"Where are we now?" Miss Ellis peered through the blurred window of the
taxi.
"Oh, it's a part you don't know. You haven't an idea," Singleton began
again, "what a triumph it is--this permit. Nobody believed it could be
brought off. And you are to see her alone! What do you say to that?" He
sat back in the car and looked at Miss Ellis.
"Is it so unusual?"
"Unusual! Bless my soul, it's unheard of! The rule is, either you stand
outside a grille and talk through bars, or you sit with a table between
you and the pr--the person you've come to see. The warder, or in this
case it would be the wardress, stands there, two feet away, hearing
every word you say and watching your hands to see that nothing's
smuggled."
"They behave like that to prisoners in the first class?"
"If a prisoner is dangerous, she has to be watched, whatever class she's
in. As a rule."
"I see. In this case they trust to our honor."
Singleton hesitated.
"A--yes. It'll be an immense relief to her to have some one she can talk
to freely. I wouldn't be surprised--you see, she's bottled herself up so
long--I wouldn't be surprised if she took you more into her confidence
than ever she's done yet. I'd be careful if I were you," he said with
unusual earnestness, "very careful not to discourage that confidence."
"I don't think it the least likely she'll take me into her confidence,"
the girl returned on a note of regret, not daring to admit the thrill
that ran through her at thought of being the chosen confidante of a
prisoner--a Prisoner of the First Class, above all, of the erring, the
wonderful Greta. Nan was the freer to speculate about her now that the
pain of cutting the woman out of her heart was eased. To serve one who
had been her friend would satisfy every canon. If it satisfied a
hitherto unquenched curiosity as well--
"You couldn't make a greater mistake," Singleton was saying with that
new earnestness of his, "than to discourage any confidence.
"Oh, I wouldn't, not for the world I wouldn't discourage her."
"_Do the other thing_," he said impressively in her ear as the car
stopped.
"Are we there?" Nan started up in excitement.
"Wait a moment." He let down the window and put his head out to speak to
the driver. The car turned in the gray light and went on a few yards.
"Tell her you'll take any message to her friends," Singleton suggested
to the girl over his shoulder.
"Her friends?"
He was staring out at glimpses of stone wall. "I should say"--he spoke
in his most detached manner--"I should say, you'd have a rather
interesting half-hour, particularly if you let her unburden her soul on
the subject of her--allies."
The car stopped. Singleton got out, and rang a bell. The car was drawn
up close against a massive gray wall. Just beyond was a great
iron-studded door. In a moment it opened. A man stood there who looked
to the irreverent eye like the jailer in a comic opera--a big, saturnine
man with an enlarged waist (or an enlargement where his waist might have
been), and round this great girth of his a broad belt with the largest
keys hanging to it Nan had ever seen out of a pantomime. She asked
afterward if they were real keys. She thought that, like the halberds of
the Beefeaters, they must be symbolic, "just to impress on people the
degree of the locked-upness they'd got to expect here." As to the jailer
himself, he, like his keys, was "too good to be true." He wasn't only
like an actor. His forbidding manner, his black-avised scowl, and gruff
voice, had for the eyes at the car window exactly the same air of
unreality as the keys. To Singleton's horror, she confided presently
that it was all she could do not to applaud and call out of the window,
"_Isn't_ he doing it well!" with the mental reservation that really he
was overdoing it.
The basso profundo with the keys stood frowning at the paper Singleton
had presented.
"Is she here?" demanded the jailer.
"Oh, yes, I'm here." Nan nodded and beckoned at him out of the window.
He gave her a yet more frightful scowl, and she nearly burst out
laughing as Singleton, in the act of helping her out, saw, to his
consternation.
The scowling giant showed them into a bare little room with an open fire
and a chair in front of a table, where a big book like a ledger lay
open. Between table and fire was a telephone; all round the walls were
benches; nothing else.
The basso profundo left them there in front of the fire. A warder passed
the door with a man in prison clothes who was carrying a bucket. The
warder spoke to the man. What he said was not intelligible, but the
quality of voice struck the light-minded smile from Nan Ellis's face.
"How he spoke!"
Singleton said he didn't notice anything unusual, but he was rather
relieved that she had stopped smiling. When the head jailer came back,
he had a wardress in tow. The jailer didn't speak, didn't even look at
the two waiting.
"This way," said the woman, and led Miss Ellis briskly down a long stone
corridor. Another wardress stood by a door slightly ajar.
"Be quick," she said to some one inside. "I can't wait here all day."
"She speaks just as the warder spoke to the man with the bucket," Nan
thought. "Does anybody speak like that to Greta?" They wouldn't do it
twice, she decided, even before the reconciling phrase "First-class
Prisoner" recurred to her. She imagined Greta turning these wooden women
into human beings with a lash of her tongue.
Going up the skeleton stairs Nan broke the echoing silence. "Does
Miss--the lady know I'm coming?" she asked in a low voice.
Stolidly pursuing her way, the wardress looked straight in front of her
for so long, Nan thought, as she told Napier afterward, that the woman
wasn't going to speak at all. But when she had sufficiently marked the
fact that she wasn't there to answer questions she said, with that same
hard tonelessness, "I don't know who'd tell her." Through more corridors
they passed till the wardress stopped just short of an open door and
rang a bell. A younger woman of the same type came round a corner.
"Tell ninety-six she's to come down," Nan's guide called out, but she
went to meet the other wardress, and the two stood talking a moment.
They seemed to resent the visitor's inquiring eyes. "That's where you
go," said the older one over her shoulder. Nan found, to her surprise,
that the direction was addressed to her, with a curt motion of the head
toward the open door. As she entered, the door closed behind her. Nan's
heart began to thump. "What if they take me for a prisoner, and no one
comes to put them right!" she thought. Her spirits had been steadily
sinking ever since she heard the warder speaking to the prisoner with
the bucket. Mr. Singleton had been wrong. Even for a prisoner of the
first class this was a terrifying place. She remembered something she
had read once that a captive in the Tower had said centuries ago, "'T is
not the confined air; 't is the Apprehension of the place." It was just
that. The atmosphere was thick, choking with apprehension. How long "96"
was in coming down! On reflection, it was almost consoling that after
that rough message Greta should take her time. Nan rested on the
confident faith that, when Greta came, the Apprehension would lessen, if
not vanish altogether, vanishing before that dauntless step.
This room was even barer than the other: no fire, no open book, no
telephone; only a long, narrow table down the middle, several stout
wooden chairs, a window heavily barred, nothing else. Sounds outside
came muffled, and the more charged with Apprehension for that. What was
happening?
The door opened. A glimpse of the tall wardress shutting herself out and
shutting in a squat figure clad in shapeless gray serge garments and a
foolish cap.
Greta? _That?_
The girl held her breath, held all her being back from admitting that
the apparition by the door _could_ be--For it wasn't the disfiguring
dress alone or chiefly, that in the first instant had paralyzed the
visitor's tongue and rooted her where she stood. Greta, yes. And they
had clothed her body with ridicule. But what had they done to her
spirit? There was a horror about the change that over-topped pity, for
that awful first moment, while Greta stood, grotesque, dreadful, not so
much looking at the girl as looking through her, looking out of eyes too
haunted by other shapes to take in an apparition so insignificant as Nan
Ellis. Even when Nan was able to move forward, "O, _Greta_!" was all she
could say, but she held out her two hands.
The changed woman hadn't even one to offer.
"What have you come for?" she said in a queer voice.
"Why, to--to see you."
"To see what I look like. Well, you see."
"O Greta!" The girl shrank as if the other woman had struck her. After a
quivering moment she added, "I came to ask if I can do anything."
"Who sent you?"
Nan knew now what was the matter with the voice: it was purged of
personality. Greta spoke like the wardresses, in a tone out of which all
modulation had gone.
"Nobody sent me," said Nan.
"No, of course not."
"I _swear_ to you, Greta, you're wrong if you think--nobody wanted me to
come. I've had to move heaven and earth, I had to beg and beg--"
"Beg who?"
"Why, beg--no, I wasn't to say that. It doesn't matter now. But it's
been more difficult than you can think. I gave them no peace. I _had_ to
see you."
"Why?"
Nan felt guiltily that Greta had guessed that part of the answer was
because of a consuming curiosity. What Greta wouldn't, couldn't, know
was the pain and compassion that swept the girl after her first moment
of recoil.
"Why?" Nan repeated. "Because of--what used to be." Greta seemed not to
hear. The girl was so aware of this that she raised her voice a little
and spoke with deliberate distinctness. "I didn't know if you had any
one you could depend on."
"You _do_ know. I was fool enough to tell you."
"Only Ernst!"
The fierce instinctive warning in Greta's face against utterance of that
name, changed to contempt:
"But they'll have got that out of you before you came here. Much good it
will do them." And then she found the strangest ground for triumph. "He
can take care of himself. They learned that at Liverpool. And because he
can take care of himself he can take care of me. If only"--her voice
fell huskily--
"If what!" The girl's self-possession broke. "Oh, you are living on the
wildest hopes! You must in a place like this. I can see it's terrible to
you to be here! But _how_ terrible is it?" In the silence she collected
herself. "No, you mayn't want me to know that. Tell me only what can be
done."
Greta walked to the window, a strange shambling gait. She looked out and
then turned round, but not to face Nan. The strained eyes went carefully
all around the room. As she turned sidewise, the gray light fell more
merciless on the ravaged face, above all on that patch of discoloration
under each eye; no mere violet shadow such as Nan had seen on the faces
of the sleepless or the sick. This was as if a muddy thumb had set a
deliberate smudge under each eye, and as if the printing of that broad,
brown stain had been done with so ruthless a pressure that it had forced
in the lower arc of the socket. The eyes made careful circuit of the
room. They inspected the ceiling. They scoured the floor. Then Greta
bent down and looked at the under side of the table-top. She looked with
absorbed attention at the chair before she sat down in it--all signs of
mental aberration in the sight of the speechless girl, just as was the
loud, toneless voice in which Greta said:
"I suppose they've sent you to get out of me what they've failed to
get."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh, you don't know what I mean?"
"Greta! Greta!"--the girl dropped into the chair opposite and leaned
across the table,--"if I can put away hard feeling and suspicion, can't
you? I don't ask you to be friends outside this place. I don't _want_
that any more. But can't you for this little time we have here together
just let me help you if I can?"
"How do you propose to help me?"
"It isn't for me to propose how. I don't know what you need."
Again those eyes made circuit of the room.
"What I need?" the hoarse voice repeated. So humped her figure was that
it gave her an air of crouching in the chair. The quick turning of the
head (all the rest of the body rigid), to look first over one shoulder,
then over the other, had in it, taken with the crouching attitude,
something animal-like. But the intensity of that listening was not given
to the voices in the corridor. Those voices seemed rather to reassure,
almost to soothe; for as they sounded nearer, she repeated quietly,
"What I need?" Moreover, she looked at Nan as if she really saw her, as
if she remembered who she was. "I sha'n't need anything long."
In the eyes bent on her across the table tears sprang up. "Are you so
ill, Greta?"
The woman made no answer. She was listening again. It seemed to be the
silence that spoke to her, not voices.
"That's one of the things I thought of," the girl went on. "I might get
them to let me bring a doctor."
"It would be a great doctor who should cure _my_ ill!"
The words were despairing enough and spoken faintly, but that touch of
the old theatricalism was so much more natural than the hoarse,
uncadenced speech alternating with the insane listening to nothing at
all, that Nan took heart. "May I say you are ill? May I try--"
Greta shook her head.
"What's the use? I've always known I shouldn't live long. We don't."
For a moment Nan couldn't speak. As to Greta, whatever she had come
through, whatever she was going toward, she hadn't got beyond enjoyment
of tearing at another's heart-strings on the way.
"You mustn't say, mustn't _think_, you aren't going to live! You must
remember--" Nan longed and didn't dare to quote the precedent of the old
father in the Berlin brewery, still watchman of the night, as Singleton
had told her. She was the more glad she hadn't ventured to speak of him
when she presently found that Greta's "we" linked her to no blood kin.
She had sunk down farther in the chair, a huddle of coarse serge and
misery, and her hands slipped off her lap and hung at her sides.
"The strain is too great," she said under her breath, speaking the truth
at last.
The strain _was_ too great. It had broken the Greta of old days. And
just as, after the wreck of some great liner, only trifles are left
floating over the grave of the Titan, so the woman's surface
theatricalism survived the loss of more considerable things.
"With people like us, our hand is against every man," she declaimed in a
husky voice, "and every man's hand is against us."
"That's not true. My hand isn't against you."
"We shall see."
"_Indeed_ we shall!"
Greta had made an effort to pull herself up and face the girl more
squarely, as though that call to "see" had imposed some change in the
focus of vigilance.
This was not the visit she had been expecting. It had taken her unaware.
With a new self-distrust, an unwonted slowness, she was collecting her
wits and her physical forces, without for an instant losing sight either
of the obvious danger or the possible unique opportunity presented by
Nan's coming. To seize the occasion to recover some of her hold over the
girl--that could endanger nothing. It might even serve.
"If you must believe," Nan was saying, "that my hand is against
you,"--barb-like, the phrase had stuck, quivering,--"you needn't think
everybody's hand is."
"With the exception of that one, whose isn't?"
The question was awkward.
"Well, there are your friends." She waited while Greta's eyes arraigned
her fiercely. "And there are the people who, from their point of view,
owe you so much."
"You mean--" Greta waited warily.
"Those who set you on. The people you've run such awful risks for."
"Oh, the powers in Germany! They'll trouble themselves about me!" Her
ghost of a laugh was more horrible than cursing. Some of the dullness
went out of Greta's eyes for a moment at sight of the impression she was
making on the girl. "You think, if we make a single mis-step, 'They'
spare us?" The slack hands came up and met in a hard grip on the bare
table-top. "They set us superhuman tasks in the midst of strangers. A
_woman_, set to play a lone hand against overwhelming odds, day in, day
out. No let up. One false move,"--the locked fingers parted, the hands
were lifted a few inches, and fell heavily on the board,--"you are
first suspect. Then you lose your liberty. Then you lose your life."
"No! no!" The fascination of horror that had held the girl broke before
that evocation of the final doom. "You mustn't be afraid of that! You
_mustn't_--"
"What do you know about it?"
"I am sure, I am sure--"
She ought to have been satisfied with the degree to which she had
wrought upon the girl. But that wasn't Greta's way. It didn't suit her
that any knowledge of intended clemency should dull the poignancy of
Nan's compassion.
"You think I'm afraid I'll lose my life _here_! Pfui!" She forced out
breath too contemptuous to lend itself to word in that first emission.
"It isn't my life these creatures want. I'm no good to them dead. I'm no
good to them alive if they had the sense to see." She flung it to the
wall over Nan's head.
"Oh, if you _knew_ how you've relieved me! Greta! Greta! I wouldn't let
myself be afraid of the worst. And yet, deep down,--since I came into
this room--I have been afraid. Thank you, Greta, for taking that horror
off my mind."
It wasn't at all what Greta had intended. She looked at the girl.
"A person like me," she said, with an effort at that high air of
old,--oh, the piteous travesty!--"a person like me, who is supposed to
know too much, if she doesn't pay with her life--it isn't always the
fault of the people she works for."
"I don't understand," Nan breathed.
"Probably not. We ourselves don't 'understand' till it's too late. What
idea had I, when I began, that every hour of my life I should be saying:
'Is it to-day? Will it be to-morrow I shall go under?' We mostly do go
under when we've served our turn."
There was the ghost of the old satisfaction in the marred face as she
read in the young one how well the old trick worked. "Be very sure it
isn't our enemies we fear most. It's those you call our friends."
"You can't"--Nan gasped--"you can't mean the German authorities who--ask
to have these things done?"
"Oh, can't I?" She positively revived before her manifest success. "One
of my own friends was let in for an English prison by a German agent
acting under orders from the Wilhelmstrasse. My friend hasn't come out.
He never will come out. Two others I knew, one a woman, made the mistake
of knowing too much, and paid the penalty."
"The penalty!" whispered the other.
"They"--Greta stared in front of her--"they disappeared." Her fixed eyes
moved. They came back to Nan. "You imagine my friends were set against a
prison wall and had their account settled by an English firing squad?
Oh, no! We in the service"--with the old arrogance she threw back her
head, crowned by the horrible cap--"we know we have no such need to fear
any foreign power as we have to fear our own."
Nan failed lamentably to respond to this form of professional pride.
"It's a ghastly trade."
"You don't know what you're talking about," Greta said harshly. "The
best brains in Europe are at this work. Ask your friends of the British
secret service."
"There's a difference between the secret service and spying."
"Oh, _is_ there! Then it would take a Jesuit to find out and a fool to
believe. We are all in the same business. Only the other nations play at
it, and we work. No questions with us, no limits. You others, yes, all
of you,"--she flung it out,--"you paddle. We? We're up to the eyes!" Her
own, marred and mud-stained, were lifted to the opposite wall. "We're
_over_ the eyes!" she triumphed. "We hold our breath down there under
the surface till we crack our lungs. And smug people judge us! People
who have never done even a safe thing to serve their country--they judge
_us_--who face death hour by hour!"
"You don't, Greta, anyway." Nan Ellis had her pride, as it seemed,
though its roots were deeper than nationality. "Lucky for you, you're in
England!"
"England!" Her face as she turned it away was hideous with hatred.
Nan stood up. "Though you refuse to be, I at least can be glad that in
England they don't--"
"Oh, don't they!" She clutched at the edge of the table and leaned
across it. "I'll tell you what the English don't do. _They don't talk
about what they do._" As Nan opened her lips, the other raised her voice
to the level of a hoarse scream. "But there's a thing they don't
understand--your friends the English. They imagine they can wear us out.
_Hein?_" Again she addressed an invisible audience, still believing, as
Nan thought, that she was under the ceaseless observation that had
turned her wits. "These _English_! They think they can force a German
woman to sell her friends, to give away her country! A German! I tell
you"--she staggered to her feet--"these devils can go on as long as ever
they like. I don't know why they stopped--"
"Stopped? Stopped what?"
"Torturing me," she said, gutturaling the r's till they sounded like the
tearing of a fabric. "'Who is my friend in the War Office?'" The words
acted on her swifter than poison, more like the twist of a knife in a
wound. She opened her mouth and gasped for air. When it came she cast it
back in a cry that wasn't human.
Nan shrank against the wall. A bell clanged.
"'The name of the man in the War Office.' Forty times he asked me that,
that devil they sent to tor-r-tur-re me." She was speaking too rapidly
to swallow; the saliva gathered in bubbles at the corners of her lips.
"Every sort of question! Every sort of trap! Insinuating; gentle; quick,
sharp as pistol-shots. Over and over and over and over, till you long to
die. Then at last, when _he's_ worn out,--not I! not I!"--she cried to
the walls,--"then I'm led away, back to my punishment cell,"--she
staggered and caught blindly at the chair back--"and the board bed is
soft as a cloud in paradise. Two minutes. The wardress! 'Come, they want
you.' I'm taken back. 'The name of your friend in the War Office?' and
_da capo_. You see the plan? _Hein?_ The devils in hell must envy the
inventor of that Third Degree."
[Illustration: "The name of the man in the War Office!"]
The thing itself comes out of the Dark Ages, but the phrase was framed
in America. Nan had heard it before. This method of procedure was
contrary, perhaps is still contrary, to English law; but there was no
more doubt that Greta von Schwarzenberg had been subjected to the Third
Degree than there was doubt of its fearful effect.
"Surely they know it's possible not to answer," the girl said,
bewildered.
"Oh, they _know_!" Greta had fallen back into that hoarse whisper. "It
isn't in nature not to answer some things--to answer something that
sounds innocent; that gives you a rest; or to answer something
dastardly. Taunts--God! the things they say! Oh, you'd answer some of
them as long as you could keep your wits and wag your tongue; and
then--" She beckoned. Nan came to her round the table. Greta seized her
by the shoulders, and with so fierce a grip the girl, in a new access of
horror, tried to draw back. Those big, square fingers held like a vise.
Greta bent her trembling, froth-flecked lips to the girl's ear. "They
don't let you sleep. That's what does it--if anything will." She did not
so much let go her hold as fling Nan from her as she raised her voice to
its highest pitch. "Not even that is going to make Greta von
Schwarzenberg a tool of the English. Never!" she flung to the right
wall. "_Never!_" she screamed to the left. "_Never!_" She choked
suddenly, fell sidewise against the chair, and dropped heavily to the
floor.
Nan ran forward with a cry. The door opened, and a couple of wardresses
rushed in.
As they raised Greta up, she pointed down the corridor. "Ha! you see?
You see?" The backs of two men were disappearing in the distance.
"You have failed again!" Greta shouted after them. "Always you'll
fail!"
The wardresses quickly had her on her feet. They handled her with a
respect so scant that Nan broke in:
"Let me, please! Oh, gently!"
"She'll show you the way out." The tall wardress nodded curtly at the
other.
Greta shot out a hand and clutched Nan's sleeve. "You wanted to help me?
Then find a way to see _him_. Say as long as it's _for him_, nothing can
break me."
"I'm going to get them to send you a doctor," the girl cried.
"Come." The tall wardress seized the disheveled figure by the other arm.
Greta seemed not to know the horrible cap was falling off. "I'd rather
have you, after all, than any doctor." She still maintained that fierce
hold on Nan. "Specially now that I know you're as"--that laugh!--"as
silly as ever. Oh, why couldn't I be _selig_, too!" Her drooping lips
quivered. She fell to feeble crying. "I _wanted_ the good things. More
than any one in this world I wanted--since I was little I've wanted to
get away from ugliness and evil. I wanted to be a lady. _Ai!_" she
shrieked. "Damn you!"
The younger wardress had slipped round behind the others. She had thrust
a hand in between Nan and Greta and loosened the prisoner's hold by some
sly use of pain.
Greta turned on the woman.
"Damn you! you--" words from which Nan fled shuddering along the
corridor, a wardress at her heels.