A VISIT TO A LADY
Turning to consider the never-stale fortunes of one of fate's bean
bags----
Mr. Billy Capper, ejected from the Hotel Splendide, took little umbrage
at such treatment; it was not an uncommon experience, and, besides, a
quiet triumph that would not be dampened by trifles filled his soul.
Cheerfully he pushed through the motley crowd on Waterport Street down
to the lower levels of the city by the Line Wall, where the roosts of
sailors and warrens of quondam adventurers off all the seven seas made
far more congenial atmosphere than that of the Splendide's hollow
pretense. He chose a hostelry more commensurate with his slender purse
than Almer's, though as a matter of fact the question of paying a hotel
bill was furthest from Billy Capper's thoughts; such formal
transactions he avoided whenever feasible. The proprietor of the San
Roc, where Capper took a room, had such an evil eye that his new guest
made a mental note that perhaps he might have to leave his bag behind
when he decamped. Capper abhorred violence--to his own person.
Alone over a glass of thin wine--the champagne days, alas! had been too
fleeting--Capper took stock of his situation and conned the
developments he hoped to be the instrument for starting. To begin
with, finances were wretchedly bad, and that was a circumstance so near
the ordinary for Capper that he shuddered as he pulled a gold guinea
and a few silver bits from his pocket, and mechanically counted them
over. Of the three hundred marks Louisa--pretty snake!--had given him
in the Café Riche and the expense money he had received from her the
following day to cover his expedition to Alexandria for the
Wilhelmstrasse naught but this paltry residue! That second-cabin
ticket on the _Princess Mary_ had taken the last big bite from his
hoard, and here he was in this black-and-tan town with a quid and
little more between himself and the old starved-dog life.
But--and Capper narrowed his eyes and sagely wagged his head--there'd
be something fat coming. When he got knee to knee with the
governor-general of the Rock, and told him what he, Billy Capper, knew
about the identity of Captain Woodhouse, newly transferred to the
signal service at Gibraltar, why, if there wasn't a cool fifty pounds
or a matter of that as honorarium from a generous government Billy
Capper had missed his guess; that's all.
"I say, Governor, of course this is very handsome of you, but I didn't
come to tell what I know for gold. I'm a loyal Englishman, and I've
done what I have for the good of the old flag."
"Quite right, Mr. Capper; quite right. But you will please accept this
little gift as an inadequate recognition of your loyalty. Your name
shall be mentioned in my despatches home."
Capper rehearsed this hypothetical dialogue with relish. He could even
catch the involuntary gasp of astonishment from the governor when that
responsible officer in his majesty's service heard the words Capper
would whisper to him; could see the commander of the Rock open a drawer
in his desk and take therefrom a thick white sheaf of bank-notes--count
them! Then--ah, then--the first train for Paris and the delights of
Paris at war-time prices.
The little spy anticipated no difficulty in gaining audience with the
governor. Before he had been fifteen minutes off the _Princess Mary_
he had heard the name of the present incumbent of Government House.
Crandall--Sir George Crandall; the same who had been in command of the
forts at Rangoon back in '99. Oh, yes, Capper knew him, and he made no
doubt that, if properly reminded of a certain bit of work Billy Capper
had done back in the Burmese city, Sir George would recall him--and
with every reason for gratefulness. To-morrow--yes, before ever Sir
George had had his morning's peg, Capper would present himself at
Government House and tell about that house on Queen's Terrace at
Ramleh; about the unconscious British officer who was carried there and
hurried thence by night, and the tall well-knit man in conference with
Doctor Koch who was now come to be a part of the garrison of the Rock
under the stolen name of Woodhouse.
Capper had his dinner, then strolled around the town to see the sights
and hear what he could hear. Listening was a passion with him.
For the color and the exotic savor of Gibraltar on a hot August night
Capper had no eye. The knife edge of a moon slicing the battlements of
the old Moorish Castle up on the heights; the minor tinkle of a guitar
sounding from a vine-curtained balcony; a Riffian muleteer's singsong
review of his fractious beast's degraded ancestry--not for these
incidentals did the practical mind under the battered Capper bowler
have room. Rather the scraps of information and gossip passed from one
blue-coated artilleryman off duty, to another over a mug of ale, or the
confidence of a sloe-eyed dancer to the guitar player in a tavern; this
was meat for Capper. Carefully he husbanded his gold piece, and
judiciously he spent his silver for drink. He enjoyed himself in the
ascetic spirit of a monk in a fast, believing that the morrow would
bring champagne in place of the thin wine his pitiful silver could
command.
Then, of a sudden, he caught a glimpse of Louisa--Louisa of the
Wilhelmstrasse. Capper's heart skipped, and an involuntary impulse
crooked his fingers into claws.
The girl was just coming out of a café--the only café aspiring to
Parisian smartness Gibraltar boasts. Her head was bare. Under an arm
she had tucked a stack of cigar boxes. Had it not been that a steady
light from an overhead arc cut her features out of the soft shadow with
the fineness of a diamond-pointed tool, Capper would have sworn his
eyes were playing him tricks. But Louisa's features were unmistakable,
whether in the Lucullian surroundings of a Berlin summer garden or here
on a street in Gibraltar. Capper had instinctively crushed himself
against the nearest wall on seeing the girl; the crowd had come between
himself and her, and she had not seen him.
All the weasel instinct of the man came instantly to the fore that
second of recognition, and the glint in his eyes and baring of his
teeth were flashed from brute instinct--the instinct of the
night-prowling meat hunter. All the vicious hate which the soul of
Billy Capper could distil flooded to his eyes and made them venomous.
Slinking, dodging, covering, he followed the girl with the cigar boxes.
She entered several dance-halls, offered her wares at the door of a
cheap hotel. For more than an hour Capper shadowed her through the
twisting streets of the old Spanish town. Finally she turned into a
narrow lane, climbed flagstone steps, set the width of the lane, to a
house under the scarp of a cliff, and let herself in at the street
door. Capper, following to the door as quickly as he dared, found it
locked.
The little spy was choking with a lust to kill; his whole body trembled
under the pulse of a murderous passion. He had found Louisa--the girl
who had sold him out--and for her private ends, Capper made no doubt of
that. Some day he had hoped to run her down, and with his fingers
about her soft throat to tell her how dangerous it was to trick Billy
Capper. But to have her flung across his path this way when anger was
still at white heat in him--this was luck! He'd see this Louisa and
have a little powwow with her even if he had to break his way into the
house.
Capper felt the doorknob again; the door wouldn't yield. He drew back
a bit and looked up at the front of the house. Just a dingy black wall
with three unlighted windows set in it irregularly. The roof projected
over the gabled attic like the visor of a cap. Beyond the farther
corner of the house were ten feet of garden space, and then the bold
rock of the cliff springing upward. A low wall bounded the garden;
over its top nodded the pale ghosts of moonflowers and oleanders.
Capper was over the wall in a bound, and crouching amid flower
clusters, listening for possible alarm. None came, and he became
bolder. Skirting a tiny arbor, he skulked to a position in the rear of
the house; there a broad patch of illumination stretched across the
garden, coming from two French windows on the lower floor. They stood
half open; through the thin white stuff hanging behind them Capper
could see vaguely the figure of a girl seated before a dressing mirror
with her hands busy over two heavy ropes of hair. Nothing to do but
step up on the little half balcony outside the windows, push through
into the room, and--have a little powwow with Louisa.
An unwonted boldness had a grip on the little spy. Never a person to
force a face-to-face issue when the trick could be turned behind
somebody's back, he was, nevertheless, driven irresistibly by a furious
anger that took no heed of consequences.
With the light foot of a cat, Capper straddled the low rail of the
balcony, pushed back one of the partly opened windows, and stepped into
Louisa's room. His eyes registered mechanically the details--a heavy
canopied bed, a massive highboy of some dark wood, chairs supporting
carelessly flung bits of wearing apparel. But he noted especially that
just as he emerged from behind one of the loose curtains a white arm
remained poised over a brown head.
"Stop where you are, Billy Capper!" The girl's low-spoken order was as
cold and tense as drawn wire. No trace of shock or surprise was in her
voice. She did not turn her head. Capper was brought up short, as if
he felt a noose about his neck.
Slowly the figure seated before the dressing mirror turned to face him.
Tumbling hair framed the girl's face, partly veiling the yellow-brown
eyes, which seemed two spots of metal coming to incandescence under
heat. Her hands, one still holding a comb, lay supinely in her lap.
"I admit this is a surprise, Capper," Louisa said, letting each word
fall sharply, but without emphasis. "However, it is like you to
be--unconventional. May I ask what you want this time--besides money,
of course?"
Capper wet his lips and smiled wryly. He had jumped so swiftly to
impulse that he had not prepared himself beforehand against the moment
when he should be face to face with the girl from the Wilhelmstrasse.
Moreover, he had expected to be closer to her--very close
indeed--before the time for words should come.
"I--I saw you to-night and followed you--here," he began lamely.
"Flattering!" She laughed shortly.
"Oh, you needn't try to come it over me with words!" Capper's teeth
showed in a nasty grin as his rage flared back from the first
suppression of surprise. "I've come here to have a settlement for a
little affair between you and me."
"Blackmail? Why, Billy Capper, how true to form you run!" The
yellow-brown eyes were alight and burning now. "Have you determined
the sum you want or are you in the open market?"
Capper grinned again, and shifted his weight, inadvertently advancing
one foot a little nearer the seated girl as he did so.
"Pretty quick with the tongue--as always," he sneered. "But this time
it doesn't go, Louisa. You pay differently this time--pay for selling
me out. Understand!" Again one foot shifted forward a few inches by
the accident of some slight body movement on the man's part. Louisa
still sat before her dressing mirror, hands carelessly crossed on her
lap.
"Selling you out?" she repeated evenly. "Oh! So you finally did
discover that you were elected to be the goat? Brilliant Capper! How
long before you made up your mind you had a grievance?"
The girl's cool admission goaded the little man's fury to frenzy. His
mind craved for action--for the leap and the tightening of fingers
around that taunting throat; but somehow his body, strangely detached
from the fiat of volition as if it were another's body, lagged to the
command. Violence had never been its mission; muscles were slow to
accept this new conception of the mind. But the man's feet followed
their crafty intelligence; by fractions of inches they moved forward
stealthily.
"You wouldn't be here now," Louisa coldly went on, "if you weren't
fortune's bright-eyed boy. You were slated to be taken off the boat at
Malta and shot; the boat didn't stop at Malta through no fault of ours,
and so you arrived at Alexandria--and became a nuisance." One of the
girl's hands lifted from her lap and lazily played along the edge of
the rosewood standard which supported the mirror on the dressing table.
It stopped at a curiously carved rosette in the rococo scroll-work.
Capper's suspicious eye noted the movement. He sparred for time--the
time needed by those stealthy feet to shorten the distance between
themselves and the girl.
"Why," he hissed, "why did you give me a number with the Wilhelmstrasse
and send me to Alexandria if I was to be caught and shot at Malta?
That's what I'm here to find out."
"Excellent Capper!" Her fingers were playing with the convolutions of
the carved rosette. "Intelligent Capper! He comes to a lady's room at
night to find the answer to a simple question. He shall have it. He
evidently does not know the method of the Wilhelmstrasse, which is to
choose two men for every task to be accomplished. One--the 'target,'
we call him--goes first; our friends whose secrets we seek are allowed
to become suspicious of him--we even give them a hint to help them in
their suspicion. They seize the 'target,' and in time of war he
becomes a real target for a firing squad, as you should have been,
Capper, at Malta. Then when our friends believe they have nipped our
move in the bud follows the second man--who turns the trick."
Capper was still wrestling with that baffling stubbornness of the body.
Each word the girl uttered was like vitriol on his writhing soul. His
mind willed murder--willed it with all the strength of hate; but still
the springs of his body were cramped--by what? Not cowardice, for he
was beyond reckoning results. Certainly not compassion or any saving
virtue of chivalry. Why did his eyes constantly stray to that white
hand lifted to allow the fingers to play with the filigree of wood on
the mirror support?
"Then you engineered the stealing of my number--from the hollow under
the handle of my cane--some time between Paris and Alexandria?" he
challenged in a whisper, his face thrust forward between hunched
shoulders.
"No, indeed. It was necessary for you to have--the evidence of your
profession when the English searched you at Malta. But the loss of
your number is not news; Koch, in Alexandria, has reported, of course."
The girl saw Capper's foot steal forward again. He was not six feet
from her now. His wiry body settled itself ever so slightly for a
spring. Louisa rose from her chair, one hand still resting on the
wooden rosette of the mirror standard. She began to speak in a voice
drained of all emotion:
"You followed me here to-night, Billy Capper, imagining in your poor
little soul that you were going to do something desperate--something
really human and brutal. You came in my window all primed for murder.
But your poor little soul all went to water the instant we faced each
other. You couldn't nerve yourself to leap upon a woman even. You
can't now."
She smiled on him--a woman's flaying smile of pity. Capper writhed,
and his features twisted themselves in a paroxysm of hate.
"I have my finger on a bell button here, Capper. If I press it men
will come in here and kill you without asking a question. Now you'd
better go."
Capper's eyes jumped to focus on a round white nib under one of the
girl's fingers there on the mirror's standard. The little ivory button
was alive--a sentient thing suddenly allied against him. That
inanimate object rather than Louisa's words sent fingers of cold fear
to grip his heart. A little ivory button waiting there to trap him!
He tried to cover his vanished resolution with bluster, sputtering out
in a tense whisper:
"You're a devil--a devil from hell, Louisa! But I'll get you. They
shoot women in war time! Sir George Crandall--I know him--I did a
little service for him once in Rangoon. He'll hear of you and your
Wilhelmstrasse tricks, and you'll have your pretty back against a wall
with guns at your heart before to-morrow night. Remember--before
to-morrow night!"
Capper was backing toward the open window behind him. The girl still
stood by the mirror, her hand lightly resting where the ivory nib was.
She laughed.
"Very well, Billy Capper. It will be a firing party for two--you and
me together. I'll make a frank confession--tell all the information
Billy Capper sold to me for three hundred marks one night in the Café
Riche--the story of the Anglo-Belgian defense arrangements. The same
Billy Capper, I'll say, who sold the Lord Fisher letters to the
kaiser--a cable to Downing Street will confirm that identification
inside of two hours. And then----"
"And your Captain Woodhouse--your cute little Wilhelmstrasse captain,"
Capper flung back from the window, pretending not to heed the girl's
potent threat; "I know all about him, and the governor'll know,
too--same time he hears about you!"
"Good night, Billy Capper," Louisa answered, with a piquant smile.
"And au revoir until we meet with our backs against that wall."
Capper's head dropped from view over the balcony edge; there was a
sound of running feet amid the close-ranked plants in the garden, then
silence.
The girl from the Wilhelmstrasse, alone in the house save for the bent
old housekeeper asleep in her attic, turned and laid her head--a bit
weakly--against the carved standard, where in a florid rosette showed
the ivory tip of the hinge for the cheval glass.