“And if I am a fool?” I asked.
“Send you to the Yser or the Dvina. You will be respectable cannon-fodder.”
“You cannot do that unless I consent,” I said.
“Can’t we?” he said, smiling wickedly. “Remember you are a citizen of nowhere. Technically, you are a rebel, and the British, if you go to them, will hang you, supposing they have any sense. You are in our power, my friend, to do precisely what we like with you.”
He was silent for a second, and then he said, meditatively:
“But I don’t think you are a fool. You may be a scoundrel. Some kinds of scoundrel are useful enough. Other kinds are strung up with a rope. Of that we shall know more soon.”
“And if I am a good man?”
“You will be given a chance to serve Germany, the proudest privilege a mortal man can have.” The strange man said this with a ringing sincerity in his voice that impressed me.
The car swung out from the trees into a park lined with saplings, and in the twilight I saw before me a biggish house like an overgrown Swiss chalet. There was a kind of archway, with a sham portcullis, and a terrace with battlements which looked as if they were made of stucco. We drew up at a Gothic front door, where a thin middle-aged man in a shooting-jacket was waiting.
As we moved into the lighted hall I got a good look at our host. He was very lean and brown, with the stoop in the shoulder that one gets from being constantly on horseback. He had untidy grizzled hair and a ragged beard, and a pair of pleasant, short-sighted brown eyes.