That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"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 Kuemmel--"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 aeroplane,
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 aeroplane--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