The adventures of Heine
and instal them in lodgings in Coventry--which was one of the towns I
was not likely to visit.
Wilhelm informed me that they preferred to go to Wednesbury, as they
were both acquainted with glass-working and there were two or three
glass factories in that town at which they could work. I made
arrangements for them to receive their weekly stipends, registered
their addresses, and sent them the card code (which was ingeniously
got up in the form of a time-table) and dismissed them from my
thoughts with the earnest hope that it would never be necessary to
utilize their services.
For we Germans abhor deeds of darkness and violence. Who has looked
through the spectacles of a serious German boy and has seen his clear
and honest blue eyes shining thoughtfully, could ever question either
the gentleness of his disposition or the transparency of his motives.
We hate deceit and cruelty, we shrink from the infliction of needless
pain and exalt the fulfilment of the law to a worship.
So I shuddered and passed from my mind all thought of Carl Jan Kattz
and Rudolph Kister. And yet, despite this innate tenderness of ours,
we Germans are all granite and iron. When we set ourselves to the
accomplishment of a task we are not to be arrested by
parsnip-buttering words or even the allurement of the most indecorous
siren, as you shall see. I have referred to the assistance I offered
to our gallant Zeppelins by the triangle of lights.
One of these light stations was arranged in the stable-yard of a good
Polish friend named Jabowski. The yard was a small one shut in on
three sides by very high walls, and on the fourth by the stable
(Jabowski was a tailor in a large way of business and employed two
carts for the collection and distribution of goods.) He hated the
English, who had treated him very scurvily and had prosecuted him for
some small breaches of the Factory Act, and he was, in consequence of
his tyranny-hatred, and for a very handsome sum I paid him, willing to
show the light--a motor head-lamp coloured green.
One night after a raid was expected Jabowski came to see me. I had
just got back from an over-night trip to Bristol and I was eager for
news. He seemed puzzled and troubled.
“Was there a raid?” I asked.
“Well, Herr Heine,” he said, “there was--but it was the most curious
raid we have had. I came to tell you about it.”
“Proceed, Jabowski,” said I graciously, although he was a man of the
lowest social order.
“At eleven o’clock last night my son and I were standing in the yard,
watching the lamp and listening for the footfall of a policeman
outside, when we heard distinctly the noise of an airship. It grew
nearer and nearer until the sound was terrific and I could hear the
people in the street scurrying away to their houses. I looked up, as
did my son, but I could see nothing. Whatever it was passed overhead
and when immediately over something fell with a thud--right in the
centre of the yard!”
“A bomb?”
“No, gracious Herr--it was a big paper bag which was evidently filled
with a sort of yellow vere. Thinking it was a new kind of poison or
some diabolical----”
“Ingenious is the word, Jabowski,” I interrupted.
“Exactly, gracious sir, some ingenious form of explosive, I did not
attempt to remove it until this morning. I gathered most of it up but
it was impossible to remove the stain from the stones.”
“There were no bombs?”
“None,” replied Jabowski with emphasis, “the raider was heard by many
people and, according to a policeman who came to see me this morning,
these yellow bags have been dropped all over the neighbourhood.”
I was thoughtful.
What did these bags portend? Obviously there was a message of some
kind, thought I, intended for me. That green light showed the raider
that there was a friend in the neighbourhood and yet----
Whilst I was talking, there was a knock at the hall-door of my flat,
and my servant (an excellent Swiss youth who had the good fortune to
be born in Breslau, of German parents) announced that the two Mr.
Geisslers wished to see me. I was amazed at the coincidence, for these
two brothers were in charge of the other two lamps which completed the
triangle.
“Show them into my bedroom, and I will come and see them, Adolph,”
said I.
The Messrs. Geissler were bakers, and good friends of their
Fatherland. One had a shop near Albany Park, and the other a bakehouse
south of the Thames.
“Victor came over to see me this morning, Herr Heine,” explained Kurt
Geissler, the elder of the two, “and as he has had the same curious
experience that I had in last night’s raid, I thought we had better
come along and see you.”
Briefly his narrative was on all four-legs with the story which
Jabowski had told. They had heard the whirr of airship engines, and a
bag of yellow dust had fallen, in Victor’s case upon the roof of the
bakehouse, and in Kurt’s case on a chicken house in his back garden.
“The police say that these bags have fallen all over the South of
London,” said Kurt.
“They’ve been dropped on north-west London too,” said Victor, and
produced an envelope full of the stuff.
I looked at it without touching the powder. It was as fine as flour.
“You must leave me to think this matter out,” I said at last, and sent
them on their way.
I was engaged in intensive cogitation half an hour later, when Major
Haynes, of the British Intelligence Department, called. While I at
first had resented his calling, I had now overcome my repugnance to
meeting one who was engaged in such underhanded and sneaking work as
the Military Intelligence Department condescend to do. We Germans have
a delicate gorge, I tell you, and there were times when, remembering
that his sly cunning had probably sent many, and had certainly sent
two brave Germans to their death, I could scarcely bring myself to
flatter him.
“Good morning, Mr. Major,” said I with a ready-adopted smile, “you are
looking inside the pink this morning.”
“Good morning, Heine,” he said. He had called me “Heine” many times
lately, and somehow I had never had the nerve to correct him. “Were
you in the raid last night?”
“The raid?” I said in innocence--amazed. “I saw nothing about it in
the papers--was there a raid?”
He laughed.
“So some people think,” he said, and then turning suddenly from the
subject he asked, “What size gloves do you take?”
It was an extraordinary question. All my wits were working at top
pressure. I was at my alertest, my mind reviewing all the
circumstances which had attended my doings of the past week.
Had I left a finger-print in my visit to the Chetwell Munition Works,
or dropped a glove on my recent conference with the executive of the
Workers for World Peace?
“I take an eight or nine size,” I said deliberately.
“That would be much too large--show me your hands.”
I extended my hands.
Why did a cold and sickly feeling come to a certain digestive organ?
Why did the beads of perspiration stand out on my brow? Why, in spite
of a mental effort of the strongest, did my face blanch and my hand
tremble?
Did I expect to hear the click of steel, and feel chill bands about my
wrists, and hear the jangle of the link that holds the handcuffs
together? Yet none of these things happened.
Mr., or Major, Haynes just took my hands in his and turned them over
with the same delicacy of touch that I have observed in the German
_haus-frau_ when she is buying fish, and turns over the soles on the
stall to find the biggest.
“Yes--a seven,” said the major, and I thought there was a note of
disappointment in his tone.
We chatted about the war for awhile and then he said good-bye and left
me with two puzzles to solve instead of one.
Fortunately the rest of the day was so fully occupied with sheer
routine work that I had not time to speculate upon the mystery of the
Yellow Raid, as I called it.
I had started two new societies. The Brotherhood of Humanity and the
Thinkers of Britain League, and these entailed an enormous amount of
correspondence. The former society had as its motive the elimination
of all wars; the latter was intended to bring together under one ægis
that considerable body of students and tractarians who regarded
frontier lines as artificial limitations set up to divide the many for
the benefit of the few. They were promising plants, and though I hoped
that Germany would never need to seek a peace but would so triumph in
the field that she would be able to dictate her terms to greedy
England, bare-legged Scotland, libertine France, and barbarian Russia,
yet we Germans are habitually cautious.
That night I learnt from the usual quarter that the weather was
propitious for a Zeppelin raid, and warned the “leaders” (the car
drivers whose powerful head-lamps guided the Zeppelins to their
destinations) and my signal friends before I left town by the 8.30
train for Bath. I got on the ’phone to London that night and
discovered that no raid had occurred, and returned by the early
morning train which reaches Paddington at 8.30. My new assistant, Mr.
Wilhelm Peters, was waiting for me at the flat.
“Bad news, Herr Heine,” he said.
“Tell me,” I replied.
“Jabowski and the two Geisslers were arrested last night in the act of
signalling.”
That was bad news indeed. I learnt that they had been raided
practically at the same hour by three parties of police, and had been
taken to Scotland Yard.
“I have been all night at work making inquiries,” said Peters, “and I
have discovered how they were detected.”
“Betrayed, of course,” said I, but to my surprise Wilhelm shook his
head.
“They betrayed themselves,” he said, “the raid of the previous night
was not a raid at all. The noise they heard was that of an English
dirigible balloon flying at a very low altitude. It was up looking for
signal lights, and detected Jabowski’s light first. It flew over the
yard and dropped a bag of yellow ochre as near the light as possible,
and the following morning the police went round the neighbourhood with
a story of a mysterious airship which had been throwing such things.
When they said that the airship had dropped many they lied. There were
only three bags dropped--on Jabowski and the two Geisslers. Once the
stain of the ochre was discovered, the police had only to wait a
favourable opportunity. The rumour of a coming raid was circulated all
over London for the purpose of deceiving us.”
I saw the thing clearly now. So that was why Mr., or Major Haynes had
come to my office. He thought that some of the yellow stuff would be
brought to me for my inspection, and that I would handle it! So you
are interested in the size of my gloves, my officer! So you would
inspect my hands, thou artful man of low cunning!
But Heine had been too clever--too wide-awakened! I could not deny
myself so much exhilaration of feeling, yet the position was a serious
one. The Geisslers I could trust. But Jabowski! Here was a man without
a country--a cringer, a born traitor, one who under pressure to save
his own miserable skin, would not hesitate to betray me and the sacred
cause for which I worked. Whatever doubts I had about the loyalty of
Jabowski were removed when his son came to see me that afternoon.
This young Jabowski was about twenty-five years of age, very dark,
with a curly head of hair and a long yellow face. He was dressed
fashionably (and a little above his class) in a check suit and a
yellow tie, and wore the diamond ring and scarf-pin that one would
rather have expected on a German gentleman than on a Polish tailor! I
was annoyed to see him.
“Why do you come here?” I asked, when he was shown into my room. “How
dare you come to my apartments?”
“It’s all right, Heine, I wasn’t watched,” he said. “I came by Tube