Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Locked in with the other papers. I was all ready to throw them out of the port when you knocked.”

  “Unlock the bag now. I’ll get rid of the whole business,” he said bluntly.

  “Kervyn — I can’t do that.”

  “What?” he exclaimed.

  “I can’t destroy those papers if there is a chance of getting through with them. I gave my promise, you know.”

  The dull surprise in his eyes changed gradually to impatience.

  “If another ship stops us, they’ll have to go overboard, anyway.”

  “We may not be stopped again. If we are, we have time.”

  “Karen.”

  “Yes — dear?”

  A slight flush came into his haggard face; he hesitated, looked up at her where she was kneeling on the sofa beside him. “Dear,” he said gently, “I have never intended that you should carry those papers to your father, or to anybody else.”

  “I don’t quite understand you.”

  “Try to understand. I am a friend to England — even a closer friend to — Belgium.”

  “I know. But you are my friend, too.”

  “Devotedly, Karen.” He took hold of her hand; she slipped down to the sofa and settled there beside him with a little air of confidence which touched and troubled him.

  “I am your friend,” he said. “But there is another friendship that demands first of all the settlement of prior obligations. And, if these obligations conflict with any others, the others must give way, Karen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The obligations of friendship — of — of affection — these must give way before a duty more imperative.”

  “What duty?”

  “Allegiance.”

  “To — whom?”

  “To the country in which my race had its origin.”

  “Yes.... But America is neutral, Kervyn.”

  “I mean — Belgium,” he said in a low voice.

  “Belgium! Are you then Belgian?” she asked, amazed.

  “When Belgium is in trouble — yes.”

  “How can you be loyal to two countries?”

  “By being loyal to my own manhood — and to the God who made me,” he answered in a low voice.

  “You feel so deeply about this war?”

  “Nothing on earth could stir me as deeply, Karen. Unless — America were in danger.”

  “I — I can’t understand.”

  “Let me help you. My family was Belgian. For many years we have been good and loyal Americans. America means home. But, nevertheless, we inherit obligations toward the country of our origin which, so far, time has not extinguished.... When I became of military age I went to Belgium and served my time in the Belgian army. Then I went — home. My father did it before me. My grandfather before him. My younger brother will do it, God willing. It is our custom to fulfill our obligations,” he added with a faint smile, “even when those obligations seem to others a trifle fanciful and old-fashioned.”

  She bent her fair head in silence, considering for a space, her hand resting rather lifelessly in his. And, after a few moments: “But how does all this interfere with our friendship?” she asked innocently.

  “It does not.... Only I could not let you take those papers to Germany, Karen.”

  “But I’ve promised.”

  “You promised to do it if it were possible.” He lifted her hand to his lips. “But — it has become impossible, Karen.”

  “Another ship may not interfere.”

  “No. But I must — interfere.”

  “You! Kervyn!”

  “Dear — I must.”

  “Betray me?”

  “Karen! Karen! What are you saying?”

  “If you take my papers away you betray our friendship!”

  “I have told you that there is a higher obligation than friendship. Even your friendship, Karen.”

  “You — you mean to take my papers from me?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “By — by violence?”

  “Karen! Look at me!”

  She gave him a white, breathless glance, wrenched her hand from his, stooped suddenly, seized the satchel, and, gathering it against her breast, clasped both arms around it. Then she looked him straight in the eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, “that is the only way. You must keep your word to the last and do your best. Only — remember that what I do now has no bearing whatever upon our friendship. I — I care for you — at this moment — more than I ever did. So — forgive me — Karen — —”

  “I never shall! Kervyn! Kervyn — think what you are doing! — —”

  He encircled her with his left arm, and with his right hand he gathered both of her slender wrists in his grasp and held them. The satchel rolled from her knees to the floor.

  “Kervyn!” she cried, “think what you are doing!” She looked up into his set face where he held her crushed against his shoulder. “I am your friend. Think what you are doing! I — I care — so much — for you!”

  “And I for you, Karen.... Is that the key around your neck on that blue ribbon?”

  “You shall not have it. Oh, Kervyn! Kervyn!” she gasped— “what are you doing to our friendship! What are you doing!”

  “‘Kervyn! Kervyn — Think what you are doing!—’”

  The struggle was already over; with his left arm he held both of her arms pinned tightly to the supple body which lay panting against him, while with his other hand he untied the narrow blue bow-knot at her throat and freed the tiny key. Then he released her. They both were deadly pale. She dropped back among the pillows and lay there staring at him. There was in the white calm of her face an expression almost pleasant.

  “So — you have done it,” she said in a curiously altered voice, but her lips scarcely moved when she spoke.

  He did not answer, but in her level eyes he saw blue lightning glimmer.

  “You did your best,” he said. “Your conscience is clear. Nobody can reproach you.”

  “Do you understand,” she said in a low, expressionless voice, “that I am your enemy?”

  “Do you reason that way, Karen?”

  “Reason?”

  “Yes. Reason it out, Karen, before you come to such a conclusion.”

  She said, very quietly: “A woman takes a shorter cut to her conclusions than by reasoning. As I did with you ... when I gave you my friendship ... unasked—” She turned her head swiftly, and sat for a moment while the starting tears dried in her eyes, unshed. They dried slowly while the battle raged within her — combat of mind and heart with every outraged instinct in arms, every emotion, every impulse. Pride, belief, faith, tenderness — all desperately wounded, fought blindly in the assault upon her heart, seeming to tear it to a thousand bleeding fragments.

  Perhaps, like the fair body of Osiris, it was immortal — a deathless, imperishable thing — or that what had come into it had become indestructible. For, after her heart lay in burning fragments within her, she turned and looked at him, and in her eyes was all the tragedy of her sex — and all its never-ending mystery to men.

  “I must end what I have begun,” he said gently.

  “Does it matter, now?”

  “I don’t know, Karen. I have no choice — even when your hatred threatens me.... I suppose it will be that, when I unlock your satchel.”

  He picked it up and fitted the key to the lock. As he opened it, a faint fresh fragrance came from it, as though he was violating the delicate intimacy of this young girl herself.

  But he set his jaws; she saw the cheek muscles tighten; and he drew from the satchel two flat envelopes. One contained the forged passports, and he placed these in his breast pocket, then looked steadily at her.

  “Our friendship breaks with those seals,” she said unsteadily.

  “Karen — I cannot help it.”

  “Yes, you can help it.... Kervyn!... Wait! I will — will say — that it is more than friendship that breaks—” She caught her breath a
nd her lip quivered— “I — I have the courage to say it — if it means anything to you — if it will help — —”

  His face reddened, then it grew pallid and expressionless.

  “Even that,” he said, “must stand aside.... Karen, from the moment I saw you I have been — in love with you.”

  And, looking her steadily in the eyes, he broke the seals.

  When the last seal broke she gave a little cry, turned and covered her eyes with both hands.

  As for Guild, he stood with a sheet of paper in his hands, staring at the tracery which covered it and which meant absolutely nothing to him. Then he looked at the remaining sheets of paper. None had any significance to him. There were three sheets of thin translucent paper. These sheets were numbered from one to three.

  The first seemed to be a hasty study from some artist’s sketch book. It appeared to be a roughly executed and hasty sketch of several rather oddly shaped trees — a mere note jotted down to record the impression of the moment — trees, a foreland, a flight of little hedge birds.

  On it, in English, the artist had written “Sunset.” Indeed, the declining and somewhat archaic sun on the horizon and the obviously evening flight of the birds seemed to render the label unnecessary.

  For a long while Guild stood studying it in the light of the stateroom ceiling lamp. And what continually arrested his attention and perplexed him was the unusual shapes of the trees and the un-birdlike flight of the birds. Also artists don’t sketch on such paper.

  Now and then he looked across at Karen with an inscrutable expression, and each time he looked at her his face seemed to grow more rigid and his set jaws more inflexible.

  The girl crouched in the corner of the lounge, her face covered by both hands and pressed against the pillows.

  He did not speak to her. Presently he turned to the next paper. It bore the rough sketch of a fish, and was numbered 2.

  It was a wretched drawing, intended, evidently, to resemble an old pike and three young ones. What it meant he had no idea. He passed to the third and last sheet of paper, and it instantly held his attention.

  On it was depicted a figure, which he supposed was the artist’s idea of a Japanese dancing girl. She held a fan in her left hand. Over her extended right hand a butterfly hovered.

  But what interested and concentrated Guild’s attention was not the very amateurish drawing, but the series of silly decorations on the paper above her head — a number of quartered circles inclosed in squares and oblongs.

  As decorations they meant nothing, indicated nothing, except that the intellect responsible for them must be a meagre one.

  But as a cipher message these doubly bisected circles promised anything.

  This is what Guild saw and what caused him to seat himself on the sofa beside the girl who still lay huddled over her pillows, her face hidden in her hands.

  Seated, he drew out the portfolio containing his letters and a notebook. Then, slipping a lead-pencil from the leather socket and tearing out a sheet of paper, he started work — using the leather-backed book for a support — on a cipher which looked to be impossible. Yet, all ciphers are solved by the same method. And he knew it.

  The first thing he did was to find his “numbers” in the mass of quartered circles. And, working steadily, swiftly, but intelligently, he had, in the course of an hour, discovered, separated and jotted down, nine of the quartered disks which he believed to represent numbers; and one extra disk which he supposed to be zero. And he numbered each symbol accordingly: merely eliminating all lines except those bisecting the smaller circles. This gave him in order

  The next thing to do was to find what letters those numbers, or combinations of numbers, represented.

  For a while he tried English, but arrived at no convincing result. So he tried German, first making a list of the letters which were likely to occur most frequently in the written language and then trying them with the symbols which occurred most frequently in the manuscript before him.

  He found that the first symbol represented the figures 21.

  The twenty-first letter of the alphabet is u. He wrote it.

  The next symbol was

  for which he substituted the figures 14. The fourteenth letter of the alphabet is n. He had, so far, two letters, u and n, to experiment with.

  He had sat for several minutes gazing absently at these two letters when, like a shot, it struck him that the French word for the number, one, was spelled un. Could the key of the cipher be French? He separated and jotted down the next combination of disks

  which gave him the numbers 19. The nineteenth letter of the alphabet is s. He wrote it.

  The next symbol was

  or the figure 9. The ninth letter of the alphabet is i.

  The next symbol was

  which, translated, gave him 24. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is x.

  He now had the letters s-i-x. And no sooner had he written them in order than the word six stared him in the face and he flushed with pure excitement.

  He had now two words, un and six. The chances were that he was somewhere on the right track and he fell to work with a concentration and ardour which left him oblivious to everything else — to time and place, and to the silent, motionless little figure huddled over the pillows beside him.

  A Fragment from Guild’s Notebook

  At the end of an hour — checked twice — but finally overcoming apparent defeat, and always following the same method of deduction, he came to an end of his symbols, and he found the leaf from his notebook was covered with the following words in order of symbol:

  Un, six douze cinq cinq vingt, douze quinz’ vingt-un sept eight, nineteen vingt trois nine douze douze twenty-five, eight cinq trois eight vingt, six quinze douze douze quinze vingt-trois, deux nine eighteen quatre nineteen.

  For these numerals spelled out capriciously in either abbreviated French or English he substituted numbers in the sequence given:

  “1 — 6 — 12 — 5 — 5 — 20 — 12 — 15 — 21 — 7 — 8 — 19

  — 23 — 9 — 12 — 12 — 25 — 8 — 5 — 3 — 8 — 20 — 6 — 15

  — 12 — 12 — 15 — 23 — 2 — 9 — 18 — 4 — 19.”

  Then for the figure 1 he wrote the first letter of the alphabet — A. For the number six he wrote the sixth letter of the alphabet F. For the number 12, the twelfth letter of the alphabet L.

  And when he had written letters for every figure in order given he had on his sheet of paper

  A FLEETLOUGHSWILLYHECHTFOLLOW

  BIRDS

  After a while he separated the words A, Fleet, Follow, and Birds, leaving the unintelligible sequence of letters LOUGHSWILLYHECHT.

  Out of this, for a long while, he could make nothing, until, by chance, taking the last five letters together, it suddenly occurred to him that the German word for pike was HECHT. Then, in a flash, he remembered the badly drawn picture of a pike and its young. Pike or Hecht, that was one of the words in all probability. But what other word the word Hecht represented he could not imagine.

  He looked at his notebook again. The letters remaining were LOUGHSWILLY. They meant absolutely nothing in any language he had even heard of. He studied what he already had — A Fleet (Blank) Pike Follow Birds. A pike follow Birds — birds — and swift as lightning a thought struck him which set him tingling to his finger-tips: somewhere in that rough, hasty, and apparently innocent sketch in which oddly shaped trees and a line of little birds figured, lay the key to the whole thing.

  He felt it, he knew it. He spread out the drawing on his knees and studied it with terrible concentration, conscious somehow or other that something about it, something in it, was vaguely familiar to him. What? Had he ever before seen another sketch by the same hand? He could not recollect. It was like millions of rough, hasty sketches jotted down by painters as notes for their own guidance only and not for others to see.

  What was there about it unusual? The trees? The shapes of the trees. Ah! he was getting nearer
the goal — he realized it, felt it, and, balked, fell into a mental rage for a moment.

  Then his habitual self-command returned; he squared his jaws, gazed grimly at the trees, and forced himself once more to answer his own questions.

  The shapes of the trees, then, were unusual. He had gotten that far. What was unusual in their shapes? The trunks and branches? No. The foliage. No. The outline!

  “God!” he whispered. And he had it.

  Over the sofa was hanging a map of the British Isles and of the Western coast of Europe. Dotted lines indicated the course taken by the Holland Line steamers. He reached up, unhooked it, looked at it, then at the drawing in his hand.

  Then he detached half of the thin sheet of paper on which the sketch was drawn and laid it over the sketch. Being translucent to the verge of transparency, he could see the drawing beneath the thin sheet covering it.

  Then, with his pencil, he steadily traced the outlines of the trees.

  When he had done this and had removed the sketch from beneath his tracing-paper he had what he expected — an outline of the British Isles, the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands; part of the coast of Norway, the French, Belgian and Dutch coast. Heligoland, and the German coast at Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven.

  From the map of the steamship company he carefully filled in boundaries and a few principal towns, then placing his outline drawing over the sketch of the trees he drew a dotted line following exactly the flight of the little birds.

  Where that flight terminated he made an arrow, then turned his eyes on the steamer map to find out where that arrow’s point rested.

  And there on the Irish coast he saw the name Lough Swilly!

  It was the last link! — the last but one.

  “A Fleet Lough Swilly. Hecht (Pike) follow birds.”

  A pike, with little pike following her, was to follow the flight of the birds — the dotted line on his outline map. The dotted line curved up out of Cuxhaven, around the Orkneys and Hebrides and into Lough Swilly — where there was a fleet!