Napier and Julian exchanged wireless messages as they passed each other on the high seas. "Nan is waiting for you in New York," was Napier's greeting.
When next Napier heard of either of them, he was in France; those two were together in America. Then he heard of Nan's being in London "for two weeks." Next she wrote him a line from New York: "Because Julian is over-worked, and he's had horrid letters from home. Please write him something cheerful."
Napier responded to this invitation by sending a sealed packet through the foreign-office bag, giving a brief account of Greta von Schwarzenberg's more pernicious activities. He ended by commending Julian to Roderick Taylor for confirmation. The answer to this, anxiously waited for, came in the form of a truly Julianesque denunciation of all secret service: "As long as we employ spies we shall suffer from spies." Greta, according to Julian, had been alarmed and harried into associations alien to her nature. As to the incontestable fact that after being deported, she had slipped back to England and had crossed the ocean disguised as a Belgian, that was "our doing. If we go interfering with freedom of travel, we must expect—" For his own part, he was busied from morning till night about matters of major importance. He had no time for fellows like Taylor. In some ways America was disappointing, but England was going from bad to worse.
From one and all of Julian's letters of that period Napier gathered that for refreshment in a very dusty time, Julian bathed his spirit in Nan Ellis's unfailing sympathy and faith. Driven and harassed as Julian was, alienated from his family, divided from old friends, with neither health nor energy to make new, he seemed able to wait for the girl's slow-forming inclination toward a closer relation, since as he wrote in his astonishing way—"since she is of such service to the work." Her special "service" seemed to be the going back and forth between London and New York.
Through all that trench nightmare compounded of dirt, physical and mental misery, and hourly danger, the bitter knowledge was pressed home that the being Gavan Napier loved best on earth was crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic on an errand he abhorred. An errand which he himself by putting the secret-service people on the track of Atlantic contraband, had changed from something safe and easy into something so difficult and so full of peril that he quailed before opening those letters of Julian's, which might tell of the failure, the detection, the arrest of the messenger.
From English sources, as the months went on, echoes reached Napier in the trenches of Mr. Julian Grant's writings and speeches on the other side of the Atlantic. These were utterances of such a character as to bring disaster upon certain persons in London held responsible for not foreseeing the inadvisability of allowing the notorious pacifist to cross the Atlantic.
It was at a time when Anglo-American relations had suffered to the point of danger by the British authorities having held up American ships carrying supplies which would ultimately find their way through neutral countries to Germany. Whether owing to the fact that German propaganda in the United States was then at the height of its success, the war spirit called to life by theLusitaniadisaster languished during a protracted interchange of Notes between the United States and the Central powers.
Nan was as poor a letter-writer as Julian was admirable. One of her meager little missives reached Napier soon after the so-called "great advance" which toward the end of September, 1915, gained a fragment of French soil about Loos at colossal cost.
"I want you to know," she wrote, "that I've been learning these last months in New York what the triumphs of German methods would mean for the world. Here, in the midst of all this luxury and waste, I've come to envy loss and sacrifice. If we in America don't get our share of it, I don't know what is to become of us." And then, from the passionate patriot, that passing mock at "America, from a safe distance, distributing victuals and justice to people giving up their lives."
Looking back, after all the turmoil and tragedy had gone by, Napier realized, as clearly as though he had been an eye-witness, the despair that fell on Julian when he heard from her own lips that Nan was "against what Germany stands for. I want my country to be against it," she wrote Napier, "and there seems to be only one way. It isn't, not yet, the way of peace. Well, there it is. I have failed Julian in the work he cares more about than anything in the world. I say to myself, I won't fail him in other ways if I can help it. What do you say, Gavan?"
Before there was time to "say," Napier had received his two wounds, a shell-shattered foot and a damaged right wrist. He was sent home, and for six-and-thirty days lay chafing in a London hospital. The time hung horribly. Most of Napier's friends were in active service or dead; the rest were swamped in work. He'd have gone out of his mind, he said afterward, if it hadn't been for Tommy Durrant. Tommy, with his eye-glass and his pre-war elegance unimpaired, his alertness and sound sense increased by new responsibilities, was still behind the old scenes and in and out of the new as well. He had been "lent" to the Admiralty Intelligence Department. Tommy was full of the increasing difficulty in Anglo-American relations. One day he came in full of "a scheme we've just put through"—a scheme talked of with a careless air, but in a voice carefully modulated.
"That woman on the other side who used to be at the McIntyres'—came back as a Belgian nun after we'd deported her, you know—well, your friend in New York, Taylor, has traced a beastly lot of trouble to her and her gang. For months Taylor's kept telling our people over here it was childish to go straining every nerve to keep the American balance from tipping the wrong way, pouring out money, losing prestige, above all, losing time, while we leave people like Schwarzenberg and her nest of adders to breed their poison—"
"What can we do?" Napier interrupted, hopeless of the answer.
"Get her out of that."
"Out of America?"
Tommy nodded with such vigor his eye-glass fell out.
"I admit it'll be damned difficult, but Singleton," he said, replacing the monocle firmly once more—"Singleton thinks he's found the way." Then, in the deepest confidence, Tommy told Napier about an ex-German spy, one Ernst Pforzheim, who'd had relations with the Schwarzenberg woman. "He'd done a lot of useful work in America as well as here, but Singleton had got our people to tell him they weren't satisfied. There was really only one thing they wanted of Pforzheim, and he hadn't done it. He'd already told the chief there were special reasons why he, Pforzheim, of all people in the world, shouldn't touch this Schwarzenberg business. The chief couldn't see it.
"'But I'mdead!" wails Pforzheim.
"'You've got to come alive,' the chief grinned. But you never in your life saw a man as depressed as that German when he heard he was somehow or other to find a way to rid us of Schwarzenberg.
"'To rid you of her?' he says, his eyes bulging. 'She's a deal more likely to rid you of me.'
"The chief looked as if he could bear that, but he said all he insisted on was that she should be got out of America. No power under heaven, Pforzheim told him, would tempt Schwarzenberg to leave America.
"'You set me an impossible task!' he wept.
"'It's the condition,' says the chief.
"'It's my death-sentence,' says Pforzheim. That was how he went off."
For the next three weeks, whenever Tommy appeared, Napier would ask, as though Ernst Pforzheim, too, were in hospital, how that person was "getting on."
Though Tommy was forever full of other news, all that he was able to produce relating to the luckless Ernst was that he'd disappeared.
Napier hadn't succeeded in getting his letters forwarded from France in those terrible days. After four weeks in hospital he cabled Julian what had happened and that he was getting on all right. A fortnight later, the day of Napier's discharge, came a telegram from New York.
Returning with Nan to-morrow.S. S. Leyden.Julian.
Returning with Nan to-morrow.S. S. Leyden.
Julian.
Not altogether by the ways that would have seemed most direct, not solely through the principals concerned, did Napier come by his most intimate knowledge of what happened on that voyage, which was for many to be the last. From his long familiarity with the way Julian "took things"; from familiarity, not long, but lit by the lamp of passion, with the natural turns and reactions of Nan Ellis, Napier filled in the outlines of the widely published and privately rehearsed story, until to him, the lover on shore, the experiences of that voyage wore an actuality denied to many of those who in their own persons lived out the awful hours. As it accumulated, this knowledge of Napier's came to be of that completer type that some of us cherish concerning matters in which our sharing has been of the kind invisible. We were not "there" in any ordinary sense. Yet indubitably we are more intensely there, in that we are not blinded by panic or numbed by the mental or the bodily blow. We, aloof in the conning-towers of love, are spared no sight, no pang. We look down with every natural sense sharpened; with some perceptions, called as yet supernatural, giving voices to the silence and to the darkness vision. But apart from these less generally recognized avenues of information, there were the great outstanding facts which filled the papers of two hemispheres.
The first six days of theLeyden'svoyage were, from the steamship company's point of view, wholly uneventful. Mr. Julian Grant had come on board obviously far from well. The reporters who interviewed him just before he sailed remarked upon the fact. Hallett Newcomb, a middle-aged Englishman of letters, returning home upon conclusion of an extended lecture tour, who had some pre-war acquaintance with Mr. Grant and yet more with Gavan Napier, had been struck at once by the change. Julian Grant's litheness had become fragility, almost emaciation. He walked with the old briskness, but as under a load. Those little lines slanting away from each side of the mustache should have taken the antique pencil another ten years to grave. Grant hadn't yet given his life in the Great War, but of a surety he had given his youth. It was gone forever. In those bright Indian-summer days that followed he would lie bundled up in his deck-chair while hour after hour, in that low, comforting voice, the girl who was his traveling companion read to him. The passengers commented on a supposed likeness between the two, though there was little in it beyond a common delicacy of feature and identity of coloring. People on theLeyden, according to Newcomb, took the pair at first for brother and sister. Anyway, she treated him like a brother, a younger brother who was to be soothed and cared for.
The matter in those books and papers that Mr. Grant seemed never to have enough of was not such stuff as would have soothed the British censor. However, it stirred to enthusiasm the frequent visitor to that sheltered nook on the deck—Miss Genevieve Sherman, as the forged passport gave out Miss Ellis's fascinating black-haired friend. To the fact that Miss Ellis didn't seem to know the lady was her friend, Mr. Hallett Newcomb was an unwilling witness. He had chanced to see the younger woman making her escape from the other on deck, only to be trapped in the cul-de-sac corridor at the bottom of which was Newcomb's cabin. Behind the half-hooked-back door he was looking through his papers for a registered cable address. The tête-à-tête outside began so quietly that he had for those first moments no sense of hearing anything private.
"So you didn't expect to see me," said Miss Genevieve Sherman whom the girl called Greta.
"How in the world could I expect such a thing?"
"Why not?"
"Why not! For the reason that sends my heart into my mouth when I realize only a little of"—the girl's voice hesitated—"of what you must know far more. The risk, Greta, the awful risk!"
"It's dear of you"—the heavier voice was caressing—"dearof you to keep thinking of that. And you're a clever child to have spotted me at once."
"Clever? I've seen you as so many people by now, I think I've got down at last to the things you can't change." The weight of sadness in the words brought out one of the woman's challenging laughs.
"I gather that what you think the essential me doesn't make you very gay, dear child."
The dear child said nothing.
"You shouldn't be surprised to see me here, running some risk it's useless to deny; but after the way we parted, what else could you expect?"
"Greta, you haven't come because of—not really because of me?"
"You've never realized," said the appealing voice, "what you were to me."
There was a longer pause and then, half choked, two little sentences fell out: "It all seems no good any more. I shall never feel the same."
"Not thesame, perhaps. You may feel something better, closer. Anyhow, I couldn't let you go away, to the other side of the world without—Why, Nan you didn't even answer my letters!"
"I couldn't."
"Couldn't?"
"There wasn't any more to say."
"That's where you're wrong. Thereismore to say. And that's one reason why I'm here—"
Newcomb slammed down the top of his portmanteau and rattled his keys.
Any ill success she may have had with the girl did not prevent Miss Greta from seizing every opportunity to work on the sympathies of the gentleman, above all, to ally herself with his international ideals. "You and I" was a phrase which Newcomb often caught as he strolled by; "from our point of view," was another. One of the impressions that was to remain longest, because so often renewed during the week at sea, was the group of which Grant remained the center; he lying spent, in his chair; Miss Ellis in another, finger in book and eyes lowered; while on the other side of him sat Miss Greta, suave, smiling, talking to Mr. Grant, but turning ingratiatingly every now and then to the girl, only to be met by that refusal of the eyes even more marked than the blankness of her silence.
Miss Greta did not continue to take this irresponsiveness well. Behind the continued and tireless effort her mood hardened, her resentment grew.
Newcomb could see that much, though she pretended with some success to make up for any disappointment, and more than make up, by turning the head of a lanky American youth.
The source of Mr. Craig Ashmole's attraction baffled Newcomb till he found out the young man's business: Mr. Ashmole was on his way to England to fill a telegraphy post. Two days out from New York one of theLeyden'swireless operators had taken to his bed; Mr. Ashmole was now installed as deputy assistant. The carroty and myopic youth was not above twenty-three and very keen about his job. He knew it well in its scientific, if not in its political, aspect; and he knew women not at all. Miss Greta's amused effort to fill up this hiatus in his education afforded no less amusement to certain lookers-on at the little comedy, as they thought it.
This was not the view of the one or two who knew the persistent fight made by the lady, that first day out, for the privilege of receiving wireless messages. Under the new rule no one had access to outside news except specially privileged official persons. It was doubtful if the rule held good after Miss Greta had publicly flouted more personable men in favor of the deputy-assistant operator. At carefully chosen times and, for the most part, in out-of-the-way corners she flirted outrageously with the absurd Ashmole. She dazed him, she dazzled him, she rattled him, she pumped him. She raised him to heaven, she reduced him to despair. She comforted him till he saw stars on the blackest night.
It was Saturday, and they had been six days at sea. But for the fact that the captain had gone ninety miles out of his course for some good reason of his own, they might, before the light of that day failed, have been sighting the round towers on the Irish coast.
The usual restlessness of the last hours of a voyage, when people alternately pack and write letters, or pack and feverishly cement new friendships and pack, was augmented by the fact of each passenger finding in his cabin late that afternoon a card on which appeared the sinister legend, "In case of need your boat is—" and a number followed. The very calmness of the information, its manner of conveyance, increased the eeriness of the warning.
Was it the lifeboat-card which those two, Grant and Miss Ellis, were discussing with that absorbed intensity?
When Newcomb had finished his four miles with the second officer and the congressman from Vermont, he came to a stop by Grant's corner in time to hear the girl break into the middle of something he was saying and urge Grant to go below. He was to try to sleep off his headache; anyway, "make up a little for loss of rest before—before—" she stumbled and looked away an instant. A world of trouble was in the face she turned again to watch the slight figure go swaying down the deck and catch at the jamb of the door to steady himself an instant before he disappeared into the companionway. He had left a book open on his rug. On the deck, all around his chair, lay the modern exemplars of that literature of peace which seems, like the old, to bring the sword.
Newcomb's eye roved once again over titles in English and German, and from the scattered incrimination he looked at the face of the girl.
"I seem to have noticed that these sentiments don't stir you to much enthusiasm."
"They are worthy of enthusiasm," she answered, as though parrying an attack on Julian behind his back.
"Why do you make phrases?" Newcomb demanded.
"I don't." Whether her quickened look sprang from a pricked conscience Newcomb couldn't be sure. "Well,aren'tthey full"—her eyes swept the litter of books and papers—"fullof fine and splendid things? You know they are. Only—"
"Only?"
She drew herself up, and the tight-pressed lips parted to say: "However much we believe them, if the house was on fire, we couldn't think about these things. The houseison fire. I can't think about—anything except saving the house and the people who are being burnt."
"Doesn't Mr. Grant tell you that those are exactlyhisaims—'to save the house' and 'to save the people'?"
"Yes," she owned sadly; "he thinks about saving everything except himself." She stopped abruptly, frightened at having made an admission which may have implied much or little. She studied Newcomb a moment with a gaze that made him long to say: "Yes, believe in me. Why shouldn't you?"
Whether the silent monition reached her, certainly her next words showed no agitation, rather, a queer, poised sagacity.
"What I sit here thinking," she went on, "is that maybe a stupid fireman, even a bad, lying fireman, could 'save the house' where Julian—Julian would only be burnt to death with the rest."
As though acting on sudden impulse, Newcomb brought out the question he had been longing to put all these days.
"Do you mind my asking you why are you leaving home at a time when traveling is, to say the least—" In the pause he said to himself: She won't trust me. Why should she—except for the difference it had seemed to make to her when she learned that he was a friend not only of Grant's, but of Gavan Napier's. In the first days they had talked about Napier.
"I've come," she said after a moment—"I've come because, do what I would, I couldn't prevent Mr. Grant's coming."
"I see. You wouldn't be on this ship if Mr. Grant weren't."
She hesitated again.
"You can see how ill he is, and his coming to America and getting deeper into—all this, holding those meetings and being so attacked about them at home, that's my doing."
"Yourdoing!" said Newcomb, giving astonishment the rein.
"Yes. If I hadn't written to him—the things I did write, he wouldn't have come to America."
"What things?"
"I can't tell anybody that. But it's because I didn't do something I'd promised, that's why Julian's here. Since there are things Ican'tdo, it's my business to do what I can." Very wisely Newcomb sat silent; she, too, as long as she could bear it. "I've told you this,—you see how private it is,—but I've told you because—" Her voice clouded. She turned away her head.
"Isn't it because you realize that I'd like to be of some use if I could?"
"Would you—couldyou help about him—about Mr. Grant?"
Newcomb's moment of silence unnerved her.
"Oh, if youknewhow we all tried to keep him in America!"
"Wouldn't he have stayed," Newcomb dared to ask, "if you had stayed?"
"No! no! Oh, you don't understand Julian. He has a duty—to the other men at home and to the country. He thinks he can help; you've heard him. 'While some men, who see it that way, are fighting for liberty abroad, it's laid on others to fight for liberty at home.' I could almost be glad he is so ill if only we had landed and I could get him home to Scotland! I didn't know whether you might, perhaps, be willing to help me to do that."
"Willing? I would indeed be willing. The question is: my power, anybody's power."
She bent forward, but the breath that should have gone in words she held an instant. And then very low the syllables fell out: "What will they do—when we land?"
"What will they do?"
"Yes, to Julian."
"I don't know."
"You haven't the least idea? Well, Julian has. He's been telling me, preparing me this afternoon."
"What has he been telling you?"
"That—these—these are his last hours as a free man." She dropped the ghost of a sob into the silence, and her head went down into her hands. It was only for a second. She sat erect again. "What he's been saying in America is enough, he thinks. Doyouthink that's enough to put a very noble person in prison in free England?"
Newcomb hadn't often wanted more to do anything than he wanted now to reassure her. It should be accounted to him for righteousness that he said: "I don't know."
At dinner that last night, the place of the wireless youth was vacant. So was the place of the Dutch official next Lady Neave, whom they called Lady Gieve, because during the first days she had worn her jacket of that name, deflated, but evident, all day and, according to report, all night. Half-way across the Atlantic she had been smiled out of her fears to the extent of carrying the life-preserver over her arm.
Miss Ellis was the only person who took no part in discussing the rumor which ran about the ship of a wireless message said to have been received by the Dutch official. His bedroom steward, also Dutch, had seen the message—"A great battle and a German defeat."
The news accounted beyond doubt for the increased noisiness in the dining saloon. From the table behind Newcomb rose excited accents, "Es ist unglaüblich!"
Newcomb turned, and caught Miss Ellis's eye. He had changed his place to the empty one beside her after hearing that Mr. Grant wasn't coming down—"a headache."
"The wireleless leakage seems to have let loose a fair amount offuror Teutonicus," he said.
She nodded; plainly she had heard the news. But she didn't want to discuss it at a board where old Professor Mohrenheim and his gentle, kindly wife occupied their places, as polite as ever, but restrained and preoccupied to-night. Voices from the all-German table rose louder.
It was known that on the last voyage excitement over some war news, published in the customary small weekly, had led to a riot. Certain offended patriots, among both Germans and their opponents, had been brought to port in irons. This was the first crossing during which no newspaper had been issued, and no wireless telegrams had appeared on the notice-board. The wisdom of these measures was abundantly proved. The mere breath of rumor had transformed the ship's company. Allies put their heads together and exulted. Neutrals argued more or less openly, betraying in every word the impossibility of neutrality. The old German couple at the end of Nan's table sat marooned. They glanced now and then, wistfully, at the all-German table next them. The sound of their tongue rumbled and clashed above the jar of crockery and service metal.
"Isn't it strange,"—Nan leaned to Newcomb as she lowered her voice,—"when Iusedto hear German, I'd think about music and poetry and beautiful words likeWaldesduft—"
"And what do you think about now—words like Belgium?"
"That isn't fair," she said quietly. "All war is awful."
"But I'd like to know what you do think about, then, instead of music andWaldesduft."
"No."
He urged her. "Please!"
"I couldn't, not at the same table where that dear old couple sit," she said quickly and glanced down the long table at the Mohrenheims.
"Tell me upstairs?"
She shook her head.
"I don't think I shall even upstairs. If, as I believe, the worst stories aren't true, it's wrong to repeat them."
"Why is it wrong to tell me and let me judge if I am to believe?"
But she wouldn't. "To repeat them gives them a false trueness," she said in that careful undertone. "Oh, I can't explain; but just to put them into words seems to spread a poison."
"You can't trust me to distinguish, to help you to distinguish?"
Again she shook her head. "What I have to think is, if some people, mistaken people, believed such things about us Americans, what would I say if I were asked whether I thought it a good thing that the false stories against us should be repeated? To make horrible pictures in people's brains; and, if the brains are weak, to turn them."
"I am sorry my brains inspire you with such distrust."
"Perhaps it's my own I'm shaky about. But I don't believe any brain can keep steady under some stories. No; mustn't think about them."
"She gets that from Grant," Newcomb decided. He looked across the table. Next the captain's empty place, sat the only person in the saloon unmoved, you would say, by the news—a British naval officer, grave, monosyllabic, and showing just that same face throughout the voyage. Not so much as a hint about his errand to the States and little enough about anything else. Until the fourth night out he had slept or dozed over a book. The only five minutes during which he had appeared really awake had been when some one in the smoking-room repeated Julian Grant's asseveration that the German atrocity stories were "faked." "Every nation tells of its enemy. Only the ignorant and unthinking are taken in."
It was then that the officer dozing in the corner lifted that face of his, with its hard, fine outline like a profile on an old coin, and came to life. The indifference cleared out of his eyes as low-hung, slumbering smoke will clear before the blast.
"If to be taken in by 'faked' stories wasallthat the innocent had to fear!" In cold accents he told about a Belgian girl. Daughter of an officer in the Belgian Army, a man he knew. When the Germans took Antwerp she was carried off. Fell into the hands of a U-boat captain. When he'd done with her, handed her over to his crew. She didn't die quickly enough. They threw her overboard. "An officer's daughter!" he repeated, as though that were the culminating point of the horror.
Some one repeated the story to Julian. His anger was a thing no one would forget.Believeit? Such stories were told for a purpose. It was "the kind of poison that infects people's wits and loses them their souls. Makes brute beasts out of humans. There are minds that batten on such lies. They get decent people to listen in the fevered, abnormal state all nerves are in nowadays. Foulness that would be choked back down their obscene throats at other times, it's listened to like some message out of Sinai or Olympus. I tell you the German U-boat captains are as good men as ever the hag War breeds. Theymustbe men of character. You daren't give a job like that to a drunken, rotten roué."
Here was Miss Greta at last, never so late before and never so resplendent. Silver sequins and black lace for that last night.
"I'm glad"—she spoke to a lady across the table—"glad to see you've emancipated yourself."
"Emancipated—how?" Lady Neave asked.
"You've broken the tyranny of the Gieve jacket."
"Don't tell me I've—" Lady Neave turned to look at the back of her chair—"yes, gone and forgotten it!" She moved outward on her swiveled seat.
"No! no!" The congressman from Vermont protested there was no need to prepare for anything so grotesque, so melodramatic, as a cold-blooded attempt to sink this poor old tub.
Miss Greta held high her braid-crowned head. "This innocent old tub," she said, "has carried thousands of tons of ammunition; but," she added relentingly, "I don't think Lady Gieve—oh, forgive me! I mean Lady Neave," she bent gracious brows upon her opposite neighbor,—"Iquiteagree you won't need your packet on this voyage."
No one answered. In the midst of a general animation, the silence that reigned again around Greta spoke loud. She stared about her.
"What has become of the hors d'œuvres?" she demanded. The Dutch steward could not have helped hearing. He went on serving the others. Again she spoke to him, more sharply still.
"Alvays it ees somet'ing! From de fir-rst you come on board," he muttered incoherently.
She turned round in her seat.
"What?Whatdo you say?"
"Vhat I say? You need not be down on me because Zhermany is beat."
Miss Greta stared.
"Germany beaten! You must be mad."
The steward's face had grown red; his anger was mounting still.
"I get it straight," he said. "Dere vas a great battle. De English and French have beat de Zhermans."
"It is a lie!"
"How do you know that?" asked the calm voice of Newcomb at Greta's side.
"How does one know anything? You wouldn't expect me to consider the possibility of such a thing just because"—her contempt followed the steward for those first yards of his progress toward the side table—"becausethatsort of creature says so?" She looked round for understanding. Something in the averted eyes of the company nettled her. "He says it,armer Wurm," she went on with her head high, "from the same motives that make others long to believe it. Jealousy."
"Do we understand you to say," Newcomb asked, "that you wouldn't believe news, however authentic, of a German defeat?"
"Therecouldn'tbe authentic news of a German defeat. If it came from some one I knew and trusted, if all the people I know and trust combined to say there had been a German defeat, I should know they were wrong."
While she waited for the hors d'œuvres, her handsome shoulders thrown back, her chin high, she pronounced a pæan to Kultur cum militarism. Newcomb construed it as a letting off pent-up steam, a vent for anger against Miss Ellis and against the gathering cloud of enemies. But it was also something more. It had in it an element of fanaticism, mixed with balked passion for force. A reckless joy in the doctrine of stick-at-nothing to serve the end. With such an accent we have heard some one very old, or very young and weak saying, "Webombed them out of the wood," or, "Wetook Hill 60." It is a singular thing in psychology and yet to be explored, this passion on the part of the physically weaker for those very brute forces in the universe which, but for their opposites, would be the sure undoing of all but the physically strongest, and, in the end, of them as well.
In the midst of her hymn to pro-Teutonism, Ashmole came in, looking more idiotic than usual, staring about out of his big glasses as though he couldn't recognize the table.
"Here we are," Miss Greta hailed him.
The youth paused by her chair an instant and mumbled something unintelligible, his eyes goggling as they swept the saloon.
"They told me the captain was down here."
Greta took hold of Ashmole's arm and tried in vain to pull him into the vacant place. He stood there lost while she whispered. Suddenly he bent and whispered back. They had done too much whispering in these last days for that to strike any one as specially strange. What struck Newcomb was the effect on Miss Greta of whatever it was Ashmole had said.
On the face that had met with brazen defiance the news of a German defeat, was stamped something more than consternation. Ashmole's own nerves were not so shaken, but he saw that.
"It's all right," he said in the act of turning from her; "they won't get us. The lights are all out."
"Lights out, you say!" Greta had risen.
"Every port covered," Ashmole muttered over his shoulder.
"Fools! They must put the lights on. Do you hear? Instantly!" She clutched her chair back. "Thisisn't the boat they want—"
Nan had risen, too. But that was because she saw Julian at the door of the saloon. Without a word he held up his hand. Equally without sound, she slipped away from the table and went toward the waiting figure. As she reached the door, a dull sound came, with a long shuddering. It passed through the ship from end to end. Instead of the echo of that detonation setting the whole place instantly in motion, it had the effect of stilling for those first seconds such motion as had been. Several hundred tongues ceased wagging. Forks and spoons remained, arrested, half-way to people's mouths. The waiters stood, dish-covers in their hands, or bottles lifted to fill glass. The very engines slowed to listen.
Even after the general movement began in the saloon, it was quiet movement and curiously undramatic; no crying out, no mad rush for the deck.
Some people looked about as if for information. Others tried to smile.
"It's come," said the congressman.
"What—whathas come?" demanded Lady Neave through the rising hum.
Out of all the growing murmur and movement Newcomb heard Greta's tense whisper: "That—a torpedo?"
The captain's order traveled with a superhuman quickness:
"Life-belts first! Women and children to the boats!"
"Plenty of time for everybody to get a life-belt," was another form that ran from mouth to mouth. Whether that insistence calmed the people, certainly it was a strangely well-behaved company that made its way, in spite of the ship's increasing list to starboard, along corridors and up companionways. Scarcely a breach in the general self-control till, on the lifeboat-deck, parties were broken up, and all men told to stand back. Though the great majority accepted the order in silence, it broke the courage of some among the women. Certain men tried persuasion. There were dumb partings; there was agonized resistance. Two or three evidently meant to stand out to the bitter end against being saved, or lost, apart from their men-folk. For a minute the morale of the crowd was in grave danger. A young wife's recurrent sob: "I can't! I can't!" rose to wildness with, "They'll have to kill me first!"
Newcomb, looking vainly about for Nan Ellis, saw a different face. Oh, yes, it belonged to that voice he had been hearing under all the rest, patient, gentle, tireless—the voice saying now in its foreign-sounding English "It is for your husband's safety that you go first." More than the words, the motherly kindness on the blunt-featured face of the old German lady, prevailed upon the distracted girl. She let go her husband's arm and clung to Mrs. Mohrenheim.
Newcomb saw now that it was Mrs. Mohrenheim who was helping the ship's officers to marshal and send forward the women and children to those who had charge of the boats. It looked as if the task would have been too much for the officers but for Mrs. Mohrenheim. An extraordinary vigor, an exalted persuasiveness, had transformed the heavy figure and the homely face. Something she had given no hint of during the voyage came out of hiding and "took charge."
In spite of the increased listing of the ship, through all his own excitement and personal fear, which Newcomb afterwards confessed, his habit of mechanical mental registry kept him vividly aware of what went on within his range.
Already, while Mrs. Mohrenheim was still dealing with that first and most unwilling of the young wives, Newcomb had seen Miss Greta pass. It hadn't taken her long to fling on a serge skirt and her fur-lined ulster. Above the life-belt fastened round her bulky figure was a brown canvas ruck-sack hoisted high against her shoulder-blades. She was fastening the buckles as she hastened toward her appointed boat, put a little out of her stride by the ever-stronger list to starboard. All the same, Miss Greta, beyond a doubt, would be among the first, Newcomb told himself, to take her appointed place, and hers would be the first boat launched.
"You will carry the child for this lady?"
Mrs. Mohrenheim had thrust a baby into Newcomb's arms.
"They say it's this way—this way!" The baby's mother, holding a little boy by the hand, hurried the child and Newcomb up the deck. The barrier of officers, stewards, and crew opened to let them through.
Yes, Miss Greta was already in the boat. The woman with the little boy was helped in, and Newcomb handed over the baby. The men at the pulleys began to lower the boat. Miss Greta was calmly tying a motor-veil round her cap.
Up on the bridge the captain, against a star-strewn sky, calling down orders, gave an impression of such tragic and awful loneliness that Newcomb was aware of a relief at seeing him joined by another figure. The two stood speaking while you might count seven or eight; then the captain pulled off his coat and exchanged with the captain of the watch. The captain of the watch came running down, putting on his chief's coat. He took charge of the next boat that was being lowered. That was the boat that tilted and hung for some seconds over the water at an angle of forty-five degrees. The angle increased to the perpendicular, and the boat whirled round, dropping the people into the oily water. The calm night air struck icily on Newcomb's sweat-beaded forehead. A horror of violent death had pierced the numbness that followed on his first panic. On the way back to the diminishing crowd of women he peered into men's faces.
"Do they realize?" he kept repeating to himself.
"Where were you when it struck us?" he heard some one ask an officer.
"Chart-room," was the curt reply.
Another voice as Newcomb passed said: "Not the periscope; but I saw the shark-fin wake of the torpedo."
Newcomb walked with difficulty, like a drunken man; it was this damned list. The most violent tossing in a hurricane was preferable. You'd have the plunging dive and recovery, which had something gallant in it, almost playful, like a giant gamboling. But this persistent violation of equilibrium got on a man's nerve.
"The lights have gone out on the starboard side," some one said.
Newcomb pulled out his watch. Stopped! He held it to his ear. No, it was going. And all this had happened in those few beggarly moments!
"What's that yelling about?" he asked irritably of a couple of men who, half-doubled, came up the slant by the wireless-room passage.
"Boat on the other side—smashed like an egg-shell against the hull."
People were drowning on both sides of the sinking ship.
"It's often safest on board," someone said.
"Yes; you stick to the ship."
There was now a dense crowd of men round the companionway. All but a handful of women had been distributed to the boats, but the handful kept on being renewed. Newcomb saw why. Grant and Miss Ellis, among others, were bringing up the people who remained over, in the second and third class. And among these huddled groups still the squat figure and the beautiful-ugly face of old Mrs. Mohrenheim moved, consoling, heartening.
"Yes, he will come after," she said. "Surely you will think about your children." More than once she had taken her text from a bystander's face. "Look at him, poor man! He can save himself if he has not you to think about. You would not risk his life? No, no.Komm, then,komm." The woman was passed along.
The mere getting to the boats was a trial of courage. Newcomb himself had no love of the horrible chute that now pitched sharply down to that dark, oily glitter that was the sea, but he offered to convoy the late-comers wherever a boat might be.
"No, you two." Mrs. Mohrenheim summoned Grant and Nan Ellis. Slowly they made their way forward with the little group of clinging children and bewildered women. Some crawled on hands and knees up the steep acclivity to where a boat swung from the davits. An officer passed the groups without stopping. He came hurrying, sliding, half squatting, with one leg stretched slanting down, the other crooked up, with the knee turned sharply out.
"You, now," he said to Mrs. Mohrenheim as he rose to his full height beside her.
"There are two ladies more." She pushed them forward.
The officer steadied them as they passed, and turned again to Mrs. Mohrenheim.
"You."
"There are those by the door; one is young." She turned unsteadily.
The officer clutched her. "I tell you,"—Newcomb barely caught the words—"it's now or never.There aren't boats enough!"
"I know," said Mrs. Mohrenheim.
She drew back and stretched out a hand to a muffled figure holding to a stanchion above where she stood. It was Professor Mohrenheim. Newcomb realized now that the figure had been there from the first.
"We have been together for forty years," the old woman said. "Too long to be parted now." Her husband bent down and took her hand. Now he had drawn her up beside him.
A man with bare feet and a blanket round him rushed on deck as word came, blown along from group to group, "The captain says every one for'ard, and each for himself."
Down by the bridge they were launching a collapsible raft.
The last Newcomb, or any one, saw of the Mohrenheims, they were standing together. They held to each other and to the stanchion.
Grant followed the girl down the swinging ladder to the raft.
Some one was crying:
"Get away! Pull out! For God's sake, get away!" Another, equally unrecognizable in the dimness, called out:
"She's going down! We'll be drawn in!"
As they pushed off, they saw the electric lights on theLeydengo out one by one.
Of the people on the raft more than one watched the death-throes of the ship with wet eyes, as though she were something sentient, human. Her angle of subsidence had changed sharply. The bow sank, leaving the stern nearly upright. Her mast was gone. For an instant her funnel lay along the water, and then with a dull roar as of the engines breaking loose and crashing down to the bottom, the rest of theLeydensank out of sight.
The end of the great ship had come with a horrible quietness, in contrast to the cries of men struggling for their lives in the wash among the wreckage.
The captain had gone down with the ship. When those in charge of the raft heard that some one had seen him jump clear, they sent up a rocket. By that addition to the starlight, for a few instants a single, half-empty lifeboat could be seen rocking violently on the swell. Several men were clinging to the gunwale. As raft and boat were swept nearer, the officer in charge of the raft raised a shout. He had recognized the captain climbing into the boat, and hauling up after him the limp body of one of his companions.
The captain's first care, when he came alongside, was to relieve the congestion on the raft. He ordered the chief engineer to transfer eight or ten. The chief engineer remembered his helpers. Grant and Newcomb were told off. Yes, the captain said, they must bring the only woman into the lifeboat.
When the transference had been effected, another rocket was sent up in order that the surviving boats might come together.
"Look!" The girl grasped Grant's arm.
The captain, too, turned his head.
"By God!" he said.
The submarine had risen and stood away to southward. So intent had the occupants of the lifeboat been to discover some sign of their companions that the discovery of themselves by the submarine flash came with a shock of surprise. In the light of that pale ray, which had picked them out of the darkness, they saw in that first moment no more than one another's faces—a memory to last them all their days.
"They're hailing us," the captain said with bitter mouth.
"Whois hailing us?" The idea of rescue was still in the forefront of his mind.
"Submarine."
How the captain knew, Newcomb had no idea. But certainly the insignificant, low-pitched shadow—obscure mother of the light-ray ... she was moving! And she was moving in the direction of theLeyden'sgrave.
A voice came from her at last, uttering not the German they thought to hear, but words yet more unfamiliar.
"He says," interrupted the Dutch captain, "we're to come 'longside."
"Shall we?" The chief engineer still could conceive orders as coming only from the autocrat of the ship at the bottom of the sea.
"No choice." The captain's voice sank lower on an oath. He leaned forward, and conferred with the men at the bow. Newcomb had noticed that the captain still wore the coat of the captain of the watch, and he saw now that when the grizzled head that had been bent in conference with the engineer, was lifted, it wore a landsman's cap—a checked deerstalker.
Clearly the engineer had been placed in command of this little expedition over the intervening blackness to learn their fate—a blackness that seemed to open to the long ray of the flash-light. To the unnautical mind, the shortened ray seemed to draw the lifeboat in and in, till the conning-tower stood clear to the straining eye; in and in, till to the right of the main origin of light dim figures took shape; in and in, till just before the oarsmen had brought the lifeboat alongside the shelving body, topped with its low deck, suddenly the light ray was extinguished. Lifeboat and submarine swung an instant in an equal blackness. Out of it a voice, again in those strange accents. No answer till an English tongue spoke from the lifeboat, "We can understand a little German."
And then, just as eyes were beginning to grow accustomed to the dark, which, after all, was darkness only by comparison, the compact figure standing out on the conning-tower against the star-sown sky turned on the light of an electric torch he held in his hand. He trailed the sudden radiance along the lifeboat, raking her fore and aft. The light lingered an instant at the stern. But the question he asked was: "Name of your ship?"
He was told.
"Dutch?"
Holland-American, she was.
"Tonnage?"
"That was given, too."
"Are you the captain?"
"No. Chief Engineer Van Zandt."
An order was issued in German, and the interrogatory went on:
"Whereisthe captain?"
"Hard to say," some one answered gruffly.
"He's where a British captain can usually be found," said another.
"In these days that 'usually' means at the bottom," retorted the commander of the submarine. "Have you got any papers?"
"Papers?"
"Yes, yes,Dummheit; where are the ship's papers?"
"We'd better ask you," retorted a voice at the stern.
"You'd better keep the tongue civil!" came sharply back, with the first betrayal of flaw in the perfect English.
Two figures coming up on the conning-tower brought with them the diffused light of some open hatchway as they took their stand behind the commander. He showed clearly now, a firm, square-built presence, a beardless round face above the muffler. He said something over his shoulder, and one of the two men just come up, stepped briskly to the commander's side. During those few seconds it seemed mere chance that the torch still lit up the stern of the lifeboat—lit the small, white face with its parted lips and shining eyes, a face so destitute of fear, so charged with sheer burning curiosity, that any sane person might be forgiven for staring hard at what could only be a crass incapacity on a girl's part to comprehend the situation.
"How many boats did you launch?" the brusk voice went on with the catechism.
The engineer decided to say eight.
"That all? Why didn't you launch more?"
"No time."
"Notime! That shows you're lying." He turned again and conferred with the little group behind him.
"Ja, ja—auch meine Meinung." He wheeled round. "All right," he called out; "shove off!"
Nobody in the lifeboat moved.
Grant's voice was heard for the first time after the second of stark silence:
"What are you going to do with the people in this boat?"
"Finished with you. Shove off!"
That loosed tongues. The boat was full of angry voices. Grant's alone, steady, quiet, but heard above them all, said:
"It's a mistake, then?—Wait a moment!"—he rose and steadied himself in the gentle swell—"I say!—it's a mistake, then, that we're a hundred miles from land?"
"Not much mistake aboutthat," the voice came back.
"Are we to wait while you overhaul the other boats?"
"Why should you wait?"
"You mean to round the others up and give us a tow?"
"Oh, do I?"
Again the commander repeated that action of his, tilting the torch so as to show up the pale oval with the eager eyes.
Newcomb readily owned afterward that the sharp collision of emotions in those minutes during the interview put out of the question any sober thinking or coördination of impressions. All that came later. But in the flux of feeling he knew even at the time that his peculiar loathing of the man wasn't altogether due to the devilish work he had finished, or fear of what was yet to come. Even in the thick of shifting dreads and hates Newcomb knew that moment by moment, ever since the colloquy began in the background of his torn mind, a consciousness was shaping which told him that this man would have cut the parting shorter but for some special stimulation of his contemptuous interest in the lifeboat. And to what could such stimulation be due but to the spectacle (Newcomb admitted its crowning strangeness) of the way in which one person in the boat was taking what most would count a catastrophe to shake the soul.
Did the fact of the absence of hatred in the face of the only woman in the boat account for the something which Newcomb had little expected to find in a German U-boat captain—that slight tendency to attitudinize in the midst of his grim business, to assume the "gallant commander" air, as no man does in exactly the same way for his fellowmen. This ghastly suggestion of flirtatiousness, following hard as it did on the heels of murder, and making its obscure demand over the very grave of the sunken ship, stirred Newcomb to a pitch of fury hardly sane. And how the thought flashed through him—how was Grant taking this girl's mockery of him, mockery of all her protectors, of decency itself? And behold Grant was "taking it"—this thing done on the floor of ocean—as a man may whose head is among the stars. Poor devil! he didn't even see it, didn't even sense what the commander's insolent use of the torch showed in that circumscribed field of intense light—the girl's eyes still wide and curious.
Instead of natural loathing, of every form of moral condemnation, she was staring at the submarine commander with breathless interest, with an eagerness that might flatter any man alive.
Grant had made his way down the lifeboat, holding to this one's shoulder, steadying himself by that one's arm, his face drawn with anxiety, but for all that a figure of hope, of conciliation.
"I say," he called out, "we haven't got any provisions in this boat, and we're—you know how far we are from land."
"Bad management," commented the German, his eyes slipping past Grant again to the face at the stern.
"Even if it is bad management, you're not going to abandon eighteen fellow-beings in an open boat in mid-Atlantic, notcivilians, to die of starvation?"
That didn't seem to deserve an answer.
"Who's in charge of your boat?" was the curt demand.
Grant hesitated.
"I am," answered Van Zandt.
"Well, don't you know how to shove off when you're told to?"
"Stop!" Julian flung up an arm. "It's an impossible barbarity! Look!" He swung round. "You haven't seen—there's a lady in the boat!"
"Oh, is there?" The flash of white teeth showed in that diffused light spreading upward from the hatch. "The lady has only herself to blame."
"To blame? How is she to blame?"
"She disobeys the order."
"What order?" Grant couldn't yet see he had nothing to hope from the man. "Youcan'tabandon us," he hurried on, "not a woman, anyway, to the torture of slow starvation."
"I'm not sure that I can." The captain's hand had gone up as though to stroke the absent mustache. When the hand came down, it showed his teeth again as he half turned toward the men behind him.
At those words, "I'm not sure that I can," the reaction in the lifeboat was so great that, with the snapping of the tension, Grant had wavered dizzily, and Nan sprang up with a cry—a cry that Newcomb took for relief till he saw her gesture toward Julian Grant. But nearer hands laid hold on him as he called out in hoarse triumph, "What did I tell you fellows!" and fell into the place they made for him. The commander turned from some humorous interchange with his officers.
"Yes, it's a fact, I can't bring myself to abandon the lady." He took up that position again near the edge of the conning-tower. With heels together he made a sharp inclination from the hips. "I have a cabin below, not luxurious, but more comfortable than—" he broke off with a curt gesture. "I place it at the lady's disposal."