International Politics—a more formidable document than the Foulis Plan was the Note which was even then being placed by Austria's Representative at Belgrade before the Serbian Council of Ministers. This, in conjunction with Germany's deferred answer to our proposal of a Conference of Representatives of the Great Powers, and the sudden, secret return of the Emperor of Germany to Berlin—"justifies Admiralty orders that have been issued," said the Minister, "directing our First—ahem!—-Battle Fleet, concentrated—as it happens!—at Portland, not to disperse for Manoeuvre Leave."
The speaker, who had pushed back his chair and crossed his legs, looked very steadily at Sir Roland as this last sentence very quietly left his thin lips. Not a muscle twitched in the other's lean, keen face. The Minister went on:
"Thus I may hope I have made clear to you my view of the situation. As for the Flying-officer, Count von Herrnung—we may presume him to have been—for no doubt he is drowned—a military spy. The German General Staff have a preference for employing men belonging to the higher social circles for work of this kind. Wonderfully organised, their system of strategical and political investigation!"
Sir Roland agreed:
"Wonderfully organised, when one goes closely into its ramifications—tracing and following them to their Headquarters in a certain underground office at the Wilhelmstrasse! But they fail in one thing. The kind of operations they contemplate can usually be deduced from the line of their reconnaissance!"
"And yet in the instance under consideration," hinted the Minister, "Count von Herrnung's intention of commandeering a machine from the Hendon Flying Ground seems to have been fairly well disguised!"
"Pardon me!" opposed Sir Roland, with quiet assurance. "He had no such intention when he arrived at Hendon. His orders were conveyed to him on the ground! And the haste with which he was got out of England with the brown satchel proves that his superiors did not dare to delay even for the precautionary measures, and that no copies nor photographs have been made of the Foulis MSS. and plans! Take it from me that the cat, if she has not already got to Germany, remains in the brown bag!"
"And the bag is somewhere in the North Sea. But it may be recovered," said the Minister, "with the body of von Herrnung."
The General returned, with a deepening of the lines upon his forehead, and at the angles of his mobile nostrils:
"It may be recovered, as you say. Butifso, it will be found upon the body of the boy." He added, meeting the question in the tired eyes of the other man: "Some objection was made by Mr. Sherbrand—the owner of the now wrecked aëroplane—to von Herrnung's taking the satchel with him in the pilot's pit. So—Mr. Sherbrand informs me—von Herrnung strapped it to the safety-belt that secured Saxham in his seat."
A gleam of interest warmed the frostiness of the Ministerial countenance:
"The boy ... Ah! yes, as I think I mentioned before, I sympathise deeply with the boy's parents. He is a son of a personal friend of your own, I understand?"
"Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at Gueldersdorp."
"Saxham—that is the name—and the child is the only one? Most sad and regrettable. And I think the paragraph in theWirementioned—one of your Boy Scouts?"
"One of my Scouts!" The Chief's bright eyes snapped as he added, "Very much to the honour of his troop. Very greatly to the credit of the Organisation—as I mean to prove to him should he happily survive to return!"
"Indeed? You interest me! Pray tell the story."
It was told, succinctly and crisply. He said quite warmly:
"I could hardly have credited! What pluck and energy! And to dare the thing—on the strength of a second flight! A boy like that should have lived! Good-bye, my dear General!"
He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:
"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in London! A shower or so—and one could do a great deal of execution with the White Coachman on our Hampshire trout-rivers, sir!"
He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of the sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass of a barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to the writing-table littered with State papers, in defiance of the thin, shrill summons of the telephone-bell....
So the General went away, owning to himself that the thing looked desperate. It was better for England that the Plans of the Foulis War Engine should lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but what of his friend, what of his friend's wife?
The keen eyes were unwontedly dim as he reached the wide Turkey-carpeted landing, and the messenger caught a snatch ofThe Flowers o' the Forestwhistled in slow time as his hurrying footsteps overtook the General. Would Sir Roland please to go back, was the gist of the message. The Minister had something further to communicate.
The War Minister was not alone. Two persons were with him—a tall man in civilian clothes who stood looking out of the window as one who had temporarily removed himself out of earshot, the other a slim and dapper Naval Secretary.
The "something further" proved to be the pith of an Admiralty communication just imparted. Early that morning a British Submarine on North Sea Patrol duty (we will call her E-131), upon returning to the surface to ascertain the cause of defective submergence, had discovered a brown leather lock-strap to be entangled with her aft diving-plane on the starboard side. A leather satchel firmly attached to the other end of the strap was jammed under the plane, and subsequently extricated by one of the men, from the collapsible.
Perhaps you can imagine the Lieutenant Commander stooping over the retrieved bit of flotsam, lying under the shaded electric light hanging over the narrow sliding table that pulled out from under his bunk in the officer's cabin—a place of privacy again, the steel bulkhead-doors being shut. For when you submerge they are all thrown wide so that the Commander's eye may traverse the whole length of an elongated engine-room, and see what every man is doing at his particular post, in a single flash.
The Commander's eye was screwed up in the vain endeavour to see under the flap of the locked satchel. He took up the thing and turned it in his hands, while the strap, soaked and twisted by sea-water and engine-power, flapped upon his knees like a long frond of wet seaweed.
"Wonder who cut the strap?" Clumsily, as though by a blunt knife wielded by a numb hand—it had been hacked through, and the satchel scratched badly in the process. He went on: "Looks like some rich American globe-trotter's travelling-satchel. No picking these locks! One might negotiate 'em with the oxygen flame-puff—if it wasn't for the risk of damaging the wads of dollar bills that might possibly be inside. Nothing to be done but rip or cut the leather—and that seems to be made strengthy with metal, somehow!" He slipped the lean blade of a penknife between the strongly stitched edges. The satchel proved to be lined with thin plates of aluminium. "As easy to get inside as the Bank of England!" he grumbled, and so it proved, if the Bank of England has ever been negotiated with a bull-head tin-opener.
Inside the leather case lined with aluminium, a little sea-water had penetrated, patching with damp a small antique portfolio of pearly, bossy shark-skin exquisitely painted with birds and foliage by some old-world Japanese master of Art. The quaintly feeble lock, and corner-guards were of bronze, gold-inlaid with scowling fox-masks, and the inevitable chrysanthemum.
The Japanese lock gave at a twist of the penknife-blade and then the portfolio disgorged its loose sheaf of yellowed papers strung together by a clew of faded silken twist. Drawings to scale and plans: sheets of manuscript and pages covered with the symbols used in chemical formulas, scribed in a clear small rounded hand.
"Great Scott!—what's this?"
The ash from the Commander's neglected cigarette fell upon the topside of the precious manuscript. He blew it reverently off, and dug himself into the pile:
"H'm, hum!"
"By Me, Robert Foulis, Seaman, Tenth Earl of Clanronald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the British Fleet, and Marquis of Araman, etc., etc. Invented & Conceived Not in Hatred of Mankind, but in Defence of my Country and the Rights Beloved by Every True Briton——"
"Marvellous old cock! And in 1854, when he was eighty if a day, he offers it for the fifth time to the British Government!"
"Busy, Owner? See you've got inside the prize-packet! My Christmas! what is it? Miss Araminta's Diary; 'FOUND AFTER FORTY YEARS!' or 'HOW I BROKE MY ENGAGEMENT WITH THE CURATE!'"
This from a young, exceedingly wet, and dirty Engineer Lieutenant, fresh from an interview with the damaged diving-plane, and smelling potently of castor-oil.
The Commander looked up, and strange things were in his eyes.
"You're pretty wide!" He added, speaking partly to the other man inside the Commander: "Jolly good thing we're on the Home trip. That main motor gives a lot o' trouble, and—suppose some purblind sailing ship crashed into us—and sent us to the bottom with THIS aboard. Great Sea Boots! It makes me crawl all down my back to think of it!"
The Second clattered down the steel ladder and filled the doorway with his burly personality.
"What makes you crawl? Don't say the leg o' mutton we bought Saturday from the skipper of that Grimsby trawler has gone back on us! Is that what the liar means by fresh meat?"
"If I told you, you'd crawl too. Or you'd think it a case of sunstroke—or D.T. of the deferred kind." The Commander stowed the papers back in the sharkskin case with gingerly carefulness that provoked the query whether he thought he had got hold of a new kind of floating mine, and elicited the retort:
"I don't think!—I know it!"
No one got anything more out of the speaker, who, presently, declining stewed mutton, whose wholesome savour amply certified to the moral character of the trawler's skipper, went to the Wireless and dispatched a pithy message to the Commander of E-131's particular Coast Defence station, and the news was flashed to Whitehall, to go forth ere long from thence over the world.
Sir Roland said, with that unwonted cloud dulling his bright eyes, and a certain huskiness of utterance:
"There's no other solution of the puzzle. Remembering that I had said to him, 'In an emergency, you might do good service to your country by destroying this!' my Scout took the only course open to him—and dumped the satchel into the sea!"
The Minister admitted with characteristic reticence:
"Whether I concur with your theory or not, I must admit to you that the report received specifies that the strap had been cut. 'Hacked through' is the actual expression—and the back of the leather outer case scratched as though by a knife."
"It is vital that I should examine the strap and see those scratches!"
The Minister answered:
"To-morrow morning by twelve o'clock—I can obtain you an opportunity. The recovered valise, or wallet, or satchel, will be brought up to the Admiralty by the officer commanding E-131. She has not yet arrived in harbour. But the Commander will doubtless receive instructions as soon as he reports himself." He continued, gracefully ignoring his previous statement that the Government had decided not to interfere: "In the absence of the Earl of Clanronald, now yachting in Northern waters, it is obligatory that the War Office should take the matter in hand."
The very tall stranger had wheeled, and advanced to Sir Roland with a smile and an outstretched hand of greeting. We know how great a heart beat in its pulses. Its short, hard grip spoke sympathy and understanding, though the voice was harsh and the light grey eyes stared out of the brick-burned, heavily-moustached face with the old sagacious, indomitable regard. He said after a word or two had passed, the Admiralty Secretary temporarily occupying the attention of the War Minister:
"By the way, you will be interested to hear something I have at first-hand from Clanronald. He has been, as perhaps you know, cruising with two ancient cronies, Lord Gaynor and Colonel Kaye, in his steam-yachtHelga, along the Danish West Coast of Jutland. He returns the richer by—what I may term a unique experience!"
Sir Roland said, meeting the Sirdar's eyes with great certainty:
"If I may guess at the nature of the experience, I should hazard that it was—an attempt in the kidnapping line?"
The other gave his short, gruff laugh:
"You have hit it. They carry a Wireless installation on theHelga, and sparked the storyviaCullercoats to Bredingley, who was stopping a week-end at Doome. The yacht was at anchorage in the outer harbour of Esbjorg, some twenty-eight kilometres from the frontier of Danish-Germany. It was midnight. Everybody on board, including the watch, seems to have been asleep except Clanronald, who was roused by something scraping the side of the yacht. Presently he heard stealthy footsteps on deck, and whispering. He was squatting on his bunk with a brace of loaded revolvers and a Winchester repeating-rifle, when the intruders opened his cabin door!"
"Did any of them survive the intrusion? If so, Clanronald has—very much changed!"
The Sirdar returned, with the quirk of a smile lurking under the heavy moustache whose brown was getting flecked with grey:
"Well—theHelgahas recently been re-enamelled, and Clanronald is faddy on the point of his new paint. Besides"—the quirk deepened into a laugh—"he thought it would be more useful to take them as live specimens of the kind of material that goes to make up the crew of a German submarine."
They looked at each other, laughing. Sir Roland inquired:
"I venture to hope that while Clanronald was about it—he collected the submarine?"
"Unfortunately, no! And, very regrettably, the collapsible boat in which the raiders had made their midnight visit was swamped when the two others—there had been four of them!—jumped into her to make off. Presumably they could swim and were picked up by the submarine—Undersea Boat No. 14—according to the testimony of one of the prisoners. The other of whom—an officer and leader of the foray—took poison, and was found dead in the cabin that served for his prison-cell. The other, a mere seaman, is too dazed with terror to be intelligible—according to Clanronald. But the whole thing is interesting!"
"Hugely and instructively. As shedding," said the General, "a certain light upon a mystery that baffled the wiseacres in 1913. I refer to the mysterious disappearance of the engineer-inventor Riesl from his cabin aboard a Hamburg Line, Leith-bound steamer. With a contract in his pocket for the supply of crude-oil-consuming marine motor-engines to the Navy of a Power—other than the German Government!"
"Possibly!—possibly! One never knows what forces are working beneath the surface." The set, brick-dust face and grave sagacious eyes of the great soldier seemed to testify to his complete innocence of anything like adouble-entendre.
He ended as the War Minister dismissed the secretary from the Admiralty, and turned again to Sir Roland, saying in his most pompous tones:
"Twelve o'clock to-morrow, then, General. Meanwhile, pray convey to his parents my admiration—in which I feel the First Lord will concur—of the remarkable qualities manifested by young Saxham! Astonishing devotion to duty, and courageous self-reliance! He should have lived!—he would have made a noble man!"
Came the curt reply:
"He is alive now! I am convinced of it!"
The Minister gave the speaker a glance of incredulity. It was so very clear to the War Secretary's logical mind that the child and the man were drowned. But the harsh voice of the great Field Marshal, England's most faithful friend, who was to succeed him in his place of power, answered for him:
"One would expect you to stick to your guns, General. Should you prove right before I sail for Egypt, bring him to see me!"
"I promise that, faithfully, my lord."
They shook hands and parted. It seemed a long week until the morrow when the secret of Robert Foulis came home to roost at Whitehall. But it ended, and twelve o'clock brought that keenly-desired opportunity of examining the cut lock-strap and the empty, knife-scored satchel in the official sanctum of the First Lord Commissioner for the Admiralty, and in the presence of that functionary.
"There seems—ah!" the First Lord mounted a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, "to be something in the nature of an address scratched upon the leather!"
Sir Roland corroborated, after a brief inspection:
"There is, most undoubtedly. And the address is that of the London Headquarters of our Organisation, No. 1000, Victoria Street."
"Dear me—dear me! Most remarkable! Now here," said the Right Hon. gentleman, breathing asthmatically and twinkling through the gold-framed pebbles, "is something not so easily deciphered. A rude symbol, something like afleur-de-liswith letters at either side, and a few other meaningless scrawls!"
"It is not afleur-de-lis," Sir Roland answered, "but a fox-mask, with the number and signature of my Scout. He belonged to the Fox Patrol, 331st London. Here is his troop-number, 22, and here are his initials, B.M.S.—Bawne Mildare Saxham. It is perfectly in order! In this way he would be expected to sign a communication to his fellow-Scout. And the marks below, I can assure you, are not meaningless. They convey that there is trouble of a very definite kind. In addition the arrow, here, taking the top of the satchel for the North as in a map—signifies, 'Road to be followed East.'" He added with a stiffening of the facial muscles that made the keen face as hard as a mask carved in boxwood:
"And followed it shall be!"