I hear an imperious voice say, “Come down, Fräulein.” The blue-coated
attaché is standing beneath my window, backed by a guard of soldiers,
not in their spiked helmets, as usual, but in their soft round caps.
Needless to say, I hasten to go down. The moment I had feared all along
has come at last.
“Who are you?” he says, looking straight into my eyes as though trying
to read my very soul.
“I am an Englishwoman,” I answer.
“Dasz sieht mann gerade aus” (That is self-evident), he replies sternly.
“Do you speak English?” I ask, just to gain time.
“I know all languages,” he says stiffly, “but now we will talk German.”
“Very well.”
“What are you doing in Manhay?”
“I am here for pleasure.” Such an imbecile reply makes the attaché
glance at me even more suspiciously.
“Have you papers?”
“Yes.” I fly up to my room, fetch out a visiting card and a Lloyd’s
bank-book and take them down to him.
He turns them over. “This bank, I have never even heard of it,” he
says. “You come from London?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know the German bank——”
Here he utters some unpronounceable name.
“I have never heard of it,” I say in my turn.
His suspicions increase. I have to answer every conceivable question
until I flatter myself I convince him, by my extremely naïve replies,
that I am not even intelligent enough to be a spy.
He dismisses the soldiers, but continues talking to me.
“If only the English had stood in with us,” he says regretfully, “we
could have swept the world together.”