Part 26

So the General went away, owning to himself that the thing looked desperate. It was better for England that the Plans of the Foulis War Engine should lie at the bottom of the North Sea, but what of his friend, what of his friend's wife?

The keen eyes were unwontedly dim as he reached the wide Turkey-carpeted landing, and the messenger caught a snatch of _The Flowers o' the Forest_ whistled in slow time as his hurrying footsteps overtook the General. Would Sir Roland please to go back, was the gist of the message. The Minister had something further to communicate.

The War Minister was not alone. Two persons were with him--a tall man in civilian clothes who stood looking out of the window as one who had temporarily removed himself out of earshot, the other a slim and dapper Naval Secretary.

The "something further" proved to be the pith of an Admiralty communication just imparted. Early that morning a British Submarine on North Sea Patrol duty (we will call her E-131), upon returning to the surface to ascertain the cause of defective submergence, had discovered a brown leather lock-strap to be entangled with her aft diving-plane on the starboard side. A leather satchel firmly attached to the other end of the strap was jammed under the plane, and subsequently extricated by one of the men, from the collapsible.

Perhaps you can imagine the Lieutenant Commander stooping over the retrieved bit of flotsam, lying under the shaded electric light hanging over the narrow sliding table that pulled out from under his bunk in the officer's cabin--a place of privacy again, the steel bulkhead-doors being shut. For when you submerge they are all thrown wide so that the Commander's eye may traverse the whole length of an elongated engine-room, and see what every man is doing at his particular post, in a single flash.

The Commander's eye was screwed up in the vain endeavour to see under the flap of the locked satchel. He took up the thing and turned it in his hands, while the strap, soaked and twisted by sea-water and engine-power, flapped upon his knees like a long frond of wet seaweed.

"Wonder who cut the strap?" Clumsily, as though by a blunt knife wielded by a numb hand--it had been hacked through, and the satchel scratched badly in the process. He went on: "Looks like some rich American globe-trotter's travelling-satchel. No picking these locks! One might negotiate 'em with the oxygen flame-puff--if it wasn't for the risk of damaging the wads of dollar bills that might possibly be inside. Nothing to be done but rip or cut the leather--and that seems to be made strengthy with metal, somehow!" He slipped the lean blade of a penknife between the strongly stitched edges. The satchel proved to be lined with thin plates of aluminium. "As easy to get inside as the Bank of England!" he grumbled, and so it proved, if the Bank of England has ever been negotiated with a bull-head tin-opener.

Inside the leather case lined with aluminium, a little sea-water had penetrated, patching with damp a small antique portfolio of pearly, bossy shark-skin exquisitely painted with birds and foliage by some old-world Japanese master of Art. The quaintly feeble lock, and corner-guards were of bronze, gold-inlaid with scowling fox-masks, and the inevitable chrysanthemum.

The Japanese lock gave at a twist of the penknife-blade and then the portfolio disgorged its loose sheaf of yellowed papers strung together by a clew of faded silken twist. Drawings to scale and plans: sheets of manuscript and pages covered with the symbols used in chemical formulas, scribed in a clear small rounded hand.

"Great Scott!--what's this?"

The ash from the Commander's neglected cigarette fell upon the topside of the precious manuscript. He blew it reverently off, and dug himself into the pile:

"H'm, hum!"

"_By Me, Robert Foulis, Seaman, Tenth Earl of Clanronald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the British Fleet, and Marquis of Araman, etc., etc. Invented & Conceived Not in Hatred of Mankind, but in Defence of my Country and the Rights Beloved by Every True Briton----_"

"Marvellous old cock! And in 1854, when he was eighty if a day, he offers it for the fifth time to the British Government!"

"Busy, Owner? See you've got inside the prize-packet! My Christmas! what is it? Miss Araminta's Diary; 'FOUND AFTER FORTY YEARS!' or 'HOW I BROKE MY ENGAGEMENT WITH THE CURATE!'"

This from a young, exceedingly wet, and dirty Engineer Lieutenant, fresh from an interview with the damaged diving-plane, and smelling potently of castor-oil.

The Commander looked up, and strange things were in his eyes.

"You're pretty wide!" He added, speaking partly to the other man inside the Commander: "Jolly good thing we're on the Home trip. That main motor gives a lot o' trouble, and--suppose some purblind sailing ship crashed into us--and sent us to the bottom with THIS aboard. Great Sea Boots! It makes me crawl all down my back to think of it!"

The Second clattered down the steel ladder and filled the doorway with his burly personality.

"What makes you crawl? Don't say the leg o' mutton we bought Saturday from the skipper of that Grimsby trawler has gone back on us! Is that what the liar means by fresh meat?"

"If I told you, you'd crawl too. Or you'd think it a case of sunstroke--or D.T. of the deferred kind." The Commander stowed the papers back in the sharkskin case with gingerly carefulness that provoked the query whether he thought he had got hold of a new kind of floating mine, and elicited the retort:

"I don't think!--I know it!"

No one got anything more out of the speaker, who, presently, declining stewed mutton, whose wholesome savour amply certified to the moral character of the trawler's skipper, went to the Wireless and dispatched a pithy message to the Commander of E-131's particular Coast Defence station, and the news was flashed to Whitehall, to go forth ere long from thence over the world.

Sir Roland said, with that unwonted cloud dulling his bright eyes, and a certain huskiness of utterance:

"There's no other solution of the puzzle. Remembering that I had said to him, '_In an emergency, you might do good service to your country by destroying this!_' my Scout took the only course open to him--and dumped the satchel into the sea!"

The Minister admitted with characteristic reticence:

"Whether I concur with your theory or not, I must admit to you that the report received specifies that the strap had been cut. 'Hacked through' is the actual expression--and the back of the leather outer case scratched as though by a knife."

"It is vital that I should examine the strap and see those scratches!"

The Minister answered:

"To-morrow morning by twelve o'clock--I can obtain you an opportunity. The recovered valise, or wallet, or satchel, will be brought up to the Admiralty by the officer commanding E-131. She has not yet arrived in harbour. But the Commander will doubtless receive instructions as soon as he reports himself." He continued, gracefully ignoring his previous statement that the Government had decided not to interfere: "In the absence of the Earl of Clanronald, now yachting in Northern waters, it is obligatory that the War Office should take the matter in hand."

The very tall stranger had wheeled, and advanced to Sir Roland with a smile and an outstretched hand of greeting. We know how great a heart beat in its pulses. Its short, hard grip spoke sympathy and understanding, though the voice was harsh and the light grey eyes stared out of the brick-burned, heavily-moustached face with the old sagacious, indomitable regard. He said after a word or two had passed, the Admiralty Secretary temporarily occupying the attention of the War Minister:

"By the way, you will be interested to hear something I have at first-hand from Clanronald. He has been, as perhaps you know, cruising with two ancient cronies, Lord Gaynor and Colonel Kaye, in his steam-yacht _Helga_, along the Danish West Coast of Jutland. He returns the richer by--what I may term a unique experience!"

Sir Roland said, meeting the Sirdar's eyes with great certainty:

"If I may guess at the nature of the experience, I should hazard that it was--an attempt in the kidnapping line?"

The other gave his short, gruff laugh:

"You have hit it. They carry a Wireless installation on the _Helga_, and sparked the story _via_ Cullercoats to Bredingley, who was stopping a week-end at Doome. The yacht was at anchorage in the outer harbour of Esbjorg, some twenty-eight kilometres from the frontier of Danish-Germany. It was midnight. Everybody on board, including the watch, seems to have been asleep except Clanronald, who was roused by something scraping the side of the yacht. Presently he heard stealthy footsteps on deck, and whispering. He was squatting on his bunk with a brace of loaded revolvers and a Winchester repeating-rifle, when the intruders opened his cabin door!"

"Did any of them survive the intrusion? If so, Clanronald has--very much changed!"

The Sirdar returned, with the quirk of a smile lurking under the heavy moustache whose brown was getting flecked with grey:

"Well--the _Helga_ has recently been re-enamelled, and Clanronald is faddy on the point of his new paint. Besides"--the quirk deepened into a laugh--"he thought it would be more useful to take them as live specimens of the kind of material that goes to make up the crew of a German submarine."

They looked at each other, laughing. Sir Roland inquired:

"I venture to hope that while Clanronald was about it--he collected the submarine?"

"Unfortunately, no! And, very regrettably, the collapsible boat in which the raiders had made their midnight visit was swamped when the two others--there had been four of them!--jumped into her to make off. Presumably they could swim and were picked up by the submarine--Undersea Boat No. 14--according to the testimony of one of the prisoners. The other of whom--an officer and leader of the foray--took poison, and was found dead in the cabin that served for his prison-cell. The other, a mere seaman, is too dazed with terror to be intelligible--according to Clanronald. But the whole thing is interesting!"

"Hugely and instructively. As shedding," said the General, "a certain light upon a mystery that baffled the wiseacres in 1913. I refer to the mysterious disappearance of the engineer-inventor Riesl from his cabin aboard a Hamburg Line, Leith-bound steamer. With a contract in his pocket for the supply of crude-oil-consuming marine motor-engines to the Navy of a Power--other than the German Government!"

"Possibly!--possibly! One never knows what forces are working beneath the surface." The set, brick-dust face and grave sagacious eyes of the great soldier seemed to testify to his complete innocence of anything like a _double-entendre_.

He ended as the War Minister dismissed the secretary from the Admiralty, and turned again to Sir Roland, saying in his most pompous tones:

"Twelve o'clock to-morrow, then, General. Meanwhile, pray convey to his parents my admiration--in which I feel the First Lord will concur--of the remarkable qualities manifested by young Saxham! Astonishing devotion to duty, and courageous self-reliance! He should have lived!--he would have made a noble man!"

Came the curt reply:

"He is alive now! I am convinced of it!"

The Minister gave the speaker a glance of incredulity. It was so very clear to the War Secretary's logical mind that the child and the man were drowned. But the harsh voice of the great Field Marshal, England's most faithful friend, who was to succeed him in his place of power, answered for him:

"One would expect you to stick to your guns, General. Should you prove right before I sail for Egypt, bring him to see me!"

"I promise that, faithfully, my lord."

They shook hands and parted. It seemed a long week until the morrow when the secret of Robert Foulis came home to roost at Whitehall. But it ended, and twelve o'clock brought that keenly-desired opportunity of examining the cut lock-strap and the empty, knife-scored satchel in the official sanctum of the First Lord Commissioner for the Admiralty, and in the presence of that functionary.

"There seems--ah!" the First Lord mounted a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, "to be something in the nature of an address scratched upon the leather!"

Sir Roland corroborated, after a brief inspection:

"There is, most undoubtedly. And the address is that of the London Headquarters of our Organisation, No. 1000, Victoria Street."

"Dear me--dear me! Most remarkable! Now here," said the Right Hon. gentleman, breathing asthmatically and twinkling through the gold-framed pebbles, "is something not so easily deciphered. A rude symbol, something like a _fleur-de-lis_ with letters at either side, and a few other meaningless scrawls!"

"It is not a _fleur-de-lis_," Sir Roland answered, "but a fox-mask, with the number and signature of my Scout. He belonged to the Fox Patrol, 331st London. Here is his troop-number, 22, and here are his initials, B.M.S.--Bawne Mildare Saxham. It is perfectly in order! In this way he would be expected to sign a communication to his fellow-Scout. And the marks below, I can assure you, are not meaningless. They convey that there is trouble of a very definite kind. In addition the arrow, here, taking the top of the satchel for the North as in a map--signifies, 'Road to be followed East.'" He added with a stiffening of the facial muscles that made the keen face as hard as a mask carved in boxwood:

"And followed it shall be!"

It had been decided amongst those who controlled such matters that the British Public were to be fed with the tale. The tapes began to run out at the newspaper-offices as the General took leave of the First Lord and the War Minister and got into his waiting car, and sped away to Harley Street to tell the Dop Doctor how the Saxham pup had proved worthy of his breed.

The evening papers made great marvel out of the story, and at all the street corners of London and the suburbs broadsheets lined the gutters, proclaiming in huge inky capitals:

"MYSTERIES OF THE SEA. EXTRAORDINARY ATTEMPTED CAPTURE OF BRITISH YACHTSMAN BY PIRATES IN DANISH WATERS! MIRACULOUS RECOVERY OF CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN! SUBMARINE IN NORTH SEA FOULS BAG CONTAINING PRICELESS HEIRLOOM STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE! LAST MESSAGE OF HERO BOY SCOUT!"

*CHAPTER XLVI*

*AT NORDEICH WIRELESS*

In the face of the outrunning tide, Undersea Boat No. 18 had nosed her way from Norderney Gat to Nordeich, by the deep-dredged low-water channel of which Luttha had told. The boy had been roused by the kick of a foot shod with a heelless rubber boot, out of a dog-sleep on the vibrating deckplates of the men's cabin, under the white glare of the electric globes. The man who kicked him hauled away the blue blanket, and pitched him his clothes, yet moist and heavy with sea-water, ordering him in broken English to get into them quickly to go ashore.

The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb from the resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty Officer Stoll and his assistant--and his temples throbbed, and there was a singing in his ears. Perhaps that was from the smell of the petrol! One breathed petrol--devoured tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup and coffee made with petrol--judging by the tang upon the palate--on board the German submarine.

The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was open, letting in the smell of the sea tanged with the odours of fish and rotten seaweed and sewage. One emerged through the manhole into a strange, windless woolly world. Through a weeping woolly-grey mist, grey, greasy-looking water lapped and licked against a weedy jetty of grey stone alongside which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off her whitey grey painted steel skin. A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or two, and some lighters laden with bricks and cement sat on the blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey and white seagulls were feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats were lying on the shelving beach of weedy sand.

To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow blur in the prevailing woolliness. Behind one, the foggy land seemed mixed up with the foggy sea, even as the yellow-white curd mixes with the whey in a dish of rennet. North, the intermittent beam thrown from a lighthouse came and went in sudden winks. Facing to the mainland again, one made out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled roofs and chimneys, and a wooden church-spire with a quaint gilded weathercock. Running south were black and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway station. Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain, that the shining metals of the permanent way ran into it and ended as sharply as though they had been cut off.

There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder. Heads showed through the manhole, and a rough hand caught the boy by the collar of his pneumatic jacket and jerked him out of his betters' way. Luttha appeared in his panoply of yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on the platform, where his second officer and another stood together at the rail. Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an old Navy cap in place of his goggled helmet, and a junior officer came after. They brought the tang of schnapps with the smell of their oilskin coats. The boy had seen them drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table in the officer's cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes.

"_Gute Reise! Viel Glueck!_" Luttha had shouted to von Herrnung, and waved his hand with a heartiness that did not seem quite real.

"_Auf wiedersehen, besten Dank!_" von Herrnung had called back to the Commander, and set his foot upon the one-rail gang-plank by which a seaman had connected the submarine with the quay. And then he had drawn it back, as though the salty plank had burned him. For a party of tall grey soldiers with brown boots and belts, and spiked helmets covered with grey stuff like their clothing, came tramping along the quay with bayonets fixed, and halted at a harsh order from their officer--and von Herrnung, with a shiny grey face, and grey lips under his red moustache, had croaked out meaningly to Luttha:

"My thanks for this, Herr Commander! We will settle the score one day!"

He went on then, and the officer arrested him. And while Bawne stood staring, taking in the scene, another brutal hand had grabbed him by the scruff--lifted him as a boy lifts a puppy--and slung him on to the stones of the quay.

"You come with us!" Somebody spoke to him in English. It was von Herrnung, and his eyes were poisonous with hate. "You bear your share in this, Her Dearest." This was a curious nickname by which the Enemy was often to address Bawne. "Where I go you will go also!--do you understand?"

The officer said something harshly, making an imperious gesture with his drawn sword, and von Herrnung saluted and fell silently into place between the grey files. Then the party marched along the quay between rows of storehouses with doors painted in broad horizontal stripes of black and white, and passed through a yard and a big open gate at the end of it, with a black and white sentry-box, and a grey-uniformed spike-helmeted sentry on duty outside the gate. The sentry presented arms, and the party swung through, and struck into a wide main-road that crossed the railhead, a sandy road with a dyke at either side of it, that followed the curve of the shore-line east.

Beyond the shore-line the North Sea fog came down, blank and drab as an asbestos curtain, waiting a westerly breeze to roll inland and blot out everything. Between shore and road were the clumped houses of the fishing-village, and a church with a wooden spire, shaped like an old-fashioned needle-case. Sand-dunes, covered with sea-holly and bent grass, came up to the road. But on the other side of the road, beyond the dyke, the eye traversed a wide expanse of dead, flat fenland, drained by a many branched creek.

Set in the midst of the fenland were buildings of some kind. One thought of barracks in the same enclosure with a martello tower or a powder-magazine, like that in Hyde Park. But two strange landmarks sticking up into the foggy sky altered the character of the flat-roofed structure of grey stone standing in a wide expanse of gravel enclosed by a strong wooden fence, stained with some drab weather-resisting composition, and entered by an imposing pair of spike-topped gates. A wide dyke full of sluggish water girdled the fence. You crossed by a wooden swing-bridge leading to the big gates. When you approached them by the road that branched from the main-road at right-angles, you realised the immense height of two hollow triangular towers of grey-painted steel latts and girders that straddled over the flat roof of the squat stone building--the shorter tower nosing up three hundred feet into the air, and its big brother more than double that height, sheathing its sharp point amongst the leaden-hued clouds, bellying full of moisture sucked up from the North Sea.

They looked alive to Bawne in a queer ugly way, throwing out their mile-long antennae to the supporting poles, linking their metal guy-ropes to solid structures of stone and concrete, like colossal web-spinning insects, half-spider, half-mantis, wholly horrible. And they reminded him of the three tall Wireless masts rearing over the Admiralty at Whitehall, and Marconi House, in the Strand, and the little one that straddled over the telegraph-cabin on Fanshaw's Flying Ground. And at the remembrance the salt tears overbrimmed his raw and burning eyelids, blotting out the muscular, vigorous backs of the men who walked in front of him, and his throat felt as choky as though he had swallowed a whole bull's-eye.

There was a sharp order to halt, and boots marked time on sandy gravel. A grey-uniformed soldier of the two on guard outside the big spike-topped gates, flanked with a black-and-white sentry-box on either side, brought his bayonet to the slope and challenged sharply. A sergeant-major of the party stepped out and answered; the sentry bellowed:

"_Raus!_"

And with the ruffle of a side-drum, the gates swung open, the guard turned out of a stone guardhouse within, and the armed party with the prisoner and the boy marched into the gravelled courtyard. The gates shut, and von Herrnung was taken off to a block of buildings distant from the central erection with the Wireless towers. There was a clock over the doorway of the guardhouse. The hands indicated a quarter to four.

Bawne, standing shivering in the morning rawness, heard the infantry officer commanding the party say in a loud, harsh voice that the boy was to be kept close and sharply looked after. Then a heavy hand gripped him roughly by the collar, and the voice belonging to the grip shouted:

"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"

Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the gruff-voiced speaker to a shed behind the guardhouse--a shed whose planks were a-tremble at all their lower edges with glittering drops of North Sea fog. He was helped in with a kick, scientifically administered--the big key crashed in the lock--and one was free to sob one's bursting heart out, lying face downwards among the hard, clean, shining straw-trusses that covered the floor of beaten earth. Somehow the tears relieved, and merciful sleep came to the child, and presently he awakened under the oilskin coat that served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted light and air, shone a large, lucent moon--in her last quarter, with Saturn, blazing like a great blue diamond, at her pale and silvery side.