"Who's been seeing reporters?" Taylor demanded.
"Schwarz."
"The deuce she has!"
Macray felt in his pocket. He drew out an evening paper, damp from the press, and folded to display:
COLONIALISM IN AMERICAENGLISH DICTATIONIMPRESSIONS OF GERMAN-AMERICAN BACK FROMBELLIGERENT COUNTRIES
COLONIALISM IN AMERICA
ENGLISH DICTATION
IMPRESSIONS OF GERMAN-AMERICAN BACK FROMBELLIGERENT COUNTRIES
Napier stood at Mr. Taylor's side, and together they read how Miss von Schwarzenberg had not been an hour on this dear American soil, before she perceived with pain that, while Germany was fighting for freedom of the seas, for human rights, America was forgetting she'd ever won hers. After a genial reference in passing to the burning of Washington by the British, the lady protested that history wasn't her strong point. Would some one, therefore, kindly tell her who had given the seas to the British? Upon the eloquent pause that seemed to have followed that request, the lady illustrated the service Germany was rendering the United States in protesting against English domination. It must be very humiliating, the lady thought, for Americans to have their mail-bags opened, their letters confiscated. "Of course some of the letters are for Germany. Why not? Is England to tell you to whom you may write? Isn't America a neutral? Or is that a pretense?" She gave cases of bitter hardships, German parents, old, ill, dying, whom faithful sons had long been accustomed to supply with remittances from America. In suffering British interference, America, so Miss Greta told the interviewer, had failed in dignity. Weakly, supinely, slavishly, America was submitting to British insolence.
Nothing in the interview occasioned Napier so much concern as the fact that it was stated to have taken place at a named hotel, "where Miss von Schwarzenberg is staying with old friends."
Mr. Taylor laughed a trifle ruefully as he threw down the sticky paper and applied a pocket-handkerchief to his long, white fingers. "I like America, he assured the newcomer, but there's no denying it's a queer country and a queer people. Isn't it so, Macray?"
Macray's only answer was a faint groan. He picked up his newspaper and walked gloomily out.
"The very strangest mixture," Taylor went on, "of shrewdness and innocence. Take their attitude toward this woman. She impresses them enormously." He disregarded Napier's "She impresses most people." "Over here they take this Mrs. Guedalla, or Schwarz, or whatever her real name is—they take her not only for a woman of education, but a womanwohlgeboren. They accept her account of misuse of her name. An obscure Western actress who, you are told, bears a certain dubious likeness to the real Greta von Schwarzenberg had feloniously adopted that honorable name. 'You know the stage way,' says Schwarzenberg. 'Tottie Tompkins turns into Arabella Beauchamp.' The real Miss von Schwarzenberg has naturallyneverbeen on the stage. She is musical. AllgebildeteGermans are musical. And that fact had been her salvation, so she tells these fatuous friends of hers over here. Being musical in the thorough German way enabled her to hold out against her proud, despotic father. When he tried to compel her to marry the dissolute Freiherr of vast possessions, Miss Greta ran away with her governess. Oh, always the scene is carefully set! And then, in order not to live on the governess, Miss Greta took to teaching music. They swallow it all! They look upon her as a patriot. A German patriot, of course; but still laboring devotedly and legitimately for her native land."
What made Taylor's dealings with her a delicate matter was the fact that she had these powerful friends, Americans whose good faith and general decency of conduct no reasonable being could doubt. She had kept herself in close relations with these people even while she was abroad. His wife discovered that in Paris. How did Schwarzenberg keep up these useful relations? Through the one channel of organized participation in the war then open to American sympathizers,Relief.
"Lord! the jobs put through in the name of Relief!" Taylor exclaimed.
On his second evening in New York Napier went with the Van Pelts, his hosts, to hear "Lohengrin" at the Metropolitan. In a stage-box sat Miss Greta, very handsome, in green, with a silver wreath on her fair hair. The elderly lady beside her, according to the Van Pelts, was a well-known "society leader" with a taste for philanthropy. She had largely financed a certain branch of American relief work. That was her husband just coming into the box. But the girl—the Van Pelts couldn't make out the girl. Napier could.
The next day, three tables away from him, at a men's luncheon given to Napier at a hotel, Greta again, with a different party except for Nan. Napier saw the girl's face brighten in that instant of catching sight of him. He saw her half rise, and then, as Greta fixed her eyes on Nan's, Napier saw the girl subside. From time to time she looked over wistfully. In a general movement after luncheon, emptying and refilling the great room, he was able to time his going out so that he might snatch a word with her.
"You haven't forgotten where I am?" she said hurriedly after they had allowed new-comers to separate them a little from their respective parties.
No, he hadn't forgotten; but he had read thatshe—he nodded in Greta's direction—was also at the same hotel.
"And that keeps you away!That'sall you care!"
"Do you want, then," he said, with that daring which the sense of being safely lost in a crowd will lend—"do youwantme to care?"
"No! At least I oughtn't to." Greta and her guests were waiting. "If I'd known how to find you," Nan went on speaking deliberately, as though making a declaration of rights, "I should have written you. I could let you see part of a letter I've had from Julian. He tells news the papers don't."
Napier thanked her gravely and gave a private address. As he saw her disappear with "that woman," he said to himself for the thousandth time, If only he'd been allowed to tell Nan about that Gull Island villainy at the time, shecouldn'thave gone on making her loyalty a cloak for their common enemy!
The temptation to use his knowledge now, strove in him with an instinctive as well as a reasoned shrinking. The Gull Island affair couldn't, he argued, still be a secret of any state importance. But in proportion as he cleared away that obstacle, the clearer yet another stood forth. It was one of the evils of a most evil time that he, Gavan Napier, of all men, had been forced to play a leading part in the violent end of a man with whom he and this gentle, sensitive girl had broken bread! Napier caught again that animal-like gleam of bared teeth as Carl Pforzheim writhed across the table for his pistol, saw again the gush of scarlet after the figure turned, met the knife, and fell back against the wall. Let all that horror be hidden in the island earth and in oblivion. If Nan knew, never, never could it be forgotten.
The "news" in the letter she sent from Julian, was all of the gathering strength of the peace movement and the glorious part in it which America was destined to play. President Wilson, "the man with more power and a greater range of action than any ruler on the earth to-day"—President Wilson was the hope of the world. The rest of the page had been torn off. Nan was learning discretion, poor child!
In the intervals of business conclaves in the city, trips to Pittsburgh and elsewhere, Napier continued to cultivate Mr. Roderick Taylor despite that gentleman's refusal to lunch out, or to dine out. Not with Mr. Napier! Taylor was never seen in the company he most liked, as he said in his pleasant way. But there were private smokes and talks during which many things that had been mysteries to Napier became clear. Those were the days when Taylor and his agents were almost daily unearthing evidences of the underground activity of the pro-German propagandist. Among these moles of international mischief Taylor's weasels came upon Schwarzenberg's traces only to lose them. "Suspects of more public weight and interest, particularly men, were far more easily dealt with. These border-line women were the devil."
Never in all that time was Napier wholly free from a dread of hearing the name of Ellis in connection with Schwarzenberg; for always in his mind the figure of the winged messenger followed the devious ways of the German, followed like her shadow. The girl he loved was lavishing faith and service, as well as financing this enemy of England. The thought was an anguish to him.
Nothing of all this to Taylor. The sole reference to the chief ground of Napier's own interest in the situation was a carelessly expressed opinion, "Schwarzenberg must be making a considerable hole in the Ellis pockets."
But, no. According to the omniscient Taylor, Schwarzenberg's spendings were on a scale quite outside the Ellis range. Taylor half closed his whitish eyelashes and regarded the end of his cigar. "I am, I believe, on the track of Schwarzenberg's new resources."
That telephone again! It was always ringing in here when Macray was out. Taylor listened, laughed, and made an appointment.
An Italian, he explained, a Mr. Luigi Montani, over here with his family. He had taken from some friends of Taylor's a furnished house in Washington. All arranged in twenty-four hours. Not a syllable in the press.
"He's just been telling me that when his servants, Italians, went downstairs the first morning, they couldn't open the front door for the mass of pro-German literature shoved through the letter-box overnight."
The incident set Taylor talking about "the slender thread" on which may hang "the everlasting things" in international relationships. He talked of America with, as Napier thought, an understanding given to few foreigners. You couldn't shake Taylor's faith in America. "But her ignorance of one entire hemisphere!"
Was it greater, Napier asked, than Old-World ignorance of the new?
No, no. Lack of mutual understanding was the common danger. To increase it was the German trump-card.
"People talk of America's largely unconscious power to wreck the world's best interests. Shewon't!" he cried with a passion that seemed alien to his nature; "but if there's even a danger of it, it is because of innocent susceptibilities which the underground people, Schwarzenberg and her crew, are rubbing raw." And there was another thing. "If they should 'get at' Wilson, we'd be in a bad way."
"The whole world would be in a bad way," said Napier, with a dizzying sense of the issues at stake.
"Yes, the whole world," Taylor agreed. And on his face, too, was a deeper gravity.
"I heard something last night"—Napier sat up suddenly—"that made me furious. I denied it. I want to hear you deny it. Fellow from Washington told us the President has given up receiving the British Ambassador."
"It's true."
"My God! then Bernstorffhasgot him!"
"Not at all. It's true Wilson's given up seeing the British ambassador, and it's true he's given up seeing the German ambassador. Oh, a long head, Wilson's! He corresponds with the accredited official representatives, and he sees the unofficial, the people he can learn from and the people he can indoctrinate. You'll be dealing with him less advantageously because of your mission, even though it's private. But"—Taylor got up to find a match. He paused to lay a hand on Napier's shoulder—"see Wilson soon."
It was already arranged, Taylor was told.
"Well, don't talk only munitions." Nobody better than the President, according to Taylor, knew that the old diplomacy was doomed. "This is the hour of the unofficial envoy."
In Washington, four days later, Napier had cause to remember that dictum.
Napier arrived at the White House some minutes before the time set for his interview. Hardly had he embarked upon a little kill-time tour through the public rooms when he heard hurrying steps behind him, and turned to confront Nan Ellis.
Her greeting was the strangest, considering all things.
"How do you do? I wanted to know—oh,haveyou seen Greta?"
No, he hadn't, he could not forbear adding, Why should he?
"She was to meet me here." The girl turned and scanned the corridor, but in an excited, absent-mindedness as though her thoughts couldn't pretend to follow her eyes. "I expect they won't let her go. Her own Embassy is immensely polite to Greta. I never knew she had so many grand acquaintances." She broke off, and then added breathlessly, "What are you doing here?"
"Waiting to see—certain people. I don't need to ask what you are here for," he added.
Her eyelids winked as though he had flicked something in her face. "Oh,"—she considered a second,—"I suppose you do know more or less, since Julianmademe talk before you. Do you know what I think?"
"I'd rather like to."
"Well, you shall. I think men are the indiscreetest people on the earth." And then, with that same suppressed excitement, she added, "All except one."
He made a movement toward a sofa—a movement she misinterpreted.
"O Gavan,don'tgo in just yet! He's got cart-loads of people to talk to, and I haven't anybody. You see, it must be somebody that as good as knows already. Thereisn'tany one but you, is there? Of course, what I came for was to see the President. Every good American wants to see the President. So I done it—" she laughed as she threw up her head—"like Huck Finn."
"Not, I gather, with thehoi polloi?"
"The what?" But she didn't stop. "Oh, the trouble I had! I wrote and I wrote. I might just as well have been in an effete monarchy trying to approach the throne on my hands and knees. It made me mad, I can tell you. I said so. Told Senator Harned so. He's a friend of my mother's. But Senator Harned wanted me to givehimthe papers. Imagine!"
"Julian's manifesto?"
"Everything. As if I would! I've come all the way from Europe for a personal interview, and a personal interview I've got to have, or—well, something would have to be done." She wagged her head.
"I see. Something with boiling oil in it."
"Oh, they came to their senses at last, this very morning." She shone in the refulgence of the late-risen sun. "But do you know, up to the very last minute I had to be as firm as the Washington monument. He sent a Private Secretary to see me. And the Private Secretary tried to make me 'abandon the matter.' Called it 'the matter'! I denied that 'matter' was the main object. I must see the President. I was an American. Hadn't every American the right to see the President? Every American had the right to wring his poor hand in the presence of hundreds of other Americans. 'Very well,' I said, 'if I mayn't see him, I'll tell Senator Harned that I applied and sent in his letter, and waited for days, and was turned away at last.
"He asked me to wait a minute—the Private Secretary did. So I 'done it' again. After a while another man came and spoke to me, a gloomy man with a face like a clergyman who's got a crime on his soul, andhetook me into the Presence." She was only half laughing. "The Presence and I said, 'How do you do.' I was almost too excited to look at him properly, now that I'd got him. But, O Gavan, heis, he really is!"
"H'm," replied Gavan.
"Wait till you see! He asked me why I'd come. Melancholy man still hung about. 'I should like to speak to you alone,' I said. Do you think he would? No. As much a 'fraid-cat as any king. But he looked at the melancholy man, and melancholy man went and looked out of the window. It was really as good as having him out of the room if I lowered my voice. Then I told him. I gave him Julian's Manifesto and the rest. Yes, I had them all in the green suit-case." She laughed triumphantly.
"Well, I wouldn't advise you to carry such merchandise again."
"I sha'n't," she agreed, "not in any such way as that. Babyish, I call it. But it was all rightthistime. I sat and watched him while he read Julian's Manifesto. He read it twice. It took hold of him. I could see that. Then I found him looking at me through his glasses.
"'What do your friends want me to do?'
"'To save civilization,' I said."
Napier could see her "doing Julian" for the President.
"I was awfully excited, but I remembered some more. He listened. He listens well. He makes you do your best. I felt encouraged. I made a case. Then I told him—oh, you won't like it, but I told him that Julian and the rest had far more backing in England than the newspapers gave the smallest inkling of. I told about the kind of men who were opposing the loss of liberty in the fight for liberty.
"'It is a menace before every country,' he said, in a discontented sort of way. He seemed not to want to think about it. I could see he was tired of considering me as a messenger any longer. I felt in the queerest way my best strength, myvalue, all going when I found him beginning to look at me as just a girl. He asked me questions that hadn't a thing to do with the great business. They were kind questions; oh, yes, kind, and as if he were really interested. He gave me a feeling, too, that he'd make everything all right. He made me feel very small and insignificant myself, but mighty proud of America."
"He seems to have taken your measure very accurately."
"What do you mean by that?" she asked, up in arms.
"Oh, we've been told he knows how to deal with women. He can manage even the Suffragettes."
"Now you are a little spiteful. I know. You are jealous because you haven't got a President.You'veonly got King George."
"I've come to be grateful for George," said Napier, fervently.
"That may be, but nobody can call him exciting."
Napier assured her that was the precise ground of his gratitude.
The assurance went unheeded. She was still simmering with the excitement of her interview.
"Now the Presidentisexciting. Perfectly wonderful,Icall him. And perfectly splendid about peace, though hedidsay"—the little pucker gathered between her brows—"hedidsay we might have to fight for it. I forgot to ask him what he meant by that. I shall be dying to hear what you think about him. Couldn't we"—she hesitated, and then as Napier did not make the hoped-for suggestion she made it herself—"couldn't we meet?"
"Nothing I 'd like better—if you're not with—if you're here with your mother."
No, her mother was still in New York with the children. That was one reason Nan was having to go back. For Mrs. Ellis was leaving on Saturday for California. "Father needs her, and she says I don't, now I have Greta."
"I see; you have Greta."
"Greta is dining out to-night." She scanned his face with an expression which, in the retrospect, comforted him even more than to remember her delight at the arrangement finally made. He was to call for her. "Not later than half-past seven," because she had the packing to do before bed—time. Yes, they were going to New York by the early train. Greta had to be in New York to-morrow night for a meeting.
"Hallet Newcomb's, I suppose?"
Nan opened her eyes.
"How odd you should guess! Butisn'tit fair-minded for her to go to a pro-Ally lecture by an Englishman?"
He smiled faintly as he hurried back to the anteroom.
On the way out, after his interview with the President, Napier could not fail to see among the waiting crowd, composed chiefly of men, the very striking figure of a yellow-haired woman in deep conversation with a certain senator much at the moment in the public eye. But Miss von Schwarzenberg did not leave Mr. Napier's recognition to chance.
"Oh, here you are!" She turned her back on the important person and joined Napier with as much effrontery as though the meeting were what she so successfully gave the impression it was, a matter mutually arranged. In face of the absence on his part of the least response, she walked on at his side. "I'm the only one here in all this throng," she said in a confidential tone, "who isn't waiting to see the President."
"That's a lie!" he said to himself as he stalked on.
"I'mwaiting to see you. You must bear with me, I'm afraid," she said in gentle accents. "It's about Nan. You haven't been to see her because I'm there. Isn't that a pity?"
Napier's apparent obliviousness of her presence vanished. He made no effort to keep his indignation out of his face as he stopped abruptly to say: "I decline to discuss that or anything else with you." He turned his back on her with unmistakable finality, marched out into the corridor, and so to the columned porch, with never a look behind.
Napier hadn't often betrayed in public such heat of anger as the woman's audacity had stirred in him. Much she cared! he told himself, still tingling. She would shrug her handsome shoulders and return to her senator. Presently she would be entering the sanctum Napier had just left. To-morrow, in Hallett Newcomb's audience. Newcomb was one of those Britons invited by American friends to come and correct transatlantic misapprehension, and to present facts. Yet even such unorganized and unofficial efforts, so slight in sum, were not suffered by the thoroughgoing German propagandists to pass unchallenged or unneutralized. In this connection Roderick Taylor had set down to Miss Greta's credit an astute discovery. It was that, as some one put the case, "pro-Ally Americans stayed away from these meetings in vast numbers." Your pro-Ally American didn't need converting. He was occupied in other ways. What he failed to recognize was that in the absence of a sufficiently represented pro-Ally element in these audiences, Miss Greta's confederates, judiciously disposed about the hall, could and frequently did get up a powerful and "spontaneous" pro-German demonstration. By this means certain meetings convened in the interests of the Allies were turned into triumph for their enemies.
In front of Napier, at the office desk in Miss Ellis's hotel, stood a man impressing on the clerk in an undertone the importance of a letter he had brought. Could he have a receipt for it? Could he see the bell-boy who was to deliver it? That business despatched, the clerk was free to attend to Mr. Napier. Yes, he had been told a gentleman of that name would call for Miss Ellis at 7:30. A bell-boy was waiting to take Mr. Napier up.
Side by side in the elevator they shot through story after story, to be set down near the roof. With his thumb pressing the envelop to a little brass tray, the bell-boy held in its place, address face-downward, the much-sealed packet which had been the object of so much solicitude. At the end of an interminable corridor the bell-boy tapped at a door. Without waiting, he opened it and went in, returning almost at once with the tray empty and the words, "This way, sir."
The instant Napier was over the threshold, the door was shut behind him. He stood facing Miss von Schwarzenberg. She had risen in the act of laying the sealed packet on the table. In the midst of his surprise Napier mentally registered the fact that he had never seen her in more brilliant good looks. She was wearing over her dinner dress a superb fur coat, thrown back to show her jeweled neck.
"I am too early," Napier said. "I will wait downstairs."
"You are not too early. It is Nan who is late. She won't be a minute." Miss Greta pointed to a chair as Napier stood that instant rigid by the door. "Don't," she cried softly—"don't be so hard upon me! Can't you see that I'm not standing in your way any more?"
"If that is so, you have your own reason for it." He turned and laid his hand on the door-handle. These American fastenings! He turned the knob fruitlessly.
"Don't be so hard!" She had come toward him; her voice burred softly over his shoulder. "When I'm trying to keep the straight road,don'tforce me down into the dark ways I abhor. Oh, listen, Gavan! Give me a chance to explain!"
"What's the matter with this door?" he demanded.
"How do I know?" She pressed her lace handkerchief to her lips.
He rattled the handle.
"For God's sake! don't make a scene!" she cried in a harsh whisper. "Are you sobenton humiliating me!—both in private and in public as you did this morning? Another woman wouldn't forgive you this morning. And now, again, you want to humiliate me. Before hotel servants!"
"You told that bell-boy to fasten the door."
"Hush! For Nan's sake, anyway, don't make a scandal here!"
Napier turned and looked at her. "Whatever your motive is you are wasting time."
"Not if you give me five minutes to explain. For you, too," she said with meaning, "it won't be wasting time."
His answer was to lift his hand and press the electric bell.
"Ah,"—she stepped back,—"you are implacable! You—you don't care how much you injure yourself if only you can injure me. Yes, you—!" She broke off and turned away. For several moments she stood in that attitude, giving him ample time to relent, her meek head bent, the dazzling whiteness of her neck set off by the dark fur collar falling away from her shoulders. The silence was broken by a stifled sob as she carried her handkerchief to her lips and began to walk up and down. "I can't disguise it from myself any longer. You"—she stopped in the middle of the room—"you are the great disaster of my life." She waited. She gave him time to disavow the role. "Very well"—she folded her arms under the heavy fur—"very well," she repeated with a quiet intensity, "I shall not go out of your life, either, without leaving my mark.Sheshall make it up to me! Yes, and she shall make it up to Julian Grant for what he has given and lost. Be sure I shall see to that!" She came forward with an air of great dignity, slipped some catch, and opened the door. "Go!" she said in a penetrating voice.
Out of the elevator that shot up in response to Napier's ring stepped the same bell-boy. Napier's last look back showed the boy running down the corridor, one of the long list of Greta's slaves.
The elevator stopped at the second floor. Nan stood waiting.
"Why," she exclaimed with boundless surprise, "wherehaveyou come from?"
"There has been some mistake," Napier said. "I was taken to the wrong floor."
"I should think so! I was going down to see if my message had been forgotten. Oh, come while I get my gloves."
She disappeared through a sitting-room into a room beyond. Clearly Greta had taken some trouble to achieve her brief tête-à-tête.
As Nan came back, drawing on a long white glove, Napier was aware of some one flying down the stairs, some one for whom express elevators ran too slowly. A moment after the terrified face of the bell-boy appeared at the open door. "Come! Come quick! She's dying!"
"Who is dying? What has happened?" Nan demanded.
"Miss von Schwarzenberg," he gasped. "Quick!"
"But Miss von Schwarzenberg has gone out!"
"No! no! She's upstairs. Come quick, or it will be too late." He rushed to the elevator and rang. "It's coming!" he cried over his shoulder.
"Is he crazy?" Nan asked, dazed, but following Napier.
"It is probably some device to prevent your going out with me," he said as the elevator stopped.
Again the boy sped down that interminable upper corridor, the two hurrying at his heels.
"I'll wait for you," Napier said. They had come to the door which the boy had not dared to open till he was supported by the presence of others. He knocked now, opened, and stood back.
Greta, in the arm-chair, the fur coat at her feet, had flung bare arms out across the table and half sat, half lay there, moaning, with hidden face.
Nan rushed in and took the woman in her arms. Napier, full of disgust for what he looked on as a piece of cheap theatricalism, was startled as the face fell back against Nan's shoulder. That it should be so blotched, so disfigured in that short time, bore witness to the violence of whatever the feeling was that had torn and still was tearing the woman. More than by any other sign, the fact that her heavy hair had become loosened unbecomingly, grotesquely, brought Napier the conviction that for once Greta von Schwarzenberg wasn't acting. The great yellow mass of braids and curls had lurched over one ear, giving a look more of drunkenness than grief to the convulsed face. That one glimpse was enough. Napier turned away and paced the corridor for those leaden-footed minutes till Nan ran out, looking blindly up and down.
"Where are you? Oh, the most cruel, awful thing has happened! She has just had his letter. Greta's lover—Count Ernst Pforzheim is dead." The girl's eyes were full of tears. "Think of poor Greta running away up here to hide herself so as not to interfere with my pleasure!" She turned back to the room.
"Have you heard—any details?" Napier detained her to ask.
"Only that he died for the fatherland."
For all Taylor's professed anxiety to have Napier's report of his interview with the President, he was late. He was very late. Macray had looked in twice, the lines in his sallow face deepening as the black-rimmed glasses verified the solitary figure in the room.
Finally he came in and closed the door. He crossed the long room and stood at Napier's side before he said with that brisk familiarity that cost Napier something not to resent: "Remember that shady Bureau de Change, Mr. Taylor told you about?" As Napier did not instantly respond, Macray went on in his gloomy telegraphese, "Suspicious boom since Schwarz's reappearance."
Oh, yes, Napier rememberedthat.
"Hahn—fellow we've had investigating—been waiting for Taylor two mortal hours. Off to Chicago to-night—Hahn. 'Fore he goes, detail in bureau business got to be established. Hahn wants to go openly—one of the public—see 'f he c'n do business."
"Well, what's the objection?"
"Noobjection. Only Taylor's kept him waitin' such an infernal time, Hahn won't be able lay hands on anybody right sort before bureau shuts. Wants a witness. Fellow seems think I c'n hang fishin'-line out the window and hook what he calls 'suitable witness.' S'poseyouwouldn't?"
Napier was growing accustomed to exigencies and odd manners. He had the man in. Once or twice before he'd seen here the clean-shaven young German-American, with his look of the typical waiter (which he wasn't) over-fed, under-exercised, a little scornful, with a leaden eye fixed on the main chance. One thought instinctively of tips as one's own eye, leaden or otherwise, took in his "waiting" air. He regarded his prospective companion without enthusiasm.
"You can't wear a stove-pipe hat," he said, "and you'd have to borrow a different overcoat."
Napier's instinctive reluctance was overborne by Macray's misinterpreting its origin. "Schwarz won't be there. No fear! All same, no sense exciting remark."
Napier in his turn made no secret of the ground of his special interest in the enterprise. "Why do you think she's behind this concern?"
Macray's curt: "Don't think. Know," decided Napier.
Two flights up, in a derelict office building on lower Broadway, they found a back room with a number on the door. It bore no business sign, no name.
The arrangement that Hahn should do the talking was initiated in the German tongue as they climbed the dingy stairs. Napier's secret uneasiness took alarm at the sound of steps behind. He looked back. On the first landing, under the flaring gas, which of itself was a sign of the outworn character of the place, a shabby old man in a fur cap was coming up behind them. Coming stealthily, Napier felt. But Hahn talked on stolidly about a hypothetical family in Karlsruhe. He knocked at the door, and then went in.
A hairless head, with outstanding ears, bent over a table, reading. The gas jet, directly above, was set in a green tin reflector, and all the light in the room seemed to concentrate itself on that corpse-white cranium; or, rather, the effect was as though the masked light, instead of being thrown on the man's head, had its origin there. A polished and luminous orb, it seemed to contain the shining like one of those porcelain globes over the old-time lamps.
"Is dis de blace vhere I can send money to Sharmany?" Hahn inquired.
"Yep," said the clerk. "Shut the door, will you?"
Hahn had not budged. "Bottsafe, hein?" he said.
"Absolute." The man got up and shut the door. It was a drafty old place, he explained. "Safe?" he went on, resuming his place and gathering the light to himself again. This was not only a safe way; it was the only safe way.
Hahn produced a worn pocket-book. He wanted to send fifteen dollars to Karslruhe.
Fifteen dollars? It was a long way to send only fifteen dollars. The worst of it was, the commission was heavier in proportion for a small sum like that. It cost the company as much to send fifteen dollars as it would cost to send five hundred.
"Vot gompany?"
"This one. Who sent you here?"
"Fleischmann, Sevent' Avenue."
"Well, didn't he tell you about the company?"
"All Fleischmann tell me is de address." What he wanted, Hahn went on, was to send fifteen dollars every fortnight.
"Oh, every fortnight." The polished head bent over the address.
Hahn opened his pocket-book and fingered some bills. But how was he to know the money would reach Karlsruhe?
"Simple enough; we guarantee it. I give you a receipt." The man opened a book of printed forms, dipped a pen into a dirty ink-stand, and wrote the date.
How long, the visitor insisted, before he would hear from his family that the money had come?
"Depends on how soon they write." The tone was distinctly superior. "Family habits in these matters are different, we find."
His family acknowledged their letters instantly, Hahn said, if they got them. Theyhadn'tbeen getting them.
"You have been here before?"
"No."
"I thought not. Then why did you expect your letters to get through, above all if they had money in them?" The unshadowed eyes in the pudding visage rested on the three five-dollar bills Hahn still held in his hand.
Hahn wished to know how soon he might hear if his family acknowledged at once.
"As a rule inside six weeks."
What would be the longest time, Hahn then wished to know.
"Two months—"
"It is a lie!" came from a crack in the noiselessly opened door. At a child's height from the floor a fur cap was thrust in. The gray beard sticking out beyond the mangy headgear gave the old face a fierceness instantly contradicted by the eyes.
"I haf a letter," he said, trembling with excitement. "De money I send two mont' before Christmas it nefer come. De money my friend send t'ree veek before dat, it nefer come. You gif me my money back!" He came in, swinging his greasy coat-tails about his shambling legs. "Here is de baper to show you get my money."
The altercation went on in German, with excuses, threats. "Get out, or the police—"
"Oh, you vill not like bolice here."
There was righteous anger on the part of the man at the desk; but a certain caution, too. Nobody could say at a time like this that in one case out of thousands something wholly unforeseen might not happen to delay—
"It isnotdelayed!" the little man screamed. "It did not come! It vill not come! Vhere is it? Gif it back!"
"Ah-h, I remember you now!" the unlashed eyelids narrowed. "In your case, and to an address like that—"
"Vot de matter vid the address?" screamed the old man. "Berfectly goot address!"
"I warned you it would be wisest to insure." He turned bruskly away from the agitated figure. "I will talk to you when I've finished. These gentlemen are in a hurry."
"Not at all. No, certainly not." Hahn backed to the door. He would wait.
"Vy to insure," the old man was shrilling, "if to send by you is, like you said, so safe?Hein?" He leaned over and hammered the ink-stained desk with a dirty fist.
The man behind the receipt-book shifted his position. He got up, and the light in the globe he bore on his shoulders was extinguished as by the turn of a screw. Hands in pocket, he stood in a shadow above the green reflector. "Safe, money undoubtedly is, in our hands. If," he repeated, "in one case out of a thousand it gets out of our hands, what then? Maybe you have heard there is a war? Maybe you can read?"
The old man gibbered with rage and offended pride; but the lines of defeat, which life had stamped on his face, deepened.
"Very well," said the other, with an effrontery that said he had marked the signs, "since you can read, you know who it is who robs the mails. Only twice since the war have they caught us, and we have sent tens of thousands of dollars. Ask the thieves of English where your money is!"
"Ai!" In the middle of the tirade the old man had turned away and spread out his hands in impotent grief.
"In war," the agent called after the broken figure—"in war it is wise to insure."
"Gone! All gone! Ai!" The quavering old voice trailed down the dingy stair.
Hahn mumbled an excuse, and the two new clients withdrew despite vigorous protests. Once outside the room, Hahn plunged down the two flights as though in fear of his life. When Napier reached the street there was no trace anywhere of either the old man, or of Hahn.
He recognized their collaboration in the account given in the New York papers, a few days later, of an exposure of one of the several concerns, all, it was hinted, under one (unnamed) management which, with no capital beyond a back room, a table, a chair, and a clerk behind a book of receipt "blanks," raked in hundreds and thousands from gullible people who thought they were helping their friends in Germany.
"Schwarzenberg and her friends will be a little straitened for a while after this," said Taylor.
The expression "her friends" grated on Napier, and Napier was already in a restless, uncertain mood. Taylor had noticed that. Significant as both men "deemed" the interview with the President, Napier had hurried over it to canvass and sift the Hahn adventure.
Taylor, lounging on the sofa, sipped his liqueur at his ease. How did he know the bulk of the bureau's money went into Schwarzenberg's pocket? Two reasons. First, she'd earned it. Languishing business doing a roaring trade from the moment she took hold. Second, the fellow she set to watch the rogues she'd put in charge was a rogue himself.
"Oh, we've deserved well of our country in blocking up a few of those rat-holes," Taylor concluded.
"My interest in it," Napier paused to say, "wasn't pure patriotism. It's made me pretty sick to see this Miss Ellis—rather a friend of mine she is, very intimate with my chief's family—so hopelessly taken in. I had an idea this bureau business might show up—"
Taylor abandoned his lounging posture. He sat looking at Napier very steadily out of his greenish eyes.
"Oh, I quite understand," Napier went on, "the exposure is too discreet to be of any use to me."
"I should rather think so!" remarked Mr. Taylor.
"All the same, it isn't fair, leaving people like the Ellises in the dark. The mother is off to the Pacific coast to-morrow." Napier added that he was due at their hotel in half an hour. He was going to talk to them, he said.
Still Taylor sat there, regarding his guest through a haze of cigar smoke. "I thought," he said after a moment, "you mentioned that youhadtalked to them—to the girl, anyway."
"I said I'd told Miss Ellis what Singleton found in Schwarzenberg's box. And God knows thatoughtto have been enough—"
"Too much," said Taylor, quietly. "Of course they passed it on to Schwarzenberg."
Napier doubted that. "You don't know the Ellises," he said, ignoring the limitations of his own acquaintance. No, his mistake had not been in telling too much. His mistake was that he hadn't told the Ellises enough. He was going to repair the mistake to-night.
"How are you going to do that?" Taylor asked in the same careful tone.
By telling them—telling the girl, anyway—that he'd avoided telling her before—theproveddesperate character of this woman's accomplices.
A peculiar fixity came into Taylor's green eyes.
"You can't pass on information we've put in your way here."
"Certainly not," returned Napier with some heat. "What I shall tell has nothing whatever to do with you. I sha'n't hint bureau." Again he consulted his watch. The time dragged.
"You'd mind, I suppose, giving me an idea what you do mean to hint?"
"I sha'n't hint at all. And I've come here to-night expressly to tell you, first, that I mean the Ellises to know about Gull Island. About Greta von Schwarzenberg's connection with it and with the man we found there."
There was silence in the room.
"I dare say you are wondering why, in the face of the exigency, I've put it off?"
Taylor had stopped smoking, but he said nothing.
"If I'd told her what I found Carl Pforzheim up to on Gull Island, she'd have to know what became of Carl. Well, I'm now going to tell her."
"You can't do that!" Taylor had come to life. He leaned forward, blinking his white lashes as if a cinder had blown in his eye.
"Why can't I?"
"For one thing, telling the Ellises would be as good as giving Schwarzenberg the key to the whole Gull Island business."
"Well, why not? Do her good. Put the fear of God into her, perhaps. And she can't spoil a game that's over and ended."
Taylor laid down his cigar.
"The Gull Island game," he said in his guarded voice, "isn'tover and ended."
Napier stood waiting.
"We've got one of our best men there this minute, personating Carl Pforzheim." Taylor nodded in the face of Napier's stark astonishment. "Your friend Singleton. He's managed the Gull Island job from the beginning. Went up again the day after you were there. Wirelessed the German agent at Amsterdam that he'd had wind of a raid on the island. He was going to destroy every trace and get out. Singleton saw to it that the truth of that much was verified, and duly reported to the Wilhelmstrasse. He promised them—still, of course, in the character of Pforzheim—to get back to the island as soon as it was safe. Well, he has got back."
"What the devil could he tell of any use to Germany that wasn't fatal to us?" Napier demanded.
"You don't yet appreciate the situation," Taylor said softly. "It's a post of special advantage just because the man in charge can choose his own time to be there. He can give important information that reaches Germany the merest trifle too late, or information that he knows they've had already from another quarter. They're fond of verifying their intelligence. And he tells them things they want to believe and can't check—things they have to take his word for, things that will throw dust in the eyes they count on seeing clearest. I tell you, Gull Island is one of the cogs in the wheel of the British machine. You won't mind if I'm frank? Well, then, you'd have hard work to commit any indiscretion"—Taylor rubbed it in—"that would serve Schwarzenberg's ends so well as to enable her to warn the Germans that a British decoy was nesting in Carl Pforzheim's place."
As he stood there, a prey to increasing uneasiness, Napier had his further glimpse of one of the disintegrating effects of wartime: the unknown quantity in character. How that had been forced home! Taylor had seemed "one of the best." No one in the British service was more trusted, and, Napier's instinct told him, no one more justly. None the less, Napier didn't see headquarters writing "all this" from the other side.
"I suppose," he found himself saying, "I oughtn't to ask you how you heard about the decoy duck on the island?"
"Well"—Taylor reflected an instant,—"after all, my instructions—yes, I'll tell you. I have it on the best possible authority. Ernst Pforzheim told me."
"Ernst! Ernst Pforzheim is in an English prison, or rather, he was before—"
"Exactly. Before he became of such use to our side. Clever dog as that fellow Singleton is, he couldn't have worked the Gull Island oracle without Ernst Pforzheim's help."
Ernst had helped Singleton! No! no! there were limits. It was, anyway, safe to say, "You must in that case rather deplore his death."
"What makes you think he's dead?" Taylor asked.
"His particular friend, Miss von Schwarzenberg, had the news yesterday."
"She had, had she? Ha! ha! The canny Ernst!" Taylor subdued his mirth to say: "Just so. Wilhelmstrasse doesn't have the news.We'reall right; and Master Ernst can go on drawing pay from two governments. Oh, he's a very practical person, is Ernst. The situation is his own invention. A piece of 'war economy,' he called it. 'You English hard up for ammunition. Why waste it shooting a spy when he can give you more valuable information than anybody in the German Secret Service?'"
"You can't seriously mean we were such fools as to trust a man like that?"
"So far from trusting him, we keep him under surveillance every hour of his life. Two of our men specially detailed."
"You aren't telling me he's over here!"
"Been here six weeks."
"Then he's a free man!"
Taylor smiled. "A man who's been doing the sort of business Ernst has, is never a free man. Nobody knows better than Ernst how little his life would be worth if he took any liberties. And why should he? This is his harvest-time. He knows he'll get more out of us than—"
"Than out of Germany?"
"They'd ask very awkward questions of Ernst in Germany; he can evade them here. But there's a day of reckoning waiting for Mr. Ernst in the fatherland. No one knows better than he that he's safer with us, looked after by two capital fellows, till after the war. Then off to South America with a fat bank-account. And, by Jove! he'll have earned it! The cheek of the devil! Except for one enterprise!" and Mr. Taylor chuckled as he relit his cigar.
"We'd been wondering," he went on, "Macray and I, why the beggar had grown so content never to go out. No more music, no theater, no smart restaurants, and so far aswecould see, no reason on earth why, with one or other of the men who stick to him day and night, heshouldn'trevisit his old haunts. Not he!" Again that pleased chuckle. "Not so long as Greta von Schwarzenberg is circulating about New York!"
"Why, he and she are, or they were, thick as thieves."
Taylor nodded.
"And it would be undeniably useful to us to have that relation continue. It's where our friend draws the line. 'All very well to laugh,' he says to me, 'youdon't know the woman. I do.Nein, danke.' So he sits and smokes and plays cards, drinks and overeats himself, and is losing his figure. I can take you round any evening, and you'll see for yourself."
"I've come to say good-by." Napier stood before Nan Ellis in the great public parlor of her hotel. More and more his most private experiences of American life had seemed conditioned by the vast restlessness of these places. He noticed that Nan, like many of her compatriots, was able to achieve an obliviousness to such surroundings that amounted to a kind of privacy.
Instead of relinquishing his hand, she had clutched it tighter: "You are not going back to England?"
"What's the use of my staying here?"
"The use?" She let his hand go. Napier received the impression that the lowering of her tone was less attributable to two or three other absorbed groups seated about the great room, than to some sudden rush of feeling that clouded her voice. "You are safe here."
He looked at her for a moment. Deliberately he shook off the impression her tone more than her words had made. "No,"—he shook his head,—"I'm far from safe where you can ring me up."
"You don'tlikeme to ring you up?"
He could have laughed if he'd been less oppressed. "It's no use. I see I can't do anything to protect you. I might as well be on the other side of the world."
"No! no!" she protested with an eagerness that caught her breath. "Besides, you are very far from sure ofgettingto the other side of the world as things are."
His look of angry scorn, for the contingency implied, agitated her.
"Oh,dobelieve me! This is a thing I know more about than you do."
"It isn't a knowledge you should have," he said sternly.
She swept the rebuke aside in her alarm. "Don't imagine," she said in that strained undertone—"don't imagine the warnings in the papers aren't serious. It is one of the things I couldn't write. Why didn't you come and see me and my mother last Thursday?"
He was aware of being as little able now, to make idle conversation with Nan, as he had been that night, after Taylor had barred all use of the Gull Island evidence. He dropped out mumbled phrases, "Unexpected business," having "to go to Washington," and was there anything else she hadn't been able to write?
Yes, yes. There was a great deal more, more than she had any right to say. But this much she must tell him: "You aren't to ask me how I know, and you won't ask me to tell you more than I've a right to. Ihavea right!" She flashed an instant's defiance at some unseen opponent, "or I'll take it, anyhow. The torpedoing is going to be extended.Yes!" she said as though to convince her own shrinking incredulity as much as his. "Neutral as well as enemy ships. They're going on till England is as isolated as she's isolated Germany. If England won't believe that, if England doesn'trealize,"—she waited an instant as if to give him time to throw out a life-line of hope to her proviso,—"then," she said as she took in Napier's motionless figure and stern face—"then what's before us is too horrible."
"I am glad you recognize the horror of the German policy."
"What good will that do!" she began hurriedly, "if you—" and then half to herself: "But you simplymustn't go! You didn't know, perhaps," she leaned nearer, "passenger-boats have been carrying guns."
"Really?" said Napier.
She nodded. "It's true. And that's why the Germans say they will sink passenger-boats. So they can't be used any more by travelers, now that they're warned."
"You see it as simple as that? Germany is to tell neutrals they are not to travel even in neutral waters!"
"If we don't use passenger-boatsforpassenger-boats, they aren't passenger-boats any more." (Napier heard Schwarzenberg speaking.) "They go loaded to the guards! Yes, war material for the Allies."
"If that is so, why is it? Would you see the Allies punished, enslaved, because the Allies haven't, as Germany has, devoted the last forty years to making and accumulating arms? Germany—"
"Oh, it'sAmericaI'm thinking of—after you!" she threw in. "If America's part is going to be just to grow rich and richer out of this awfulness, I don't know how I shall bear it. And that's what I'm telling Julian. But all that,"—she swept it aside with one of those quick motions of a flashing hand,—"if Ibegyou not to go—"
"It's no use," said Napier.
"Nothing I could say ordo?"
He shook his head.
"Very well, then," she said with hurt mouth that quivered, "what is the name of your boat?"
He considered a moment. "Don't you think it would be very indiscreet of me to tell you?"
"It will be the discreetest thing you ever did in your life."
"Why do you want to know?"
"I want to know because"—again she bent to him—"because there's a black-list." He saw her eyes bright with terror. "You must give me time to find out...."
"I see," he interrupted. "You would like me to owe my life to Greta von Schwarzenberg."
"To me, Gavan,"—the pallor of her face yielded to a sudden flush,—"if you could bear that."
"I haven't decided on my boat," he said.
"But I thought you came to say good-by?"
He was going on a few weeks' tour on this side, he said.
Oh, the lightening in her face. He seemed bent only on teasing her a little, in withholding the answer to her quick: "Whereabouts are you going to tour?" When she had waited for the answer that didn't come she said: "You're afraid I'll tell. Everybody's afraid every one else will tell. Everybody's changed."
"Not Miss Greta, surely?"
"Greta as much as anybody," she flung out. And then, as though she regretted that ebullition, she added hastily: "I suppose I mustn't ask you—what next, after the few weeks' tour."
"Yes, you may ask that," Napier said, the smile going out of his eyes. "France next."
They parted with no hint from him of the fact that one result of his second visit to Washington had been an extension of the highly successful unofficial mission.
For Taylor had been right in saying the old sharp demarcations between government departments were being erased. More and more diplomacy impinged on the twin provinces of trade and world finance. The astute were beginning to see that the problem of munitions was own brother to food supply, which in its turn was a matter of transport. In view of the now frequent sinkings of Allied ships, not only South American meat, wheat, but South American tonnage, might become of supreme importance in a protracted war. Unfortunately, German influence had attained dangerous proportions in those remote, fertile areas below the equator. Napier and another unofficial British envoy received orders from home to proceed to Rio on instructions from the British Ambassador at Washington.
He returned to New York early in May, to find the country in a state of excitement such as the United States had not known since the assassination of Lincoln. Some twenty-four hours before, the Germans had torpedoed theLusitania. Fifteen hundred lives had been sacrificed. The effect on Napier was the effect on many. TheLusitaniadead recruited tens of thousands.
On the afternoon of the day of his arrival in New York, Napier returned to his hotel, having engaged passage to England by the next ship.
A lady, he was told, waited to see him. What lady was likeliest to have news so quickly of his arrival? He shrank from the thought of Greta as from something reptilian. Itcouldn'tbe Greta on this day of all days. And who else, but the being of all the world he most hungered to see? So thinking, he made his way among the hosts of horror-stricken people, one sole theme in every mouth,Lusitania! Lusitania!Some, and not one most voluble or outwardly most excited, uttered the word War with an accent that Napier wished might have been heard across the Rhine. He kept on telling himself that he knew it would be Nan he should find waiting; but he was not prepared for the Nan he found, nor for that low exclamation: "At last! Atlast!" nor for the shaken voice in which she disposed of his question how had she known of his arrival.
"An arrangement with the clerk," she said, to ring her up as soon—
"Thenthatwas before!"—said Napier hungrily.
"Yes, before the awful news." A shuddering vagueness seemed to close about her like a mist. It shut out the moment's shining at his coming. He could see that blank horror at the tragedy obscured for the moment everything else in life.
Only Napier, it seemed, felt the added strain of this coming and going of excited people, the bringing in of telegrams, the dictating of others. The girl paid no more attention to the other people scattered about the great room, to their tension or their tears, than they to hers. As she turned to throw her trembling body down in a chair by the window, the look in her eyes startled Napier.
"And did you see what the papers said?" she demanded.
The terrible newspaper accounts, which he had not yet found time to read, she had by heart. Behind that veil of nervous vagueness he caught glimpses of the intensity of her realization—her participation, one might almost say—in the scenes off the Irish coast.
"Had you any special friend on board?" he asked.
"Special fr—" she repeated in that low voice. And then her note climbed quickly to what for her was the climax of the huge disaster. "They were Americans!" So she confessed that limitation which a faulty imagination sets to our humanity—a limitation she had imagined she despised. "Americans they were, and innocent. I keep thinking most of the children. There were such lots of children, Gavan, on that boat. I kept seeing them all night long. I could hear their voices growing weaker—" her own failed her for a moment. And when she found it again, it was a different voice altogether, firm and bitter. "People say to me, 'theLusitaniawas warned not to sail.'"
Yes, Napier had heard that was so.
"As ifthatcould excuse—it's what Greta says. 'They were warned,' she keeps repeating. 'They disobeyed the warning.' The little children, the babies disobeyed the German warning! Oh-h!" The small tightened fist beat upon one knee to call back the self-control that threatened to desert her. "I've had a horrible morning with Greta. She—something has died in Greta. I'd been feeling ever since—" Again she broke off and seemed to seize upon comparative commonplace to steady her nerves. "It was true about her being married. She admitted it the day she read of Mr. Guedalla's death in the paper. She got some money. It wasn't her not telling us she was married; it was other things. Oh, I've been unhappy enough! But this—this! Gavan, I couldn't get her to say it was horrible. She wasn't even sorry. Oh, Gavan,she was glad!" The locked fingers writhed in her lap. She seemed not to know that she was weeping. "What do you think Greta said at last? 'It would be a lesson,' she said. A lesson! To torture and kill fifteen hundred innocent people. A lesson to the children! To little babies!" She turned her quivering face away a moment. "I think," she said under her broken breath—"I think I should have gone mad if you hadn't come back. Oh, I'm so glad you're back!"
He simply hadn't the courage at that moment to tell her he was going to sail for England the following day. He told her in a very gentle note sent late in the afternoon. They were to dine together.
She met him with steady looks.
"I've cabled to Julian," she said immediately, "that I'm coming back with you."
TheParnassianwas to sail at ten.
Napier had stood outside the entrance to the dock, waiting for Nan, since ten minutes past nine. At twenty minutes to ten there she was at last.
"But where is your luggage?" he called out. He had warned her not to trust it to other hands. In that second before the cab drew alongside something in the face at the window prepared him for the answer. "That's why I am late. I had to have everything taken off. And I tried to telephone you. Just as I was leaving—this came." She held a paper toward him as she got out of the cab. She stood there while he read:
I depend on your waiting till I come sailing to-dayOlympic.Julian.
I depend on your waiting till I come sailing to-dayOlympic.
Julian.
As Napier looked up, speechless in that first moment, she whispered: "Serves me right. Greta said, I was running away." She put out her hand and steadied herself against the window-frame of the cab. "Where you're going they shoot deserters, don't they! Well, I've been shot. Oh, not fatally! just in the leg. Enough to stop me."
"You are going to wait for Julian?"
"What else is possible?" She hung her head. "He and the others, they've depended on me. Well, they must not any more. And when he comes,"—her breast heaved as she brought it out,—"I shall tell him something else."
"Tell Julian! What shall you tell Julian?"
The lifted eyes were swimming.
"That it'syou. That to see you go without me breaks my heart."
"Nan!" he cried and pulled himself up with an effort that brought the blood into his face. Other passengers, arriving late, for all their own agitation at the prospect of some hitch in getting themselves and their baggage on board, stared back over their shoulders at the leave-taking out in the street.
Napier flung a "Wait!" to the cabman, and held his watch in one hand. "Come," he said and took Nan by the arm. He walked her a little way from the dock entrance.
"I think," he went on gravely, "Iwouldn'ttell Julian. You see, Nan, you've got to consider that I mayn't be coming back." He didn't look at her. "What's theuseof telling Julian? Isn't there enough misery in the world without adding to it?"
"That's what Julian and I think," she said, blurring her words. "Enough misery in the world without war. You never cared about that old misery as Julian did. And that's what makes it so—so—not to be borne that you should feel you have to go and meet the new horror out there."
"Well, I do feel like that," he said.
"And yet it isn't any longer just duty. You want to go!" she cried. "I saw that yesterday when we talked about theLusitania."
"Yes," he said grimly, "I want to go."
"Well, so do lots of my countrymen." And Napier couldn't have told whether dismay or pride was dominant in the new note. His hand slipped down her arm and found her fingers. Napier's valet, Day, came running out of the dock-gates. He looked distractedly across the wide, open space before the slips.
"Yes!" Napier hailed him. "I'll be there!" He gripped her hand hard before he let it go. "I'll have to run for it. Good-by." On an impulse, whether mere instinct to cover his emotion or some obscurer working of the mind behind his wretchedness, he caught Julian's cable out of her hold. He held the paper in front of his misty eyes as he hurried toward the dock entrance. The hour the message had been sent from London struck him now for the first time. He halted suddenly. In a voice harsh with the effort to keep it steady he called back: "Did Greta know that you meant to go with me?"
"Yes," came the panting answer as the girl ran forward a few steps. "I told her before I saw you that I couldn't bear it over here any longer. And now you—you are leaving me!" She stopped.
"You'll lose the boat, sir!" Day called out.
Napier's last vision of Nan Ellis showed the girl still standing there looking after him and sobbing openly in the street.
This cable, he knew now was no reply to Nan's. It was the reply to some message sent hours earlier by Greta von Schwarzenberg.