Three months went by before I was able to take advantage of K——’s invitation to pay him a visit at what he had called his “business headquarters,” and as I had naturally expected that she would have played many and diverse parts in the interim, it was with some surprise that I found the “——” still “dressed” as she had been when I last saw her.
“We’ve never quite been able to pull it off,” K—— explained, “and the waiting, and the not-quites and the might-have-beens have given me no end of a dose of that kind of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. But we’ve at least been
lucky enough not to queer the game by showing our hand, so that there’s still as good a chance as ever to make good with it under favourable circumstances. For that reason, the less we say about it for the present the better. That’s in regard to this particular stunt, I mean. As for the rest of the ‘Q’ stuff that we’ve brought off, or tried to bring off, during the last three years—I’m at your service to-night after dinner. The Germans have been publishing accounts of some of the stunts, under the title of ‘British Atrocities,’ for some months now, but as there are slight variations from the truth here and there, you may still be interested in getting some of the details a bit nearer the original fount.
“They claimed, for instance, that when one of their ‘heroic’ U-boats ran alongside an armed British patrol boat, which had surrendered to it, to transfer a boarding-party, an officer of the M.L. rushed on deck and threw down on the deck of the submarine what the skipper of the latter took to be a packet of secret books, and that this ‘packet,’ exploding, eventually resulted in the sinking of the guileless German craft. Now, about the only thing which is correct about that account is the statement that a U-boat was sunk. It wasn’t an armed M.L. that surrendered to Herr Ober-Lootenant—armed M.L.’s don’t do that sort of thing, take my word for it—but an unarmed, or practically unarmed, pleasure yacht, which had
apparently become disabled and blown to sea. And the trusting U-boat did not come alongside to put aboard a prize crew to navigate its captive to a German port as they’d try to make you believe, but only to sink it with bombs placed in the hold, so as to save shells or a torpedo. And it wasn’t a packet of secret books that put the pirate down, but a ‘baby,’ and my baby at that. No, I don’t mean that I threw a real child of mine to Moloch—I haven’t any to throw—but only that the idea of this literal enfant terrible, with a percussion cap on the top of his head and a can of T.N.T. for a body, originated under my hat.
“It’s not surprising that the Huns didn’t get the thing straight at first, though I believe one of their later versions does have a child in the cast, for none of the Germans present have yet returned to tell just what happened. About half of them never will see their beloved ‘Vodderland’ again, and I don’t mind telling you that I’m not wearing any crepe on my sleeve on that account, either. Do you know”—K——’s face flushed red and his brow contracted in the anger the thought aroused—“that those —— pirates were going right ahead to sink what they thought was nothing but a pleasure yacht, with a number of women and children in it, although it was plain as day to them that the one boat carried would founder under a quarter of our number? That’s your Hun every time, and it was just that insensate lust of his to murder
anything helpless that I reckoned on in baiting my trap. I felt dead certain—— But I’ll tell you the whole yarn this evening.”
Several bits of salvage from the “——’s” pleasure-yacht days figured in the little feast K—— had spread that evening, and I remember particularly that the Angostura was from a bottle Commodore P—— had himself secured at the time when that incomparable bitter was distilled in a little ramshackle pile-built factory at Ciudad Bolivar, on the upper Orinoco. And the coffee that same genial bon vivant had had blended and sealed in glass by an old Arab merchant at Aden, while the Benedictine had cost him a climb on foot through an infernally hot August afternoon to an ancient monastery inland of Naples. It was between sips of Benedictine—from a priceless little Morning Glory-shaped curl of Phœnician glass, picked up in Antioch one winter by the owner, and overlooked in the “stripping” operations—that K—— told me the story of the first of what he called his “Q-rious” operations.
“There was a story attached to just about every little package of food and drink P—— left in the yacht,” said K——, unrolling the gold foil from a cigar whose band bore the name of a Piñar del Rio factory which is famed as accepting no order save from its small but highly select list of private customers in various parts of the world; “and in the several letters he has written begging me to make
free with them he has told me most of the yarns. The consequence was that, while the good things lasted—they’re most of them finished now—I was getting in the way of enjoying eating and drinking them, telling where they came from and how they were come by, just about as much as good old P—— himself must have done. In fact, I think that their possible loss was about my worst worry when I tried my first ‘Q’ stunt on.