think ourselves lucky, I suppose, that he went no higher than a
colonel. There was a moment when I thought he was going very much
higher to the very top, Von Wetten. For, make no mistake, that young
man knows his value."
Von Wetten frowned undecidedly. "The top," he repeated. "There is
only one top. You can't mean?"
The Baron took the word from his mouth. "Yes," he said, "the Emperor.
I thought for a while he was going to demand that. And do you know
what I should have answered?"
Von Wetten threw up his head and his face cleared. "Of course I
know," he said. "You'd have cut the dirty traitor down where he
stood!"
The Baron did not move. "No," he said. "I should have accepted those
terms also, Von Wetten."
The Baron's hand rested on the edge of the table in front of Herr
Haase; he sat, staring at it, a piece of human furniture on the stage
of a tragedy. The other two confronted each other above his patient
and useful head. He would have liked to look from one to the other,
to watch their faces, but he was too deeply drilled for that. He
heard Von Wetten's voice with a quaver in it.
"Then things are going as badly as all that?"
"Yes," answered the Baron. "Badly! It is not just this battle that is
going on now in France; it strikes deeper than that. The plan that
was to give us victory has failed us; we find ourselves, with a
strength which must diminish, fighting an enemy whose strength
increases. We must not stop at anything now; what is at stake is too
tremendous."
"But--."
The Baron hushed him. "Listen, Von Wetten," he said. "I will be
patient with you. I do not speak to you of of the Idea of which
Germany and Prussia are the body and the weapon. No; but have you
ever realized that you, yes, you! belong to the most ridiculed, most
despised nation on earth? That your countrywomen furnish about eighty
per cent. of the world's prostitutes; that a German almost anywhere
is a waiter, or a sausage-manufacturer, or a beer-seller, the butt of
comic papers in a score of languages? All that has not occurred to
you, eh?
"Well, think of it, and think, too, of what this machine may do for
us. Think of a Germany armed in a weaponless world, and, if empire
and mastery convey nothing to you, think of oh! American women
walking the streets in Berlin, comic English waiters in German
cafe's, slavish French laborers in German sweat-shops. And all this
boxed into a machine on a tripod by a monomaniac whose price we can
pay!"
He paused and walked towards the window. "Dictate the telegram to the
Staff, Von Wetten," he said, over his shoulder.
Von Wetten laid his hat and cane on a chair and crossed the room. "I
feel as if I were stabbing a fellow-officer in the back," he said,
drearily. Then, to Herr Haase: "Take this, you!"
"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," said Herr Haase, and picked up his pen.
There were twelve long telegrams in all, of which many had to be
amended, pruned, sub-edited, and rewritten; each was directed to a
plain private address in Berlin, and each was to be answered to the
address of Herr Haase. One, which gave more trouble than any of the
others, was to Siegfried Meyer, Number One, Unter den Linden; it was
long before the Baron and Von Wetten could smooth its phrases to a
suavity and deference which satisfied them. Coffee was brought them
to lubricate their labors, but none to Herr Haase; his part was to
write down, scratch out, rewrite, while beyond the windows the night
marched up from the east and the lake grew bleak and vague.
"Now, my good Haase," said the Baron, when the last word-fabric was
decided upon and confirmed, "you will take those home with you, put
them into code, and dispatch them. You should have the last of them
off by midnight. And to-morrow, when the answers begin to come, you
will report here as quickly as possible."
"Zu befehl, Excellenz," said Herr Haase, his hands full of papers.
"Then good night, my good Haase," said the Baron.
"Good night to your Excellency," returned Herr Haase, from the
doorway. "Good night, Herr Hauptmann!" to Von Wetten's back.
"Shut the door," replied Von Wetten.
There was a moon at midnight, a great dull disc of soft light
touching the antique gables and cloistered streets of the little city
to glamour, blackening the shadows under the arches, and streaking
the many channels of the swift river with long reflections. Herr
Haase, returning from the telegraph office, walked noiseless as a
ghost through those ancient streets, for he had soft bedroom slippers
on his feet. His work was done for the day; he had put off business
as one lays aside a garment. From his lips ascended the mild incense
of one of those moist yellow cigars they make at Vevey. He paused
upon the first bridge to gaze down upon the smooth, hurrying water,
and his soul that soul which served the general purpose of a
monkey-wrench in adjusting the machine of history spoke aloud.
"A rum-punch," it confided to the night and the moon. "Yes, two
glasses; and a belegtes Brodchen; and a warm foot-bath. And then,
bed!"
Not for him, at any rate, were the doubts and hopes that tangled in
the Baron von Steinlach's massive head. A man with sore feet is prone
to feel that the ground he stands on is at least solid. In his
pleasant veranda next morning, with his coffee fragrant before him on
the chequered tablecloth, he read in the Bund: the British communique
of the battle of the Somme, new villages taken, fortified woods
stormed, prisoners multiplying, the whole monstrous structure of the
German war-machine cracking and failing. While he read he ate and
drank tranquilly; no thoughts of yesterday's business intruded upon
his breakfast peace. He finished the communique.
Then: "Liars!" he commented, comfortably, reaching for his cup.
"Those English are always liars!"
It was a good and easy day that thus opened. The answers to his
telegrams did not begin to arrive till noon, and then they were only
formulae acknowledging receipt, which he did not need his code-book
to decipher. With his black umbrella opened against the drive of the
sun, he carried them at his leisure to the Baron, where he sat alone
in his cool upper chamber working deliberately among his papers,
received the customary ghost of a smile and the murmur, "Der gute
Haase," and got away. The slovenly porter, always with his look of
having slept in his clothes, tried to engage him in talk upon the
day's news. "You," said Herr Haase, stepping round him, "are one of
those who believe anything; schamen Sie sich!" And so back to the
comfortable villa on the hillside with its flaming geraniums and its
atmosphere of that comfort and enduring respectability which stood to
Herr Haase for the very inwardness of Germany. Yes, a good day!
It lasted as long as the daylight; the end of it found Herr Haase,
his lamp alight, his back turned to the Alpine-glow on the mountains,
largely at ease in his chair, awaiting the arrival of his
Dienstmadchen with the culminating coffee of the day. His yellow
cigar was alight; he was fed and torpid; digestion and civilization
were doing their best for him. As from an ambush there arrived the
fat, yellow telegraph envelope.
"Ach, was!" protested Herr Haase. "And I thought it was the coffee
you were bringing."
"'S Kaffee kommt gleich," the stout, tow-haired girl assured him; but
already he had torn open the envelope and was surveying its
half-dozen sheets of code. Two hours of work with the key, at least;
he groaned, and hoisted himself from his chair.
"Bring the coffee to the office," he bade, and went to telephone a
warning to the Baron.
The code was a cumbersome one; its single good quality was that it
passed unsuspected at a time when nervous telegraph departments were
refusing all ciphers. It consisted of brief phrases and single words
alternately; the single words the codebook offered a selection of a
couple of hundred of them were meaningless, and employed solely to
separate the phrases; and for half an hour Herr Haase's task was to
separate this ballast from the cargo of the message and jettison it.
There lay before him then a string of honest-looking mercantile
phrases "market unsettled," "collections difficult," and the like
which each signified a particular word. He sat back in his chair and
took a preliminary glance at the thing.
It was a code he used frequently himself, and there were phrases in
the message, two or three, which he knew by heart. As he scanned it
it struck him that all of these were of the same character; they were
words of deprecation or demur. "Existing rate of exchange" meant
"regret"; "active selling" meant "impossible"; and "usual discount"
was the code-form of "unfortunate." Herr Haase frowned and reached
for his key.
Midnight was close at hand when he reached the Baron's room, with the
telegram and his neatly-written interpretation in an envelope. He had
changed his coat and shoes for the visit; it was the usual Herr
Haase, softish of substance, solemn of attire, official of demeanor,
who clicked and bowed to the Baron and Von Wetten in turn.
"Our good Haase," said the Baron. "At last!"
He wore a brown cloth dressing-gown with a cord about the middle; and
somehow the garment, with its long skirts and its tied-in waist,
looked like a woman's frock? With the white hair and the contained
benevolence and power of his face it gave him the aspect of a
distorted femininity, a womanhood unnatural and dire. Even Herr Haase
perceived it, for he stared a moment open-mouthed before he recovered
himself. Von Wetten, smoking, in an easy chair, was in evening dress.
Herr Haase, with customary clockwork-like military motions, produced
his envelope and held it forth.
"The code-telegram of which I telephoned your Excellency and a
transcription of it," he announced.
Von Wetten took his cigar from his lips and held it between his
fingers. The Baron waved the proffered envelope from him.
"Read it to us, my good Haase," he said.
"Zu befehl, Excellenz!" Herr Haase produced from the envelope the
crackling sheet of thin paper, held it up to the light, standing the
while with heels together and chest outthrust, and read in the high
barrack-square voice:
"Herr Sigismund Haase, Friedrichsruhe, Thunam-See, Switzerland. From
Secret Service Administration, Berlin. July 21st, 1916. In reply to
your code-message previously acknowledged, regret to report that
officer you require was recently severely wounded. Hospital
authorities report that it is impossible to move him. Trust this
unfortunate event does not stultify your arrangements. Your further
instructions awaited."
Herr Haase refolded the paper and returned it to the envelope and
stood waiting.
It was Von Wetten who spoke first. "Thank God!" he said loudly.
The old baron, standing near him, hands joined behind his back, had
listened to the reading with eyes on the floor. He shook his head
now, gently, dissenting rather than contradicting.
"Oh, no," he said slowly. "Don't be in a hurry to do that, Von
Wetten."
"But, Excellency," Von Wetten protested, "I meant, of course."
"I know," said the Baron. "I know what you thanked God for; and I
tell you don't be in too great a hurry."
He began to walk to and fro in the room. He let his hands fall to his
sides; he was more than ever distortedly womanlike, almost visibly
possessed and driven by his single purpose. Von Wetten, the extinct
cigar still poised in his hand, watched him frowningly.
"Sometimes" the Baron seemed to speak as often a man deep in thought
will hum a tune "sometimes I have felt before what I feel now a
current in the universe that sets against me, against us. Something
pulls the other way. It has all but daunted me once or twice."
He continued to pace to and fro, staring at the varnished floor.
"But, Excellency," urged Von Wetten, "there are still ways and means.
If we can decoy this inventor-fellow across the frontier and then,
there is his wife! Pressure could be brought to bear through the
woman. If we got hold of her, now!"
The Baron paused in his walk to hear him.
"And find an English army blasting its way through Belgium with that
machine to come to her rescue? No," he said; and then, starting from
his moody quiet to a sudden loudness: "No! We know his price to lash
this Von Specht across the face with a whip and we have agreed to it.
Let him lash him as he lies on a stretcher, if he likes! I know that
type of scorched brain, simmering on the brink of madness. He'll do
it, and he'll keep faith; and it'll be cheap at the price. Haase!"
He wheeled on Herr Haase suddenly.
"Zu befehl, Excellenz," replied Herr Haase.
The Baron stared at him for some moments, at the solid, capable,
biddable creature he was, stable and passive in the jar of the
overturned world. He pointed to the table.
"Sit there, my good Haase," he ordered. "I will dictate you a
telegram. Not code this time, plain German!"
He resumed his to-and-fro walk while Herr Haase established himself.
"Direct it to our private address in the Wilhelmstrasse," he ordered.
"Then write: 'You are to carry out orders previously communicated.
Send Von Specht forthwith, avoiding all delay. Telegraph hour of his
departure and keep me informed of his progress. No objections to this
order are to be entertained.'"
"'Entertained,'" murmured Herr Haase, as he wrote the last word.
"Sign it as before," directed the Baron. "You see, Von Wetten, it was
too soon!"
Von Wetten had not moved; he sat staring at the Baron. His hand
twitched and the dead cigar fell to the floor.
"I don't care," he burst out, "it's wrong; it's not worth it nothing
could be. I'd be willing to go a long way, but a Prussian officer!
It's, it's sacrilege. And a wounded man at that!"
The Baron did not smile but mirth was in his face. "That was an
afterthought, Von Wetten," he said "the wounded man part of it." He
turned to Herr Haase impatiently.
"Off with you!" he commanded. "Away, man, and get that message sent!
Let me have the replies as they arrive. No, don't wait to bow and say
good night; run, will you!"
His long arm, in the wide sleeve of the gown, leaped up, pointing to
the door. Herr Haase ran.
Obediently as a machine, trotting flat-footed over the cobbles of the
midnight streets, he ran, pulling up at moments to take his breath,
then running on again. Panting, sweating, he lumbered up the steps of
the telegraph office and thrust the message through the grille to the
sleepy clerk.
"What is Von Specht?" grumbled the clerk. "Is this a cipher-message?"
"No," gasped Herr Haase. "Can't you read? This is plain German!"
Herr Haase, one has gathered, was not afflicted with that weakness of
the sense which is called imagination. Not his to dream dreams and
see visions; nor, while he tenderly undressed himself and put himself
into his bed, to dwell in profitless fancy over the message he had
sent, bursting like a shell among the departments and administrations
which are the body of Germany's official soul. Nor later either, when
the spate of replies kept him busy decoding and carrying them down to
the Baron, did he read into them more than the bare import of their
wording. "Von Specht transferred to hospital coach attached special
train, accompanied military doctor and orderlies in civil clothes.
Left Base Hospital No. 64 at 3:22 P.M. Condition weak, feverish,"
said the first of them. It did not suggest to him the hush of the
white ward broken by the tread of the stalwart stretcher-bearers, the
feeble groaning as they shifted the swathed and bandaged form from
the bed to the stretcher, the face thin and haggard with yet remains
of sunburn on its bloodlessness, the progress to the railway, the
grunt and heave of the men as they hoisted their burden to the
waiting hospital-carriage. None of all that for Herr Haase.
Later came another message: "Patient very feverish. Continually
inquires whither going and why. Please telegraph some answer to meet
train at Bengen with which may quiet him." To that Herr Haase was
ordered to reply: "Tell Colonel von Specht that he is serving his
Fatherland," and that elicited another message from the train at
Colmar: "Gave patient your message, to which he replied, 'That is
good enough for me.' Is now less feverish, but very weak."
And finally, from Basle, came the news that the train and its
passengers had crossed the frontier; Colonel von Specht was in
Switzerland.
"You, my good Haase, will meet the train," said the Baron von
Steinlach. "The Embassy has arranged to have it shunted to a siding
outside the station. You will, of course, tell them nothing of what
is in contemplation. Just inform whoever is in charge that I will
come later. And, Von Wetten, I think we will send the car with a note
to bring Herr Bettermann here at the same time."
"Here, Excellency?"
"Yes," said the Baron. "After all, we want to keep the thing as quiet
as possible, and that fellow is capable of asking a party of friends
to witness the ceremony." There was malicious amusement in the eye he
turned on Von Wetten. "And we don't want that, do we?" he suggested.
Von Wetten shuddered.
The siding at which the special train finally came to rest was
"outside the station" in the sense that it was a couple of miles
short of it, to be reached by a track-side path complicated by piles
of sleepers and cinder-heaps. Herr Haase, for the purpose of his
mission, had attired himself sympathetically rather than
conveniently; he was going to visit a colonel and, in addition to
other splendors, he had even risked again the patent leather boots.
He was nearly an hour behind time when he reached at length the two
wagons-lits carriages standing by themselves in a wilderness of
tracks.
Limping, perspiring, purple in the face, he came alongside of them,
peering up at their windows. A face showed at one of them, spectacled
and bearded, gazing motionlessly through the panes with the effect of
a sea-creature in an aquarium. It vanished and reappeared at the end
door of the car.
"Hi! You, what do you want here?" called the owner of the face to
Herr Haase.
Herr Haase came shuffling towards the steps.
"Ich stelle Mich vor; I introduce myself," he said ceremoniously.
"Haase sent by his Excellency, the Herr Baron von Steinlach."
The other gazed down on him, a youngish man, golden-blond as to beard
and hair, with wide, friendly eyes magnified by his glasses. He was
coatless in the heat, and smoked a china-bowled German pipe like a
man whose work is done and whose ease is earned; yet in his face and
manner there was a trace of perturbation, an irritation of
nervousness.
"Oh!" he said, and spoke his own name. "Civil-doctor Fallwitz. I've
been expecting somebody. You'd better come inside, hadn't you?"
Outside was light and heat; inside was shadow and heat. Dr. Fallwitz
led the way along the corridor of the car, with its gold-outlined
scrollwork and many brass-gadgeted doors, to his own tiny
compartment, smelling of hot upholstery and tobacco. Herr Haase
removed his hat and sank puffing upon the green velvet cushions.
"You are hot, nicht wahr?" inquired Dr. Fallwitz politely.
"Yes," said Herr Haase. "But, Herr Doktor, since you are so good it
is not only that. If it is gross of me to ask it but if I might take
off my boots for some moments. You see, they are new."
"Aber ich bitte," cried the doctor.
The doctor stood watching him while he struggled with the buttons,
and while he watched he frowned and gnawed at the amber mouthpiece of
his pipe.
He waited till Herr Haase, with a loud, luxurious grunt, had drawn
off the second boot.
"There will be a row, of course," he remarked then. "These
Excellencies and people are only good for making rows. But I told
them he couldn't be moved."
Herr Haase shifted his toes inside his socks. "You mean Colonel von
Specht? But isn't he here, then?"
The young doctor shook his head. "We obeyed orders," he said. "We had
to. Those people think that life and death are subject to orders. I
kept him going till we got here, but about an hour ago he had a
hemorrhage."
He put his pipe back into his mouth, inhaled and exhaled a cloud of
smoke, and spoke again.
"Died before we could do anything," he said. "You see, after all he
had been through, he hadn't much blood to spare. What did they want
him here for, do you know?"
"No," said Herr Haase. "But I know the Herr Baron was needing him
particularly. Was fur eine Geschichte!"
"Want to see him?" asked the young doctor.
It had happened to Herr Haase never to see a dead man before.
Therefore, among the incidents of his career, he will not fail to
remember that the progress in his socks from the one car to the
other, the atmosphere of the second car where the presence of death
was heavy on the stagnant air, and the manner in which the thin white
sheet outlined the shape beneath. A big young orderly in shabby
civilian clothes was on guard; at the doctor's order he drew down the
sheet and the dead man's face was bare. He who had slashed a helpless
conscript across the face with a whip, for whom yet any service of
his Fatherland was "good enough," showed to the shrinking Herr Haase
only a thin, still countenance from whose features the eager passion
and purpose had been wiped, leaving it resolute in peace alone.
"I I didn't know they looked like that," whispered Herr Haase.
The two homeward miles of cindery path were difficult; the sun was
tyrannical; his boots were a torment; yet Herr Haase went as in a
dream. He had seen reality; the veil of his daily preoccupations had
been rent for him; and it needed the impertinence of the
ticket-collector at the door of the station, who was unwilling to let
him out without a ticket, to restore him. That battle won, he found
himself a cab, and rattled over the stones of Thun to the hotel door.
He prepared no phrases in which to clothe his news; facts are facts
and are to be stated as facts. What he murmured to himself as he
jolted over the cobbles was quite another matter.
"Ticket, indeed!" he breathed rancorously. "And I tipped him two
marks only last Christmas!"
The Baron's car was waiting at the hotel door; the cab drew up behind
it. The cabman, of course, wanted more than his due, and didn't get
it; but the debate helped to take Herr Haase's mind still further off
his feet. He entered the cool hall of the hotel triumphantly and made
for the staircase.
"O, mein Herr!"
He turned; he had not seen the lady in the deep basket-chair just
within the door, but now, as she rose and came towards him, he
recognized her. It was the wife of Bettermann, the inventor, the
shape upon the balcony of the chalet who had overlooked their
experiments and overheard the bargain they had made.
Herr Haase bowed. "Gnadige Frau?"
He remembered her as little and pleasantly pretty; her presence above
them on the balcony had touched his German sentimentalism. She was
pretty now, with her softness and blossom-like fragility, but with it
was a tensity, a sort of frightened desperation.
She hesitated for words, facing him with lips that trembled, and
large, painful eyes of nervousness. "He he is here," she said, at
last. "My husband they sent a car to fetch him to them. He is up
there now, with them!"
Herr Haase did not understand. "But yes, gracious lady," he answered.
"Why not? The Herr Baron wished to speak to him."
She put out a small gloved hand uncertainly and touched his sleeve.
"No," she said. "Tell me! I, I am so afraid. That other, the officer
who cut Egon's face my husband's I mean, he has arrived? Tell me,
mein Herr! Oh, I thought you would tell me; I saw you the other day,
and those others never spoke to you, and you were the only one who
looked kind and honest." She gulped and recovered. "He has arrived?"
"Well, now," began Herr Haase paternally. In all his official life he
had never "told" anything. Her small face, German to its very
coloring, pretty and pleading, tore at him.
"Yes, he has arrived," he said shortly. "I have I have just seen
him."
"Oh!" It was almost a cry. "Then then they will do it? Mein Herr,
mein Herr, help me! Egon, he has been thinking only of this for
years; and now, if he does it, he will think of nothing else all his
life. And he mustn't he mustn't! It's it will be madness. I know him.
Mein Herr, there is nobody else I can ask; help me!"