That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
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 and chimneys, and a
wooden church-spire with a quaint gilded weathercock. Running south
were black and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway
station. Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain, that the shining
metals of the permanent way ran into it and ended as sharply as though
they had been cut off.
There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder. Heads showed through
the manhole, and a rough hand caught the boy by the collar of his
pneumatic jacket and jerked him out of his betters' way. Luttha
appeared in his panoply of yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on
the platform, where his second officer and another stood together at the
rail. Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an old Navy cap in
place of his goggled helmet, and a junior officer came after. They
brought the tang of schnapps with the smell of their oilskin coats. The
boy had seen them drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table
in the officer's cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes.
"_Gute Reise! Viel Glueck!_" Luttha had shouted to von Herrnung, and
waved his hand with a heartiness that did not seem quite real.
"_Auf wiedersehen, besten Dank!_" von Herrnung had called back to the
Commander, and set his foot upon the one-rail gang-plank by which a
seaman had connected the submarine with the quay. And then he had drawn
it back, as though the salty plank had burned him. For a party of tall
grey soldiers with brown boots and belts, and spiked helmets covered
with grey stuff like their clothing, came tramping along the quay with
bayonets fixed, and halted at a harsh order from their officer--and von
Herrnung, with a shiny grey face, and grey lips under his red moustache,
had croaked out meaningly to Luttha:
"My thanks for this, Herr Commander! We will settle the score one day!"
He went on then, and the officer arrested him. And while Bawne stood
staring, taking in the scene, another brutal hand had grabbed him by the
scruff--lifted him as a boy lifts a puppy--and slung him on to the
stones of the quay.
"You come with us!" Somebody spoke to him in English. It was von
Herrnung, and his eyes were poisonous with hate. "You bear your share
in this, Her Dearest." This was a curious nickname by which the Enemy
was often to address Bawne. "Where I go you will go also!--do you
understand?"
The officer said something harshly, making an imperious gesture with his
drawn sword, and von Herrnung saluted and fell silently into place
between the grey files. Then the party marched along the quay between
rows of storehouses with doors painted in broad horizontal stripes of
black and white, and passed through a yard and a big open gate at the
end of it, with a black and white sentry-box, and a grey-uniformed
spike-helmeted sentry on duty outside the gate. The sentry presented
arms, and the party swung through, and struck into a wide main-road that
crossed the railhead, a sandy road with a dyke at either side of it,
that followed the curve of the shore-line east.
Beyond the shore-line the North Sea fog came down, blank and drab as an
asbestos curtain, waiting a westerly breeze to roll inland and blot out
everything. Between shore and road were the clumped houses of the
fishing-village, and a church with a wooden spire, shaped like an
old-fashioned needle-case. Sand-dunes, covered with sea-holly and bent
grass, came up to the road. But on the other side of the road, beyond
the dyke, the eye traversed a wide expanse of dead, flat fenland,
drained by a many branched creek.
Set in the midst of the fenland were buildings of some kind. One
thought of barracks in the same enclosure with a martello tower or a
powder-magazine, like that in Hyde Park. But two strange landmarks
sticking up into the foggy sky altered the character of the flat-roofed
structure of grey stone standing in a wide expanse of gravel enclosed by
a strong wooden fence, stained with some drab weather-resisting
composition, and entered by an imposing pair of spike-topped gates. A
wide dyke full of sluggish water girdled the fence. You crossed by a
wooden swing-bridge leading to the big gates. When you approached them
by the road that branched from the main-road at right-angles, you
realised the immense height of two hollow triangular towers of
grey-painted steel latts and girders that straddled over the flat roof
of the squat stone building--the shorter tower nosing up three hundred
feet into the air, and its big brother more than double that height,
sheathing its sharp point amongst the leaden-hued clouds, bellying full
of moisture sucked up from the North Sea.
They looked alive to Bawne in a queer ugly way, throwing out their
mile-long antennae to the supporting poles, linking their metal
guy-ropes to solid structures of stone and concrete, like colossal
web-spinning insects, half-spider, half-mantis, wholly horrible. And
they reminded him of the three tall Wireless masts rearing over the
Admiralty at Whitehall, and Marconi House, in the Strand, and the little
one that straddled over the telegraph-cabin on Fanshaw's Flying Ground.
And at the remembrance the salt tears overbrimmed his raw and burning
eyelids, blotting out the muscular, vigorous backs of the men who walked
in front of him, and his throat felt as choky as though he had swallowed
a whole bull's-eye.
There was a sharp order to halt, and boots marked time on sandy gravel.
A grey-uniformed soldier of the two on guard outside the big
spike-topped gates, flanked with a black-and-white sentry-box on either
side, brought his bayonet to the slope and challenged sharply. A
sergeant-major of the party stepped out and answered; the sentry
bellowed:
"_Raus!_"
And with the ruffle of a side-drum, the gates swung open, the guard
turned out of a stone guardhouse within, and the armed party with the
prisoner and the boy marched into the gravelled courtyard. The gates
shut, and von Herrnung was taken off to a block of buildings distant
from the central erection with the Wireless towers. There was a clock
over the doorway of the guardhouse. The hands indicated a quarter to
four.
Bawne, standing shivering in the morning rawness, heard the infantry
officer commanding the party say in a loud, harsh voice that the boy was
to be kept close and sharply looked after. Then a heavy hand gripped
him roughly by the collar, and the voice belonging to the grip shouted:
"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"
Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the gruff-voiced speaker
to a shed behind the guardhouse--a shed whose planks were a-tremble at
all their lower edges with glittering drops of North Sea fog. He was
helped in with a kick, scientifically administered--the big key crashed
in the lock--and one was free to sob one's bursting heart out, lying
face downwards among the hard, clean, shining straw-trusses that covered
the floor of beaten earth. Somehow the tears relieved, and merciful