prosperous alehouse, and here Bill showed quite his old form. He
waltzed, he threw somersaults, he found handkerchiefs, he carried the
hat; his docility was all that Trotter and the Signor could have
asked. They cleared one and sevenpence out of his tricks, and would
have stayed to drink it; but Bill walked calmly on up the road and
barely gave them time enough to buy food.
They cursed him lavishly; the Signor raved in a hot frenzy; but they
dared not lose him. The dog led them at an easy pace and they labored
after him furiously, while a great pale moon mounted in the sky and
the soft night deepened over the fields.
He let them down at last at an end of grass where a few of last
year's straw ricks afforded lodging for the night. Both the men were
tired enough to be glad of the respite and they sank down in the
shadow of a rick with little talk.
"It gets me," Trotter said. "The dog's a danger. 'E ought to be
drownded."
The Signor snarled. "An' us?" he demanded. "We go to work, eh? You
pick da grass-a to make-a da hay and me I drive-a da cart, eh? Oh,
Trottair, you fool!"
"'Ere, let's 'ave some grub and stow the jaw for a bit," said
Trotter.
He had bread and meat, bought in a hurry at the tail of the village
while Bill receded down the road.
As soon as he laid it bare, Bill growled.
"T'row heem some, queeck," cried the Signor.
Bill caught the loaf and settled down to it with an appetite. Trotter
stared at him with a gape.
"Well, blow me!" he said. "'Ave we come to feedin' the bloomin' dog
before we feeds ourselves? 'As the beggar struck for that? I s'pose
'e'll be wantin' wages next."
"Oh, shutta da gab!" snapped the Signor.
"That's all very well," retorted Trotter. "But I'm an Englishman, I
am. You're only a furriner; you're used to bein' put upon. But
I'm--."
Bill growled again and rose to his feet. Trotter tossed him a piece
of meat.
All that was long ago. Now if you stray through the South of England
during the months between May and October, you may yet meet Bill and
his companions. Trotter still wears tights, but he is thinner and
much more wholesome to see; but the Signor has added a kind of shiny
servility to his courtly Italian manner.
Bill is sleek and fat.
And now, when they come to rest at noonday, you will see, if you
watch them, that before Trotter takes his boots off he feeds the dog.
And the Signor fetches him water.
VII
"PLAIN GERMAN"
Beyond the arcaded side-walks, whose square-pillared arches stand
before the house-fronts like cloisters, the streets of Thun were
channels 'of standing sunlight, radiating heat from every
cobblestone. Herr Haase, black-coated and white-waistcoated as for a
festival, his large blond face damp and distressful, came panting
into the hotel with the manner of an exhausted swimmer climbing
ashore. In one tightly-gloved hand he bore a large and bulging linen
envelope.
"Pfui!" He puffed, and tucked the envelope under one arm in order to
take off his green felt hat and mop himself. "Aber what a heat, what
a heat!"
The brass-buttoned hotel porter, a-sprawl in a wicker chair in the
hall, lowered his newspaper and looked up over his silver spectacles.
He was comfortably unbuttoned here and there, and had omitted to
shave that morning, for this was July, 1916, and since the war had
turned Switzerland's tourists into Europe's cannon-fodder, he had run
somewhat to seed.
"Yes, it is warm," he agreed, without interest, and yawned. "You have
come to see" he jerked his head towards the white staircase and its
strip of red carpet "to see him not? He is up there. But what do you
think of the news this morning?"
Herr Haase was running, his handkerchief round the inside of his
collar. "To see him! I have come to see the Herr Baron von
Steinlach," he retorted, crossly. "And what news are you talking
about now?" He continued to pant and wipe while the porter read from
his copy of the Bund, the German official communique of the previous
day's fighting on the Somme.
"I don't like it," said the porter, when he had finished. "It looks
as if we were losing ground. Those English."
Herr Haase pocketed his handkerchief and took the large envelope in
his hand again. He was a bulky, middle-aged man, one of whose
professional qualifications it was that he looked and sounded
commonplace, the type of citizen who is the patron of beer-gardens,
wars of aggression, and the easily remembered catchwords which are
the whole political creed of his kind. His appearance was the bushel
under which his secret light burned profitably; it had indicated him
for his employment as a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and the
tenant of the pretty villa on the hill above Thun, whence he drove
his discreet and complicated traffic in those intangible wares whose
market is the Foreign Office in Berlin.
He interrupted curtly. "Don't talk to me about the English!" he
puffed. "Gott strafe England!" He stopped. The porter was paid by the
same hand as himself. The hall was empty save for themselves, and
there was no need to waste good acting on a mere stage-hand in the
piece.
"The English," he said, "are going to have a surprise."
"Eh?" The slovenly man in the chair gaped up at him stupidly. Herr
Haase added to his words the emphasis of a nod and walked on to the
stairs.
In the corridor above, a row of white-painted bedroom doors had each
its number. Beside one of them a tall young man was sunk spinelessly
in a chair, relaxed to the still warmth of the day. He made to rise
as Herr Haase approached, swelling for an instant to a drilled and
soldierly stature, but, recognizing him, sank back again.
"He's in there," he said languidly. "Knock for yourself."
"Schlapschwanz!" remarked Herr Haase indignantly, and rapped upon the
door. A voice within answered indistinctly. Herr Haase, removing his
hat, opened the door and entered.
The room was a large one, an hotel bedroom converted into a
sitting-room, with tall French windows opening to a little veranda,
and a view across the lime-trees of the garden to the blinding silver
of the lake of Thun and the eternal snow-fields of the Bernese
Oberland. Beside the window and before a little spindle-legged
writing-table a man sat. He turned his head as Herr Haase entered.
"Ach, der gute Haase," he exclaimed.
Herr Haase brought his patent leather heels together with a click and
bowed like a T-square.
"Excellenz!" he said, in a strange, loud voice, rather like a man in
a trance. "Your Excellency's papers, received by the train arriving
from Bern at eleven-thirty-five."
The other smiled, raising to him a pink and elderly face, with a
clipped white moustache and heavy tufted brows under which the faint
blue eyes were steady and ironic. He was a large man, great in the
frame and massive; his movements had a sure, unhurried deliberation;
and authority, the custom and habit of power, clad him like a
garment. Years and the moving forces of life had polished him as
running water polishes a stone. The Baron von Steinlach showed to
Herr Haase a countenance supple as a hand and formidable as a fist.
"Thank you, my good Haase," he said, in his strong deliberate German.
"You look hot. This sun, eh? Poor fellow!"
But he did not bid him sit down. Instead, he turned to the linen
envelope, opened it, and shook out upon the table its freight of
lesser envelopes, typed papers, and newspaper-clippings.
Deliberately, but yet with a certain discrimination and efficiency,
he began to read them. Herr Haase, whose new patent leather boots
felt red-hot to his feet, whose shirt was sticking to his back,
whose collar was melting, watched him expressionlessly.
"There is a cloud of dust coming along the lake road," said the Baron
presently, glancing through the window. "That should be Captain von
Wetten in his automobile. We will see what he has to tell us, Haase."
"At your orders, Excellency," deferred Herr Haase.
"Because" he touched one of the papers before him "this news, Haase,
is not good. It is not good. And this discovery here, if it be all
that is claimed for it, should work miracles."
He glanced up at Herr Haase and smiled again. "Not that I think
miracles can ever be worked by machinery," he added.
It was ten minutes after this that the column of dust on the lake
road delivered its core and cause in the shape of a tall man, who
knocked once at the door and strode in without waiting for an answer.
"Ah, my dear Von Wetten," said the Baron pleasantly. "It is hot, eh?"
"An oven," replied Von Wetten curtly. "This place is an oven. And the
dust, ach!"
The elder man made a gesture of sympathy. "Poor fellow!" he said.
"Sit down; sit down. Haase, that chair!"
And Herr Haase, who controlled a hundred and twelve subordinates, who
was a Swiss citizen and a trusted secret agent, brought the chair and
placed it civilly, neither expecting nor receiving thanks.
The new-comer was perhaps twenty-eight years of age, tall, large in
the chest and little in the loins, with a narrow, neatly-chiseled
face which fell naturally to a chill and glassy composure. "Officer"
was written on him as clear as a brand; his very quiet clothes sat on
his drilled and ingrained formality of posture and bearing as
noticeably as a mask and domino; he needed a uniform to make him
inconspicuous. He picked up his dangling monocle, screwed it into his
eye, and sat back.
"And now?" inquired the Baron agreeably, "and now, my dear Von
Wetten, what have you to tell us?"
"Well, Excellenz" Captain von Wetten hesitated. "As a matter of fact,
I've arranged for you to see the thing yourself this afternoon."
The Baron said nothing merely waited, large and still against the
light of the window which shone on the faces of the other two.
Captain von Wetten shifted in his chair awkwardly. "At five,
Excellenz," he added; "it'll be cooler then. You see, Herr Baron,
it's not the matter of the machine I've seen that all right; it's the
man."
"So!" The explanation, which explained nothing to Herr Haase, seemed
to satisfy the Baron. "The man, eh? But you say you have seen the
machine. It works?"
"It worked all right this morning," replied Von Wetten. "I took my
own explosives with me, as you know some French and English
rifle-cartridges and an assortment of samples from gun charges and
marine mines. I planted some in the garden; the place was all pitted
already with little craters from his experiments; and some,
especially the mine stuff, I threw into the lake. The garden's on the
edge of the lake, you know. Well, he got out his machine thing like a
photographic camera, rather, on a tripod turned it this way and that
until it pointed to my explosives, and pop! off they went like a lot
of fireworks. Pretty neat, I thought."
"Ah!" The Baron's elbow was on his desk and his head rested in his
hand. "Then it is what that Italian fellow said he had discovered in
1914. 'Ultra-red rays,' he called them. What was his name, now?"
"Never heard of him," said Von Wetten.
From the background where Herr Haase stood among the other furniture
came a cough. "Oliver," suggested Herr Haase mildly.
The Baron jerked a look at him. "No, not Oliver," he said. "Ulivi
that was it; Ulivi! I remember at the time we were interested,
because, if the fellow could do what he claimed." He broke off. "Tell
me," he demanded of Von Wetten. "You are a soldier; I am only a
diplomat. What would this machine mean in war in this war, for
instance? Supposing you were in command upon a sector of the front;
that in the trenches opposite you were the English; and you had this
machine? What would be the result?"
"Well!" Von Wetten deliberated. "Pretty bad for the English, I should
think," he decided.
"But how, man how?" persisted the Baron. "In what way would it be bad
for them?"
Von Wetten made an effort; he was not employed for his imagination.
"Why," he hesitated, "because I suppose the cartridges would blow up
in the men's pouches and in the machine-gun belts; and then the
trench-mortar ammunition and the hand grenades; well, everything
explosive would simply explode! And then we'd go over to what was
left of them, and it would be finished."
He stopped abruptly as the vision grew clearer. "Aber," he began
excitedly.
The old Baron lifted a hand and quelled him.
"The machine you saw this morning, which you tested, will do all
this?" he insisted.
Von Wetten was staring at the Baron. Upon the question he let his
monocle fall and seemed to consider. "I, I don't see why not," he
replied.
The Baron nodded thrice, very slowly. Then he glanced up at Herr
Haase. "Then miracles are worked by machinery, after all," he said.
Then he turned again to Von Wetten.
"Well?" he said. "And the man? We are forgetting the man; I think we
generally do, we Germans. What is the difficulty about the man?"
Von Wetten shrugged. "The difficulty is that he won't name his
price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of
fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something,
across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you!
Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even
offered to let me take my stuff to the other side of the lake, three
miles away, and explode it at that distance. But when it came to
terms, all he'd do was to look the other way and mumble."
"What did you offer him?" demanded the Baron.
"My orders, Your Excellency," answered Captain von Wetten formally,
"were to agree to his price, but not to attempt negotiations in the
event of difficulty over the terms. That was reserved for Your
Excellency."
"H'm!" The Baron nodded. "Quite right," he approved. "Quite right;
there is something in this. Men have their price, but sometimes they
have to be paid in a curious currency. By the way, how much money
have we?"
Herr Haase, a mere living ache inhabiting the background, replied.
"I am instructed, Excellency, that my cheque will be honored at sight
here for a million marks," he answered, in the loud hypnotized voice
of the drill-ground. "But there is, of course, no limit."
The Baron gave him an approving nod. "No limit," he said. "That is
the only way to do things no limit, in money or anything else! Well,
Haase can bring the car round at what time, Von Wetten?"
"Twenty minutes to five!" Von Wetten threw the words over his
shoulder.
"And I shall lunch up here; it's cooler. You'd better lunch with me,
and we can talk. Send up a waiter as you go, my good Haase."
Herr Haase bowed, but clicked only faintly. "Zu Befehl, Excellenz,"
he replied, and withdrew.
In the hall below he sank into a chair, groaned and fumbled at the
buttons of his boots. He was wearing them for the first time, and
they fitted him as though they had been shrunk on to him. The porter,
his waistcoat gaping, came shambling over to him.
"You were saying," began the porter, "that the English."
Herr Haase boiled over. "Zum Teufel mit den Englandern und mit Dir,
Schafskopf!" he roared, tearing at the buttons. "Send up a waiter to
the Herr Baron and call me a cab to go home in!"
It was in a sunlight tempered as by a foreboding of sunset, when the
surface of the lake was ribbed like sea sand with the first
breathings of the evening breeze, that Herr Haase, riding proudly in
the back seat of honor, brought the motor-car to the hotel. He had
changed his garb of ceremony and servitude; he wore grey now, one of
those stomach-exposing, large-tailed coats which lend even to the
straightest man the appearance of being bandy-legged; and upon his
feet were a pair of tried and proven cloth boots.
The porter, his waistcoat buttoned for the occasion, carried out a
leather suit-case and placed it in the car, then stood aside, holding
open the door, as the Baron and Von Wetten appeared from the hall.
Von Wetten, true to his manner, saw neither Herr Haase's bow nor the
porter's lifted cap; to him, salutations and civilities came like the
air he breathed, and were as little acknowledged. The Baron gave to
Herr Haase the compliment of a glance that took in the grey coat and
the cloth boots, and the ghost of an ironic, not unkindly smile.
"Der gute Haase," he murmured, and then, as though in absence of
mind, "Poor fellow, poor fellow!"
His foot was upon the step of the car when he saw the leather
suit-case within. He paused in the act of entering.
"What is this baggage?" he inquired.
Von Wetten craned forward to look. "Oh, that! I wanted you to see the
machine at work, Excellenz, so I'm bringing a few cartridges and
things."
His Excellency withdrew his foot and stepped back. "Explosives, eh?"
He made a half-humorous grimace of distaste. "Haase, lift that bag
out carefully, man! and carry it in front with you. And tell the
chauffeur to drive cautiously!"
Their destination was to the eastward of the little town, where the
gardens of the villas trail their willow-fringes in the water. Among
them, a varnished yellow chalet lifted its tiers of glassed-in
galleries among the heavy green of fir-trees; its door, close beside
the road, was guarded by a gate of iron bars. The big car slid to a
standstill beside it with a scrape of tires in the dust.
"A moment," said the old baron, as Herr Haase lifted his hand to the
iron bell-pull that hung beside the gate. "Who are we? What names
have you given, Von Wetten? Schmidt and Meyer or something more
fanciful?"
"Much more fanciful, Excellenz." Von Wetten allowed himself a smile.
"I am Herr Wetten; Your Excellency is Herr Steinlach. It could not be
simpler."
The Baron laughed quietly. "Very good, indeed," he agreed. "And
Haase? You did not think of him? Well, the good Haase, for the time
being, shall be the Herr von Haase. Eh, Haase?"
"Zu Befehl, Excellenz," deferred Herr Haase.
The iron bell-pull squealed in its dry guides; somewhere within the
recesses of the house a sleeping bell woke and jangled. Silence
followed. The three of them waited upon the road in the slant of the
sunshine, aware of the odor of hot dust, trees, and water. Herr Haase
stood, in the contented torpor of service and obedience, holding the
heavy suit-case to one side of the gate; to the other, the Baron and
Von Wetten stood together. Von Wetten, with something of rigidity
even in his ease and insouciance, stared idly at the windows through
which, as through stagnant eyes, the silent house seemed to be
inspecting them; the Baron, with his hands joined behind him, was
gazing through the gate at the unresponsive yellow door. His pink,
strong face had fallen vague and mild; he seemed to dream in the
sunlight upon the threshold of his enterprise. All of him that was
formidable and potent was withdrawn from the surface, sucked in, and
concentrated in the inner centers of his mind and spirit.
There sounded within the door the noise of footsteps; a bolt clashed,
and there came out to the gate a young woman with a key in her hand.
The Baron lifted his head and looked at her, and she stopped, as
though brought up short by the impact of his gaze. She was a small
creature, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, as
fresh and pretty as apple-blossom. But it was more than shyness that
narrowed her German-blue eyes as she stood behind the bars, looking
at the three men.
Von Wetten, tall, comely, stepped forward.
"Good afternoon, gnadige Frau. We have an appointment with your
husband for this hour. Let me present Herr Steinlach Herr von Haase."
The two bowed at her; she inspected each in turn, still with that
narrow-eyed reserve.
"Yes," she said then, in a small tinkle of a voice. "My husband is
expecting you."
She unlocked the gate; the key resisted her, and she had to take both
hands to it, flushing with the effort of wrenching it over. They
followed her into the house, along an echoing corridor, to a front
room whose windows framed a dazzling great panorama of wide water,
steep blue mountain, and shining snow-slopes. Herr Haase, coming last
with the suitcase, saw around the Baron's large shoulders how she
flitted across and called into the balcony: "Egon, the Herren are
here!" Then, without glancing at them again, she passed them and
disappeared.
Herr Haase's wrist was aching with his burden. Gently, and with
precaution against noise, he stooped, and let the suit-case down upon
the floor. So that he did not see the entry at that moment of the man
who came from the balcony, walking noiselessly upon rubber-soled
tennis-shoes. He heard Von Wetten's "Good afternoon, Herr
Bettermann," and straightened up quickly to be introduced.
He found himself taking the hand it lay in his an instant as
lifelessly as a glove of a young man whose eyes, over-large in a
tragically thin face and under a chrysanthemum shock of hair, were at
once timid and angry. He was coatless, as though he had come fresh
from some work, and under his blue shirt his shoulders showed
angular. But what was most noticeable about him, when he lifted his
face to the light, was the scar of which Von Wetten had spoken a red
and jagged trace of some ugly wound, running from the inner corner of
the right eye to the edge of the jaw. He murmured some inaudible
acknowledgment of Herr Haase's scrupulously correct greeting.
Then, as actually as though an arm of flesh and blood had thrust him
back. Herr Haase was brushed aside. It was as if the Baron von
Steinlach, choosing his moment, released his power of personality
upon the scene as a man lets go his held breath. "A wonderful view
you have here, Herr Bettermann," was all he said. The young man
turned to him to reply; it was as though their opposite purposes and
wills crossed and clashed like engaged swords. Herr Haase, and even
the salient and insistent presence of Von Wetten, thinned and became
vague ghostly, ineffectual natives of the background in the stark
light of the reality of that encounter.
There were some sentences, mere feigning, upon that radiant
perspective which the wide windows framed.
Then: "My friend and associate, Herr Wetten here, has asked me to
look into this matter," said the Baron. His voice was silk, the silk
"that holds fast where a steel chain snaps."
"First, to confirm his impressions of the the apparatus; second" the
subtle faint-blue eyes of the old man and the dark suspicious eyes of
the young man met and held each other "and second, the question, the
minor question, of the price. However" his lips, under the clipped,
white moustache, widened in a smile without mirth "that need not take
us long, since the price, you see, is not really a question at all."
The haggard young man heard him with no change in that painful
intensity of his.
"Isn't it?" he said shortly. "We'll see! But first, I suppose, you
want to see the thing at work. I have here cordite, gelignite,
trinitrotoluol," but his hare's eyes fell on the suit-case, "perhaps
you have brought your own stuff?"
"Yes," said the Baron; "I have brought my own stuff."
The garden of the villa was a plot of land reaching down to a parapet
lapped by the still stone-blue waters of the lake. Wooden steps led
down to it from the balcony; Herr Haase, descending them last with
the suit-case, paused an instant to shift his burden from one hand to
the other, and had time to survey the place the ruins of a lawn,
pitted like the face of a small-pox patient with small holes, where
the raw clay showed through the unkempt grass the "craters" of which
Captain von Wetten had spoken. Tall fir-trees, the weed of
Switzerland, bounded the garden on either hand, shutting it in as
effectually as a wall. Out upon the blue-and-silver floor of the lake
a male human being rowed a female of his species in a skiff; and near
the parapet something was hooded under a black cloth, such as
photographers use, beneath whose skirts there showed the feet of a
tripod.
Herr Bettermann, the young man with the scar, walked across to it. At
first glimpse, it had drawn all their eyes; each felt that here,
properly and decently screened, was the core of the affair. It was
right that it should be covered up and revealed only at the due
moment; yet Bettermann went to it and jerked the black cloth off,
raping the mystery of the thing as crudely as a Prussian in Belgium.
"Here it is," he said curtly. "Put your stuff where you like."