The ultimate picket line gained and passed, the car leaped forward with the bound of some freed animal, its twin headlights feeling far ahead the road to the south. Behind lay Paris, the city of dread. Ahead—far ahead, where the continent is spiked down with a rock, Gibraltar. Beyond that the safe haven from this madness of the millions—America.
Jane Gerson stretched out her arms to the vision and laughed shrilly.
CHAPTER VII
THE HOTEL SPLENDIDE
Mr. Joseph Almer, proprietor of the Hotel Splendide, on Gibraltar's Waterport Street, was alone in his office, busy over his books. The day was August fifth. The night before the cable had flashed word to General Sir George Crandall, Governor-general of the Rock, that England had hurled herself into the great war. But that was no concern of Mr. Joseph Almer except as it affected the hotel business; admittedly it did bring complications there.
A sleek well-fed Swiss he was; one whose neutrality was publicly as impervious as the rocky barriers of his home land. A bland eye and a suave professional smile were the ever-present advertisements of urbanity on Joseph Almer's chubby countenance. He spoke with an accent that might have got him into trouble with the English masters of the Rock had they not known that certain cantons in Switzerland occupy an unfortunate contiguity with Germany, and Almer, therefore, was hardly to be blamed for an accident of birth. From a window of his office, he looked out on crooked Waterport Street, where all the world of the Mediterranean shuffled by on shoes, slippers and bare feet. Just across his desk was the Hotel Splendide's reception room—a sad retreat, wherein a superannuated parlor set of worn red plush tried to give the lie to the reflection cast back at it by the dingy gold-framed mirror over the battered fireplace. Gaudy steamship posters and lithographs of the Sphinx and kindred tourists' delights were the walls' only decorations. Not even the potted palm, which is the hotel man's cure-all, was there to screen the interior of the office-reception room from the curious eyes of the street, just beyond swinging glass doors. Joseph Almer had taken poetic license with the word "splendide"; but in Gibraltar that is permissible; necessary, in fact. Little there lives up to its reputation save the Rock itself.
It was four in the afternoon. The street outside steamed with heat, and the odors that make Gibraltar a lasting memory were at their prime of distillation. The proprietor of the Splendide was nodding over his books. A light footfall on the boards beyond the desk roused him. A girl with two cigar boxes under her arm slipped, like a shadow, up to the desk. She was dressed in the bright colors of Spain, claret-colored skirt under a broad Romany sash, and with thin white waist, open at rounded throat. A cheap tortoise-shell comb held her coils of chestnut hair high on her head. Louisa of the Wilhelmstrasse; but not the same Louisa—the sophisticated Louisa of the Café Riche and the Winter Garden. A timid little cigar maker she was, here in Gibraltar.
"Louisa!" Almer's head bobbed up on a suddenly stiffened neck as he whispered her name. She set her boxes of cigars on the desk, opened them, and as she made gestures to point the worthiness of her wares, she spoke swiftly, and in a half whisper:
"All is as we hoped, Almer. He comes on the Princess Mary—a cablegram from Koch just got through to-day. I wanted——"
"You mean——" Almer thrust his head forward in his eagerness, and his eyes were bright beads.