"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"
Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand:
"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"
"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them, and that place is the London War Office!"
The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:
"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years! It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean War,--taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,--because--_Grosse Gott!_--it was too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. _Pfui_! Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence. Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into subservience under the rod of Fear!"
Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured and hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched fist:
"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have drunk so long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!--but the originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the country-seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour after you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a man know everything with Wireless? And you, with no inkling that you carried for Germany--Victory in the World-War that is coming--you who have lost Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, _bei Gott_!"
He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:
"As I have said, I pity you!--though you have tried to bribe me!--but it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your cartridges are wetted--your revolver will not serve you. And you will not get a chance to drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My fellows have got the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away, with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor, whose property they are! Then we run, only periscopes showing, for the Gat of Norderney. There is a clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any tide. You have to account there to the All Highest for the satchel, or I, _bei Gott!_ must account to him for it and you!"
And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck. Two of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his instructions, to be left alone, you understand.
One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed Him so industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the lieutenants offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p. Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.
Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack, beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate worlds.
Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.
*CHAPTER XXXVI*
*HUE AND CRY*
Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death, the buff broadsheets of the _Evening Wire_ edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:
AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET. STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN. AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS. THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE. "COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC STROKE?"
Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east, north, south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of thousands and disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the aerial ascent.
The small audience interested in the aeroplane, her freight, and her behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the ear. The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last three-seater air-bus had rounded the aerodrome, landed and deposited the last passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but the rest had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.
The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line. Rooks and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the selling of stale _boutonnieres_ about the entrances of restaurants, the serving of drinks and suppers at night-clubs and so on.
On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken her departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to the sky as they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously alike.
There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick, fair eyebrows. He was ready to swear it was the same girl. But the face that had looked into his that night in Paris was somehow softer, younger.... It was not only the alteration in the colour of the hair.... If you had taken the big, hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and dipped her into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not only her hair but her whole body had been bleached, you would not have accomplished such a transformation--unless the chemical had possessed the power to change the colour of her mind and soul.
The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly, and spoken to you like a pal. In that atmosphere of sexual excitement, amongst those crowds of men and women, flushed with meat and wine and the desire of sensual pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented breeze from the North.
Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him who had no sisters. He had often wondered how she came to be in that place. But it had never occurred to him to lump her with the ordinary pleasure-seeker. He had read--more correctly than von Herrnung, who believed her from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of Knowledge--Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile, and honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.
What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed, browny-green as agate. What a wonderful voice came out of the depths of her splendid chest. The arch of her breastbone reminded you of a violoncello. How splendidly her head was set upon its column of warm, living ivory! Her firm round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had failed to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady of the Isle of Music. Everything about her was planned on the scale of magnificence. Six feet tall, she walked the earth like a goddess, or as women must have walked when the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.