FROM THAT WHICH IS WRITTEN
1
For several moments I was dumbfounded. Suspect B had shown his hand!
In spite of all my precautions, I had been tracked. We confronted one
another in silence, then:
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, “and I can’t imagine where you
have sprung from.”
“Easy answered.” Kluster rolled the unlighted cigar from one end of
his flexible mouth to the other. “I mean we both belong in the same
camp. And I didn’t spring from any place; I just walked up.”
“Walked up?”
“You said it. I came along beside the baby canyon. That was your
route.”
“But I heard no sound.”
“I don’t make any sound when I don’t want to. Besides, you were busy.”
“Do you mean,” I demanded angrily, “that you have been following me?”
“No, sir. I got here first.”
“What!”
“You passed me by the little old cave back there. As soon as you were
all set I crept up on you.”
Anger left me. The man’s imperturbable ill-humour was defeating. If,
in spite of his surly friendliness, he “belonged” in the enemy camp,
at least he was a comprehensible flesh-and-blood American citizen.
Really, I hadn’t a scrap of evidence connecting him with the purpose
of my journey, except his friendship with Mme. Yburg. After all, the
Devil’s Elbow was open to the public; and amid all this phantasmagoria
it was good to get to grips with sanity; therefore:
“At the moment, Mr. Kluster,” I said, “you definitely have the
advantage. I don’t know how you got here, and I don’t know why you
came here. I don’t even know who you are, except that your name is
Kluster----”
As I spoke, he had been regarding me under drooping lids--lids which
concealed a pair of lancet-keen gray eyes. Now, he interrupted, and:
“Wrong!” said he: “it isn’t! That’s the name in my passport, but
Washington knows different.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“It’s easy. Your job’s covering the Felsenweir circus-newspaper
commission, I guess. Mine’s the same--United States Secret Service.
Name of Lonergan--John Lonergan. We might as well work together. I
don’t want publicity at the wrong time.”
“But”--I was temporarily at a loss for words--“might I ask what
Felsenweir has to do with the United States?”
“You might,” he returned sourly. “A newspaper man might ask any damn
thing. Are you the Brian Woodville who went up the Rio Negro for the
New York _Bulletin_?”
“I am.”
“Glad to know you better,” said this extraordinary individual. “How
are you fixed from now on? We ought to pool notes.”
Perhaps, as coldly recorded, there would seem to be nothing in this
interview on the Devil’s Elbow to have convinced any but a credulous
fool that Mr. Aldous P. Kluster was what he now claimed to be. Yet,
for my part, I never doubted him. I saw the man in a new light. Much
that had been obscure became obvious. I experienced an intense
curiosity; and:
“I am meeting Mme. Yburg for tea,” I replied truthfully, “and I am
dining with M. Paul. Shall we meet somewhere later?”
“You bet we shall,” he replied. He glanced down at the Zeiss glasses.
“Seen anything fresh?” he asked.
And, at the question, realizing that I stood on the brink of a
precipice with a stranger--probably armed; how only one other knew of
my presence there--the chauffeur, a suspicious character--I suffered a
revulsion of sentiment.
“I’ve watched for hours,” Kluster (or Lonergan) went on. “Not from
here. This look-out is a hundred per cent right. From three parts up
the Mercuriusberg. I’ve seen the figures patrolling, but not a damn
thing else.”
I laughed to hide embarrassment--silently cursing my cowardly qualms.
“I saw them to-day for the first time.”
He nodded, rolling the cigar between his lips.
“Didn’t know why you were coming here,” he murmured. “Plain enough
now. I covered you early this morning. The gink driving the car fell
for ten dollars and brought me here first! Listen. Mme. Yburg is
clever. Play for safety. Paul beats me. But tell him _nothing_. Got it
clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“I’ll go first, if it’s all the same to you, and send the car back.
Don’t let the driver know you’re wise to him. And do your look-out
from farther beyond where the sun doesn’t get your lenses. I don’t
know what kind of things live in Felsenweir, but I guess they can
_see_. Ten o’clock outside the Kurhaus. Some table left of the steps.
I’ll look for you.”
2
When I joined Mme. Yburg at the Casino, her manner struck me as odd.
She was charming as ever, conveying that sense of coolness, physical
as well as mental, which was part and parcel of her personality. She
wore green, with a little tight-fitting hat which for some reason set
me thinking of gnomes and fairies--and so brought back a memory of the
grotto under the Devil’s Elbow.
Her beautiful, calm eyes studied me with disturbing frankness, as the
waiter brought tea.
“Has your busy day been successful?” she asked.
“Not entirely,” I replied. “And yours?”
“I had lunch on the Mercuriusberg,” she said, removing a handbag to
make room for the tea tray. “Very much like a tripper, as you call it;
but I adore the view.”
“It must be a familiar view?”
She smiled, and glanced aside as the band began to play again. Her
long, psychic hands fascinated.
“My husband had a villa here. But we were rarely in Baden.”
“I’m sorry. Have I stirred up unhappy memories?”
“Not at all.” Her regard became fixed upon me once more. “My marriage
was not entirely happy--what marriage is? And if I had any regrets,
time has softened them. My husband has been dead for eleven years.”
“The war?” I suggested gently.
She nodded.
Upon my sympathy, my natural sympathy with any victim of that ghastly
international tragedy, came hot-foot the most poisonous suspicions.
She played cleverly. A beautiful widow bereaved by one’s own
countrymen or allies--it might be, by one’s own hand--is a
distractingly appealing figure. “Mme. Yburg is clever”--the strident
voice seemed to ring in my ears. “Play for safety.…” _Had_ she been to
the Mercuriusberg?
A number of dancers took the floor, and:
“Shall we dance?” I asked.
Mme. Yburg, watching me with those calm eyes in which lay so old and
so dearly bought a wisdom as well as a smile which irritated whilst it
caressed, shook her head slightly.
“You don’t really want to, do you?”
“Frankly, I don’t. I should rather talk here.”
“So should I.”
As a result, we talked--about a hundred and one things. But never
about the Black Forest and its secrets. Mme. Yburg knew the world
almost as well as I knew it. My only advantage was in respect of
inaccessible spots right off the map. Europe, Asia, Africa,
America--she had travelled them all. Her knowledge of human character
left me miles behind. She made me feel like an infant. Only when--out
of pity, I think, for my masculine inferiority--she led me on to talk
of the Sahara and of the unexplored country up the Rio Negro, did I
recover my poise. At last:
“There are still a lot of jobs,” she said--she spoke vernacular
English in a fascinating unfamiliar way--“which only a man can do.”
Her words awakened me to the passage of time. I had been absorbed in
that most delightful task--talking about myself to an attractive and
sympathetic woman. The band had ceased, and departed. I glanced at my
wrist watch, and:
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Please forgive me! We have barely time
to dress!”
“You are forgiven,” said Mme. Yburg. “You have made me forget.…”
3
It was all of a quarter to seven when I joined M. Paul in the bar. His
resplendence was difficult to define: but he made me feel dowdy. He
wore dinner kit which would have caused the editor of the _Tailor and
Cutter_ to scream with joy; but I was well turned out, too, for that
matter. It was the personality of the man, plus his faultless clothes,
which created the impression.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, and leaped from his stool, regardless of the
criticism of other occupants of the bar. “It is you--on the very tick
of time!”
“A couple of ticks behind, to be exact,” I murmured.
I had previously grappled with the problem of what it was about the
Frenchman’s mode of speech which intrigued me. At this moment I
grasped it. He used the latest slang with facility--but gave the terms
a new quality. In other words, reported, much of his conversation
would have read like that of an Englishman; heard, it was peculiarly
different.
He swept aside my natural suggestion with dramatic scorn.
“No, no!” he cried. “To-night _I_ am host!”
Host he was--and a number-one host he proved himself to be. He had
ordered dinner at the Kurhaus--not, he explained, because he regarded
the cuisine there as superior to that of the Regal, but “because it is
always a change.”
I perceived, when we had taken our places at a reserved window table
where we could both see and hear the excellent orchestra, that M. Paul
was a gourmet of discrimination. He had ordered a dinner--upon which
he invited my amateur comments--that displayed Teutonic cookery to its
greatest advantage. This evidenced genius. So many people order a
French meal in a German restaurant.
Any doubts I had had respecting my later appointment at the Kurhaus
were speedily removed by M. Paul.
“I hope it does not mean loneliness for you,” he said. “But at
half-past nine I must run away.”
It suited me very well and I said so.
“Good,” said M. Paul. “Then we can enjoy our dinner.”
He talked of many things, and entertainingly, but ere long, as I had
anticipated, touched upon Mme. Yburg, to whom he referred as “your
charming little friend.”
I took him up on that, knowing the expression, translated into the
speaker’s tongue, to possess a subtly different meaning.
“Mme. Yburg is certainly charming,” I agreed; “and we are friends. But
only friends. We met a week ago.”
His keen, handsome, actor’s face registered a momentary surprise which
I could have sworn was real. But believing, as I did, that M. Paul and
Mme. Yburg were allies in a thus far incomprehensible conspiracy, I
challenged my own judgment. In the woman’s society, that afternoon, I
had certainly forgotten, or had dismissed, those mediæval ideas which
I had built up around her. Now, I asked myself if I was in the company
of a dupe or of an accomplice.
Mme. Yburg was fascinating; I had experienced the thrall of her
peculiar personality. Was this brilliant Frenchman, with his
feverishly bright eyes and pale skin, a discarded fly? Had the spider
bled him white and cast him away? And was the poor infatuated victim
jealously searching the horizon for who should be his successor? Or…?
“You surprise me, Mr. Woodville,” he said--and his sincerity one would
have set beyond dispute. “I quite thought you were old friends.”
He looked at me in a new way, and began to talk about Paris.
I was nonplussed, and I fenced so badly in my subsequent attempts to
draw the conversation into desired channels that I began to wonder if
_all_ my theories about M. Paul were wrong! A welcome turn was given
to a very aimless conversation by my companion.
Gazing rapturously over my left shoulder:
“Ah, name of a good little man,” he murmured--“how exquisite! No! it
cannot be that she is German.”
His racial prejudice made me laugh, but:
“Laugh, my friend, if you wish,” he said. “But the goddess Diana is
reborn a mortal. See, here is our coffee. You may move your chair.
Please select a cigar”--the head waiter had brought a case--“and share
with me the joy of looking at a beautiful girl.”
I declined the cigar--I never smoke them--but lighted a cigarette and
turned as M. Paul suggested. The object of his interest was
unmistakable. She sat at a table not far removed, in the company of a
plain, elderly lady than whom a more formidable duenna could not well
be imagined.
Perhaps it was “written,” as the Moslems have it; but, at the moment
of my turning, the girl was looking in our direction. I found myself
meeting a grave regard from the most liquid, frank, yet searching blue
eyes I had ever seen.
Their glance held me. I stared too long for courtesy. “Diana reborn”
was not so extravagant as I had supposed. The subject of M. Paul’s
poetry was deliciously tanned as one would imagine that divinity to
have been. Her perfect arms and shoulders seemed to have absorbed the
glow of sunlight. She was joyously, naïvely youthful, and her hair
was a golden bronze such as surely must have crowned the Greek
goddess.
No doubt my honest admiration was all too apparent. The girl flushed
and glanced aside. I found myself focussed by a pair of black-rimmed
spectacles worn by the duenna, which resembled dragon’s eyes.
Embarrassed by my own bad form, I turned to M. Paul. But he was
dreamily gazing over my left shoulder. The orchestra outside in the
gardens began to play, and:
“Was I not right?” he murmured. “They are playing the Fire Music. See!
it calls to her--the grandeur of Germany’s only genius! She has a
beautiful soul in a beautiful body!”