Those were the local agents, and now and then they had to be visited, as a merchant in New York or London visits his outlying agents in China or Africa, just to judge their efficiency and devotion, hearten them up, coach them in the latest modes of publicity, transport and salesmanship, and instil the inspiring faith that good work never passes unseen by the Olympian eyes of the firm and that shining guerdons await the virtuous. Oh! plenty to learn. And, presently, plenty to do, not obtrusively.
IV
He had become, in two years, a neat hand at the trick, and a Major with good marks to his name, when an airman still more boyish than himself put him down in the dusk of a winter evening on a great frozen field in the bend of the Rhine between Godorf and Cologne.
In the eye of reason such a descent was not possible. It was almost as if a German plane had set down passengers in Richmond Park. But some bluffs depend for success upon their very absurdity. They are too mad to be guarded against. Major Gresson’s pink-faced pilot had plenty of time to bid the impudent farewell, “So long, old son,” and then to rise cannily from the petrified mud and rough grass of the field, and to wind up his steep spiral staircase of air to the height he wanted, before every searchlight from Bonn to Cologne was groping for him all over the sky.
A German anti-aircraft gun on a fast motor lorry was on the spot in five minutes, eagerly guided for the last few hundred yards by a discharged Bavarian soldier, who had seen everything. “A single seater, Sergeant. A small biplane,” he informed the NCO in charge of the gun. “I think the swine had engine trouble. My God! if I’d had my old rifle! But ach! this for-ever-damned leg! I couldn’t even get near him in time.”
The poor man did, indeed, walk very lame from the knee wound that had ended his soldiering days and sent him tramping the roads of the Rhineland in his old Army tunic and boots, with the interval filled by a pair of the reach-me-down trousers of peace. He also wore the Iron Cross and he made no secret of a pocketful of chits redounding enviably to his military honour. His face was young, fair and ingenious, but he took a good look at the red-worsted regimental number on the sergeant’s shoulder-strap before he said much about his own regiment.
The little flutter was soon over. The sergeant presented the youthful veteran with a cigar and took himself off with his gun and its crew. Then the lame Bavarian hobbled off briskly along the high road running into the north, where a turbid red glow on the underside of a cloud marked the site of Cologne. The twilight was all but night now; a thin whistling wind stung the Bavarian’s face; the black frost was hardening.
About every half mile the Bavarian stopped dead and listened carefully. Not a boot except his own was ringing on the road. After each time that he thus made sure of being alone, he had much less of a limp, and went much faster, till it was getting near time to listen again. When the few bleared window-lights of the village of Roden came into sight he limped very badly again.
That was a Tuesday evening. In the evening dusk of the following Monday the super-boyish pilot, with nobody in the observer’s seat, was to turn off his engine, at some immense height in the sky and great distance away, and slope silently down to the very spot where he had made his first landing. There, if still alive, a German ex-soldier was to be blowing his nose with a white hanky and whistling “The Watch on the Rhine,” with some slight variations, but always fortissimo.
This, you perceive, was a thoroughly reasoned arrangement. Having been caught asleep there, only six days before, the Germans were sure to be on the watch at that point—so sure that it was also sure that no British pilot would be such a fool as to take liberties there for a long time to come. So sure of this were the Germans certain to be, that it was quite a sound spec for the British Air Staff to assume that no place could be safer for that boy to land on, next week. You see, we all grew into psychologists during the war. We probed into layer below layer of our enemy’s thoughts, second thoughts, counter-thoughts, forethoughts and afterthoughts. Sometimes we brought off grand strokes in this way. And sometimes we didn’t.
V
Gresson’s long tour of calls on the agents was finished before noon on the Sunday. He was enormously glad of it. Each call had been a separate danger. For many spies are in the pay of both sides. It means double money, and also protection behind either front and lots of news to be got on each side and sold on the other. Their double game is often known to one or both of their employers; but, even then, they may be thought to be useful. Bits of false news may be deftly put in a double spy’s way, for him to snap up and convey to his second paymaster.
But even a double spy may have other and more intractable passions to clash with his deep thirst for coin. He may really be backing one side: he may secretly want it to win: and it may not be the right one. A spy has been known to make a quite dramatic final break with one of his two clients in business. The last time that one capital spy, as he had been thought, was dropped behind the German front he took a shot with his revolver at the English aeroplane that had just dropped him. Others “declare to win,” as we say on the turf, by denouncing a fellow-spy whom they meet in the country of their choice.
Gresson knew all this. And whatever people may say of the thrills and fine savours of peril, it was never with any flawless and whole-hearted enjoyment that he went into the house of some venal scrub who at any moment might throw up the window and yell for a policeman to lead Gresson off to the slaughter. Between each of these calls and the next he would rest from fear for a little and look into shop windows, or at the scenery, till he felt he could do with another dose of blue funk. By midday on Sunday he was as tired of the hard labour of holding down his apprehensions as you might be if you had been shaved thirty times in a week by a person who might or might not feel like cutting your throat—about even betting each way.
Now, Gresson, although he was getting on very well as a serpent—in a professional way and for the good of his country—was still a bit of a dove in some other ways. He was simple: he did not keep up with the more brisk-minded youth of his day; he was a poor hand at sneering; it never occurred to him that a thing must needs be wholly rubbish if other people had treasured it for a few hundred years. In fact he was unconventional, and he did and thought what he liked, without shouting about it. This careless disrespect for current fashion was privately carried so far that he went quite often to church, merely because he liked going. And, though he had no genius for prayer, as some people have, he had a private hobby of glowing, when he was in church, with intense and humble longings for things, of the more decent sort, that he specially valued or admired, and also of working up a fervent sort of gratefulness—to whom, he couldn’t say—for everything that had lately gone well with him. So it occurred to him now that, having half a day free in Cologne, he would go to the afternoon service in the Cathedral.
He found an empty seat in the inner South aisle, near a pillar and slightly turned to the left, so that it gave him a view of all the huge nave. There was scarcely another man in the place. All the thousands of women who filled it were wearing dead black, and most of them the dress of widows—half a furlong of widows. Some of the faces were veiled and some not. Even of the veilless women many were soundlessly weeping: many other faces were marred with the salt scald of more secret tears.
The winter daylight was failing; the lamplight was meagre; opposite Gresson, in the North windows, the prelates and saints and heraldic blazonments were sinking into mere lustrous darkness. The dim religious light was its most sombre self: the Gothic forest gloom, the death of the short, bitter day, the shadows in the hearts of all these smitten women, the great cloud blackening over a falling nation—Gresson felt them all press in upon him together and quiet and soften him.
As the service went on, he insensibly gave himself up to it more and more wholly. He let it work upon him as it would. Soon he lost all consciousness of his disguise and his danger—indeed, of everything but the rite,
the chanting, the figure implied and evoked by it all, the figure of youth and its gifts, even the gift of the clean soul’s inner serenity, given up freely for love of something undeservedly beloved. Just to hold alive in his mind the idea of that was an ecstasy to be prolonged at the full height and heat of its joy by gazing intently at something, anything, the flame of a tall candle, the gleam of a lectern of brass. So he gazed level, along a row of the ranged faces, at a light burning beyond, till a trivial movement in front of him broke the precarious spell of this highly strung reverie. One of the faces had made a half-turn towards his own, as though the intensity of his gaze had emitted a jet of some sort that could brush past a cheek and be felt. A woman was gazing at him steadily with an air of utter astonishment.
He knew her at once. She wore widow’s clothes: her features were thinner: some force would seem to have taken them when they were softer than now and moulded them into a fixed tragic mask: if all the lost hopes in the world had been shovelled into one grave, such a mask might have been put at its head. Yet he knew her at once. No other face, he was sure, could have had just that proud sculpturing of the brows and the chin, or the poised self-control of the lips and eyes that he had carried, in all their harlotry kit, through the streets of Amiens.
But she here! Why, of course—she, too, must be here as a spy. Not in the regular way, for she would have been on his list. Perhaps she was one of the fearful women of legend, queenly and monstrous Delilahs, the vessels of sadic vengeance that have delighted to turn an enemy’s lusts into gins and knives to trap him and stab him. He fancied that France had given birth to such women before. The Medical Officer had told him so.
The service was ending, women rising wearily from their knees, shaking their skirts a little and streaming away. The chimera woman waited a little. Gresson waited too, till she gave him a look or gesture—he wasn’t sure which, but he knew that he was being bidden to follow her out. As she moved towards the West door he fell in behind her.
Where a weak lamp burned under the porch she stopped, turned and said, “So? It is you!” in the German that all must speak there.
“I trust you recovered,” he said, “without very bad pain.”
“Pain!” she seemed to reject the idea that such pains could matter. She looked at his motley get-up as a disabled soldier, discharged, and wearing out bits of his old uniform. Her eyes softened a little. “And so,” she said, “all the time, you were one of us—and on duty, like me, in that horrible city—horrible!”
“Us!” His word was little more than a gasp—the escape that must come when the breath has been taken away by some smashing news or strange vision. “May we walk on?” he said. “There?” He pointed to the wide flagged space, east of the Domhof, where nobody used to walk then.
She nodded and walked on beside him. He used every second of silence to think the case out in his head and to plan an escape for himself. So that was what she had been—the seductress-spy of all ages—and he the British fool-officer who was to babble in her arms. She might have caught him too. Thank God for that bomb! But now she had him—caught, done for, the moment his German slipped up or he let out a fact that gave him away.
They had reached the big vacant flagged square when she asked abruptly, “You knew what I was when you saved me? You knew I was dead if they once got me into a hospital, with the papers I had in my clothes?”
He didn’t answer. He asked his own question. “Papers, Madam? British papers? Army ones?”
“Of course. Every shred I had got on that journey in France.”
“From British officers? Whom you had——?” Imprudent but uncontrollable anger was flaming up in his mind. To think of poor devils, perhaps his own friends, under their sentence of death, trying to get their last gulp of pleasure out of this world, and then tricked by this dignified harlot into betraying the lives of their men! And yet it was part of his nature to pull in his tongue before it could say the most venomous word.
But she understood, partly. “No,” she said. “Yours was the first British uniform I had approached—in that way. That was the miracle. God put a German inside it, to guard me—a true German, pure-minded, brave. Yes, it was a miracle—I was like Abraham. I had risked what was most precious to me, and at the last moment my sacrifice had been spared me, and you were the last man, as well as the first, to whom I was to offer my body.”
Amazement was quenching his anger. It shouldn’t have done so. It wasn’t his job to be moved, or to admire. It wasn’t the way to get home and bring the goods with him. And yet he was moved. There are times when you feel not to yield admiration, even to enemies, would be treason to all that is finest in life. He murmured, “You offered that sacrifice!”
“What woman wouldn’t—for Germany—if she knew all that I knew?” Her voice was not loud, but it had the brooding fervour that some women’s have when they bend and doat in ecstasy over a child. They stopped short on the flags. “Only listen!” she said, and he felt a detaining finger placed on his sleeve.
The unlighted streets had emptied. Silence was almost complete. Through it there rose to their ears the urgent whisper of a great river busy at its work, brushing a hundred piers and quays with the insistent swish of its voluminous stream. “The Rhine!” As she breathed the word she seemed to cling to it and caress it, as if just to utter it were a key giving entrance to gardens of felicity. “The Rhine and the vines and the forests and all the old, kind, simple life of brown, hard-working people in villages, and the songs and dear ways of our own.”
He muttered, “How could you do it?” He had a sister who would have done much for England, but some things were almost unthinkable.
“See,” she said more quietly, as a friend reasons with a friend. “My husband was killed in the month of our marriage. My two brothers were killed. I had no sister. My father and mother were dead. And we were losing the war, and my husband had said you could win any war if you only knew what your enemy had in his mind. And Judith had won a great war in that fearful way, and why shouldn’t I? But, oh! the horror of it—yes, you’re right, you understand—the thought of some foul lusting boar half-drunk, with his slobbery tusks. And then the miracle came and you were courteous and noble and delicate in your heart and your hands. Do you know what I wished—in my mind, secretly, when I thought you were English, I wished, with all the strength of my heart—of course, it was only a wild, fantastical wish—that some day that one Englishman—only just he—might be in a danger as deadly as mine was, and I then to help him.”
“You would have helped him?”
“Yes.”
“Even if his were the very same danger as yours?”
“You mean, if he——?”
“Yes—if he were in Germany, doing what you did in France? If you met him here, now, skulking about in disguise, and you suddenly saw who it was?” Some thirty paces away, across the dark square, a sentry in front of a building paced up and down on his post, with a smart little stamp of a foot at each about turn. “Would you call out to that sentry?” said Gresson.
He didn’t know why he was putting it to the touch and taking her at her word. We don’t know why we do many things that we do. Something other than reason, something below it, emits an imperious impulse that comes to the top like a bubble of air from the invisible bed of a pool. It must burst into action.
She saw in a moment what he was avowing. She stopped dead; she seemed to grow taller. He felt he had lost the great throw; he was done for—had tried to strike on something that might be responsible in her ferocious and generous mind, and had struck on the ferocity only. In the dark he could see her eyes burn at him like those of a beast crouching back in a cave. “You dared!” she said, with an intense quiet fury. “You dared to prostitute that uniform!—that Cross!”
The game was all but up. And one thing he could swear would not help him with her, and that was to whine. “
You dared worse, you brave woman,” he said. “You were shameless.”
For a second or two she said nothing, under his taunt. She stood perfectly still. The queer clear calm which extreme danger brings to some men had come on him now. He wondered almost tranquilly—was anything within her mind struggling with anything else? Had he a single friend left in that redoubtable citadel?
When she did speak, it was low and resentfully. “Why to God did you tell me?”
“God knows. I don’t,” he said, quite sincerely. “Perhaps because you had said things about yourself—frightfully intimate things. It feels better to give a bit back, in the confidence line, and not do all the taking. Sort of vanity, probably. Well, aren’t you calling that sentry?” He asked almost sharply, prompted by some inarticulate guide like a wrestler’s perception of when to shift his grip, or strain harder, or give for a moment.
She made some gesture—he couldn’t see what it was: he guessed it to mean she put off, for a few minutes more, his sentence of death. Her voice, when it did come, was almost a wail. “What possessed you to come? You!—a man, with clean fighting to do! A woman has nothing to use but cunning and sex. But a man! What need had you to turn spy? What devil possessed you?”
The Big Book of Espionage Page 14
