I was constantly haunted by the remembrance of a face—the face of that man in the crowd with the eyes askew. As I sat alone at my fireside, often reading the papers through, even to the advertisements, and out of patience with everything and everybody, those narrow beady eyes would rise before me. I would recognise that face with the curious exultant expression anywhere.
After long debate within myself I had come to the conclusion, however, that the man with the eyes askew was not actually the person who had substituted in my machine a wooden bolt for a steel one.
I recollect the expression upon that hard, furrowed countenance even now—a wildly exultant expression as though he were gloating over the death-trap so cunningly prepared for me. Yet, when I reflected during my convalescence, I knew that no lunatic’s hand was responsible for such crafty contrivance, and further, the person who had withdrawn the steel bolt would certainly not come forth so boldly to peer into my face as that podgy little stranger had done.
No. The man with the eyes askew might, perhaps, have gained secret knowledge of the dastardly plot, and come there to watch me rise to my death. But I was confident that his was not the Invisible Hand that had been raised against me.
From everybody—even from Lionel Eastwell and the insurance people—we concealed the truth. Lionel, who lived in Albemarle Street, not far away often came in to cheer me up, sitting with me, consuming cigarettes, expressing wonder at the reason of my accident, and gossiping technicalities, as airmen will always gossip. Indeed, at the Royal Automobile Club the air “boys” are the biggest gossips in that institution—which, not so long ago, Prince Henry of Prussia so completely “nobbled.”
Reminiscences of the “Prince Henry Motor Tour” through England have not been exactly popular since August 1914—and any member mentioning His Imperial Highness’s name had become at once taboo. The remembrance of that tour through the heat and dust of the Moselle valley, and afterwards from south to north of England, is still with me. My pilot in Germany was a certain Uhlan captain, who afterwards distinguished himself as responsible for the atrocities committed upon the poor inoffensive Belgians in Dinant, on the Meuse. The lives of seven hundred of those poor victims, men, women and children butchered in cold blood in the Grand Place outside the church with the bulgy spire cries out for vengeance upon that fair-haired spick-and-span Prussian who sat beside me for many days chatting so amiably in English, and assuring me that Germany would ever be Great Britain’s firmest friend and ally.
Ah! How cleverly were we all bamboozled! Whenever I entered the portals of the club I remembered, as many of my fellow-members did, how completely we were gulled and blinded by that horde of German secret agents who came to us as friends and fellow-motorists, and partook of our hospitality while actively plotting for our undoing.
Lionel Eastwell sat discussing this with me one dark rainy afternoon.
“There’s no doubt that the Germans held out the hand of friendship and laughed up their sleeves,” he said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke upwards from his lips. “Now that one remembers, one grows furious at it all. I confess that I liked Germany and the Germans. My people went to Germany each summer, for the mater was a bit of a musician, and we usually drifted to Dresden. I suppose I inherited from her my love of music, and that’s why I was sent to Dresden for a couple of years’ tuition.”
“And did you never suspect?” I asked. “Remember what Lord Roberts and many others told us. Recollect how we were warned by men who had travelled, and who knew.”