"Pass on, please," commanded the big constable gruffly at my elbow.
"And you?—you will say nothing? Promise me, M'sieur Le Queux," von Sybertz urged again in French.
"I have promised," was my reply. "You are arrested—for me, that is sufficient. I wish you no ill-will, though you are my enemy," I added.
"Ah, yes, you are English!" exclaimed the spy. "I knew—I have known always that the English are gentlemen. Au revoir—and a thousand thanks for your promise."
And my friend the spy—a man who, on account of his refined and gentlemanly bearing, and the money which had, for years, been at his command, was a particularly dangerous secret-agent of the Kaiser—lifted his shabby grey hat politely, and then passed dolefully on, with the big constable at his elbow, to the train which stood waiting to convey him to that barbed-wire enclosure high upon Frith Hill.
I watched him pass out of my sight, while the crowd, on their part, watched me in wonder. I knew I had aroused the suspicions of the police by speaking in a foreign tongue. That meeting had been a strangely dramatic one. In those moments there came up before me visions of past meetings. Five years before, I had first known him living in a pretty white villa, with palms in front, on Mont Boron, outside Nice, and taking his lunch daily at the Reserve, at Beaulieu, one of the most expensive luncheon-places in Europe. I had met him in the Russie in Rome, in Doney's in Florence, and in the Pera Palace in Constantinople. He was a gay, merry companion, and half a dozen times I had been to variety theatres with him and to garish night-cafés afterwards. Yet I knew him to be a German international spy, and so intimate had we become that he had scarcely taken the trouble to conceal the fact from me.
In those few brief moments there had been enacted before me, at that busy London terminus, the dénouement of a great life-drama, and, as the spy disappeared, there arose before me recollections of the gay places of Europe where we had before met—the Rooms at Monte Carlo, the Casino at Trouville, and other places where he had been such a well-known figure, always exquisitely dressed, always the acme of correctness, and always a great favourite with the fair sex. What would the latter think could they see him now?
In silence and in sorrow I have watched the proceedings of many a German spy in this country—watched while the public have been lulled to slumber by those who rule. Ah! it has all been a fearful comedy, which has, alas! now ended in tragedy—the tragedy of our dead sons, brothers and husbands who lie in unnumbered graves in France and in Belgium.
My thoughts revert to individual cases which I have investigated during recent years.