The adventures of Heine
to the Fatherland should be so cruelly extinguished.
I put the whistle to my lips and blew shrilly; short, long and
trilling blasts. I repeated it, and scarcely had the echoes died away
when two men came blundering round the corner of the building, one in
his shirt-sleeves, one in the black coat of a clerk. They stopped dead
as they saw Major Haynes, and put up their hands, for his revolver was
covering them.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said as he snapped the handcuffs upon them,
“fortunes of war.”
They glared from him to me, and one said to the other quickly in
German:
“We’re caught. This is Voss’s work. We ought to have prevented his
leaving us.”
“Excellent news,” said Major Haynes briefly, “so Voss was the third
man. You may comfort yourselves with the knowledge that he was
arrested in London to-day, though your detection was not due to him
but to my friend here.”
I was trembling before the glare of those haughty German eyes.
“If you’d given us another day,” one of them growled in English, “we’d
have settled your cursed factory.”
“So I gather,” said Major Haynes.
“As for this swine,” he made a movement toward me and I stepped back
till I realized I was stepping toward the T.N.T. store, when I stepped
sideways. But the place was alive with detectives now. They seemed to
spring out of the ground and I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw
these unfortunate men being led away.
“You can take off your mask now, Heine, they will never see you,” said
Major Haynes. “Poor devils! We will go up to town by a late train and
I’ll see what I can do for you in the morning.”
“Major Haynes,” I said brokenly, “I don’t want to see you to-morrow. I
am very ill. The danger I have been through, the strain upon my
nerves, how I envy you your coolness----”
“The strain upon your nerves, Heine?” said Major Haynes, with brutal
innocence.
“I have not your lack of imagination,” I said crossly. “I cannot sit
here waiting for a factory to blow up, watching the minutes pass----”
I wiped my brow with a silk handkerchief, looked up at the clock as it
struck seven, and shuddered.
“There was no danger, my dear man,” said the major calmly.
“But you told me that they were going to blow up the factory at seven
o’clock.”
“Exactly,” said Major Haynes, “you heard what the gentleman told you,
seven o’clock.”
“Well, this is seven o’clock,” I said.
“Yes, but I meant seven o’clock to-morrow night,” said the major.
Such a bluffer!
CHAPTER XVII.
THE COMING OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
If there is one quality which we Germans possess in a superlative
quantity it is a sense of justice. We Germans may be proud, we may be
too soft-hearted, we may be romantic, but we are just. The idea of
injustice is abhorrent to the truly-German. How many quarrels have I
seen at the dining tables in the various German pensions in which I
have lived, because one good German thought another was getting too
large a helping! You see it in every phase of life, and I must confess
that in my own case, nothing so irritates me, so rouses my deep German
wrath, which is a terrible thing in itself, as the knowledge that I am
not getting my share.
Understand, that I say nothing which may be taken as disparaging to
the heads of those departments under whose guidance I have worked and
for whose interest I have taken risks--risks which have not been
compensated by the meagre salary and the grudging letters of thanks
which I have received. We Germans are people of iron will and
determination. We are perhaps the best disciplined people in the
world. Give a German an order to go into battle or to walk to the
cannon’s mouth, whether it is loaded or not, and he will obey,
marching with parade step and a calm, stern face to what may very
easily be considerable personal disfigurement.
I myself have taken orders from my superiors with a sharp “Ja, Herr!”
and a stern salute, well knowing that if I carried those orders out I
would be going to certain destruction. Many of those orders I have
obeyed, having carefully reconnoitred the way and discovered the
dangers which might be avoided, for none but a fool would rush
bat-eyed into terrible perils if he could avoid them.
I have explained the circumstances under which I came to be under a
cloud, not only with the British Government, but, alas!--and my soul
weeps at the thought!--with the Government of my beloved Fatherland. I
make no complaint. We Germans never whine. We have in the
Wilhelmstrasse men without imagination, men without gratitude, men
with the brains of she-asses!
After my deportation from England and the torpedoing of the ship which
carried me, and my return to these shores on a submarine, I ceased to
be what I was, the recognized head and centre of the Intelligence
Service of the Fatherland in England. Though I had worked
independently, I had worked without success.
Major Haynes, of the British Intelligence Corps, knew I was in
England, probably had me watched night and day, and was, as the
English saying goes, “fair to my face but bitter to my stomach.”
I do not know whether I must hate this man, or whether, in my
professional zeal, admire one who must be clever--why should I deny
it?--since he had got the better of me. He was a suave, calm man with
a foolish sense of humour which no German would ever understand, a
cynical man who had probably been crossed in love in his earlier
life--possibly by some beautiful German girl, who lured the poor fool
on and then threw him over with a sneer. I often used to lie in bed
picturing the circumstances which brought about his snarling views of
Germany, and often I have enacted the scene, in which I was the
beautiful young girl.
What bitter things I have said to him! How I have tossed my rosy locks
at this proud Englishman or Scotsman, standing pale and dejected
before me begging for one rose from my hair!
I had plenty of time to dream. I was out of touch with the
organization I had created with so much labour, forethought, and
genius. I was unattached and officially unrecognized. I suspected that
some one else had taken on my work, but I found it difficult to
discover who was in my place owing to the embargo which Major Haynes
had laid upon me against communicating with certain people, the names
of whom in some mysterious way this cunning man knew, who might inform
me upon the situation.
I was sitting one day, morose and brooding, in my new lodgings in
Bayswater, meditating upon my fallen state and wondering if I had very
much farther to fall. I confess there were tears in my eyes when I
remembered all the power I had wielded, all the wonderful letters of
encouragement which had come to me from the well-born and illustrious
Captain Baron von Hazfeld, the chief of the Military Intelligence
Department; and of how I was now without recognition, a fugitive
hunted on the face of the earth, doubtless mocked at by men to whom I
had extended a helping hand.
It was near coffee-time, that is to say, nearly four o’clock in the
afternoon, when a knock came on my bedroom door and my landlady
entered with a telegram in her hand.
“For you, Mr. Smith,” she said.
I had given the name of Smith because I thought it was not likely to
attract unusual attention. It is a name very commonly used in England
by people who wish to remain anonymous.
“For me, my dear madam?” I said, taking the telegram in my hand. “Oh,
yes, I remember. A friend of mine is coming to London and he promised
to wire the hour of his arrival.”
With this pleasant little fiction I waved her out of the room.
You may wonder why I gave any excuse at all, but we Germans are by
nature furtive, and it is part of my business to puzzle and deceive
those with whom I am brought into contact.
I opened the telegram. My address was only known to two or three
people and none of these were compatriots of mine. Judge then of my
surprise when I saw that it was a cable addressed to me from
Stockholm, and read:
“Twenty-five kegs of butter consigned to you per The Scandia Export
Company.”
The telegram was signed “Fredericks.”
I needed no code-book to understand that message. It was an order from
a very powerful and an extremely illustrious member of my profession,
a gentleman with whom I had had some correspondence and, indeed, one
whom I had met on the occasion to which I have referred in these
stories of my purchasing a newspaper.
“Twenty-five kegs” meant “call upon.”
The next morning I sallied forth. A glance at a telephone book in one
of the telephone boxes told me the address of the Scandia Export
Company, which was in Upper Thames Street.
You would think, of course, that I made my way direct to my objective.
That was not the case. I had seen in the telephone book that the
Scandia Company, with whom, by the way, I had never had any previous
dealings, was a wholesale provision merchant.
I hired a cab and drove off to Bisbury’s, one of the greatest
wholesale provision merchants in London, asked to see the manager and
demanded from him whether he could supply me with twenty-five firkins
of Danish butter at the current price. Butter at this time was getting
very scarce and the polite manager informed me that it was impossible
for him to supply me.
I drove to another provision merchant’s, this time in Long Acre, and
repeated my request. Here an offer was made to sell me the amount I
required, and I noted the price and said I would call again. From
thence my cab took me into the south of London to another butter
merchant, who was unable to supply me. And so one after the other I
called upon six firms, all of which did business in butter, before I
touched the Scandia Export Company.
I am no fool. We Germans are wide-awake. I knew, or guessed, that Mr.,
or Major, Haynes (a more un-military person I have never seen) would
have me watched and that probably my shadow was following me now.
How puzzled he would be! What! Was Heine thinking of opening a butter
shop that he went to all these great merchants? No, sir. Heine would
be no butter-patter, but Heine knew that he had an excuse for calling
at the Scandia Company, and that it was no more suspicious to call
upon this particular firm than it was to call upon the half a dozen
whom he had already visited, or the three or four more that he would
visit in the course of the day.
And so I came to the Scandia Company and found its offices on the
first floor of a very dark and untidy building. I was met by a clerk
in a large and gloomy room which was furnished with a desk, a stool
and a copying press, and politely stated my business.
“You wish to see Mr. Brantl, I think,” said the clerk. “If you will
wait a moment I will find out if he is engaged.”
He went out of the room through a glass-panelled door and was away for
a few minutes. Presently he returned leaving the door open.
“Will you step this way?” he said, and I passed into the room, closing
the door behind me.
Mr. Brantl was a short, thick-set man with a close-cropped beard who
looked at me sharply through his gold-rimmed spectacles.
“Sit down,” he said imperiously, and then without a word of
preliminary he plunged into what I can only describe as an impertinent
and ill-toned harangue.
“Now, look here, Heine,” he said, and by his simple, direct rudeness I
perceived that he was no more of a Swede than a turnip (a play on
words which is called a “pun” in English), but a true Prussian and
probably very highly connected. “You have made a mess of things.”
I stared at the man.
“I don’t understand you,” I said coldly.
“You’ve made a mess of things, and don’t interrupt me,” he barked.
“Headquarters are crazy with you. You upset all their arrangements and
you have left your work in England in a disgraceful condition. Don’t