Napier and Julian exchanged wireless messages as they passed each other
on the high seas. "Nan is waiting for you in New York," was Napier's
greeting.
When next Napier heard of either of them, he was in France; those two
were together in America. Then he heard of Nan's being in London "for
two weeks." Next she wrote him a line from New York: "Because Julian is
over-worked, and he's had horrid letters from home. Please write him
something cheerful."
Napier responded to this invitation by sending a sealed packet through
the foreign-office bag, giving a brief account of Greta von
Schwarzenberg's more pernicious activities. He ended by commending
Julian to Roderick Taylor for confirmation. The answer to this,
anxiously waited for, came in the form of a truly Julianesque
denunciation of all secret service: "As long as we employ spies we shall
suffer from spies." Greta, according to Julian, had been alarmed and
harried into associations alien to her nature. As to the incontestable
fact that after being deported, she had slipped back to England and had
crossed the ocean disguised as a Belgian, that was "our doing. If we go
interfering with freedom of travel, we must expect--" For his own part,
he was busied from morning till night about matters of major importance.
He had no time for fellows like Taylor. In some ways America was
disappointing, but England was going from bad to worse.
From one and all of Julian's letters of that period Napier gathered that
for refreshment in a very dusty time, Julian bathed his spirit in Nan
Ellis's unfailing sympathy and faith. Driven and harassed as Julian was,
alienated from his family, divided from old friends, with neither health
nor energy to make new, he seemed able to wait for the girl's
slow-forming inclination toward a closer relation, since as he wrote in
his astonishing way--"since she is of such service to the work." Her
special "service" seemed to be the going back and forth between London
and New York.
Through all that trench nightmare compounded of dirt, physical and
mental misery, and hourly danger, the bitter knowledge was pressed home
that the being Gavan Napier loved best on earth was crossing and
re-crossing the Atlantic on an errand he abhorred. An errand which he
himself by putting the secret-service people on the track of Atlantic
contraband, had changed from something safe and easy into something so
difficult and so full of peril that he quailed before opening those
letters of Julian's, which might tell of the failure, the detection, the
arrest of the messenger.
From English sources, as the months went on, echoes reached Napier in
the trenches of Mr. Julian Grant's writings and speeches on the other
side of the Atlantic. These were utterances of such a character as to
bring disaster upon certain persons in London held responsible for not
foreseeing the inadvisability of allowing the notorious pacifist to
cross the Atlantic.
It was at a time when Anglo-American relations had suffered to the
point of danger by the British authorities having held up American ships
carrying supplies which would ultimately find their way through neutral
countries to Germany. Whether owing to the fact that German propaganda
in the United States was then at the height of its success, the war
spirit called to life by the _Lusitania_ disaster languished during a
protracted interchange of Notes between the United States and the
Central powers.
* * * * *
Nan was as poor a letter-writer as Julian was admirable. One of her
meager little missives reached Napier soon after the so-called "great
advance" which toward the end of September, 1915, gained a fragment of
French soil about Loos at colossal cost.
"I want you to know," she wrote, "that I've been learning these last
months in New York what the triumphs of German methods would mean for
the world. Here, in the midst of all this luxury and waste, I've come to
envy loss and sacrifice. If we in America don't get our share of it, I
don't know what is to become of us." And then, from the passionate
patriot, that passing mock at "America, from a safe distance,
distributing victuals and justice to people giving up their lives."
Looking back, after all the turmoil and tragedy had gone by, Napier
realized, as clearly as though he had been an eye-witness, the despair
that fell on Julian when he heard from her own lips that Nan was
"against what Germany stands for. I want my country to be against it,"
she wrote Napier, "and there seems to be only one way. It isn't, not
yet, the way of peace. Well, there it is. I have failed Julian in the
work he cares more about than anything in the world. I say to myself, I
won't fail him in other ways if I can help it. What do you say, Gavan?"
Before there was time to "say," Napier had received his two wounds, a
shell-shattered foot and a damaged right wrist. He was sent home, and
for six-and-thirty days lay chafing in a London hospital. The time hung
horribly. Most of Napier's friends were in active service or dead; the
rest were swamped in work. He'd have gone out of his mind, he said
afterward, if it hadn't been for Tommy Durrant. Tommy, with his
eye-glass and his pre-war elegance unimpaired, his alertness and sound
sense increased by new responsibilities, was still behind the old scenes
and in and out of the new as well. He had been "lent" to the Admiralty
Intelligence Department. Tommy was full of the increasing difficulty in
Anglo-American relations. One day he came in full of "a scheme we've
just put through"--a scheme talked of with a careless air, but in a
voice carefully modulated.
"That woman on the other side who used to be at the McIntyres'--came
back as a Belgian nun after we'd deported her, you know--well, your
friend in New York, Taylor, has traced a beastly lot of trouble to her
and her gang. For months Taylor's kept telling our people over here it
was childish to go straining every nerve to keep the American balance
from tipping the wrong way, pouring out money, losing prestige, above
all, losing time, while we leave people like Schwarzenberg and her nest
of adders to breed their poison--"
"What can we do?" Napier interrupted, hopeless of the answer.
"Get her out of that."
"Out of America?"
Tommy nodded with such vigor his eye-glass fell out.
"I admit it'll be damned difficult, but Singleton," he said, replacing
the monocle firmly once more--"Singleton thinks he's found the way."
Then, in the deepest confidence, Tommy told Napier about an ex-German
spy, one Ernst Pforzheim, who'd had relations with the Schwarzenberg
woman. "He'd done a lot of useful work in America as well as here, but
Singleton had got our people to tell him they weren't satisfied. There
was really only one thing they wanted of Pforzheim, and he hadn't done
it. He'd already told the chief there were special reasons why he,
Pforzheim, of all people in the world, shouldn't touch this
Schwarzenberg business. The chief couldn't see it.
"'But I'm _dead_!" wails Pforzheim.
"'You've got to come alive,' the chief grinned. But you never in your
life saw a man as depressed as that German when he heard he was somehow
or other to find a way to rid us of Schwarzenberg.
"'To rid you of her?' he says, his eyes bulging. 'She's a deal more
likely to rid you of me.'
"The chief looked as if he could bear that, but he said all he insisted
on was that she should be got out of America. No power under heaven,
Pforzheim told him, would tempt Schwarzenberg to leave America.
"'You set me an impossible task!' he wept.
"'It's the condition,' says the chief.
"'It's my death-sentence,' says Pforzheim. That was how he went off."
For the next three weeks, whenever Tommy appeared, Napier would ask, as
though Ernst Pforzheim, too, were in hospital, how that person was
"getting on."
Though Tommy was forever full of other news, all that he was able to
produce relating to the luckless Ernst was that he'd disappeared.
* * * * *
Napier hadn't succeeded in getting his letters forwarded from France in
those terrible days. After four weeks in hospital he cabled Julian what
had happened and that he was getting on all right. A fortnight later,
the day of Napier's discharge, came a telegram from New York.
Returning with Nan to-morrow. _S. S. Leyden._
JULIAN.
Not altogether by the ways that would have seemed most direct, not
solely through the principals concerned, did Napier come by his most
intimate knowledge of what happened on that voyage, which was for many
to be the last. From his long familiarity with the way Julian "took
things"; from familiarity, not long, but lit by the lamp of passion,
with the natural turns and reactions of Nan Ellis, Napier filled in the
outlines of the widely published and privately rehearsed story, until to
him, the lover on shore, the experiences of that voyage wore an
actuality denied to many of those who in their own persons lived out the
awful hours. As it accumulated, this knowledge of Napier's came to be of
that completer type that some of us cherish concerning matters in which
our sharing has been of the kind invisible. We were not "there" in any
ordinary sense. Yet indubitably we are more intensely there, in that we
are not blinded by panic or numbed by the mental or the bodily blow.
We, aloof in the conning-towers of love, are spared no sight, no pang.
We look down with every natural sense sharpened; with some perceptions,
called as yet supernatural, giving voices to the silence and to the
darkness vision. But apart from these less generally recognized avenues
of information, there were the great outstanding facts which filled the
papers of two hemispheres.
The first six days of the _Leyden's_ voyage were, from the steamship
company's point of view, wholly uneventful. Mr. Julian Grant had come on
board obviously far from well. The reporters who interviewed him just
before he sailed remarked upon the fact. Hallett Newcomb, a middle-aged
Englishman of letters, returning home upon conclusion of an extended
lecture tour, who had some pre-war acquaintance with Mr. Grant and yet
more with Gavan Napier, had been struck at once by the change. Julian
Grant's litheness had become fragility, almost emaciation. He walked
with the old briskness, but as under a load. Those little lines slanting
away from each side of the mustache should have taken the antique pencil
another ten years to grave. Grant hadn't yet given his life in the Great
War, but of a surety he had given his youth. It was gone forever. In
those bright Indian-summer days that followed he would lie bundled up in
his deck-chair while hour after hour, in that low, comforting voice, the
girl who was his traveling companion read to him. The passengers
commented on a supposed likeness between the two, though there was
little in it beyond a common delicacy of feature and identity of
coloring. People on the _Leyden_, according to Newcomb, took the pair at
first for brother and sister. Anyway, she treated him like a brother, a
younger brother who was to be soothed and cared for.
The matter in those books and papers that Mr. Grant seemed never to have
enough of was not such stuff as would have soothed the British censor.
However, it stirred to enthusiasm the frequent visitor to that sheltered
nook on the deck--Miss Genevieve Sherman, as the forged passport gave
out Miss Ellis's fascinating black-haired friend. To the fact that Miss
Ellis didn't seem to know the lady was her friend, Mr. Hallett Newcomb
was an unwilling witness. He had chanced to see the younger woman making
her escape from the other on deck, only to be trapped in the cul-de-sac
corridor at the bottom of which was Newcomb's cabin. Behind the
half-hooked-back door he was looking through his papers for a registered
cable address. The tete-a-tete outside began so quietly that he had for
those first moments no sense of hearing anything private.
"So you didn't expect to see me," said Miss Genevieve Sherman whom the
girl called Greta.
"How in the world could I expect such a thing?"
"Why not?"
"Why not! For the reason that sends my heart into my mouth when I
realize only a little of"--the girl's voice hesitated--"of what you must
know far more. The risk, Greta, the awful risk!"
"It's dear of you"--the heavier voice was caressing--"_dear_ of you to
keep thinking of that. And you're a clever child to have spotted me at
once."
"Clever? I've seen you as so many people by now, I think I've got down
at last to the things you can't change." The weight of sadness in the
words brought out one of the woman's challenging laughs.
"I gather that what you think the essential me doesn't make you very
gay, dear child."
The dear child said nothing.
"You shouldn't be surprised to see me here, running some risk it's
useless to deny; but after the way we parted, what else could you
expect?"
"Greta, you haven't come because of--not really because of me?"
"You've never realized," said the appealing voice, "what you were to
me."
There was a longer pause and then, half choked, two little sentences
fell out: "It all seems no good any more. I shall never feel the same."
"Not the _same_, perhaps. You may feel something better, closer. Anyhow,
I couldn't let you go away, to the other side of the world without--Why,
Nan you didn't even answer my letters!"
"I couldn't."
"_Couldn't?_"
"There wasn't any more to say."
"That's where you're wrong. There _is_ more to say. And that's one
reason why I'm here--"
Newcomb slammed down the top of his portmanteau and rattled his keys.
Any ill success she may have had with the girl did not prevent Miss
Greta from seizing every opportunity to work on the sympathies of the
gentleman, above all, to ally herself with his international ideals.
"You and I" was a phrase which Newcomb often caught as he strolled by;
"from our point of view," was another. One of the impressions that was
to remain longest, because so often renewed during the week at sea, was
the group of which Grant remained the center; he lying spent, in his
chair; Miss Ellis in another, finger in book and eyes lowered; while on
the other side of him sat Miss Greta, suave, smiling, talking to Mr.
Grant, but turning ingratiatingly every now and then to the girl, only
to be met by that refusal of the eyes even more marked than the
blankness of her silence.
Miss Greta did not continue to take this irresponsiveness well. Behind
the continued and tireless effort her mood hardened, her resentment
grew.
Newcomb could see that much, though she pretended with some success to
make up for any disappointment, and more than make up, by turning the
head of a lanky American youth.
The source of Mr. Craig Ashmole's attraction baffled Newcomb till he
found out the young man's business: Mr. Ashmole was on his way to
England to fill a telegraphy post. Two days out from New York one of the
_Leyden's_ wireless operators had taken to his bed; Mr. Ashmole was now
installed as deputy assistant. The carroty and myopic youth was not
above twenty-three and very keen about his job. He knew it well in its
scientific, if not in its political, aspect; and he knew women not at
all. Miss Greta's amused effort to fill up this hiatus in his education
afforded no less amusement to certain lookers-on at the little comedy,
as they thought it.
This was not the view of the one or two who knew the persistent fight
made by the lady, that first day out, for the privilege of receiving
wireless messages. Under the new rule no one had access to outside news
except specially privileged official persons. It was doubtful if the
rule held good after Miss Greta had publicly flouted more personable men
in favor of the deputy-assistant operator. At carefully chosen times
and, for the most part, in out-of-the-way corners she flirted
outrageously with the absurd Ashmole. She dazed him, she dazzled him,
she rattled him, she pumped him. She raised him to heaven, she reduced
him to despair. She comforted him till he saw stars on the blackest
night.
It was Saturday, and they had been six days at sea. But for the fact
that the captain had gone ninety miles out of his course for some good
reason of his own, they might, before the light of that day failed, have
been sighting the round towers on the Irish coast.
The usual restlessness of the last hours of a voyage, when people
alternately pack and write letters, or pack and feverishly cement new
friendships and pack, was augmented by the fact of each passenger
finding in his cabin late that afternoon a card on which appeared the
sinister legend, "In case of need your boat is--" and a number followed.
The very calmness of the information, its manner of conveyance,
increased the eeriness of the warning.
* * * * *
Was it the lifeboat-card which those two, Grant and Miss Ellis, were
discussing with that absorbed intensity?
When Newcomb had finished his four miles with the second officer and the
congressman from Vermont, he came to a stop by Grant's corner in time to
hear the girl break into the middle of something he was saying and urge
Grant to go below. He was to try to sleep off his headache; anyway,
"make up a little for loss of rest before--before--" she stumbled and
looked away an instant. A world of trouble was in the face she turned
again to watch the slight figure go swaying down the deck and catch at
the jamb of the door to steady himself an instant before he disappeared
into the companionway. He had left a book open on his rug. On the deck,
all around his chair, lay the modern exemplars of that literature of
peace which seems, like the old, to bring the sword.
Newcomb's eye roved once again over titles in English and German, and
from the scattered incrimination he looked at the face of the girl.
"I seem to have noticed that these sentiments don't stir you to much
enthusiasm."
"They are worthy of enthusiasm," she answered, as though parrying an
attack on Julian behind his back.
"Why do you make phrases?" Newcomb demanded.
"I don't." Whether her quickened look sprang from a pricked conscience
Newcomb couldn't be sure. "Well, _aren't_ they full"--her eyes swept the
litter of books and papers--"_full_ of fine and splendid things? You
know they are. Only--"
"Only?"
She drew herself up, and the tight-pressed lips parted to say: "However
much we believe them, if the house was on fire, we couldn't think about
these things. The house _is_ on fire. I can't think about--anything
except saving the house and the people who are being burnt."
"Doesn't Mr. Grant tell you that those are exactly _his_ aims--'to save
the house' and 'to save the people'?"
"Yes," she owned sadly; "he thinks about saving everything except
himself." She stopped abruptly, frightened at having made an admission
which may have implied much or little. She studied Newcomb a moment with
a gaze that made him long to say: "Yes, believe in me. Why shouldn't
you?"
Whether the silent monition reached her, certainly her next words showed
no agitation, rather, a queer, poised sagacity.
"What I sit here thinking," she went on, "is that maybe a stupid
fireman, even a bad, lying fireman, could 'save the house' where
Julian--Julian would only be burnt to death with the rest."
As though acting on sudden impulse, Newcomb brought out the question he
had been longing to put all these days.
"Do you mind my asking you why are you leaving home at a time when
traveling is, to say the least--" In the pause he said to himself: She
won't trust me. Why should she--except for the difference it had seemed
to make to her when she learned that he was a friend not only of
Grant's, but of Gavan Napier's. In the first days they had talked about
Napier.
"I've come," she said after a moment--"I've come because, do what I
would, I couldn't prevent Mr. Grant's coming."
"I see. You wouldn't be on this ship if Mr. Grant weren't."
She hesitated again.
"You can see how ill he is, and his coming to America and getting deeper
into--all this, holding those meetings and being so attacked about them
at home, that's my doing."
"_Your_ doing!" said Newcomb, giving astonishment the rein.
"Yes. If I hadn't written to him--the things I did write, he wouldn't
have come to America."
"What things?"
"I can't tell anybody that. But it's because I didn't do something I'd
promised, that's why Julian's here. Since there are things I _can't_ do,
it's my business to do what I can." Very wisely Newcomb sat silent; she,
too, as long as she could bear it. "I've told you this,--you see how
private it is,--but I've told you because--" Her voice clouded. She
turned away her head.
"Isn't it because you realize that I'd like to be of some use if I
could?"
"Would you--_could_ you help about him--about Mr. Grant?"
Newcomb's moment of silence unnerved her.
"Oh, if you _knew_ how we all tried to keep him in America!"
"Wouldn't he have stayed," Newcomb dared to ask, "if you had stayed?"
"No! no! Oh, you don't understand Julian. He has a duty--to the other
men at home and to the country. He thinks he can help; you've heard him.
'While some men, who see it that way, are fighting for liberty abroad,
it's laid on others to fight for liberty at home.' I could almost be
glad he is so ill if only we had landed and I could get him home to
Scotland! I didn't know whether you might, perhaps, be willing to help
me to do that."
"Willing? I would indeed be willing. The question is: my power,
anybody's power."
She bent forward, but the breath that should have gone in words she held
an instant. And then very low the syllables fell out: "What will they
do--when we land?"
"What will they do?"
"Yes, to Julian."
"I don't know."
"You haven't the least idea? Well, Julian has. He's been telling me,
preparing me this afternoon."
"What has he been telling you?"
"That--these--these are his last hours as a free man." She dropped the
ghost of a sob into the silence, and her head went down into her hands.
It was only for a second. She sat erect again. "What he's been saying in
America is enough, he thinks. Do _you_ think that's enough to put a very
noble person in prison in free England?"
Newcomb hadn't often wanted more to do anything than he wanted now to
reassure her. It should be accounted to him for righteousness that he
said: "I don't know."