Ruth sorted the pages over swiftly and, finding that their texts fell under nine heads, she removed the twenty-eight pages which were under five of these heads; the other twenty-three pages she restored to the two packets. She thrust the removed pages under her corset; and, carrying the others in their wet packets, she left the room. Descending the wide, black stairs, she found Adler pacing the hallway as he had paced the terrace.
He led her into a large, high, dark paneled, mullion-windowed room where old armor and battle maces stood upon the black walls above modern office filing cases and with an ancient carved table topped with glass and desk blotter; before this was an ordinary swivel chair. Adler motioned Ruth to this as he put out his hand for the packets.
“The reports now, please, gnädiges Fräulein!” Adler asked. “A transcription immediately must be ready for Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch! He will not find it like talking with Hauptmann von Forstner; but we must do what we can!”
Ruth handed him the packets and she sat down in the swivel chair while, on the other side of the glass table top, Adler spread out the sheets. Their number appeared to satisfy him; at least he questioned nothing, but, having the pages in order, he unlocked a small, flat drawer and took out three paper stencils. The apertures through the paper differed, Ruth saw, with each stencil. Adler laid them in order over the first three sheets, and, bending, read to himself the words which remained in sight under the stencils. Ruth could not see what he read nor the brief transcript he made with pencil upon a pad. He shifted the stencils to the next three sheets, read the result again, made his transcript, and again shifted.
Adler came to the end and gazed up at Ruth. The other women whom Hauptmann von Forstner had invited to Lauengratz and who had used those apartments above evidently had been of unquestionable loyalty, for the secretary, when he gazed up at this guest of his dead master, did not challenge her. He sought information to prepare himself for the visit of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, not half an hour away.
“Besides these, gnädiges Fräulein,” he appealed anxiously, “did Herr Hauptmann make no verbal mention of other matters?”
Ruth shook her head. “Personal matters between him and myself,” she said. “But he did not go into the reports of others with me at all. In fact, he would not even receive my report; since I was coming into Germany I could make it myself to Oberst-Lieutenant Fallenbosch. That would be safer, he said.”
This true recital threw Adler into gesturing despair. “Exactly; it is precisely what he would do! It is safest; it is most discreet to put nothing, or as little as possible, upon paper. That is always his obsession! So discreet! When I say to him it is not always safer he laughs or tells me to mind my own business! Discretion! It is because he is so obsessed by it that he directs our secret service for the district. ‘Have merely an ordered mind, a good memory, Adler,’ he always says to me, ‘and nothing will be misplaced, nothing will get astray, nothing will be obtained by others.’
“‘Yes, Herr Hauptmann,’ I say, ‘but suppose something happen to that ordered mind and that good memory! What then?’ Ah! He laughs at me and pats me on the back so indulgently. But where is that ordered mind; where now is that memory to which the most important things may be committed? Well, he is away from the trouble,” the secretary raged in his dismay. “He can hear nothing which Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch may say of him. But I—I will get it.... Yet you can make your report to him. At least, that much may be added. You have come from where, Fräulein Brun? Which front?” he beseeched hopefully.
“From Picardy,” Ruth said. “I had the honor to be assigned to Roisel and to attach myself, particularly, to the British Fifth Army.”