“Michel, go down to the Grand Hotel at once and ask for Monsieur Legrand. Tell him I wish to see him. If he will kindly come up here in a taxi.”
“Bien, m’sieur!” and the grave-faced servant bowed and withdrew.
A few moments later Arnaud Rigaux took from a drawer in his library table an electric torch and led the way up the great wide staircase, through his own bedroom, past a door into a smaller dressing-room, in which was a huge mahogany wardrobe. The door of this he opened, and pushing the back outwards through a line of coats hanging there, a dark opening was revealed. Into this both men passed, finding themselves upon a wooden flight of dusty stairs, up which they ascended for two floors, until they arrived in a long, low attic, beneath the sloping roof of which were suspended, upon porcelain insulators, many thin, black-enamelled wires.
“Come! You shall hear for yourself,” Rigaux exclaimed; and passing along to the gable-end of the main wall of the house, he paused before two tables, upon which were set out a most complete set of wireless instruments.
To the uninitiated eye those two tables were filled with a most complicated assortment of weird electrical apparatus connected by india-rubber covered wires. To the expert, however, all was quite clear. On the one table stood a receiving-set of the latest pattern, while upon the other was what is technically known as “a five kilowatt set,” which would transmit wireless messages as far as Nauen, the great wireless station near Potsdam, and, indeed, over a radius of nearly a thousand miles. It was a Marconi set, not Telefunken.
Arnaud Rigaux seated himself upon a stool before the receiving-table, while overhead, insulated from the rafters of the roof, were a hundred bare copper wires strung across and across. His example was followed by Captain von Silberfeld, both clamping the double head-telephones over their ears, listening.
Next instant both heard the buzzing ticks of wireless, so weird and uncanny to those uninitiated.
“Da-de, Da-de-da. Da-de, Da-de-da.”
It was a call. Then followed the code-letters, “B.B.N.” with “B.Y.B.”
“Hush!” Rigaux exclaimed, glancing at the book at his elbow. “The British Admiralty station at Cleethorpes are calling the battleship London.”