He then courteously took me across to that portion of the great grimy works, with its wonderful steel melting and refining furnaces, to where the Emden process was about to be carried out.
"I suppose you have no fear of the new method being learnt by any of your rivals—by any German firm, for instance?" I asked.
"Not in the least," laughed the manager, a bluff, grey-bearded man, speaking in his broad Hallamshire dialect; "we take good care of that. Each workman only does a part, the whole of the process being only known to myself. It wouldn't do for us to give Professor Emden forty thousand pounds for the secret and then allow it to fall into foreign hands. The Germans would, of course, give anything for it," he added. "Emden is a patriotic Englishman even though he is very eccentric, and if he liked he could have got almost anything he cared to ask from Krupp's."
"That's just the point," I said; and then, as we walked back to the office, I explained my fears. But, like the Professor himself, he only laughed them to scorn. So that evening I again returned to London filled with anxiety and disappointment.
Just before eleven that same night I strolled past the house of Hermann Hartmann, in Pont Street, vaguely wondering what I could do to prevent a theft which must, I knew, shortly be committed. In all probability the ingenious Hartmann already had a secret agent in Joynson's works, but even if he had, he would certainly not be able to discover the secret. I had quite satisfied myself upon that point.
No, the peril lay in the Professor himself—the strange old pig-headed patriot.
Scarcely had I passed Hartmann's house, the exterior of which I knew so well, when I heard the front door close and saw a man coming down the steps. As he walked in my direction I halted beneath a lamp to light a cigarette, and by so doing I obtained a glimpse of his face as he passed.
He was a young, good-looking, smartly dressed man, with dark eyes and hair and a rather sallow complexion. I put him down to be an Italian, but I had never set eyes upon him before. No doubt he was one of Hartmann's travelling agents—a man who went up and down England visiting the fixed spies of Germany, or "letter-boxes," as they are known in the bureau of secret police in Berlin—collecting their reports and making payments for information or services rendered.
Knowing so much of the ways of the German secret agent, curiosity prompted me to follow him. He strolled as far as the corner of Sloane Street and Knightsbridge, and then boarded a motor-bus as far as Piccadilly Circus. Thence he walked to the German beer-hall, the Gambrinus, just off Coventry Street, where he joined a tall, thin, grey-moustached man, an Italian like himself, who was seated awaiting him. I idled across to a table close by, called for beer, and sat smoking a cigarette and straining my ears to catch their conversation, which was in Italian, a language I know fairly well.
I discovered the following facts. The thin-faced man was called Giovanni, while the elegant young fellow was Uberto, and they were discussing the arrival of somebody. Giovanni seemed dubious about something, while the man who had left Hartmann's seemed enthusiastic.