Not that he failed altogether to tackle Julian, nor to tackle him on the admittedly burning questions: such as Julian's speech introducing a deputation to the Prime Minister, or that highly provocative letter assailing British pre-war diplomacy, the letter rejected by the "Times" and "accepted, of course, by the dingiest radical rag in the kingdom."
"They are using you!" Napier had burst out.
"I am content to be used. I ask nothing better."
More quietly, more gravely, Napier agreed it was a thing about which a man must be his own judge. Butby so muchhe must hesitate to judge for others. "The Pacifists are making a cat's-paw of you, I tell you. If you like that for yourself ..." he shrugged. Then, abandoning his momentary return to thelaissez-allerform of other days, he looked straight into Julian's eyes and with an earnestness that would have enlightened any one but Grant, "I don't know how you reconcile it to your conscience to involve a girl in such ..." he broke off. As Julian stood waiting serenely: "A girl as young and as far away from home—"
"Nan! Oh, you don't know Nan!"
Another time: "Why drag her into—all this?" Gavan demanded. "It isn't as if she could do anything."
"Oh, can't she!"
"What, in the name of—"
Although Julian wouldn't answer, an opportunity came to put the question to Nan. Napier found himself sitting opposite her at dinner in Lowndes Square on the night following the House of Commons debate on German spies. That topic, in the forefront of every mind, was ignored by tacit consent. Conversation fell for a few memorable minutes on the appalling statement, just issued officially, that there had been 57,000 casualties in the British Expeditionary Force up to the end of October. How many had fallen since in the bloody struggle about Ypres, fiercest of the war, and how many on either side would survive the stark misery of that first little-prepared-for winter in the trenches, no one present had heart to ask. But the question, urged in print and cried from platforms by Julian and his friends, was there in the girl's face.
Sir William seemed to answer by saying the one redeeming feature of the business was that it was too awful to last. The Germans must see they have failed.
"Why," the girl asked, with her candid eyes on her host, "if the Government believed that, why was Lord Kitchener calling for a hundred thousand men?"
"Oh,that—that was to show the Germans what they had to expect if theydidn'tcome to their senses."
While the dessert was going round, she got up, with a look at the clock and an apology. It was understood that she had an engagement.
"Always an emergency in these days," Sir William mocked pleasantly at the Women's Corps. "Gavan, see they get her a taxi, will you?"
The footman's whistle grew fainter as Napier helped her into her coat. They hadn't been alone since those hurried moments on the platform after Greta had gone. Something now in her slight awkwardness as she struggled with her coat, her increased anxiety to be off ("I ought to have gone ten minutes ago. I can always find a cab quicker than a footman") gave Napier a feeling that he had misinterpreted her avoidance. Not the new Greta-born distrust of him, but distrust of herself. His heart rose at that quick conviction. Rogers wouldn't be long, he reassured her, and then: "I wish he might, or, rather, I wish I hadn't to go back to the House with Sir William. I'd take you wherever it is you are going." He stopped suddenly.
"Would you? Would you really? That's what I've been longing to ask.Youwouldn't sit dumb, helpless, like me if once you'd heard Julian—"
"I'm under the impression that Ihave'heard Julian.'"
"No! no! not just arguing with you. I mean at one of the meetings."
"I see. Where I can't answer back."
"And now you're looking like that!" She turned away with nervous abruptness, but he had interposed between her and the doorknob.
"And you—have you any idea how unhappyyouare looking?"
"Well, why not?—if it is, as Julian says, 'such a brute of a world.'"
"Julianoughtn't to think so," Napier said bitterly. "Julian has you—"
"Oh, has he! Poor Julian!"
"Do you mean he hasn't?" They were both trembling.
"I mean, whether he has or hasn't, we aren't rid of the miserableness. Once you are started wrong, you can't get right, it seems. Not without—" Suddenly her eyes filled. A shower of words tumbled out in a shaken whisper: "At first—oh, for long, I thought you hardly knew I was there, at Kirklamont, in the world! Then, when you began to notice me, it was only to criticize me. Oh, I used to see you laughing; not with your mouth, with your eyes. You laughed at Julian, too, for thinking I was all right." She broke in upon his protest, which was none the less horrified for being self-convicted.
"Yes, yes; you tried to prevent Julian from caring. I could have forgiven you that," she said, with her look of indignant candor; "yes, I couldeasilyhave forgiven you if you'd done it from anynicereason, like jealousy. Youdidn'tdo it from a nice reason." Still under her breath, she hurled it at him.
"Hush! They might—" he glanced at the dining-room door.
"You thought I shouldn't 'do.' Julian—well, maybe you know what he thought. So I let him try to make up to me. He couldn't, but I let him try. And what's come out of it all is that Julian—"
"Yes, yes; I know, I know."
"I've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see"—she seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall light, vehement, unhappy—"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And besides that, Julian's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, whyareyou!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between love of a person and hate of his creed.
They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal years. I kept thinking that Julian won't ever come here again. And what a pity it was! Unless you—docome and hear him, Gavan, with me! To-morrow afternoon.Please!"
"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."
And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.
Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow—so narrow as to be negligible—limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace, no general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a draw as its opposite.
Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the ex-member of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans that ultimately drowned his appeal.
No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up there facing the crowd. Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His boyishness, and that something of moral passion that compelled you to listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.
His voice reached Napier tired and hoarse:
"You don't believe the Germans were encircled in a band of iron? You don't believe they hadn't sufficient outlet for their immense capacities? Oh, no; the commercial greed of other nations didn't hem them in! Tell me, then, what's behind this vast discovery of German activity in lands not their own? What about the difficulty even in England of combing them out of commerce, out of clubs, even out of Parliament? What about the hold they have in Sweden and Holland; in Genoa; in South America, not to speak of the United States? Now, notice. No other nation has so disseminated itself about the globe in practical activities. What's the reason? Can you answer that? Wrong. The reason is that energy must go somewhere. The Germans weren't to have colonies; they weren't to have seaports, not openly. So they took them in the only way left. They took them by a vast, silent effort that has sown the German broadcast over the world."
Agreement as to that exploded in every direction. The speaker strained his voice to dominate the din:
"They didn't specially love us—the Germans. No; nor we them, perhaps."
He was forced to wait till the enthusiasm which greeted that view had spent itself.
"Now, just think a moment. The Germans—I'm speaking of before the war, remember—they believed theirs was the only true civilization."
Wild derision from the English cockneys. The few soldiers scattered through the crowd appeared to have less emotion to expend than did the civilians. They listened stolidly. In the first lull the speaker went on:
"Now, why—why did these notorious home-lovers turn their backs on what for them was the only true civilization? Why did they come here in such numbers?"
"To spy!"
"To steal our jobs!"
"'Peaceful penetration' for the ends of war!"
"Listen! They overran us and other countries because we prevented the legitimate expansion of the German Empire."
High and clear over the confused shouting, "That's a lie!" a voice cried angrily. The direct charge acted like a stimulant. The word "lie" was caught up by a score of throats.
"An' why ain't 'eat the front?"
Above the increasing disorder Napier caught fragments from the platform:
"Waste places of the earth, crying out for labor and development. Yes, in bitterneedof something the German could give,wantedto give—"
But pandemonium had broken loose, and reigned irresistible for some moments. As the wave of sound ebbed, those high, fife-like notes, conquering hoarseness for a moment, soared above the din and over the bobbing heads of the multitude:
"Wasteplaces! Yet we grudged even the waste places to that supremely hard-working people. Why?"
A hail of answers, every one a stone of scorn.
"As you don't seem to know why it was we grudged these places to the Germans, you'd better let me tell you. We grudged them to an industrious people because the people weren't British people. What happened? No! no!no!Listen! The Germans—the Germans—"
Cries of "Belgium!" mixed with booing and cursing, drowned the voice again and again till the moment when it rose with "they" in lieu of the word intolerable.
"They have done what you say. I'm not here to deny it. They've turned the most fertile lands of Europe into wastes. Why? Because we refused them the places that were already waste. Energy must go somewhere. Energy that could have helped to save the world has gone to the devastation of Belgium, to the ruin of France. Gone to the torture and death of tens of thousands of British men. Whose fault? Ours,ours, I tell you!"
A roar went up as the crowd surged forward. Napier, carried with it, saw men near the foot of the platform gesticulating wildly with clenched fists above their heads:
"Liar! Pro-German!"
And still the penny-whistle voice shrilled clear a moment over the turgid outpouring of muddy minds:
"The vast crime, the unparalleled lunacy of war! If I have a private quarrel and I kill my opponent, I am hanged for a felon. If the Government I live under has a public quarrel, and at their bidding I kill some man I never saw before, I am a patriot.No!I am a murderer."
That was more than the soldiers could stand. They joined in the rush for the column. Yet, as Napier remembered afterward, the soldiers who by implication had been called murderers were less like wild beasts in their fury than the men who had stayed at home. The men weren't in khaki who strove, vainly at the first essay, by dint of climbing on other men's shoulders, to storm the platform.
As for Napier, he would never have been able to get anywhere near the speaker but that his precipitation was taken by those about him for uncontrollable rage. Even with the aid of hatred to forge him a way, he found getting to the front a cursedly impeded business. Then came that moment of sheer physical sickness at his closer vision of the pack of wolves ravening below the unfriended figure. Julian, facing the onset, facing the hate-inflamed eyes in heads just appearing above the platform; Julian still crying peace in that appalling loneliness which typified his yet greater loneliness in a nation and a time given up to war.
Ruffians with villainous faces, and simpletons fired with the responsibility of standing up for England, doing it so safely, too, by means of breaking the head of one young gentleman—up the platform they scrambled after their ringleaders and closed round the speaker.
In those last few hard-won yards Napier had collected a policeman. But above the attackers had fought Julian, to the edge of the platform. Napier had an instant's glimpse of him with a splash of scarlet down his face before they threw him over.
Upon that, a new emotion seized the crowd—a panic born of the consciousness of limits to police indifference. The mass swayed and broke away from where the figure had fallen. There were plenty of policemen, now that the need for their intervention was past.
Napier shouted to them for an ambulance, as he ran forward. Of the faces bent over the figure lying limp at the foot of the platform, one was lifted—Nan Ellis's.
"Wait!" Napier called to one of the policemen. "Get that lady out of this, will you?"
But the lady would come when she could take "him" along. "A taxi, please."
Some one had given her a large-sized pocket-handkerchief. She made a bandage and tied it round the bleeding head. Some one else fetched a cab for the lady. And the ambulance would be there in a minute.
"Oh, he'll hate the ambulance! Help me to get him to the cab!" she besought.
His eyelids opened, and he moaned a little as, between Napier and one of the policemen, Julian was carried through the alley which had been opened in the crowd. As the limp figure was borne past, they muttered and jeered.
"Oh,hush!" cried a voice. "Isn't it enough to have nearly killed him?" Nan's question cut its way through the muttering and hate; it startled the people into momentary silence. But when the little procession had gained the cab and were driving off, the anger of the disintegrated mob broke out afresh. The air was filled with cries, and for several hundred yards men and boys ran along by the taxi, shouting insult and imprecation through the window.
Napier looked out. Not one of those foul-mouthed pursuers wore khaki or sailor's blue.
That was something.
Late that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed."
Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new lodging, with the avowed intention of taking him home and seeing that he was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene.
In the midst of it, in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian in a few faint sentences put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the morning.
"Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me."
In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back into his mother's favor.
"Do they meet, those two?" Arthur asked.
"My mother and Nan? Rather. They get along like a house afire."
If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged circles of British shell shortage at the Front. The Germans had shells to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby; five hundred casualties, the papers said.
In spite of all the evil news, Julian was better. You could read that in his mother's face.
"I believe he'll be able to go over to America early in the new year," she said.
"To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed.
"It would be everything to have him out of England till the war is over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the law and the prophets, but so a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't you agree?"
"Then—they're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out.
"Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything? The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we shouldn't like it, so I took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said the lady reflectively. "Shemusthave been confused, for what do you think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can Ihelpcaring about anybody with such a perfectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Wasn't that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James see it as I did, and that it would all come right."
Julian's way of helping it all to "come right" was to employ his convalescence in carrying on the propaganda from his sick bed with unabated ardor; or, rather, an ardor increased by the excitement of its transmission largely through Nan Ellis.
That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given her recurred to him again and again. Messenger, indeed! carrying contraband, not to say high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street!
The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That was the heart-breaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news. Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the more private hour.
Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to allow them any more to discuss these things. And here was some one wholly forgetting, if she had ever heard, that constraint-breeding, melancholy fact; some one who pronounced the words abhorred in an even, every-day voice, smiled the while, and sat at her ease. Too newly Julian had skirted death for his mother not to make shift to endure that which first brought back the hues and lights of life to the corpse-white face.
Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn bed-table.
During one of Napier's visits, he had seen her rise and leave the room. When she came back, she found Julian laughing as he hadn't for many a day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick.
Sometimes the messenger didn't spare the mixed audience in Berkeley Street a graver, more passionate mood.
"Mr. Lazenby was wonderful, talking about the awful casualty lists, and the way sheer hate is shriveling up men's minds. I do wish you'd heard, Julian, what he said about America and what President Wilson might do for peace."
"By minding his own affairs and not interfering with our blockade? Yes." For once Lady Grant and her enemies were in accord.
"I told them," Nan went on, smiling at Julian, "that you said the President had the greatest opportunity in all history. 'Eggs-actly!'" she lifted and brought down her slim arm in accurate reproduction of Lazenby's sledgehammer gesture: "'The President of the United States is the man to go for!' They had cheered that. '—The man with a more absolute power and a greater range of action that any ruler on the earth to-day!'"
"Just so!" Lady Grant's deep voice came down more quietly but hardly less heavy than Lazenby's hammer, "—Raging socialists building all their hopes on the irresponsible Despot."
"Oh.... Despots!" Miss Nan appeared to pass these gentlemen in mental review. "Do you know, they've done something more outrageous than ever?"
Now we'll have it, Gavan thought to himself. He had been conscious on this particular evening of an undercurrent of emotion in the smooth stream of the girl's talk—a peculiar shining in her eyes, that perplexed him. It certainly wasn't happiness. She was for once keeping back something.
"I told you," she said suddenly to Julian, with that new intimacy which seemed to clear the room of other occupants, "I told you Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book was practically finished. Yes. Well, the authorities aren't going to let it be published."
"What!" Julian very nearly leaped out of bed. "Suppress the greatest contribution to sane thinking since 'Progress and Poverty'? To dare to ban the 'Philosophy of Force' and pretend we are fighting for liberty!"
"You ought not to have told him," Lady Grant reproached the girl.
Julian caught his mother up. "Not tell me? Of course she had to tell me. She knows if she didn't bring me the news here, I'd have to go where I could depend on getting it."
His mother exchanged looks with Gavan.
"I told them whatI'ddo." Nan said it with that little catch of excitement in her voice. "I'd get Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book over to America. They wouldn't be afraid to publish it over there."
"Why should they? TheAmericansaren't standing in the breach," said Lady Grant, with heightened color.
Nan looked away. Her mouth quivered a little. It was clear that she was reminding herself, Julian's mother!
"America! The very thing!" In the baggy dressing-gown Julian had twisted the upper part of his thin body sidewise, leaning towards the messenger.
"The trouble is," she began in a lower voice, and then hesitated.
"What's the matter?" His impatience made him irritable. "You aren't so silly as to suppose we can't say what we like before Gavan and my mother?"
"No, oh, no," she answered with a haste that convicted her. "I was just going to tell you Mr. Norfolk seems to think"—and for all Julian's assurance and her own acceptance of it, her voice sank—"the mails aren't safe."
"Not safe?"
She shook her head.
"Not any more. Mr. Norfolk says there's a—a supervision already."
"What?"
"Oh, not openly."
"A secret censorship! Hah! Hear that?" he challenged his friend. "That's what your policy's come to!"
"What makes Norfolk think—" Gavan began at his calmest.
"He doesn't think. He knows." There was a little pause. "Things don't get through. And the things that don't get through, they're always, he says, things of a certain kind." She broke the strain of the next few moments' silence. "I said if they didn't trust the mails why shouldn't Mr. Norfolk take his book over along with your 'League of Nations Manifesto' that they're all so wanting to get into President Wilson's hands. They asked me what I thought the inspectors would be doing while Mr. Norfolk was walking about with contraband literature under his arm. Did you ever hear such an excuse? I said: 'Do you think the inspectors would stop you? Well, the inspectors wouldn't stopme!' Yes," she added in a slightly offended tone, "they laughed, too. I didn't mind that so much as to see them accepting the—interference, and just sitting there. Talking! It made me wild. 'Do you reallywantto get that into the President's hands?' I asked them. 'Very well. You give it to me.'"
"You'd take it!" The involuntary exclamation slipped over Gavan's lips.
Julian hadn't needed to ask.
"You darling!" He held out his hand.
"Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr. Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's "Manifesto," then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they said."
"They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Arthur, seriously.
"Whatrisk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British Government hasn't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own country. Besides, they wouldn't find it. And suppose they did, the English couldn't shoot me. I told them this afternoon, 'I'mnot bound by your horrid war regulations.' But no," she said lugubriously through the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody's afraid."
"Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining in his moved face. "It's a great bond."
Gavan recognized the fact now, and all its implications, that Julian, with his pale halo of martyrdom, was able to draw closer to the girl than anybody else on her idealist side. Politics? She wasn't thinking about the future of governments and the stamp to be set on civilization, Napier told himself. She was thinking that bayonet work was cruel and revolting. She was prepared to let the great ideals be bayonetted like the babies of the Belgian stories, rather than let the war go on!
The last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening toward the end of January, about half-past six. Julian's convalescence, not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting: "Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs.
"And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being pelted."
She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America and the labor parties everywhere.
Away from that slavery to sickroom sensibilities, Gavan couldn't bear it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the peacemongers weren't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to Sir William, who had just lost his second son!
"Not Niel! Oh, Gavan, Niel!"
"Yes, blown to atoms at Soissons."
"Niel! Niel, too!" she cried. "If only they had been able to stop it in time!"
"Stop it! Stop men from going into a war like this! I'm not an idealist myself,"—he couldn't, to save his life, keep bitterness out of his voice—"but I do know there have been men who went into this war to defend the weak and to right wrong. A good many of those men can't speak for themselves any longer—" For a moment even Gavan couldn't speak for them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists—nearly every friend I had."
"Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian."
"Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go." He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they fight on, some of them because—other men have died and mustn't have died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. It's the dead call the loudest, 'Come, join up!'"
The tears stood in her eyes, but she shook her head.
"The dead can't speak for themselves. I wish they could. Soldiers—people who've been in it—aren't half so hot for going on with the struggle as a civilian like you."
"I'mnota civilian. I'm gazetted to the Scottish Borderers. This is the last time I'll see you."
"Oh, Gavan!" She held up her shaking hands.
He longed to beg her forgiveness, to say he hadn't meant in the very least to tell her like that; but all he could do was to explain, "The last, I mean, till I get my first leave," he ended in his most casual voice.
"Oh, Gavan!" she repeated. And then she turned abruptly and went out of the room. Left him standing there. Not even good-by.
It had been hard enough for Gavan to arrange it even before that awful news about Niel.
"You aren't fit," Sir William had stormed. When he calmed down a little, he went and had another talk with the doctor. No medical man who knew his business would pass Mr. Napier, Sir William was told; but the need for officers was great. Mr. Napier would have his way. In the final issue Sir William had his.
The very same evening of the interview with Nan this new thing had been sprung on Napier.
Something, Sir William said, that Gavan could do for the country that the country needed more than it needed another amateur officer at the Front. Gavan was to go to America by the first ship on a secret mission.
The newly commissioned officer protested with all his might. He had no experience of missions, secret or otherwise; he had no experience of America. Nevertheless, there were others in high places who agreed with Sir William. In the scarcity of suitable men at that particular crisis, and in view of the confidence felt in Napier by the authorities, they were in agreement as to the advisability of despatching him, in addition to the practical expert from the Admiralty already over there, to pay a private visit to America, in the course of which certain government contracts for munitions of war were to be effected—quietly, without rousing pro-German opposition.
The exigency was put to Napier in a way difficult to meet. He had himself seen regiments of men in training for months in civilian clothes, and who had never held a firearm in their hands. He had seen an entire camp drilling with dummy rifles. He was aware of the lack even of the plants necessary to turn out rifles to equip a quarter of the recruits called for. And now Sir William told him the secret of the shortage of ammunition for British troops already at the Front.
"We've sent our men out there to face the German guns, and our mencan't reply! We've got to have guns and shells and rifles ... everything. We've got to get them from America.You'vegot to get them from America; you and Jameson."
Sir William quoted yet another reason besides the main ones given, for Gavan Napier's being the man to go; his personal friendship with one of the chief of that group called "Steel Kings" overseas.
As usual in the case of projects with which William McIntyre had most to do, this one was quickly shaped and smartly carried through. Time was the essence of Napier's mission to America, not only in view of the needs of our men in France, but in order that neither the other neutral governments nor the Central empires should know of the attempt to tide over the interval of scarcity before the munition plants of Great Britain should be established and the output secure.
The night before he left England, Napier received his final sailing orders during a tête-à-tête dinner with Sir William at the club. The privacy of those last minutes was broken in upon by Tommy Durrant, hot-foot on Sir William's traces. Tommy was just back from the Front. Something ought to be done, according to Tommy, to lessen the ineffectiveness of the inspectors of refugees crossing over to England. He retailed the story then going the rounds about a man who spoke Walloon all right, arm bandaged, sling—all that sort of thing. Somebody on the boat didn't like the look of him, and had the wit to ask to see his wound. He was very sensitive about showing his wound. It was not unnatural, "doctor's orders," and that kind of thing. An R. A. M. C. man got the landing authorities to insist. Fearful shindy! Fella's arm as sound as Tommy's own. Didn't Sir William believe it? Very well, then. Not five hours ago, as Tommy was waiting to get through the barrier on this side, he had noticed a Belgian nun. He'd seen lots of nuns. Why should he have noticed this one? Couldn't make out till she turned her head with a backward look just as she disappeared. "And it was that woman who used to be at your house, Sir William; the governess."
Napier's heart failed him for one sick moment. To be leaving England at the very moment of Greta von Schwarzenberg's return! Tommy was asking Sir William why "a ladylike that" should be coming back here in disguise. Surely there was something very fishy about it.
"Well, you say you've reported to Scotland Yard. Let them deal with it!" Sir William rattled his seals impatiently.
Poor Tommy was having no success at all with his news. It was plain that Sir William was more annoyed at being made a participant than at the fact itself. Napier couldn't refrain from warning him.
"She'll be trying to get into communication with Miss Ellis—with Madge."
Tommy, more considerate, soothed Sir William.
"She won't risk that, whatever's the explanation of her slinking back. She'll lay low for a while, anyway." Tommy registered his conviction, "She saw I'd recognized her, and didn't love me for it."
A good part of that last night in London, Napier spent in writing Nan a full account of the results of Singleton's visit to Lamborough. He wound up by warning her that Greta was in London, disguised as a Belgian refugee. Moreover, Scotland Yard would have full and accurate knowledge of those with whom the woman held any, even the slightest and most innocent, communication.
He sealed the letter and left it in the trusty keeping of his servant. The packet was not to go out of Day's hands except to be placed in those of Miss Ellis.
Napier's secret was well kept. His own family had so little idea of his change of plan that until he had cabled them from New York, they supposed him to have vanished, in the now familiar way, into the B. E. F.
Before ever the Atlantic liner left the docks, Napier's eyes, or rather, his ears, in the first instance, began to open. What they took in was the fact of the singular pervasiveness of the German tongue. On examining the speakers, they were seen to be men young or youngish and certainlyKriegsfähig. The stamp that the German system sets on the person who has been trained to military command differentiated certain of these foreign-speaking passengers from the ordinary reservist. There were at least four Germans of good military rank on board, no doubt calling themselves "Americans returning to their American homes." Here was a chance to observe at short range one of the greatest difficulties of those days: how was England to safeguard herself without wounding the susceptibilities of a friendly, but officially neutral, nation?
As he shouldered a way among his alien enemies, that new, involuntary hatred of the Teuton accent may have played some part in the rapture with which his ears greeted a voice not English, indeed, yet sounding for him its special harmonies.
He turned with a leap of the heart toward the voice that floated up from the crowd pressing to the gangway, a voice that called out to a porter something about a "green suit-case." Looking down from, the height of the tall ship, for all his hungry eagerness, he couldn't see the face that went with that voice, nothing but hats: men's soft felts and hard bowlers; the feathers and ribbons of ladies' headgear. Then came a moment when, among them all, a little cap of brown came slowly up on its golden wings till it landed Nan Ellis on the deck.
This latest manifestation of the cap of magic produced in Napier's mind a medley of instinctive joy, an utter bewilderment, and that readiness of acceptance, apparently without effort or cost, with which we greet those strokes of fortune whose strangeness throws us back on the essential mystery through which the most commonplace of us daily threads his way.
Her first words in another mouth would have been an intolerable irony:
"So this is how you go to the Front!" He was glad of the quick flush that rose to ask his pardon.
"To accept the worst construction on my being here," he answered, smiling, "I am not the only shuttle-cock."
She evaded the explanation of her own presence with a speech that even at the time struck Napier as being more odd than her apparition on board theBritannia.
"Forgive me for saying that. I know, wherever you are in these days, youareat the Front."
It was something. It was undoubtedly too much, and yet it comforted. The eager hope rose in him: she had come to know of Greta's return. Without Napier's intervention, she had come to know of matters in that connection which had made her flee. Hardly was the hope framed when it was dashed.
"I got tired of waiting to hear from Greta," she explained. Besides, she had a feeling she couldn't go on. She'd written him that. To show him she really had got off, the letter was to be posted from Queenstown. It was in—Heavens! wherewasthe green suit-case? Seeing him had put it out of her head.
Oh, Napier would look for, he would find, the green suit-case!
But,no, she dashed after him. "Certainly not," she faltered as she caught him up, unless by any chance she shouldn't find it in her cabin. With consternation in her face, she flew down the companionway.
Serenity had returned when Napier met her a quarter of an hour later on the way to the dining-saloon.
"It's a wonder I knew you," he said, "in a different hat."
"Can't wear the Mercury on board ship. But I won't have you mocking at it." She stood with several letters in her hand.
"Why mayn't I mock at a Mercury cap if I like?" He remembered he hadn't waited till now to commit that indiscretion.
"Because my Mercury cap is your responsibility."
"My—"
"You've forgotten already!" As they went down, she reminded him of that time she appeared in the blue hat with Michaelmas daisies. "You perfectly hated it." Yes, he remembered he hadn't liked it. And Julian had quoted Herbert Spencer. Nobody was ever satisfied with hitting on the right thing. If a person found a special kind of ink-pot that suited him, or a milk-jug that would pour without spilling, or clothes that were just right, "we were so certain to want a change that the same thing wasn't made again," Miss Nan supplemented. "But my same-shaped hathasbeen made again and again, and you never noticed!That'sall I get."
It was only to himself that Napier said: "No! no! She got more—more than was wise or well."
"Did you find the green suit-case?" he asked, "and my letter?"
"Oh, yes. But the letter was hardly worth showing."
He claimed the sealed envelope and opened it on the spot. He read:
Dear Gavan:This is to say good-by. Since my talk with you I haven't felt I could go on staying here in England. So, as I have no news from Germany and hear that my mother is in New York, I'm moving heaven and earth to get off to-morrow in the only really good sailing this month. I wish I need not think of you over there in France, but I don't know how I can help that.Yours,Nan Ellis.P.S.—Perhaps you wouldn't mind writing me. N. E.
Dear Gavan:
This is to say good-by. Since my talk with you I haven't felt I could go on staying here in England. So, as I have no news from Germany and hear that my mother is in New York, I'm moving heaven and earth to get off to-morrow in the only really good sailing this month. I wish I need not think of you over there in France, but I don't know how I can help that.
Yours,
Nan Ellis.
P.S.—Perhaps you wouldn't mind writing me. N. E.
She gave a New York address.
Only to himself he put the question, On what terms had she left Julian? What lay behind the delight in the eyes that welcomed Napier? Ask? Not he. He would try not so much as to wonder. Even if the shining of the hours in front of them was no more than the fragile iridescence of a bubble floating in the sun, the greater was the need not to touch such beauty with too inquiring finger.
They found their places in the haphazard way of the first luncheon, before the seating is arranged. By ones and twos others came in, till the table, at which Nan was the only woman, was full. The strangers at her end seemed disposed to silence. Such words as fell audibly, though English and addressed chiefly to the waiter, bore out the impression given by the faces. Napier saw the steward about it afterward. There were to be no Germans at his table as finally selected. He wished afterward he had added, and no American actors. In which case Miss Nan wouldn't have come up from dinner with Mr. Vivian Roxborough and walked the deck at his side a good half-hour. If it were only for Julian's sake, she couldn't be left to Mr. Vivian Roxborough. Napier made it his business to avert the chance.
That next day—forever and forever the sunshine and the sweetness of those hours would leave something of their flavor and their light behind. If only they could go on sailing, sailing, and never land!
So Napier said to himself, as he hurried back on the second afternoon, after a talk with the captain—a talk somewhat marred by a flickering fear as to whether that actor might have appropriated the guardian chair. No; one of those Germans! Napier's change of table had neither prevented Nan from bowing to some of the men she had broken bread with during that first meal on board, nor prevented chance conversation (initiated by one or other of the Germans) upon that promising opening, "You are American?"
Even Nan knew that the handsome big man who stood by her now was an officer. He may have been thirty-eight, and he was certainly in the pink of condition. In the midst of whatever it was he had been saying, Napier carried the lady off to the lower and less-frequented deck.
"How they must laugh at the stupid English, those Germans!" he muttered, as he strode along at her side. "Here we are, six months after the declaration of war, and enemy aliens still going back and forth as easily as in times of peace. Those that don't find their way back into the German Army—"
"Howcanthey!"
"What's to prevent them? Anyway, those who don't take the popular pleasure trip, New York to Genoa and so to Germany, can be trusted to advance the German propaganda in the two Americas. But they won't find traveling so easy after this."
"Why? Who will prevent them?" Her questions had come quickly.
"The British Government will prevent them—after the Intelligence Department gets my report." He took out of his pocket a paper destined to have an effect, the least part of which was to give Napier many a sleepless night months after he had posted it.
The first eyes to rest on the report after Napier's own, regarded it, as he felt even at the time, with something more than disapproval.
"Don't send that!" the girl urged. She added reasons in whose syllabling Napier heard Julian's voice. Oh, he had well indoctrinated her! As Napier listened, obviously unmoved, there came into Nan's earnestness a note that gave him more uneasiness than her "opinions"—a note of anxiety, a note of something very like panic. "You can't send that! It—it might makesuchtrouble, not only—not to people you call your enemies." She caught herself up. "As Julian says, 'The reactions from that kind of tyranny—'"
Napier said quietly he must accept the reactions.
"But youcan't!" she repeated. "It's the greatest mercy you've showed it to me. Oh, Gavan, you don't want to make trouble between England and America? Youwillif you send in that report. I dobegyou—"
Napier had seldom known more difficult moments than those that followed. As she stood beside him on the saloon-deck near the companionway-door, he glanced at the mail-box near the purser's window. Its open brass mouth seemed to bray a warning: "If you don't post that letter now, you never will." Napier stepped inside, and dropped the envelope through the slit.
Nan sat down on a folding-stool near the ship's railing. Napier went back and stood silent by her for a moment. Then he said:
"Give me what credit you can. I don't remember ever doing anything harder than that."
To his surprise, instead of reproaching him or punishing him with silence or with tears, "What do you expect your Government will do?" she said.
"Oh, I don't know." He didn't try to keep the touch of impatience out of his voice. "Regulate the traffic a little better, perhaps." He would have left it at that but for a trifling occurrence. The head of the German officer whom they had left a few minutes before on the upper deck appeared just then out of an open port in the dining-saloon. For the merest instant it was there, only to be withdrawn. And why, pray,shouldn'ta man of any race look out at the sea from a public window? even, come to that, glance out at a pretty girl? "People may as well know," Napier said, "that the British Government has come to a point where it will be obliged to exercise its censorship openly and thoroughly instead of—" He frowned in the direction where the offending head had been. "I doubt if these fellows on board here have even been asked to make a declaration, let alone been examined."
"Whyshouldthey be examined?" The voice beside him rose indignant. "On the open sea! bound for a neutral country!"
He looked at her with different eyes. "The British port was the proper place," he said. "And perhaps peoplewereexamined. You know better than I."
"Iknow?" She stared at him.
"You know if they asked you to make a declaration before you came on board."
"Me?A declaration! About what?"
"As to what you are taking over." He heard his own stern voice as if it were some one else's.
"They asked," she said, with her chin up, "if I were taking over any letters to people in America?"
"And what did you say?"
"That Iwasn'ttaking over any letters." Her note, like his, had grown less and less patient. "Though I don't call it their business to ask an American going to America if she—"
"Do you mean," the interrogation went on, "they didn't look for themselves?"
"Look! Look where?"
"Look through your luggage, your hand-bag, your 'green suit-case.'"
"Certainly not."
"Well, they ought. And I shall see that next time they do."
Not anger only, and not only spirited revolt, appeared on the face Napier loved. The something else he had been vaguely aware of showed there clearer. He glanced sharply round and then bent over her. "What would happen if they did their duty? What if they were to search you?"
"To search me!" She stood up.
"Sh!" He looked round again.
"They can't!" she triumphed. "Not now."
"Ah!" The emission of breath came as though forced out by a sudden physical anguish.
"What's the matter? What are you thinking?" she cried.
"I'm thinking that I wish to God you'd go and get all that infernal stuff of Julian's in the green suit-case and throw it overboard."
"I haven't got any 'infernal stuff,'" she said, with the faint pink rising in her cheeks.
To Napier's further characterization of "the stuff," his bitter denunciation of this using of English good faith to hamper, if not to betray, England, the girl had her defense. Or, rather, she had Julian's reinforced by the American's innocent belief, prior to 1917, that to the citizens of that favored land no Old-World rules need apply, no Old-World danger was a menace. "Americans don't recognize," was one of her phrases. "We make our own rules. You are talking in the air. I am not carrying over any letters."
"Look me in the eyes, Nan, and say that you are not carrying something that I would prevent from reaching America if I had the power."
She got up and walked alone toward the stern of the ship. As she turned to come back, Vivian Roxborough rose out of his chair. Before he reached her side, a capped and aproned figure darted out of the narrow corridor, near the smoking-room, and spoke to Miss Ellis. The girl and the stewardess went below together. No sign of Nan for the rest of the afternoon.
At six o'clock Napier sent a note to her cabin.
I hope you're not feeling out of sorts in any way. But if you are, mayn't I see you a moment?Yours ever,G. N.
I hope you're not feeling out of sorts in any way. But if you are, mayn't I see you a moment?
Yours ever,
G. N.
The answer came back:
Not out of sorts at all, thank you,Yours as always,N. E.
Not out of sorts at all, thank you,
Yours as always,
N. E.
When he didn't find her at the dinner-table,—she had been punctual hitherto—Napier went back to the upper deck and waited for her near the companionway. Ten minutes went by. She must, after all, have been below somewhere, and was no doubt at dinner by now. He went back to the saloon and looked in. She was not there. As he returned again to keep his watch on the corridor leading from her cabin, the same stewardess who had carried the girl off early in the afternoon came laboriously up from lower regions, carrying a tray.
"Oh—a—you are the one who is looking after Miss Ellis, aren't you?"
"Yes. I'm taking in her dinner."
"Oh, I see." But it wasn't true. He didn't see in the very least why he should be punished in this way, a sulky way, moreover, and singularly un-Nanlike, as he told himself.
Just after the luncheon-bugle sounded the next day, Napier met the same stewardess again. Again she came toiling up the companionway, tray-laden.
"You are taking that to Miss Ellis?"
Yes, she was.
"She is ill, then?"
"No, she isn't ill. Just having her dinner in Number Twenty-four."
"Twenty-four isn't Miss Ellis's number."
"No, sir. It's the number of the lady who isn't feeling very well, though she does eat well. I'll say that for her." The woman pursued her way with the access of vigor that a dash of vindictiveness will sometimes generate.
He had not so much as a glimpse of Nan until evening. Going down to dress, he met her coming out of the library with an armful of books.
"Well, at last!" He tried to take the books. She backed away from him.
"No, no, thank you. They're just nicely balanced."
"Look here, what have I done?"
"You've barred my way." She tried to pass.
"It isn't like you to take a mortal offense and not say how or what about."
"I haven't—taken offense." She leaned against the wall, hugging the books.
"Then why do you stay in your cabin the whole blessed time?"
"I haven't been in my cabin. I've been in—I've been looking after a lady who wasn't well when she came on board and who is a very bad sailor. So as I'm rather a good one—shewillwonder what has become—" and before Napier could gather his wits, Nan was flying down the corridor.
The next day same program was continued, except that Napier hung much about corridor and companionway, waiting in vain for even a glimpse of the flying figure. While walking the deck he had located Number Twenty-four, noting with surprise that a passenger who was ill, especially a woman looked after by Nan, should keep her port closed in fine weather. He had of course looked up the number on the table diagram. Twenty-four was occupied by Mlle. La Farge, the devil take her!
A restless, wearisome day. He knew it an ill preparation for sleep. He turned up the light over his berth, the fierce, unshaded light, and read till his eyeballs burned. He extinguished the horrible glare and lay in the dark, turning and tossing, seeing in the renewal of his Nan-fever a punishment for defective loyalty to his friends. Twelve o'clock came. Is she asleep? As for him, he was wider awake than ever.
One o'clock in the morning. It wasn't to be borne. The real trouble was that instead of taking a proper amount of exercise, he'd hung about waiting. What was the night, the morning, rather—what was it like? He couldn't bring himself to turn on the fierce flood of light. He felt his way to the port. Yes, a gibbous moon, rolling lopsidedly among the cloud-rack over a corrugated-iron sea. Was it hot or cold away from the stifling steam heat? He opened his port and breathed deep. He was not the only sleepless passenger. Two heads showed dimly, two figures in long ulsters leaning against the rail.
Presently a voice: "Now a little more walking, and you'll feel better."
Nan! Good Samaritanizing! She was supporting the shorter figure, her arm round the thick waist. They started down the deck in the direction of Napier's open port, but thought better of it. They turned and went the other way in face of the wind.
Napier pulled on some clothes and hurried out. When he got to the other, the colder side, of the ship, there they were, going at a good round pace for an indisposed person, pounding down the deck locked in that embrace.
Well, women were odd beings. Here was evidently some frantic new friendship started. He drew back in the semi-darkness and leaned against the wall, smoking. The two heads hatless, with motor-veils tied round them, were close together. The invalid ceased speaking as they passed.
Nan's voice was blurred, troubled. "Theremustbe some mistake—" the rest was lost.
As they turned to come back, the mild, intermittent shining of the moon lit the two faces for a passing moment—lit one delicate-featured, pale, eager; and the other, full, pink-cheeked, with heavy, handsome outlines and prominent eyes. By all the gods, it was?—No, itcouldn't—Something worse than a headache must be the matter with Napier when he could imagine so startling a likeness.
"I don't know how to get any more," Nan was saying.
"You can borr-ch-ow some," said the other in remembered accents.
When the figures turned to come down again, the shorter of the two halted suddenly. Napier had come out of the shadow and stood in such dim light as there was, with his back against the ship's railing, waiting for them.
It was the invalid who first caught sight of him. She turned about, and before one could much more than blink, she had wrenched open the weather door and disappeared.
Nan stood still for a bewildered instant, while Napier went forward.
"Sothat'swhy!" he said. "Very well, then, you've got to know!" Leaning on the railing there beside her in the windy moonlight, he told her what Singleton had found in Greta's room.
Before he had gone far Napier was acutely aware of the girl's stiffening; aware of a withdrawal, infinitesimal as expressed in the body, a chasm as between their souls. He could feel that she was thinking: "Gavan looked on! He allowed that baseness at Lamborough!" That he should put a false construction upon what was found was the least of his misdoing.
"Oh, yes,"—she turned sharply away—"she told me you'd say that!"
Was it anger or suppressed tears that clouded her voice? Napier didn't know.
"What Greta must have suffered those horrible last hours at the McIntyres'! All to spare me, to save me the humiliation of knowing how you could treat my friend! She knew what that would mean to me. We,—" she gave him her eyes again—"we at home treated Greta like a princess. And she deserved it." As Napier made no attempt to rebut that view, she dropped her head, struggling an instant with some new enemy to self-control. "Greta puts me, too, to shame. That longing to see me again that made her risk coming back to England! Only to find that she might do me an injury, might compromise me! Imagine Greta in a thick veil, waiting about in the dusk to catch a glimpse—Saw me coming out of the shipping office with Madge. And when she found I was sailing on this boat, droppedeverythingto come along!Gretaunderstands loyalty." She fell back upon ground evidently prepared for her. "Isn'tit 'trying to undermine,'isn'tit 'poisoning the mind,' if you ask me to put the worst construction on innocent things? Greta's diary! As she says, if you'd read my diary to my mother, you'd havemein the Tower. Oh, she is fair and just! She's been saying to me only to-night, that since I'll be going back there, perhaps living among them, I'm to remember it's only to the Germans the English are perfectly horrible. She was quite willing to leave me my illusions about you all till you yourself tear them away."
"Do you mind telling me how I've done that?" He tried to stem the torrent.
She steadied herself with an elbow on the railing.
"Haven't you told me yourself about going through my friend's trunks when she wasn't there? Oh, that—that, Gavan, was—" She turned suddenly and buried her face in her arm.
"Yes, it was a mistake."
She lifted a wet face up to him in the moonlight.
"The alternative," he said miserably, "would have been better. Instead of the private one, a public examination, Greta Schwarzenberg in prison instead of free—"
"Then she is right!" Nan stood back, clear of the railing, facing him. "You do want to be revenged."
She stood there, with the wind catching at the ends of her chiffon veil, blowing them back over her shoulder, for that instant before she, too, fled from him through the weather door.
The morning of arrival found every one in the natural state of excitement induced by eight days' anticipation and three thousand miles of progress toward a given goal. Napier's glimpse of Nan, hurrying out of the breakfast-salon by an opposite door as he went in, showed excitement in her, too. Notwithstanding all that had happened, he was determined not to part from her on that note of last night. Anything, the merest commonplace, rather than that, he told himself, unable to strangle a larger hope.
Not in vain he, in his turn, despatched breakfast in short order and went above. There she was on the promenade-deck, her back to him, her face to the faint, still far-off outline of her native land.
In the raw chill of that February morning the prospect appeared anything but welcoming to Napier. It was different for her. In the forefront of her mind she was no doubt waving the Stars and Stripes. But, Napier could have sworn, deep in her heart was the thought of him and a secret planning of one of those "meetings in New York" she had spoken of in the first days. She stood there lightly poised, a little wistful, more than a little alluring. Another man, noting the empty deck, remembering that other sea they had stood by, locked together, would have gone up to her and put an arm about the waiting figure. The scene of pretty confusion and tender yielding, the withdrawal, "Some one is sure to come!" and the hurried arrangement to meet—he saw it all. He wondered afterward what would have happened had he played his part.
When she found him at her side with "Good morning," she turned sharply as though to fly. It was all in the convention.
"You must be very happy to-day," he said.
"Happy!Why should I be happy?"
"Well, to be so near home."
"Oh, home!" She lifted her shoulder slightly. "New York is less my home than—" she stopped short.
"Than England?" he said.
"There's one thing, anyway," she said in her elusive way. "If I can't go back for a good while, neither can you."
He stared at her, a great hope contending with mystification.
"Do I understand," he forced himself to answer lightly, "that you refuse to let me return home without you?"
Her cheeks showed sudden color.
"The Germans refuse to let either of us go if what Greta has heard is so."
"And what has she heard?"
"That soon after we sailed the Kaiser declared a blockade of England, an Atlantic war zone."
She saw that Napier had already had the wireless news before he asked:
"How does that affect you and me?"
"Even neutral ships aren't safe after to-morrow," she said, accepting with the hypnotized docility shown by so many in those early days any edict bearing the German stamp. "What I've been thinking is, you'll be over here till the end of the war, so there'll be time to—to understand—to getsomethings straight, anyhow." She turned to answer the good morning of one of the ship's officers.
Napier always believed that the first real shock to Nan's faith in Greta came as the passengers of theBritanniawere about to disembark an hour later. Mr. Vivian Boxborough, very smart in new ultra-English clothes, had been observed threading his way among the crowd on deck, plainly in quest of Miss Ellis. No sooner had he caught sight of her than he pressed forward, and no sooner was he near her than he stopped short, his eyes intent on the lady at Miss Ellis's side.
Greta had forborne to challenge curiosity by absolutely concealing her features. But probably no one better than she understood the serviceability for disguise of a heavily figured white-lace veil.
Mr. Roxborough must have known her well to be able to say with such assurance: "Why, Greta—" and then in the rebound from that betrayal of too close acquaintanceship away to the other end of the scale: "I didn't know you were on board, Mrs. Guedalla."
Greta stared at him through the meshes of the elaborate pattern and said with her grand air: "Some mistake, I think."
Roxborough pinched his lips. "Oh, you don't remember me! Well, perhaps you'll remember your husband. I'm rather expecting my manager to meet me on the dock. Or perhaps it'syouMr. Guedalla is waiting for," Roxborough added with a peculiar smile.
Greta put a hand through Nan's arm and drew her near the gangway. Something must have been said for the girl turned her back with decision upon her late admirer. But her face was more than disturbed; it was shamed, frightened. A cut in public is a terrible thing to the innocent mind.
Napier stood close behind the pair, waiting for the excuse he felt that Mrs. Guedalla would make for not going down with the crowd to confront her husband. But the lady was too entirely mistress of herself for that. Perhaps she counted on Mr. Guedalla's knowledge of the wisdom of not interfering with his wife. Straight down the gangplank she walked, Nan behind her, recovering herself enough to make little signals toward a group—two ladies, a young man, and three children with flags—waving and smiling at Nan Ellis, first from the end of the crowded pier, then running along at the side, and now waiting finally at the bottom of the gangway to fall upon the girl with their welcome.
Napier had no difficulty in deciding which of them was her mother in face of the fact that Mrs. Ellis looked more like an elder sister. Yes, that must be a nice woman; but stupid, he decided, noting the cordiality, after the first motion of surprise, with which Mrs. Ellis received the lady in the baffling veil. She kissed Greta through the lace. Bah! With Nan's address in his pocket, he could afford to leave her and her party in the hands of a customs officer, opening trunks on the pier.
Indeed, he had little choice, he found himself appropriated by an English friend and an American steel magnate—carried away into a world about which all that he had heard had very little prepared him.
His private as well as patriotic interest in the possibilities unfolded did not prevent him from putting himself in touch with the British Intelligence Department before he dined that first night on American soil.
The chief agent in New York was, or had been, as Napier knew, the British partner in an American shipping house. That he had married an American heiress, Napier also knew. He was the more surprised to find Mr. Roderick Taylor installeden garçonat an hotel.
"My w-wife," said the long, fair young man with the strictly pomaded hair, "is in P-Paris with her sister, who is or-organizing American Hospital Relief. In any case,"—his smile seemed to accept Napier as one to be treated frankly—"all sorts of coming and going is less marked in a c-caravansary like this." The luxurious sitting room bore at that moment, though it was not yet six o'clock, signs of the indicated traffic. A bridge table not long abandoned, to judge by the glasses and cigar ends, stood there.
He had run across Stein, coming out from luncheon, said Mr. Taylor. Old Viennese friend of his, Stein. Had him up along with O'Leary, the Sinn Feiner, and a German-American dark horse, Bieber. "We are all dining at Bieber's to-morrow," Mr. Taylor smiled as one who preserves a native modesty in full view of triumph. It wasn't the smile he showed to his experimental bridge parties. "Greta von S-S—" the slight, very slight stammer gave a touch of unreadiness which perhaps prevented the extreme competency of Mr. Roderick Taylor from being too marked. Napier noticed later than the stammer was hardly discernible when the engaging young man was off duty.
"Yes, von Schwarzenberg." He helped Taylor over the barbed-wire of Teutonic syllables.
"Knowher?" Taylor could go on glibly enough. "Rather!" And what, he asked, made Mr. Napier think the woman who had crossed with him as Mademoiselle La Fargewas—
Clearly Mr. Taylor, whether in obedience to his own judgment or to the issue of somemot d'ordre, was disposed to take Napier at face-value; but he was far from accepting Napier's facts on the sole ground of Napier's belief in them. After the Schwarzenberg incident had been probed and sifted, Mr. Taylor sat back in his chair, gently perplexed and obviously perturbed.
"It's not that we haven't been expecting her. The chief value of one of our men is that he has hitherto been able to keep in touch with her. But if she really has left the other side, he ought to have warned us." He took up the receiver of his desk telephone, and then laid it down. "We go warily with Miss von Schwarzenberg." He rose and opened a door at the very moment that a frail, grizzled man entered the adjoining room from the hall. "Oh, Macray, just a moment!"
The man did not stop to take off either hat or coat. Middle-aged, dyspeptic-looking, he came in, settling his black-rimmed pince-nez on an insufficient nose. He took a reporter's note-book out of his pocket and stood there, sour, hopeless, a mere sketch of a man in black and white.
"Greta Schwarz is back," said Mr. Taylor. Without a pause and in the same low voice he ran rapidly over the main facts in the story Napier had told him. "Just set them to work," he wound up. "Quickest way to get on her track—" he turned to Napier—"what's the American girl's address?" Napier did not disguise his reluctance to produce that particular information.
"You understand," he repeated for the benefit of the pessimist with the note-book, "this Miss Ellis is under the most complete misapprehension about the woman."
"Of course, of course," agreed Mr. Taylor.
Macray impassively poised his pen. Napier gave the address. Macray set down a grudging stroke or two, and then: "All New York knows where to find Schwarzenberg," he said, dragging out the information as though to talk increased his affliction, whatever it was. "Just heard. Been seeing reporters all afternoon."