Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off
Spurn Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if
necessary to German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to
Nordeich in British aeroplane.' The message comes from the German
Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I
have carried out my instructions to the letter. There is only _one_ man
going to be broken over this affair!"
Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some more of
his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust
himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking
a farewell shot at the cuspidor:
"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry for
you, _bei Gott_! But to make game of those who command me is not the
purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any
experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the
Imperial German Navy--a man born of plain people--without fortune or
even _von_ before my family name!"
Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human being
who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the
straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him
the pickings of the wrecked aeroplane.
"For her instruments and signalling outfit--the seats and vacuum flasks
even--are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell
for----" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under
her belly that I reserve for Majesty--the French have bought it or think
they have!"
The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for the
All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He
added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:
"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions.
Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,--chatting with a handsome
Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover--as I am waiting to get an
inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth
buying for use in their Service Aeronautique. I am summoned by a groom
of our Embassy to speak to some Excellencies--I follow and find myself
clicking my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von
Bohlen in an Embassy auto-car--to be sent off at a moment's notice in a
little cranky devil of an English monoplane--with secret dispatches for
the All Highest--on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer
falling and the hour past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker
paused for breath.
Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp
sound, a trick of his when in meditation:
"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for
long-distance flying. And luck it was!--if you had been of my mind.
Tell me, did not _they_ give you plain instructions?"
"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha
answered calmly:
"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they
would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather
satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will
convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands.
And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your
very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next
your heart!'"
The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:
"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I
would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it
about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"
"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"
Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was
fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and
a wave of the hand:
"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the
dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another
messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"
"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them,
and that place is the London War Office!"
The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the
three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his
piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:
"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish
sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as
applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big
devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon
that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and
twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in
1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the
drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it.
It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean
War,--taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again
ejected,--because--_Grosse Gott!_--it was too inhuman! As though a
weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness
could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes
me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its
inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of
diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience
under the rod of Fear!"
Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their
rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured
and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty,
clenched fist:
"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to
steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have
drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall
strong-vaults, see you!--but the originals from the muniment-room of the
Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour
after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the
tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with
Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for
Germany--Victory in the World-War that is coming--you who have lost
Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, _bei Gott_!"
He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:
"As I have said, I pity you!--though you have tried to bribe me!--but it
will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your
cartridges are wetted--your revolver will not serve you. And you will
not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My
fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it
away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose
property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of
Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour,
navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for
the satchel, or I, _bei Gott!_ must account to him for it and you!"
And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway
and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two
of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von
Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his
instructions, to be left alone, you understand.
One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so
industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants
offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager
beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and
brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed
hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000
h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with
only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her
electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.
Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the
last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack,
beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate
worlds.
Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same
fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below
the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning,
and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.
*CHAPTER XXXVI*
*HUE AND CRY*
Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis
rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death,
the buff broadsheets of the _Evening Wire_ edged the kerbs of Fleet
Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to
Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of
newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:
AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET.
STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE
THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN.
AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS.
THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE.
"COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC
STROKE?"
Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east,
north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of
thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened
the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a
taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a
mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aerial ascent.
The small audience interested in the aeroplane, her freight, and her
behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the
ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last
three-seater air-bus had rounded the aerodrome, landed and deposited the
last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but
the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.
The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of
treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line.
Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no
longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and
hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as
programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the
selling of stale _boutonnieres_ about the entrances of restaurants, the
serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.
On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her
departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to
the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly
drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.
There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows.
He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked
into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not
only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the
big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her
into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole
body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a
transformation--unless the chemical had possessed the power to change
the colour of her mind and soul.
The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to
you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those
crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of
sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented
breeze from the North.
Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no
sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But
it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary
pleasure-seeker. He had read--more correctly than von Herrnung, who
believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of
Knowledge--Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and
honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.
What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as
agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid
chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How
splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her
firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed
to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of
Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence.
Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must
have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.
Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while Destiny limped
towards him in the person of an undersized telegraph-clerk whose
complexion, previously pallid, had deteriorated to dirty green. He
began, extending a shaky hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:
"For you, sir. Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his tools, so 'e
burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner. They rung us up about twenty
times while he was at the job. And the message is important, sir!"
"I'll see! Thank you, Burgin!"
Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and read:
"_Your--German--acquaintance--suspected--agent--
robbery--documents--national--importance. At--all--
costs--keep--him--until--I--come._"
The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the thing. But
the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant was the hammer-blow that
drove the nail to the quick. His sharp eye, following the climbing
aeroplane, had seen her flatten and swing about and leap forwards,
exactly as the carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.
"My Gawd," he yelped out. "See there! Blimy, if the --'s not done us!
Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I was spellin' out the screed.
Gone with the Bird--the Bird and the 'overing gear. My Gawd! Wot's to
be done?"
"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's voice in the pale
clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell ungently on his shoulder. "You've
done your best! It's not your fault if luck was on the other side!
But--" His eyes went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the
tall white shape with the hat of twinkling silver. "But the boy!" A
sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness overtopped it. He caught at
and gripped the clerk's thin shoulder to keep himself upright. "My God!
How shall I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if that
German fellow has carried off the boy?"
"Steady-O! Ketch on to me, sir.... Nobody's looking!" said the
telegraph clerk. He was a hero-worshipper on a robust scale and
Sherbrand his chosen deity. "This ain't our young Boss givin' in, but
just his empty inside playin' tricks on him," he assured himself. To
Sherbrand he said humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot
cocoa and toke there. Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me taking
the liberty of saying so--and you can't do nothing till he comes!"
The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the entrance-gates, almost
before the sentence left the lips of the clerk. Now his alert, upright
figure came in sight, briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and
wrought to the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow
that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness and faintness,
straightened his tall body, clapped both hands to his mouth, and gave
the huntsman's view-halloo:
"_Stole away! Stole--awa-aay!_"
Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the dwindling
speck high upon the north horizon that represented the worldly prospects
of Sherbrand, and a handsome sum in cash. The Bird, just then entering
a broad belt of gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another
instant. But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing gesture, and seen,
and understood.
Then he was upon them, saying in accents jarred with anger:
"How was this allowed to happen? You were warned. You had my wire?"
Sherbrand's mouth was wrung awry with another spasm of mirthless
laughter. He fought it back and held out the crumpled slip of paper,
saying:
"I did, but luck was on _his_ side. Thanks to a relapse on Macrombie's
part, I got this after the Bird had flown."
"The Bird..."
The blue-grey eyes and the keen hazel met, and struck a spark between
them.
"'The Bird.' He has taken French leave--or, more appropriately,
German--by the help of your machine?"
Sherbrand nodded, setting his teeth grimly. The wailing voice of the
pallid clerk came in like a refrain:
"'Ooked it. Bunked--so 'elp me Jimmy Johnson! With our young guv'nor's
mono', and the gyro 'overer!"
Said the Chief, moving sharply towards where the Wireless mast straddled
over the telegraph-cabin:
"He has adopted the only means of exit by which it was possible for him
to escape. All railways stations are being watched, all highways
patrolled by our agents, travelling in high-powered motor-cars. We are
on the look-out for him at every ocean shipping-port. One road we left
open, not having the means to block it--and that is the road of the
stork and the swan! Decidedly, I might have guessed that he would play
Young Lochinvar after this fashion. But until I left the ground an hour
ago I did not know of the theft of the Clanronald Plan."
"The Clanronald--" Sherbrand was beginning, when the Chief cut him
short.
"I had forgotten that you are as little wise as I was an hour back.
Better glance at this paragraph while I make use of your O. T.
installation and Wireless, and put the fear of Heaven into Macrombie,
incidentally and by the way."
He thrust a tightly-folded copy of the _Evening Wire_ upon Sherbrand and
vanished into the rum-flavoured stuffiness of the cabin, with the pallid
telegraph clerk close upon his heels. And upon Sherbrand, in the act of
unfolding the newspaper, rushed his Fate, in a hat of silver spangles:
challenging the knowledge in him with blazing eyes well upon the level
of his own.
"Mr. Sherbrand.... Tell me what has happened? Why do you look so--queer
and--white?"
She herself was whiter than her narrow dress, and the mouth the eager
rush of words poured from was pale under its rose-tinted salve. She
hurried on breathlessly:
"They show no signs of coming back--it fidgets me horribly. And--I was
looking--from over there, where I was with Uncle Owen,--when you called
out, 'Stole away!' and waved your arm." She glanced at the sky,
shuddered and looked back at him. "Am I silly? But all the same, the
General told you something! I don't ask what! But I funk--I don't know
why, but it's beastly--the sensation! Tell me I've nothing to be afraid
of--I swear I'll take your word!"
That she was just then a creature full of fears was written large upon
her. She might have quoted Queen Constance, who I think was also a
galumpher, meaning a woman of big build and sweeping gestures, and an
imperious temper withal. Sherbrand feared also, and the pang of
solicitude for the pretty boy so unexpectedly dragged into the vortex of
a diplomatic and political felony was, to do him credit, quite as sharp
as the pang caused him by the rape of the Bird.
He answered:
"Miss Saxham, I do not believe that there is any danger of an accident.
But--that there will be delay--I shall not try to disguise. The fact
is----"
A guttural, Teutonic voice said close at Sherbrand's shoulder.
"_Gnaediges Fraeulein_ will wish to return home? It is getting late, so
very late! I haf instructions from my master to drive the _Fraeulein_
back to her address."
Sherbrand wheeled, to be confronted by the thickset figure of the
moustached and uniformed attendant who had occupied the seat beside the
chauffeur of the big blue F.I.A.T. car.
"Who is this?" he demanded in a look, and Patrine, her pallor drowned in
a scarlet blush of horrible embarrassment, stammered:
"I really--haven't the least idea!"
"You hear!" Sherbrand's tone was not pleasant. "The lady does not know
you--that ought to be enough!"
Patrine felt herself drowning in chill waves of horror. The man
persisted:
"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here.... I haf
my orders to drive the lady home in the yellow car!"
In his muddy eyes there flickered a leer or a menace. Patrine saw the
Doctor coming and flew to his side. Sherbrand said, looking sternly at
the German:
"You understand, your orders are nothing to the lady. She does not
choose to be driven home by you!"
The man protested:
"But my master----"
Sherbrand demanded:
"Who is your master?" Then a sudden light dawned upon him, and he
turned and knocked sharply at the cabin-door. At which the liveried
attendant, as a man who finds hesitancy a double-edged weapon, wheeled
in military fashion and retreated, casting a surly glance over his
shoulder, and quickening his heavy footsteps to a jog-trot as the
General's active person appeared at Sherbrand's side.
"That man, Sir Roland!" Sherbrand's slight gesture indicated the
thickset figure now getting hurriedly into the yellow Darracq. He
added, as the car swirled round the corner of the restaurant and
vanished in the direction of the entrance-gates, "Ought I to have
grabbed the brute, and hung on to him? He was certainly with a party of
foreign-looking people, who interviewed von Herrnung just before he got
away. You saw them?"
"I certainly saw them. And I agree with you that their unexpected
appearance has had to do with their countryman's sudden departure," said
the Chief. "But to grab an orderly of the German Embassy would be--only
less risky than grabbing a Kaiser's messenger, on suspicion of his
carrying stolen War Secrets in his official bag."
"A Kaiser's messenger!" Sherbrand's mouth shaped a soundless whistle,
"Why, now I remember, he had a dispatch-case or valise with him.
Wouldn't hear of leaving it behind!"
"I--daresay not," the Chief's dry smile commented.
Sherbrand went on:
"I developed muscle in persuading him to let it go in the observer's
cockpit for fear of it fouling the warping-controls. No wonder he stuck
to it. War Secrets!"
"It is plain you haven't glanced at the _Evening Wire_. It tells the
story rather pithily, beginning with an outbreak of fire on Tuesday
night at Gwyll Castle, Denbigh, caused by a short-circuit in the
electric-lighting apparatus of the North Tower."
He went on:
"I waste no time telling you, for all that's possible has been done now
in setting our agents on the track of the flying thief! The North Tower
at Gwyll holds the priceless Clanronald library, and the Muniment
Chamber, where they bottle up the original MSS. detailing the War Plan
of the old Earl. The short-circuit that set up the blaze was--the kind
that any amateur can arrange for with rubber gloves, a pair of pliers
and a bit of soda-water wire."
"Is it known who the amateur was?"
"There is reason to suspect one Heir Rassing, an under-librarian of
German nationality, who behaved like a hero, according to the local Fire
Brigade! He it was, who suggested--Clanronald being absent on a
yachting-cruise in the Fjords of Norway--that the contents of the
Muniment Chamber should be transferred to the strong-room in the
basement of the East Wing. He superintended the removal, armed with
knowledge, enthusiasm, and a large-sized Webley Scott revolver, with
which he volunteered to keep solitary guard till morning, outside the
strong-room door!"
"And when daylight came--" hinted Sherbrand.
"It discovered the zealous Herr Rassing to be missing, and a
corresponding hiatus in the treasures of the Muniment Chamber. Item, a
sharkskin case inlaid with ivory figures, Japanese, antique and
valuable,--containing the original diagrams--chemical _formulae_ and so
on--embodying the famous Plan."
Sherbrand asked.
"Was it as tremendous as they tell one?"
The crisp voice answered:
"Tremendous it not only was, but Is. The most terrible and effective
method of annihilating an enemy, that has ever been conceived by the
brain of man."
Sherbrand said, drawing a deep breath: