I took my breakfast by the window, watching the German soldiery
cleaning up Morsbronn. For that wonderful Teutonic administrative
mania was already manifesting itself while ruined houses still smoked;
method replaced chaos, order marched on the heels of the Prussian
rear-guard, which enveloped Morsbronn in a whirlwind of Uhlans, and
left it a silent, blackened landmark in the August sunshine.
Soldiers in canvas fatigue-dress, wearing soft, round, visorless caps,
were removing the débris of the fatal barricade; soldiers with shovel
and hoe filled in the trenches and raked the long, winding street
clean of all litter; soldiers with trowel and mortar were perched on
shot-torn houses, mending chimneys and slated roofs so that their
officers might enjoy immunity from rain and wind and defective flues.
In the court-yards and stables I could see cavalrymen in
stable-jackets, whitewashing walls and out-buildings and ill-smelling
stalls, while others dug shovelfuls of slaked lime from wheelbarrows
and spread it through stable-yards and dirty alleys. Everywhere quiet,
method, order, prompt precision reigned; I even noticed a big,
red-fisted artilleryman tying up tall, blue larkspurs, dahlias, and
phlox in a trampled garden, and he touched the ragged masses of bloom
with a tenderness peculiar to a flower-loving and sentimental people,
whose ultimate ambition is a quart of beer, a radish, and a green leaf
overhead.
At the corners of the walls and blind alleys, placards in French and
German were posted, embodying regulations governing the village under
Prussian military rule. The few inhabitants of Morsbronn who had
remained in cellars during the bombardment shuffled up to read these
notices, or to loiter stupidly, gaping at the Prussian eagles
surmounting the posters.
A soldier came in and started the fire in my fireplace. When he went
out I drew my code-book from my breeches-pocket and tossed it into the
fire. After it followed my commission, my memoranda, and every scrap
of writing. The diamonds I placed in the bosom of my flannel shirt.
Toward one o'clock I heard the shrill piping of a goat-herd, and I saw
him, a pallid boy, clumping along in his wooden shoes behind his two
nanny-goats, while the German soldiers, peasants themselves, looked
after him with curious sympathy.
A little later a small herd of cattle passed, driven to pasture by a
stolid Alsatian, who replied to the soldiers' questions in German
patois and shrugged his heavy shoulders like a Frenchman.
A cock crowed occasionally from some near dunghill; once I saw a cat
serenely following the course of a stucco wall, calm, perfectly
self-composed, ignoring the blandishments of the German soldiers, who
called, "Komm mitz! mitz!" and held out bits of sausage and black
bread.
A German ambulance surgeon arrived to see me in the afternoon. The
Countess was busy somewhere with Buckhurst, who had come with news for
her, and the German surgeon's sharp double rap at the door did not
bring her, so I called out, "Entrez donc!" and he stalked in,
removing his fatigue-cap, which action distinguished him from his
brother officers.
He was a tall, well-built man, perfectly uniformed in his
double-breasted frocked tunic, blue-eyed, blond-bearded, and
immaculate of hand and face, a fine type of man and a credit to any
army.
After a brief examination he sat down and resumed a very bad cigar,
which had been smouldering between his carefully kept fingers.
"Do you know," he said, admiringly, "that I have never before seen
just such a wound. The spinal column is not even grazed, and if, as I
understand from you, you suffered temporarily from complete paralysis
of the body below your waist, the case is not only interesting but
even remarkable."
"Is the superficial lesion at all serious?" I asked.
"Not at all. As far as I can see the blow from the bullet temporarily
paralyzed the spinal cord. There is no fracture, no depression. I do
not see why you should not walk if you desire to."
"When? Now?"
"Try it," he said, briefly.
I tried. Apart from a certain muscular weakness and a great fatigue, I
found it quite possible to stand, even to move a few steps. Then I sat
down again, and was glad to do so.
The doctor was looking at my legs rather grimly, and it suddenly
flashed on me that I had dropped my blanket and he had noticed my
hussar's trousers.
"So," he said, "you are a military prisoner? I understood from the
provost marshal that you were a civilian."
As he spoke Buckhurst appeared at the door, and then sauntered in,
quietly greeting the surgeon, who looked around at the sound of his
footsteps on the stone floor. There was no longer a vestige of doubt
in my mind that Buckhurst was a German agent, or at least that the
Germans _believed_ him to be in their pay. And doubtless he was in
their pay, but to whom he was faithful nobody could know with any
certainty.
"How is our patient, doctor?" he asked.
"Convalescent," replied the doctor, shortly, as though not exactly
relishing the easy familiarity of this pale-eyed gentleman in gray.
"Can he travel to-day?" inquired Buckhurst, without apparent
interest.
"Before he travels," said the officer, "it might be well to find out
why he wears part of a hussar uniform."
"I've explained that to the provost," observed Buckhurst, examining
his well-kept finger-nails. "And I have a pass for him also--if he is
in a fit condition to travel."
The officer gave him a glance full of frank dislike, adjusted his
sabre, pulled on his white gloves, and, bowing very slightly to me,
marched straight out of the room and down the stairs without taking
any notice of Buckhurst. The latter looked after the officer, then his
indifferent eyes returned to me. Presently he sat down and produced a
small slip of paper, which he very carefully twisted into a cocked
hat.
"I suppose you doubt my loyalty to France," he said, intent on his
bit of paper.
Then, logically continuing my rôle of the morning, I began to upbraid
him for a traitor and swear that I would not owe my salvation to him,
and all the while he was calmly transforming his paper from one toy
into another between deft, flat fingers.
"You are unjust and a trifle stupid," he said. "I am paid by Prussia
for information which I never give. But I have the entre of their
lines. I do it for the sake of the Internationale. The Internationale
has a few people in its service ... _And it pays them well_."
He looked squarely at me as he said this. I almost trembled with
delight: the man undervalued me, he had taken me at my own figure, and
now, holding me in absolute contempt, he was going to begin on me.
"Scarlett," he said, "what does the government pay you?"
I began to protest in a torrent of patriotism and sentimentality. He
watched me impassively while I called Heaven to witness and proclaimed
my loyalty to France, ending through sheer breathlessness in a
maundering, tearful apotheosis where mixed metaphors jostled each
other--the government, the Emperor, and the French flag, consecrated
in blood--and finally, calling his attention to the fact that twenty
centuries had once looked down on this same banner, I collapsed in my
chair and gave him his chance.
He took it. With subtle flattery he recognized in me a powerful arm of
a corrupt Empire, which Empire he likened to the old man who rode
Sindbad the Sailor. He admitted my noble loyalty to France, pointing
out, however, that devotion to the Empire was not devotion to France,
but the contrary. Skilfully he pictured the unprepared armies of the
Empire, huddled along the frontier, seized and rent to fragments, one
by one; adroitly he painted the inevitable ending, the armies that
remained cut off and beaten in detail.
And as I listened I freely admitted to myself that I had undervalued
him; that he was no crude Belleville orator, no sentimental
bathos-peddling reformer, no sansculotte with brains ablaze, squalling
for indiscriminate slaughter and pillage; he was a cool student in
crime, taking no chances that he was not forced to take, a calm,
adroit, methodical observer, who had established a theory and was
carefully engaged in proving it.
"Scarlett," he said, in English, "let us come to the point. I am a
mercenary American; you are an American mercenary, paid by the French
government. You care nothing for that government or for the country;
you would drop both to-day if your pay ceased. You and I are
outsiders; we are in the world to watch our chances. And our chance is
here."
He unfolded the creased bit of paper and spread it out on his knees,
smoothing it thoughtfully.
"What do I care for the Internationale?" he asked, blandly. "I am
high in its councils; Karl Marx knows less about the Internationale
than do I. As for Prussia and France--bah!--it's a dog-fight to me,
and I lack even the interest to bet on the German bull-dog.
"You will know me better some day, and when you do you will know that
I am a man who has determined to get rich if I have to set half of
France against the other half and sack every bank in the Empire.
"And now the time is coming when the richest city in Europe will be
put to the sack. You don't believe it? Yet you shall live to see Paris
besieged, and you shall live to see Paris surrender, and you shall
live to see the Internationale rise up from nowhere, seize the
government by the throat, and choke it to death under the red flag of
universal--ahem!... license"--the faintest sneer came into his pallid
face--"and every city of France shall be a commune, and we shall pass
from city to city, leisurely, under the law--_our_ laws, which we will
make--and I pity the man among us who cannot place his millions in the
banks of England and America!"
He began to worry the creased bit of paper again, stealthy eyes on the
floor.
"The revolt is as certain as death itself," he said. "The Society of
the Internationale honeycombs Europe--your police archives show you
that--and I tell you that, of the two hundred thousand soldiers of
the national guard in Paris to-day, ninety per cent. are
ours--_ours_, soul and body. You don't believe it? Wait!
"Yet, for a moment, suppose I am right? Where are the government
forces? Who can stop us from working our will? Not the fragments of
beaten and exhausted armies! Not the thousands of prisoners which you
will see sent into captivity across the Rhine! What has the government
to lean on--a government discredited, impotent, beaten! What in the
world can prevent a change, an uprising, a revolution? Why, even if
there were no such thing as the Internationale and its secret Central
Committee--to which I have the honor to belong"--and here his sneer
was frightful--"I tell you that before a conquering German army had
recrossed the Rhine this land of chattering apes would be tearing one
another for very want of a universal scape-goat.
"But that is exactly where we come into the affair. We find the
popular scape-goat and point him out--the government, my friend. And
all we have to do is to let the mob loose, stand back, and count
profits."
He leaned forward in his chair, idly twisting his crumpled bit of
paper in one hand.
"I am not fool enough to believe that our reign will last," he said.
"It may last a month, two months, perhaps three. Then we leaders will
be at one another's throats--and the game is up! It's always so--mob
rule can't last--it never has lasted and never will. But the prudent
man will make hay before the brief sunshine is ended; I expect to
economize a little, and set aside enough--well, enough to make it pay,
you see."
He looked up at me quietly.
"I am perfectly willing to tell you this, even if you used your
approaching liberty to alarm the entire country, from the Emperor to
the most obscure scullion in the Tuileries. Nothing can stop us now,
nothing in the world can prevent our brief reign. Because these
things are certain, the armies of France will be beaten--they are
already beaten. Paris will hold out; Paris will fall; and with Paris
down goes France! And as sure as the sun shall rise on a conquered
people, so sure shall rise that red spectre we call the
Internationale."
The man astonished me. He put into words a prophecy which had haunted
me from the day that war was declared--a prophetic fear which had
haunted men higher up in the service of the Empire--thinking men who
knew what war meant to a country whose government was as rotten as its
army was unprepared, whose political chiefs were as vain, incompetent,
ignorant, and weak as were the chiefs of its brave army--an army
riddled with politics, weakened by intrigue and neglect--an army used
ignobly, perverted, cheated, lied to, betrayed, abandoned.
That, for once, Buckhurst spoke the truth as he foresaw it, I did not
question. That he was right in his infernal calculations, I was
fearsomely persuaded. And now the game had advanced, and I must
display what cards I had, or pretended to have.
"Are you trying to bribe me?" I blurted out, weakly.
"Bribe you," he repeated, in contempt. "No. If the prospect does not
please you, I have only to say a word to the provost marshal."
"Wouldn't that injure your prospects with the Countess?" I said, with
fat-brained cunning. "You cannot betray me and hope for her
friendship."
He glanced up at me, measured my mental capacity, then nodded.
"I can't force you that way," he admitted.
"He's bound to get to Paradise. Why?" I wondered, and said, aloud:
"What do you want of me?"
"I want immunity from the secret police, Mr. Scarlett."
"Where?"
"Wherever I may be."
"In Morbihan?"
"Yes."
"In Paradise?"
"Yes."
I was silent for a moment, then, looking him in the eye, "What do I
gain?"
Ah, the cat was out now. Buckhurst did not move, but I saw the muscles
of his face relax, and he drew a deep, noiseless breath.
"Well," he said, coolly, "you may keep those diamonds, for one
thing."