FORCE
He knocked sharply at the stateroom door and called, "Karen! It is I!
Open!"
She flung open the door, satchel in hand, and he entered, closed the
door, relocked it, and dropped down on the lounge, staring at space.
"Kervyn! What is it?" she asked faintly, one hand against her breast.
"It is all right," he said--"as far as we are concerned--for the
present, anyway. God! I can't realize it--I can't get over it----"
"What, Kervyn?" she faltered, kneeling on the lounge beside the half
dazed man. "What happened? Why are you so ghastly pale? Are we really
quite safe? Or are you trying to make it easier for me----"
"No; you and I are safe enough for the moment," he said. "But men are
dying out yonder. The sea is full of dead men, Karen. And--I saw it
all."
"I heard guns. What has happened?"
"I don't know. It was a mine perhaps, perhaps a torpedo. A ship has been
blown up." He lifted his head and turned to her: "But you are not to say
such a thing to anybody--after I leave you at Trois Fontaines."
"No, Kervyn."
"Not to anybody. Not even to your father. Do you understand me, Karen?"
"No. But I won't tell anybody."
"Because," he explained wearily, "the Admiralty may have reasons for
concealing it. If they mean to conceal it, this ship of ours will be
stopped again and held for a while in some French or British port."
"Why?"
"So that the passengers cannot talk about what they saw tonight."
His haunted glance fell on the satchel at their feet. "As for that," he
said, "I've had enough of it, and I'll take no further chances. Where
are our passports?"
"Locked in with the other papers. I was all ready to throw them out of
the port when you knocked."
"Unlock the bag now. I'll get rid of the whole business," he said
bluntly.
"Kervyn--I can't do that."
"What?" he exclaimed.
"I can't destroy those papers if there is a chance of getting through
with them. I gave my promise, you know."
The dull surprise in his eyes changed gradually to impatience.
"If another ship stops us, they'll have to go overboard, anyway."
"We may not be stopped again. If we are, we have time."
"Karen."
"Yes--dear?"
A slight flush came into his haggard face; he hesitated, looked up at
her where she was kneeling on the sofa beside him. "Dear," he said
gently, "I have never intended that you should carry those papers to
your father, or to anybody else."
"I don't quite understand you."
"Try to understand. I am a friend to England--even a closer friend
to--Belgium."
"I know. But you are _my_ friend, too."
"Devotedly, Karen." He took hold of her hand; she slipped down to the
sofa and settled there beside him with a little air of confidence which
touched and troubled him.
"I _am_ your friend," he said. "But there is another friendship that
demands first of all the settlement of prior obligations. And, if these
obligations conflict with any others, the others must give way, Karen."
"What do you mean?"
"The obligations of friendship--of--of affection--these must give way
before a duty more imperative."
"What duty?"
"Allegiance."
"To--whom?"
"To the country in which my race had its origin."
"Yes.... But America is neutral, Kervyn."
"I mean--Belgium," he said in a low voice.
"Belgium! Are you then Belgian?" she asked, amazed.
"When Belgium is in trouble--yes."
"How can you be loyal to two countries?"
"By being loyal to my own manhood--and to the God who made me," he
answered in a low voice.
"You feel so deeply about this war?"
"Nothing on earth could stir me as deeply, Karen. Unless--America were
in danger."
"I--I can't understand."
"Let me help you. My family was Belgian. For many years we have been
good and loyal Americans. America means home. But, nevertheless, we
inherit obligations toward the country of our origin which, so far, time
has not extinguished.... When I became of military age I went to Belgium
and served my time in the Belgian army. Then I went--home. My father did
it before me. My grandfather before him. My younger brother will do it,
God willing. It is our custom to fulfill our obligations," he added with
a faint smile, "even when those obligations seem to others a trifle
fanciful and old-fashioned."
She bent her fair head in silence, considering for a space, her hand
resting rather lifelessly in his. And, after a few moments: "But how
does all this interfere with our friendship?" she asked innocently.
"It does not.... Only I could not let you take those papers to Germany,
Karen."
"But I've promised."
"You promised to do it if it were possible." He lifted her hand to his
lips. "But--it has become impossible, Karen."
"Another ship may not interfere."
"No. But I must--interfere."
"You! _Kervyn!_"
"Dear--I _must_."
"_Betray_ me?"
"Karen! Karen! What are you saying?"
"If you take my papers away you betray our friendship!"
"I have told you that there is a higher obligation than friendship. Even
_your_ friendship, Karen."
"You--you mean to take my papers from me?"
"Yes, dear."
"By--by _violence_?"
"Karen! Look at me!"
She gave him a white, breathless glance, wrenched her hand from his,
stooped suddenly, seized the satchel, and, gathering it against her
breast, clasped both arms around it. Then she looked him straight in the
eyes.
"Yes," he said, "that is the only way. You must keep your word to the
last and do your best. Only--remember that what I do now has no bearing
whatever upon our friendship. I--I care for you--at this moment--more
than I ever did. So--forgive me--Karen----"
"I never shall! Kervyn! Kervyn--think what you are doing!----"
He encircled her with his left arm, and with his right hand he gathered
both of her slender wrists in his grasp and held them. The satchel
rolled from her knees to the floor.
"Kervyn!" she cried, "think what you are doing!" She looked up into his
set face where he held her crushed against his shoulder. "I am your
friend. Think what you are doing! I--I care--so much--for you!"
"And I for you, Karen.... Is that the key around your neck on that blue
ribbon?"
"You shall not have it. Oh, Kervyn! Kervyn!" she gasped--"what are you
doing to our friendship! What are you doing!"
[Illustration: "'Kervyn! Kervyn--Think what you are doing!--'"]
The struggle was already over; with his left arm he held both of her
arms pinned tightly to the supple body which lay panting against him,
while with his other hand he untied the narrow blue bow-knot at her
throat and freed the tiny key. Then he released her. They both were
deadly pale. She dropped back among the pillows and lay there staring at
him. There was in the white calm of her face an expression almost
pleasant.
"So--you have done it," she said in a curiously altered voice, but her
lips scarcely moved when she spoke.
He did not answer, but in her level eyes he saw blue lightning glimmer.
"You did your best," he said. "Your conscience is clear. Nobody can
reproach you."
"Do you understand," she said in a low, expressionless voice, "that I am
your enemy?"
"Do you reason that way, Karen?"
"Reason?"
"Yes. Reason it out, Karen, before you come to such a conclusion."
She said, very quietly: "A woman takes a shorter cut to her conclusions
than by reasoning. As I did with you ... when I gave you my friendship
... unasked--" She turned her head swiftly, and sat for a moment while
the starting tears dried in her eyes, unshed. They dried slowly while
the battle raged within her--combat of mind and heart with every
outraged instinct in arms, every emotion, every impulse. Pride, belief,
faith, tenderness--all desperately wounded, fought blindly in the
assault upon her heart, seeming to tear it to a thousand bleeding
fragments.
Perhaps, like the fair body of Osiris, it was immortal--a deathless,
imperishable thing--or that what had come into it had become
indestructible. For, after her heart lay in burning fragments within
her, she turned and looked at him, and in her eyes was all the tragedy
of her sex--and all its never-ending mystery to men.
"I must end what I have begun," he said gently.
"Does it matter, now?"
"I don't know, Karen. I have no choice--even when your hatred threatens
me.... I suppose it will be that, when I unlock your satchel."
He picked it up and fitted the key to the lock. As he opened it, a faint
fresh fragrance came from it, as though he was violating the delicate
intimacy of this young girl herself.
But he set his jaws; she saw the cheek muscles tighten; and he drew from
the satchel two flat envelopes. One contained the forged passports, and
he placed these in his breast pocket, then looked steadily at her.
"Our friendship breaks with those seals," she said unsteadily.
"Karen--I cannot help it."
"Yes, you can help it.... Kervyn!... Wait! I will--will say--that it is
more than friendship that breaks--" She caught her breath and her lip
quivered--"I--I have the courage to say it--if it means anything to
you--if it will help----"
His face reddened, then it grew pallid and expressionless.
"Even that," he said, "must stand aside.... Karen, from the moment I saw
you I have been--in love with you."
And, looking her steadily in the eyes, he broke the seals.
When the last seal broke she gave a little cry, turned and covered her
eyes with both hands.
As for Guild, he stood with a sheet of paper in his hands, staring at
the tracery which covered it and which meant absolutely nothing to him.
Then he looked at the remaining sheets of paper. None had any
significance to him. There were three sheets of thin translucent paper.
These sheets were numbered from one to three.
The first seemed to be a hasty study from some artist's sketch book. It
appeared to be a roughly executed and hasty sketch of several rather
oddly shaped trees--a mere note jotted down to record the impression of
the moment--trees, a foreland, a flight of little hedge birds.
[Illustration]
On it, in English, the artist had written "Sunset." Indeed, the
declining and somewhat archaic sun on the horizon and the obviously
evening flight of the birds seemed to render the label unnecessary.
For a long while Guild stood studying it in the light of the stateroom
ceiling lamp. And what continually arrested his attention and perplexed
him was the unusual shapes of the trees and the un-birdlike flight of
the birds. Also artists don't sketch on such paper.
Now and then he looked across at Karen with an inscrutable expression,
and each time he looked at her his face seemed to grow more rigid and
his set jaws more inflexible.
The girl crouched in the corner of the lounge, her face covered by both
hands and pressed against the pillows.
He did not speak to her. Presently he turned to the next paper. It bore
the rough sketch of a fish, and was numbered 2.
[Illustration]
It was a wretched drawing, intended, evidently, to resemble an old pike
and three young ones. What it meant he had no idea. He passed to the
third and last sheet of paper, and it instantly held his attention.
On it was depicted a figure, which he supposed was the artist's idea of
a Japanese dancing girl. She held a fan in her left hand. Over her
extended right hand a butterfly hovered.
[Illustration]
But what interested and concentrated Guild's attention was not the very
amateurish drawing, but the series of silly decorations on the paper
above her head--a number of quartered circles inclosed in squares and
oblongs.
[Illustration]
As decorations they meant nothing, indicated nothing, except that the
intellect responsible for them must be a meagre one.
But as a cipher message these doubly bisected circles promised anything.
This is what Guild saw and what caused him to seat himself on the sofa
beside the girl who still lay huddled over her pillows, her face hidden
in her hands.
Seated, he drew out the portfolio containing his letters and a notebook.
Then, slipping a lead-pencil from the leather socket and tearing out a
sheet of paper, he started work--using the leather-backed book for a
support--on a cipher which looked to be impossible. Yet, all ciphers are
solved by the same method. And he knew it.
[Illustration]
The first thing he did was to find his "numbers" in the mass of
quartered circles. And, working steadily, swiftly, but intelligently, he
had, in the course of an hour, discovered, separated and jotted down,
nine of the quartered disks which he believed to represent numbers; and
one extra disk which he supposed to be zero. And he numbered each symbol
accordingly: merely eliminating all lines except those bisecting the
smaller circles. This gave him in order
[Illustration]
The next thing to do was to find what letters those numbers, or
combinations of numbers, represented.
For a while he tried English, but arrived at no convincing result. So he
tried German, first making a list of the letters which were likely to
occur most frequently in the written language and then trying them with
the symbols which occurred most frequently in the manuscript before him.
He found that the first symbol represented the figures 21.
[Illustration]
The twenty-first letter of the alphabet is _u_. He wrote it.
The next symbol was
[Illustration]
for which he substituted the figures 14. The fourteenth letter of the
alphabet is _n_. He had, so far, two letters, _u_ and _n_, to experiment
with.
He had sat for several minutes gazing absently at these two letters
when, like a shot, it struck him that the French word for the number,
one, was spelled _un_. Could the key of the cipher be French? He
separated and jotted down the next combination of disks
[Illustration]
which gave him the numbers 19. The nineteenth letter of the alphabet is
_s_. He wrote it.
The next symbol was
[Illustration]
or the figure 9. The ninth letter of the alphabet is _i_.
The next symbol was
[Illustration]
which, translated, gave him 24. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet
is _x_.
He now had the letters _s-i-x_. And no sooner had he written them in
order than the word six stared him in the face and he flushed with pure
excitement.
He had now two words, _un_ and _six_. The chances were that he was
somewhere on the right track and he fell to work with a concentration
and ardour which left him oblivious to everything else--to time and
place, and to the silent, motionless little figure huddled over the
pillows beside him.
[Illustration: A Fragment from Guild's Notebook]
At the end of an hour--checked twice--but finally overcoming apparent
defeat, and always following the same method of deduction, he came to an
end of his symbols, and he found the leaf from his notebook was covered
with the following words in order of symbol:
Un, six douze cinq cinq vingt, douze quinz'
vingt-un sept eight, nineteen vingt trois nine douze
douze twenty-five, eight cinq trois eight vingt, six
quinze douze douze quinze vingt-trois, deux nine
eighteen quatre nineteen.
For these numerals spelled out capriciously in either abbreviated French
or English he substituted numbers in the sequence given:
"1--6--12--5--5--20--12--15--21--7--8--19
--23--9--12--12--25--8--5--3--8--20--6--15
--12--12--15--23--2--9--18--4--19."
Then for the figure 1 he wrote the first letter of the alphabet--_A_.
For the number six he wrote the sixth letter of the alphabet _F_. For
the number 12, the twelfth letter of the alphabet _L_.
And when he had written letters for every figure in order given he had
on his sheet of paper
A FLEETLOUGHSWILLYHECHTFOLLOW
BIRDS
After a while he separated the words _A_, _Fleet_, _Follow_, and
_Birds_, leaving the unintelligible sequence of letters
LOUGHSWILLYHECHT.
Out of this, for a long while, he could make nothing, until, by chance,
taking the last five letters together, it suddenly occurred to him that
the German word for pike was HECHT. Then, in a flash, he remembered the
badly drawn picture of a pike and its young. Pike or Hecht, that was one
of the words in all probability. But what _other_ word the word Hecht
represented he could not imagine.
He looked at his notebook again. The letters remaining were LOUGHSWILLY.
They meant absolutely nothing in any language he had even heard of. He
studied what he already had--A Fleet (Blank) Pike Follow Birds. A _pike_
follow _Birds_--_birds_--and swift as lightning a thought struck him
which set him tingling to his finger-tips: somewhere in that rough,
hasty, and apparently innocent sketch in which oddly shaped trees and a
line of little birds figured, lay the key to the whole thing.
He felt it, he _knew_ it. He spread out the drawing on his knees and
studied it with terrible concentration, conscious somehow or other that
something about it, something _in_ it, was vaguely familiar to him.
_What?_ Had he ever before seen another sketch by the same hand? He
could not recollect. It was like millions of rough, hasty sketches
jotted down by painters as notes for their own guidance only and not for
others to see.
What was there about it unusual? The trees? The _shapes_ of the trees.
Ah! he was getting nearer the goal--he realized it, felt it, and,
balked, fell into a mental rage for a moment.
Then his habitual self-command returned; he squared his jaws, gazed
grimly at the trees, and forced himself once more to answer his own
questions.
The shapes of the trees, then, were unusual. He had gotten that far.
What was unusual in their shapes? The trunks and branches? No. The
foliage. No. The outline!
"God!" he whispered. And he had it.
Over the sofa was hanging a map of the British Isles and of the Western
coast of Europe. Dotted lines indicated the course taken by the Holland
Line steamers. He reached up, unhooked it, looked at it, then at the
drawing in his hand.
Then he detached half of the thin sheet of paper on which the sketch was
drawn and laid it over the sketch. Being translucent to the verge of
transparency, he could see the drawing beneath the thin sheet covering
it.
Then, with his pencil, he steadily traced the _outlines_ of the trees.
When he had done this and had removed the sketch from beneath his
tracing-paper he had what he expected--an _outline_ of the British
Isles, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands; part of the coast of Norway,
the French, Belgian and Dutch coast. Heligoland, and the German coast at
Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven.
From the map of the steamship company he carefully filled in boundaries
and a few principal towns, then placing his outline drawing over the
sketch of the trees he drew a dotted line following exactly the flight
of the little birds.
Where that flight terminated he made an arrow, then turned his eyes on
the steamer map to find out where that arrow's point rested.
And there on the Irish coast he saw the name Lough Swilly!
It was the last link!--the last but one.
"A Fleet Lough Swilly. Hecht (Pike) follow birds."
A pike, with little pike following her, was to follow the flight of the
birds--the dotted line on his outline map. The dotted line curved up out
of Cuxhaven, around the Orkneys and Hebrides and into Lough
Swilly--_where there was a fleet_!
[Illustration]
Out of Cuxhaven--_Cuxhaven!_ where lay the German submarines!--A pike,
and young! A parent ship and submarines!
The last link was forged; the chain complete--not quite--not entirely.
The Japanese dancing girl? And under the number of the sketch, 3,--were
three symbols. They were junks with latten sails.
Perhaps there were three Japanese battleships at Lough Swilly. It didn't
matter; the chain was complete enough for him.