Chapter VII: "plain German" (1)

Beyond the arcaded side-walks, whose square-pillared arches stand before the house-fronts like cloisters, the streets of Thun were channels 'of standing sunlight, radiating heat from every cobblestone. Herr Haase, black-coated and white-waistcoated as for a festival, his large blond face damp and distressful, came panting into the hotel with the manner of an exhausted swimmer climbing ashore. In one tightly-gloved hand he bore a large and bulging linen envelope.

"Pfui!" He puffed, and tucked the envelope under one arm in order to take off his green felt hat and mop himself. "Aber what a heat, what a heat!"

The brass-buttoned hotel porter, a-sprawl in a wicker chair in the hall, lowered his newspaper and looked up over his silver spectacles. He was comfortably unbuttoned here and there, and had omitted to shave that morning, for this was July, 1916, and since the war had turned Switzerland's tourists into Europe's cannon-fodder, he had run somewhat to seed.

"Yes, it is warm," he agreed, without interest, and yawned. "You have come to see" he jerked his head towards the white staircase and its strip of red carpet "to see him not? He is up there. But what do you think of the news this morning?"

Herr Haase was running, his handkerchief round the inside of his collar. "To see him! I have come to see the Herr Baron von Steinlach," he retorted, crossly. "And what news are you talking about now?" He continued to pant and wipe while the porter read from his copy of the Bund, the German official communique of the previous day's fighting on the Somme.

"I don't like it," said the porter, when he had finished. "It looks as if we were losing ground. Those English."

Herr Haase pocketed his handkerchief and took the large envelope in his hand again. He was a bulky, middle-aged man, one of whose professional qualifications it was that he looked and sounded commonplace, the type of citizen who is the patron of beer-gardens, wars of aggression, and the easily remembered catchwords which are the whole political creed of his kind. His appearance was the bushel under which his secret light burned profitably; it had indicated him for his employment as a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and the tenant of the pretty villa on the hill above Thun, whence he drove his discreet and complicated traffic in those intangible wares whose market is the Foreign Office in Berlin.

He interrupted curtly. "Don't talk to me about the English!" he puffed. "Gott strafe England!" He stopped. The porter was paid by the same hand as himself. The hall was empty save for themselves, and there was no need to waste good acting on a mere stage-hand in the piece.

"The English," he said, "are going to have a surprise."

"Eh?" The slovenly man in the chair gaped up at him stupidly. Herr Haase added to his words the emphasis of a nod and walked on to the stairs.

In the corridor above, a row of white-painted bedroom doors had each its number. Beside one of them a tall young man was sunk spinelessly in a chair, relaxed to the still warmth of the day. He made to rise as Herr Haase approached, swelling for an instant to a drilled and soldierly stature, but, recognizing him, sank back again.

"He's in there," he said languidly. "Knock for yourself."

"Schlapschwanz!" remarked Herr Haase indignantly, and rapped upon the door. A voice within answered indistinctly. Herr Haase, removing his hat, opened the door and entered.

The room was a large one, an hotel bedroom converted into a sitting-room, with tall French windows opening to a little veranda, and a view across the lime-trees of the garden to the blinding silver of the lake of Thun and the eternal snow-fields of the Bernese Oberland. Beside the window and before a little spindle-legged writing-table a man sat. He turned his head as Herr Haase entered.

"Ach, der gute Haase," he exclaimed.

Herr Haase brought his patent leather heels together with a click and bowed like a T-square.

"Excellenz!" he said, in a strange, loud voice, rather like a man in a trance. "Your Excellency's papers, received by the train arriving from Bern at eleven-thirty-five."

The other smiled, raising to him a pink and elderly face, with a clipped white moustache and heavy tufted brows under which the faint blue eyes were steady and ironic. He was a large man, great in the frame and massive; his movements had a sure, unhurried deliberation; and authority, the custom and habit of power, clad him like a garment. Years and the moving forces of life had polished him as running water polishes a stone. The Baron von Steinlach showed to Herr Haase a countenance supple as a hand and formidable as a fist.

"Thank you, my good Haase," he said, in his strong deliberate German. "You look hot. This sun, eh? Poor fellow!"

But he did not bid him sit down. Instead, he turned to the linen envelope, opened it, and shook out upon the table its freight of lesser envelopes, typed papers, and newspaper-clippings. Deliberately, but yet with a certain discrimination and efficiency, he began to read them. Herr Haase, whose new patent leather boots felt red-hot to his feet, whose shirt was sticking to his back, whose collar was melting, watched him expressionlessly.

"There is a cloud of dust coming along the lake road," said the Baron presently, glancing through the window. "That should be Captain von Wetten in his automobile. We will see what he has to tell us, Haase."

"At your orders, Excellency," deferred Herr Haase.

"Because" he touched one of the papers before him "this news, Haase, is not good. It is not good. And this discovery here, if it be all that is claimed for it, should work miracles."

He glanced up at Herr Haase and smiled again. "Not that I think miracles can ever be worked by machinery," he added.

It was ten minutes after this that the column of dust on the lake road delivered its core and cause in the shape of a tall man, who knocked once at the door and strode in without waiting for an answer.

"Ah, my dear Von Wetten," said the Baron pleasantly. "It is hot, eh?"

"An oven," replied Von Wetten curtly. "This place is an oven. And the dust, ach!"

The elder man made a gesture of sympathy. "Poor fellow!" he said. "Sit down; sit down. Haase, that chair!"

And Herr Haase, who controlled a hundred and twelve subordinates, who was a Swiss citizen and a trusted secret agent, brought the chair and placed it civilly, neither expecting nor receiving thanks.

The new-comer was perhaps twenty-eight years of age, tall, large in the chest and little in the loins, with a narrow, neatly-chiseled face which fell naturally to a chill and glassy composure. "Officer" was written on him as clear as a brand; his very quiet clothes sat on his drilled and ingrained formality of posture and bearing as noticeably as a mask and domino; he needed a uniform to make him inconspicuous. He picked up his dangling monocle, screwed it into his eye, and sat back.

"And now?" inquired the Baron agreeably, "and now, my dear Von Wetten, what have you to tell us?"

"Well, Excellenz" Captain von Wetten hesitated. "As a matter of fact, I've arranged for you to see the thing yourself this afternoon."

The Baron said nothing merely waited, large and still against the light of the window which shone on the faces of the other two.

Captain von Wetten shifted in his chair awkwardly. "At five, Excellenz," he added; "it'll be cooler then. You see, Herr Baron, it's not the matter of the machine I've seen that all right; it's the man."

"So!" The explanation, which explained nothing to Herr Haase, seemed to satisfy the Baron. "The man, eh? But you say you have seen the machine. It works?"

"It worked all right this morning," replied Von Wetten. "I took my own explosives with me, as you know some French and English rifle-cartridges and an assortment of samples from gun charges and marine mines. I planted some in the garden; the place was all pitted already with little craters from his experiments; and some, especially the mine stuff, I threw into the lake. The garden's on the edge of the lake, you know. Well, he got out his machine thing like a photographic camera, rather, on a tripod turned it this way and that until it pointed to my explosives, and pop! off they went like a lot of fireworks. Pretty neat, I thought."

"Ah!" The Baron's elbow was on his desk and his head rested in his hand. "Then it is what that Italian fellow said he had discovered in 1914. 'Ultra-red rays,' he called them. What was his name, now?"

"Never heard of him," said Von Wetten.

From the background where Herr Haase stood among the other furniture came a cough. "Oliver," suggested Herr Haase mildly.

The Baron jerked a look at him. "No, not Oliver," he said. "Ulivi that was it; Ulivi! I remember at the time we were interested, because, if the fellow could do what he claimed." He broke off. "Tell me," he demanded of Von Wetten. "You are a soldier; I am only a diplomat. What would this machine mean in war in this war, for instance? Supposing you were in command upon a sector of the front; that in the trenches opposite you were the English; and you had this machine? What would be the result?"

"Well!" Von Wetten deliberated. "Pretty bad for the English, I should think," he decided.

"But how, man how?" persisted the Baron. "In what way would it be bad for them?"

Von Wetten made an effort; he was not employed for his imagination. "Why," he hesitated, "because I suppose the cartridges would blow up in the men's pouches and in the machine-gun belts; and then the trench-mortar ammunition and the hand grenades; well, everything explosive would simply explode! And then we'd go over to what was left of them, and it would be finished."

He stopped abruptly as the vision grew clearer. "Aber," he began excitedly.

The old Baron lifted a hand and quelled him.

"The machine you saw this morning, which you tested, will do all this?" he insisted.

Von Wetten was staring at the Baron. Upon the question he let his monocle fall and seemed to consider. "I, I don't see why not," he replied.

The Baron nodded thrice, very slowly. Then he glanced up at Herr Haase. "Then miracles are worked by machinery, after all," he said. Then he turned again to Von Wetten.

"Well?" he said. "And the man? We are forgetting the man; I think we generally do, we Germans. What is the difficulty about the man?"

Von Wetten shrugged. "The difficulty is that he won't name his price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something, across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you! Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even offered to let me take my stuff to the other side of the lake, three miles away, and explode it at that distance. But when it came to terms, all he'd do was to look the other way and mumble."

"What did you offer him?" demanded the Baron.

"My orders, Your Excellency," answered Captain von Wetten formally, "were to agree to his price, but not to attempt negotiations in the event of difficulty over the terms. That was reserved for Your Excellency."

"H'm!" The Baron nodded. "Quite right," he approved. "Quite right; there is something in this. Men have their price, but sometimes they have to be paid in a curious currency. By the way, how much money have we?"

Herr Haase, a mere living ache inhabiting the background, replied.

"I am instructed, Excellency, that my cheque will be honored at sight here for a million marks," he answered, in the loud hypnotized voice of the drill-ground. "But there is, of course, no limit."

The Baron gave him an approving nod. "No limit," he said. "That is the only way to do things no limit, in money or anything else! Well, Haase can bring the car round at what time, Von Wetten?"

"Twenty minutes to five!" Von Wetten threw the words over his shoulder.

"And I shall lunch up here; it's cooler. You'd better lunch with me, and we can talk. Send up a waiter as you go, my good Haase."

Herr Haase bowed, but clicked only faintly. "Zu Befehl, Excellenz," he replied, and withdrew.

In the hall below he sank into a chair, groaned and fumbled at the buttons of his boots. He was wearing them for the first time, and they fitted him as though they had been shrunk on to him. The porter, his waistcoat gaping, came shambling over to him.

"You were saying," began the porter, "that the English."

Herr Haase boiled over. "Zum Teufel mit den Englandern und mit Dir, Schafskopf!" he roared, tearing at the buttons. "Send up a waiter to the Herr Baron and call me a cab to go home in!"

It was in a sunlight tempered as by a foreboding of sunset, when the surface of the lake was ribbed like sea sand with the first breathings of the evening breeze, that Herr Haase, riding proudly in the back seat of honor, brought the motor-car to the hotel. He had changed his garb of ceremony and servitude; he wore grey now, one of those stomach-exposing, large-tailed coats which lend even to the straightest man the appearance of being bandy-legged; and upon his feet were a pair of tried and proven cloth boots.

The porter, his waistcoat buttoned for the occasion, carried out a leather suit-case and placed it in the car, then stood aside, holding open the door, as the Baron and Von Wetten appeared from the hall. Von Wetten, true to his manner, saw neither Herr Haase's bow nor the porter's lifted cap; to him, salutations and civilities came like the air he breathed, and were as little acknowledged. The Baron gave to Herr Haase the compliment of a glance that took in the grey coat and the cloth boots, and the ghost of an ironic, not unkindly smile.

"Der gute Haase," he murmured, and then, as though in absence of mind, "Poor fellow, poor fellow!"

His foot was upon the step of the car when he saw the leather suit-case within. He paused in the act of entering.

"What is this baggage?" he inquired.

Von Wetten craned forward to look. "Oh, that! I wanted you to see the machine at work, Excellenz, so I'm bringing a few cartridges and things."

His Excellency withdrew his foot and stepped back. "Explosives, eh?" He made a half-humorous grimace of distaste. "Haase, lift that bag out carefully, man! and carry it in front with you. And tell the chauffeur to drive cautiously!"

Their destination was to the eastward of the little town, where the gardens of the villas trail their willow-fringes in the water. Among them, a varnished yellow chalet lifted its tiers of glassed-in galleries among the heavy green of fir-trees; its door, close beside the road, was guarded by a gate of iron bars. The big car slid to a standstill beside it with a scrape of tires in the dust.

"A moment," said the old baron, as Herr Haase lifted his hand to the iron bell-pull that hung beside the gate. "Who are we? What names have you given, Von Wetten? Schmidt and Meyer or something more fanciful?"

"Much more fanciful, Excellenz." Von Wetten allowed himself a smile. "I am Herr Wetten; Your Excellency is Herr Steinlach. It could not be simpler."

The Baron laughed quietly. "Very good, indeed," he agreed. "And Haase? You did not think of him? Well, the good Haase, for the time being, shall be the Herr von Haase. Eh, Haase?"

"Zu Befehl, Excellenz," deferred Herr Haase.

The iron bell-pull squealed in its dry guides; somewhere within the recesses of the house a sleeping bell woke and jangled. Silence followed. The three of them waited upon the road in the slant of the sunshine, aware of the odor of hot dust, trees, and water. Herr Haase stood, in the contented torpor of service and obedience, holding the heavy suit-case to one side of the gate; to the other, the Baron and Von Wetten stood together. Von Wetten, with something of rigidity even in his ease and insouciance, stared idly at the windows through which, as through stagnant eyes, the silent house seemed to be inspecting them; the Baron, with his hands joined behind him, was gazing through the gate at the unresponsive yellow door. His pink, strong face had fallen vague and mild; he seemed to dream in the sunlight upon the threshold of his enterprise. All of him that was formidable and potent was withdrawn from the surface, sucked in, and concentrated in the inner centers of his mind and spirit.

There sounded within the door the noise of footsteps; a bolt clashed, and there came out to the gate a young woman with a key in her hand. The Baron lifted his head and looked at her, and she stopped, as though brought up short by the impact of his gaze. She was a small creature, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, as fresh and pretty as apple-blossom. But it was more than shyness that narrowed her German-blue eyes as she stood behind the bars, looking at the three men.

Von Wetten, tall, comely, stepped forward.

"Good afternoon, gnadige Frau. We have an appointment with your husband for this hour. Let me present Herr Steinlach Herr von Haase."

The two bowed at her; she inspected each in turn, still with that narrow-eyed reserve.

"Yes," she said then, in a small tinkle of a voice. "My husband is expecting you."

She unlocked the gate; the key resisted her, and she had to take both hands to it, flushing with the effort of wrenching it over. They followed her into the house, along an echoing corridor, to a front room whose windows framed a dazzling great panorama of wide water, steep blue mountain, and shining snow-slopes. Herr Haase, coming last with the suitcase, saw around the Baron's large shoulders how she flitted across and called into the balcony: "Egon, the Herren are here!" Then, without glancing at them again, she passed them and disappeared.

Herr Haase's wrist was aching with his burden. Gently, and with precaution against noise, he stooped, and let the suit-case down upon the floor. So that he did not see the entry at that moment of the man who came from the balcony, walking noiselessly upon rubber-soled tennis-shoes. He heard Von Wetten's "Good afternoon, Herr Bettermann," and straightened up quickly to be introduced.

He found himself taking the hand it lay in his an instant as lifelessly as a glove of a young man whose eyes, over-large in a tragically thin face and under a chrysanthemum shock of hair, were at once timid and angry. He was coatless, as though he had come fresh from some work, and under his blue shirt his shoulders showed angular. But what was most noticeable about him, when he lifted his face to the light, was the scar of which Von Wetten had spoken a red and jagged trace of some ugly wound, running from the inner corner of the right eye to the edge of the jaw. He murmured some inaudible acknowledgment of Herr Haase's scrupulously correct greeting.

Then, as actually as though an arm of flesh and blood had thrust him back. Herr Haase was brushed aside. It was as if the Baron von Steinlach, choosing his moment, released his power of personality upon the scene as a man lets go his held breath. "A wonderful view you have here, Herr Bettermann," was all he said. The young man turned to him to reply; it was as though their opposite purposes and wills crossed and clashed like engaged swords. Herr Haase, and even the salient and insistent presence of Von Wetten, thinned and became vague ghostly, ineffectual natives of the background in the stark light of the reality of that encounter.

There were some sentences, mere feigning, upon that radiant perspective which the wide windows framed.

Then: "My friend and associate, Herr Wetten here, has asked me to look into this matter," said the Baron. His voice was silk, the silk "that holds fast where a steel chain snaps."

"First, to confirm his impressions of the the apparatus; second" the subtle faint-blue eyes of the old man and the dark suspicious eyes of the young man met and held each other "and second, the question, the minor question, of the price. However" his lips, under the clipped, white moustache, widened in a smile without mirth "that need not take us long, since the price, you see, is not really a question at all."

The haggard young man heard him with no change in that painful intensity of his.

"Isn't it?" he said shortly. "We'll see! But first, I suppose, you want to see the thing at work. I have here cordite, gelignite, trinitrotoluol," but his hare's eyes fell on the suit-case, "perhaps you have brought your own stuff?"

"Yes," said the Baron; "I have brought my own stuff."

The garden of the villa was a plot of land reaching down to a parapet lapped by the still stone-blue waters of the lake. Wooden steps led down to it from the balcony; Herr Haase, descending them last with the suit-case, paused an instant to shift his burden from one hand to the other, and had time to survey the place the ruins of a lawn, pitted like the face of a small-pox patient with small holes, where the raw clay showed through the unkempt grass the "craters" of which Captain von Wetten had spoken. Tall fir-trees, the weed of Switzerland, bounded the garden on either hand, shutting it in as effectually as a wall. Out upon the blue-and-silver floor of the lake a male human being rowed a female of his species in a skiff; and near the parapet something was hooded under a black cloth, such as photographers use, beneath whose skirts there showed the feet of a tripod.

Herr Bettermann, the young man with the scar, walked across to it. At first glimpse, it had drawn all their eyes; each felt that here, properly and decently screened, was the core of the affair. It was right that it should be covered up and revealed only at the due moment; yet Bettermann went to it and jerked the black cloth off, raping the mystery of the thing as crudely as a Prussian in Belgium.

"Here it is," he said curtly. "Put your stuff where you like."

The cloth removed disclosed a contrivance like two roughly cubical boxes, fitted one above the other, the upper projecting a little beyond the lower, and mounted on the apex of the tripod. A third box, evidently, by the terminals which projected from its cover, the container of a storage battery, lay between the feet of the tripod, and wires linked it with the apparatus above. Beside the tripod lay a small black bag such as doctors are wont to carry.

Von Wetten took a key from his pocket and threw it on the ground. "Unlock that bag," he said to Herr Haase, and turned towards the Baron and his host.

Herr Haase picked up the key, unlocked the suitcase, and stood ready for further orders. The Baron was standing with Bettermann by the tripod; the latter was talking and detaching some piece of mechanism within the apparatus. His voice came clearly across to Herr Haase.

"Two blades," he was saying, "and one varies their angle with this. The sharper the angle, the greater the range of the ray and the shorter the effective arc. But, of course, this machine is only a model."

"Quite so," acquiesced the Baron.

"These" his hand emerged from the upper box "are the blades."

He withdrew from the apparatus a contrivance like a pair of brief tongs, of which the shanks were stout wires and the spatulates were oblongs of thin, whitish metal like aluminum, some three inches long by two wide.

"The essence of the whole thing," he said. "You see, they are hinged; one sets them wider or closer according to the range and the arc one requires. These plates they are removable. I paint the compound on them, and switch the current on through this battery."

"Ah, yes," agreed the Baron dreamily. "The compound that has to be painted on."

The thin face of the inventor turned upon him; the great eyes smoldered. "Yes," was the answer; "yes. I, I paint it on enough for three or four demonstrations, and then I throw the rest into the lake. So my secret is safe, you see."

The Baron met his eyes with the profound ironic calm of his own. "Safe, I am sure," he replied. "The safer the better. And now, where would you prefer us to arrange our explosives?"

The other shrugged his shoulders. "Where you like," he said, bending to the little black hand-bag. "Lay them on the ground or bury them, or throw them into the lake, if they're waterproof. Only don't put them too near the house. I don't want any more of my windows broken."

There was a tone of aggression in his voice, and his eyes seemed to affront them, then strayed in a moment's glance towards the house. Herr Haase, following his look, had a glimpse of the little wife upon the upper balcony looking down upon the scene. The young man with the scar it glowed at whiles, red and angry seemed to make her some sign, for she drew back out of sight at once.

Herr Haase would have liked to watch the further intercourse of the Baron and the lean young man; but Von Wetten, indicating to him a small iron spade, such as children dig with on the sea-beach, and a pointed iron rod, set him to work at making graves for the little paper-wrapped packages which he took from the suit-case. The captain stood over him while he did it, directing him with orders curt as oaths and wounding as blows, looking down upon his sweating, unremonstrant obedience as from a very mountain-top of superiority. The clay was dry as flour, and puffed into dust under the spade; the slanting sun had yet a vigor of heat; and Herr Haase, in his tail-coat and his cloth boots, floundered among the little craters and earth-heaps, and dug and perspired submissively.

As he completed each hole to Von Wetten's satisfaction, that demigod dropped one or more of his small packages into it, and arranged them snugly with the iron rod. While he did so, Herr Haase eased himself upright, wiped the sweat from his brow, and gazed across at the other two. He saw the young man dipping a brush in a bottle, which he had taken from the black bag, and painting with it upon the metal plates, intent and careful; while beside him the old baron, with his hands clasped behind his back, watched him with just that air of blended patronage and admiration with which a connoisseur, visiting a studio, watches an artist at work.

Von Wetten spoke at his elbow. "Fill this in!" he said, in those tones of his that would have roused rebellion in a beast of burden. "And tread the earth down on it firmly!"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," answered Herr Haase hastily. But he was slow enough in obeying to see the young man, his painting finished, take the bottle in his hand, and toss it over the parapet into the lake and turn, the great jagged scar suddenly red and vivid on the pallor of his thin face, to challenge the Baron with his angry eyes.

The Baron met them with his small indomitable smile. "The machine is ready now?" he inquired smoothly.

"Ready when you are," snapped the other.

Herr Haase had to return to his labors then and lose the rest of that battle of purposes, of offence offered and refused, which went on over the head of the waiting machine. Von Wetten left him for a while and was busy throwing things that looked like glass jars into the lake. When at last the fifth and final hole was filled and trodden down under the sore heels in the cloth boots, the others were standing around the apparatus. They looked up at him as he cast down the spade and clapped a hand to the main stiffness in the small of his back.

"All finished?" called the Baron. "Then come over here, my good friend, or you will be blown up. Eh, Herr Bettermann?"

Herr Bettermann shrugged those sharp shoulders of his; he was shifting the tripod legs of his machine. "Blow him up if you like," he said. "He's your man."

Von Wetten and the Baron laughed at that, the Baron civilly and perfunctorily, as one laughs at the minor jests of one's host, and Von Wetten as though the joke were a good one. Herr Haase smiled deferentially, and eased himself into the background by the parapet.

"And now," said the Baron, "to our fireworks!"

Herr Bettermann answered with the scowl-like contraction of the brows which he used in place of a nod.

"All right," he said. "Stand away from the front of the thing, will you? You know yourselves the kind of stuff you've buried yes? Also, los!"

The old baron had stepped back to Herr Haase's side; as the young man put his hands to the apparatus, he crisped himself with a sharp intake of breath for the explosion. A switch clicked under the young man's thumb, and he began to move the machine upon its pivot mounting, traversing it like a telescope on a stand. It came round towards the fresh yellow mounds of earth which marked Herr Haase's excavations; they had an instant in which to note, faint as the whirring of a fly upon a pane, the buzz of some small mechanism within the thing. Then, not louder than a heavy stroke upon a drum, came the detonation of the buried cartridges in the first hole, and the earth above them suddenly ballooned and burst like an over-inflated paper-bag and let through a spit of brief fire and a jet of smoke.

"Ach, du lieber" began the Baron, and had the words chopped off short by the second explosion. A stone the size of a tennis-ball soared slowly over them and plopped into the water a score of yards away. The Baron raised an arm as if to guard his face, and kept it raised; Von Wetten let his eyeglass fall, lifted it in his hand and held it there; only Herr Haase, preserving his formal attitude of obedient waiting, his large bland face inert, stood unmoved, passively watching this incident of his trade.

The rest of the holes blew up nobly; the last was applauded by a crash of glass as one of the upper windows of the house broke and came raining down in splinters. The lean young man swore tersely. "Another window!" he snarled. The Baron lowered his arm and let his breath go in a sigh of relief. "That is all, is it not?" he demanded. "Gott sei Dank I hate things that explode. But I am glad that I saw it, now that it is over, very glad indeed!"

There was a touch of added color in the even pink of his face, and something of restlessness, a shine of excitement, in his eyes. Even his voice had a new tone of unfamiliar urgency. He glanced to and fro from Herr Wetten to Herr Haase as though seeking someone to share his emotion.

Bettermann's thin voice broke in curtly. "It isn't over," he said. "There's the stuff he" with a glance like a stab at Von Wetten "threw into the lake. Ready?"

"Ach!" The Baron stepped hastily aside. "Yes; I had forgotten that. Quite ready, my dear sir quite ready. Haase, my good friend, I think I'll stand behind you this time."

"Zu Befehl, Excellenz," acquiesced Herr Haase, and made of his solidity and stolidity a screen and a shield for the master-mind in its master-body. Herr Bettermann, bending behind his machine, took in the grouping with an eye that sneered and exulted, jerked his angular blue-clad shoulders contemptuously, and turned again to his business.

The eye of the machine roamed over the face of the water, seeming to peer searchingly into the depths of shining blue; the small interior whir started again upon the click of the switch, and forthwith three explosions, following upon each other rapidly, tore that tranquil water-mirror, spouting three geyser-jets into the sun-soaked evening air. The waves they raised slapped loudly at the wall below the parapet, and there were suddenly dead fish floating pale-bellied on the surface.

"Mines!" It was a whisper behind Herr Haase's large shoulder. "English mines!"

Herr Bettermann straightened himself upright behind the tripod. "There's a fine for killing fish like that," he remarked bitterly. "And the window besides, curse it!"

The Baron looked round at him absently. "Too bad!" he agreed. "Too bad!" He moved Herr Haase out of his way with a touch of his hand and walked to the parapet. He stood there, seeming for some moments to be absorbed in watching the dead fish as they rocked in the diminishing eddies. Herr Bettermann picked up the black cloth and draped it again over his apparatus. There was a space of silence.

Presently, with a shrug as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from some train of thought, the Baron turned. "Yes," he said, slowly, half to himself. "Y-es!" He lifted his eyes to the inventor.

"Well, we have only three things to do," he said. "They should not take us long. But it is pleasant here in your garden, Herr Bettermann, and we might sit down while we do them."

He sat as he spoke, letting himself down upon the low parapet with an elderly deliberation; at his gesture Von Wetten sat likewise, a few yards away; Herr Haase moved a pace, hesitated, and remained standing.

"I'll stand," said Bettermann shortly. "And what are the three things that you have got to do?"

"Why," replied the Baron, evenly, "the obvious three, surely to pay for your broken window nicht wahr? to pay the fine for killing the fish, and to pay your price for the machine. There is nothing else to pay for, is there?"

"Oh!" The young man stared at him.

"So, if you will tell us the figure that will content you, we can dispatch the matter," continued the Baron. "That is your part to name a figure. Supposing always" his voice slowed; the words dropped one by one "supposing always that there is a figure!"

The other continued to stare, gaunt as a naked tree in the evening flush, his face white under his tumbled hair, the jagged scar showing, upon it like a new wound.

"You don't suppose you'll get the thing for nothing, do you?" he broke out suddenly.

The Baron shook his head. "No," he said, "I don't think that. But it has struck me I may not need my cheque-book. You see, for all I can tell, Herr Bettermann, the window may be insured; and the police may not hear of the fish; and as for the machine well, the machine may be for sale; but you have less the manner of a salesman, Herr Bettermann, than any man I have ever seen."

The gaunt youth glowered uncertainly. "I'm not a salesman," he retorted resentfully.

The Baron nodded. "I was sure of it," he said. "Well, if you will let me, I'll be your salesman for you; I have sold things in my time, and for great prices too. Now, I can see that you are in a difficulty. You are a patriotic Swiss citizen and you have scruples about letting your invention go out of your own country; is that it? Because, if so, it can be arranged."

He stopped; the lean youth had uttered a spurt of laughter, bitter and contemptuous.

"Swiss!" he cried. "No more Swiss than yourself, Herr Baron!"

"Eh?" To Herr Haase, watching through his mask of respectful aloofness, it was as though the Baron's mind and countenance together snapped almost audibly into a narrowed and intensified alertness. The deep, white-fringed brows gathered over the shrewd pale eyes. "Not a Swiss?" he queried. "What are you, then?"

"Huh!" the other jeered, openly. "I knew you the moment I saw you. Old Herr Steinlach, eh? Why, man, I've been expecting you and getting ready for you ever since your blundering, swaggering spy there" with a jerk of a rigid thumb towards Von Wetten "and this fat slave" Herr Haase was indicated here "first came sniffing round my premises. I knew they'd be sending you along, with your blank cheques and your tongue; and here you are!"

He mouthed his words in an extravagance of offence and ridicule; his gaunt body and his thin arms jerked in a violence of gesticulation, and the jagged scar that striped his face pulsed from red to white. The old baron, solid and unmoving on his seat, watched him with still attention.

"Not a Swiss?" he persisted, when the young man had ceased to shout and shrug.

For answer, suddenly as an attacker, the young man strode across to him and bent, thrusting his feverish and passion-eaten face close to the other man's. His forefinger, long, large-knuckled, jerked up; he traced with it upon his face the course of the great disfiguring scar that flamed diagonally from the inner corner of the right eye to the rim of the sharp jaw.

"Did you ever see a Swiss that carried a mark like that?" he cried, his voice breaking to a screech. "Or an Englishman, or a Frenchman? Or anybody but but" he choked breathlessly on his words "or anybody but a German? Man, it's my passport!"

He remained yet an instant, bent forward, rigid finger to face, then rose and stepped back, breathing hard. The three of them stuck, staring at him.

Von Wetten broke the silence. "German?" he said, in that infuriating tone of peremptory incredulity which his kind in all countries commands. "You, a German?"

The lean youth turned on him with a movement like a swoop. "Yes me!" he spat. "And a deserter from my military service, too! Make the best of that, you Prussian Schweinhund!"

"Was!" Von Wetten started as though under a blow; his monocle fell; he made a curious gesture, bringing his right hand across to his left hip as though in search of something; and gathered himself as though about to spring to his feet. The Baron lifted a quiet hand and subdued him.

"Yes," he said, in his even, compelling tones. "Make the best of that, Von Wetten."

Von Wetten stared, arrested in the very act of rising. "Zu Befehl, Herr Baron," he said, in a strained voice, and continued staring. The Baron watched him frowningly an instant, to make sure of his submission, and turned again to Herr Bettermann where he stood, lean and glowering, before them.

"Now," he said, "I am beginning to see my way dimly, dimly. A deserter a German and that scar is your passport! Ye-es! Well, will you tell me, Herr Bettermann, in plain German, how you came by that scar?"

"Yes," said Bettermann, fiercely, "I will!"

Behind him, where the house windows shone rosy in the sunset, Herr Haase could see upon the lower balcony the shimmer of a white frock and a face that peeped and drew back. The little wife was listening.

"It was the captain of my company," said Bettermann, with a glare at Von Wetten. "Another Prussian swine-dog like this brute here." He waited. Von Wetten regarded him with stony calm and did not move. Bettermann flushed. "He sent me for his whip, and when I brought it, he called me to attention and cut me over the face with it."

"Eh?" The old baron sat up. "Aber-"

"Just one cut across the face, me with my heels glued together and my hands nailed to my sides," went on Bettermann. "Then 'Dismiss!' he ordered, and I saluted and turned about and marched away with my smashed face. And then you ask me if I am a Swiss!" He laughed again.

"But," demanded the Baron, "what had you done? Why did he do that to you?"

"Didn't I tell you he was a Prussian swine?" cried Bettermann. "Isn't that reason enough? But, if you will know, he'd seen me speak to a lady in the street. Afterwards me standing to attention, of course! he made a foul comment on her, and asked me for her name and address."

"And you wouldn't tell him?"

"Tell him!" cried Bettermann. "No!"

Herr Haase saw the girl on the balcony lean forward as though to hear the word, its pride and its bitterness, and draw back again as though to hear it had been all that she desired.

"Von Wetten!" The Baron spoke briskly. "You hear what Herr Bettermann tells me? Such things happen in the army do they?"

Von Wetten shrugged. "They are strictly illegal, sir," he replied, formally. "There are severe penalties prescribed for such actions. But, in the army, in the daily give-and-take of the life of a regiment, of course, they do happen. Herr Bettermann," very stiffly, "was unfortunate."

Betterman was staring at him, but said nothing. The Baron glanced from Von Wetten to the lean young man and shook his head.

"I am beginning I think I am beginning to see," he said. "And it seems to me that I shall not need that cheque-book. Herr Bettermann, I am very sure you have not forgotten the name of that officer."

"Forgotten!" said the other. "No, I've not forgotten. And, so that you shan't forget, I've got it written down for you!"

He fished a card from the breast-pocket of his blue shirt. The Baron received it, and held it up to the light.

"Captain Graf von Specht, the Kaiserjaeger," he read aloud. "Ever hear of him, Von Wetten?"

Von Wetten nodded. "Neighbor of mine in the country, Excellenz," he replied. "We were at the cadet-school together. Colonel now; promoted during the war. He would regret, I am sure."

"He will regret, I am sure," interrupted the Baron, pocketing the card. "And he will have good cause. Well, Herr Bettermann, I think I know your terms now. You want to see the Graf von Specht again here? I am right, am I not?"

Bettermann's eyes narrowed at him. "Yes," he said. "You're right. Only this time it is he that must bring the whip!"

Herr Haase's intelligence, following like a shorthand-writer's pencil, ten words behind the speaker, gave a leap at this. Till now, the matter had been for him a play without a plot; suddenly understanding, he cast a startled glance at Von Wetten.

The captain sat up alert.

"Certainly!" The old baron was replying to young Bettermann. "And stand to attention! And salute! I told you that I would agree to your terms, and I agree accordingly. Captain that is, Colonel von Specht shall be here, with the whip, as soon as the telegraph and the train can bring him. And then, I assume, the machine."

"Pardon!" Captain von Wetten had risen. "I have not understood." He came forward between the two, very erect and military, and rather splendid with his high-held head and drilled comeliness of body. "There has been much elegance of talk and I am stupid, no doubt; but, in plain German, what is it that Colonel von Specht is to do?"

Bettermann swooped at him again, choking with words; the captain stood like a monument callous to his white and stammering rage, the personification and symbol of his caste and its privilege.

It was the Baron who answered from his seat on the parapet, not varying his tone and measured delivery.

"Colonel von Specht," he said, "is to bring a whip here and stand to attention while Herr Bettermann cuts him over the face with it. That is all. Now sit down and be silent."

Captain von Wetten did not move. "This is impossible," he said. "There are limits. As a German officer, I resent the mere suggestion of this insult to the corps of officers. Your Excellency."

The Baron lifted that quiet hand of his. "I order you to sit down and be silent," he said.

Captain von Wetten hesitated. It seemed to Herr Haase, for a flattering instant, that the captain's eyes sought his own, as though in recognition of a familiar and favorable spirit. He tried to look respectfully sympathetic.

"Very good, your Excellency," said Von Wetten, at length. "The Emperor, of course, will be informed."

He turned and stalked away to his former place. The Baron, watching him, smiled briefly.

"Well, Herr Bettermann," said the Baron, rising stiffly, "it will not help us to have this arrangement of ours in writing. I think we'll have to trust one another. Our chemists, then, can come to you for the formula as soon as you have finished with Colonel von Specht? That is agreed yes? Good! And you see, I was right from the beginning; I did not need my cheque-book after all."

He began to move towards the house, beckoning Captain von Wetten and Herr Haase to follow him. Herr Haase picked up the empty suit-case, stood aside to let Von Wetten pass, and brought up the rear of the procession.

At the foot of the wooden steps that led up to the veranda, the Baron halted and turned to Bettermann.

"One thing makes me curious," he said. "Suppose we had not accepted your terms, what would you have done? Sold your machine to our enemies?"

Bettermann was upon the second step, gauntly silhouetted against the yellow wood of the house. He looked down into the elder man's strong and subtle face.

"No," he answered. "I meant to at first, but I haven't purged the German out of me yet and I couldn't. But I'd let your army of slaves and slave-drivers be beaten by its own slavery as it would be and you know it. I wouldn't take a hand in it; only, if anything happened to me; if, for instance, I disappeared some night, well, you'd find the machine and the formula in the hands of the English, that's all!"

He turned and led the way up the wooden steps. It seemed to tired Herr Haase, lugging the suit-case, that Captain von Wetten was swearing under his breath.

He was not imaginative, our Herr Haase; facts were his livelihood and the nurture of his mind. But in the starved wastes of his fancy something had struck a root, and as he rode Thun-wards in the front seat of the car, with the suit-case in his lap and the setting sun in his eyes, he brooded upon it. It was the glimpse of the little wife in the balcony the girl who had lived with the scar upon her husband's face and in his soul, and had leaned forward to eavesdrop upon his cruel triumph. Behind him, the two demi-gods talked together; snatches of their conversation tempted him to listen; but Herr Haase was engrossed with another matter. When the Prussian colonel, one living agony of crucified pride, stood for the blow, and the whip whistled through the air to thud on the flesh of his upturned face would she be watching then?

He was still thinking of it when the car drew up at the hotel door.

"Upstairs at once," directed the Baron, as he stepped hastily to the sidewalk. "You too, my good Haase; we shall want you."

In the Baron's upper room, where that morning he had suffered the torture of the boot, Herr Haase was given a seat at the little writing-table. The Baron himself cleared it for him, wiping its piles of papers to the floor with a single sweep of his hand.

"Get ready to write the telegrams which we shall dictate," he commanded. "But first will you be able to get them through in code?"

"Code is forbidden, your Excellency," replied Herr Haase, in his parade voice. "But we have also a phrase-code, a short phrase for every word of the message which passes. It makes the telegram very long."

"Also gut!" approved the Baron. "Now, Von Wetten, first we will wire the Staff. You know how to talk to them; so dictate a clear message to Haase here."

Von Wetten was standing by the door, hat and cane in hand. His face, with its vacant comeliness, wore a formality that was almost austere.

"Zu Befehl, Excellenz," he replied. "But has your Excellency considered that, after all, there may be other means? I beg your Excellency's pardon, but it occurs to me that we have not tried alternative offers. For instance, we are not limited as to money."

The Baron made a little gesture of impatience, indulgent and paternal. He leaned a hand on the table and looked over Herr Haase's head to the tall young officer.

"We are not limited as to colonels, either," he answered. "We must think ourselves lucky, I suppose, that he went no higher than a colonel. There was a moment when I thought he was going very much higher to the very top, Von Wetten. For, make no mistake, that young man knows his value."

Von Wetten frowned undecidedly. "The top," he repeated. "There is only one top. You can't mean?"

The Baron took the word from his mouth. "Yes," he said, "the Emperor. I thought for a while he was going to demand that. And do you know what I should have answered?"

Von Wetten threw up his head and his face cleared. "Of course I know," he said. "You'd have cut the dirty traitor down where he stood!"

The Baron did not move. "No," he said. "I should have accepted those terms also, Von Wetten."

The Baron's hand rested on the edge of the table in front of Herr Haase; he sat, staring at it, a piece of human furniture on the stage of a tragedy. The other two confronted each other above his patient and useful head. He would have liked to look from one to the other, to watch their faces, but he was too deeply drilled for that. He heard Von Wetten's voice with a quaver in it.

"Then things are going as badly as all that?"

"Yes," answered the Baron. "Badly! It is not just this battle that is going on now in France; it strikes deeper than that. The plan that was to give us victory has failed us; we find ourselves, with a strength which must diminish, fighting an enemy whose strength increases. We must not stop at anything now; what is at stake is too tremendous."

"But--."

The Baron hushed him. "Listen, Von Wetten," he said. "I will be patient with you. I do not speak to you of of the Idea of which Germany and Prussia are the body and the weapon. No; but have you ever realized that you, yes, you! belong to the most ridiculed, most despised nation on earth? That your countrywomen furnish about eighty per cent. of the world's prostitutes; that a German almost anywhere is a waiter, or a sausage-manufacturer, or a beer-seller, the butt of comic papers in a score of languages? All that has not occurred to you, eh?

"Well, think of it, and think, too, of what this machine may do for us. Think of a Germany armed in a weaponless world, and, if empire and mastery convey nothing to you, think of oh! American women walking the streets in Berlin, comic English waiters in German cafe's, slavish French laborers in German sweat-shops. And all this boxed into a machine on a tripod by a monomaniac whose price we can pay!"

He paused and walked towards the window. "Dictate the telegram to the Staff, Von Wetten," he said, over his shoulder.

Von Wetten laid his hat and cane on a chair and crossed the room. "I feel as if I were stabbing a fellow-officer in the back," he said, drearily. Then, to Herr Haase: "Take this, you!"

"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," said Herr Haase, and picked up his pen.

There were twelve long telegrams in all, of which many had to be amended, pruned, sub-edited, and rewritten; each was directed to a plain private address in Berlin, and each was to be answered to the address of Herr Haase. One, which gave more trouble than any of the others, was to Siegfried Meyer, Number One, Unter den Linden; it was long before the Baron and Von Wetten could smooth its phrases to a suavity and deference which satisfied them. Coffee was brought them to lubricate their labors, but none to Herr Haase; his part was to write down, scratch out, rewrite, while beyond the windows the night marched up from the east and the lake grew bleak and vague.