The Great Impersonation

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Seaman was silent for a moment.

  “There is reason in what you say,” he admitted presently. “It is for a few months only. What is your proposition?”

  “That you see the Princess in my place at once,” Dominey suggested eagerly. “Point out to her that for the present, for political reasons, I am and must remain Everard Dominey, to her as to the rest of the world. Let her be content with such measure of friendship and admiration as Sir Everard Dominey might reasonably offer to a beautiful woman whom he met today for the first time, and I am entirely and with all my heart at her service. But let her remember that even between us two, in the solitude of her room as in the drawing-rooms where we might meet, it can be Everard Dominey only until my mission is ended. You think, perhaps, that I lay unnecessary stress upon this. I do not. I know the Princess and I know myself.”

  Seaman glanced at the clock. “At what hour was your appointment?”

  “It was not an appointment, it was a command,” Dominey replied. “I was told to be at Belgrave Square at seven o’clock.”

  “I will have an understanding with the Princess,” promised Seaman, as he took up his hat. “Dine with me downstairs at eight o’clock on my return.”

  ***

  Dominey, descending about an hour later, found his friend Seaman already established at a small, far-away table set in one of the recesses of the grill room. He was welcomed with a little wave of the hand, and cocktails were at once ordered.

  “I have done your errand,” Seaman announced. “Since my visit I am bound to admit that I realise a little more fully your anxiety.”

  “You probably had not met the Princess before?”

  “I had not. I must confess that I found her a lady of somewhat overpowering temperament. I fancy, my young friend,” Seaman continued, with a twitch at the corner of his lips, “that somewhere about August next year you will find your hands full.”

  “August next year can take care of itself,” was the cool reply.

  “In the meantime,” Seaman continued, “the Princess understands the situation and is, I think, impressed. She will at any rate do nothing rash. You and she will meet within the course of the next few hours, but on reasonable terms. To proceed! As I drove back here after my interview with the Princess, I decided that it was time you made the acquaintance of the person who is chiefly responsible for your presence here.”

  “Terniloff?”

  “Precisely! You have maintained, my young friend,” Seaman went on after a brief pause, during which one waiter had brought their cocktails and another received their order for dinner, “a very discreet and laudable silence with regard to those further instructions which were promised to you immediately you should arrive in London. Those instructions will never be committed to writing. They are here.”

  Seaman touched his forehead and drained the remaining contents of his glass.

  “My instructions are to trust you absolutely,” Dominey observed, “and, until the greater events stir, to concentrate the greater part of my energies in leading the natural life of the man whose name and place I have taken.”

  “Quite so,” Seaman acquiesced.

  He glanced around the room for a moment or two, as though interested in the people. Satisfied at last that there was no chance of being overheard, he continued:

  “The first idea you have to get out of your head, my dear friend, if it is there, is that you are a spy. You are nothing of the sort. You are not connected with our remarkably perfect system of espionage in the slightest degree. You are a free agent in all that you may choose to say or do. You can believe in Germany or fear her—whichever you like. You can join your cousin’s husband in his crusade for National Service, or you can join me in my efforts to cement the bonds of friendship and affection between the citizens of the two countries. We really do not care in the least. Choose your own part. Live yourself thoroughly into the life of Sir Everard Dominey, Baronet, of Dominey Hall, Norfolk, and pursue exactly the course which you think Sir Everard himself would be likely to take.”

  “This,” Dominey admitted, “is very broadminded.”

  “It is common sense,” was the prompt reply. “With all your ability, you could not in six months’ time appreciably affect the position either way. Therefore, we choose to have you concentrate the whole of your energies upon one task and one task only. If there is anything of the spy about your mission here, it is not England or the English which are to engage your attention. We require you to concentrate wholly and entirely upon Terniloff.”

  Dominey was startled.

  “Terniloff?” he repeated. “I expected to work with him, but—”

  “Empty your mind of all preconceived ideas,” Seaman enjoined. “What your duties are with regard to Terniloff will grow upon you gradually as the situation develops.”

  “As yet,” Dominey remarked, “I have not even made his acquaintance.”

  “I was on the point of telling you, earlier in our conversation, that I have made an appointment for you to see him at eleven o’clock tonight at the Embassy. You will go to him at that hour. Remember, you know nothing, you are waiting for instructions. Let speech remain with him alone. Be particularly careful not to drop him a hint of your knowledge of what is coming. You will find him absolutely satisfied with the situation, absolutely content. Take care not to disturb him. He is a missioner of peace. So are you.”

  “I begin to understand,” Dominey said thoughtfully.

  “You shall understand everything when the time comes for you to take a hand,” Seaman promised, “and do not in your zeal forget, my friend, that your utility to our great cause will depend largely upon your being able to establish and maintain your position as an English gentleman. So far all has gone well?”

  “Perfectly, so far as I am concerned,” Dominey replied. “You must remember, though, that there is your end to keep up. Berlin will be receiving frantic messages from East Africa as to my disappearance. Not even my immediate associates were in the secret.”

  “That is all understood,” Seaman assured his companion. “A little doctor named Schmidt has spent many marks of the Government money in frantic cables. You must have endeared yourself to him.”

  “He was a very faithful associate.”

  “He has been a very troublesome friend. It seems that the natives got their stories rather mixed up concerning your namesake, who apparently died in the bush, and Schmidt continually emphasised your promise to let him hear from Cape Town. However, all this has been dealt with satisfactorily. The only real dangers are over here, and so far you seem to have encountered the principal ones.”

  “I have at any rate been accepted,” Dominey declared, “by my nearest living relative, and incidentally I have discovered the one farseeing person in England who knows what is in store for us.”

  Seaman was momentarily anxious.

  “Whom do you mean?”

  “The Duke of Worcester, my cousin’s husband, of whom you were speaking just now.”

  The little man’s face relaxed.

  “He reminds me of the geese who saved the Capitol,” he said, “a brainless man obsessed with one idea. It is queer how often these fanatics discover the truth. That reminds me,” he added, taking a small memorandum book from his waistcoat pocket and glancing it through. “His Grace has a meeting tonight at the Holborn Town Hall. I shall make one of my usual interruptions.”

  “If he has so small a following, why don’t you leave him alone?” Dominey enquired.

  “There are others associated with him,” was the placid reply, “who are not so insignificant. Besides, when I interrupt I advertise my own little hobby.”

  “These—we English are strange people,” Dominey remarked, glancing around the room after a brief but thoughtful pause. “We advertise and boast about our colossal wealth, and yet we are incapable of the slightest self-sacrifice i
n order to preserve it. One would have imagined that our philosophers, our historians, would warn us in irresistible terms, by unanswerable scientific deduction, of what was coming.”

  “My compliments to your pronouns,” Seaman murmured, with a little bow. “A propos of what you were saying, you will never make an Englishman—I beg your pardon, one of your countrymen—realise anything unpleasant. He prefers to keep his head comfortably down in the sand. But to leave generalities, when do you think of going to Norfolk?”

  “Within the next few days,” Dominey replied.

  “I shall breathe more freely when you are securely established there,” his companion declared. “Great things wait upon your complete acceptance, in the country as well as in town, as Sir Everard Dominey. You are sure that you perfectly understand your position there as regards your—er—domestic affairs?”

  “I understand all that is necessary,” was the somewhat stiff reply.

  “All that is necessary is not enough,” Seaman rejoined irritably. “I thought that you had wormed the whole story out of that drunken Englishman?”

  “He told me most of it. There were just one or two points which lay beyond the limits where questioning was possible.”

  Seaman frowned angrily.

  “In other words,” he complained, “you remembered that you were a gentleman and not that you were a German.”

  “The Englishman of a certain order,” Dominey pronounced, “even though he be degenerate, has a certain obstinacy, generally connected with one particular thing, which nothing can break. We talked together on that last night until morning; we drank wine and brandy. I tore the story of my own exile from my breast and laid it bare before him. Yet I knew all the time, as I know now, that he kept something back.”

  There was a brief pause. During the last few minutes a certain tension had crept in between the two men. With it, their personal characteristics seemed to have become intensified. Dominey was more than ever the aristocrat; Seaman the plebian schemer, unabashed and desperately in earnest. He leaned presently a little way across the table. His eyes had narrowed but they were as bright as steel. His teeth were more prominent than usual.

  “You should have dragged it from his throat,” he insisted. “It is not your duty to nurse fine personal feelings. Heart and soul you stand pledged to great things. I cannot at this moment give you any idea what you may not mean to us after the trouble has come, if you are able to play your part still in this country as Everard Dominey of Dominey Hall. I know well enough that the sense of personal honour amongst the Prussian aristocracy is the finest in the world, and yet there is not a single man of your order who should not be prepared to lie or cheat for his country’s sake. You must fall into line with your fellows. Once more, it is not only your task with regard to Terniloff which makes your recognition as Everard Dominey so important to us. It is the things which are to come later.—Come, enough of this subject. I know that you understand. We grow too serious. How shall you spend your evening until eleven o’clock? Remember you did not leave England an anchorite, Sir Everard. You must have your amusements. Why not try a music hall?”

  “My mind is too full of other things,” Dominey objected.

  “Then come with me to Holborn,” the little man suggested. “It will amuse you. We will part at the door, and you shall sit at the back of the hall, out of sight. You shall hear the haunting eloquence of your cousin-in-law. You shall hear him trying to warn the men and women of England of the danger awaiting them from the great and rapacious German nation. What do you say?”

  “I will come,” Dominey replied in spiritless fashion. “It will be better than a music hall, at any rate. I am not at all sure, Seaman, that the hardest part of my task over here will not be this necessity for self-imposed amusements.”

  His companion struck the table gently but impatiently with his clenched fist.

  “Man, you are young!” he exclaimed. “You are like the rest of us. You carry your life in your hands. Don’t nourish past griefs. Cast the memory of them away. There’s nothing which narrows a man more than morbidness. You have a past which may sometimes bring the ghosts around you, but remember the sin was not wholly yours, and there is an atonement which in measured fashion you may commence whenever you please. I have said enough about that. Greatness and gaiety go hand in hand. There! You see, I was a philosopher before I became a professor of propaganda. Good! You smile. That is something gained, at any rate. Now we will take a taxicab to Holborn and I will show you something really humorous.”

  At the entrance to the town hall, the two men, at Seaman’s instigation, parted, making their way inside by different doors. Dominey found a retired seat under a balcony, where he was unlikely to be recognised from the platform. Seaman, on the other hand, took up a more prominent position at the end of one of the front rows of benches. The meeting was by no means overcrowded, overenthusiastic, overanything. There were rows of empty benches, a good many young couples who seemed to have come in for shelter from the inclement night, a few sturdy, respectable-looking tradesmen who had come because it seemed to be the respectable thing to do, a few genuinely interested, and here and there, although they were decidedly in the minority, a sprinkling of enthusiasts. On the platform was the Duke, with civic dignitaries on either side of him; a distinguished soldier, a Member of Parliament, a half dozen or so of nondescript residents from the neighbourhood, and Captain Bartram. The meeting was on the point of commencement as Dominey settled down in his corner.

  First of all the Duke rose, and in a few hackneyed but earnest sentences introduced his young friend Captain Bartram. The latter, who sprang at once into the middle of his subject, was nervous and more than a little bitter. He explained that he had resigned his commission and was therefore free to speak his mind. He spoke of enormous military preparations in Germany and a general air of tense expectation. Against whom were these preparations? Without an earthly doubt against Germany’s greatest rival, whose millions of young men, even in this hour of danger, preferred playing or watching football or cricket on Saturday afternoons to realising their duty. The conclusion of an ill-pointed but earnest speech was punctuated by the furtive entrance into the hall of a small boy selling evening newspapers, and there was a temporary diversion from any interest in the proceedings on the part of the younger portion of the audience, whilst they satisfied themselves as to the result of various Cup Ties. The Member of Parliament then descended upon them in a whirlwind of oratory and in his best House of Commons style. He spoke of black clouds and of the cold breeze that went before the coming thunderstorm. He pointed to the collapse of every great nation throughout history who had neglected the arts of self-defence. He appealed to the youth of the nation to prepare themselves to guard their womenkind, their homes, the sacred soil of their country, and at that point was interrupted by a drowsy member of the audience with stentorian lungs, who seemed just at that moment to have waked up.

  “What about the Navy, guv’nor?”

  The orator swept upon the interrupter in his famous platform manner. The Navy, he declared, could be trusted at all times to do its duty, but it could not fight on sea and land. Would the young man who had just interrupted do his, and enrol his name for drill and national service that evening?—and so on. The distinguished soldier, who was suffering from a cold, fired off a few husky sentences only, to the tune of rounds of applause. The proceedings were wound up by the Duke, who was obviously, with the exception of the distinguished soldier, much more in earnest than any of them, and secured upon the whole a respectful attention. He brought in a few historical allusions, pleaded for a greater spirit of earnestness and citizenship amongst the men of the country, appealed even to the women to develop their sense of responsibility, and sat down amidst a little burst of quite enthusiastic applause.—The vote of thanks to the chairman was on the point of being proposed when Mr. Seaman, standing up in his place, appealed to the chairman for permissio
n to say a few words. The Duke, who had had some experience with Mr. Seaman before, looked at him severely, but the smile with which Mr. Seaman looked around upon the audience was so good-natured and attractive that he had no alternative but to assent. Seaman scrambled up the steps on to the platform, coughed apologetically, bowed to the Duke, and took possession of the meeting. After a word or two of compliment to the chairman, he made his confession. He was a German citizen—he was indeed one of that bloodthirsty race. (Some laughter.) He was also, and it was his excuse for standing there, the founder and secretary of a league, doubtless well known to them, a league for promoting more friendly relations between the business men of Germany and England. Some of the remarks which he had heard that evening had pained him deeply. Business often took him to Germany, and as a German he would be doing less than his duty if he did not stand up there and tell them that the average German loved the Englishman like a brother, that the object of his life was to come into greater kinship with him, that Germany, even at that moment, was standing with hand outstretched to her relatives across the North Sea, begging for a deeper sympathy, begging for a larger understanding. (Applause from the audience, murmurs of dissent from the platform.) And as to those military preparations of which they had heard so much (with a severe glance at Captain Bartram), let them glance for one moment at the frontiers of Germany, let them realise that eastwards Germany was being continually pressed by an ancient and historic foe of enormous strength. He would not waste their time telling them of the political difficulties which Germany had had to face during the last generation. He would simply tell them this great truth,—the foe for whom Germany was obliged to make these great military preparations was Russia. If ever they were used it would be against Russia, and at Russia’s instigation.—In his humble way he was striving for the betterment of relations between the dearly beloved country of his birth and the equally beloved country of his adoption. Such meetings as these, instituted, as it seemed to him, for the propagation of unfair and unjustified suspicions, were one of the greatest difficulties in his way. He could not for a moment doubt that these gentlemen upon the platform were patriots. They would prove it more profitably, both to themselves and their country, if they abandoned their present prejudiced and harmful campaign and became patriots of his Society.