"Schwarzenberg and her friends will be a little straitened for a while
after this," said Taylor.
The expression "her friends" grated on Napier, and Napier was already in
a restless, uncertain mood. Taylor had noticed that. Significant as both
men "deemed" the interview with the President, Napier had hurried over
it to canvass and sift the Hahn adventure.
Taylor, lounging on the sofa, sipped his liqueur at his ease. How did he
know the bulk of the bureau's money went into Schwarzenberg's pocket?
Two reasons. First, she'd earned it. Languishing business doing a
roaring trade from the moment she took hold. Second, the fellow she set
to watch the rogues she'd put in charge was a rogue himself.
"Oh, we've deserved well of our country in blocking up a few of those
rat-holes," Taylor concluded.
"My interest in it," Napier paused to say, "wasn't pure patriotism. It's
made me pretty sick to see this Miss Ellis--rather a friend of mine she
is, very intimate with my chief's family--so hopelessly taken in. I had
an idea this bureau business might show up--"
Taylor abandoned his lounging posture. He sat looking at Napier very
steadily out of his greenish eyes.
"Oh, I quite understand," Napier went on, "the exposure is too discreet
to be of any use to me."
"I should rather think so!" remarked Mr. Taylor.
"All the same, it isn't fair, leaving people like the Ellises in the
dark. The mother is off to the Pacific coast to-morrow." Napier added
that he was due at their hotel in half an hour. He was going to talk to
them, he said.
Still Taylor sat there, regarding his guest through a haze of cigar
smoke. "I thought," he said after a moment, "you mentioned that you
_had_ talked to them--to the girl, anyway."
"I said I'd told Miss Ellis what Singleton found in Schwarzenberg's box.
And God knows that _ought_ to have been enough--"
"Too much," said Taylor, quietly. "Of course they passed it on to
Schwarzenberg."
Napier doubted that. "You don't know the Ellises," he said, ignoring the
limitations of his own acquaintance. No, his mistake had not been in
telling too much. His mistake was that he hadn't told the Ellises
enough. He was going to repair the mistake to-night.
"How are you going to do that?" Taylor asked in the same careful tone.
By telling them--telling the girl, anyway--that he'd avoided telling her
before--the _proved_ desperate character of this woman's accomplices.
A peculiar fixity came into Taylor's green eyes.
"You can't pass on information we've put in your way here."
"Certainly not," returned Napier with some heat. "What I shall tell has
nothing whatever to do with you. I sha'n't hint bureau." Again he
consulted his watch. The time dragged.
"You'd mind, I suppose, giving me an idea what you do mean to hint?"
"I sha'n't hint at all. And I've come here to-night expressly to tell
you, first, that I mean the Ellises to know about Gull Island. About
Greta von Schwarzenberg's connection with it and with the man we found
there."
There was silence in the room.
"I dare say you are wondering why, in the face of the exigency, I've put
it off?"
Taylor had stopped smoking, but he said nothing.
"If I'd told her what I found Carl Pforzheim up to on Gull Island, she'd
have to know what became of Carl. Well, I'm now going to tell her."
"You can't do that!" Taylor had come to life. He leaned forward,
blinking his white lashes as if a cinder had blown in his eye.
"Why can't I?"
"For one thing, telling the Ellises would be as good as giving
Schwarzenberg the key to the whole Gull Island business."
"Well, why not? Do her good. Put the fear of God into her, perhaps. And
she can't spoil a game that's over and ended."
Taylor laid down his cigar.
"The Gull Island game," he said in his guarded voice, "_isn't_ over and
ended."
Napier stood waiting.
"We've got one of our best men there this minute, personating Carl
Pforzheim." Taylor nodded in the face of Napier's stark astonishment.
"Your friend Singleton. He's managed the Gull Island job from the
beginning. Went up again the day after you were there. Wirelessed the
German agent at Amsterdam that he'd had wind of a raid on the island. He
was going to destroy every trace and get out. Singleton saw to it that
the truth of that much was verified, and duly reported to the
Wilhelmstrasse. He promised them--still, of course, in the character of
Pforzheim--to get back to the island as soon as it was safe. Well, he
has got back."
"What the devil could he tell of any use to Germany that wasn't fatal to
us?" Napier demanded.
"You don't yet appreciate the situation," Taylor said softly. "It's a
post of special advantage just because the man in charge can choose his
own time to be there. He can give important information that reaches
Germany the merest trifle too late, or information that he knows they've
had already from another quarter. They're fond of verifying their
intelligence. And he tells them things they want to believe and can't
check--things they have to take his word for, things that will throw
dust in the eyes they count on seeing clearest. I tell you, Gull Island
is one of the cogs in the wheel of the British machine. You won't mind
if I'm frank? Well, then, you'd have hard work to commit any
indiscretion"--Taylor rubbed it in--"that would serve Schwarzenberg's
ends so well as to enable her to warn the Germans that a British decoy
was nesting in Carl Pforzheim's place."
As he stood there, a prey to increasing uneasiness, Napier had his
further glimpse of one of the disintegrating effects of wartime: the
unknown quantity in character. How that had been forced home! Taylor had
seemed "one of the best." No one in the British service was more
trusted, and, Napier's instinct told him, no one more justly. None the
less, Napier didn't see headquarters writing "all this" from the other
side.
"I suppose," he found himself saying, "I oughtn't to ask you how you
heard about the decoy duck on the island?"
"Well"--Taylor reflected an instant,--"after all, my instructions--yes,
I'll tell you. I have it on the best possible authority. Ernst Pforzheim
told me."
"Ernst! Ernst Pforzheim is in an English prison, or rather, he was
before--"
"Exactly. Before he became of such use to our side. Clever dog as that
fellow Singleton is, he couldn't have worked the Gull Island oracle
without Ernst Pforzheim's help."
Ernst had helped Singleton! No! no! there were limits. It was, anyway,
safe to say, "You must in that case rather deplore his death."
"What makes you think he's dead?" Taylor asked.
"His particular friend, Miss von Schwarzenberg, had the news yesterday."
"She had, had she? Ha! ha! The canny Ernst!" Taylor subdued his mirth to
say: "Just so. Wilhelmstrasse doesn't have the news. _We're_ all right;
and Master Ernst can go on drawing pay from two governments. Oh, he's a
very practical person, is Ernst. The situation is his own invention. A
piece of 'war economy,' he called it. 'You English hard up for
ammunition. Why waste it shooting a spy when he can give you more
valuable information than anybody in the German Secret Service?'"
"You can't seriously mean we were such fools as to trust a man like
that?"
"So far from trusting him, we keep him under surveillance every hour of
his life. Two of our men specially detailed."
"You aren't telling me he's over here!"
"Been here six weeks."
"Then he's a free man!"
Taylor smiled. "A man who's been doing the sort of business Ernst has,
is never a free man. Nobody knows better than Ernst how little his life
would be worth if he took any liberties. And why should he? This is his
harvest-time. He knows he'll get more out of us than--"
"Than out of Germany?"
"They'd ask very awkward questions of Ernst in Germany; he can evade
them here. But there's a day of reckoning waiting for Mr. Ernst in the
fatherland. No one knows better than he that he's safer with us, looked
after by two capital fellows, till after the war. Then off to South
America with a fat bank-account. And, by Jove! he'll have earned it! The
cheek of the devil! Except for one enterprise!" and Mr. Taylor chuckled
as he relit his cigar.
"We'd been wondering," he went on, "Macray and I, why the beggar had
grown so content never to go out. No more music, no theater, no smart
restaurants, and so far as _we_ could see, no reason on earth why, with
one or other of the men who stick to him day and night, he _shouldn't_
revisit his old haunts. Not he!" Again that pleased chuckle. "Not so
long as Greta von Schwarzenberg is circulating about New York!"
"Why, he and she are, or they were, thick as thieves."
Taylor nodded.
"And it would be undeniably useful to us to have that relation continue.
It's where our friend draws the line. 'All very well to laugh,' he says
to me, '_you_ don't know the woman. I do. _Nein, danke._' So he sits and
smokes and plays cards, drinks and overeats himself, and is losing his
figure. I can take you round any evening, and you'll see for yourself."
* * * * *
"I've come to say good-by." Napier stood before Nan Ellis in the great
public parlor of her hotel. More and more his most private experiences
of American life had seemed conditioned by the vast restlessness of
these places. He noticed that Nan, like many of her compatriots, was
able to achieve an obliviousness to such surroundings that amounted to a
kind of privacy.
Instead of relinquishing his hand, she had clutched it tighter: "You are
not going back to England?"
"What's the use of my staying here?"
"The use?" She let his hand go. Napier received the impression that the
lowering of her tone was less attributable to two or three other
absorbed groups seated about the great room, than to some sudden rush of
feeling that clouded her voice. "You are safe here."
He looked at her for a moment. Deliberately he shook off the impression
her tone more than her words had made. "No,"--he shook his head,--"I'm
far from safe where you can ring me up."
"You don't _like_ me to ring you up?"
He could have laughed if he'd been less oppressed. "It's no use. I see
I can't do anything to protect you. I might as well be on the other side
of the world."
"No! no!" she protested with an eagerness that caught her breath.
"Besides, you are very far from sure of _getting_ to the other side of
the world as things are."
His look of angry scorn, for the contingency implied, agitated her.
"Oh, _do_ believe me! This is a thing I know more about than you do."
"It isn't a knowledge you should have," he said sternly.
She swept the rebuke aside in her alarm. "Don't imagine," she said in
that strained undertone--"don't imagine the warnings in the papers
aren't serious. It is one of the things I couldn't write. Why didn't you
come and see me and my mother last Thursday?"
He was aware of being as little able now, to make idle conversation with
Nan, as he had been that night, after Taylor had barred all use of the
Gull Island evidence. He dropped out mumbled phrases, "Unexpected
business," having "to go to Washington," and was there anything else she
hadn't been able to write?
Yes, yes. There was a great deal more, more than she had any right to
say. But this much she must tell him: "You aren't to ask me how I know,
and you won't ask me to tell you more than I've a right to. I _have_ a
right!" She flashed an instant's defiance at some unseen opponent, "or
I'll take it, anyhow. The torpedoing is going to be extended. _Yes!_"
she said as though to convince her own shrinking incredulity as much as
his. "Neutral as well as enemy ships. They're going on till England is
as isolated as she's isolated Germany. If England won't believe that,
if England doesn't _realize_,"--she waited an instant as if to give him
time to throw out a life-line of hope to her proviso,--"then," she said
as she took in Napier's motionless figure and stern face--"then what's
before us is too horrible."
"I am glad you recognize the horror of the German policy."
"What good will that do!" she began hurriedly, "if you--" and then half
to herself: "But you simply _mustn't go_! You didn't know, perhaps," she
leaned nearer, "passenger-boats have been carrying guns."
"Really?" said Napier.
She nodded. "It's true. And that's why the Germans say they will sink
passenger-boats. So they can't be used any more by travelers, now that
they're warned."
"You see it as simple as that? Germany is to tell neutrals they are not
to travel even in neutral waters!"
"If we don't use passenger-boats _for_ passenger-boats, they aren't
passenger-boats any more." (Napier heard Schwarzenberg speaking.) "They
go loaded to the guards! Yes, war material for the Allies."
"If that is so, why is it? Would you see the Allies punished, enslaved,
because the Allies haven't, as Germany has, devoted the last forty years
to making and accumulating arms? Germany--"
"Oh, it's _America_ I'm thinking of--after you!" she threw in. "If
America's part is going to be just to grow rich and richer out of this
awfulness, I don't know how I shall bear it. And that's what I'm telling
Julian. But all that,"--she swept it aside with one of those quick
motions of a flashing hand,--"if I _beg_ you not to go--"
"It's no use," said Napier.
"Nothing I could say or _do_?"
He shook his head.
"Very well, then," she said with hurt mouth that quivered, "what is the
name of your boat?"
He considered a moment. "Don't you think it would be very indiscreet of
me to tell you?"
"It will be the discreetest thing you ever did in your life."
"Why do you want to know?"
"I want to know because"--again she bent to him--"because there's a
black-list." He saw her eyes bright with terror. "You must give me time
to find out...."
"I see," he interrupted. "You would like me to owe my life to Greta von
Schwarzenberg."
"To me, Gavan,"--the pallor of her face yielded to a sudden flush,--"if
you could bear that."
"I haven't decided on my boat," he said.
"But I thought you came to say good-by?"
He was going on a few weeks' tour on this side, he said.
Oh, the lightening in her face. He seemed bent only on teasing her a
little, in withholding the answer to her quick: "Whereabouts are you
going to tour?" When she had waited for the answer that didn't come she
said: "You're afraid I'll tell. Everybody's afraid every one else will
tell. Everybody's changed."
"Not Miss Greta, surely?"
"Greta as much as anybody," she flung out. And then, as though she
regretted that ebullition, she added hastily: "I suppose I mustn't ask
you--what next, after the few weeks' tour."
"Yes, you may ask that," Napier said, the smile going out of his eyes.
"France next."
They parted with no hint from him of the fact that one result of his
second visit to Washington had been an extension of the highly
successful unofficial mission.
For Taylor had been right in saying the old sharp demarcations between
government departments were being erased. More and more diplomacy
impinged on the twin provinces of trade and world finance. The astute
were beginning to see that the problem of munitions was own brother to
food supply, which in its turn was a matter of transport. In view of the
now frequent sinkings of Allied ships, not only South American meat,
wheat, but South American tonnage, might become of supreme importance in
a protracted war. Unfortunately, German influence had attained dangerous
proportions in those remote, fertile areas below the equator. Napier and
another unofficial British envoy received orders from home to proceed to
Rio on instructions from the British Ambassador at Washington.
He returned to New York early in May, to find the country in a state of
excitement such as the United States had not known since the
assassination of Lincoln. Some twenty-four hours before, the Germans had
torpedoed the _Lusitania_. Fifteen hundred lives had been sacrificed.
The effect on Napier was the effect on many. The _Lusitania_ dead
recruited tens of thousands.
On the afternoon of the day of his arrival in New York, Napier returned
to his hotel, having engaged passage to England by the next ship.
A lady, he was told, waited to see him. What lady was likeliest to have
news so quickly of his arrival? He shrank from the thought of Greta as
from something reptilian. It _couldn't_ be Greta on this day of all
days. And who else, but the being of all the world he most hungered to
see? So thinking, he made his way among the hosts of horror-stricken
people, one sole theme in every mouth, _Lusitania! Lusitania!_ Some, and
not one most voluble or outwardly most excited, uttered the word War
with an accent that Napier wished might have been heard across the
Rhine. He kept on telling himself that he knew it would be Nan he should
find waiting; but he was not prepared for the Nan he found, nor for that
low exclamation: "At last! At _last_!" nor for the shaken voice in
which she disposed of his question how had she known of his arrival.
"An arrangement with the clerk," she said, to ring her up as soon--
"Then _that_ was before!"--said Napier hungrily.
"Yes, before the awful news." A shuddering vagueness seemed to close
about her like a mist. It shut out the moment's shining at his coming.
He could see that blank horror at the tragedy obscured for the moment
everything else in life.
Only Napier, it seemed, felt the added strain of this coming and going
of excited people, the bringing in of telegrams, the dictating of
others. The girl paid no more attention to the other people scattered
about the great room, to their tension or their tears, than they to
hers. As she turned to throw her trembling body down in a chair by the
window, the look in her eyes startled Napier.
"And did you see what the papers said?" she demanded.
The terrible newspaper accounts, which he had not yet found time to
read, she had by heart. Behind that veil of nervous vagueness he caught
glimpses of the intensity of her realization--her participation, one
might almost say--in the scenes off the Irish coast.
"Had you any special friend on board?" he asked.
"Special fr--" she repeated in that low voice. And then her note climbed
quickly to what for her was the climax of the huge disaster. "They were
Americans!" So she confessed that limitation which a faulty imagination
sets to our humanity--a limitation she had imagined she despised.
"Americans they were, and innocent. I keep thinking most of the
children. There were such lots of children, Gavan, on that boat. I kept
seeing them all night long. I could hear their voices growing weaker--"
her own failed her for a moment. And when she found it again, it was a
different voice altogether, firm and bitter. "People say to me, 'the
_Lusitania_ was warned not to sail.'"
Yes, Napier had heard that was so.
"As if _that_ could excuse--it's what Greta says. 'They were warned,'
she keeps repeating. 'They disobeyed the warning.' The little children,
the babies disobeyed the German warning! Oh-h!" The small tightened fist
beat upon one knee to call back the self-control that threatened to
desert her. "I've had a horrible morning with Greta. She--something has
died in Greta. I'd been feeling ever since--" Again she broke off and
seemed to seize upon comparative commonplace to steady her nerves. "It
was true about her being married. She admitted it the day she read of
Mr. Guedalla's death in the paper. She got some money. It wasn't her not
telling us she was married; it was other things. Oh, I've been unhappy
enough! But this--_this_! Gavan, I couldn't get her to say it was
horrible. She wasn't even sorry. Oh, Gavan, _she was glad_!" The locked
fingers writhed in her lap. She seemed not to know that she was weeping.
"What do you think Greta said at last? 'It would be a lesson,' she said.
A lesson! To torture and kill fifteen hundred innocent people. A lesson
to the children! To little babies!" She turned her quivering face away a
moment. "I think," she said under her broken breath--"I think I should
have gone mad if you hadn't come back. Oh, I'm so glad you're back!"
* * * * *
He simply hadn't the courage at that moment to tell her he was going to
sail for England the following day. He told her in a very gentle note
sent late in the afternoon. They were to dine together.
She met him with steady looks.
"I've cabled to Julian," she said immediately, "that I'm coming back
with you."
The _Parnassian_ was to sail at ten.
Napier had stood outside the entrance to the dock, waiting for Nan,
since ten minutes past nine. At twenty minutes to ten there she was at
last.
"But where is your luggage?" he called out. He had warned her not to
trust it to other hands. In that second before the cab drew alongside
something in the face at the window prepared him for the answer. "That's
why I am late. I had to have everything taken off. And I tried to
telephone you. Just as I was leaving--this came." She held a paper
toward him as she got out of the cab. She stood there while he read:
I depend on your waiting till I come sailing to-day _Olympic_.
JULIAN.
As Napier looked up, speechless in that first moment, she whispered:
"Serves me right. Greta said, I was running away." She put out her hand
and steadied herself against the window-frame of the cab. "Where you're
going they shoot deserters, don't they! Well, I've been shot. Oh, not
fatally! just in the leg. Enough to stop me."
"You are going to wait for Julian?"
"What else is possible?" She hung her head. "He and the others, they've
depended on me. Well, they must not any more. And when he comes,"--her
breast heaved as she brought it out,--"I shall tell him something else."
"Tell Julian! What shall you tell Julian?"
The lifted eyes were swimming.
"That it's _you_. That to see you go without me breaks my heart."
"Nan!" he cried and pulled himself up with an effort that brought the
blood into his face. Other passengers, arriving late, for all their own
agitation at the prospect of some hitch in getting themselves and their
baggage on board, stared back over their shoulders at the leave-taking
out in the street.
Napier flung a "Wait!" to the cabman, and held his watch in one hand.
"Come," he said and took Nan by the arm. He walked her a little way from
the dock entrance.
"I think," he went on gravely, "I _wouldn't_ tell Julian. You see, Nan,
you've got to consider that I mayn't be coming back." He didn't look at
her. "What's the _use_ of telling Julian? Isn't there enough misery in
the world without adding to it?"
"That's what Julian and I think," she said, blurring her words. "Enough
misery in the world without war. You never cared about that old misery
as Julian did. And that's what makes it so--so--not to be borne that you
should feel you have to go and meet the new horror out there."
"Well, I do feel like that," he said.
"And yet it isn't any longer just duty. You want to go!" she cried. "I
saw that yesterday when we talked about the _Lusitania_."
"Yes," he said grimly, "I want to go."
"Well, so do lots of my countrymen." And Napier couldn't have told
whether dismay or pride was dominant in the new note. His hand slipped
down her arm and found her fingers. Napier's valet, Day, came running
out of the dock-gates. He looked distractedly across the wide, open
space before the slips.
"Yes!" Napier hailed him. "I'll be there!" He gripped her hand hard
before he let it go. "I'll have to run for it. Good-by." On an impulse,
whether mere instinct to cover his emotion or some obscurer working of
the mind behind his wretchedness, he caught Julian's cable out of her
hold. He held the paper in front of his misty eyes as he hurried toward
the dock entrance. The hour the message had been sent from London struck
him now for the first time. He halted suddenly. In a voice harsh with
the effort to keep it steady he called back: "Did Greta know that you
meant to go with me?"
"Yes," came the panting answer as the girl ran forward a few steps. "I
told her before I saw you that I couldn't bear it over here any longer.
And now you--you are leaving me!" She stopped.
"You'll lose the boat, sir!" Day called out.
Napier's last vision of Nan Ellis showed the girl still standing there
looking after him and sobbing openly in the street.
This cable, he knew now was no reply to Nan's. It was the reply to some
message sent hours earlier by Greta von Schwarzenberg.