CHAPTER XVIII

On the following evening, at eight o'clock, John Manton presented himself at Dacent Smith's apartment in Jermyn Street. He had hurried to London in answer to a wire, telling him to report himself personally. Elaine, who had made the journey with him, had gone on to her rooms in Camden Town. The door of Dacent Smith's suite of rooms was opened by Grew, who conducted John immediately to the great man's apartment. As always, when John visited his Chief's abode, the speckless cleanliness of the stairs, the glitter of varnish and brass reminded him somewhat of the interior of a battleship.

His superior's own room was orderly as usual, and Dacent Smith himself, who occupied a deep leather-covered chair at the hearth, rose and greeted him with a cordial handshake. The elder man was in evening clothes; he was, as always, plump, ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, and cheery in manner. His politeness struck John in marked contrast to the gruffness of Doctor Voules. These two men, Voules and Dacent Smith, heads of two great secret armies, were conducting a duel for supremacy. They were totally different in character and calibre, and John (perhaps he was prejudiced in the matter) was prepared at any odds to back Dacent Smith to win.

"Help yourself to a cigarette, Treves."

John took a cigarette, and seated himself in a chair opposite his Chief. For a moment there was silence, then Dacent Smith, who had been watching the ascending smoke, looked at the younger man with the faintly humorous light that sometimes animated his vivid eyes.

"I am glad to see you alive, Treves. You have had one of the narrowest of escapes."

John expressed his surprise.

"I wasn't aware of any narrow escape, sir."

"Perhaps not," said Dacent Smith, "but yesterday morning, when you went to Voules's house, you literally walked into the lions' den. Fortunately, however, you were successful in preserving a whole skin."

"I had no sense of anything adventurous happening during that visit," John returned, full of curiosity.

"I'll tell you exactly just what did happen," Dacent Smith continued. He rose, went to his desk, and drew a letter from one of the drawers. "Read that letter," he said, "and see what your chances would have been if it had arrived at Voules's house before you did."

"Who wrote it?" asked John, looking at the single initial "S" at the end of the sheet.

"Your amiable friend, Crumbs," answered Dacent Smith. "He discovered Cherriton's letter in your dispatch case."

John lifted his eyebrows in intense surprise.

"I had no idea that letter was discovered, sir. I took every precaution against discovery, and should have destroyed it, but it appeared to me a specimen of Cherriton's handwriting might be useful to you in the future."

"It will be useful when we come to stop his activities," answered Dacent Smith. "In the meantime its discovery by Sims very nearly resulted in your career coming to a sudden end. You can imagine the situation, Treves," he went on, "if that letter had arrived at Brooke when you were in Voules's house. For their own sakes, Voules and the others would never have dared to let you go. However, the letter never reached Voules, for Sinclair had it out of the locked bag at the fort five minutes after Sims deposited it there."

"It's a lucky thing for me," John said, handing back the letter to his Chief, "that Sinclair acted the way he did."

"Devilish lucky, Treves." Dacent Smith rose, placed the letter in a drawer in his desk and returned to his seat at the hearth.

"Now, Treves, as to Voules. Who is he?"

"He is some one in authority," answered John. "There is no doubt of that whatever."

"What is his appearance?"

"He is a heavily-built, bullet-headed man, between fifty and sixty. I should judge him to be used to exercising autocratic authority over others. When I reached Rollo Meads there were also present in the house two Germans, who gave me the impression of being naval officers. The fourth member of the party was Captain Cherriton, whose real name is Rathenau, as I discovered owing to the fact that they spoke German, which Cherriton believes I don't understand."

John continued and detailed fully his interview with Voules. He described his receipt of the cocaine tabloids from Conrad and his exhibition of the bogus five little wounds on his wrist, which had convinced Voules that he was a victim of the drug habit. When he had concluded Dacent Smith's lips tightened.

"You acted very shrewdly, Treves. I will see that Voules and his little party are kept under observation. From your description, I can tell you exactly who Voules is, Treves," he said. "We have suspected his identity for some time. Until two months ago Voules was General von Kuhne, in command of a corps of the Fifteenth Army. He is a Badenser, born and reared in Constance. Our investigation department informs me that he is credited by the enemy with great ability. In character he is instinctively aggressive; a fighter imbued through and through with the offensive spirit. It is to General von Kuhne that we owe our present awkward predicament on the South Coast. Outwardly nothing is wrong, but our department knows that Germany is preparing a heavy blow. We are contending against something new, big, and masterful; something that has been arranged and planned for months. How far General von Kuhne's plans have matured I do not yet know. We are so far, Treves, only groping towards knowledge. My reports tell me that at least eight forts on the South Coast are being subtly tampered with in one way or another. You have seen yourself the masterly manner in which Sims managed to work his will at Heatherpoint.

"Sims's dossier," he went on, "reached me in full only to-night, and is a further instance of an effective German trick. Sims's real name is Steinbaum. He is a Hamburg Jew, who emigrated to America in 1912. We cannot trace him from then until 1915, when, with the German naval attache at Washington, Captain Boy Ed, he made an attempt to blow up the Pittsburg bridge works. He escaped the American police, and vanished. The next step in his career was when he landed at Liverpool from America. He was already a German spy, and enlisted in our army under the name of Sims, a baker by trade."

"I suppose," inquired John, "the idea of arresting Voules and his immediate confederates is outside our plan?"

Dacent Smith nodded. He put his finger-tips together, and remained thoughtfully silent for several minutes.

"No; it would not do," he said, as though desirous of convincing John of the correctness of his judgment "If I were to lay Voules, and a dozen of the others whom we know, suddenly by the heels, we should damage our chances, possibly irretrievably. You see, if we did that, we should be removing our special avenues of information. By arresting the spies we know, we should lose the great mass of information we manage to glean from them, and at the same time should be obliged to continue the fight against other agents whom we do not know. Do you follow me?"

John nodded. "I confess it never occurred to me in that light, but I can see the force of your argument."

"We always stand to learn something from Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, by secretly reading all her letters," continued Dacent Smith, "but if we arrest her we lose that advantage. Then, again, their present scheme in the South may be so far advanced that it will work to fruition by itself, even if we remove a dozen individuals. General von Kuhne is, of course, the keystone of the whole business, and when the time comes we shall get him----" he paused a moment, and looked quizzically into John's face--"or he will get us!"

"He will have to rise pretty early in the morning to get you," thought John, genuinely impressed by his reasoning. Nevertheless, he inwardly admitted that Kuhne was an antagonist well fitted to measure swords even with Dacent Smith. Always, in these short interviews he obtained with his Chief, John felt himself drawn anew to the head of his department. Manton had no doubt whatever of Dacent Smith's ability, his intelligence was keen as a sword-blade, and swift as that same blade in the hands of a brilliant fencer. For all that, it seemed strange to John, as he sat in the well-furnished, neatly-ordered, bachelor apartment, to think that this quiet, well-groomed, middle-aged gentleman was the head and heart, the chief nerve centre, in fact, of the greatest defensive force in the country.

"Now," said Dacent Smith, when he concluded his observations, "is there anything at all troubling your mind, Treves, anything you'd like to get off your chest, for instance?"

John looked at him quickly, wondering if his keen eye had detected anything.

"Well," he confessed, "as a matter of fact, there is something that bothers me a good deal."

"Pass me another cigarette," said Dacent Smith, "and let me hear it."

John handed him another cigarette, and hesitated.

"Go on," urged his Chief.

"Well, I should like to report, sir," John said at length, "that my personal position has become--well, peculiarly difficult during the past few days."

"Do you find your work disappointing?"

"I am keener on my work than ever," John answered.

"What is it, then?"

"Well," confessed John, "to be precise, I find I am getting rather entangled with a lady." His tone was serious, and Dacent Smith took the statement gravely.

"Mrs. Beecher Monmouth, do you mean?"

John shook his head.

"Mrs. Beecher Monmouth is rather pressing whenever I meet her," he said, with a deprecating smile, "but she is not the lady in question."

"Who is the lady?"

John was silent; he found a strange diffidence in tackling this subject. It was a matter of some difficulty to state exactly what was the situation between himself and Elaine. Dacent Smith waited, and then tapped the arm of his chair with his finger, which was his only manner of showing impatience.

"Come, Treves, who is the lady?"

"Bernard Treves's wife, sir!"

"Oh! And wherein lies the particular awkwardness?"

"Yesterday she came down to the Gordon Hotel in Newport to see me, and stayed the night there."

"Was that awkward for you?"

"I'm afraid it was, sir. It seems," went on John, "that there was a disagreement between her and her husband, which ended in the lady refusing to live with him until he improved his habits."

"A very proper and spirited attitude to take," responded Dacent Smith.

"That is my opinion," said John, "but, unfortunately, she has decided to forgive her husband."

Dacent Smith suddenly sat erect.

"You don't mean she has made any untoward discovery?"

"Oh, no," said John, "she accepts me absolutely. And so far as I know she has never experienced the faintest doubt. But the awkwardness comes in through the fact that she has decided to forgive her husband and take him back again!"

Dacent Smith looked at the younger man for a minute, then whistled softly.

"By gad, Treves, yours is certainly a difficult path."

"I am glad you see it as I do, sir."

"Devilish difficult--and what's the lady like? Is she young and pretty?"

"She is about twenty-three years of age," said John, "and--and, well pretty doesn't quite describe her. She has dark hair and grey eyes. She is rather above the average in height. She----" John hesitated and stumbled. "I am no connoisseur in these matters, sir, but in my opinion she is an unusually beautiful girl."

Dacent Smith looked at him squarely.

"And that, no doubt, intensifies your difficulty, eh, Treves?"

"Well, my position last night," he said briefly, "was more than awkward." A sudden note of irritation found its way into John's voice; he could not have himself explained why he felt irritation. "The situation was wrong altogether. I felt I had no right to pass as Bernard Treves. It is one thing to deceive Treves's father in a good cause, or to deceive everybody else, but it is quite another matter to trick a young, good-looking woman the way I had to deceive Mrs. Treves. It doesn't seem to me to be playing the game, sir."

"You mean," inquired Dacent Smith, quietly, "the young lady made advances to you, she forgave you, and offered to live with you again as your wife, and you, being a man of honour, felt the situation keenly? Tell me, Treves," he went on, with a new interest in the matter, "what is she like? Her mental equipment, I mean?"

"She is very feminine, and by no means a fool," explained John. "I evaded her last night, but she came to London with me to-day, and is waiting for me this evening. She knows Cherriton and Manwitz. Cherriton, as a matter of fact, has been paying her undesirable attentions." John, who had been looking at the hearth-rug, suddenly lifted his face. "That's the whole situation, sir, and I don't feel that I can go on deceiving her."

For a long minute there was silence in the little room. Dacent Smith's little gilt clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half-hour.

"We're in deep waters here, Treves," he said slowly and seriously. "I can see only two ways out of it. One is that she should be restored to her undesirable husband."

"If," said John, "Treves is cured of his drug habit, I suppose that would be the right thing to do." Even as he spoke a feeling shot through him that was quite definitely antagonistic to this idea. He felt jealous and utterly resentful at the thought.

"He isn't cured, and shows no likelihood of being cured," answered Dacent Smith. "My last report is that he tried to break out of the nursing home, and very nearly got away. He is in the condition where he would give his very soul to get drugs. No," he said, shaking his head, "we'll leave Bernard Treves in his present isolation. In surrendering his personality to you he is making some slight restitution; he is unconsciously doing something for his country. We need waste no pity on him. So far as we are concerned, Treves does not count."

"What if Treves had actually managed to escape, sir?"

"In that case 'Voules' and the rest of them would be down on you like a ton of bricks, but we need not at present anticipate a calamity of that sort. Now in regard to Treves's wife, when you see her to-night, give her my compliments, and say I should like her to call here one afternoon this week. I think I can then ease the awkwardness of your position in regard to her. I have an idea at any rate."

Half an hour later John made his way out to Camden Town, and rang the bell of 65, Bowles Avenue. Elaine herself opened the door and offered him a smiling welcome.