Naturally enough, they fell to speaking of the absent captain and in the course of their conversation Jeanne asked Slade if it were true that negroes were hanging from all the lamp posts of New York and if it were true that the American people were really for Germany, but that President Wilson sided with England and so made them fight against the Fatherland.
Slade told her that these were all lies and that he would like to come face to face with the man, whether German or German-American, who uttered such nonsense.
“He say ziss is all—how you say—nonsense,” Jeanne told me. “He will not be mad, because ziss is nonsense. So. I tell him all zese sings—only he laugh. Lies—nonsense—and he laugh.”
Apparently he had rallied her for believing all this extravagant stuff from the curious German mind. “He tell me I am so much at ease—ziss is why I believe.” I suppose he told her that she was easy. He told her also that he would bring her some elephants and tigers from the neighboring woods next day and so the talk passed off in pleasant banter.
What, then, was the surprise of both Jeanne and her father when, on showing their visitor to the little room upstairs which he was to occupy, he strode over to the old chest of drawers which stood in a corner and taking up a photograph of a man in a sumptuous German uniform, demanded to know if that was the captain.
“I tell him yess,” said the girl, “and how he make me take ze picture. Ziss I do not like to have, but I am so afraid, I must take eet. So I put it here—you see? Maybe he ask.”
Slade, according to her, took the picture, looked at it with an expression of rage, tore it into pieces and threw it on the floor. “So he talk low, too, and say mooch—vere rude,” she said.
To put the whole thing in a few plain words, he was evidently siezed with ungovernable rage, declared he would kill the man upon sight for a lying, sneaking wretch and hoped that he might meet him there and have done with it. The girl was greatly surprised and very much frightened, and her father also when she translated Slade’s talk for him. Her imperfect English was not always clear to me, but I gathered that Slade’s outburst was such as to shock her and it presented him in a new light to me. No doubt, these poor people had been thoroughly cowed by the Germans and feared the consequence of any harm which might befall their arrogant tyrant of the two black crosses.
“He’ll have a black cross over his grave if I ever see him!” Slade had muttered when he heard of this evident badge of honor.
“Even when we leave him,” Jeanne told me, “he sit on ze side of ze bed and look—so hard and his mouth—big—eet ees shut like ziss.” And she compressed her pretty lips with a very feeble look of grim and murderous wrath. Thus they left him, a stranger in the enemy country, with perils all about him, for the little rest which he might get before his dangerous business of the morrow.