"Do you see that last sentence? 'We shall do what we like in neutral
countries.' No man ever spoke the mind of his nation better than
Peiffer did that night in a squalid cafe in Melilla."
Slingsby looked out over the harbour to where the sun was setting on
the sierras. He would have given an arm to be sure of what Peiffer had
set on foot behind those hills.
"I wonder," he said uneasily, and from that day he began to sleep
badly.
Then came another and a most disquieting phase of the affair. Peiffer
began to write letters to Slingsby. He was not comfortable. He was not
being treated as an officer should be. He had no amusements, and his
food was too plain. Moreover, there were Germans and Austrians up in
the camp who turned up their noses at him because their birth was
better than his.
"You see what these letters mean?" said Slingsby. "Peiffer wants to be
sent away from the Rock."
"You are reading your own ideas into them," I replied.
But Slingsby was right. Each letter under its simple and foolish
excuses was a prayer for translation to a less dangerous place. For as
the days passed and no answer was vouchsafed, the prayer became a real
cry of fear.
"I claim to be sent to England without any delay. I must be sent," he
wrote frankly and frantically.
Slingsby set his teeth with a grim satisfaction.
"No, my friend, you shall stay while the danger lasts. If it's a year,
if you are alone in the camp, still you shall stay. The horrors you
have planned you shall share with every man, woman and child in the
town."
We were in this horrible and strange predicament. The whole colony was
menaced, and from the Lines to Europa Point only two men knew of the
peril. Of those two, one, in an office down by the harbour,
ceaselessly and vainly, with a dreadful anxiety, asked "When?" The
other, the prisoner, knew the very hour and minute of the catastrophe,
and waited for it with the sinking fear of a criminal awaiting the
fixed moment of his execution.
Thus another week passed.
Slingsby became a thing of broken nerves. If you shut the door noisily
he cursed; if you came in noiselessly he cursed yet louder, and one
evening he reached the stage when the sunset gun made him jump.
"That's enough," I said sternly. "To-day is Saturday. To-morrow we
borrow the car"--there is only one worth talking about on the
Rock--"and we drive out."
"I can't do it," he cried.