Late that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to
Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a
nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed."
Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new
lodging, with the avowed intention of taking him home and seeing that he
was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly
refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene.
In the midst of it, in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably
established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian in a few faint
sentences put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the
morning.
"Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me."
In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to
find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily
by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back into his
mother's favor.
"Do they meet, those two?" Arthur asked.
"My mother and Nan? Rather. They get along like a house afire."
If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little
talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy
evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged
circles of British shell shortage at the Front. The Germans had shells
to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby;
five hundred casualties, the papers said.
In spite of all the evil news, Julian was better. You could read that in
his mother's face.
"I believe he'll be able to go over to America early in the new year,"
she said.
"To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed.
"It would be everything to have him out of England till the war is
over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my
eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the
law and the prophets, but so a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't
you agree?"
"Then--they're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out.
"Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything?
The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we shouldn't like it, so I
took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said
the lady reflectively. "She _must_ have been confused, for what do you
think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she
would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure
that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for
him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can I _help_ caring
about anybody with such a perfectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Wasn't
that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James
see it as I did, and that it would all come right."
Julian's way of helping it all to "come right" was to employ his
convalescence in carrying on the propaganda from his sick bed with
unabated ardor; or, rather, an ardor increased by the excitement of its
transmission largely through Nan Ellis.
That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given her recurred to
him again and again. Messenger, indeed! carrying contraband, not to say
high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street!
The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made
the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That
was the heart-breaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would
come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from
semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news.
Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the
more private hour.
Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and
without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between
Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to
allow them any more to discuss these things. And here was some one
wholly forgetting, if she had ever heard, that constraint-breeding,
melancholy fact; some one who pronounced the words abhorred in an even,
every-day voice, smiled the while, and sat at her ease. Too newly Julian
had skirted death for his mother not to make shift to endure that which
first brought back the hues and lights of life to the corpse-white
face.
Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in
face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn
bed-table.
During one of Napier's visits, he had seen her rise and leave the room.
When she came back, she found Julian laughing as he hadn't for many a
day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of
persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women
know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick.
Sometimes the messenger didn't spare the mixed audience in Berkeley
Street a graver, more passionate mood.
"Mr. Lazenby was wonderful, talking about the awful casualty lists, and
the way sheer hate is shriveling up men's minds. I do wish you'd heard,
Julian, what he said about America and what President Wilson might do
for peace."
"By minding his own affairs and not interfering with our blockade? Yes."
For once Lady Grant and her enemies were in accord.
"I told them," Nan went on, smiling at Julian, "that you said the
President had the greatest opportunity in all history. 'Eggs-actly!'"
she lifted and brought down her slim arm in accurate reproduction of
Lazenby's sledgehammer gesture: "'The President of the United States is
the man to go for!' They had cheered that. '--The man with a more
absolute power and a greater range of action that any ruler on the earth
to-day!'"
"Just so!" Lady Grant's deep voice came down more quietly but hardly
less heavy than Lazenby's hammer, "--Raging socialists building all
their hopes on the irresponsible Despot."
"Oh.... Despots!" Miss Nan appeared to pass these gentlemen in mental
review. "Do you know, they've done something more outrageous than ever?"
Now we'll have it, Gavan thought to himself. He had been conscious on
this particular evening of an undercurrent of emotion in the smooth
stream of the girl's talk--a peculiar shining in her eyes, that
perplexed him. It certainly wasn't happiness. She was for once keeping
back something.
"I told you," she said suddenly to Julian, with that new intimacy which
seemed to clear the room of other occupants, "I told you Mr. Oswin
Norfolk's book was practically finished. Yes. Well, the authorities
aren't going to let it be published."
"_What!_" Julian very nearly leaped out of bed. "Suppress the greatest
contribution to sane thinking since 'Progress and Poverty'? To dare to
ban the 'Philosophy of Force' and pretend we are fighting for liberty!"
"You ought not to have told him," Lady Grant reproached the girl.
Julian caught his mother up. "Not tell me? Of course she had to tell me.
She knows if she didn't bring me the news here, I'd have to go where I
could depend on getting it."
His mother exchanged looks with Gavan.
"I told them what _I'd_ do." Nan said it with that little catch of
excitement in her voice. "I'd get Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book over to
America. They wouldn't be afraid to publish it over there."
"Why should they? The _Americans_ aren't standing in the breach," said
Lady Grant, with heightened color.
Nan looked away. Her mouth quivered a little. It was clear that she was
reminding herself, Julian's mother!
"America! The very thing!" In the baggy dressing-gown Julian had twisted
the upper part of his thin body sidewise, leaning towards the messenger.
"The trouble is," she began in a lower voice, and then hesitated.
"What's the matter?" His impatience made him irritable. "You aren't so
silly as to suppose we can't say what we like before Gavan and my
mother?"
"No, oh, no," she answered with a haste that convicted her. "I was just
going to tell you Mr. Norfolk seems to think"--and for all Julian's
assurance and her own acceptance of it, her voice sank--"the mails
aren't safe."
"Not safe?"
She shook her head.
"Not any more. Mr. Norfolk says there's a--a supervision already."
"What?"
"Oh, not openly."
"A secret censorship! Hah! Hear that?" he challenged his friend. "That's
what your policy's come to!"
"What makes Norfolk think--" Gavan began at his calmest.
"He doesn't think. He knows." There was a little pause. "Things don't
get through. And the things that don't get through, they're always, he
says, things of a certain kind." She broke the strain of the next few
moments' silence. "I said if they didn't trust the mails why shouldn't
Mr. Norfolk take his book over along with your 'League of Nations
Manifesto' that they're all so wanting to get into President Wilson's
hands. They asked me what I thought the inspectors would be doing while
Mr. Norfolk was walking about with contraband literature under his arm.
Did you ever hear such an excuse? I said: 'Do you think the inspectors
would stop you? Well, the inspectors wouldn't stop _me_!' Yes," she
added in a slightly offended tone, "they laughed, too. I didn't mind
that so much as to see them accepting the--interference, and just
sitting there. Talking! It made me wild. 'Do you really _want_ to get
that into the President's hands?' I asked them. 'Very well. You give it
to me.'"
"You'd take it!" The involuntary exclamation slipped over Gavan's lips.
Julian hadn't needed to ask.
"You darling!" He held out his hand.
"Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr.
Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's
"Manifesto," then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was
still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It
would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they
said."
"They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Arthur,
seriously.
"_What_ risk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British
Government hasn't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own
country. Besides, they wouldn't find it. And suppose they did, the
English couldn't shoot me. I told them this afternoon, '_I'm_ not bound
by your horrid war regulations.' But no," she said lugubriously through
the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody's afraid."
"Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining
in his moved face. "It's a great bond."
Gavan recognized the fact now, and all its implications, that Julian,
with his pale halo of martyrdom, was able to draw closer to the girl
than anybody else on her idealist side. Politics? She wasn't thinking
about the future of governments and the stamp to be set on civilization,
Napier told himself. She was thinking that bayonet work was cruel and
revolting. She was prepared to let the great ideals be bayonetted like
the babies of the Belgian stories, rather than let the war go on!
The last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening
toward the end of January, about half-past six. Julian's convalescence,
not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The
newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting:
"Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the
Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs.
"And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's
library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being
pelted."
She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full
of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America
and the labor parties everywhere.
Away from that slavery to sickroom sensibilities, Gavan couldn't bear
it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment
against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the
home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the
peacemongers weren't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude
in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to
Sir William, who had just lost his second son!
"Not Niel! Oh, Gavan, Niel!"
"Yes, blown to atoms at Soissons."
"Niel! Niel, too!" she cried. "If only they had been able to stop it in
time!"
"Stop it! Stop men from going into a war like this! I'm not an idealist
myself,"--he couldn't, to save his life, keep bitterness out of his
voice--"but I do know there have been men who went into this war to
defend the weak and to right wrong. A good many of those men can't speak
for themselves any longer--" For a moment even Gavan couldn't speak for
them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists--nearly
every friend I had."
"Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian."
"Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And
now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go."
He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not
saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they
fight on, some of them because--other men have died and mustn't have
died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. It's the dead call the
loudest, 'Come, join up!'"
The tears stood in her eyes, but she shook her head.
"The dead can't speak for themselves. I wish they could.
Soldiers--people who've been in it--aren't half so hot for going on with
the struggle as a civilian like you."
"I'm _not_ a civilian. I'm gazetted to the Scottish Borderers. This is
the last time I'll see you."
"Oh, Gavan!" She held up her shaking hands.
He longed to beg her forgiveness, to say he hadn't meant in the very
least to tell her like that; but all he could do was to explain, "The
last, I mean, till I get my first leave," he ended in his most casual
voice.
"Oh, Gavan!" she repeated. And then she turned abruptly and went out of
the room. Left him standing there. Not even good-by.
* * * * *
It had been hard enough for Gavan to arrange it even before that awful
news about Niel.
"You aren't fit," Sir William had stormed. When he calmed down a little,
he went and had another talk with the doctor. No medical man who knew
his business would pass Mr. Napier, Sir William was told; but the need
for officers was great. Mr. Napier would have his way. In the final
issue Sir William had his.
The very same evening of the interview with Nan this new thing had been
sprung on Napier.
Something, Sir William said, that Gavan could do for the country that
the country needed more than it needed another amateur officer at the
Front. Gavan was to go to America by the first ship on a secret mission.
The newly commissioned officer protested with all his might. He had no
experience of missions, secret or otherwise; he had no experience of
America. Nevertheless, there were others in high places who agreed with
Sir William. In the scarcity of suitable men at that particular crisis,
and in view of the confidence felt in Napier by the authorities, they
were in agreement as to the advisability of despatching him, in addition
to the practical expert from the Admiralty already over there, to pay a
private visit to America, in the course of which certain government
contracts for munitions of war were to be effected--_quietly_, without
rousing pro-German opposition.
The exigency was put to Napier in a way difficult to meet. He had
himself seen regiments of men in training for months in civilian
clothes, and who had never held a firearm in their hands. He had seen an
entire camp drilling with dummy rifles. He was aware of the lack even of
the plants necessary to turn out rifles to equip a quarter of the
recruits called for. And now Sir William told him the secret of the
shortage of ammunition for British troops already at the Front.
"We've sent our men out there to face the German guns, and our men
_can't reply_! We've got to have guns and shells and rifles ...
everything. We've got to get them from America. _You've_ got to get them
from America; you and Jameson."
Sir William quoted yet another reason besides the main ones given, for
Gavan Napier's being the man to go; his personal friendship with one of
the chief of that group called "Steel Kings" overseas.
As usual in the case of projects with which William McIntyre had most to
do, this one was quickly shaped and smartly carried through. Time was
the essence of Napier's mission to America, not only in view of the
needs of our men in France, but in order that neither the other neutral
governments nor the Central empires should know of the attempt to tide
over the interval of scarcity before the munition plants of Great
Britain should be established and the output secure.
The night before he left England, Napier received his final sailing
orders during a tete-a-tete dinner with Sir William at the club. The
privacy of those last minutes was broken in upon by Tommy Durrant,
hot-foot on Sir William's traces. Tommy was just back from the Front.
Something ought to be done, according to Tommy, to lessen the
ineffectiveness of the inspectors of refugees crossing over to England.
He retailed the story then going the rounds about a man who spoke
Walloon all right, arm bandaged, sling--all that sort of thing. Somebody
on the boat didn't like the look of him, and had the wit to ask to see
his wound. He was very sensitive about showing his wound. It was not
unnatural, "doctor's orders," and that kind of thing. An R. A. M. C. man
got the landing authorities to insist. Fearful shindy! Fella's arm as
sound as Tommy's own. Didn't Sir William believe it? Very well, then.
Not five hours ago, as Tommy was waiting to get through the barrier on
this side, he had noticed a Belgian nun. He'd seen lots of nuns. Why
should he have noticed this one? Couldn't make out till she turned her
head with a backward look just as she disappeared. "And it was that
woman who used to be at your house, Sir William; the governess."
Napier's heart failed him for one sick moment. To be leaving England at
the very moment of Greta von Schwarzenberg's return! Tommy was asking
Sir William why "a lady _like that_" should be coming back here in
disguise. Surely there was something very fishy about it.
"Well, you say you've reported to Scotland Yard. Let them deal with it!"
Sir William rattled his seals impatiently.
Poor Tommy was having no success at all with his news. It was plain that
Sir William was more annoyed at being made a participant than at the
fact itself. Napier couldn't refrain from warning him.
"She'll be trying to get into communication with Miss Ellis--with
Madge."
Tommy, more considerate, soothed Sir William.
"She won't risk that, whatever's the explanation of her slinking back.
She'll lay low for a while, anyway." Tommy registered his conviction,
"She saw I'd recognized her, and didn't love me for it."