German Idealism And The Jew

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German Idealism And The Jew

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.
that man—knowing what I have learned to-day. And therefore I do
not grudge—I give freely——"
"You give—you do not grudge——" She suddenly wrenched
away her hands and said in a tone that chilled Saxham:
"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne is—
dead?"
The Doctor made answer:
"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given back to
us. As far as knowledge goes—except for one fact I am little wiser
than you."
"I must know what that one thing is! You will tell me now, and
all!"
The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of golden
fire. To her husband's thought she was like some slender Roman
patrician at the stake, as she stood up against the background of
flaming splendour, and waited to hear the worst.

CHAPTER XLIII
THE PLUNDERED NEST

If that story of the aëroplane over the North Sea in the thickening
dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of the nor'-west gale, with
the dropping revolutions and the hiccuping engine, had seemed
desperate before, it was ghastly now. Saxham's last hope died as he
told. When he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural
composure:
 "Perhaps I have loved our child too much, and that is why he is
taken from me.... And yet how can a mother love by measure and
by rule? Did Our Lady withhold any part of her love from her Divine
Child? Did not the dearest of all earthly mothers say to me—in that
waking Vision, the God-given reality of which I have never doubted
—'Be to a son of Owen's what I have been to you!'"
Her strained composure gave way. Her face quivered and the
tears broke forth. She nipped her trembling lips close and shut her
quivering eyelids with her fingers, but the fountains were unsealed,
and she wept. Perhaps it was better so. She dried her eyes
presently, and yielding to Saxham's persuasions in that she
consented to go and lie down, she came into his embrace and laid
her arms about his neck and kissed him with wifely tenderness,
saying:
"I will answer now, what you said a little while ago. You shall
see under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has ever been
folded down over a secret kept from you. When my boy was to be
born, and I was weak and suffering, the doubt—the dread, that has
haunted and tortured you, assailed me and made me wretched—for
a little while. Then I gathered together, jealously, every noble, true
and brave thing you had ever done for me or for others; every good
deed of kindness, every unselfish tender thought. I asked you to
take me with you to visit your poorer patients. I saw their hollow
eyes brighten and heard them bless you when you turned from their
bedsides to carry comfort and help elsewhere. And I wrote down
these things in a book. They shine from its pages like jewels. When I
die it was to be given to Bawne.... It will be if he lives to come back
to us.... There is a prayer at the end that, in His goodness, God
might give me in my boy a man like you!"
He went with her to the door and looked after her earnestly as
she passed down the corridor out of his sight.
Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at the
consulting-room table. The bright boy had stood there beside him a
few short hours before. He was there now, pleading with a silent
voice, coaxing with unseen looks, tugging with invisible hands. He
always would be. Though Time softened the mother's anguish of
loss, there would be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern
man whose nature was Fidelity. Other children might yet call the Dop
Doctor father, but their little fingers would never blur the imprint of
the firstborn's babyish hand upon his heart.
Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and unshaven,
trying to attend to the pressing correspondence that had
accumulated since the previous noon. Even as, to the shrill crying of
the Fleet bugles, a windy grey day broke over the choppy Solent,
showing the huge pageant of Sea Power ready for the King.
Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might
follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and
aëroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead.
As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those
lights he had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained
windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the
Belgian and German Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels
and Paris and St. Petersburg—later to cast off its Teutonic name in
loathing and be Petrograd—similar phenomena might have been
observed. "Austria was going to take some step," as Prince
Lichnowsky had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary,
adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable. And
the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously confided to the British
Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the intention of Austria-
Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not swallow, in the
Note demanding the removal of all officers and functionaries guilty
of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron
Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to be
accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in
which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.
The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even
then were doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be
Peace. But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual
processes, was unsure, not so things that are guided merely by
Instinct. Like the wise creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and
Bechuanaland in 1900, these knew quite well that War was in the air.
It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity,
huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the
rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the
forests of Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of
Switzerland. Immense flights of birds not usually migratory,
partridges, pheasants, grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl
went South with the animals. Under cover of night the colossal
game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland—their furred
and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine swamps of the
Russian Dnieper and Dniester—spreading the news, sending the
alarm before them:
"Man is coming, and with him War!"
 Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had
warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of
millions of marching feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but
sure approach of Titanic death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety
in flight, before the cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel,
and chemicals a thousand times more deadly, rolled down to
overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through those July nights the sound
of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting hoofs, and
heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake and underbrush,
hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath, and musky
odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded
spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-
banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such
signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight,
bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and
owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of
Earth would shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole
History of War. And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying
and barking answered: War, War, War!

CHAPTER XLIV
PATRINE REMEMBERS

Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped, white-

enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for
having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne
might be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not,
Lynette might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather
imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether
Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite as
irreligious as she had boasted—and lay revelling drowsily in the
comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.
She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad
staring wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos,
took her and lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away
on a wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as
though an electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark
galleries of her brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus
merrily with her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then
whisking the cup away. Like many other practical jests, this ends in
breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the chemist for
sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.

In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness

thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental
fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the
supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of
sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by
tall palms with gilded leaves.
On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of
the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with
gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of
pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of
masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and
thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on
a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was
smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were
sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it had seemed that
night to Patrine.
After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee
for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a
wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where
white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings
filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were
serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated
supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-
pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told
their tale of excess.
The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had
seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz
made you feel top-hole. They had supped—was it lobster Américaine
or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?—when there
came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and
thrilling forth the amorous phrases of Samson et Dalila, leaped all at
once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in
the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange,
discordant, exotic instruments.
"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk,
human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote
Lady Beauvayse.
Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained
exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder.
Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.
"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very
chic! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"
"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.
Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet mob,—
and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-
talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups
of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a
dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the
ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the
scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire
marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving
oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was
decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.
To the strange barbaric music of the dance from São Paulo men
and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as
other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently
Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse
with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know
Tango and the thing came easily—or you imagined it did, after so
much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl
had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers,
with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide
red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-
silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily
round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes.
She had felt herself being hurried somewhere—out of the pillared
dancing-hall....
She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She
recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-
curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted
corridor. The inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing
mouth under the red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth
in a tigerish way. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale
as water. He had looked at her curiously, and said with a strange
accent:
"So, Isis, you are mine now!"
"I suppose so!"
"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for
me. Shall we go back—or would you prefer——"
She said with her face turned from him sullenly:
"I should prefer to go—to where I live!"
He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of
renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had
wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her
lace scarf about her head, and taken her through a passage back to
the vestibule where the three ambiguous statues stood about the
central fountain, upon whose restless jet of water played shifting
lights of different hues. By some arrangement of those who had
planned the Upas, there faced you as you issued with your
companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that had its
finger on its smiling, carmined lips....
And then—the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the
shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting,
von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of one of them—could the
man have been the German who had leered at her that day at
Hendon?—and then he had put her in, and followed her, and taken
her back to Berkeley Square....
It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy
manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely
supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that belated
hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if you'd arrived with the
milkman, so long as you turned up smiling at her bedside with your
fountain-pen, and her coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her
early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her
morning mail.

Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the

unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been
removed, just when his attitude had become formidable and
menacing—there might yet be pitfalls of her own digging to brave
and shun.
Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut
eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to,
suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her
own voice say to von Herrnung:
"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than
never to see nor hear of you again!"
He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not
understood.
"Under no—possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear!
Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not prudent at
all!"
And later:
 "You give me to understand that whatever happens—whatever
happens—you will have nothing more to do with me?"
Idiot!—besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the
peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain.
Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon
those who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....
Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy
silhouettes, negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever
loved Patrine. Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he
wasn't alive now. And Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if—that
happened? And—Sherbrand! A blush burned over her, and she flung
herself face downwards, burying her scorching face among the
pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung from her, by
nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.
So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished
recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and
brought her morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup,
someone else knocked, and opened the door softly, and Patrine
turned—to meet the look of Lynette.
And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she
was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and
felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her
broke forth in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself
saying:
"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you
from grief like this!"
And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We
are actors often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even
when Calamity with one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the
palpitating flesh and quivering nerves down to the living bone.
"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by
the bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:
"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You
wished him not to go—you begged Owen not to allow——"
There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence:
"He thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But
yet I thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."
"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the
mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was
held to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her.
You can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of
passionate, remorseful tenderness:
"Here is my place!—here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her
wet face on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group
not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that
there was no dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of
the fallen roses on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the
worst known, Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered
more.
Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never
to know just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be
anything more fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands
of sorrowing women since the beginning of the Great War?
It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather.
The clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans,
and the scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in
midsummer. Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked
down at the girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious
splendour of her dead beech-leaf hair. She did not—how could she?
—fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded
her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the
contact. She drew the unresisting arms upwards and about her, and
lifted the prone head and took it to her bosom, saying:
"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"
They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath
stirring the heavy tresses:
"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"
Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:
"No! At least!—It is hideous now and he hated it! I—I had to tell
him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris
air!"
Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over:
"Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"
"I don't deserve that any one should!"
"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did
you start?"
For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world
mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette
upholding and defending David's daughter, who had brought
disgrace upon them. She lifted her head and released herself almost
roughly from Lynette's embrace. She stooped down and took the
hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and kissed it, and rose up looking
wonderfully big and stately, and extraordinarily tall.
 "I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best
woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not
worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But—if
somebody like you had been my mother—perhaps there'd have been
something to show for it to-day."
Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet
house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish
laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the
stairs and in the passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-
ting of the hall telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no
more noise than a thrush makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine
threw on her bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing
transparency, lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires
of men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long cheval-glass,
smiling with something of the subtlety of the androgynous genius of
the Upas Club fountain—the figure that faced the guests as they
entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.
"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to
Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're
not going to trust to Chance and Luck. You're going—for Uncle
Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's, and Bawne's—and Mother's and
Irma's and your own—don't pretend you're a victim!—to marry
Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"
Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to
Sherbrand troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the
side of moral sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty
towards her neighbour—the sense of these two obligations that are
the foundation and cornerstone of Christianity—had not as yet
awakened in Patrine.
She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the
cachet of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor,
with his four hundred per annum—as the proverbial church-mouse.
But she herself was not altogether penniless. There would be a
hundred and fifty pounds a year for Patrine when she married;
derived from moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by
Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various legal
provisos, from depredations on the part of the unknown possessive
male.
Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself,
that was better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon
might the marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies
to the solving of that question. How many sleepless nights—they
were horribly unbecoming!—lay between Patrine and Security? The
Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question. She felt like
the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.

CHAPTER XLV
FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA

On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of

Naval Goody Two Shoes and aëroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets
for tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the
screens at the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that
evoked from huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic
clapping. Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging
to the most ancient of all professions—who had accepted the
invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the familiar crowd
on the Empire Promenade.
The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were
more drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing the
ultimatum expected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal
of Belgrade to eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue.
They were cheering in Berlin that night for Krieg mit Russland.
"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to
his crony. "Why then should it not happen now?"
"War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in
the same key.
"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled
Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be
smacked—good! If the French—good also! If the English, a thousand
times the better!"
"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his
second liqueur-glass of Kümmel—"that it will not be this time as at
the affair of Agadir!"
"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven
millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and
for shell—one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel
packed with super-explosive. No, no! Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie
in der Agadir!"
He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil,
steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:
 "What are these Gottverflucht jackasses braying about?"
The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir
John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet—
now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet
with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces,
and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and
the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade
and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously
into "God save the King!"
The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait
flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another
expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed....
"'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?"
demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through
the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching
and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding,
"Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you—I am!"
"He hissed.... The —— hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and
vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me——"
"No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German
who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery,
much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots,
and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry
features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in
charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest
of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street
Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in the Daily
Teller or the Morning Wire, but it was crowded out by the report—in
leaded type—of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his
volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D.,
F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of
Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now
that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had
established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the
Briton and the Boer.
A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the
deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian Field
Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of the German Imperial
Foreign Office, and hero of the two days' flight from Hanover to Paris
in the previous April,—to essay the crossing to Germany at a late
hour, and in the face of a threatening gale. Another paragraph
recorded how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly
described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"), "had been
found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg Line, bound for
Newcastle, floating derelict in the North Sea."
A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the stroke
of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of Saxham's. He answered it
through the roaring in his ears of the North Sea waters that had
drowned the boy.
"Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so toughly
tried, so faithfully trusted. "You have heard the report? Your voice
tells me you have! Hope, man!—hope!—against everything go on
hoping!"
The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:
"Have I—grounds for hope?"
Came the prompt reply:
 "I say yes! Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!"
"God bless you, General!"
"Have you—you have not told her?"
Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips:
"No!—I thought I should like to keep my wife for another hour
or two!"
There was a crisp, sharp order:
"Go to her now, and steel her with this from me—that the
aëroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted. The First
Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears positively to this.
The 'Gnome' engine had been taken out of the stirrups, and the
gyroscopic hovering-gear removed wholesale. Do you comprehend
that this means—a pre-arranged thing? Listen!—I'll pound it into
you, confound you! Once—they have been picked up! Twice—they
have been picked up! Three times—they have been picked up! Go to
your wife and tell her so from me!"
The speaker rang off.
But he knew discouragement. The rapid march of events across
the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung's flight from
Hendon had elicited a check from Official Headquarters.
Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and cooling
your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted to the private
sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the presence of Britain's
Secretary of State for War. See him, seated square and upright in a
high-backed leather-covered arm-chair behind a big green cloth
covered mahogany desk, a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a
nose of the beaky type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey
receding from tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue
eyes, a little weakened by much recent poring over State documents
by electric-light.
The British Government found it incompatible with its present
line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the recovery of the Foulis
Papers. For forty-five years their duplicates had lain in safe-keeping
at the War Office. They were there now. That was the Minister's
chief point.
The Foulis War Engine had never been patented—never
acquired by the British War Office. Such distinction or favour as the
tenth Earl had received from Government had been conferred in
recognition of the dead man's gallant services to his country, not as
the reward of his inventive gift. Ergo, the British Government could
not concern itself with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll
Castle. To pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of
the Clanronald family. If his lordship chose to drop the matter!—the
Colonel's celebrated Parliamentary shrug and smile conveyed the
rest.

There was another point still. If the Plans of the War Engine of
Clanronald had once been seen by—alien eyes, the possession of the
formulas did not matter two pence. The cat that had grown grey in
the bag was out of it for good. In the Colonel's opinion—a priceless
asset in the highly delicate condition of International Politics—a more
formidable document than the Foulis Plan was the Note which was
even then being placed by Austria's Representative at Belgrade
before the Serbian Council of Ministers. This, in conjunction with
Germany's deferred answer to our proposal of a Conference of
Representatives of the Great Powers, and the sudden, secret return
of the Emperor of Germany to Berlin—"justifies Admiralty orders that
have been issued," said the Minister, "directing our First—ahem!—-
Battle Fleet, concentrated—as it happens!—at Portland, not to
disperse for Manoeuvre Leave."
The speaker, who had pushed back his chair and crossed his
legs, looked very steadily at Sir Roland as this last sentence very
quietly left his thin lips. Not a muscle twitched in the other's lean,
keen face. The Minister went on:
"Thus I may hope I have made clear to you my view of the
situation. As for the Flying-officer, Count von Herrnung—we may
presume him to have been—for no doubt he is drowned—a military
spy. The German General Staff have a preference for employing men
belonging to the higher social circles for work of this kind.
Wonderfully organised, their system of strategical and political
investigation!"
Sir Roland agreed:
"Wonderfully organised, when one goes closely into its
ramifications—tracing and following them to their Headquarters in a
certain underground office at the Wilhelmstrasse! But they fail in one
thing. The kind of operations they contemplate can usually be
deduced from the line of their reconnaissance!"
"And yet in the instance under consideration," hinted the
Minister, "Count von Herrnung's intention of commandeering a
machine from the Hendon Flying Ground seems to have been fairly
well disguised!"
"Pardon me!" opposed Sir Roland, with quiet assurance. "He
had no such intention when he arrived at Hendon. His orders were
conveyed to him on the ground! And the haste with which he was
got out of England with the brown satchel proves that his superiors
did not dare to delay even for the precautionary measures, and that
no copies nor photographs have been made of the Foulis MSS. and
plans! Take it from me that the cat, if she has not already got to
Germany, remains in the brown bag!"
"And the bag is somewhere in the North Sea. But it may be
recovered," said the Minister, "with the body of von Herrnung."
The General returned, with a deepening of the lines upon his
forehead, and at the angles of his mobile nostrils:
"It may be recovered, as you say. But if so, it will be found upon
the body of the boy." He added, meeting the question in the tired
eyes of the other man: "Some objection was made by Mr. Sherbrand
—the owner of the now wrecked aëroplane—to von Herrnung's
taking the satchel with him in the pilot's pit. So—Mr. Sherbrand
informs me—von Herrnung strapped it to the safety-belt that
secured Saxham in his seat."
A gleam of interest warmed the frostiness of the Ministerial
countenance:
"The boy ... Ah! yes, as I think I mentioned before, I
sympathise deeply with the boy's parents. He is a son of a personal
friend of your own, I understand?"
"Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at
Gueldersdorp."
"Saxham—that is the name—and the child is the only one? Most
sad and regrettable. And I think the paragraph in the Wire
mentioned—one of your Boy Scouts?"
"One of my Scouts!" The Chief's bright eyes snapped as he
added, "Very much to the honour of his troop. Very greatly to the
credit of the Organisation—as I mean to prove to him should he
happily survive to return!"
"Indeed? You interest me! Pray tell the story."
It was told, succinctly and crisply. He said quite warmly:
"I could hardly have credited! What pluck and energy! And to
dare the thing—on the strength of a second flight! A boy like that
should have lived! Good-bye, my dear General!"
He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:
"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in London!
A shower or so—and one could do a great deal of execution with the
White Coachman on our Hampshire trout-rivers, sir!"
He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of the
sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass of a
barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to the writing-
table littered with State papers, in defiance of the thin, shrill
summons of the telephone-bell....

So the General went away, owning to himself that the thing looked
desperate. It was better for England that the Plans of the Foulis War
Engine should lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but what of his
friend, what of his friend's wife?
The keen eyes were unwontedly dim as he reached the wide
Turkey-carpeted landing, and the messenger caught a snatch of The
Flowers o' the Forest whistled in slow time as his hurrying footsteps
overtook the General. Would Sir Roland please to go back, was the
gist of the message. The Minister had something further to
communicate.
 The War Minister was not alone. Two persons were with him—a
tall man in civilian clothes who stood looking out of the window as
one who had temporarily removed himself out of earshot, the other
a slim and dapper Naval Secretary.
The "something further" proved to be the pith of an Admiralty
communication just imparted. Early that morning a British
Submarine on North Sea Patrol duty (we will call her E-131), upon
returning to the surface to ascertain the cause of defective
submergence, had discovered a brown leather lock-strap to be
entangled with her aft diving-plane on the starboard side. A leather
satchel firmly attached to the other end of the strap was jammed
under the plane, and subsequently extricated by one of the men,
from the collapsible.
Perhaps you can imagine the Lieutenant Commander stooping
over the retrieved bit of flotsam, lying under the shaded electric light
hanging over the narrow sliding table that pulled out from under his
bunk in the officer's cabin—a place of privacy again, the steel
bulkhead-doors being shut. For when you submerge they are all
thrown wide so that the Commander's eye may traverse the whole
length of an elongated engine-room, and see what every man is
doing at his particular post, in a single flash.
The Commander's eye was screwed up in the vain endeavour to
see under the flap of the locked satchel. He took up the thing and
turned it in his hands, while the strap, soaked and twisted by sea-
water and engine-power, flapped upon his knees like a long frond of
wet seaweed.
"Wonder who cut the strap?" Clumsily, as though by a blunt
knife wielded by a numb hand—it had been hacked through, and the
satchel scratched badly in the process. He went on: "Looks like some
rich American globe-trotter's travelling-satchel. No picking these
locks! One might negotiate 'em with the oxygen flame-puff—if it
wasn't for the risk of damaging the wads of dollar bills that might
possibly be inside. Nothing to be done but rip or cut the leather—
and that seems to be made strengthy with metal, somehow!" He
slipped the lean blade of a penknife between the strongly stitched
edges. The satchel proved to be lined with thin plates of aluminium.
"As easy to get inside as the Bank of England!" he grumbled, and so
it proved, if the Bank of England has ever been negotiated with a
bull-head tin-opener.
Inside the leather case lined with aluminium, a little sea-water
had penetrated, patching with damp a small antique portfolio of
pearly, bossy shark-skin exquisitely painted with birds and foliage by
some old-world Japanese master of Art. The quaintly feeble lock,
and corner-guards were of bronze, gold-inlaid with scowling fox-
masks, and the inevitable chrysanthemum.
The Japanese lock gave at a twist of the penknife-blade and
then the portfolio disgorged its loose sheaf of yellowed papers
strung together by a clew of faded silken twist. Drawings to scale
and plans: sheets of manuscript and pages covered with the symbols
used in chemical formulas, scribed in a clear small rounded hand.
"Great Scott!—what's this?"
The ash from the Commander's neglected cigarette fell upon the
topside of the precious manuscript. He blew it reverently off, and
dug himself into the pile:
"H'm, hum!"
 "By Me, Robert Foulis, Seaman, Tenth Earl of Clanronald, G.C.B.,
Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the British Fleet, and Marquis of
Araman, etc., etc. Invented & Conceived Not in Hatred of Mankind,
but in Defence of my Country and the Rights Beloved by Every True
Briton——"
"Marvellous old cock! And in 1854, when he was eighty if a day,
he offers it for the fifth time to the British Government!"
"Busy, Owner? See you've got inside the prize-packet! My
Christmas! what is it? Miss Araminta's Diary; 'FOUND AFTER FORTY
YEARS!' or 'HOW I BROKE MY ENGAGEMENT WITH THE CURATE!'"
This from a young, exceedingly wet, and dirty Engineer
Lieutenant, fresh from an interview with the damaged diving-plane,
and smelling potently of castor-oil.
The Commander looked up, and strange things were in his eyes.
"You're pretty wide!" He added, speaking partly to the other
man inside the Commander: "Jolly good thing we're on the Home
trip. That main motor gives a lot o' trouble, and—suppose some
purblind sailing ship crashed into us—and sent us to the bottom with
THIS aboard. Great Sea Boots! It makes me crawl all down my back
to think of it!"
The Second clattered down the steel ladder and filled the
doorway with his burly personality.
"What makes you crawl? Don't say the leg o' mutton we bought
Saturday from the skipper of that Grimsby trawler has gone back on
us! Is that what the liar means by fresh meat?"
"If I told you, you'd crawl too. Or you'd think it a case of
sunstroke—or D.T. of the deferred kind." The Commander stowed
the papers back in the sharkskin case with gingerly carefulness that
provoked the query whether he thought he had got hold of a new
kind of floating mine, and elicited the retort:
"I don't think!—I know it!"
No one got anything more out of the speaker, who, presently,
declining stewed mutton, whose wholesome savour amply certified
to the moral character of the trawler's skipper, went to the Wireless
and dispatched a pithy message to the Commander of E-131's
particular Coast Defence station, and the news was flashed to
Whitehall, to go forth ere long from thence over the world.

Sir Roland said, with that unwonted cloud dulling his bright eyes,
and a certain huskiness of utterance:
"There's no other solution of the puzzle. Remembering that I
had said to him, 'In an emergency, you might do good service to
your country by destroying this!' my Scout took the only course open
to him—and dumped the satchel into the sea!"
The Minister admitted with characteristic reticence:
"Whether I concur with your theory or not, I must admit to you
that the report received specifies that the strap had been cut.
'Hacked through' is the actual expression—and the back of the
leather outer case scratched as though by a knife."
"It is vital that I should examine the strap and see those
scratches!"
The Minister answered:
"To-morrow morning by twelve o'clock—I can obtain you an
opportunity. The recovered valise, or wallet, or satchel, will be
brought up to the Admiralty by the officer commanding E-131. She
has not yet arrived in harbour. But the Commander will doubtless
receive instructions as soon as he reports himself." He continued,
gracefully ignoring his previous statement that the Government had
decided not to interfere: "In the absence of the Earl of Clanronald,
now yachting in Northern waters, it is obligatory that the War Office
should take the matter in hand."
The very tall stranger had wheeled, and advanced to Sir Roland
with a smile and an outstretched hand of greeting. We know how
great a heart beat in its pulses. Its short, hard grip spoke sympathy
and understanding, though the voice was harsh and the light grey
eyes stared out of the brick-burned, heavily-moustached face with
the old sagacious, indomitable regard. He said after a word or two
had passed, the Admiralty Secretary temporarily occupying the
attention of the War Minister:
"By the way, you will be interested to hear something I have at
first-hand from Clanronald. He has been, as perhaps you know,
cruising with two ancient cronies, Lord Gaynor and Colonel Kaye, in
his steam-yacht Helga, along the Danish West Coast of Jutland. He
returns the richer by—what I may term a unique experience!"
Sir Roland said, meeting the Sirdar's eyes with great certainty:
"If I may guess at the nature of the experience, I should hazard
that it was—an attempt in the kidnapping line?"
The other gave his short, gruff laugh:
"You have hit it. They carry a Wireless installation on the Helga,
and sparked the story via Cullercoats to Bredingley, who was
stopping a week-end at Doome. The yacht was at anchorage in the
outer harbour of Esbjorg, some twenty-eight kilometres from the
frontier of Danish-Germany. It was midnight. Everybody on board,
including the watch, seems to have been asleep except Clanronald,
who was roused by something scraping the side of the yacht.
Presently he heard stealthy footsteps on deck, and whispering. He
was squatting on his bunk with a brace of loaded revolvers and a
Winchester repeating-rifle, when the intruders opened his cabin
door!"
"Did any of them survive the intrusion? If so, Clanronald has—
very much changed!"
The Sirdar returned, with the quirk of a smile lurking under the
heavy moustache whose brown was getting flecked with grey:
"Well—the Helga has recently been re-enamelled, and
Clanronald is faddy on the point of his new paint. Besides"—the
quirk deepened into a laugh—"he thought it would be more useful to
take them as live specimens of the kind of material that goes to
make up the crew of a German submarine."
They looked at each other, laughing. Sir Roland inquired:
"I venture to hope that while Clanronald was about it—he
collected the submarine?"
"Unfortunately, no! And, very regrettably, the collapsible boat in
which the raiders had made their midnight visit was swamped when
the two others—there had been four of them!—jumped into her to
make off. Presumably they could swim and were picked up by the
submarine—Undersea Boat No. 14—according to the testimony of
one of the prisoners. The other of whom—an officer and leader of
the foray—took poison, and was found dead in the cabin that served
for his prison-cell. The other, a mere seaman, is too dazed with
terror to be intelligible—according to Clanronald. But the whole thing
is interesting!"
 "Hugely and instructively. As shedding," said the General, "a
certain light upon a mystery that baffled the wiseacres in 1913. I
refer to the mysterious disappearance of the engineer-inventor Riesl
from his cabin aboard a Hamburg Line, Leith-bound steamer. With a
contract in his pocket for the supply of crude-oil-consuming marine
motor-engines to the Navy of a Power—other than the German
Government!"
"Possibly!—possibly! One never knows what forces are working
beneath the surface." The set, brick-dust face and grave sagacious
eyes of the great soldier seemed to testify to his complete innocence
of anything like a double-entendre.
He ended as the War Minister dismissed the secretary from the
Admiralty, and turned again to Sir Roland, saying in his most
pompous tones:
"Twelve o'clock to-morrow, then, General. Meanwhile, pray
convey to his parents my admiration—in which I feel the First Lord
will concur—of the remarkable qualities manifested by young
Saxham! Astonishing devotion to duty, and courageous self-reliance!
He should have lived!—he would have made a noble man!"
Came the curt reply:
"He is alive now! I am convinced of it!"
The Minister gave the speaker a glance of incredulity. It was so
very clear to the War Secretary's logical mind that the child and the
man were drowned. But the harsh voice of the great Field Marshal,
England's most faithful friend, who was to succeed him in his place
of power, answered for him:
"One would expect you to stick to your guns, General. Should
you prove right before I sail for Egypt, bring him to see me!"
 "I promise that, faithfully, my lord."
They shook hands and parted. It seemed a long week until the
morrow when the secret of Robert Foulis came home to roost at
Whitehall. But it ended, and twelve o'clock brought that keenly-
desired opportunity of examining the cut lock-strap and the empty,
knife-scored satchel in the official sanctum of the First Lord
Commissioner for the Admiralty, and in the presence of that
functionary.
"There seems—ah!" the First Lord mounted a pair of gold-
rimmed pince-nez, "to be something in the nature of an address
scratched upon the leather!"
Sir Roland corroborated, after a brief inspection:
"There is, most undoubtedly. And the address is that of the
London Headquarters of our Organisation, No. 1000, Victoria Street."
"Dear me—dear me! Most remarkable! Now here," said the
Right Hon. gentleman, breathing asthmatically and twinkling through
the gold-framed pebbles, "is something not so easily deciphered. A
rude symbol, something like a fleur-de-lis with letters at either side,
and a few other meaningless scrawls!"
"It is not a fleur-de-lis," Sir Roland answered, "but a fox-mask,
with the number and signature of my Scout. He belonged to the Fox
Patrol, 331st London. Here is his troop-number, 22, and here are his
initials, B.M.S.—Bawne Mildare Saxham. It is perfectly in order! In
this way he would be expected to sign a communication to his
fellow-Scout. And the marks below, I can assure you, are not
meaningless. They convey that there is trouble of a very definite
kind. In addition the arrow, here, taking the top of the satchel for
the North as in a map—signifies, 'Road to be followed East.'" He
added with a stiffening of the facial muscles that made the keen face
as hard as a mask carved in boxwood:
"And followed it shall be!"
It had been decided amongst those who controlled such matters
that the British Public were to be fed with the tale. The tapes began
to run out at the newspaper-offices as the General took leave of the
First Lord and the War Minister and got into his waiting car, and sped
away to Harley Street to tell the Dop Doctor how the Saxham pup
had proved worthy of his breed.
The evening papers made great marvel out of the story, and at
all the street corners of London and the suburbs broadsheets lined
the gutters, proclaiming in huge inky capitals:

"MYSTERIES OF THE SEA. EXTRAORDINARY ATTEMPTED CAPTURE

OF BRITISH YACHTSMAN BY PIRATES IN DANISH WATERS!
MIRACULOUS RECOVERY OF CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN! SUBMARINE
IN NORTH SEA FOULS BAG CONTAINING PRICELESS HEIRLOOM
STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE! LAST MESSAGE OF HERO BOY
SCOUT!"

CHAPTER XLVI
AT NORDEICH WIRELESS

In the face of the outrunning tide, Undersea Boat No. 18 had nosed
her way from Norderney Gat to Nordeich, by the deep-dredged low-
water channel of which Luttha had told. The boy had been roused by
the kick of a foot shod with a heelless rubber boot, out of a dog-
sleep on the vibrating deckplates of the men's cabin, under the
white glare of the electric globes. The man who kicked him hauled
away the blue blanket, and pitched him his clothes, yet moist and
heavy with sea-water, ordering him in broken English to get into
them quickly to go ashore.
The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb from the
resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty Officer Stoll and his
assistant—and his temples throbbed, and there was a singing in his
ears. Perhaps that was from the smell of the petrol! One breathed
petrol—devoured tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup
and coffee made with petrol—judging by the tang upon the palate—
on board the German submarine.
The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was open,
letting in the smell of the sea tanged with the odours of fish and
rotten seaweed and sewage. One emerged through the manhole into
a strange, windless woolly world. Through a weeping woolly-grey
mist, grey, greasy-looking water lapped and licked against a weedy
jetty of grey stone alongside which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off
her whitey grey painted steel skin. A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or
two, and some lighters laden with bricks and cement sat on the
blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey and white seagulls were
feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats were lying on the
shelving beach of weedy sand.
To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow blur in
the prevailing woolliness. Behind one, the foggy land seemed mixed
up with the foggy sea, even as the yellow-white curd mixes with the
whey in a dish of rennet. North, the intermittent beam thrown from
a lighthouse came and went in sudden winks. Facing to the mainland
again, one made out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled roofs