British Public were to be fed with the tale. The tapes began to run out
at the newspaper-offices as the General took leave of the First Lord and
the War Minister and got into his waiting car, and sped away to Harley
Street to tell the Dop Doctor how the Saxham pup had proved worthy of
his breed.
The evening papers made great marvel out of the story, and at all the
street corners of London and the suburbs broadsheets lined the gutters,
proclaiming in huge inky capitals:
"MYSTERIES OF THE SEA. EXTRAORDINARY ATTEMPTED CAPTURE OF BRITISH
YACHTSMAN BY PIRATES IN DANISH WATERS! MIRACULOUS RECOVERY OF
CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN! SUBMARINE IN NORTH SEA FOULS BAG CONTAINING
PRICELESS HEIRLOOM STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE! LAST MESSAGE OF HERO BOY
SCOUT!"
*CHAPTER XLVI*
*AT NORDEICH WIRELESS*
In the face of the outrunning tide, Undersea Boat No. 18 had nosed her
way from Norderney Gat to Nordeich, by the deep-dredged low-water
channel of which Luttha had told. The boy had been roused by the kick of
a foot shod with a heelless rubber boot, out of a dog-sleep on the
vibrating deckplates of the men's cabin, under the white glare of the
electric globes. The man who kicked him hauled away the blue blanket,
and pitched him his clothes, yet moist and heavy with sea-water,
ordering him in broken English to get into them quickly to go ashore.
The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb from the
resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty Officer Stoll and his
assistant--and his temples throbbed, and there was a singing in his
ears. Perhaps that was from the smell of the petrol! One breathed
petrol--devoured tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup and
coffee made with petrol--judging by the tang upon the palate--on board
the German submarine.
The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was open, letting in
the smell of the sea tanged with the odours of fish and rotten seaweed
and sewage. One emerged through the manhole into a strange, windless
woolly world. Through a weeping woolly-grey mist, grey, greasy-looking
water lapped and licked against a weedy jetty of grey stone alongside
which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off her whitey grey painted steel
skin. A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or two, and some lighters laden
with bricks and cement sat on the blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey
and white seagulls were feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats were
lying on the shelving beach of weedy sand.
To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow blur in the
prevailing woolliness. Behind one, the foggy land seemed mixed up with
the foggy sea, even as the yellow-white curd mixes with the whey in a
dish of rennet. North, the intermittent beam thrown from a lighthouse
came and went in sudden winks. Facing to the mainland again, one made
out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled roofs and chimneys, and a
wooden church-spire with a quaint gilded weathercock. Running south
were black and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway
station. Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain, that the shining
metals of the permanent way ran into it and ended as sharply as though
they had been cut off.
There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder. Heads showed through
the manhole, and a rough hand caught the boy by the collar of his
pneumatic jacket and jerked him out of his betters' way. Luttha
appeared in his panoply of yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on
the platform, where his second officer and another stood together at the
rail. Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an old Navy cap in
place of his goggled helmet, and a junior officer came after. They
brought the tang of schnapps with the smell of their oilskin coats. The
boy had seen them drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table
in the officer's cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes.
"_Gute Reise! Viel Glueck!_" Luttha had shouted to von Herrnung, and
waved his hand with a heartiness that did not seem quite real.
"_Auf wiedersehen, besten Dank!_" von Herrnung had called back to the
Commander, and set his foot upon the one-rail gang-plank by which a
seaman had connected the submarine with the quay. And then he had drawn
it back, as though the salty plank had burned him. For a party of tall
grey soldiers with brown boots and belts, and spiked helmets covered
with grey stuff like their clothing, came tramping along the quay with
bayonets fixed, and halted at a harsh order from their officer--and von
Herrnung, with a shiny grey face, and grey lips under his red moustache,
had croaked out meaningly to Luttha:
"My thanks for this, Herr Commander! We will settle the score one day!"
He went on then, and the officer arrested him. And while Bawne stood
staring, taking in the scene, another brutal hand had grabbed him by the
scruff--lifted him as a boy lifts a puppy--and slung him on to the
stones of the quay.
"You come with us!" Somebody spoke to him in English. It was von
Herrnung, and his eyes were poisonous with hate. "You bear your share
in this, Her Dearest." This was a curious nickname by which the Enemy
was often to address Bawne. "Where I go you will go also!--do you
understand?"
The officer said something harshly, making an imperious gesture with his
drawn sword, and von Herrnung saluted and fell silently into place
between the grey files. Then the party marched along the quay between
rows of storehouses with doors painted in broad horizontal stripes of
black and white, and passed through a yard and a big open gate at the
end of it, with a black and white sentry-box, and a grey-uniformed
spike-helmeted sentry on duty outside the gate. The sentry presented
arms, and the party swung through, and struck into a wide main-road that
crossed the railhead, a sandy road with a dyke at either side of it,
that followed the curve of the shore-line east.
Beyond the shore-line the North Sea fog came down, blank and drab as an
asbestos curtain, waiting a westerly breeze to roll inland and blot out
everything. Between shore and road were the clumped houses of the
fishing-village, and a church with a wooden spire, shaped like an
old-fashioned needle-case. Sand-dunes, covered with sea-holly and bent
grass, came up to the road. But on the other side of the road, beyond
the dyke, the eye traversed a wide expanse of dead, flat fenland,
drained by a many branched creek.
Set in the midst of the fenland were buildings of some kind. One
thought of barracks in the same enclosure with a martello tower or a
powder-magazine, like that in Hyde Park. But two strange landmarks
sticking up into the foggy sky altered the character of the flat-roofed
structure of grey stone standing in a wide expanse of gravel enclosed by
a strong wooden fence, stained with some drab weather-resisting
composition, and entered by an imposing pair of spike-topped gates. A
wide dyke full of sluggish water girdled the fence. You crossed by a
wooden swing-bridge leading to the big gates. When you approached them
by the road that branched from the main-road at right-angles, you
realised the immense height of two hollow triangular towers of
grey-painted steel latts and girders that straddled over the flat roof
of the squat stone building--the shorter tower nosing up three hundred
feet into the air, and its big brother more than double that height,
sheathing its sharp point amongst the leaden-hued clouds, bellying full
of moisture sucked up from the North Sea.
They looked alive to Bawne in a queer ugly way, throwing out their
mile-long antennae to the supporting poles, linking their metal
guy-ropes to solid structures of stone and concrete, like colossal
web-spinning insects, half-spider, half-mantis, wholly horrible. And
they reminded him of the three tall Wireless masts rearing over the
Admiralty at Whitehall, and Marconi House, in the Strand, and the little
one that straddled over the telegraph-cabin on Fanshaw's Flying Ground.
And at the remembrance the salt tears overbrimmed his raw and burning
eyelids, blotting out the muscular, vigorous backs of the men who walked
in front of him, and his throat felt as choky as though he had swallowed
a whole bull's-eye.
There was a sharp order to halt, and boots marked time on sandy gravel.
A grey-uniformed soldier of the two on guard outside the big
spike-topped gates, flanked with a black-and-white sentry-box on either
side, brought his bayonet to the slope and challenged sharply. A
sergeant-major of the party stepped out and answered; the sentry
bellowed:
"_Raus!_"
And with the ruffle of a side-drum, the gates swung open, the guard
turned out of a stone guardhouse within, and the armed party with the
prisoner and the boy marched into the gravelled courtyard. The gates
shut, and von Herrnung was taken off to a block of buildings distant
from the central erection with the Wireless towers. There was a clock
over the doorway of the guardhouse. The hands indicated a quarter to
four.
Bawne, standing shivering in the morning rawness, heard the infantry
officer commanding the party say in a loud, harsh voice that the boy was
to be kept close and sharply looked after. Then a heavy hand gripped
him roughly by the collar, and the voice belonging to the grip shouted:
"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"
Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the gruff-voiced speaker
to a shed behind the guardhouse--a shed whose planks were a-tremble at
all their lower edges with glittering drops of North Sea fog. He was
helped in with a kick, scientifically administered--the big key crashed
in the lock--and one was free to sob one's bursting heart out, lying
face downwards among the hard, clean, shining straw-trusses that covered
the floor of beaten earth. Somehow the tears relieved, and merciful
sleep came to the child, and presently he awakened under the oilskin
coat that served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under
his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted light and air,
shone a large, lucent moon--in her last quarter, with Saturn, blazing
like a great blue diamond, at her pale and silvery side.
In the shed, which had been destined but luckily not used as a kennel
for the Adjutant's Pomeranian boar-hound, the boy remained in durance
vile for a period of several days. The drills and parades, the buglings
and drummings that marked the ordinary course of garrison life, alone
enlivened the cramped monotony. He was given coarse food and drink
three times a day, and permitted to exercise for half-an-hour in charge
of a corporal within the limits of the gravelled courtyard. Soldiers
were drilling there on most of these occasions, big men in the brand-new
green-grey uniform that seemed a kind of Service kit, and who regarded
Bawne with looks of quite incomprehensible malignancy, and when their
mouths were not closed by Prussian military discipline, made coarse or
beastly jokes at his expense.
You are to suppose a pitifully unequal struggle on the part of the boy
to maintain decency, cleanliness, and self-respect under these
conditions, which would have ended in hopeless lethargy had the Saxham
pup sprung from a feebler race. Two things helped him at this juncture.
The Rosary he said in his straw lair at night, and certain stimulating
reading contained in a sea-stained and grimy-paged Scout's Notebook,
that nobody had seen him with, or having seen had thought it worth their
while to take away. You can see him on the sixth morning of captivity
squatting on his straw, poring over the Alphabet of the Morse Signalling
Code, the Rules for First Aid, and so on, following the ten precepts of
Scout Law.
"_Rule No. 7_. A Scout obeys orders of his patrol-leader or
scout-master without question."
He nodded his head as he read the words and his heavy eyes brightened.
He pushed back the dulled and rumpled hair from his forehead and
straightened his hunched back.
"_Rule No. 8_. A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties...."
The smile was bravely forced. He held up his head, filled his lungs
with air, inflated his chest, pouted his lips, and began to whistle
_Rule Britannia_. And at the second bar, somebody booted the door
heavily and a thick voice bellowed:
"_Halt den Mund!_"
It was the voice of the soldier who was Bawne's jailor, and the whistle
quavered and broke down. And as the boyish heart swelled to bursting
and the irrepressible tears brimmed over, a musical motor-horn, some
distance off, sounded clearly and sweetly:
"Ta-rara-ta ra!" And a Prussian officer's voice drowned out the
sweetness of the answering echo, shouting:
"_Achtung! Wache heraus!_"
Bugles sounded, side-drums beat, there was a crunching of heavy boots
upon stone and gravel, followed by the click of presented arms, and the
groaning of the heavy gates swung back. Amidst all these significant
noises, you caught the purr and crackle of pneumatic tyres rolling over
the wooden bridge into the courtyard. As they stopped short, a bugle
sounded imperatively, and hoarse voices gave the order:
"_Helm ab!_"
And a multitudinous shout answered--a thick, short, crashing utterance
that suggested the fall of a tree. Three trees fell crashing, and then
in a little still of awe a sharp, hollow voice answered:
"_Danke, meine Kinden!_"
And the boy squatting, listening in the straw, was conscious of a queer
tingling sensation that made his hair stiffen on his scalp and sent odd
little waves of shuddering down the whole length of his spine. The
voice was not melodious or powerful. But it set the nerves on edge, and
made you wonder what he could be like--the man to whom it belonged. And
the question made a picture in the mind, of a mouth with thin lips that
were parched and discoloured, a cruel mouth, matching the harsh and
hollow utterance.
The time crawled on and the sun climbed high. It must have been noon or
nearly when measured steps approached the shed, and the door was
unlocked. This time a non-commissioned officer who had kicked Bawne
yesterday caught hold of the boy, hauled him out of the shed, and made
at the double towards the squat stone building bestridden by the pair of
Wireless towers. Their intolerable shadows, the sun being nearly
overhead, barred the big courtyard with wide lateral and diagonal bands
and stripes of blackness. It was as though two Brobdingnagian spiders
had spun there a pair of webs of incredible size.
There were soldiers on guard with fixed bayonets at the open doors, that
led into the square low-ceiled stone vestibule. Before the two wide
steps stood a bright yellow motor-car. It was big, roomy, and
luxurious, with the Prussian eagle in black and red on both doors. A
young officer in field-grey and flat cap sat immovable at the
steering-wheel. At a little distance waited two other cars. Their
chauffeurs wore a dark blue livery with silver braid and buttons, and
these cars were black-enamelled and studiously plain.
Inside the vestibule were more sentries and a small body of soldiers,
all with fixed bayonets. Also three dubious individuals in black
uniform who might have been detectives or not. They were grouped
outside a heavy door on the right hand as you entered. Despite the
presence of so many persons a singular quiet reigned. Footfalls made no
noise on the floor, presumably of stone, covered with thick, resilient
red rubber. There were no windows, light being admitted from overhead
by a skylight of thick opaline glass.
I have said that quiet reigned, but as the corollary of a sharp harsh
voice that talked without cessation. It upbraided, denounced,
interrogated; interrupted conjectural answers with contradiction; burst
out anew into shrill denunciation, and switched off the current of abuse
to pelt its object with questions again. It rasped the nerves. Of the
men who heard it some grew pale, others were red and sweated freely.
When it broke off in a scream like a vicious stallion's neigh, a
susurration of horror passed from one to another of the erect, silent,
and rigid men waiting in the vestibule. The neighing scream was
followed by a small commotion. The door opened, and a tall,
grey-moustached, grey-cloaked cavalry officer, in a silver helmet
crested with a perching eagle, demanded--Bawne's little German serving
him once more at this juncture:
"Water! Immediately--a glass of water!" and vanished again.
An orderly got the water, passing out by another tall door in the centre
of the vestibule and coming back with a filled tumbler on a china plate.
One of the men in black snatched it from him and knocked officiously.
But the harsh shrill voice had begun to rate again, and when the door
was opened, a thick-set officer in a spiked infantry helmet, with a
glittering gold moustache and sharp blue eyes twinkling through
glittering gold pince-nez, waved the water away as though it had never
been asked for.
"The boy!" he said, in a shrill falsetto whisper. "_Seine Majestaet_
wants the boy!"
Then it seemed as though twenty zealous hands propelled the boy towards
the mysterious room's threshold. The officer in pince-nez grabbed his
arm and pulled him briskly in.
*CHAPTER XLVII*
*THE MAN OF "THE DAY"*
You were in a square, singularly light, though windowless room
immediately underneath the lower, pointed end of the biggest Wireless.
The room was lighted along the top of the walls on two sides by oblong
slabs of thick opaque glass with many ventilators controlled by levers.
The huge metal ribs and supports of the colossal steel tower overhead
were built deep into the solid stone masonry. Through a massive block
of crystal glass--the insulator on which the pointed end of the mast
rested, your vision was snatched up--up dizzily--through the vertical
labyrinth of metal ribs and girders, until it ended at the inner
extremity of the apex, seven hundred and fifty feet above. The shrill
song of the wind amongst the steel ribs, and spars, and guy-ropes, whose
ends were linked to reinforced steel beams or ground-anchors, sunk in
heavy outside foundations of masonry, hardly reached one here. But from
the dynamo-room that absorbed the space between this and the second
Wireless chamber, you heard the deep moan of the Goldberg Alternator,
its rotor speed maintained by a 500 horse-power Krafit engine, sunk, to
lessen the tremendous vibration, in a solid steel and cement lined
power-house, deep below the level of the soggy ground.
The boy's wide blue eyes took in the wonder and the strangeness of his
surroundings. Lightness and whiteness, a ship-shape neatness, a
scrupulous freedom from dust, a dazzling polish and burnish on surfaces
or knobs or handles of wood, brass, or copper, characterised the place.
About the walls were metal cylinders with pipes and induction-coils,
frames supporting reels of wire in rows, and brass things like pincers
in rows above them; and above these, rows of shining crystal bull's-eyes
like port-lights, and yet others with stars and circles of electric
bulbs.
At the distant end of the long, light, shining room, the deck-like run
of the polished boards was broken by a step leading to a platform where
the rigidly-erect figures of three men in dark blue uniform sat at the
middle, and at either end of a long narrow table burdened with
instruments whose use Bawne partly knew. The midmost operator, sitting
with his back to you, wore a head-band with receiver ear-pieces, beyond
which his ears, large, thick, and red as quarter-pounds of beefsteak,
projected in a singularly grotesque way. The man seated on the right of
the table had a paper-pad and pencil, and the man on the left sat in
front of a typewriter, with lowered intent eyes and fingers crooked
above the keys, as one waiting to type off a Wireless message, and the
tingling desire to approach and see the apparatus more closely evoked a
wiggle on the part of the boy that was grimly checked by a big hard hand
that gripped his arm. This reminded him that he was a prisoner. Like
von Herrnung, Bawne thought and--then upon his right he became aware of
von Herrnung, green as a drowned man--and with all the stiffening gone
out of him--wilting over the supporting arms of two officers of the
garrison. And then a voice said something shrilly and harshly--and
Saxham's son found himself looking into a pair of steel-blue, shining,
flickering eyes, with whites curiously veined with red.
The man to whom the eyes belonged sat immediately facing you, on the
opposite side of a big kneehole writing-table with rows of drawers in
its pedestals, and official-looking ledgers upon it, also files of
papers, dispatch-cases, three big inkstands, and the shining metal
pillar of a telephone transmitter, the base of which the officer gripped
with his right hand as he leaned forwards, sharply scrutinising you.
The hand was large and muscular, with short, thick, crooked fingers,
covered with jewelled rings that sparkled in the sun.
Half a dozen other officers stood at some little distance behind the
seated personage.... Five out of the six wore the Service dress of
grey-green serge, with spiked helmets covered with the same material.
Badges, buckles, chain-straps, and the hilts of swords curved or
straight were dulled to rigorous uniformity, and belts, gloves, and
boots were of earth, not tan-coloured, brown. Thus much Bawne grasped,
but of these individualities, save one, he got no clear impression. You
were obliged to look at, and think of, the man sitting in the chair.
Those strange eyes stung as they fastened on you and sucked at you,
somehow making you think of a tiger lurking in a cave of ice. They were
shadowed by the peak of a grey-green field-cap, with an edge of vivid
crimson showing above its deep band of silver lace, oakleaf and
acorn-patterned. He wore a loose grey overcoat with silver buttons,
thrown open to reveal a grey-green single-breasted Service jacket with a
turn-down collar edged with silver lace and faced with crimson, and a
glittering decoration dangling below the hook. But as he was of the
short-necked, fleshy type of man, and kept his head well down and thrust
forward, staring you out of countenance over a grizzled moustache with
upright, bushy ends--and all the light in the room came from overhead,
the decoration was obscured by the shadow of his chin. A sharp chin,
meagrely modelled, with a cleft in the middle, suggesting petulance and
vanity. The chin of a mediocre actor of romantic parts.
"So you are the boy?"
The tobacco-stained teeth in the mouth under the dyed moustache were
filled and patched with gold that glittered when he spoke to you. There
was a flash of yellow metal now as he added:
"You do not answer, no? Come nearer, boy!"
His legs, short, thick legs in grey riding-breeches and brown boots with
beautiful spurs of gold and steel, stuck out towards you under the
table. As you stepped out briskly to lessen the distance between you,
he pulled the legs back sharply, and a handsome, dark young officer,
standing on his right, put out a brown-gloved hand warningly, as though
the border of the big Turkey rug on which stood the kneehole
writing-table were a frontier-line that must not be crossed.
As he did this, the seated man glanced round at him, nodding approval,
and the pale, jagged seam of a scar on his left cheek showed plainly
against the dark, harsh, fever-dry skin. With the slewing of his head
the decoration hanging by a swivel at the collar of his single-breasted
Service jacket flashed into the light. Bawne saw a large Maltese Cross
eight-pointed and blue-enamelled, having a black eagle, with outspread
wings, between each arm. Crossed swords in diamonds were above,
surmounted by a diamond Crown Imperial. And a black and white ribbon
supported another Cross of plain black edged with silver, at a
buttonhole of the Norfolk-cut jacket of grey-green. Possibly the boy had
guessed in whose presence he stood, even before the young officer, at an
impatient signal from his master, said in excellent English:
"I am commanded to tell you that you are in the presence of the Emperor
of Germany."
*CHAPTER XLVIII*
*PATRINE IS ENGAGED*