Part 5

The old man looked at him with a snarl of savage mockery.

“Don’t waste any more of my time, Kranz! Look at her--is it even probable that an imbecile creature like that can be of use in our business? Look at her, I say!”

He flung out a hand toward a young girl who stood with obvious reluctance in the centre of the luxuriously furnished apartment. She was perhaps eighteen but her youth had neither beauty nor charm. Her features were soft and heavy; the nose thick; the chin receding; the eyes weak and protuberant. Unmistakably, her personality was of the feeblest. Her face flooded scarlet with shame and her eyes swam with tears at this brutal insult. Yet evidently she did not dare to rush away. Only she looked beseechingly toward Kranz, like a dog who awaits a sign from its master.

His sallow face blanched. The thin lips under the dark moustache lost their curves, became a straight line.

“Agathe!” he said, and his voice of command was strangely in contrast with the tone in which he had entreated the old man. “Go into the next room and wait!”

The girl vanished without a word. Kranz waited until she had closed the door, and then he turned once more to his superior.

“I implore Your Excellency to listen!” he said with a desperate gesture. “I stake my reputation upon it----”

The old man grunted scornfully.

“Your reputation!”

The dark eyes flashed.

“My reputation with you, _Excellenz_,” he corrected in a gentle voice of complete cynicism.

The old man stared at him.

“Well, go on!” he said brutally, after a short pause which was eloquent of his appraisement. He cleaned his pince-nez to mark his contemptuous indifference to anything that might be said.

“You remember Karl Wertheimer, _Excellenz_?”

The old man swung round on him, replaced the pince-nez.

“Shot by the English.--You’ll never equal him, Kranz.”

Kranz shrugged his shoulders.

“_Excellenz_, I believe neither in God nor Devil--until the other day I believed that death finished us completely--but I assure you solemnly upon my--upon anything which you think will bind me--that the soul, or whatever you choose to call it, of Karl Wertheimer speaks through that girl!” There was a pause of silence in which the old man’s eyes probed him to the depths. He proffered no comment and Kranz continued, his voice intensely earnest. “The English shot Karl Wertheimer in London--but they did not kill him. His--his soul is here, in Berlin, in this room, alive as ever, as eager as ever to work for the Fatherland!”

“He always had patriotic notions,” murmured the old man, with a sly smile at the obviously cosmopolitan Kranz, “--that is why he was such an invaluable agent. Go on with your little romance.”

“It is no romance, _Excellenz_, I assure you--it is living fact. Karl Wertheimer was a useful agent while he lived upon this earth--but he is immeasurably more useful now that he is a--a spirit. There are no walls that can keep him out--there is nothing he cannot see if he chooses to--there is no conversation he cannot overhear----”

“H’m!” grunted the old man, “admitted that if he is a spirit he can do all this--how can he communicate it to us?”

“Through this girl!”

“Who is she, this girl?”

“The daughter of some shopkeeper or other. I followed her ankles one evening in the Park--it was night, and I could not see her face.” He smiled cynically. “I won’t trouble Your Excellency with the details. I brought her in here and no sooner had she sat down in that chair when she swooned off. I was just cursing my luck--I saw her face for the first time then!--and wondering how I was going to get rid of her, _when Karl spoke to me_. I confess, _Excellenz_, it gave me a pretty bad turn. It was so utterly unexpected--his voice coming from her lips. However, I pulled myself together--and we had a most interesting conversation----”

“He could answer your questions?” interjected the old man, sharply.

“Just as if he were himself sitting in the chair. So, naturally, I kept a tight hold on the girl. She has not been allowed out since.”

“H’m!” The old man grunted again and looked at his watch. “Well, I have missed my appointment,” he said with the factitious bad temper he owed to his dignity. “I may as well see her performance. Fetch her in!”

Kranz went to the door and called.

“Agathe!”

The girl entered, stood with her eyes fixed timorously on him. He pointed to a large armchair by the fireplace.

“Sit down!” he commanded. The girl obeyed dully, one little apprehensive glance at him the only sign of any mental life in her. She sat upright, her hands on her lap, staring stupidly into the fire. Two heavy tears collected themselves in her protuberant eyes rolled down her cheeks. They seemed but to emphasize her degradation. Her tyrant stood over her, his dark eyes hard.

“Lean back and go to sleep!”

She sank back among the cushions. Obviously, she had no will at all of her own. Her eyes closed. Her expressionless face twitched for a moment and then was as still as a mask. Her bosom heaved in the commencement of deep and heavy breathing which continued in the normality of slumber. The old man watched her, keenly and contemptuously alert for any sign of simulation.

Kranz pulled a little table across to the fireplace. A telephone instrument, incongruously utilitarian in this luxurious room, and writing materials were on it.

“You should note down what is said, _Excellenz_,” he said earnestly, in a low voice.

The old man ignored him, his eyes on the girl. Suddenly he shuddered in a rush of cold air. The paper on the table fluttered as in a draught. He turned to Kranz in savage irritation.

“Shut that window!”

Kranz shook his head.

“They are all shut, _Excellenz_!” His whisper was one of genuine awe. “Hush! It’s beginning! _He’s come!_”

The old man favoured him with a glance of inexpressible contempt. The scorn was still in his eyes when he jerked round to the girl again in an involuntary start of surprise at a sudden greeting.

“Good evening, _Excellenz_!” The words issued from that expressionless mask of the deeply breathing girl, but they were uttered in a tone of easy jocularity, followed by a little good-humoured laugh, which was uncanny in its contrast with her degraded personality. Despite the feminine vocal chords which had articulated the phrase, the _timbre_ and intonation were vividly those of a man of the world.

The old man stared speechlessly. His faculties seemed inhibited under the shock. The red faded out of his round face, left it ashen gray under the close-cropped white hair. Kranz, watching him narrowly, feared for his heart. He made a brusque little gesture as though seizing control of himself.

“_Herr Gott!_ It’s--it’s _his_ voice!” he gasped.

His eyes turned to Kranz and there was fear in them, a primitive fear of the supernatural. Trembling, he reeled rather than walked to the chair by the table with the telephone, dropped heavily into it. Kranz broke the oppressive silence, posed himself as master of the situation.

“Good evening, _Karl_!” he said as though welcoming an everyday acquaintance into the room.

“Hallo, Kranz!” came the easy, jocular voice through the lips of the entranced girl. “_Wie gehts?_ I am glad you persuaded His Excellency to come. Now we can start!”

The old man pulled himself together, moistened his lips for speech.

“Is--is that really you, Karl?” he asked, unevenly.

The merry little laugh, so uncanny from the only origin visible, preceded the answer.

“Really I, _Excellenz_--Karl Wertheimer, shot six months ago by the English in the Tower of London, and as alive in this room as ever I was.” The tone changed to that of a humorously bantering introduction. “Karl Wertheimer, _Excellenz_, the terror of the English counterespionage department, at your service--still!”

The old man fumblingly produced a handkerchief and mopped at the perspiration on his brow. He hesitated for an appropriate remark.

“Why----?” he asked falteringly, and stopped.

The merry little laugh rang out again in the silent room.

“Why, _Excellenz_? Because in my earth-life I had only one passion--and it is as strong as ever it was. _Stronger_, for I owe our enemies a grudge for that little early-morning shooting party in the Tower. You’ve no idea how I long for a really good cigar, _Excellenz_,” he finished in a tone of jesting complaint.

The old man stared into the empty air beyond the girl.

“And you can really obtain information and convey it?” He was recovering his poise. The question was asked in the brusque tone familiar to his subordinates.

“Test me, _Excellenz_!”

“I assure you, _Excellenz_----!” interjected Kranz, eagerly.

His superior waved him aside. The brow under the short white hair had recovered its normal ruddiness, was wrinkled in cogitation. He felt in his pocket and produced a letter in a sealed envelope.

“Tell me from whom this comes,” he said.

He proffered the letter as though expecting it to be taken out of his fingers. Then, as it was not, he dropped his hand with a gesture of hopeless bafflement. There was so real a feeling of the actual presence of Karl Wertheimer in the room that the quite normal fact of the letter remaining untouched emphasized suddenly the uncanny nature of this conversation.

“Permit me, _Excellenz_,” said Kranz, politely. He took the letter and laid it on the girl’s brow. Her lips moved at once.

“This purports to be from the firm of Wilson and Staunton, Boston, to the firm of Jensen and Auerstedt, Christiania, with reference to an overdue account.” The voice was still the chuckling voice of Karl Wertheimer. “Actually, it is a communication in code to you from Heinrich Biedermann at New York. Do you wish me to read the message? I still remember the old code, _Excellenz_!”

“No--no!” interposed the old man. “Never mind!”

“Perhaps you would like me to tell you what Heinrich Biedermann is doing at this moment, _Excellenz_?”

“But he is in New York! You can’t be here and there, too!”

Again came the merry little laugh.

“Time and Space are an illusion of matter, _Excellenz_. I half forget that you are still subject to it.--Well, Heinrich Biedermann is sitting with a young woman in a restaurant, having tea. They are both very cheerful, for he has just received a remittance from you, and he has bought her a new hat. The sun is setting and he is lost in admiration of the glow of her red hair against the background of the illuminated sky which he can perceive through the window. He is hopelessly in love with her, which is unfortunate, as the lady happens to be a spy, by name Desirée Rochefort, in the pay of the French Secret Service.”

“The devil----!” ejaculated the old man.

“But,” said Kranz in a puzzled tone. “Sunset?--It is nearly midnight!”

The old man turned on him.

“Fool! There is a difference of six hours in time between here and America. That proves it--if anything can be proof of such wild improbability!”

“Test me again!” said the amused and confident voice of Karl Wertheimer. “Something really difficult this time!”

The old man leaned back in his chair and pondered. Then the gleam of an idea came into his malicious gray eyes.

“Right!” he said, emphatically. “You know the library in my house?”

“Certainly, _Excellenz_!”

“Go into my library. Read me the fifteenth line of the ninety-first page of the sixth volume on the third shelf of the right-hand side, without opening the book. Can you do that?”

“You shall see, _Excellenz_,” replied the voice, cheerfully. “The sixth volume counting from the left, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“I will note that,” said Kranz, coming to the table. He wrote the particulars and looked up to his superior. “Do you know what the line is, _Excellenz_?” he asked.

“I don’t even know what the book is!” replied the old man, harshly. He wrinkled his brows in impatience at the silence, which prolonged itself through several seconds. The girl seemed quite normally asleep.

“Here you are, _Excellenz_!” It was again the mocking voice of Karl Wertheimer which issued from her lips. “The book is Shakespeare. The line is ‘_England, bound in with the triumphant sea._’ Can you interpret the omen, _Excellenz_?”

“The U-boat war----” murmured Kranz, as if to himself.

“Write it down!” commanded the old man. Kranz wrote the line.

His Excellency took up the telephone receiver.

“Hallo! Hallo!” He gave a number and waited. “Hallo! Is Wolff there?--Tell him I want him at once! Yes--a thousand devils!--Wolff! my secretary! Are you all deaf?” he vociferated irascibly. “Hallo! Is that you, Wolff? Yes, of course it is I speaking! You ought to know my voice by this time!--Go into the library and get--” He hesitated. Kranz passed him the sheet of paper “--get the sixth volume from the left on the third shelf of the right-hand side. Bring it to the telephone. Hurry now!”

Again he waited. There was a tense silence in the room, a silence which was emphasized by the heavy and regular breathing of the sleeping girl.

“Hallo! Are you there?--Is that you, Wolff? Be quiet! Answer my questions!--Have you got the book?--Right--What is it?--An English book?--Shakespeare--right!--Now turn up page--page ninety-one. Got it?--Count to the fifteenth line----” He turned from the telephone to Kranz. “Write down what I repeat!” Then again speaking into the telephone: “Yes? Read out the line!--what?--‘_England, bound in with the triumphant sea_’--a thousand devils!--Wolff! Wolff! wait a minute!--where did you find the book? On the shelf? Had it been touched? You are sure that it had not been touched--not opened? Oh, you have been in the library all the evening, working----”

“Tell him that the love-poem he has been writing to Fräulein Mimi in your library to-night is not only banal but it does not scan,” interjected the mocking voice of Karl Wertheimer. “The line ‘_Unsere Herzen schlagen rhythmisch_’ is particularly bad.”

The old man glanced toward the vacant air over the girl and grinned. He repeated the message into the telephone. He waited a moment--and then burst into chuckling laughter.

“_Famos!_--He’s smashed the receiver. Scared out of his life!--I heard him yell.” He put down the instrument and turned again to the chair. “Karl Wertheimer, I believe in your reality--I believe in your powers.” His voice was solemn. “The Fatherland has work for you to do.”

“That is why I am here, _Excellenz_.” The voice came jauntily through the expressionless lips of the unconscious girl.

The old man pursed his mouth under the clipped white moustache and pondered. Kranz watched him with acute interest.

“Listen!” said the old man, looking up in a sudden decision. “At the present time the Allied Military Missions in Washington are negotiating with the United States Government with regard to the despatch of the American Army to Europe, for the coming campaign. We know this--we know that any day now they may come to an agreement. It is of the utmost importance to us that we should know, _immediately_, the numbers promised and the schedule of sailings. The fate of the world depends upon it. The secret will be most jealously guarded--triply locked out of reach of any ordinary agent. Can you read it, as you read the line in that closed book?”

“I can, _Excellenz_--if you can give me some indication where to look,” replied the voice. “We must, so to speak, _focus_ ourselves--I can’t now explain the conditions with us, but you will understand what I mean--spirit pervades----” For the first time in the colloquy the voice spoke with hesitation, as though despairing of explaining the inexplicable. “Direction--definite direction--is essential----”

“H’m,” the old man grunted. “Well, I suggest Forsdyke--you know, the permanent Chief of Department--as the man most likely to prepare the schedule. You know where he lives?”

“The very house in Washington!” replied the voice triumphantly. “Good enough! I will do my best, _Excellenz_.”

“To-day is the 21st of February,” said the old man. “We _must_ know by the end of the month. Vast issues depend on it. Can you do it?”

“I will try.” The voice came feebly and as from far away. “I must go now, _Excellenz_--the power--the power is failing--fast. Good-bye--good-bye, Kranz--take--take care of the girl--she--she is the--only means--of--communication----” The last words came in a whisper, ceased. The girl appeared to be in normal slumber.

The old man turned to Kranz, spoke out of preoccupation which otherwise ignored him.

“Give me my hat and coat!”

A sudden anxiety paled the sallow face.

“Your Excellency remembers what Karl said,” he murmured as he assisted his chief into the heavy fur-lined garment.--“The girl is the only means of communication. I need not remind Your Excellency that the girl is my----”

“You need not remind me of anything, Kranz,” interrupted the old man, harshly. “You will not be forgotten. Good-night!”

Kranz accompanied him obsequiously to the door.

* * * * *

On that evening of the 21st of February a cheerful little party was assembled around the dinner-table of Henry Forsdyke, Chief of a certain department in the United States Administration. The large room, which had been built by a Southern magnate who led Washington society in pre-Civil War days, was illumined only by the shaded lights of the table, and beyond the dazzling shirt-fronts of the men it lapsed into a gloom that was intensified by the dark curtains over the long windows and was scarcely relieved by the glinting gilt frames of the pictures spaced on the walls hung in a dull tint. In that half-light the servants moved, scarcely real. Only the party within the illuminated oval of white napery, sparkling glass, and gleaming silver was vividly actual, plucked out of shadow. It was a fad of the host’s, this concentration of the light upon the table. He alleged that it emphasized the personalities of his guests. His daughter, who was irreverent, accused him of an atavistic tendency that craved for the candle-light of his ancestors.

Within the magic oval the party exchanged light-hearted talk that effervesced every now and then into merry laughter where a young girl’s voice predominated. All were in evident good spirits. The host himself, a man of between fifty and sixty years, with shrewd gray eyes looking out of a face characterized by a pointed and neatly clipped iron-gray beard, set the tone. He smiled down the table with a contentment that seemed to spring from a secret satisfaction, the contentment of a man who has completed an anxious and difficult task and can now relax. He was in his best vein of sententious humour.

The same undertone of relief could have been discerned by the acute in the gaiety of young Jimmy Lomax, Forsdyke’s private secretary, although one alone of the little glances between him and his host’s daughter, if intercepted, might have seemed sufficient reason.

Captain Sergeantson, Jimmy Lomax’s chum, had obvious cause for cheerfulness. Attached to a Special Service Department, he had just returned from Europe, where he had fulfilled an extremely difficult mission with conspicuous success. His home-coming had provided the excuse for this little dinner-party.

As for Professor Lomax, Jimmy’s father, no one had ever seen him other than in high spirits. The author--after a lifetime of profound and exact scientific research that had earned him a world-wide reputation--of an enquiry into the possible survival of human personality, which was the controversial topic of that winter and which threatened to deprive him of that reputation, he was in striking contrast with the idea of him propagated by the sensational Press. There was nothing of the visionary about those clear-cut features. A stranger would have diagnosed him as a lawyer--a lawyer whose judicial perception of evidence was clarified by a sense of humour. The mobile mouth, even in silence, hinted at this latter quality. The eyes twinkled, eminently sane, under a well-balanced brow. He joked like a schoolboy with his host’s daughter, exciting--for the secretly selfish pleasure of hearing it--her gay young laugh. Occasionally he glanced across to his son, approbation in his eyes.

Hetty Forsdyke, the only woman of the party, was a typical specimen of self-reliant, college-bred American girl. Good to look upon, her beauty hinted at a race which had been proud of its exclusiveness long after Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the States. Her vivacity and charm had roots, perhaps, in the same stock, but the cool, level-headed understanding of life, which she expressed in a slang that provoked her father to vain rebuke, and the genuineness of which was vouched for by her clear gray eyes, was an attribute of the Forsdykes and the North.

The dinner was nearly at an end. Forsdyke, launched on a story of a Presidential campaign in the Middle West a generation ago, had arrived at the stage where the chuckles of his hearers were on the point of culminating in the final burst of laughter. Hetty, her glass between her fingers, half-way to her mouth, was looking at him with a smile that pretended the story was quite new to her. Suddenly her expression changed. She stared, as if spell-bound, at the dark curtains from which her father’s oval face detached itself in the illumination of the table. The glass slipped from her fingers, smashed.

Forsdyke’s story ceased abruptly. Four pairs of alarmed eyes focussed themselves upon his daughter. Jimmy, involuntarily, had half risen from his chair. The movement seemed to recall the girl to her surroundings. She shuddered and then, with an evident effort of will, brought back her gaze to the table. Her smile routed the momentary anxiety of her companions.

“How careless of me!” she said easily, quelling, with quiet self-control, her confusion ere it could well be remarked. “I don’t know what I was thinking of!--Do go on, Poppa! It was just getting interesting.”

She signed composedly to a servant to pick up the broken glass, and settled herself, all attention, to the familiar story.

“What a hostess she is!” thought her father. “Just like----” He did not finish the complementary clause and stifled another which began: “I wonder what I shall do when----” He picked up his story again and was rewarded by his meed of laughter. But his eyes rested uneasily on his daughter and he promised himself a later enquiry into this abnormality.

The party withdrew into the drawing-room, where, since Forsdyke was a widower of many years’ masculine supremacy, the men lit their cigars. Hetty, at a request from her father, seated herself at the grand piano in the far corner, and commenced the soft chords of a Chopin prelude. Jimmy Lomax stood over her. There was already something proprietary in his air. But the girl, after one glance up at him, seemed to forget his presence in the spell of the music. Her position commanded a full view of the room and she looked dreamily across to where the three men were gathered by the white marble fireplace.

Suddenly the music stopped on a crashing discord. The girl had jumped to her feet, was trembling violently. Young Lomax clutched at her.

“Hetty! What----?”

She broke away from him, came swiftly across the room to his father.

“Professor!” she said. “You were once in practice as a doctor, weren’t you?”

The twinkling eyes went grave as they met hers. There was unmistakable seriousness in her question.

“Yes, my dear----”

“Then I want you to examine me right here, Professor!” she said. “Tell me if I’ve got fever!”

She met the amazed eyes of the other men with a look which announced that she knew her own business.