"I have a cabin below. I place it at the lady's disposal"
On the lifeboat for those first seconds a silence of petrification reigned. On the submarine sounded voices—voices which hadn't been heard before. For one sick instant Newcomb tried to fit those sounds to expostulation, to revolt. And then hope died, transfixed by laughter.
But the commander himself was grave, almost decorous.
"Well, what do you say?" He was looking straight at the girl. "You must make up your mind quickly. I've wasted too much time already."
"Far too much," burst from a man's throat down below.
"Unless," the German went on calmly—"unless, as seems probable, the lady hasn't understood."
No wonder that he so interpreted the lady's face, for in the circumscribed field of intense light her eyes showed wide to an incredible vision. "It is true what your own people have told you," he went on. "To stay where you are means death."
She spoke directly to him for the first time.
"And these—these others!"
"The fate of men in war," said the commander. "There is no need for you to share it."
Only the rushing sound of the water for a breath's interval till she gave him the measure of her incorrigible hope. "You'll save the others, too!"
He checked his impatient gesture to demand: "You think they won't let you come—alone!" No wonder he persisted, for she was looking at him still with that excited hopefulness, though dashed now with bewilderment, her brows drawn together as though she were trying with all her might and main, in spite of dazzle and glare, to make out something dim and far and inconceivably precious—nothing less than an ultimate fate in man.
"I give you my word," he called out, "nobody shall prevent you."
"Yes, somebody will!" Julian shouted.
Twice fifteen hands were ready to make the assurance good. Four of them were laid to the oars. It was all over while you'd count half a dozen, but out of those flying seconds of half-paralyzed effort Newcomb kept the memory of a lifeboat that seemed to share the mortal agitations of her crew; a boat that for an instant—an eternity—swung under unequal oar-strokes in an oily glitter that swelled up black, polished, till it shut out the horizon stars.
As though no man had stirred, the Leyden captain was roaring: "What are you about? Shove off!" His voice thickened to incoherent cursing even before a couple of boat-hook heads crashed down on the gunwale and hauled the boat sharply back against the body of the submarine.
"Are you mad?" It wasn't lost on any one in the lifeboat that the German's free hand had found his pistol as he added: "Isn't there sense enough among you to know you're helpless? You've only the girl to thank that I don't ram you to hell." A word over his shoulder sent two of the crew down through that faint gush of light to the deck. "I'm sending for you."
"Julian!" After the guttural male voice, the high childish cry seemed to tear the quivering night in two.
Strangely it was answered. The pacifist Julian turned and flung himself upon the man at his side. He seemed to grapple insanely with the Leyden captain, till something in his keeping was torn out of his hand. Over their heads a shot rang out. Two sailors, about to board the lifeboat, hesitated, turned and vanished.
Newcomb was for the moment so sure it was the U-boat commander who had fired that his next impression was of a thing purely fantastic; for the figure up there against the stars, that figure inclined in a mockery of courtesy to Nan Ellis, jumped to attention; held the attitude rigidly an instant, and then, as though in pride of pose he had overreached himself, fell back. Men sprang to catch him and darkness closed round the dropped torch.
Out of the half-crazed confusion that followed, it was hard afterward to recall anything with both certainty and distinctness except the captain's rough order to Julian, "Here, give it back!" and a pistol changed hands. Newcomb had his share in wrenching the boat-hooks from their hold and in the feverish self-defeating activity of the oarsmen.
Out of the semi-darkness on the submarine torches spouted light. Out of the turmoil on conning-tower and deck, cries of fury crystallized to a single sentence repeated in German by a dozen tongues, "Axes! Axes! Stave her in!"
The first lieutenant gesticulated madly.
"Stop rowing instantly, or I fire!"
"Row! Row hard! For God's sake," Grant's voice prayed, "give me an oar!"
No one heeded; the rowers rowed for their lives. Two revolver-shots rang out, and the chief engineer rowed no more.
Instead of pursuing, the submarine had darted away. She was swinging half round a circle; she was, God in heaven! what now? She was heading this way again, coming at full speed.
Newcomb brought his eyes back to the faces nearest him. They showed him only that his own sick sense of helplessness was shared, and shared the remembrance of that threat, but for the girl. To ram the lifeboat? As easy as for a child to stick the end of a spoon through the breakfast egg.
On she came; you heard the mutter of her engines. He couldn't bring himself to look at the girl. For fear of meeting her eyes with knowledge in them at last Newcomb found himself turning dizzily away from all those stricken faces. In the teeth of death he remembered staring round the black half-circle of the heavens.
The very cloud-wrack was seized by fear ... it ran scudding away from the scene. It left naked the shivering stars. Two little sounds alone in all that silence: a sobbing of water against the sides of the boat; and that other, the low mutter of the oncoming doom.
In that final rush, the blackness in which the submarine moved, curled up and fell away from her bow like black earth on either side of a ploughshare—now like earth snow powdered.
That was the last thing Newcomb remembered—of the curling white lip of the bow wave as the engine of death came rushing at the lifeboat. That and voices in the extremity of horror that cried: "Jump! Jump!"
Those who didn't were not seen again.
CHAPTER XXVII
So long it takes to tell these things. So brief a time to happen. In eighteen seconds the submarine had gone a thousand yards, and men struggling in her wake had crowded a lifetime into a span.
Horrible as were the cries of the drowning, Newcomb's crowning fear was that they would cease. He clung to his broken grating, and strained his eyes in the changing light. Off there to left of him—not again the submarine! She had checked her course and swung round. As quickly as she had shot away after her murderous work was done, here, describing a half-circle, she was rushing back.
Almost at the instant of recognition of the changed course there, only a few yards off, a head, two heads, showed above the water. Newcomb remembered crying out a warning, "She's coming back!" as the swift seconds brought the swifter U-boat and the sound of renewed firing nearer. Newcomb could see the figure of the commander jumping about grotesquely on the narrow platform of the conning-tower, and heard him calling down to the armed sailors on the deck. And all the while the commander himself kept firing, like a madman, down on the water at every head he saw. Hit or miss and on to the next. As the submarine raced by, he shot even the bits of wreckage; he shot the shadows. "Ha! da ist eins. Und da—siehst du? Noch eins—!"
Meanwhile the torch-lights and the flash, sweeping again the farther reaches, lighted fiercely whatever they played on, and thus the intervening lanes of blackness between the lighted ridges of the waves offered momentary asylum. Up one of these dim stretches Newcomb trod water, clinging to his fragment of grating.
How long after he never knew before that moment when he sighted the moving shadow that turned into a lifeboat. A man clung to the gunwale with one hand, and with the other helped hands outstretched from the boat to draw some one on board.
"There is no r-r-room!" a voice was crying. In the midst of the passionate altercation between the officer in charge and a woman in the boat, Grant and Newcomb were hauled in and given rum.
At intervals, with his flash, the officer in charge swept the circumambient shadow. Though Newcomb was beginning to revive, he couldn't face that void. He turned to the human presences nearest him. At his side was a man the officer called Gillow, thick-set, ruddy, with close black beard and lively eyes. Among those last confused recollections on board the Leyden had been this fellow's running up on deck barefoot and in his underclothes. He sat now in somebody's overcoat, with a blanket muffled about his legs and feet. A child somewhere behind began to cry.
Newcomb turned to look back. The exploring light picked out a head in a close-fitting cap tied well down with a heavy veil that left the face uncovered. For an instant Newcomb met the challenging eyes of Greta.
In the bottom of the boat, dead or unconscious, lay the girl, Nan Ellis.
The night wore on, with low-voiced tales of what they had been through. Engineer Gillow told how, in the confusion of the launching, lifeboat No. 11, originally in charge of the officer of the watch, had collided with two other boats. All three were damaged, No. 11 so seriously as to be virtually useless. In the end No. 11 wasn't needed, was Gillow's terse summary of what followed. It hadn't been possible to save everybody; they had done their best. There was a poor devil there in the bow, a naked stoker they had picked up. He'd had his clothes burned off by the fire in the engine-room. Assistant-Engineer Gillow himself had as narrow an escape as any; he'd been asleep while the torpedoed ship was sinking. A rush of sea water had washed him out of his bunk barely in time, as he put it, to catch the last boat. Now he was going to catch forty winks. He folded his short arms with an air of resolution, and dropped his beard into the turned-up collar of the borrowed coat. In two or three minutes he slept. The rest sat waiting for the day.
That dawning, so passionately longed for, showed no hint of man or of his work on all the plain of ocean, not so much as a shattered thwart.
On the lifeboat itself the gray, sun-shrouded morning showed a company of eight men, counting Newcomb, Grant, and the stoker; seven women; four children, fretful from chill and hunger; and a half-grown cabin-boy. The second officer, a wiry, hard-bitten Welshman, was staring through his binoculars north, south, east, west. Hardly would he persuade himself to put the glass down when he would grip hold of it again. Up it would go to eyes that had gleamed an instant with some new, some always futile hope.
The naked stoker had been partly clothed. He lay in a stupor of exhaustion under damp coats and sodden canvas. The gray daylight showed Julian Grant with feverish eyes, and dry lips that said, "Nan's sleeping, too." She shared the tarpaulin which had been spread in the first place for the stoker and two children. Grant and two women, a stewardess and a passenger with a baby, occupied the seat facing the captain and the bow, facing that still figure of Nan Ellis. Miss Greta, as the morning showed, was the only woman not disheveled. Whether in the collision she had been wet at all, she looked dry now, and still rigorously buttoned up, tied down, and belted in. She was still wearing the small flat Rüch-Sak, lying high on her high shoulders, and she kept her eyes on the second officer; especially when, after he had shut his binocular case with a snap, he began to serve out rations of biscuit and water.
A child began to wail. "I can't keep him warm," said the mother. Her face was wet.
After consultation with Engineer Gillow, the second officer decided it was no use waiting for the rescue ship. He called for rowers. He called for something white for a flag of distress.
A man offered a gray sweater for the crying child on condition the mother should take off its white frock and let that be flown as a signal. The mother wanted to take the sweater and keep the white frock, too. With difficulty she was persuaded to the exchange.
Grant had roused Nan Ellis to take her share of the biscuit and water ration. She opened heavy eyes, ate, drank, and slept again the profound sleep of exhaustion.
Newcomb and Grant had been among the first to take each his turn at the oars. They kept it up in shifts all the windless day, and all day long the baby's frock signaled the distress which there seemed no eye on all the globe to heed.
Toward evening the stoker grew delirious. Out of the wrappings that concealed him he lifted a huge head, bristling with coarse, red hair.
"I know," he shouted in a Devon accent—"suffocated in the bunkers! That's it; yes, suffocated!" The giant choked and began to thrash about.
"Can't have that!" called out the second officer. "Quiet there!" The stern voice seemed to bring the man to himself for a minute. At the first sign of disturbance Newcomb had turned with an impulse to reassure Nan Ellis; but she slept on.
The eyes of the second officer came back once more from that endless interrogation of the ocean. "Boat won't stand much," he said in an undertone. "Mended one leak."
Down at his feet the red-haired giant was stirring again. He heaved, he cursed at some obstruction there under the canvas. He sat up and pulled out a block and tackle; and with it he fell to hammering at a stay.
"Open the hatch..." he shouted a string of foul language.
Nan Ellis started up, and turned with horror to face the incredible apparition.
"Lash him down," ordered the second officer, calmly.
It was a horrible performance. The girl hid her eyes till Grant had put her in his own place, but facing the other way, while he helped the engineer, the cabin-boy, and Newcomb to overpower the man. The girl sat crouched at Greta's side, each looking a different way. In an interval in his grim business Newcomb watched for the moment of recognition between the two, a moment strangely long delayed. Presently it dawned upon him that each was intimately aware of the other's presence and that neither meant to make a sign.
In the little breeze that at last was springing up the second officer, with help of Gillow and the cabin-boy, was getting up the sail. For the space of a good hour the boat sped over the water. At dusk the wind freshened, the sail was reefed down for the night under a sky all nimbus near the horizon, the zenith full of drab-colored cumulus moving sullenly northeast.
"It's below freezing all right," some one said.
Another spoke of the effect of icebergs drifting down.
"It's the time of year that happens."
"I wish it would freeze the stoker's tongue," said the cabin-boy.
An hour went by, longer than the longest day. Newcomb was dropping into a painful doze when something brought him back to a yet more painful consciousness. What was it? He was too much reduced to take the smallest initiative in finding out. He sat huddled, staring at the moon risen well above the nimbus and for the moment riding clear even of the scattered cumulus. Engineer Gillow had the watch. The second officer sat in the bow, with rigid back and open eyes. The stoker moaned. Every one else slept or seemed to sleep. No, not the two women sitting together with eyes averted.
"I didn't know it was you, Nan," he heard Greta whisper.
"You knew it was somebody," came the answer at last.
"All I could think of is, he's waiting for me! Ernst! He's escaped. I dare not die while Ernst needs me."
The girl made no sound.
"Can't you understand what it means to me that he should say, 'For the sake of everything we care for, I must come and help him!' How could I think that anybody else's life mattered—when Ernst is waiting for me!"
"Waiting for you.... Where?"
"Oh, I shall find him—And nobody else will! 'It all depends on you, Greta'; that's what he says. He'll see that I'm safe, he says,' and happy!' For the first time he speaks of marriage. He needs me!" she triumphed.
"One last great service is laid upon us, then Buenos Aires—Ernst and I."
The stoker's moaning mounted to a horrible, hoarse yell. It waked the sleeping, half-numb children. They, too, screamed with fright and misery. So the hours wore on, with appeals for water, with weeping and with worse. Once the stoker wrenched himself free. They bound him again. That made him more violent than before. All the rest of the night he raved. In the morning he was gone. No one asked a question.
The sail went up early that day, though the sea looked threatening and the wind was squally. Within the hour all canvas had to be furled and the sea-anchor streamed. The lamentable figures in the boat huddled closer. Of Greta you could hardly see a distinguishing sign, so was she muffled and surrounded. The seas rose higher and the wash came flooding in.
"Just as well they should think we get it over the gunwale," the second officer said to Newcomb. "Some of the damned rivets must have got strained."
The passengers began to crowd up, half toward the bow, half at the stern. Amidships was awash.
The hail turned to sleet, and the sleet to fine rain. In the stark misery of it the longing grew almost irresistible to jump overboard and end it all. More than one of that tragic company thought again and again: "I've come to the end. I can bear no more," not knowing yet the awful power of the flesh to endure and keep the soul imprisoned.
But the chance-made captain knew. "A hand here!" he ordered, and Newcomb helped the engineer to spread the boat-cover over the people, and to do it in spite of the icy wind that tore the freezing canvas out of one's grasp and seemed along with it to tear out one's finger-nails; failing that, to wrench one's half-frozen fingers out of their sockets. Yet at last the thing was spread and fastened. There was no one who didn't welcome it, and none to whom, as shelter, it wasn't a mock. Some craned out and held the canvas so as to catch the rain. There was enough to sting, enough to chill the marrow, but not enough to drink; yet furred and feverish tongues were pressed against the moistened canvas.
Toward evening the appeals for water became demands. One of the women, a thin, febrile creature with insane eyes, grew violent. For more than one the early stages of hushed despair had passed. Few were able to sit still. They came out from under cover with faces that made the heart shrink. They climbed about the boat in the failing light, moaning, threatening. Among the worst was the cabin-boy. It was clear he was light-headed.
"You've been drinking sea-water," the captain arraigned him, fiercely.
The boy denied the charge, whimpering.
"I think, sir," the engineer interrupted, "the sea-anchor's gone." The captain lashed two oars together and made another. In the early darkness the wind freshened, drenching the boat with spray.
Greta had joined in the bailing. She came up out of the stern like some hibernating brown animal of the bursa family. She worked well.
They bailed in shifts, hour by hour. The men bailed all night long. They bailed till the buckets and pannikins fell out of their swollen hands. In the small hours of morning Nan Ellis had crawled to the seat by Grant.
Another eternity went by. Slow daylight battled long with the mists of night and fog. The girl sat with her arms round the rigid figure of Julian Grant; but for that he would have slipped away like that other—Did any one know besides Newcomb of the gray head lying face downward in the wash that was sucking and slapping to and fro in the bottom of the boat?
Newcomb himself lost all sense of time in those intervals of partial unconsciousness too full of suffering to deserve the name of sleep, but he recollected the timbre of the voice that called out something inarticulate in German just before Gillow shouted, "Light! a light!"
And there it was, far away to eastward, infinitesimal, but steady, a gleam. At first it looked as if it might be the morning star shining through the breaking fog-veil, red like Mars. Then, changing like only man-made brightness, the light showed green.
The excitement among those who still were conscious bore its touch of mania. Where the captain's stern call to order might have failed, the question, "Who knows if it isn't a submarine?" sobered the most hopeful.
"Whatever it is, it's coming nearer!" Nan Ellis cried the news at Julian's irresponsive ear. Out of the cage of despair her flagging voice soared in a rapture of recovered faith: "Light, Julian! A light!"
And now there stood out against the streak of dawn the hull and funnels of a steamer. All eyes watched that phantom ship as though for an instant to lose sight of her would be tantamount to letting her go to the bottom. They held her to her holy purpose by that thread of vision, the optic nerve. And to those passionately watchful eyes the course of the steamer had seemed to lie in a dead reckoning right across the lifeboat. She couldn't miss them. Suddenly her course diverged; she was bearing to the west! Newcomb saw the captain's hand shake as he lighted a signal, his only and most precious Coston Light. Ah, she got that! Another feeble cry went up from the lifeboat, for the steamer slackened speed, she turned. She had altered her course for fear of running the lifeboat down. Now perhaps she could see—
Anyway, eyes in the lifeboat could see—the steamer sheering off to southward. The captain and the engineer shot off their pistols. Others in the boat, not too far gone, screamed like creatures on the rack. It wasn't tragic so much as horrible. They howled like animals.
The ship went on. She faded. She was gone.
"They're afraid it's a trap," said the engineer. "You didn't know it, but we're a decoy-boat, ha, ha! Signals of distress? Ha! ha! Too thin. We're a submarine. Didn't you know?"
More than men and boats had been sacrificed in the war.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Napier was not yet out of the hospital when the cable came, telling the date of Julian's sailing from New York and that Nan was returning by the same ship.
Nine days after, Napier sat in his sister's London house, raging feverishly at his slow convalescence, which wasn't in reality slow at all. To him, there, caught, as he said, "by the foot, like a rabbit in a trap," came the awful news—they still cried these things in streets—of the torpedoing of the Leyden.
He sent his man Day to Liverpool that evening to give help or, at the worst, to send back instant news. The knowledge that Sir James and Lady Grant had taken the first train on the same errand was a thought to lean on.
Yet those next days of waiting! They were followed by the news, wirelessed from the SS. Clonmel, which told of falling in with a handful of Leyden survivors among a boatful of dead. "Identities not established," it announced. That meant people too injured or too delirious to tell their names; people rescued too late, people dying.
Who could sit and wait in London? Not Napier. Within two hours of a stormy interview with his surgeon Napier was on his way.
Leaning on his crutches, he stood in the crowd on the Liverpool wharf. Among the faces all about him, fear-darkened, hope-lit, tear-stained, or merely curious, one of them caught Napier's eye for its look of detachment. Or was it for something familiar? The blue eyes crossed his with no flicker of recognition. But when Napier looked round again, the man was withdrawing from the line of vision, and to do that was no easy matter in the crush. Was it Ernst Pforzheim, with his mustache shaved off? Napier had decided against so far-fetched an assumption before the incident was forgotten in the wild cheering that broke from the crowd, and which rose again and again, as the Clonmel steamed up the Mersey with its tragic remnant.
There was no glimpse of Julian among those ravaged faces, and no use, Napier told himself, no earthly use, to look for that other. Yet all the forces of body and of soul met in the concentration of his scrutiny from end to end of the slowing ship.
No, she wasn't there. Napier's right hand tightened on the bar of his crutch. He leaned an instant against the shoulder of his servant, feeling the dreaded onset of that dizzy sickness which comes back upon men who have had a touch of gas. Still, he was master enough of himself to notice that the captain moved a little as he put up his hand in recognition of some one on the wharf. Then Napier saw her—or was it Nan?
The face, with the scarf wound round it, was like a mask. Lines, features, the pale brune coloring, were there; but where was Nan?
A second cheer had gone up from the docks as the Clonmel made fast. The crowd surged forward, shouting questions about the fate of certain Liverpool stokers and seamen. The police intervened, and opened a lane as the first passengers came down the gangway, hatless, unshaven, in borrowed clothes. Women in the crowd below, crying out names, questions, had to be held back by main force. "Let the passengers land first!" And still the cries went up, one sharper than all the rest: "Is Jimmy O'Brian saved?"
The pressure was relieved about the gangway when Nan, one of the last to land, had reached the wharf. She stood with those vacant eyes of hers on Gavan's crutch instead of on his face.
"You—wounded!"
He had not shaped the words, "Where's Julian?" and yet she answered him. "Julian is dead. The rescue people buried him—at sea."
Napier tried ineffectually enough to shield her from a man with a note-book, volleying questions.
While Napier and his man, with the girl between them, slowly made their way through the throng, Napier told her she must take over the rooms he had engaged.
"You won't be able to travel for a day or two," he said.
She stopped short at that, and began to look about with those unseeing eyes. She was "quite able to travel." She "must travel." She was going to Scotland.
A chill gripped Gavan's heart. Was she delirious?
"Anywhere you like when you've had a few days—"
"A few days? I can't wait a few days. She can't wait—Julian's mother. I'm going first to her."
An immense relief swept over him. The mind was there, the faithful, loyal mind.
"You needn't go to Scotland. The Grants are behind you, in that crowd, talking to the captain."
Vision rose again in the dimmed eyes. A great tenderness lit the still features as Nan caught sight of the tall, bent old man beside Julian's mother, and the changed face of the woman.
When once she had reached them, the last threads that had seemed precariously to hold her to Napier snapped. Her meeting with the Grants was very quiet, but evidently it changed the old people's plans in so far as they had plans. Sir James took Nan on his arm. The policeman, piloting Lady Grant, led the way out of the crowd within a yard of Napier. The girl turned to him.
"Gavan!"
"Where shall you be?" Napier made a motion to join her.
"She'll be with us, naturally," said Julian's father, his eyes resting an instant on Napier. "And you—soon you'll come—" he didn't try to finish. That "soon" had said enough. The old man could not at the moment bear even Gavan near his grief. The look in his eyes brought tears to Napier's as, forlornly, he watched the little group disappear in the crowd.
What a world! Would people ever be happy again?
The reporters, who had got hold of the captain and one of the survivors, surrounded the pair three and four deep. Their ranks were broken by a distracted woman with a shawl over her head, strained tight round her piteous face.
"Is it here he is, the gentleman who was saved? For the love of God, sir, did ye see Jimmy O'Brian? I'm his mother."
Napier leaned more heavily on his servant.
"We must get out of this," he said. But they couldn't. People who hadn't found their friends were not to be convinced they weren't on board. Again and again denied access to the ship, they pressed through the crowd with cries and questions. They couldn't see the crutch. Napier was knocked and jostled. The old gas-sickness was heavy on him. He took refuge on a sea-chest behind a pile of luggage, and sent Day to keep places in the train. When he lifted his swimming head, struggling still against that tide of nausea rising to choke him, Napier saw that the crowd had thinned now to a few groups of last, despairing lingerers. Even the cries for Jimmy O'Brian had sunk into the same stillness that wrapped the sailor at the bottom of the sea. A little old man in a threadbare coat closely buttoned round a meager body went up to the guard at the foot of the gangway.
"You are quite sure? The passengers are all off?"
"Haven't I told you no end o' times? They're gone, every man Jack of 'em, and we're hoistin' the gangway."
The old man walked forlornly away, his threadbare ulster flapping against his shins.
"Any idea when the other lady will be coming off?" a foreign-sounding voice asked on the other side of the luggage.
"'Other lady'! What other lady?"
Napier, leaning over, saw something shoved into a grimy fist. The Clonmel deck-hand had no need to look at the aid to memory. The faculty of touch had applied the stimulus. "There was another lady," he said; "but she ain't comin' ashore here. Goin' back with us to Ireland."
Napier watched the sailor take the inquirer over to the guard. The guard proved amenable. In a moment the stranger with the square back had passed up the gangway. No detectives were with him; he had gone on board alone. If it wasn't Ernst Pforzheim, it was some mustacheless individual extremely like him in feature, and as unlike as a seedy bowler, shabby clothes, and a slouching air could render the smart young gentleman of Glenfallon Castle. What did it mean?
The same question seemed to have occurred to a reporter who observed from a distance this case of flagrant favoritism. He was further rewarded for his patience by seeing presently the sailor who had been tipped beckoned by a steward from the top of the gangway. The reporter came strolling along the now nearly deserted wharf. He coasted gloomily round the piled-up luggage, looking at the labels. When he had passed out of Napier's range—suddenly voices!
Napier shifted his position again. Two men who had given no sign of life before were being asked some question by the reporter. One of the pair caught Napier's eye. Singleton! Napier's chilled blood ran swiftly. It was Ernst, then, who had gone on board! And if he didn't come back, if he was for escaping to Ireland, Singleton and his companion would search the ship. Plainly Singleton was trying to get rid of the reporter. Whatever was afoot here, it was not desirable to have it in the papers. The secret-service man and his companion, who looked as if he might be a plain-clothes policeman, turned a cold shoulder on the reporter, and suddenly fell back in the direction of Napier. Suddenly the reporter darted out from the shadow of the luggage and stood hovering near the gangway. The sailor and a steward were bringing down a shrouded figure in an invalid chair—a lady, you might think, if you didn't strongly suspect it to be Ernst doubling on his track after getting wind of Singleton waiting down there behind the luggage. When quiet had descended on the wharf and the ship was searched, Mr. Ernst would be far away.
"Put the lady down." Singleton's companion had planted himself in the way of the little procession, his coat turned back to show the police badge.
"Go on, I tell you!" The voice that came shrilly out of the veils was bewilderingly unlike the one Napier had been waiting for. The rest was mere pantomime from where he sat. The veiled head turned and seemed to catch sight of Singleton. Whereon the invalid darted out of the chair and ran with extraordinary fleetness down toward the warehouses.
When Gavan had pulled himself up on his crutch, he saw in the middle distance Singleton's companion and the reporter running along the wharf, while some yards further on, a squat, petticoated figure struggled fiercely in the arms of a fat policeman. Hat and veil were torn off, and Napier had an instant's glimpse of the face of Greta von Schwarzenberg, horrible with fear. The next instant she had succeeded in drawing back far enough to lift her foot, and to launch at the policeman a totally unexpected blow in the belly. Stark astonishment, as much as anything, sent the man stumbling back a couple of paces. The woman darted past into a region of piled barrels, casks, and cases, policeman and reporter in pursuit. Napier had fleeting glimpses of a game of hide-and-seek, grotesque in spite of the fact that it was played with passion, Greta appearing, disappearing, the others hot on her track, Greta tearing off scarf, ulster, and jacket as she ran, and casting them forth for her pursuers to catch their feet in. The policeman again fulfilled her hopes, but in vain was the net spread in sight of Singleton. He it was who at the most critical moment headed her off from the street. Back she doubled toward the water and was once more lost to view.
"If it was anybody else," Napier said, struggling to a balance on the well foot, "I'd say she hadn't a dog's chance."
"No, sir," the returned Day remarked obligingly as he steadied the crutch.
Owing, Napier afterward learned, to police orders in connection with the apprehension of a passenger off the Clonmel, the Euston train was still in the station. As Napier hobbled along the platform, Singleton and one of the ship's officers went by, making hurried inspection of each carriage. One door they opened revealed a man lying out at full length on the seat. As he raised his head, Napier recognized in the changed face Hallett Newcomb. The Clonmel officer asked if his late passenger had seen anything of "the lady, the older one."
Newcomb shook his head. He'd heard she was going on to Ireland.
"So did we," said Singleton. "We sent a man on board to induce her quietly to change her mind; but that woman's the devil. Simply vanished into air, or, rather, I believe she dived." All the same, they went on with their examination. Napier meanwhile had his bag brought into Hallett Newcomb's carriage. The fruitless search for Greta ended; the train was allowed to proceed.
On that journey back to London Napier heard through what the survivors of the Leyden had lived, to what Julian had succumbed.
In those next days Nan lay in that house in Berkeley Street where she had helped to nurse Julian back to health. Napier sent or telephoned daily to inquire for her. "Great care, complete quiet," Lady Grant wrote at the end of a week. "Not easily or soon will she shake off the horror of that voyage and of Julian's death."
Napier was the less prepared for Singleton's visit, a few days later, hot-foot from Berkeley Street. Singleton had, as he said, hunted up Miss Ellis "as a last hope." Oh, yes, he'd seen her.
"She'd been on the point of sending to you to get my address. What I hoped she'd tell me, I've come to doubt if she knows. I want your opinion on that. I see now I shall have to go warily." Singleton drew his chair closer to the fire and held out a hand to the blaze. There was not wariness only in the fine eyes, but the passion of the quest, and behind all a suppressed excitement, new in Napier's knowledge of the man. "For months," he went on, "there's been a leakage at the War Office."
Yes, Napier knew that. What he didn't know was that Schwarzenberg had been the one to make first-hand use of the leakage. Singleton had come to believe she'd engineered it. However that might be, "there's leakage still."
Napier caught the infection of Singleton's excitement.
"Can't Ernst get to the bottom of it—with the lady's kind help?"
"Her help? After he'd let her into the Liverpool trap?" inquired Singleton with scorn for such innocence. "Ernst, poor devil, won his release from Miss Greta, when he'd got her into our hands." The secret-service man studied the fire, frowning. "I didn't get what I went for, but I've had a rather curious interview with your American friend. She'd been looking at back copies of the newspapers. The library, where she was lying, was half snowed under with newspapers. Been poring over accounts of the torpedoing and the rescue. But she hadn't been able to find anything about Greta, not a breath. 'Well,' I said, 'doesn't that mean there's nothing to say?'
"'Only something to keep dark?' she suggested. Oh, she's no fool! She sat up and looked through me. I explained that all I meant was that Schwarzenberg mightn't be of such general interest as she imagined. She thought that over a moment, and then she said something that astonished me a good deal, given the terms Newcomb tells me they'd been on.' If it isn't known where Greta is,' she said, 'that's bad all round.' I asked, 'Why, all round?'
"She wouldn't answer directly. 'To be able to vanish like that,' she said. 'It's true, then; you do some things badly over here.'
"'Undoubtedly we do.'" Singleton smiled again as though recalling a compliment paid the British service.
And then he owned that she had very nearly bowled him over the next moment by saying: "'You don't happen to know where Mr. Ernst Pforzheim is?'
"'Pforzheim?'" Singleton had echoed feebly with his vacant, uninterested look. "'What makes you think of Pforzheim?'
"'Because wherever Ernst Pforzheim is, we'll find Greta.'"
Singleton smiled at her: "You're clear off the track. Pforzheim was arrested ages ago and locked up."
"But he escaped; Greta told me so."
"Well, he hasn't escaped, so make your mind easy about that."
She lay silent a moment, turning it over in her mind: "But if she didn't find Ernst, what did she do?"
Singleton seemed not to know the answer to that.
The girl sat up with startling suddenness: "'I thought I'd ask you first,' she said.
"'And second?'
"'I shall have to pull myself together and find out if somebody doesn't know where she is.'"
Singleton asked, "Why?" As she didn't answer that: "Is there any great hurry?"
"Well, there is," she admitted, with a nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands. "I can't say any more, but the authorities have got to know."
"To know—" He waited.
"That Greta ought to be found."
"And when she is found?" Singleton inquired innocently.
Her answer evidently cost her something. "She ought to be sent out of the country."
Singleton suggested the futility of that had been proved.
"That's why, that's why!" She clutched the silk coverlid. "The people who know how to deal with these things have got to know. Though for me to have to tell them,"—her eyes filled—"it's an awful thing!"
He saw a way to ingratiate himself.
"I think I can save you that," he said.
"Can you? Can you? Oh, I'd be endlessly thankful!"
"I didn't say that nobody knew where to find the lady. Lord, it made her sit up straighter than ever."
"I was right, then," she said. "I felt you'd be the one to know. But you are keeping back something. Mr. Singleton, what has happened to Greta?"
He told her nothing very serious had happened as yet.
She lay back on the cushions an instant, with her chin up and her eyes on the window cornice.
"Then—I'm—not too late," she said.
"Too late for what?"
"Where is she?"
"I didn't tell you I could put my hand on her," he said. "I told you, very privately, of course, and as a great—the greatest—mark of confidence, that there were those who could."
"Well, I've got to be one of them," she said in her shortcut American way. When she saw he wasn't going to notice that observation, she went on: "Ever since I got better, I've lain in the room up there waiting for a letter from her." She had said it precisely as though her last encounter with the Schwarzenberg had been one of ordinary friendship. "I telegraphed Lady McIntyre to forward any letters, and she has. Not a thing from Greta."
"No, I dare say not," Singleton had answered.
"But why do you 'dare say not'?" Anxiety settled on her face again. "You make me all the surer of what I've been feeling so strongly that I can't sleep. Greta is in terrible need of help. All the more because of what she's done."
"And do you imagine, if she were in need of help, she'd turn to you?"
"Oh, quite certainly."
Singleton hadn't been able to repress the rejoinder: "It's a good thing, then, she can't." He wasn't the least prepared for the sensation by that innocent utterance.
"She can't!" The girl had risen, and the silk coverings fell about her feet as she stood there with frightened eyes, saying under her breath, "Why can't she?"
He did his best to soothe her. "You've just admitted you wouldn't have her free to carry out her designs."
"No! no!" She dropped weakly on the edge of the sofa and sat leaning forward: "Not free to do harm, but surely she is free to write to a friend?"
"I wouldn't, if I were you, be heard calling yourself a friend."
"I was a friend," she said. "How far can you go back, once you've been an intimate friend?"
"You have never been a friend, intimate or otherwise, because you never really knew the woman." And then he told her—not the details of the struggle on the wharf, the escape at risk of drowning, and the two days' pursuit of one of the most notorious spies in Europe. He told her merely that Miss von Schwarzenberg was under detention during his Majesty's pleasure.
When he had done so, he devoutly wished he hadn't.
"Instead of helping us to find out who the woman's accomplices are," he complained to Napier, "your Miss Ellis will be worrying us about the woman herself."
Then Singleton developed the idea that had come to him after leaving Berkeley Street. Mightn't it be possible to get the all-important clue out of Schwarzenberg herself by means of the Ellis girl if the authorities could be persuaded to give her access to Miss Ellis?
Napier was quite sure when his visitor left that Singleton was convinced of the hopelessness as well as the inadvisability of that device. Napier thought the less about what he characterized to himself as "the fellow's crazy project," because his mind was occupied with endless speculations about Nan.
A sentence in a letter which came the next day in answer to one of Napier's, shed a certain light. "Don't you, too, feel that I must tell Lady Grant how things are before I see you here? I haven't the strength for that just yet." She went on to say she'd seen Singleton and she had since tried to get more definite news through the authorities. "But you won't want to hear about Greta, though I must just tell you that Mr. Singleton has been very kind. He's found out she's a Prisoner of the First Class. That's so like Greta, if she was to be a prisoner at all!"
In his uneasiness Napier managed, two days later, to get Singleton on the telephone. He was told in a voice with impatience of "the stupidity at H. Q. which persisted in blocking the unceasing efforts of that girl to get permission to see the Elusive One. I've advised your friend"—Singleton's laugh came metallic along the wire—"to ask you to get her the permit."
"She knows better," retorted Napier. Something seemed to go wrong with the line after that. He didn't get Singleton again. Singleton was greatly occupied about that time.
As a special, indeed an unprecedented, concession, a permit was ultimately obtained for an unnamed lady to pay a visit to a person designated only by the Number 96 in a metropolitan prison.
Singleton didn't show Miss Ellis the permit until he had talked to her for some minutes about the superhuman difficulties that had to be surmounted before he had been able to get their request so much as listened to. He had sworn not to yield up the all-powerful piece of paper without exacting a pledge from Miss Ellis. She was to promise on her word of honor that she wouldn't let the Schwarzenberg know who had moved in the matter. This was of an importance he could not explain to her, but it was "the condition."
CHAPTER XXIX
"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."
