"Se murio, y sobre su cara
"Un panuelito le heche...."
It was the song of Black Pablo, the singer in the lane.
Good fortune, I have always contended, comes to those who make ready to receive it. I can well imagine the Foolish Virgins of the parable spending the rest of their lives lamenting their hard fate and attributing their wise sisters' preparedness not to prevision but to good luck. Throughout my life I have always tried to leave nothing to chance but the dénouement. It is in the dénouement that Fate lies in ambush, waiting to slay or to spare....
I had done what I could, I reflected as I lay up in my stuffy hole. Now Fate must take a hand. I had no settled plan. In course of time they would come to look for me and if they did not drag me forth by the heels from my hiding-place, I should watch for the best opportunity that presented itself for my dash into liberty....
I think I may have dozed off; for I did not hear the shed door above me open. What brought me to my senses with a shock and set my nerves a-tingling was the stump of a heavy footstep, a well-remembered halting step, that made my heart stand still.
Then came the hubbub of excited voices, the glare of torch-light filtering through the interstices of the floor and the roar of Clubfoot's voice shouting orders. A long beam of white light clove the darkness of my lair. Someone had climbed down into the hole. I held my breath and wondered whether against the white concrete on which I lay my drill suit might escape notice.
Heavy feet trampled above my head; a door slammed violently and a whistle shrilled thrice. Again there came that clumping tread, shaking the very fabric of the hut. Then silence fell and I breathed again.
Suddenly a voice spoke, almost in my ear, as it seemed, from outside the shed.
"He may have tunnelled," the speaker said in German.
"If he has," replied a voice in the same language, "he can't have gone far. He hadn't time!"
The voices moved away.
The speakers were obviously going to make the round of the shed on the outside to see where I had escaped. They would find no opening and I should be caught like a rat in a trap. If I were to make a bolt for it, it must be now or never. I began to shuffle my way backwards towards the hole in the floor....
The shed was empty and, oh! thank God! the door stood wide. Beyond it I had a glimpse of an open space surrounded by half a dozen wooden huts, a fire burning low in the centre. I tiptoed to the door.
The night was very dark. I could hear men crashing about on the outskirts of the camp. One of them carried a torch and its red and smoky glare flickered over the trees and bushes. But the little clear space between the huts was deserted. Once I could get away from the light thrown by the fire....
Now I was through the door. I could hear them on the far side of the shed. In three silent bounds I was past the fire and across the open. Then I was brought up short by a low building lying directly in my path. As I halted, nonplussed for the instant, a door facing me opened and a mulatto poked his head out. He recognised me for a stranger at once. He rolled his eyes at me in surprise and would have cried out.
But I leapt at him, my fingers at his throat, and as he toppled over backwards across the threshold of the door, I tightened my grip until I felt the breath choking out of him. However, having got him down, I released my hold and ran my hands over his filthy clothes.
In the hip-pocket of his striped cotton trousers I found a Browning and a large key. I thrilled at the touch of the pistol in my hand. After successfully travelling the first stage on the road to freedom I had now a weapon to help me over the next! Surely things were coming my way!
The mulatto, upon whose chest my knee pressed hard, was grey with fear. He was a picturesque-looking ruffian with rings in his ears and a gaudy bandana handkerchief bound about his brows. I tore off his head-dress and unceremoniously crammed it into his mouth. There seemed to be about three yards of it and it was far from clean. But the yellow-boy gobbled it down and by the time I had pushed the end of it past his thick lips he appeared to be very effectively gagged. Then I strapped his hands together behind his back with his own belt and tethered his legs with an end of rope which I found in a corner. He made no attempt at resistance.
This job satisfactorily accomplished, I rose to my feet and looked about me. Where was Marjorie? Had any harm befallen her? In my mind's eye there arose the picture of her as I had left her standing on the fringe of the forest, a slim, girlish figure, a little thrilled but making such a brave show of calm. What had they done with her? In which of these squalid huts was she confined?
The room in which I found myself, dimly lit by a single candle stuck in a bottle, was obviously the cook's galley. There was a stove in one corner and remnants of food on the table. The mulatto, of course, would be the cook. Then there crept into my memory something Marjorie had said about a hideous negro in whose custody she had been left before I met her with Custrin in the forest. And I turned over in my hand the key which I had taken from the mulatto's pocket.
At the back of the kitchen was a door. It was locked but that key fitted it. As I softly turned the lock and swung the door back, there was a little cry, a flutter of something white, and Marjorie stood in the pool of yellow light thrown by the guttering candle across the threshold. I beckoned to her and put my finger to my lips.
She was very pale and her face looked as though she had been crying. But her splendid courage never failed her. She seemed to take in at a glance the disordered room and the yellow-skinned mulatto trussed up on the floor.
"My dear!" she whispered softly as she came out and stood by my side as though awaiting orders.
The galley door gaped wide as I had left it. The open space about the fire was still deserted; but I yet heard the sound of voices and the crash of feet in the undergrowth beyond the circle of light flung by the dying embers. And I noticed with growing anxiety that the eastern sky was growing light.
"We can't afford to wait!" I whispered to the girl. "We shall have to run for it. If only we can make our way in the dark to the grave! I can find myself to rights after that...."
"There's a path through the forest to the grave," rejoined Marjorie. "I followed it this morning. I can show you where it is."
I made her drink a cup of rum from a wicker-bound jar that stood on the floor and took a dram myself. It was wicked stuff, raw and almost proof, but I felt a great deal the better for it. I also pocketed some cold meat and bread. Famished as I was, I would not stop to eat; but I meant us to make a meal at the first opportunity.
Suddenly, from somewhere quite close at hand, voices reached my ear. Swiftly I drew the galley door towards me and peeped through the crack. Silhouetted against the firelight two figures were striding rapidly towards the hut. One of them, a great black shape, went with a limp.
In a flash, without a noise, I pulled the door to and flattening my palm on the candle, extinguished it, plunging the galley into darkness.
"We must get out by the back," I whispered to Marjorie at my side.
"There is no way!" she replied. "There is not even a window in the back room!"
"Then stay here behind the door!" I told her. "And, whatever happens.... whatever happens, do you understand?.... don't make a sound but leave things to me. And when I say 'Run,' run!...."
In a bound I was at the mulatto's side and had dragged him by the feet into the inner room. It was a fetid, black hole. I felt the outline of a truckle bed against the farther wall. I flung the cook down on it and spread a blanket over him. I was back in the galley at Marjorie's side just as a heavy footstep rang on the hard earth without.
Then the hut door was violently flung open.
"Pizarro!" called a thick voice in Spanish. "Pizarro! Nombre de Dios! Is the man deaf?"
We pressed ourselves flat against the wall as the door swung inwards. A white gleam of light pierced the darkness of the room and showed up clearly the rough panels of the door at the other end.
"Well!" said the thick voice, in German this time, "the door's shut anyway!"
The hut shook to his heavy tread as he stumped in, the fair young German, the brother of the Unknown, at his heels. Noiselessly I slipped out behind them.
They stopped suddenly. Clubfoot was at the door. If they turned round now, I should have to fight for it....
"Na nu!" ejaculated Grundt, without looking back. "The key's in the door. Show a light, Ferdinand!"
I heard the door creak on its hinges, saw the flash-light pick out the vague shape beneath the coverlet on the bed. And then the full force of my error broke upon me. I had left the mulatto's head exposed and, instead of Monica's soft golden-brown hair, Ferdinand's lamp showed us a coal-black woolly thatch.
Clubfoot, half across the threshold, swung round to the young German who was close behind him. But, before he could speak, I pitched myself with every ounce of weight I could command at Ferdinand's back and propelled him and Clubfoot violently into the inner room. I heard the loud crash as they fell in a heap on the floor and a smothered screech from the bed as I slammed the door and locked it.
"Now," I cried to Marjorie, "run!...."
"An unpleasant scene of violence, mein liebes Fräulein," he remarked, dabbing his forehead with a red handkerchief, "which might so easily have been avoided. But, when men take passion instead of reason for guide—was wollen Sie? The war destroyed logical thinking. To-day it is rare to find anyone capable of taking a perfectly dispassionate view of life. Jawohl!...."
Marjorie wondered vaguely what he meant. His manner was ingratiating; but she was conscious that he was watching her closely to mark the effect of his words.
"We Germans lost the war. Therefore, a man like your friend Okewood believes that everywhere and in all circumstances, the German must be in a state of inferiority. How short-sighted, meine Gnädige! And what a blemish this want of logic signifies in an otherwise remarkable character! To go no farther a-field in search of an illustration than this delightful island;—war or no war, the fact remains that the strength of my little party puts the Herr Major in an inferiority of thirteen to one. How much wiser on his part it would have been to have recognised this fact yesterday! Let us hope that you will not be so ill-advised as to ignore it! You take my meaning? How quick you are!...."
For a minute his thick fingers drummed on the blanket thrown across him.
"Your Herr father has gone to fetch the yacht, nicht wahr?"
"It is no use asking me," replied Marjorie. "I have not seen my father since I landed on the island...."
"So, so!" placidly observed Grundt, "another question for friend Okewood presently. But perhaps you can tell me what has become of Herr Okewood? Where exactly did you leave him?"
Marjorie was thinking desperately. It was merely a matter of time, probably of minutes now, she reflected, before I should be captured and dragged out of the cave. But some instinct prompted her, as she told me afterwards, to give no information about me until she had actually seen me once more in Grundt's power. So she simply shrugged her shoulders.
"I trust that this gesture does not imply," said Clubfoot, "that you do not know where you left Major Okewood, for that would be acting a lie. And lying, meine Gnädige, would do you no good in your present predicament. You must not take advantage of our good nature, o, nein! Do not forget that on a desert island man is apt to sink back into his primitive state...."
His voice was gentle and caressing; but the implication in his words was horrible.
"You come to us unbidden. You throw yourself upon our chivalry. Ja! that is all very well. But have you made sure that the conventions of civilised life obtain in this little island republic of which I am president? Hein, hein, had you thought of that? But won't you please sit down?"
"I prefer to stand," replied the girl shortly.
"You make me do discredit to our old German courtesy, liebes Fräulein. I cannot sit while you remain standing, and in this hot sun .... bitte!"
With his spade-like hand he smoothed out a place on the grass under the shade of his tree. Dully, almost against her will, Marjorie sank down.
A gleam awoke in the cripple's eyes as he pawed the girl's bare arm.
"Listen!" he said, lowering his voice confidentially and leaning towards her. "The Spaniards of my party come without exception from the lowest scum of the Central American sea-board. Their table-talk is enlivened with anecdotes of their—shall we say conquests?—which fill even me with disgust and dismay. And my Germans, yes,—I, a good German, must admit it—they, too, have forgotten something of the conventions of civilised life. For five years or more they have been outlaws, dirty Boches, the rejected of mankind—they who are of that race,"—his voice rang out triumphant but then trembled and broke—"Gott! that is the salt of the earth!"
For an instant he seemed to be genuinely moved. Bitter memories kindled a spark of anger in his fierce, dark eyes. But the mood passed swiftly and his voice was gentle, his manner sleek as before when he resumed.
"You make it difficult, very difficult for me. You come here, a delicate, fair young maid and you expect to live unscathed in a camp of rough men; for I do not conceal from you the fact, Miss Garth, that unless your father is reasonable you may be with us for many days...."
He broke off suggestively. The girl dared not look at him for fear of the thought unspoken she might read in his leering eyes.
"Would you be surprised to learn? it is always best to be frank, nicht wahr?—that it will require an armed guard to keep these men away from you at night?...."
At that Marjorie revolted. She sprang to her feet and walked away, sickened at the picture he had suggested to her by every word. Grundt made no attempt to follow her.
"I am sure you will be reasonable," he murmured.
A man burst turbulently into the hollow. It was von Hagel. He was smeared all over with grey dust and his heavy boots showed white gashes where the rocks had cut them. He was pale and the livid weal across his right cheek seemed to distort his features.
"Well?" said Grundt sternly.
The young man made a helpless gesture of the hands. Slowly Clubfoot sat up erect and a heavy scowl drew his eyebrows together. One could almost see the young German quake as he stood before his leader, dumb, confused, aimlessly moving his hands. At last he faltered out:—
"He is not there!"
A convulsion of anger seemed to shake the huge cripple. The close-shaven hair of his scalp moved, his heavy nostrils twitched as solidly, viciously, his great jowl set.
"Not there!" he ejaculated hoarsely, his voice strangling with anger. "What do you mean 'not there'? Black Pablo's orders were to bring him down to me. Why has he not done so? Himmelkreuzdonnerwetter!"—his hairy hands beat on his knee with rage—"why don't you answer me?"
"We.... we.... gained the top shelf unobserved," stammered out von Hagel. "It was deserted. There is only one cave.... with a clear drop down. The steps appear to have quite recently broken away. Pablo, Schröder and I went with torches—they let us down with ropes. We came to a lower chamber where some native dead are buried. At the end was the narrow air-slit through which the girl escaped...."
"And the Engländer was not there, you say?"
"No!"
"Schafskopf! He was never there!"
"We saw him enter it. Besides, we found burnt matches on the ground and the ashes of his pipe...."
"Then he went out by the air-hole...."
"It is too narrow. Ramon, who is slightly built, could not get through...."
"And there is no other cave?"
"No!"
"Evidently he left by the way he entered, and escaped under the noses of your sentries...."
"Impossible, Herr Doktor! By the way he went in, without ropes, both ascent and descent are out of the question! And since early morning the path, which is the only means of access to the cliff, has been guarded...."
Shaking with ague, Clubfoot was struggling to regain his self-control.
"Erlauben Sie!" he said in a voice half-suffocated with rage, "let us get this right. I do not admit miracles. We know that the Engländer and the girl took refuge in this cave. Gut! The girl, we know, came out through the air-hole. Where is then the man?"
Von Hagel looked at Marjorie.
"Why not ask the girl?" he suggested.
"You've heard what he said," screamed Clubfoot, whipping round and shaking his finger at Marjorie. "Where did you leave this man?"
Then Marjorie told them she had left me in the cave.
"Sehen Sie?" roared Clubfoot. "He's escaped under your very snouts, schweinhunde that you are! He's in that cave yet! Get out of my sight, you dog! And send Black Pablo here! Tell him he has to reckon with me now! And by God if I have to go to him myself——"
Von Hagel had turned and fled. The cripple had risen to his knees. The perspiration poured off his face as, with trembling limbs, he vainly strove to overcome the weakness that mastered him, while he mouthed and mumbled a stream of threats.
Then from the sea a gun spoke, a single report that broke the brooding silence of the island and went echoing and clanging among the tall, grave rocks. Clubfoot's babble ceased on the instant. He desisted from his attempt to rise to his feet and remained immobile save for the trembling of his great torso. Slowly he turned his head and looked at Marjorie who, transfixed with fear, was watching him.
Thus I found them as, a moment later, I stepped into the hollow.
"Sit down, Grundt!" I said.
As I was sitting on the verandah of John Bard's bungalow, glancing through a two-month old copy of The Sketch, I heard the clang of the iron gate below where I sat. I raised my eyes from the paper and looked down the gardens. At my feet was stretched a dark tangle of palms and luxuriant tropical verdure, beyond them in the distance the glass-like surface of the sea, on which a great lucent moon threw a gleaming path of light.
The night was very tranquil. From the port at the foot of the hill, on which my old friend, John Bard, had built his bungalow in this earthly paradise, the occasional screech of a winch was wafted with astonishing clearness over the warm air. Somewhere in the distance there was the faint monotonous thrumming of guitars. To these night noises of the little Central American port the sea murmured faintly a ceaseless accompaniment.
I heard voices in the garden. Within the house a door swung to with a thud; there was the patter of slippered feet over the matting in the living-room and Akawa, Bard's Japanese servant, was at my elbow. His snow-white drill stood out against the black shadows which the moon cast at the back of the verandah. He did not speak; but his mask-like face waited for me to notice him.
"Well, Akawa?" said I; "what is it?"
"Doña Luisa ask for the Señor Commandante, excuse me!" announced the Jap stolidly.
Comfortably stretched out in a cane chair, a cold drink frosting its long glass in the trough at my side, I turned and stared at the butler. I was undoubtedly the Señor Commandante, for thus, in the course of a lazy, aimless sort of holiday on the shores of the Pacific, had my rank of Major been hispaniolised.
But what lady wanted me? Who could possibly know me here, seeing that only the day before one of John Bard's fruit ships had landed me from San Salvador?
Doña Luisa! The name had an alluring, romantic ring, especially on this gorgeous night, the velvety sky powdered with glittering stars, the air heavy with perfumes exhaled from the scented gardens. That broad strain of romance in me (which makes so much trouble for us Celts) responded strongly to the appeal of my environment. Doña Luisa! The distant strains of music seemed to thrum that soft name into my brain.
I swung my feet to the ground, stood up and stretched myself.
"Where is the lady?" I demanded. "In the sitting-room?"
"No, sir," replied the Japanese. "In the garden!"
More and more romantic! Had some lovely señorita, in high comb and mantilla, been inflamed by a chance sight of the Inglez as I had walked through the grass-grown streets of the city with John Bard that morning, and pursued me to my host's gardens to declare her love? The thought amused me and I smiled. Yet I don't mind admitting that, on my way through the sitting-room in Akawa's wake, I glanced at a mirror and noted with satisfaction that my white drill was spotless, and my hair smooth. I adjusted my tie and with that little touch of swagger which the prospect of a romantic rendezvous imparts to the gait of the most modest of us men, I passed out of the room to the corridor which led to the door into the gardens.
The passage was brightly lit so that, on emerging into the darkness again, my eyes were dazzled. At first I could only discern a vast black shape. But presently I made out the generous proportions of an enormously stout, coal-black negress.
She was wearing a torn and filthy cotton dress and about her head was bound a spotted pink and white handkerchief. With her vast bosom and ample span of hip she looked almost as broad as she was long. On seeing me she bobbed.
"You'm Señor Commandante?" she asked in English in her soft negro voice.
"Yes," I replied, rather taken aback by this droll apparition. "What did you want with me?"
"I has a letter for you, suh!"
She plunged a brown hand into the unfathomable depths of her opulent corsage.
"From Doña Luisa?" I asked expectantly.
The negress stopped her groping and grinned up at me with flashing teeth. Her eyeballs glistened white as her face lit up with a broad smile. Then she tapped herself with a grimy paw.
"I is Doña Luisa!" she announced with pride.
I staggered beneath the shock of this revelation. My vision of a sloe-eyed damsel in a mantilla vanished in smoke.
"I has a fine Spanish name," remarked the lady resuming her spasmodic searchings of her person, "but I wus riz in N'Awleans. That's how I talks English so good! Ah!"
With a grunt she fished out a folded sheet of dirty note-paper and handed it to me.
"You're certain this is meant for me?" I asked, racking my brains to recall who was likely to send me messages by such an intermediary and at such an hour.
"I sure is!" responded Doña Luisa with authority.
Stepping back into the lighted corridor I unfolded the note and read:—
"To Major Desmond Okewood, D.S.O.
"Do you remember the beach-comber to whom you did a good turn at San Salvador a few weeks back? I now believe I am in a position to repay it if you will accompany the bearer of this note. I wish to see you most urgently but I am too ill to come to you. Don't dismiss this note as merely an ingenious attempt on my part to raise the wind. Perhaps, by the time you have received it, I shall have already escaped from the disgrace and infamy of my present existence. Therefore come at once, I beg you.
"And make haste."
The note was written in pencil in rather a shaky hand. There was no signature. But I remembered the writer perfectly and his signature would have availed me nothing; for I never knew his name.
Our meeting happened thus. I was visiting the jail at San Salvador and in the prison-yard I remarked among the shambling gang of prisoners taking exercise a pallid, hollow-eyed creature whose twitching mouth and fluttering hands betrayed the habitual drunkard recovering from a bout. I should have dismissed this scarecrow figure from my mind only that, suddenly evading the little brown warder, he plucked me by the coat and cried:—
"If you're a sahib, man, you'll get me out of this hell!"
He spoke in English and there was a refined note in his voice which, coupled with the haggard expression of his face, decided me to inquire into his case. I discovered that the man, as, indeed, he had avowed himself in the letter, was a beach-comber, a drunken wastrel, a dope fiend. In short, he was one of the unemployable, and every Consulate in the Central Americas was closed to him. But he was an Englishman; more, by birth an English gentleman. One of the officials at our Consulate told me that he was, undoubtedly, of good family.
Well, one doesn't like to think of one of one's own kith and kin locked up with a lot of coffee-coloured cut-throats among the cockchafers and less amiable insects of a Dago calaboose. So I interested myself in Friend Beach-comber and he was set free. His incarceration was the result of a tradesman's plaint and a few dollars secured his release. A few more, as it appeared in the upshot, had ensured his lasting gratitude; for I gave him a ten dollar bill to see him on his way, the State stipulating, as a condition of his liberation, that he should leave the city forthwith.
The outcast's letter was in my hand. I looked at Doña Luisa and hesitated. Would it not be simpler to give the woman a couple of dollars and send her about her business? Surely this note was nothing more than a subterfuge to obtain a further "loan" with which to buy drink or drugs—the dividing line between the two is none too clearly defined in the Central Americas.
But I found myself thinking of the beachcomber's eyes. I recalled a certain wistfulness, a sort of lonely dignity, in their mute appeal. I glanced through the note a second time. I rather liked its independent tone. So in the end I bade the woman wait while I fetched my hat. But as I took down my panama from its peg I paused an instant, then, running into my room, picked my old automatic out of my dressing-case and slid it into my jacket pocket. I had long since learnt the lesson of the Secret Service that a man may only once forget to carry arms.
As soon as I stepped out into the gardens the old negress waddled off down the path, her bare feet pattering almost noiselessly on the hard earth. She made no further effort at conversation; but, with a swiftness surprising in one of her prodigious bulk, paddled rapidly through the scented night down the hill towards the winking lights of the port. As we left the pleasant height on which John Bard's bungalow stood, I missed the cooling night breeze off the Pacific. The air grew closer. It was steamy and soon I was drenched in perspiration.
Doña Luisa skirted the quays softly lapped by the sluggish, phosphorescent water, and plunged into a network of small streets fringed by the little yellow houses. Most of them were in darkness; for it was getting late, but here and there a shaft of golden light, shining through a heart-shaped opening cut in the shutters, fell athwart the cobbled roadway. There was something subtly evil, something louche, about the quarter. From behind the barred and bolted windows of one such shuttered house came strains of music, fast and furious, endlessly repeated accompanied by the rhythmic stamp of a Spanish dance and the smart click of castanettes. Over the door a red light glowed dully....
But presently we left the purlieus of the port and after passing a long block of warehouses, black and forbidding, came upon a kind of township of tumbledown wooden cabins on the outskirts of the city. The stifling air was now heavy with all manner of evil odours; and heaps of refuse, dumped in the broken roadway, reeked in the hot night. The houses were the merest shanties, most of them in a dilapidated condition.
But the place swarmed with life. Black faces grinned at the unglazed casements; dark figures hurried to and fro; while from many cabins came chattering voices raised high in laughter or dispute. In the distance a native drum throbbed incessantly. To me it was like entering an African village. I knew we were in the negro quarter of the city.
Suddenly Doña Luisa stopped and when I was beside her said in a low voice:—
"We'm mos' there!"—and struck off down a narrow lane.
Somewhere behind one of the shacks, in a full, mellow tenor, a man, hidden by the night, was singing to the soft tinkling accompaniment of a guitar. He sang in Spanish and I caught a snatch of the haunting refrain:—
"Se murio, y sobre su cara
"Un panuelito le heche...."
But the next moment the negress, after fumbling with a key, pushed me through a big door and the rest of the song was lost in the slamming of a great beam she fixed across it. The door gave access to a little square yard with adobe walls, an open shed along one side, a low shanty along the other. Doña Luisa pushed at a small wooden door in the wall of the shanty. Instantly a thin, quavering voice called out in English:—
"Have you brought him?"
The woman murmured some inaudible reply and the voice went on:—
"Have you barred the door? Then send him in! And you, get out and leave us alone!"
With a little resigned shrug of the shoulders the negress stepped back into the yard and pushed me into the cabin.
I was loth to leave him. What he had told me of the fate of his friend, the man called Dutchey, made me feel a trifle apprehensive of his own safety. And I had had a kind of feeling that, for all his apparent calm, he was frightened. On looking back at my interview that night with the beach-comber in his wretched shack, I realise there must have been something unusually sweet about his personality. Its flavour seemed to linger; for I left him, as I have said, reluctantly, and I have thought of him many times since.
The back door led straight into a kind of open shed which, from the stove and stacked-up wood pile, I judged to be Doña Luisa's cooking-place. The shed gave on a dusty yard, small and narrow, smelling horribly of poultry, with a high mud wall. In this wall I saw—for the moonlight made everything as bright as day—a wooden door. On reaching it I found that it was locked.
For a moment I had a mind to go back to the front and home by the way I had come. But I felt doubtful as to whether I should be able to follow in the opposite direction the intricate route by which Doña Luisa had brought me, and I had no desire to be lost in the negro quarter at night. So without more ado I scaled the mud wall and, dropping to earth on the other side, found myself in the plantation of which the beach-comber had spoken.
Here I was alone with the noises of the tropical night. Of human being there was neither sound nor sign. However, I had Adams's directions firmly in my head; and by following them to the letter came back at last without incident, but very hot and sticky, to John Bard's bungalow.
The verandah was empty, the house very quiet. I looked at my watch. It was half past eleven. Bard had gone down to the club for his usual evening rubber of bridge but I had excused myself for I had meant to write letters. I knew it would be at least an hour before Bard returned; for he was a late bird. So I went through to my room, had a sponge down and changed into pyjamas and made my way to the living-room.
It was a delightfully airy apartment, one side, glazed, opening on to the verandah, the other walls distempered a pale green. There were native mats on the floor and comfortable chairs stood about the room. I went over to the writing desk in the corner, switched on the reading-lamp and lit a cigar. Then I pulled out of my pocket the package which I had received from the beach-comber.
The outer covering was a piece of greasy flannel which looked as if it had been torn off an old shirt. With my knife I slit up the stitches—it had been lightly tacked across with thread—and pulled out a narrow pad of oilskin folded once across. Spread out it made a piece roughly about nine inches long by six wide. Across it stood written some lines hastily scribbled in indelible pencil. The hand was crabbed and irregular, the writing indistinct and, in some places, almost completely effaced. But I could distinguish enough to recognise that both the hand and the words were German.
At this I felt my pulse quicken. A faint instinct of the chase began to stir in my blood. For three long months I had dawdled deliriously; for, in turning my face towards the sunshine of the New World, I had deliberately turned my back on the thrills and disappointments, the dangers and the ennuis of the Secret Service. This almost undecipherable scrawl, with here and there a German word clearly protruding itself (I could read "Kiel" and "siehst Du") and, above all, the indelible pencil, in whose pale mauve character gallant young men wrote the real history of the war, brought back to me with vivid clearness, memorable moments of those half-forgotten campaigning days. I fumbled in a drawer of the desk for Bard's big magnifying glass, drew up my chair and set myself stolidly—as I had so often done in the past!—to the deciphering of what is in all circumstances, easily the most illegible handwriting in the world.
In truth, no writing is harder to read than the German. In his intercourse with the foreigner, the brother Boche, it is true, not infrequently employs the Latin character. But, for communications among themselves, the Germans continue to use their own damnable hieroglyphics. I have often wondered to see how the most unintelligent German will read off with ease a closely written scrawl of German handwriting looking as though a spider, after taking an ink-bath, had jazzed up and down the page.
This particular specimen of the Hun fist was a proper Chinese puzzle. Where in places it was beginning to be decipherable, the heavy indelible ink had run (under the influence of damp, I suppose) and where the writing was not a mass of smears it was illegible in a degree to make one despair.
Well, I got down to it properly. My knowledge of German (which I know about as well as English) was a great help. Finally, with the assistance of Bard's magnifying-glass, a deduction here and a guess there, after nearly an hour's hard work, I produced what was, as nearly as I could make it, an accurate version of the original. My greatest triumph lay, I think, in establishing the fact that an unusually baffling row of cryptic signs at the bottom of the thing was, in reality, four bars of music.
But when I had set it all down (on a sheet of John Bard's expensive glazed note-paper), I scratched my head and, despite my aching eyes, took another good look at the original. For I could make no sense of the writing at all.
The message (for such it seemed to be) was signed with the single letter "U." And this is what I got:—
Mittag. 18/11/18.
"Primmer', Simmer' viel
"Die Garnison von Kiel
"Mit Kompass dann am besten
"Denk' an den Ordensfesten
"Am Zuckerhut vorbei
"Siehst Du die Lorelei
"Und magst Du Schätzchen gern.
Blankly I stared at this doggerel. Then I took down from the rack another sheet of paper and jotted down a rough English translation:—
Noon. 18/11/18.
"Flash, flash much
"The garrison of Kiel
"Then with the compass is best
"Think of the Feast of Orders
"Past the Sugar-Loaf
"You'll see the Lorelei
"And if you desire the sweetheart.
U."