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Title: Ashenden: or, The British Agent
Author: Maugham, W. Somerset [William Somerset] (1874-1965)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Heinemann, 1961
Date first posted: 6 February 2016
Date last updated: 6 February 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1299

This ebook was produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  THE COLLECTED EDITION OF
  THE WORKS OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM





  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  ASHENDEN

  OR THE BRITISH AGENT



  HEINEMANN
  LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO




  FIRST PUBLISHED 1928

  REPRINTED 1928 (twice), 1929 (twice),
  1931, 1934, 1938, 1948 (twice),
  1950, 1951 (twice), 1956, 1961



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  BY THE WINDMILL PRESS LTD
  KINGSWOOD, SURREY




PREFACE

This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department
during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction.  Fact is a
poor story-teller.  It starts a story at haphazard, generally long
before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving
loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion.  It works up to an
interesting situation, and then leaves it in the air to follow an issue
that has nothing to do with the point; it has no sense of climax and
whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance.  There is a school
of novelists that looks upon this as the proper model for fiction.  If
life, they say, is arbitrary and disconnected, why, fiction should be
so too; for fiction should imitate life.  In life things happen at
random, and that is how they should happen in a story; they do not lead
to a climax, which is an outrage to probability, they just go on.
Nothing offends these people more than the punch or the unexpected
twist with which some writers seek to surprise their readers, and when
the circumstances they relate seem to tend towards a dramatic effect
they do their best to avoid it.  They do not give you a story, they
give you the material on which you can invent your own.  Sometimes it
consists of an incident presented, you might think, at haphazard, and
you are invited to divine its significance.  Sometimes they give you a
character and leave it at that.  They give you the materials for a dish
and expect you to do the cooking yourself.  Now this is one way like
another of writing stories and some very good stories have been written
in it.  Chekov used it with mastery.  It is more suitable for the very
short story than for the longer one.  The description of a mood, an
environment or an atmosphere, can hold your attention for half a dozen
pages, but when it comes to fifty a story needs a supporting skeleton.
The skeleton of a story is of course its plot.  Now a plot has certain
characteristics that you cannot get away from.  It has a beginning, a
middle and an end.  It is complete in itself.  It starts with a set of
circumstances which have consequences, but of which the causes may be
ignored; and these consequences, in their turn the cause of other
circumstances, are pursued till a point is reached when the reader is
satisfied that they are the cause of no further consequences that need
be considered.  This means that a story should begin at a certain point
and end at a certain point.  It should not wander along an uncertain
line, but follow, from exposition to climax, a bold and vigorous curve.
If you wanted to represent it diagrammatically you would draw a
semicircle.  It is very well to have the element of surprise, and this
punch, this unexpected twist, which the imitators of Chekov despise, is
only bad when it is badly done; when it is an integral part of the
story and its logical issue it is excellent.  There is nothing wrong in
a climax, it is a very natural demand of the reader; it is only wrong
if it does not follow naturally from the circumstances that have gone
before.  It is purely an affectation to elude it because in life as a
general rule things tail off ineffectively.

For it is quite unnecessary to treat as axiomatic the assertion that
fiction should imitate life.  It is merely a literary theory like
another.  There is in fact a second theory that is just as plausible,
and this is that fiction should use life merely as raw material which
it arranges in ingenious patterns.  You have a very good analogy in
painting.  The landscape painters of the seventeenth century were not
interested in the direct representation of nature, which to them was no
more than the occasion for a formal decoration.  They constructed a
scene architecturally, balancing for example the mass of a tree with
the mass of a cloud, and used light and shade to make a definite
pattern.  Their intention was not to portray a landscape but to create
a work of art.  It was a deliberate composition.  In their arrangement
of the facts of nature they were satisfied if they did not outrage the
spectator's sense of reality.  It was left for the Impressionists to
paint what they saw.  They tried to catch nature in its fleeting
beauty; they were content to render the radiance of sunlight, the
colour of shadows or the translucency of the air.  They aimed at truth.
They wanted a painter to be no more than an eye and a hand.  They
despised intelligence.  It is strange how empty their paintings look
now when you place them beside the stately pictures of Claude.  The
method of Claude is the method of that master of the short story Guy de
Maupassant.  It is a very good one and I have a notion that it will
survive the other.  Already it is getting a little difficult to care
much what middle-class Russians were like fifty years ago, and the
anecdote in Chekov's stories is not as a rule absorbing enough (as the
story of Paolo and Francesca or of Macbeth is absorbing) to hold your
attention apart from your interest in the people.  The method of which
I speak is that which chooses from life what is curious, telling and
dramatic; it does not seek to copy life, but keeps to it closely enough
not to shock the reader into disbelief; it leaves out this and changes
that; it makes a formal decoration out of such of the facts as it has
found convenient to deal with and presents a picture, the result of
artifice, which, because it represents the author's temperament, is to
a certain extent a portrait of himself, but which is designed to
excite, interest and absorb the reader.  If it is a success he accepts
it as true.

I have written all this in order to impress upon the reader that this
book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much more so than
several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the
last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs.  The work of an
agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely
monotonous.  A lot of it is uncommonly useless.  The material it offers
for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it
coherent, dramatic and probable.

In 1917 I went to Russia.  I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik
Revolution and to keep Russia in the war.  The reader will know that my
efforts did not meet with success.  I went to Petrograd from
Vladivostock.  One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped
at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch
water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs.
A blind soldier was sitting on a bench.  Other soldiers sat beside him
and more stood behind.  There were from twenty to thirty.  Their
uniforms were torn and stained.  The blind soldier, a big, vigorous
fellow, was quite young.  On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a
beard that has never been shaved.  I daresay he wasn't eighteen.  He
had a broad face, with flat, wide features; and on his forehead was a
great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight.  His closed eyes
gave him a strangely vacant look.  He began to sing.  His voice was
strong and sweet.  He accompanied himself on an accordion.  The train
waited on and he sang song after song.  I could not understand his
words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear
the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the
interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the
toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of
the ripe corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long
months of dark winter; and then the dancing of women in the villages
and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt
the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches
on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death.
It was horrible and deeply moving.  A cap lay at the singer's feet and
the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized
them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was
something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt
that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting
world.  He did not seem quite human.  The soldiers stood silent and
hostile.  Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the
travelling herd.  There was a disdainful anger on their side and
immeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was
but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.




ASHENDEN



I

R.

It was not till the beginning of September that Ashenden, a writer by
profession, who had been abroad at the outbreak of the war, managed to
get back to England.  He chanced soon after his arrival to go to a
party and was there introduced to a middle-aged Colonel whose name he
did not catch.  He had some talk with him.  As he was about to leave
this officer came up to him and asked:

"I say, I wonder if you'd mind coming to see me.  I'd rather like to
have a chat with you."

"Certainly," said Ashenden.  "Whenever you like."

"What about to-morrow at eleven?"

"All right."

"I'll just write down my address.  Have you a card on you?"

Ashenden gave him one and on this the Colonel scribbled in pencil the
name of a street and the number of a house.  When Ashenden walked along
next morning to keep his appointment he found himself in a street of
rather vulgar red-brick houses in a part of London that had once been
fashionable, but was now fallen in the esteem of the house-hunter who
wanted a good address.  On the house at which Ashenden had been asked
to call there was a board up to announce that it was for sale, the
shutters were closed and there was no sign that anyone lived in it.  He
rang the bell and the door was opened by a non-commissioned officer so
promptly that he was startled.  He was not asked his business, but led
immediately into a long room at the back, once evidently a dining-room,
the florid decoration of which looked oddly out of keeping with the
office furniture, shabby and sparse, that was in it.  It gave Ashenden
the impression of a room in which the brokers had taken possession.
The Colonel, who was known in the Intelligence Department, as Ashenden
later discovered, by the letter R., rose when he came in and shook
hands with him.  He was a man somewhat above the middle height, lean,
with a yellow, deeply-lined face, thin grey hair and a toothbrush
moustache.  The thing immediately noticeable about him was the
closeness with which his blue eyes were set.  He only just escaped a
squint.  They were hard and cruel eyes, and very wary; and they gave
him a cunning, shifty look.  Here was a man that you could neither like
nor trust at first sight.  His manner was pleasant and cordial.

He asked Ashenden a good many questions and then, without further
to-do, suggested that he had particular qualifications for the secret
service.  Ashenden was acquainted with several European languages and
his profession was excellent cover; on the pretext that he was writing
a book he could without attracting attention visit any neutral country.
It was while they were discussing this point that R. said:

"You know you ought to get material that would be very useful to you in
your work."

"I shouldn't mind that," said Ashenden.

"I'll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day and I can
vouch for its truth.  I thought at the time it would make a damned good
story.  One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a
cold and he had some very important documents with him that he kept in
a dispatch-case.  They were very important indeed.  Well, a day or two
after he arrived he picked up a yellow-haired lady at some restaurant
or other where there was dancing, and he got very friendly with her.
To cut a long story short, he took her back to his hotel--of course it
was a very imprudent thing to do--and when he came to himself in the
morning the lady and the dispatch-case had disappeared.  They had one
or two drinks up in his room and his theory is that when his back was
turned the woman slipped a drug into his glass."

R. finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close-set eyes.

"Dramatic, isn't it?" he asked.

"Do you mean to say that happened the other day?"

"The week before last."

"Impossible," cried Ashenden.  "Why, we've been putting that incident
on the stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels.
Do you mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?"

R. was a trifle disconcerted.

"Well, if necessary, I could give you names and dates, and believe me,
the Allies have been put to no end of trouble by the loss of the
documents that the dispatch-case contained."

"Well, sir, if you can't do better than that in the secret service,"
sighed Ashenden, "I'm afraid that as a source of inspiration to the
writer of fiction it's a washout.  We really can't write that story
much longer."

It did not take them long to settle things and when Ashenden rose to go
he had already made careful note of his instructions.  He was to start
for Geneva next day.  The last words that R. said to him, with a
casualness that made them impressive, were:

"There's just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on
this job.  And don't forget it.  If you do well you'll get no thanks
and if you get into trouble you'll get no help.  Does that suit you?"

"Perfectly."

"Then I'll wish you good afternoon."




II

_A Domiciliary Visit_

Ashenden was on his way back to Geneva.  The night was stormy and the
wind blew cold from the mountains, but the stodgy little steamer
plodded sturdily through the choppy waters of the lake.  A scudding
rain, just turning into sleet, swept the deck in angry gusts, like a
nagging woman who cannot leave a subject alone.  Ashenden had been to
France in order to write and dispatch a report.  A day or two before,
about five in the afternoon, an Indian agent of his had come to see him
in his rooms; it was only by a lucky chance that he was in, for he had
no appointment with him, and the agent's instructions were to come to
the hotel only in a case of urgent importance.  He told Ashenden that a
Bengali in the German service had recently come from Berlin with a
black cane trunk in which were a number of documents interesting to the
British Government.  At that time the Central Powers were doing their
best to foment such an agitation in India as would make it necessary
for Great Britain to keep their troops in the country and perhaps send
others from France.  It had been found possible to get the Bengali
arrested in Berne on a charge that would keep him out of harm's way for
a while, but the black cane trunk could not be found.  Ashenden's agent
was a very brave and very clever fellow and he mixed freely with such
of his countrymen as were disaffected to the interests of Great
Britain.  He had just discovered that the Bengali before going to Berne
had, for greater safety, left the trunk in the cloak-room at Zrich
Station, and now that he was in jail, awaiting trial, was unable to get
the _bulletin_ by which it might be obtained into the hands of any of
his confederates.  It was a matter of great urgency for the German
Intelligence Department to secure the contents of the trunk without
delay, and since it was impossible for them to get hold of it by the
ordinary official means, they had decided to break into the station
that very night and steal it.  It was a bold and ingenious scheme and
Ashenden felt a pleasant exhilaration (for a great deal of his work was
uncommonly dull) when he heard of it.  He recognised the dashing and
unscrupulous touch of the head of the German secret service at Berne.
But the burglary was arranged for two o'clock on the following morning
and there was not a moment to lose.  He could trust neither the
telegraph nor the telephone to communicate with the British officer at
Berne, and since the Indian agent could not go (he was taking his life
in his hands by coming to see Ashenden and if he were noticed leaving
his room it might easily be that he would be found one day floating in
the lake with a knife-thrust in his back), there was nothing for it but
to go himself.

There was a train to Berne that he could just catch and he put on his
hat and coat as he ran downstairs.  He jumped into a cab.  Four hours
later he rang the bell of the headquarters of the Intelligence
Department.  His name was known there but to one person, and it was for
him that Ashenden asked.  A tall tired-looking man, whom he had not met
before, came out and without a word led him into an office.  Ashenden
told him his errand.  The tall man looked at his watch.

"It's too late for us to do anything ourselves.  We couldn't possibly
get to Zrich in time."

He reflected.

"We'll put the Swiss authorities on the job.  They can telephone, and
when your friends attempt their little burglary, I have no doubt
they'll find the station well guarded.  Anyhow, you had better get back
to Geneva."

He shook hands with Ashenden and showed him out.  Ashenden was well
aware that he would never know what happened then.  Being no more than
a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, he never had the
advantage of seeing a completed action.  He was concerned with the
beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the
middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of
discovering.  It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give
you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them
together to construct in your mind a connected narrative.

Notwithstanding his fur coat and his muffler, Ashenden was chilled to
the bone.  It was warm in the saloon and there were good lights to read
by, but he thought it better not to sit there in case some habitual
traveller, recognising him, wondered why he made these constant
journeys between Geneva in Switzerland and Thonon in France; and so,
making the best of what shelter could be found, he passed the tedious
time in the darkness of the deck.  He looked in the direction of
Geneva, but could see no lights, and the sleet, turning into snow,
prevented him from recognising the landmarks.  Lake Leman, on fine days
so trim and pretty, artificial like a piece of water in a French
garden, in this tempestuous weather was as secret and as menacing as
the sea.  He made up his mind that, on getting back to his hotel, he
would have a fire lit in his sitting-room, a hot bath, and dinner
comfortably by the fireside in pyjamas and a dressing-gown.  The
prospect of spending an evening by himself with his pipe and a book was
so agreeable that it made the misery of that journey across the lake
positively worth while.  Two sailors tramped past him heavily, their
heads bent down to save themselves from the sleet that blew in their
faces, and one of them shouted to him: _Nous arrivons_; they went to
the side and withdrew a bar to allow passage for the gangway, and
looking again Ashenden through the howling darkness saw mistily the
lights of the quay.  A welcome sight.  In two or three minutes the
steamer was made fast and Ashenden, muffled to the eyes, joined himself
to the little knot of passengers that waited to step ashore.  Though he
made the journey so often--it was his duty to cross the lake into
France once a week to deliver his reports and to receive
instructions--he had always a faint sense of trepidation when he stood
among the crowd at the gangway and waited to land.  There was nothing
on his passport to show that he had been in France; the steamer went
round the lake touching French soil at two places, but going from
Switzerland to Switzerland, so that his journey might have been to
Vevey or to Lausanne; but he could never be sure that the secret police
had not taken note of him, and if he had been followed and seen to land
in France, the fact that there was no stamp on his passport would be
difficult to explain.  Of course he had his story ready, but he well
knew that it was not a very convincing one, and though it might be
impossible for the Swiss authorities to prove that he was anything but
a casual traveller, he might nevertheless spend two or three days in
jail, which would be uncomfortable, and then be firmly conducted to the
frontier, which would be mortifying.  The Swiss knew well that their
country was the scene of all manner of intrigues; agents of the secret
service, spies, revolutionaries and agitators infested the hotels of
the principal towns and, jealous of their neutrality, they were
determined to prevent conduct that might embroil them with any of the
belligerent powers.

There were as usual two police officers on the quay to watch the
passengers disembark and Ashenden, walking past them with as
unconcerned an air as he could assume, was relieved when he had got
safely by.  The darkness swallowed him up and he stepped out briskly
for his hotel.  The wild weather with a scornful gesture had swept all
the neatness from the trim promenade.  The shops were closed and
Ashenden passed only an occasional pedestrian who sidled along,
scrunched up, as though he fled from the blind wrath of the unknown.
You had a feeling in that black and bitter night that civilisation,
ashamed of its artificiality, cowered before the fury of elemental
things.  It was hail now that blew in Ashenden's face and the pavement
was wet and slippery so that he had to walk with caution.  The hotel
faced the lake.  When he reached it and a page-boy opened the door for
him, he entered the hall with a flurry of wind that sent the papers on
the porter's desk flying into the air.  Ashenden was dazzled by the
light.  He stopped to ask the porter if there were letters for him.
There was nothing, and he was about to get into the lift when the
porter told him that two gentlemen were waiting in his room to see him.
Ashenden had no friends in Geneva.

"Oh?" he answered, not a little surprised.  "Who are they?"

He had taken care to get on friendly terms with the porter and his tips
for trifling services had been generous.  The porter gave a discreet
smile.

"There is no harm in telling you.  I think they are members of the
police."

"What do they want?" asked Ashenden.

"They did not say.  They asked me where you were, and I told them you
had gone for a walk.  They said they would wait till you came back."

"How long have they been there?"

"An hour."

Ashenden's heart sank, but he took care not to let his face betray his
concern.

"I'll go up and see them," he said.  The liftman stood aside to let him
step into the lift, but Ashenden shook his head.  "I'm so cold," he
said, "I'll walk up."

He wished to give himself a moment to think, but as he ascended the
three flights slowly his feet were like lead.  There could be small
doubt why two police officers were so bent upon seeing him.  He felt on
a sudden dreadfully tired.  He did not feel he could cope with a
multitude of questions.  And if he were arrested as a secret agent he
must spend at least the night in a cell.  He longed more than ever for
a hot bath and a pleasant dinner by his fireside.  He had half a mind
to turn tail and walk out of the hotel, leaving everything behind him;
he had his passport in his pocket and he knew by heart the hours at
which trains started for the frontier: before the Swiss authorities had
made up their minds what to do he would be in safety.  But he continued
to trudge upstairs.  He did not like the notion of abandoning his job
so easily, he had been sent to Geneva, knowing the risks, to do work of
a certain kind, and it seemed to him that he had better go through with
it.  Of course it would not be very nice to spend two years in a Swiss
prison, but the chance of this was, like assassination to kings, one of
the inconveniences of his profession.  He reached the landing of the
third floor and walked to his room.  Ashenden had in him, it seems, a
strain of flippancy (on account of which, indeed, the critics had often
reproached him) and as he stood for a moment outside the door his
predicament appeared to him on a sudden rather droll.  His spirits went
up and he determined to brazen the thing out.  It was with a genuine
smile on his lips that he turned the handle and entering the room faced
his visitors.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said he.

The room was brightly lit, for all the lights were on, and a fire
burned in the hearth.  The air was grey with smoke, since the
strangers, finding it long to wait for him, had been smoking strong and
inexpensive cigars.  They sat in their great-coats and bowler-hats as
though they had only just that moment come in; but the ashes in the
little tray on the table would alone have suggested that they had been
long enough there to make themselves familiar with their surroundings.
They were two powerful men, with black moustaches, on the stout side,
heavily built, and they reminded Ashenden of Fafner and Fasolt, the
giants in _The Rhinegold_; their clumsy boots, the massive way they sat
in their chairs and the ponderous alertness of their expression, made
it obvious that they were members of the detective force.  Ashenden
gave his room an enveloping glance.  He was a neat creature and saw at
once that his things, though not in disorder, were not as he had left
them.  He guessed that an examination had been made of his effects.
That did not disturb him, for he kept in his room no document that
would compromise him; his code he had learned by heart and destroyed
before leaving England, and such communications as reached him from
Germany were handed to him by third parties and transmitted without
delay to the proper places.  There was nothing he need fear in a
search, but the impression that it had been made confirmed his
suspicion that he had been denounced to the authorities as a secret
agent.

"What can I do for you, gentlemen?" he asked affably.  "It's warm in
here, wouldn't you like to take off your coats--and hats?"

It faintly irritated him that they should sit there with their hats on.

"We're only staying a minute," said one of them.  "We were passing and
as the _concierge_ said you would be in at once, we thought we would
wait."

He did not remove his hat.  Ashenden unwrapped his scarf and
disembarrassed himself of his heavy coat.

"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked, offering the box to the two
detectives in turn.

"I don't mind if I do," said the first, Fafner, taking one, upon which
the second, Fasolt, helped himself without a word, even of thanks.

The name on the box appeared to have a singular effect on their
manners, for both now took off their hats.

"You must have had a very disagreeable walk in this bad weather," said
Fafner, as he bit half an inch off the end of his cigar and spat it in
the fire-place.

Now it was Ashenden's principle (a good one in life as well as in the
Intelligence Department) always to tell as much of the truth as he
conveniently could; so he answered as follows:

"What do you take me for?  I wouldn't go out in such weather if I could
help it.  I had to go to Vevey to-day to see an invalid friend and I
came back by boat.  It was bitter on the lake."

"We come from the police," said Fafner casually.

Ashenden thought they must consider him a perfect idiot if they
imagined he had not long discovered that, but it was not a piece of
information to which it was discreet to reply with a pleasantry.

"Oh, really," he said.

"Have you your passport on you?"

"Yes.  In these war-times I think a foreigner is wise always to keep
his passport on him."

"Very wise."

Ashenden handed the man the nice new passport which gave no information
about his movements other than that he had come from London three
months before and had since then crossed no frontier.  The detective
looked at it carefully and passed it on to his colleague.

"It appears to be all in order," he said.

Ashenden, standing in front of the fire to warm himself, a cigarette
between his lips, made no reply.  He watched the detectives warily, but
with an expression, he flattered himself, of amiable unconcern.  Fasolt
handed back the passport to Fafner, who tapped it reflectively with a
thick forefinger.

"The chief of police told us to come here," he said, and Ashenden was
conscious that both of them now looked at him with attention, "to make
a few enquiries of you."

Ashenden knew that when you have nothing apposite to say it is better
to hold your tongue; and when a man has made a remark that calls to his
mind for an answer, he is apt to find silence a trifle disconcerting.
Ashenden waited for the detective to proceed.  He was not quite sure,
but it seemed to him that he hesitated.

"It appears that there have been a good many complaints lately of the
noise that people make when they come out of the Casino late at night.
We wish to know if you personally have been troubled by the
disturbance.  It is evident that as your rooms look on the lake and the
revellers pass your windows, if the noise is serious, you must have
heard it."

For an instant Ashenden was dumbfounded.  What balderdash was this the
detective was talking to him (boom, boom, he heard the big drum as the
giant lumbered on the scene), and why on earth should the chief of
police send to him to find out if his beauty sleep had been disturbed
by vociferous gamblers?  It looked very like a trap.  But nothing is so
foolish as to ascribe profundity to what on the surface is merely
inept; it is a pitfall into which many an ingenuous reviewer has fallen
headlong.  Ashenden had a confident belief in the stupidity of the
human animal, which in the course of his life had stood him in good
stead.  It flashed across him that if the detective asked him such a
question it was because he had no shadow of proof that he was engaged
in any illegal practice.  It was clear that he had been denounced, but
no evidence had been offered, and the search of his rooms had been
fruitless.  But what a silly excuse was this to make for a visit and
what a poverty of invention it showed!  Ashenden immediately thought of
three reasons the detectives might have given for seeking an interview
with him and he wished that he were on terms sufficiently familiar with
them to make the suggestions.  This was really an insult to the
intelligence.  These men were even stupider than he thought; but
Ashenden had always a soft corner in his heart for the stupid and now
he looked upon them with a feeling of unexpected kindliness.  He would
have liked to pat them gently.  But he answered the question with
gravity.

"To tell you the truth, I am a very sound sleeper (the result doubtless
of a pure heart and an easy conscience), and I have never heard a
thing."

Ashenden looked at them for the faint smile that he thought his remark
deserved, but their countenances remained stolid.  Ashenden, as well as
an agent of the British Government, was a humorist, and he stifled the
beginnings of a sigh.  He assumed a slightly imposing air and adopted a
more serious tone.

"But even if I had been awakened by noisy people I should not dream of
complaining.  At a time when there is so much trouble, misery and
unhappiness in the world, I cannot but think it very wrong to disturb
the amusement of persons who are lucky enough to be able to amuse
themselves."

"_En effet_," said the detective.  "But the fact remains that people
have been disturbed and the chief of police thought the matter should
be enquired into."

His colleague, who had hitherto preserved a silence that was positively
sphinx-like, now broke it.

"I notice by your passport that you are an author, _monsieur_," he said.

Ashenden in reaction from his previous perturbation was feeling
exceedingly debonair and he answered with good humour:

"It is true.  It is a profession full of tribulation, but it has now
and then its compensations."

"_La gloire_," said Fafner politely.

"Or shall we say notoriety?" hazarded Ashenden.

"And what are you doing in Geneva?"

The question was put so pleasantly that Ashenden felt it behoved him to
be on his guard.  A police officer amiable is more dangerous to the
wise than a police officer aggressive.

"I am writing a play," said Ashenden.

He waved his hand to the papers on his table.  Four eyes followed his
gesture.  A casual glance told him that the detectives had looked and
taken note of his manuscripts.

"And why should you write a play here rather than in your own country?"

Ashenden smiled upon them with even more affability than before, since
this was a question for which he had long been prepared, and it was a
relief to give the answer.  He was curious to see how it would go down.

"_Mais, monsieur_, there is the war.  My country is in a turmoil, it
would be impossible to sit there quietly and write a play."

"Is it a comedy or a tragedy?"

"Oh, a comedy, and a light one at that," replied Ashenden.  "The artist
needs peace and quietness.  How do you expect him to preserve that
detachment of spirit that is demanded by creative work unless he can
have perfect tranquillity?  Switzerland has the good fortune to be
neutral, and it seemed to me that in Geneva I should find the very
surroundings I wanted."

Fafner nodded slightly to Fasolt, but whether to indicate that he
thought Ashenden an imbecile or whether in sympathy with his desire for
a safe retreat from a turbulent world, Ashenden had no means of
knowing.  Anyhow the detective evidently came to the conclusion that he
could learn nothing more from talking to Ashenden, for his remarks grew
now desultory and in a few minutes he rose to go.

When Ashenden, having warmly shaken their hands, closed the door behind
the pair he heaved a great sigh of relief.  He turned on the water for
his bath, as hot as he thought he could possibly bear it, and as he
undressed reflected comfortably over his escape.

The day before, an incident had occurred that had left him on his
guard.  There was in his service a Swiss, known in the Intelligence
Department as Bernard, who had recently come from Germany, and Ashenden
had instructed him to go to a certain caf desiring to see him, at a
certain time.  Since he had not seen him before, so that there might be
no mistake he had informed him through an intermediary what question
himself would ask and what reply he was to give.  He chose the luncheon
hour for the meeting, since then the caf was unlikely to be crowded
and it chanced that on entering he saw but one man of about the age he
knew Bernard to be.  He was by himself and going up to him Ashenden
casually put to him the pre-arranged question.  The pre-arranged answer
was given, and sitting down beside him, Ashenden ordered himself a
Dubonnet.  The spy was a stocky little fellow, shabbily dressed, with a
bullet-shaped head, close-cropped, fair, with shifty blue eyes and a
sallow skin.  He did not inspire confidence, and but that Ashenden knew
by experience how hard it was to find men willing to go into Germany he
would have been surprised that his predecessor had engaged him.  He was
a German-Swiss and spoke French with a strong accent.  He immediately
asked for his wages and these Ashenden passed over to him in an
envelope.  They were in Swiss francs.  He gave a general account of his
stay in Germany and answered Ashenden's careful questions.  He was by
calling a waiter and had found a job in a restaurant near one of the
Rhine bridges, which gave him good opportunity to get the information
that was required of him.  His reasons for coming to Switzerland for a
few days were plausible and there could apparently be no difficulty in
his crossing the frontier on his return.  Ashenden expressed his
satisfaction with his behaviour, gave him his orders and was prepared
to finish the interview.

"Very good," said Bernard.  "But before I go back to Germany I want two
thousand francs."

"Do you?"

"Yes, and I want them now, before you leave this caf.  It's a sum I
have to pay, and I've got to have it."

"I'm afraid I can't give it to you."

A scowl made the man's face even more unpleasant to look at than it was
before.

"You've got to."

"What makes you think that?"

The spy leaned forward and, not raising his voice, but speaking so that
only Ashenden could hear, burst out angrily:

"Do you think I'm going on risking my life for that beggarly sum you
give me?  Not ten days ago a man was caught at Mainz and shot.  Was
that one of your men?"

"We haven't got anyone at Mainz," said Ashenden, carelessly, and for
all he knew it was true.  He had been puzzled not to receive his usual
communications from that place and Bernard's information might afford
the explanation.  "You knew exactly what you were to get when you took
on the job, and if you weren't satisfied you needn't have taken it.  I
have no authority to give you a penny more."

"Do you see what I've got here?" said Bernard.

He took a small revolver out of his pocket and fingered it
significantly.

"What are you going to do with it?  Pawn it?"

With an angry shrug of the shoulders he put it back in his pocket.
Ashenden reflected that had he known anything of the technique of the
theatre Bernard would have been aware that it was useless to make a
gesture that had no ulterior meaning.

"You refuse to give me the money?"

"Certainly."

The spy's manner, which at first had been obsequious, was now somewhat
truculent, but he kept his head and never for a moment raised his
voice.  Ashenden could see that Bernard, however big a ruffian, was a
reliable agent, and he made up his mind to suggest to R. that his
salary should be raised.  The scene diverted him.  A little way off two
fat citizens of Geneva, with black beards, were playing dominoes, and
on the other side a young man with spectacles was with great rapidity
writing sheet after sheet of an immensely long letter.  A Swiss family
(who knows, perhaps Robinson by name), consisting of a father and
mother and four children, were sitting round a table making the best of
two small cups of coffee.  The _caissire_ behind the counter, an
imposing brunette with a large bust encased in black silk, was reading
the local paper.  The surroundings made the melodramatic scene in which
Ashenden was engaged perfectly grotesque.  His own play seemed to him
much more real.

Bernard smiled.  His smile was not engaging.

"Do you know that I have only to go to the police and tell them about
you to have you arrested?  Do you know what a Swiss prison is like?"

"No, I've often wondered lately.  Do you?"

"Yes, and you wouldn't much like it."

One of the things that had bothered Ashenden was the possibility that
he would be arrested before he finished his play.  He disliked the
notion of leaving it half done for an indefinite period.  He did not
know whether he would be treated as a political prisoner or as a common
criminal and he had a mind to ask Bernard whether in the latter case
(the only one Bernard was likely to know anything about) he would be
allowed writing materials.  He was afraid Bernard would think the
inquiry an attempt to laugh at him.  But he was feeling comparatively
at ease and was able to answer Bernard's threat without heat.

"You could of course get me sentenced to two years' imprisonment."

"At least."

"No, that is the maximum, I understand, and I think it is quite enough.
I won't conceal from you that I should find it extremely disagreeable.
But not nearly so disagreeable as you would."

"What could you do?"

"Oh, we'd get you somehow.  And after all, the war won't last for ever.
You are a waiter, you want your freedom of action.  I promise you that
if I get into any trouble, you will never be admitted into any of the
allied countries for the rest of your life.  I can't help thinking it
would cramp your style."

Bernard did not reply, but looked down sulkily at the marble-topped
table.  Ashenden thought this was the moment to pay for the drinks and
go.

"Think it over, Bernard," he said.  "If you want to go back to your
job, you have your instructions, and your usual wages shall be paid
through the usual channels."

The spy shrugged his shoulders, and Ashenden, though not knowing in the
least what was the result of their conversation, felt that it behoved
him to walk out with dignity.  He did so.

And now as he carefully put one foot into the bath, wondering if he
could bear it, he asked himself what Bernard had in the end decided on.
The water was just not scalding and he gradually let himself down into
it.  On the whole it seemed to him that the spy had thought it would be
as well to go straight, and the source of his denunciation must be
looked for elsewhere.  Perhaps in the hotel itself.  Ashenden lay back,
and as his body grew used to the heat of the water gave a sigh of
satisfaction.

"Really," he reflected, "there are moments in life when all this to-do
that has led from the primeval slime to myself seems almost worth
while."

Ashenden could not but think he was lucky to have wriggled out of the
fix he had found himself in that afternoon.  Had he been arrested and
in due course sentenced R., shrugging his shoulders, would merely have
called him a damned fool and set about looking for someone to take his
place.  Already Ashenden knew his chief well enough to be aware that
when he had told him that if he got into trouble he need look for no
help he meant exactly what he said.




III

_Miss King_

Ashenden, lying comfortably in his bath, was glad to think that in all
probability he would be able to finish his play in peace.  The police
had drawn a blank and though they might watch him from now on with some
care it was unlikely that they would take a further step until he had
at least roughed out his third act.  It behoved him to be prudent (only
a fortnight ago his colleague at Lausanne had been sentenced to a term
of imprisonment), but it would be foolish to be alarmed: his
predecessor in Geneva, seeing himself, with an exaggerated sense of his
own importance, shadowed from morning till night, had been so affected
by the nervous strain that it had been found necessary to withdraw him.
Twice a week Ashenden had to go to the market to receive instructions
that were brought to him by an old peasant woman from French Savoy who
sold butter and eggs.  She came in with the other market-women and the
search at the frontier was perfunctory.  It was barely dawn when they
crossed and the officials were only too glad to have done quickly with
these chattering noisy women and get back to their warm fires and their
cigars.  Indeed this old lady looked so bland and innocent, with her
corpulence, her fat red face, and her smiling good-natured mouth, it
would have been a very astute detective who could imagine that if he
took the trouble to put his hand deep down between those voluminous
breasts of hers, he would find a little piece or paper that would land
in the dock an honest old woman (who kept her son out of the trenches
by taking this risk) and an English writer approaching middle-age.
Ashenden went to the market about nine when the housewives of Geneva
for the most part had done their provisioning, stopped in front of the
basket by the side of which, rain or wind, hot or cold, sat that
indomitable creature and bought half a pound of butter.  She slipped
the note into his hand when he was given change for ten francs and he
sauntered away.  His only moment of risk was when he walked back to his
hotel with the paper in his pocket, and after this scare he made up his
mind to shorten as much as possible the period during which it could be
found on him.

Ashenden sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not
reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as
every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to
add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether.  On the
other hand he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to
empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find in
himself the will-power to step out of it like a man.  He had often
heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that
people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on
insufficient evidence: they had never seen him in a hot, but
diminishingly hot, bath.  His mind, however, wandered back to his play,
and telling himself jokes and repartees that he knew by bitter
experience would never look so neat on paper nor sound so well on the
stage as they did then, he abstracted his mind from the fact that his
bath was growing almost tepid, when he heard a knock at the door.
Since he did not want anyone to enter, he had the presence of mind not
to say "come in," but the knocking was repeated.

"Who is it?" he cried irascibly.

"A letter."

"Come in then.  Wait a minute."

Ashenden heard his bedroom-door open and getting out of the bath flung
a towel round him and went in.  A page-boy was waiting with a note.  It
needed only a verbal answer.  It was from a lady staying in the hotel
asking him to play bridge after dinner and was signed in the
continental fashion Baronne de Higgins.  Ashenden, longing for a cosy
meal in his own room, in slippers and with a book leaned up against a
reading-lamp, was about to refuse when it occurred to him that under
the circumstances it might be discreet to show himself in the
dining-room that night.  It was absurd to suppose that in that hotel
the news would not have spread that he had been visited by the police
and it would be as well to prove to his fellow-guests that he was not
disconcerted.  It had passed through his mind that it might be someone
in the hotel who had denounced him and indeed the name of the sprightly
baroness had not failed to suggest itself to him.  If it was she who
had given him away there would be a certain humour in playing bridge
with her.  He gave the boy a message that he would be pleased to come
and proceeded slowly to don his evening clothes.

The Baroness von Higgins was an Austrian, who on settling in Geneva
during the first winter of the war, had found it convenient to make her
name look as French as possible.  She spoke English and French
perfectly.  Her surname, so far from Teutonic, she owed to her
grandfather, a Yorkshire stable-boy, who had been taken over to Austria
by a Prince Blankenstein early in the nineteenth century.  He had had a
charming and romantic career; a very good-looking young man, he
attracted the attention of one of the arch-duchesses and then made such
good use of his opportunities that he ended his life as a baron and
minister plenipotentiary to an Italian court.  The baroness, his only
descendant, after an unhappy marriage, the particulars of which she was
fond of relating to her acquaintance, had resumed her maiden name.  She
mentioned not infrequently the fact that her grandfather had been an
ambassador, but never that he had been a stable-boy and Ashenden had
learned this interesting detail from Vienna; for as he grew friendly
with her he had thought it necessary to get a few particulars about her
past, and he knew among other things that her private income did not
permit her to live on the somewhat lavish scale on which she was living
in Geneva.  Since she had so many advantages for espionage, it was
fairly safe to suppose that an alert secret service had enlisted her
services and Ashenden took it for granted that she was engaged somehow
on the same kind of work as himself.  It increased if anything the
cordiality of his relations with her.

When he went into the dining-room it was already full.  He sat down at
his table and feeling jaunty after his adventure ordered himself (at
the expense of the British Government) a bottle of champagne.  The
baroness gave him a flashing, brilliant smile.  She was a woman of more
than forty, but in a hard and glittering manner extremely beautiful.
She was a high-coloured blonde with golden hair of a metallic lustre,
lovely no doubt but not attractive, and Ashenden had from the first
reflected that it was not the sort of hair you would like to find in
your soup.  She had fine features, blue eyes, a straight nose, and a
pink and white skin, but her skin was stretched over her bones a trifle
tightly; she was generously _dcollett_ and her white and ample bosom
had the quality of marble.  There was nothing in her appearance to
suggest the yielding tenderness that the susceptible find so alluring.
She was magnificently gowned, but scantily bejewelled, so that
Ashenden, who knew something of these matters, concluded that the
superior authority had given her _carte blanche_ at a dressmaker's but
had not thought it prudent or necessary to provide her with rings or
pearls.  She was notwithstanding so showy that but for R.'s story of
the minister, Ashenden would have thought the sight of her alone must
have aroused in anyone on whom she desired to exercise her wiles, the
sense of prudence.

While he waited for his dinner to be served, Ashenden cast his eyes
over the company.  Most of the persons gathered were old friends by
sight.  At that time Geneva was a hot-bed of intrigue and its home was
the hotel at which Ashenden was staying.  There were Frenchmen there,
Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks and Egyptians.  Some
had fled their country, some doubtless represented it.  There was a
Bulgarian, an agent of Ashenden's, whom for greater safety he had never
even spoken to in Geneva; he was dining that night with two
fellow-countrymen and in a day or so, if he was not killed in the
interval, might have a very interesting communication to make.  Then
there was a little German prostitute, with china-blue eyes and a
doll-like face, who made frequent journeys along the lake and up to
Berne, and in the exercise of her profession got little titbits of
information over which doubtless they pondered with deliberation in
Berlin.  She was of course of a different class from the baroness and
hunted much easier game.  But Ashenden was surprised to catch sight of
Count von Holzminden and wondered what on earth he was doing there.
This was the German agent in Vevey and he came over to Geneva only on
occasion.  Once Ashenden had seen him in the old quarter of the city,
with its silent houses and deserted streets, talking at a corner to a
man whose appearance very much suggested the spy and he would have
given a great deal to hear what they said to one another.  It had
amused him to come across the Count, for in London before the war he
had known him fairly well.  He was of great family and indeed related
to the Hohenzollerns.  He was fond of England; he danced well, rode
well and shot well; people said he was more English than the English.
He was a tall, thin fellow, in well-cut clothes, with a close-cropped
Prussian head, and that peculiar bend of the body as though he were
just about to bow to a royalty that you feel, rather than see, in those
who have spent their lives about a court.  He had charming manners and
was much interested in the Fine Arts.  But now Ashenden and he
pretended they had never seen one another before.  Each of course knew
on what work the other was engaged and Ashenden had had a mind to chaff
him about it--it seemed absurd when he had dined with a man off and on
for years and played cards with him, to act as though he did not know
him from Adam--but refrained in case the German looked upon his
behaviour as further proof of the British frivolity in face of war.
Ashenden was perplexed Holzminden had never set foot in that hotel
before and it was unlikely that he had done so now without good reason.

Ashenden asked himself whether this event had anything to do with the
unusual presence in the dining-room of Prince Ali.  At that juncture it
was imprudent to ascribe any occurrence, however accidental it looked,
to the hazard of coincidence.  Prince Ali was an Egyptian, a near
relation of the Khedive, who had fled his country when the Khedive was
deposed.  He was a bitter enemy of the English and was known to be
actively engaged in stirring up trouble in Egypt.  The week before, the
Khedive in great secrecy had passed three days at the hotel and the
pair of them had held constant meetings in the Prince's apartments.  He
was a little fat man with a heavy black moustache.  He was living with
his two daughters and a certain Pasha, Mustapha by name, who was his
secretary and managed his affairs.  The four of them were now dining
together; they drank a great deal of champagne, but sat in a stolid
silence.  The two princesses were emancipated young women who spent
their nights dancing in restaurants with the bloods of Geneva.  They
were short and stout, with fine black eyes and heavy sallow faces; and
they were dressed with a rich loudness that suggested the Fish-market
at Cairo rather than the Rue de la Paix.  His Highness usually ate
upstairs but the princesses dined every evening in the public
dining-room: they were chaperoned vaguely by a little old Englishwoman,
a Miss King, who had been their governess; but she sat at a table by
herself and they appeared to pay no attention to her.  Once Ashenden,
going along a corridor, had come upon the elder of the two fat
princesses berating the governess in French with a violence that took
his breath away.  She was shouting at the top of her voice and suddenly
smacked the old woman's face.  When she caught sight of Ashenden she
gave him a furious look and flinging into her room slammed the door.
He walked on as though he had noticed nothing.

On his arrival Ashenden had tried to scrape acquaintance with Miss
King, but she had received his advances not merely with frigidity but
with churlishness.  He had begun by taking off his hat when he met her,
and she had given him a stiff bow, then he had addressed her and she
had answered with such brevity that it was evident that she wished to
have nothing much to do with him.  But it was not his business to be
discouraged, so with what assurance he could muster he took the first
opportunity to enter into conversation with her.  She drew herself up
and said in French, but with an English accent:

"I don't wish to make acquaintance with strangers."

She turned her back on him and next time he saw her, cut him dead.

She was a tiny old woman, just a few little bones in a bag of wrinkled
skin, and her face was deeply furrowed.  It was obvious that she wore a
wig, it was of a mousy brown, very elaborate and not always set quite
straight, and she was heavily made up, with great patches of scarlet on
her withered cheeks and brilliantly red lips.  She dressed
fantastically in gay clothes that looked as though they had been bought
higgledy-piggledy from an old-clothes shop and in the daytime she wore
enormous, extravagantly girlish hats.  She tripped along in very small
smart shoes with very high heels.  Her appearance was so grotesque that
it created consternation rather than amusement.  People turned in the
street and stared at her with open mouths.

Ashenden was told that Miss King had not been to England since she was
first engaged as governess of the prince's mother and he could not but
be amazed to think of all she must have seen during those long years in
the harems of Cairo.  It was impossible to guess how old she was.  How
many of those short Eastern lives must have run their course under her
eyes and what dark secrets must she have known!  Ashenden wondered
where she came from; an exile from her own country for so long, she
must possess in it neither family nor friends: he knew that her
sentiments were anti-English and if she had answered him so rudely he
surmised that she had been told to be on her guard against him.  She
never spoke anything but French.  Ashenden wondered what it was she
thought of as she sat there, for luncheon and dinner, by herself.  He
wondered if she ever read.  After meals she went straight upstairs and
was never seen in the public sitting-rooms.  He wondered what she
thought of those two emancipated princesses who wore garish frocks and
danced with strange men in second-rate cafs.  But when Miss King
passed him on her way out of the dining-room it seemed to Ashenden that
her mask of a face scowled.  She appeared actively to dislike him.  Her
gaze met his and the pair of them looked at one another for a moment;
he imagined that she tried to put into her stare an unspoken insult.
It would have been pleasantly absurd in that painted, withered visage
if it had not been for some reason rather oddly pathetic.

But now the Baroness de Higgins, having finished her dinner, gathered
up her handkerchief and her bag, and with waiters bowing on either side
sailed down the spacious room.  She stopped at Ashenden's table.  She
looked magnificent.

"I'm so glad you can play bridge to-night," she said in her perfect
English, with no more than a trace of German accent.  "Will you come to
my sitting-room when you are ready and have your coffee?"

"What a lovely dress," said Ashenden.

"It is frightful.  I have nothing to wear, I don't know what I shall do
now that I cannot go to Paris.  Those horrible Prussians," and her r's
grew guttural as she raised her voice, "why did they want to drag my
poor country into this terrible war?"

She gave a sigh, and a flashing smile, and sailed on.  Ashenden was
among the last to finish and when he left the dining-room it was almost
empty.  As he walked past Count Holzminden, Ashenden feeling very gay
hazarded the shadow of a wink.  The German agent could not be quite
sure of it and if he suspected it might rack his brains to discover
what mystery it portended.  Ashenden walked up to the second floor and
knocked at the baroness's door.

"_Entrez, entrez_," she said and flung it open.

She shook both his hands with cordiality and drew him into the room.
He saw that the two persons who were to make the four had already
arrived.  They were Prince Ali and his secretary.  Ashenden was
astounded.

"Allow me to introduce Mr. Ashenden to your Highness," said the
baroness, speaking in her fluent French.

Ashenden bowed and took the proffered hand.  The Prince gave him a
quick look, but did not speak.  Madame de Higgins went on:

"I do not know if you have met the Pasha."

"I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ashenden," said the
Prince's secretary, warmly shaking his hand.  "Our beautiful baroness
has talked to us of your bridge and His Highness is devoted to the
game.  _N'est-ce pas, Altesse_?"

"_Oui, oui_," said the Prince.

Mustapha Pasha was a huge fat fellow, of forty-five perhaps, with large
mobile eyes and a big black moustache.  He wore a dinner-jacket with a
large diamond in his shirt-front and the _tarboosh_ of his country.  He
was exceedingly voluble, and the words tumbled out of his mouth
tumultuously, like marbles out of a bag.  He took pains to be extremely
civil to Ashenden.  The Prince sat in silence, looking at Ashenden
quietly from under his heavy eyelids.  He seemed shy.

"I have not seen you at the club, _Monsieur_," said the Pasha.  "Do you
not like baccarat?"

"I play but seldom."

"The baroness, who has read everything, tells me that you are a
remarkable writer.  Unfortunately I do not read English."

The baroness paid Ashenden some very fulsome compliments, to which he
listened with a proper and grateful politeness, and then, having
provided her guests with coffee and liqueurs, she produced the cards.
Ashenden could not but wonder why he had been asked to play.  He had
(he flattered himself) few illusions about himself, and so far as
bridge was concerned none.  He knew that he was a good player of the
second class, but he had played often enough with the best players in
the world to know that he was not in the same street with them.  The
game played now was contract, with which he was not very familiar, and
the stakes were high; but the game was obviously but a pretext and
Ashenden had no notion what other game was being played under the rose.
It might be that knowing he was a British agent the Prince and his
secretary had desired to see him in order to find out what sort of
person he was.  Ashenden had felt for a day or two that something was
in the air and this meeting confirmed his suspicions, but he had not
the faintest notion of what nature this something was.  His spies had
told him of late nothing that signified.  He was now persuaded that he
owed that visit of the Swiss police to the kindly intervention of the
baroness and it looked as though the bridge-party had been arranged
when it was discovered that the detectives had been able to do nothing.
The notion was mysterious, but diverting, and as Ashenden played one
rubber after another, joining in the incessant conversation, he watched
what was said by himself no less closely than what was said by the
others.  The war was spoken of a good deal and the baroness and the
Pasha expressed very anti-German sentiments.  The baroness's heart was
in England whence her family (the stable-boy from Yorkshire) had sprung
and the Pasha looked upon Paris as his spiritual home.  When the Pasha
talked of Montmartre and its life by night the Prince was roused from
his silence.

"_C'est une bien belle ville, Paris_," he said.

"The Prince has a beautiful apartment there," said his secretary, "with
beautiful pictures and life-sized statues."

Ashenden explained that he had the greatest sympathy for the national
aspirations of Egypt and that he looked upon Vienna as the most
pleasing capital in Europe.  He was as friendly to them as they were to
him.  But if they were under the impression that they would get any
information out of him that they had not already seen in the Swiss
papers he had a notion that they were mistaken.  At one moment he had a
suspicion that he was being sounded upon the possibility of selling
himself.  It was done so discreetly that he could not be quite sure,
but he had a feeling that a suggestion floated in the air that a clever
writer could do his country a good turn and make a vast amount of money
for himself if he cared to enter into an arrangement that would bring
to a troubled world the peace that every humane man must so sincerely
desire.  It was plain that nothing very much would be said that first
evening, but Ashenden as evasively as he could, more by general
amiability than by words, tried to indicate that he was willing to hear
more of the subject.  While he talked with the Pasha and the beautiful
Austrian he was conscious that the watchful eyes of Prince Ali were
upon him, and he had an uneasy suspicion that they read too much of his
thoughts.  He felt rather than knew that the Prince was an able and
astute man.  It was possible that after he left them the Prince would
tell the other two that they were wasting their time and there was
nothing to be done with Ashenden.  Soon after midnight, a rubber having
been finished, the Prince rose from the table.

"It is getting late," he said, "and Mr. Ashenden has doubtless much to
do to-morrow.  We must not keep him up."

Ashenden looked upon this as a signal to take himself off.  He left the
three together to discuss the situation and retired not a little
mystified.  He could only trust that they were no less puzzled than he.
When he got to his room he suddenly realised that he was dog-tired.  He
could hardly keep his eyes open while he undressed, and the moment he
flung himself into bed he fell asleep.

He would have sworn that he had not been asleep five minutes when he
was dragged back to wakefulness by a knocking at the door.  He listened
for a moment.

"Who is it?"

"It's the maid.  Open.  I have something to say to you."

Cursing, Ashenden turned on his light, ran a hand through his thinning
and rumpled hair (for like Julius Csar he disliked exposing an
unbecoming baldness) and unlocked and opened the door.  Outside it
stood a tousled Swiss maid.  She wore no apron and looked as though she
had thrown on her clothes in a hurry.

"The old English lady, the governess of the Egyptian princesses, is
dying and she wants to see you."

"Me?" said Ashenden.  "It's impossible.  I don't know her.  She was all
right this evening."

He was confused and spoke his thoughts as they came to him.

"She asks for you.  The doctor says, will you come?  She cannot last
much longer."

"It must be a mistake.  She can't want me."

"She said your name and the number of your room.  She says: quick,
quick."

Ashenden shrugged his shoulders.  He went back into his room to put on
slippers and a dressing-gown, and as an after-thought dropped a small
revolver into his pocket.  Ashenden believed much more in his acuteness
than in a firearm, which is apt to go off at the wrong time and make a
noise, but there are moments when it gives you confidence to feel your
fingers round its butt, and this sudden summons seemed to him
exceedingly mysterious.  It was ridiculous to suppose that those two
cordial stout Egyptian gentlemen were laying some sort of trap for him,
but in the work upon which Ashenden was engaged the dullness of routine
was apt now and again to slip quite shamelessly into the melodrama of
the 'sixties.  Just as passion will make use brazenly of the hackneyed
phrase, so will chance show itself insensitive to the triteness of the
literary convention.

Miss King's room was two floors higher than Ashenden's, and as he
accompanied the chamber-maid along the corridor and up the stairs he
asked her what was the matter with the old governess.  She was flurried
and stupid.

"I think she has had a stroke.  I don't know.  The night-porter woke me
and said Monsieur Bridet wanted me to get up at once."

Monsieur Bridet was the assistant-manager.

"What is the time?" asked Ashenden.

"It must be three o'clock."

They arrived at Miss King's door and the maid knocked.  It was opened
by Monsieur Bridet.  He had evidently been roused from his sleep; he
wore slippers on his bare feet, grey trousers and a frock-coat over his
pyjamas.  He looked absurd.  His hair as a rule plastered neatly on his
head stood on end.  He was extremely apologetic.

"A thousand excuses for disturbing you, Monsieur Ashenden, but she kept
asking for you and the doctor said you should be sent for."

"It doesn't matter at all."

Ashenden walked in.  It was a small back room and all the lights were
on.  The windows were closed and the curtains drawn.  It was intensely
hot.  The doctor, a bearded, grizzled Swiss, was standing at the
bedside.  Monsieur Bridet, notwithstanding his costume and his evident
harassment, found in himself the presence of mind to remain the
attentive manager, and with ceremony effected the proper introduction.

"This is Mr. Ashenden, for whom Miss King has been asking Dr. Arbos of
the Faculty of Medicine of Geneva."

Without a word the doctor pointed to the bed.  On it lay Miss King.  It
gave Ashenden a shock to look at her.  She wore a large white cotton
night-cap (on entering Ashenden had noticed the brown wig on a stand on
the dressing-table) tied under the chin and a white, voluminous
nightdress that came high up in the neck.  Nightcap and nightdress
belonged to a past age and reminded you of Cruikshank's illustrations
to the novels of Charles Dickens.  Her face was greasy still with the
cream she had used before going to bed to remove her make-up, but she
had removed it summarily and there were streaks of black on her
eyebrows and of red on her cheeks.  She looked very small, lying in the
bed, no larger than a child, and immensely old.

"She must be well over eighty," thought Ashenden.

She did not look human, but like a doll, the caricature of an old, old
witch that an ironic toymaker had amused himself with modelling.  She
lay perfectly still on her back, the tiny little body hardly marked
under the flatness of the blanket, her face even smaller than usual
because she had removed her teeth; and you would have thought she was
dead but for the black eyes, strangely large in the shrunken mask, that
stared unblinkingly.  Ashenden thought their expression changed when
she saw him.

"Well, Miss King, I'm sorry to see you like this," he said with forced
cheerfulness.

"She cannot speak," said the doctor.  "She had another little stroke
when the maid went to fetch you.  I have just given her an injection.
She may partly recover the use of her tongue in a little while.  She
has something to say to you."

"I will gladly wait," said Ashenden.

He fancied that in those dark eyes he saw a look of relief.  For a
moment or two the four of them stood round the bed and stared at the
dying woman.

"Well, if there is nothing I can do, I may just as well go back to
bed," said Monsieur Bridet then.

"_Allez, mon ami_," said the doctor.  "You can do nothing."

Monsieur Bridet turned to Ashenden.

"May I have a word with you?" he asked.

"Certainly."

The doctor noticed a sudden fear in Miss King's eyes.

"Do not be alarmed," he said kindly.  "Monsieur Ashenden is not going.
He will stay as long as you wish."

The assistant-manager took Ashenden to the door and partly closed it so
that those within should not hear his undertones.

"I can count on your discretion, Monsieur Ashenden, can I not?  It is a
very disagreeable thing to have anyone die in a hotel.  The other
guests do not like it and we must do all we can to prevent their
knowing.  I shall have the body removed the first possible moment and I
shall be extremely obliged if you will not say that there has been a
death."

"You can have every confidence in me," said Ashenden.

"It is very unfortunate that the manager should be away for the night.
I am afraid he will be exceedingly displeased.  Of course if it had
been possible I would have sent for an ambulance and had her taken to
the hospital, but the doctor said she might die before we got her
downstairs and absolutely refused to let me.  It is not my fault if she
dies in the hotel."

"Death so often chooses its moments without consideration."  murmured
Ashenden.

"After all she is an old woman, she should have died years ago.  What
did this Egyptian prince want to have a governess of that age for?  He
ought to have sent her back to her own country.  These Orientals, they
are always giving trouble."

"Where is the Prince now?" asked Ashenden.  "She has been in his
service for many years.  Ought you not to wake him?"

"He is not in the hotel.  He went out with his secretary.  He may be
playing baccarat.  I do not know.  Anyhow I cannot send all over Geneva
to find him."

"And the princesses?"

"They have not come in.  They seldom return to the hotel till dawn.
They are mad about dancing.  I do not know where they are and in any
case they would not thank me for dragging them away from their
diversions, because their governess has had a stroke, I know what they
are.  The night-porter will tell them when they arrive and then they
can please themselves.  She does not want them.  When the night-porter
fetched me and I went into her room I asked where his highness was and
she cried with all her strength: no, no."

"She could talk then?"

"Yes, after a fashion, but the thing that surprised me was that she
spoke in English.  She always insisted on talking French.  You know,
she hated the English."

"What did she want with me?"

"That I cannot tell you.  She said she had something that she must say
to you at once.  It is funny, she knew the number of your room.  At
first when she asked for you I would not let them send.  I cannot have
my clients disturbed in the middle of the night because a crazy old
woman asks for them.  You have the right to your sleep, I imagine.  But
when the doctor came he insisted.  She gave us no peace and when I said
she must wait till morning she cried."

Ashenden looked at the assistant-manager.  He seemed to find nothing at
all touching in the scene he related.

"The doctor asked who you were and when I told him he said that perhaps
she wished to see you because you were a compatriot."

"Perhaps," said Ashenden dryly.

"Well, I shall try to get a little sleep.  I shall give the
night-porter orders to wake me when everything is over.  Fortunately
the nights are long now and if everything goes well we may be able to
get the body away before it is light."

Ashenden went back into the room and immediately the dark eyes of the
dying woman fixed upon him.  He felt that it was incumbent upon him to
say something, but as he spoke he reflected on the foolish way in which
one speaks to the sick.

"I'm afraid you're feeling very ill, Miss King."

It seemed to him that a flash of anger crossed her eyes and Ashenden
could not but imagine that she was exasperated by his futile words.

"You do not mind waiting?" asked the doctor.

"Of course not."

It appeared that the night-porter had been roused by the ringing of the
telephone from Miss King's room, but on listening could get no one to
speak.  The bell continued to ring, so he went upstairs and knocked at
the door.  He entered with his pass-key and found Miss King lying on
the floor.  The telephone had fallen too.  It looked as though, feeling
ill, she had taken off the receiver to call for help and then
collapsed.  The night-porter hurried to fetch the assistant-manager and
together they had lifted her back into bed.  Then the maid was wakened
and the doctor sent for.  It gave Ashenden a queer feeling to listen to
the doctor giving him these facts in Miss King's hearing.  He spoke as
though she could not understand his French.  He spoke as though she
were already dead.

Then the doctor said:

"Well, there is really nothing more that I can do.  It is useless for
me to stay.  I can be rung up if there is any change."

Ashenden, knowing that Miss King might remain in that condition for
hours, shrugged his shoulders.

"Very well."

The doctor patted her raddled cheek as though she were a child.

"You must try to sleep.  I will come back in the morning."

He packed up the dispatch-case in which he had his medical appliances,
washed his hands and shuffled himself into a heavy coat.  Ashenden
accompanied him to the door and as he shook hands the doctor gave his
prognosis in a pout of his bearded mouth.  Ashenden, coming back,
looked at the maid.  She sat on the edge of a chair, uneasily, as
though in the presence of death she feared to presume.  Her broad, ugly
face was bloated with fatigue.

"There's no use in your staying up," Ashenden said to her.  "Why don't
you go to bed?"

"_Monsieur_ wouldn't like to remain here alone.  Somebody must stay
with him."

"But good heavens, why?  You have your day's work to do to-morrow."

"In any case I have to get up at five."

"Then try to get a little sleep now.  You can give me a look in when
you get up.  _Allez_."

She rose heavily to her feet.

"As the gentleman wishes.  But I will stay very willingly."

Ashenden smiled and shook his head.

"_Bonsoir, ma pauvre mademoiselle_," said the maid.

She went out and Ashenden was left alone.  He sat by the bedside and
again his eyes met Miss King's.  It was embarrassing to encounter that
unshrinking stare.

"Don't worry yourself, Miss King.  You've had a slight stroke.  I'm
sure your speech will come back to you in a minute."

He felt certain then that he saw in those dark eyes a desperate effort
to speak.  He could not be mistaken.  The mind was shaken by desire,
but the paralysed body was incapable of obedience.  For her
disappointment expressed itself quite plainly, tears came to her eyes
and ran down her cheeks.  Ashenden took out his handkerchief and dried
them.

"Don't distress yourself, Miss King.  Have a little patience and I'm
sure you'll be able to say anything you want."

He did not know if it was his fancy that he read in her eyes now the
despairing thought that she had not the time to wait.  Perhaps it was
only that he ascribed to her the notions that came to himself.  On the
dressing-table were the governess's poor little toilet things,
silver-backed embossed brushes and a silver mirror; in a corner stood a
shabby black trunk and on the top of the wardrobe a large hat-box in
shiny leather.  It all looked poor and mean in that trim hotel room,
with its suite in highly varnished rose-wood.  The glare was
intolerable.

"Wouldn't you be more comfortable if I turned out some of the lights?"
asked Ashenden.

He put out all the lamps but the one by the bedside and then sat down
again.  He had a longing to smoke.  Once more his eyes were held by
those other eyes in which was all that remained alive of that old, old
woman.  He felt certain that she had something that she wanted urgently
to say to him.  But what was it?  What was it?  Perhaps she had asked
him only because, feeling death near, she had had a sudden yearning,
she the exile of so many years, to die with someone of her own people,
so long forgotten, by her side.  That was what the doctor thought.  But
why should she have sent for him?  There were other English people in
the hotel.  There was an old pair, a retired Indian Civilian and his
wife, to whom it seemed more natural that she should turn.  No one
could be more of a stranger to her than Ashenden.

"Have you got something to say to me, Miss King?"

He tried to read an answer in her eyes.  They continued to stare at him
meaningly, but what the meaning was he had no notion.

"Don't be afraid I shall go.  I will stay as long as you want me."

Nothing, nothing.  The black eyes, and as he looked at them they seemed
to glow mysteriously as though there were fire behind them, the eyes
continued to hold him with that insistent stare.  Then Ashenden asked
himself if she had sent for him because she knew that he was a British
agent.  Was it possible that at that last moment she had had some
unexpected revulsion of feeling from everything that had signified to
her for so many years?  Perhaps at the moment of death a love for her
country, a love that had been dead for half a century, awakened again
in her--("I'm silly to fancy these idiotic things," thought Ashenden,
"it's cheap and tawdry fiction")--and she had been seized with a desire
to do something for what was after all her own.  No one was quite
himself just then and patriotism (in peace-time an attitude best left
to politicians, publicists and fools, but in the dark days of war an
emotion that can wring the heart-strings), patriotism made one do odd
things.  It was curious that she had been unwilling to see the Prince
and his daughters.  Did she on a sudden hate them?  Did she feel
herself a traitor on their account and now at the last hour wish to
make amends?  ("It's all very improbable, she's just a silly old maid
who ought to have died years ago.")  But you couldn't ignore the
improbable.  Ashenden, his common sense protesting, became strangely
convinced that she had some secret that she wished to impart to him.
She had sent for him knowing who he was because he could make use of
it.  She was dying and feared nothing.  But was it really important?
Ashenden leaned forward trying more eagerly to read what her eyes had
to say.  Perhaps it was only some trivial thing that was important only
in her addled old brain.  Ashenden was sick of the people who saw spies
in every inoffensive passer-by and plots in the most innocent
combination of circumstances.  It was a hundred to one that if Miss
King recovered her speech she would tell him something that could be of
no use to anybody.

But what must that old woman know!  With her sharp eyes and sharp ears
she must have had the chance to discover matters that were closely
hidden from persons that seemed less insignificant.  Ashenden thought
again how he had had the impression that something of real consequence
was being prepared round about him.  It was curious that Holzminden
should have come to the hotel that day; and why had Prince Ali and the
Pasha, those wild gamblers, wasted an evening in playing
contract-bridge with him?  It might be that some new plan was in
question, it might be that the very greatest affairs were afoot, and
perhaps what the old woman had to say might make all the difference in
the world.  It might mean defeat or victory.  It might mean anything.
And there she lay powerless to speak.  For a long time Ashenden stared
at her in silence.

"Has it got anything to do with the war, Miss King?" he said on a
sudden, loudly.

Something passed through her eyes and a tremor shot across her little
old face.  It was a distinct movement.  Something strange and horrible
was happening and Ashenden held his breath.  The tiny frail body was
suddenly convulsed and that old woman, as though by a final desperate
effort of will, raised herself up in the bed.  Ashenden sprang forward
to support her.

"England," she said, just that one word, in a harsh cracked voice, and
fell back in his arms.

When he laid her down on the pillow, he saw that she was dead.




IV

_The Hairless Mexican_

"Do you like macaroni?" said R.

"What do you mean by macaroni?" answered Ashenden.  "It is like asking
me if I like poetry.  I like Keats and Wordsworth and Verlaine and
Goethe.  When you say macaroni, do you mean _spaghetti, tagliatelli,
rigatoni, vermicelli, fettucini, tufali, farfalli_, or just macaroni?"

"Macaroni," replied R., a man of few words.

"I like all simple things, boiled eggs, oysters and caviare, _truite au
bleu_, grilled salmon, roast lamb (the saddle by preference), cold
grouse, treacle tart and rice pudding.  But of all simple things the
only one I can eat day in and day out, not only without disgust but
with the eagerness of an appetite unimpaired by excess, is macaroni."

"I am glad of that because I want you to go down to Italy."

Ashenden had come from Geneva to meet R. at Lyons and having got there
before him had spent the afternoon wandering about the dull, busy and
prosaic streets of that thriving city.  They were sitting now in a
restaurant on the _place_ to which Ashenden had taken R. on his arrival
because it was reputed to give you the best food in that part of
France.  But since in so crowded a resort (for the Lyonese like a good
dinner) you never knew what inquisitive ears were pricked up to catch
any useful piece of information that might fall from your lips, they
had contented themselves with talking of indifferent things.  They had
reached the end of an admirable repast.

"Have another glass of brandy?" said R.

"No, thank you," answered Ashenden, who was of an abstemious turn.

"One should do what one can to mitigate the rigours of war," remarked
R. as he took the bottle and poured out a glass for himself and another
for Ashenden.

Ashenden, thinking it would be affectation to protest, let the gesture
pass, but felt bound to remonstrate with his chief on the unseemly
manner in which he held the bottle.

"In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the
waist and a bottle by the neck," he murmured.

"I am glad you told me.  I shall continue to hold a bottle by the waist
and give women a wide berth."

Ashenden did not know what to reply to this and so remained silent.  He
sipped his brandy and R. called for his bill.  It was true that he was
an important person, with power to make or mar quite a large number of
his fellows, and his opinions were listened to by those who held in
their hands the fate of empires; but he could never face the business
of tipping a waiter without an embarrassment that was obvious in his
demeanour.  He was tortured by the fear of making a fool of himself by
giving too much or of exciting the waiter's icy scorn by giving too
little.  When the bill came he passed some hundred-franc notes over to
Ashenden and said:

"Pay him, will you?  I can never understand French figures."

The groom brought them their hats and coats.

"Would you like to go back to the hotel?" asked Ashenden.

"We might as well."

It was early in the year, but the weather had suddenly turned warm, and
they walked with their coats over their arms.  Ashenden knowing that R.
liked a sitting-room had engaged one for him and to this, when they
reached the hotel, they went.  The hotel was old-fashioned and the
sitting-room was vast.  It was furnished with a heavy mahogany suite
upholstered in green velvet and the chairs were set primly round a
large table.  On the walls, covered with a dingy paper, were large
steel engravings of the battles of Napoleon, and from the ceiling hung
an enormous chandelier once used for gas, but now fitted with electric
bulbs.  It flooded the cheerless room with a cold, hard light.

"This is very nice," said R., as they went in.

"Not exactly cosy," suggested Ashenden.

"No, but it looks as though it were the best room in the place.  It all
looks very _good_ to me."

He drew one of the green velvet chairs away from the table and, sitting
down, lit a cigar.  He loosened his belt and unbuttoned his tunic.

"I always thought I liked a cheroot better than anything," he said,
"but since the war I've taken quite a fancy to Havanas.  Oh, well, I
suppose it can't last for ever."  The corners of his mouth flickered
with the beginning of a smile.  "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any
good."

Ashenden took two chairs, one to sit on and one for his feet, and when
R. saw him he said: "That's not a bad idea," and swinging another chair
out from the table with a sigh of relief put his boots on it.

"What room is that next door?" he asked.

"That's your bedroom."

"And on the other side?"

"A banqueting hall."

R. got up and strolled slowly about the room and when he passed the
windows, as though in idle curiosity, peeped through the heavy rep
curtains that covered them, and then returning to his chair once more
comfortably put his feet up.

"It's just as well not to take any more risk than one need," he said.

He looked at Ashenden reflectively.  There was a slight smile on his
thin lips, but the pale eyes too closely set together, remained cold
and steely.  R.'s stare would have been embarrassing if Ashenden had
not been used to it.  He knew that R. was considering how he would
broach the subject that he had in mind.  The silence must have lasted
for two or three minutes.

"I'm expecting a fellow to come and see me to-night," he said at last.
"His train gets in about ten."  He gave his wrist-watch a glance.
"He's known as the Hairless Mexican."

"Why?"

"Because he's hairless and because he's a Mexican."

"The explanation seems perfectly satisfactory," said Ashenden.

"He'll tell you all about himself.  He talks nineteen to the dozen.  He
was on his uppers when I came across him.  It appears that he was mixed
up in some revolution in Mexico and had to get out with nothing but the
clothes he stood up in.  They were rather the worse for wear when I
found him.  If you want to please him you call him General.  He claims
to have been a general in Huerta's army, at least I think it was
Huerta; anyhow he says that if things had gone right he would be
minister of war now and no end of a big bug.  I've found him very
useful.  Not a bad chap.  The only thing I really have against him is
that he will use scent."

"And where do I come in?" asked Ashenden.

"He's going down to Italy.  I've got rather a ticklish job for him to
do and I want you to stand by.  I'm not keen on trusting him with a lot
of money.  He's a gambler and he's a bit too fond of the girls.  I
suppose you came from Geneva on your Ashenden passport."

"Yes."

"I've got another for you, a diplomatic one, by the way, in the name of
Somerville with visas for France and Italy.  I think you and he had
better travel together.  He's an amusing cove when he gets going, and I
think you ought to get to know one another."

"What is the job?"

"I haven't yet quite made up my mind how much it's desirable for you to
know about it."

Ashenden did not reply.  They eyed one another in a detached manner, as
though they were strangers who sat together in a railway carriage and
each wondered who and what the other was.

"In your place I'd leave the General to do most of the talking.  I
wouldn't tell him more about yourself than you find absolutely
necessary.  He won't ask you any questions, I can promise you that, I
think he's by way of being a gentleman after his own fashion."

"By the way, what is his real name?"

"I always call him Manuel, I don't know that he likes it very much, his
name is Manuel Carmona."

"I gather by what you have not said that he's an unmitigated scoundrel."

R. smiled with his pale blue eyes.

"I don't know that I'd go quite so far as that.  He hasn't had the
advantages of a public-school education.  His ideas of playing the game
are not quite the same as yours or mine.  I don't know that I'd leave a
gold cigarette-case about when he was in the neighbourhood, but if he
lost money to you at poker and had pinched your cigarette-case he would
immediately pawn it to pay you.  If he had half a chance he'd seduce
your wife, but if you were up against it he'd share his last crust with
you.  The tears will run down his face when he hears Gounod's 'Ave
Maria' on the gramophone, but if you insult his dignity he'll shoot you
like a dog.  It appears that in Mexico it's an insult to get between a
man and his drink and he told me himself that once when a Dutchman who
didn't know passed between him and the bar he whipped out his revolver
and shot him dead."

"Did nothing happen to him?"

"No, it appears that he belongs to one of the best families.  The
matter was hushed up and it was announced in the papers that the
Dutchman had committed suicide.  He did practically.  I don't believe
the Hairless Mexican has a great respect for human life."

Ashenden who had been looking intently at R. started a little and he
watched more carefully than ever his chief's tired, lined and yellow
face.  He knew that he did not make this remark for nothing.

"Of course a lot of nonsense is talked about the value of human life.
You might just as well say that the counters you use at poker have an
intrinsic value, their value is what you like to make it; for a general
giving battle, men are merely counters and he's a fool if he allows
himself for sentimental reasons to look upon them as human beings."

"But, you see, they're counters that feel and think and if they believe
they're being squandered they are quite capable of refusing to be used
any more."

"Anyhow, that's neither here nor there.  We've had information that a
man called Constantine Andreadi is on his way from Constantinople with
certain documents that we want to get hold of.  He's a Greek.  He's an
agent of Enver Pasha and Enver has great confidence in him.  He's given
him verbal messages that are too secret and too important to be put on
paper.  He's sailing from the Pirus, on a boat called the _Ithaca_,
and will land at Brindisi on his way to Rome.  He's to deliver his
dispatches at the German embassy and impart what he has to say
personally to the ambassador."

"I see."

At this time Italy was still neutral; the Central Powers were straining
every nerve to keep her so; the Allies were doing what they could to
induce her to declare war on their side.

"We don't want to get into any trouble with the Italian authorities, it
might be fatal, but we've got to prevent Andreadi from getting to Rome."

"At any cost?" asked Ashenden.

"Money's no object," answered R., his lips twisting into a sardonic
smile.

"What do you propose to do?"

"I don't think you need bother your head about that."

"I have a fertile imagination," said Ashenden.

"I want you to go down to Naples with the Hairless Mexican.  He's very
keen on getting back to Cuba.  It appears that his friends are
organising a show and he wants to be as near at hand as possible so
that he can hop over to Mexico when things are ripe.  He needs cash.
I've brought money down with me, in American dollars, and I shall give
it to you to-night.  You'd better carry it on your person."

"Is it much?"

"It's a good deal, but I thought it would be easier for you if it
wasn't bulky, so I've got it in thousand-dollar notes.  You will give
the Hairless Mexican the notes in return for the documents that
Andreadi is bringing."

A question sprang to Ashenden's lips, but he did not ask it.  He asked
another instead.

"Does this fellow understand what he has to do?"

"Perfectly."

There was a knock at the door.  It opened and the Hairless Mexican
stood before them.

"I have arrived.  Good evening, Colonel.  I am enchanted to see you."

R. got up.

"Had a nice journey, Manuel?  This is Mr. Somerville, who's going to
Naples with you, General Carmona."

"Pleased to meet you, sir."

He shook Ashenden's hand with such force that he winced.

"Your hands are like iron, General," he murmured.

The Mexican gave them a glance.

"I had them manicured this morning.  I do not think they were very well
done.  I like my nails much more highly polished."

They were cut to a point, stained bright red, and to Ashenden's mind
shone like mirrors.  Though it was not cold the General wore a fur coat
with an astrakhan collar and with his every movement a wave of perfume
was wafted to your nose.

"Take off your coat, General, and have a cigar," said R.

The Hairless Mexican was a tall man, and though thinnish gave you the
impression of being very powerful; he was smartly dressed in a blue
serge suit, with a silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the breast pocket
of his coat, and he wore a gold bracelet on his wrist.  His features
were good, but a little larger than life-size, and his eyes were brown
and lustrous.  He was quite hairless.  His yellow skin had the
smoothness of a woman's and he had no eyebrows nor eyelashes; he wore a
pale brown wig, rather long, and the locks were arranged in artistic
disorder.  This and the unwrinkled sallow face, combined with his
dandified dress, gave him an appearance that was at first glance a
trifle horrifying.  He was repulsive and ridiculous, but you could not
take your eyes from him.  There was a sinister fascination in his
strangeness.

He sat down and hitched up his trousers so that they should not bag at
the knee.

"Well, Manuel, have you been breaking any hearts to-day?" said R. with
his sardonic joviality.

The General turned to Ashenden.

"Our good friend, the Colonel, envies me my successes with the fair
sex.  I tell him he can have just as many as I if he will only listen
to me.  Confidence, that is all you need.  If you never fear a rebuff
you will never have one."

"Nonsense, Manuel, one has to have your way with the girls.  There's
something about you that they can't resist."

The Hairless Mexican laughed with a self-satisfaction that he did not
try to disguise.  He spoke English very well, with a Spanish accent,
but with an American intonation.

"But since you ask me, Colonel, I don't mind telling you that I got
into conversation on the train with a little woman who was coming to
Lyons to see her mother-in-law.  She was not very young and she was
thinner than I like a woman to be, but she was possible, and she helped
me to pass an agreeable hour."

"Well, let's get to business," said R.

"I am at your service, Colonel."  He gave Ashenden a glance.  "Is Mr.
Somerville a military man?"

"No," said R., "he's an author."

"It takes all sorts to make a world, as you say.  I am happy to make
your acquaintance, Mr. Somerville.  I can tell you many stories that
will interest you; I am sure that we shall get on well together.  You
have a sympathetic air.  I am very sensitive to that.  To tell you the
truth I am nothing but a bundle of nerves and if I am with a person who
is antipathetic to me I go all to pieces."

"I hope we shall have a pleasant journey," said Ashenden.

"When does our friend arrive at Brindisi?" asked the Mexican, turning
to R.

"He sails from the Pirus in the _Ithaca_ on the fourteenth.  It's
probably some old tub, but you'd better get down to Brindisi in good
time."

"I agree with you."

R. got up and with his hands in his pockets sat on the edge of the
table.  In his rather shabby uniform, his tunic unbuttoned, he looked a
slovenly creature beside the neat and well-dressed Mexican.

"Mr. Somerville knows practically nothing of the errand on which you
are going and I do not desire you to tell him anything.  I think you
had much better keep your own counsel.  He is instructed to give you
the funds you need for your work, but your actions are your own affair.
If you need his advice of course you can ask for it."

"I seldom ask other people's advice and never take it."

"And should you make a mess of things I trust you to keep Mr.
Somerville out of it.  He must on no account be compromised."

"I am a man of honour, Colonel," answered the Hairless Mexican with
dignity, "and I would sooner let myself be cut in a thousand pieces
than betray my friends."

"That is what I have already told Mr. Somerville.  On the other hand,
if everything pans out O.K. Mr. Somerville is instructed to give you
the sum we agreed on in return for the papers I spoke to you about.  In
what manner you get them is no business of his."

"That goes without saying.  There is only one thing I wish to make
quite plain; Mr. Somerville understands of course that I have not
accepted the mission with which you have entrusted me on account of the
money?"

"Quite," replied R. gravely, looking him straight in the eyes.

"I am with the Allies body and soul, I cannot forgive the Germans for
outraging the neutrality of Belgium, and if I accept the money that you
have offered me it is because I am first and foremost a patriot.  I can
trust Mr. Somerville implicitly, I suppose?"

R. nodded.  The Mexican turned to Ashenden.

"An expedition is being arranged to free my unhappy country from the
tyrants that exploit and ruin it and every penny that I receive will go
on guns and cartridges.  For myself I have no need of money; I am a
soldier and I can live on a crust and a few olives.  There are only
three occupations that befit a gentleman, war, cards and women; it
costs nothing to sling a rifle over your shoulder and take to the
mountains--and that is real warfare, not this manoeuvring of battalions
and firing of great guns--women love me for myself, and I generally win
at cards."

Ashenden found the flamboyance of this strange creature, with his
scented handkerchief and his gold bracelet, very much to his taste.
This was far from being just the man in the street (whose tyranny we
rail at but in the end submit to) and to the amateur of the baroque in
human nature he was a rarity to be considered with delight.  He was a
purple patch on two legs.  Notwithstanding his wig and his hairless big
face, he had undoubtedly an air; he was absurd, but he did not give you
the impression that he was a man to be trifled with.  His
self-complacency was magnificent.

"Where is your kit, Manuel?" asked R.

It was possible that a frown for an instant darkened the Mexican's brow
at the abrupt question that seemed a little contemptuously to brush to
one side his eloquent statement, but he gave no other sign of
displeasure.  Ashenden suspected that he thought the Colonel a
barbarian insensitive to the finer emotions.

"I left it at the station."

"Mr. Somerville has a diplomatic passport so that he can get it through
with his own things at the frontier without examination if you like."

"I have very little, a few suits and some linen, but perhaps it would
be as well if Mr. Somerville would take charge of it.  I bought half a
dozen suits of silk pyjamas before I left Paris."

"And what about you?" asked R., turning to Ashenden.

"I've only got one bag.  It's in my room."

"You'd better have it taken to the station while there's someone about.
Your train goes at one ten."

"Oh?"

This was the first Ashenden had heard that they were to start that
night.

"I think you'd better get down to Naples as soon as possible."

"Very well."

R. got up.

"I'm going to bed.  I don't know what you fellows want to do."

"I shall take a walk about Lyons," said the Hairless Mexican.  "I am
interested in life.  Lend me a hundred francs, Colonel, will you?  I
have no change on me."

R. took out his pocket-book and gave the General the note he asked for.
Then to Ashenden:

"What are you going to do?  Wait here?"

"No," said Ashenden, "I shall go to the station and read."

"You'd both of you better have a whisky and soda before you go, hadn't
you?  What about it, Manuel?"

"It is very kind of you, but I never drink anything but champagne and
brandy."

"Mixed?" asked R. dryly.

"Not necessarily," returned the other with gravity.

R. ordered brandy and soda and when it came, whereas he and Ashenden
helped themselves to both, the Hairless Mexican poured himself out
three parts of a tumbler of neat brandy and swallowed it in two noisy
gulps.  He rose to his feet and put on his coat with the astrakhan
collar, seized in one hand his bold black hat and, with the gesture of
a romantic actor giving up the girl he loved to one more worthy of her,
held out the other to R.

"Well, Colonel, I will bid you good night and pleasant dreams.  I do
not expect that we shall meet again so soon."

"Don't make a hash of things, Manuel, and if you do keep your mouth
shut."

"They tell me that in one of your colleges where the sons of gentlemen
are trained to become naval officers it is written in letters of gold:
there is no such word as impossible in the British Navy.  I do not know
the meaning of the word failure."

"It has a good many synonyms," retorted R.

"I will meet you at the station, Mr. Somerville," said the Hairless
Mexican, and with a flourish left them.

R. looked at Ashenden with that little smile of his that always made
his face look so dangerously shrewd.

"Well, what d'you think of him?"

"You've got me beat," said Ashenden.  "Is he a mountebank?  He seems as
vain as a peacock.  And with that frightful appearance can he really be
the lady's man he pretends?  What makes you think you can trust him?"

R. gave a low chuckle and he washed his thin, old hands with imaginary
soap.

"I thought you'd like him.  He's quite a character, isn't he?  I think
we can trust him."  R.'s eyes suddenly grew opaque.  "I don't believe
it would pay him to double-cross us."  He paused for a moment.
"Anyhow, we've got to risk it.  I'll give you the tickets and the money
and then you can take yourself off; I'm all in and I want to go to bed."

Ten minutes later Ashenden set out for the station with his bag on a
porter's shoulder.

Having nearly two hours to wait he made himself comfortable in the
waiting-room.  The light was good and he read a novel.  When the time
drew near for the arrival of the train from Paris that was to take them
direct to Rome and the Hairless Mexican did not appear Ashenden,
beginning to grow a trifle anxious, went out on the platform to look
for him.  Ashenden suffered from that distressing malady known as train
fever; an hour before his train was due he began to have apprehensions
lest he should miss it; he was impatient with the porters who would
never bring his luggage down from his room in time and he could not
understand why the hotel bus cut it so fine; a block in the street
would drive him to frenzy and the languid movements of the station
porters infuriate him.  The whole world seemed in a horrid plot to
delay him; people got in his way as he passed through the barriers;
others, a long string of them, were at the ticket-office getting
tickets for other trains than his and they counted their change with
exasperating care; his luggage took an interminable time to register;
and then if he was travelling with friends they would go to buy
newspapers, or would take a walk along the platform, and he was certain
they would be left behind, they would stop to talk to a casual stranger
or suddenly be seized with a desire to telephone and disappear at a
run.  In fact the universe conspired to make him miss every train he
wanted to take and he was not happy unless he was settled in his
corner, his things on the rack above him, with a good half-hour to
spare.  Sometimes by arriving at the station too soon he had caught an
earlier train than the one he had meant to, but that was nerve-racking
and caused him all the anguish of very nearly missing it.

The Rome express was signalled and there was no sign of the Hairless
Mexican, it came in and he was not to be seen.  Ashenden became more
and more harassed.  He walked quickly up and down the platform, looked
in all the waiting-rooms, went to the _consigne_ where the luggage was
left; he could not find him.  There were no sleeping-cars, but a number
of people got out and he took two seats in a first-class carriage.  He
stood at the door, looking up and down the platform and up at the
clock; it was useless to go if his travelling companion did not turn
up, and Ashenden made up his mind to take his things out of the
carriage as the porter cried en voiture: but, by George! he would give
the brute hell when he found him.  There were three minutes more, then
two minutes, then one; at that late hour there were few persons about
and all who were travelling had taken their seats.  Then he saw the
Hairless Mexican, followed by two porters with his luggage and
accompanied by a man in a bowler-hat, walk leisurely on to the
platform.  He caught sight of Ashenden and waved to him.

"Ah, my dear fellow, there you are.  I wondered what had become of you."

"Good God, man, hurry up or we shall miss the train."

"I never miss a train.  Have you got good seats?  The _chef de gare_
has gone for the night; this is his assistant."

The man in the bowler-hat took it off when Ashenden nodded to him.

"But this is an ordinary carriage.  I am afraid I could not travel in
that."  He turned to the stationmaster's assistant with an affable
smile.  "You must do better for me than that, _mon cher_."

"_Certainement, mon gnral_, I will put you into a _salon-lit_.  Of
course."

The assistant stationmaster led them along the train and put them in an
empty compartment where there were two beds.  The Mexican eyed it with
satisfaction and watched the porters arrange the luggage.

"That will do very well.  I am much obliged to you."  He held out his
hand to the man in the bowler-hat.  "I shall not forget you and next
time I see the Minister I will tell him with what civility you have
treated me."

"You are too good, General.  I shall be very grateful."

A whistle was blown and the train started.

"This is better than an ordinary first-class carriage, I think, Mr.
Somerville," said the Mexican.  "A good traveller should learn how to
make the best of things."

But Ashenden was still extremely cross.

"I don't know why the devil you wanted to cut it so fine.  We should
have looked a pair of damned fools if we'd missed the train."

"My dear fellow, there was never the smallest chance of that.  When I
arrived I told the stationmaster that I was General Carmona,
Commander-in-Chief of the Mexican Army, and that I had to stop off in
Lyons for a few hours to hold a conference with the British
Field-Marshal.  I asked him to hold the train for me if I was delayed
and suggested that my government might see its way to conferring an
order on him.  I have been to Lyons before, I like the girls here; they
have not the _chic_ of the Parisians, but they have something, there is
no denying that they have something.  Will you have a mouthful of
brandy before you go to sleep?"

"No, thank you," said Ashenden morosely.

"I always drink a glass before going to bed, it settles the nerves."

He looked in his suit-case and without difficulty found a bottle.  He
put it to his lips and had a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back
of his hand and lit a cigarette.  Then he took off his boots and lay
down.  Ashenden dimmed the light.

"I have never yet made up my mind," said the Hairless Mexican
reflectively, "whether it is pleasanter to go to sleep with the kisses
of a beautiful woman on your mouth or with a cigarette between your
lips.  Have you ever been to Mexico?  I will tell you about Mexico
to-morrow.  Good night."

Presently Ashenden heard from his steady breathing that he was asleep
and in a little while himself dozed off.  Presently he woke.  The
Mexican, deep in slumber, lay motionless; he had taken off his fur coat
and was using it as a blanket; he still wore his wig.  Suddenly there
was a jolt and the train with a noisy grinding of brakes stopped; in
the twinkling of an eye, before Ashenden could realise that anything
had happened, the Mexican was on his feet with his hand to his hip.

"What is it?" he cried.

"Nothing.  Probably only a signal against us."

The Mexican sat down heavily on his bed.  Ashenden turned on the light.

"You wake quickly for such a sound sleeper," he said.

"You have to in my profession."

Ashenden would have liked to ask him whether this was murder,
conspiracy or commanding armies, but was not sure that it would be
discreet.  The General opened his bag and took our the bottle.

"Will you have a nip?" he asked.  "There is nothing like it when you
wake suddenly in the night."

When Ashenden refused he put the bottle once more to his lips and
poured a considerable quantity of liquor down his throat.  He sighed
and lit a cigarette.  Although Ashenden had seen him now drink nearly a
bottle of brandy, and it was probable that he had had a good deal more
when he was going about the town, he was certainly quite sober.
Neither in his manner nor in his speech was there any indication that
he had drunk during the evening anything but lemonade.

The train started and soon Ashenden again fell asleep.  When he awoke
it was morning and turning round lazily he saw that the Mexican was
awake too.  He was smoking a cigarette.  The floor by his side was
strewn with burnt-out butts and the air was thick and grey.  He had
begged Ashenden not to insist on opening a window, for he said the
night air was dangerous.

"I did not get up, because I was afraid of waking you.  Will you do
your toilet first or shall I?"

"I'm in no hurry," said Ashenden.

"I am an old campaigner, it will not take me long.  Do you wash your
teeth every day?"

"Yes," said Ashenden.

"So do I.  It is a habit I learned in New York.  I always think that a
fine set of teeth are an adornment to a man."

There was a wash-basin in the compartment and the General scrubbed his
teeth, with gurglings and garglings, energetically.  Then he got a
bottle of eau-de-Cologne from his bag, poured some of it on a towel and
rubbed it over his face and hands.  He took a comb and carefully
arranged his wig; either it had not moved in the night or else he had
set it straight before Ashenden awoke.  He got another bottle out of
his bag, with a spray attached to it, and squeezing a bulb covered his
shirt and coat with a fine cloud of scent, did the same to his
handkerchief, and then with a beaming face, like a man who has done his
duty by the world and is well pleased, turned to Ashenden and said:

"Now I am ready to brave the day.  I will leave my things for you, you
need not be afraid of the eau-de-Cologne, it is the best you can get in
Paris."

"Thank you very much," said Ashenden.  "All I want is soap and water."

"Water?  I never use water except when I have a bath.  Nothing can be
worse for the skin."

When they approached the frontier, Ashenden, remembering the General's
instructive gesture when he was suddenly awakened in the night, said to
him:

"If you've got a revolver on you I think you'd better give it to me.
With my diplomatic passport they're not likely to search me, but they
might take it into their heads to go through you and we don't want to
have any bothers."

"It is hardly a weapon, it is only a toy," returned the Mexican, taking
out of his hip-pocket a fully loaded revolver of formidable dimensions.
"I do not like parting with it even for an hour, it gives me the
feeling that I am not fully dressed.  But you are quite right, we do
not want to take any risks; I will give you my knife as well.  I would
always rather use a knife than a revolver; I think it is a more elegant
weapon."

"I daresay it is only a matter of habit," answered Ashenden.  "Perhaps
you are more at home with a knife."

"Anyone can pull a trigger, but it needs a man to use a knife."

To Ashenden it looked as though it were in a single movement that he
tore open his waistcoat and from his belt snatched and opened a long
knife of murderous aspect.  He handed it to Ashenden with a pleased
smile on his large, ugly and naked face.

"There's a pretty piece of work for you, Mr. Somerville.  I've never
seen a better bit of steel in my life, it takes an edge like a razor
and it's strong; you can cut a cigarette-paper with it and you can hew
down an oak.  There is nothing to get out of order and when it is
closed it might be the knife a schoolboy uses to cut notches in his
desk."

He shut it with a click and Ashenden put it along with the revolver in
his pocket.

"Have you anything else?"

"My hands," replied the Mexican with arrogance, "but those I daresay
the custom officials will not make trouble about."

Ashenden remembered the iron grip he had given him when they shook
hands and slightly shuddered.  They were large and long and smooth;
there was not a hair on them or on the wrists, and with the pointed,
rosy, manicured nails there was really something sinister about them.




V

_The Dark Woman_

Ashenden and General Carmona went through the formalities at the
frontier independently and when they returned to their carriage
Ashenden handed back to his companion the revolver and the knife.  He
sighed.

"Now I feel more comfortable.  What do you say to a game of cards?"

"I should like it," said Ashenden.

The Hairless Mexican opened his bag again and from a corner extracted a
greasy pack of French cards.  He asked Ashenden whether he played
_cart_ and when Ashenden told him that he did not suggested piquet.
This was a game that Ashenden was not unfamiliar with, so they settled
the stakes and began.  Since both were in favour of quick action, they
played the game of four hands, doubling the first and last.  Ashenden
had good enough cards, but the General seemed notwithstanding always to
have better.  Ashenden kept his eyes open and he was not careless of
the possibility that his antagonist might correct the inequalities of
chance, but he saw nothing to suggest that everything was not above
board.  He lost game after game.  He was capoted and rubiconed.  The
score against him mounted up and up till he had lost something like a
thousand francs, which at that time was a tidy sum.  The General smoked
innumerable cigarettes.  He made them himself with a twist of the
finger, a lick of his tongue and incredible celerity.  At last he flung
himself against the back of his seat.

"By the way, my friend, does the British Government pay your card
losses when you are on a mission?" he asked.

"It certainly doesn't."

"Well, I think you have lost enough.  If it went down on your expense
account I would have proposed playing till we reached Rome, but you are
sympathetic to me.  If it is your own money I do not want to win any
more of it."

He picked up the cards and put them aside.  Ashenden somewhat ruefully
took out a number of notes and handed them to the Mexican.  He counted
them and with his usual neatness put them carefully folded into his
pocket-book.  Then, leaning forward, he patted Ashenden almost
affectionately on the knee.

"I like you, you are modest and unassuming, you have not the arrogance
of your countrymen, and I am sure that you will take my advice in the
spirit in which it is meant.  Do not play piquet with people you don't
know."

Ashenden was somewhat mortified and perhaps his face showed it, for the
Mexican seized his hand.

"My dear fellow, I have not hurt your feelings?  I would not do that
for the world.  You do not play piquet worse than most piquet players.
It is not that.  If we were going to be together longer I would teach
you how to win at cards.  One plays cards to win money and there is no
sense in losing."

"I thought it was only in love and war that all things were fair," said
Ashenden, with a chuckle.

"Ah, I am glad to see you smile.  That is the way to take a loss.  I
see that you have good humour and good sense.  You will go far in life.
When I get back to Mexico and am in possession of my estates again you
must come and stay with me.  I will treat you like a king.  You shall
ride my best horses, we will go to bull-fights together, and if there
are girls you fancy you have only to say the word and you shall have
them."

He began telling Ashenden of the vast territories, the haciendas and
the mines in Mexico of which he had been dispossessed.  He told him of
the feudal state in which he lived.  It did not matter whether what he
said was true or not, for those sonorous phrases of his were fruity
with the rich-distilled perfumes of romance.  He described a spacious
life that seemed to belong to another age and his eloquent gestures
brought before the mind's eye tawny distances and vast green
plantations, great herds of cattle and in the moonlit night the song of
the blind singers that melted in the air and the twanging of guitars.

"Everything I lost, everything.  In Paris I was driven to earn a
pittance by giving Spanish lessons or showing Americans--_Americanos
del Norte_, I mean--the night life of the city.  I who have flung away
a thousand _duros_ on a dinner have been forced to beg my bread like a
blind Indian.  I who have taken pleasure in clasping a diamond bracelet
round the wrist of a beautiful woman have been forced to accept a suit
of clothes from a hag old enough to be my mother.  Patience.  Man is
born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but misfortune cannot last
for ever.  The time is ripe and soon we shall strike our blow."

He took up the greasy pack of cards and set them out in a number of
little piles.

"Let us see what the cards say.  They never lie.  Ah, if I had only had
greater faith in them I should have avoided the only action of my life
that has weighed heavily on me.  My conscience is at ease.  I did what
any man would do under the circumstances, but I regret that necessity
forced upon me an action that I would willingly have avoided."

He looked through the cards, set some of them on one side on a system
Ashenden did not understand, shuffled the remainder and once more put
them in little piles.

"The cards warned me, I will never deny that, their warning was dear
and definite.  Love and a dark woman, danger, betrayal and death.  It
was as plain as the nose on your face.  Any fool would have known what
it meant and I have been using the cards all my life.  There is hardly
an action that I make without consulting them.  There are no excuses.
I was besotted.  Ah, you of the Northern races do not know what love
means, you do not know how it can prevent you from sleeping, how it can
take your appetite for food away so that you dwindle as if from a
fever, you do not understand what a frenzy it is so that you are like a
madman and you will stick at nothing to satisfy your desire.  A man
like me is capable of every folly and every crime when he is in love,
_si_, _Seor_, and of heroism.  He can scale mountains higher than
Everest and swim seas broader than the Atlantic.  He is god, he is
devil.  Women have been my ruin."

Once more the Hairless Mexican glanced at the cards, took some out of
the little piles and left others in.  He shuffled them again.

"I have been loved by multitudes of women.  I do not say it in vanity.
I offer no explanation.  It is mere matter of fact.  Go to Mexico City
and ask them what they know of Manuel Carmona and of his triumphs.  Ask
them how many women have resisted Manuel Carmona."

Ashenden, frowning a little, watched him reflectively.  He wondered
whether R., that shrewd fellow who chose his instruments with such a
sure instinct, had not this time made a mistake, and he was uneasy.
Did the Hairless Mexican really believe that he was irresistible or was
he merely a blatant liar?  In the course of his manipulations he had
thrown out all the cards in the pack but four, and these now lay in
front of him face downwards and side by side.  He touched them one by
one but did not turn them up.

"There is fate," he said, "and no power on earth can change it.  I
hesitate.  This is a moment that ever fills me with apprehension and I
have to steel myself to turn over the cards that may tell me that
disaster awaits me.  I am a brave man, but sometimes I have reached
this stage and not had the courage to look at the four vital cards."

Indeed now he eyed the backs of them with an anxiety he did not try to
hide.

"What was I saying to you?"

"You were telling me that women found your fascinations irresistible?"
replied Ashenden dryly.

"Once all the same I found a woman who resisted me.  I saw her first in
a house, a _casa de mujeres_ in Mexico City, she was going down the
stairs as I went up; she was not very beautiful, I had had a hundred
more beautiful, but she had something that took my fancy and I told the
old woman who kept the house to send her to me.  You will know her when
you go to Mexico City; they call her La Marqueza.  She said that the
girl was not an inmate, but came there only from time to time and had
left.  I told her to have her there next evening and not to let her go
till I came.  But I was delayed and when I arrived La Marqueza told me
that the girl had said she was not used to being kept waiting and had
gone.  I am a good-natured fellow and I do not mind if women are
capricious and teasing, that is part of their charm, so with a laugh I
sent her a note of a hundred _duros_ and promised that on the following
day I would be punctual.  But when I went, on the minute, La Marqueza
handed me back my hundred _duros_ and told me the girl did not fancy
me.  I laughed at her impertinence.  I took off the diamond ring I was
wearing and told the old woman to give her that and see whether it
would induce her to change her mind.  In the morning La Marqueza
brought me in return for my ring--a red carnation.  I did not know
whether to be amused or angry.  I am not used to being thwarted in my
passions, I never hesitate to spend money (what is it for but to
squander on pretty women?), and I told La Marqueza to go to the girl
and say that I would give her a thousand _duros_ to dine with me that
night.  Presently she came back with the answer that the girl would
come on the condition that I allowed her to go home immediately after
dinner.  I accepted with a shrug of the shoulders.  I did not think she
was serious.  I thought that she was saying that only to make herself
more desired.  She came to dinner at my house.  Did I say she was not
beautiful?  She was the most beautiful, the most exquisite creature I
had ever met.  I was intoxicated.  She had charm and she had wit.  She
had all the _gracia_ of the Andalusian.  In one word she was adorable.
I asked her why she had treated me so casually and she laughed in my
face.  I laid myself out to be agreeable.  I exercised all my skill.  I
surpassed myself.  But when we finished dinner she rose from her seat
and bade me good night.  I asked her where she was going.  She said I
had promised to let her go and she trusted me as a man of honour to
keep my word.  I expostulated, I reasoned, I raved, I stormed.  She
held me to my word.  All I could induce her to do was to consent to
dine with me the following night on the same terms.

"You will think I was a fool, I was the happiest man alive; for seven
days I paid her a thousand silver _duros_ to dine with me.  Every
evening I waited for her with my heart in my mouth, as nervous as a
_novillero_ at his first bull-fight, and every evening she played with
me, laughed at me, coquetted with me and drove me frantic.  I was madly
in love with her.  I have never loved anyone so much before or since.
I could think of nothing else, I was distracted.  I neglected
everything.  I am a patriot and I love my country.  A small band of us
had got together and made up our minds that we could no longer put up
with the misrule from which we were suffering.  All the lucrative posts
were given to other people, we were being made to pay taxes as though
we were tradesmen, and we were exposed to abominable affronts.  We had
money and men.  Our plans were made and we were ready to strike.  I had
an infinity of things to do, meetings to go to, ammunition to get,
orders to give; I was so besotted over this woman that I could attend
to nothing.

"You would have thought that I should be angry with her for making such
a fool of me, me who had never known what it was not to gratify my
smallest whim; I did not believe that she refused me to inflame my
desires, I believed that she told the plain truth when she said that
she would not give herself to me until she loved me.  She said it was
for me to make her love me.  I thought her an angel.  I was ready to
wait.  My passion was so consuming that sooner or later, I felt, at
last it must communicate itself to her; it was like a fire on the
prairie that devours everything around it; and at last--at last she
said she loved me.  My emotion was so terrific that I thought I should
fall down and die.  Oh, what rapture! oh, what madness!  I would have
given her everything I possessed in the world, I would have torn down
the stars from heaven to deck her hair; I wanted to do something to
prove to her the extravagance of my love, I wanted to do the
impossible, the incredible, I wanted to give her myself, my soul, my
honour, all, all I had and all I was; and that night when she lay in my
arms I told her of our plot and who we were that were concerned in it.
I felt her body stiffen with attention, I was conscious of a flicker of
her eyelids, there was something, I hardly knew what, the hand that
stroked my face was dry and cold; a sudden suspicion seized me and all
at once I remembered what the cards had told me: love and a dark woman,
danger, betrayal and death.  Three times they'd said it and I wouldn't
heed.  I made no sign that I had noticed anything.  She nestled up
against my heart and told me that she was frightened to hear such
things and asked me if So-and-so was concerned.  I answered her.  I
wanted to make sure.  One after the other, with infinite cunning,
between her kisses she cajoled me into giving every detail of the plot,
and now I was certain, as certain as I am that you sit before me, that
she was a spy.  She was a spy of the President's and she had been set
to allure me with her devilish charm and now she had wormed out of me
all our secrets.  The lives of all of us were in her hands and I knew
that if she left that room in twenty-four hours we should be dead men.
And I loved her, I loved her; oh, words cannot tell you the agony of
desire that burned my heart; love like that is no pleasure; it is pain,
pain, but the exquisite pain that transcends all pleasure.  It is that
heavenly anguish that the saints speak of when they are seized with a
divine ecstasy.  I knew that she must not leave the room alive and I
feared that if I delayed my courage would fail me.

"'I think I shall sleep,' she said.

"'Sleep, my dove,' I answered.

"'_Alma de mi corazn_,' she called me.  'Soul of my heart.'  They were
the last words she spoke.  Those heavy lids of hers, dark like a grape
and faintly humid, those heavy lids of hers closed over her eyes and a
little while I knew by the regular movement of her breast against mine
that she slept.  You see, I loved her, I could not bear that she should
suffer; she was a spy, yes, but my heart bade me spare her the terror
of knowing what must happen.  It is strange, I felt no anger because
she had betrayed me, I should have hated her because of her vileness; I
could not, I only felt that my soul was enveloped in night.  Poor
thing, poor thing.  I could have cried for pity for her.  I drew my arm
very gently from around her, my left arm that was, my right was free,
and raised myself on my hand.  But she was so beautiful, I turned my
face away when I drew the knife with all my strength across her lovely
throat.  Without awaking she passed from sleep to death."

He stopped and stared frowning at the four cards that still lay, their
backs upward, waiting to be turned up.

"It was in the cards.  Why did I not take their warning?  I will not
look at them.  Damn them.  Take them away."

With a violent gesture he swept the whole pack on to the floor.

"Though I am a free-thinker I had masses said for her soul."  He leaned
back and rolled himself a cigarette.  He inhaled a long breathful of
smoke.  He shrugged his shoulders.  "The Colonel said you were a
writer.  What do you write?"

"Stories," replied Ashenden.

"Detective stories?"

"No."

"Why not?  They are the only ones I read.  If I were a writer I should
write detective stories."

"They are very difficult.  You need an incredible amount of invention.
I devised a murder story once, but the murder was so ingenious that I
could never find a way of bringing it home to the murderer, and after
all, one of the conventions of the detective story is that the mystery
should in the end be solved and the criminal brought to justice."

"If your murder is as ingenious as you think the only means you have of
proving the murderer's guilt is by the discovery of his motives.  When
once you have found a motive the chances are that you will hit upon
evidence that till then had escaped you.  If there is no motive the
most damning evidence will be inconclusive.  Imagine for instance that
you went up to a man in a lonely street on a moonless night and stabbed
him to the heart.  Who would ever think of you?  But if he was your
wife's lover, or your brother, or had cheated or insulted you, then a
scrap of paper, a bit of string or a chance remark would be enough to
hang you.  What were your movements at the time he was killed?  Are
there not a dozen people who saw you before and after?  But if he was a
total stranger you would never for a moment be suspected.  It was
inevitable that Jack the Ripper should escape unless he was caught in
the act."

Ashenden had more than one reason to change the conversation.  They
were parting at Rome and he thought it necessary to come to an
understanding with his companion about their respective movements.  The
Mexican was going to Brindisi and Ashenden to Naples.  He meant to
lodge at the Htel de Belfast, which was a large second-rate hotel near
the harbour frequented by commercial travellers and the thriftier kind
of tripper.  It would be as well to let the General have the number of
his room so that he could come up if necessary without enquiring of the
porter, and at the next stopping-place Ashenden got an envelope from
the station-buffet and made him address it in his own writing to
himself at the post-office in Brindisi.  All Ashenden had to do then
was to scribble a number on a sheet of paper and post it.

The Hairless Mexican shrugged his shoulders.

"To my mind all these precautions are rather childish.  There is
absolutely no risk.  But whatever happens you may be quite sure that I
will not compromise you."

"This is not the sort of job which I'm very familiar with," said
Ashenden.  "I'm content to follow the Colonel's instructions and know
no more about it than it's essential I should."

"Quite so.  Should the exigencies of the situation force me to take a
drastic step and I get into trouble I shall of course be treated as a
political prisoner.  Sooner or later Italy is bound to come into the
war on the side of the Allies and I shall be released.  I have
considered everything.  But I beg you very seriously to have no more
anxiety about the outcome of our mission than if you were going for a
picnic on the Thames."

But when at last they separated and Ashenden found himself alone in a
carriage on the way to Naples he heaved a great sigh of relief.  He was
glad to be rid of that chattering, hideous and fantastic creature.  He
was gone to meet Constantine Andreadi at Brindisi and if half of what
he had told Ashenden was true, Ashenden could not but congratulate
himself that he did not stand in the Greek spy's shoes.  He wondered
what sort of a man he was.  There was a grimness in the notion of his
coming across the blue Ionian, with his confidential papers and his
dangerous secrets, all unconscious of the noose into which he was
putting his head.  Well, that was war, and only fools thought it could
be waged with kid gloves on.




VI

_The Greek_

Ashenden arrived in Naples and having taken a room at the hotel, wrote
its number on a sheet of paper in block letters and posted it to the
Hairless Mexican.  He went to the British Consulate where R. had
arranged to send any instructions he might have for him and found that
they knew about him and everything was in order.  Then he put aside
these matters and made up his mind to amuse himself.  Here in the South
the spring was well advanced and in the busy streets the sun was hot.
Ashenden knew Naples pretty well.  The Piazza di San Ferdinando, with
its bustle, the Piazza del Plebiscito, with its handsome church,
stirred in his heart pleasant recollections.  The Strada di Chiaia was
as noisy as ever.  He stood at corners and looked up the narrow alleys
that climbed the hill precipitously, those alleys of high houses with
the washing set out to dry on lines across the street like pennants
flying to mark a feast-day; and he sauntered along the shore, looking
at the burnished sea with Capri faintly outlined against the day, till
he came to Posilippo, where there was an old, rambling and bedraggled
_palazzo_ in which in his youth he had spent many a romantic hour.  He
observed the curious little pain with which the memories of the past
wrung his heart-strings.  Then he took a fly drawn by a small and
scraggy pony and rattled back over the stones to the _Galleria_, where
he sat in the cool and drank an _americano_ and looked at the people
who loitered there, talking, for ever talking with vivacious gestures,
and, exercising his fancy, sought from their appearance to divine their
reality.

For three days Ashenden led the idle life that fitted so well the
fantastical, untidy and genial city.  He did nothing from morning till
night but wander at random, looking, not with the eye of the tourist
who seeks for what ought to be seen, nor with the eye of the writer who
looks for his own (seeing in a sunset a melodious phrase or in a face
the inkling of a character), but with that of the tramp to whom
whatever happens is absolute.  He went to the museum to look at the
statue of Agrippina the Younger, which he had particular reasons for
remembering with affection, and took the opportunity to see once more
the Titian and the Brueghel in the picture gallery.  But he always came
back to the church of Santa Chiara.  Its grace, its gaiety, the airy
persiflage with which it seemed to treat religion and at the back of
this its sensual emotion; its extravagance, its elegance of line; to
Ashenden it seemed to express, as it were in one absurd and
grandiloquent metaphor, the sunny, dusty, lovely city and its bustling
inhabitants.  It said that life was charming and sad; it's a pity one
hadn't any money, but money wasn't everything, and anyway why bother
when we are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and it was all very
exciting and amusing, and after all we must make the best of things:
_facciamo una piccola combinazione_.

But on the fourth morning when Ashenden, having just stepped out of his
bath, was trying to dry himself on a towel that absorbed no moisture,
his door was quickly opened and a man slipped into his room.

"What d'you want?" cried Ashenden.

"It's all right.  Don't you know me?"

"Good Lord, it's the Mexican.  What have you done to yourself?"

He had changed his wig and wore now a black one, close-cropped, that
fitted on his head like a cap.  It entirely altered the look of him and
though this was still odd enough, it was quite different from that
which he had borne before.  He wore a shabby grey suit.

"I can only stop a minute.  He's getting shaved."

Ashenden felt his cheeks suddenly redden.

"You found him then?"

"That wasn't difficult.  He was the only Greek passenger on the ship.
I went on board when she got in and asked for a friend who had sailed
from the Pirus.  I said I had come to meet a Mr. George Diogenidis.  I
pretended to be much puzzled at his not coming, and I got into
conversation with Andreadi.  He's travelling under a false name.  He
calls himself Lombardos.  I followed him when he landed and do you know
the first thing he did?  He went into a barber's and had his beard
shaved.  What do you think of that?"

"Nothing.  Anyone might have his beard shaved."

"That is not what I think.  He wanted to change his appearance.  Oh,
he's cunning.  I admire the Germans, they leave nothing to chance, he's
got his whole story pat, but I'll tell you that in a minute."

"By the way, you've changed your appearance too."

"Ah, yes, this is a wig I'm wearing; it makes a difference, doesn't it?"

"I should never have known you."

"One has to take precautions.  We are bosom friends.  We had to spend
the day in Brindisi and he cannot speak Italian.  He was glad to have
me help him and we travelled up together.  I have brought him to this
hotel.  He says he is going to Rome to-morrow, but I shall not let him
out of my sight; I do not want him to give me the slip.  He says that
he wants to see Naples and I have offered to show him everything there
is to see."

"Why isn't he going to Rome to-day?"

"That is part of the story.  He pretends he is a Greek business man who
has made money during the war.  He says he was the owner of two
coasting steamers and has just sold them.  Now he means to go to Paris
and have his fling.  He says he has wanted to go to Paris all his life
and at last has the chance.  He is close.  I tried to get him to talk.
I told him I was a Spaniard and had been to Brindisi to arrange
communications with Turkey about war material.  He listened to me and I
saw he was interested, but he told me nothing and of course I did not
think it wise to press him.  He has the papers on his person."

"How do you know?"

"He is not anxious about his grip, but he feels every now and then
round his middle, they're either in a belt or in the lining of his
vest."

"Why the devil did you bring him to this hotel?"

"I thought it would be more convenient.  We may want to search his
luggage."

"Are you staying here too?"

"No, I am not such a fool as that.  I told him I was going to Rome by
the night train and would not take a room.  But I must go, I promised
to meet him outside the barber's in fifteen minutes."

"All right."

"Where shall I find you to-night if I want you?"

Ashenden for an instant eyed the Hairless Mexican, then with a slight
frown looked away.

"I shall spend the evening in my room."

"Very well.  Will you just see that there's nobody in the passage?"

Ashenden opened the door and looked out.  He saw no one.  The hotel in
point of fact at that season was nearly empty.  There were few
foreigners in Naples and trade was bad.

"It's all right," said Ashenden.

The Hairless Mexican walked boldly out.  Ashenden closed the door
behind him.  He shaved and slowly dressed.  The sun was shining as
brightly as usual on the square and the people who passed, the shabby
little carriages with their scrawny horses, had the same air as before,
but they did not any longer fill Ashenden with gaiety.  He was not
comfortable.  He went out and called as was his habit at the Consulate
to ask if there was a telegram for him.  Nothing.  Then he went to
Cook's and looked out the trains to Rome: there was one soon after
midnight and another at five in the morning.  He wished he could catch
the first.  He did not know what were the Mexican's plans; if he really
wanted to get to Cuba he would do well to make his way to Spain, and,
glancing at the notices in the office, Ashenden saw that next day there
was a ship sailing from Naples to Barcelona.

Ashenden was bored with Naples.  The glare in the streets tired his
eyes, the dust was intolerable, the noise was deafening.  He went to
the _Galleria_ and had a drink.  In the afternoon he went to a cinema.
Then, going back to his hotel, he told the clerk that since he was
starting so early in the morning he preferred to pay his bill at once,
and he took his luggage to the station, leaving in his room only a
dispatch-case in which were the printed part of his code and a book or
two.  He dined.  Then returning to the hotel, he sat down to wait for
the Hairless Mexican.  He could not conceal from himself the fact that
he was exceedingly nervous.  He began to read, but the book was
tiresome, and he tried another; his attention wandered and he glanced
at his watch.  It was desperately early; he took up his book again,
making up his mind that he would not look at his watch till he had read
thirty pages, but though he ran his eyes conscientiously down one page
after another he could not tell more than vaguely what it was he read.
He looked at the time again.  Good God, it was only half-past ten.  He
wondered where the Hairless Mexican was, and what he was doing; he was
afraid he would make a mess of things.  It was a horrible business.
Then it struck him that he had better shut the window and draw the
curtains.  He smoked innumerable cigarettes.  He looked at his watch
and it was a quarter past eleven.  A thought struck him and his heart
began to beat against his chest; out of curiosity he counted his pulse
and was surprised to find that it was normal.  Though it was a warm
night and the room was stuffy his hands and feet were icy.  What a
nuisance it was, he reflected irritably, to have an imagination that
conjured up pictures of things that you didn't in the least want to
see!  From his standpoint as a writer he had often considered murder
and his mind went to that fearful description of one in _Crime and
Punishment_.  He did not want to think of this topic, but it forced
itself upon him; his book dropped to his knees and staring at the wall
in front of him (it had a brown wall-paper with a pattern of dingy
roses) he asked himself how, if one had to, one would commit a murder
in Naples.  Of course there was the Villa, the great leafy garden
facing the bay in which stood the aquarium; that was deserted at night
and very dark; things happened there that did not bear the light of day
and prudent persons after dusk avoided its sinister paths.  Beyond
Posilippo the road was very solitary and there were byways that led up
the hill in which by night you would never meet a soul, but how would
you induce a man who had any nerves to go there?  You might suggest a
row in the bay, but the boatman who hired the boat would see you; it
was doubtful indeed if he would let you go on the water alone; there
were disreputable hotels down by the harbour where no questions were
asked of persons who arrived late at night without luggage; but here
again the waiter who showed you your room had the chance of a good look
at you and you had on entering to sign an elaborate questionnaire.

Ashenden looked once more at the time.  He was very tired.  He sat now
not even trying to read, his mind a blank.

Then the door opened softly and he sprang to his feet.  His flesh
crept.  The Hairless Mexican stood before him.

"Did I startle you?" he asked smiling.  "I thought you would prefer me
not to knock."

"Did anyone see you come in?"

"I was let in by the night-watchman; he was asleep when I rang and
didn't even look at me.  I'm sorry I'm so late, but I had to change."

The Hairless Mexican wore now the clothes he had travelled down in and
his fair wig.  It was extraordinary how different he looked.  He was
bigger and more flamboyant; the very shape of his face was altered.
His eyes were shining and he seemed in excellent spirits.  He gave
Ashenden a glance.

"How white you are, my friend!  Surely you're not nervous?"

"Have you got the documents?"

"No.  He hadn't got them on him.  This is all he had."

He put down on the table a bulky pocket-book and a passport.

"I don't want them," said Ashenden quickly.  "Take them."

With a shrug of the shoulders the Hairless Mexican put the things back
in his pocket.

"What was in his belt?  You said he kept feeling round his middle."

"Only money.  I've looked through the pocket-book.  It contains nothing
but private letters and photographs of women.  He must have locked the
documents in his grip before coming out with me this evening."

"Damn," said Ashenden.

"I've got the key of his room.  We'd better go and look through his
luggage."

Ashenden felt a sensation of sickness in the pit of his stomach.  He
hesitated.  The Mexican smiled not unkindly.

"There's no risk, _amigo_," he said, as though he were reassuring a
small boy, "but if you don't feel happy, I'll go alone."

"No, I'll come with you," said Ashenden.

"There's no one awake in the hotel and Mr. Andreadi won't disturb us.
Take off your shoes if you like."

Ashenden did not answer.  He frowned because he noticed that his hands
were slightly trembling.  He unlaced his shoes and slipped them off.
The Mexican did the same.

"You'd better go first," he said.  "Turn to the left and go straight
along the corridor.  It's number thirty-eight."

Ashenden opened the door and stepped out.  The passage was dimly lit.
It exasperated him to feel so nervous when he could not but be aware
that his companion was perfectly at ease.  When they reached the door
the Hairless Mexican inserted the key, turned the lock and went in.  He
switched on the light.  Ashenden followed him and closed the door.  He
noticed that the shutters were shut.

"Now we're all right.  We can take our time."

He took a bunch of keys out of his pocket, tried one or two and at last
hit upon the right one.  The suitcase was filled with clothes.

"Cheap clothes," said the Mexican contemptuously as he took them out.
"My own principle is that it's always cheaper in the end to buy the
best.  After all one is a gentleman or one isn't a gentleman."

"Are you obliged to talk?" asked Ashenden.

"A spice of danger affects people in different ways.  It only excites
me, but it puts you in a bad temper, _amigo_."

"You see I'm scared and you're not," replied Ashenden with candour.

"It's merely a matter of nerves."

Meanwhile he felt the clothes, rapidly but with care, as he took them
out.  There were no papers of any sort in the suitcase.  Then he took
out his knife and slit the lining.  It was a cheap piece and the lining
was gummed to the material of which the suitcase was made.  There was
no possibility of anything being concealed in it.

"They're not here.  They must be hidden in the room."

"Are you sure he didn't deposit them in some office?  At one of the
consulates, for example?"

"He was never out of my sight for a moment except when he was getting
shaved."

The Hairless Mexican opened the drawers and the cupboard.  There was no
carpet on the floor.  He looked under the bed, in it, and under the
mattress.  His dark eyes shot up and down the room, looking for a
hiding-place, and Ashenden felt that nothing escaped him.

"Perhaps he left them in charge of the clerk downstairs?"

"I should have known it.  And he wouldn't dare.  They're not here.  I
can't understand it."

He looked about the room irresolutely.  He frowned in the attempt to
guess at a solution of the mystery.

"Let's get out of here," said Ashenden.

"In a minute."

The Mexican went down on his knees, quickly and neatly folded the
clothes, and packed them up again.  He locked the bag and stood up.
Then, putting out the light, he slowly opened the door and looked out.
He beckoned to Ashenden and slipped into the passage.  When Ashenden
had followed him he stopped and locked the door, put the key in his
pocket and walked with Ashenden to his room.  When they were inside it
and the bolt drawn Ashenden wiped his clammy hands and his forehead.

"Thank God, we're out of that!"

"There wasn't really the smallest danger.  But what are we to do now?
The Colonel will be angry that the papers haven't been found."

"I'm taking the five o'clock train to Rome.  I shall wire for
instructions there."

"Very well, I will come with you."

"I should have thought it would suit you better to get out of the
country more quickly.  There's a boat to-morrow that goes to Barcelona.
Why don't you take that and if necessary I can come to see you there?"

The Hairless Mexican gave a little smile.

"I see that you are anxious to be rid of me.  Well, I won't thwart a
wish that your inexperience in these matters excuses.  I will go to
Barcelona.  I have a visa for Spain."

Ashenden looked at his watch.  It was a little after two.  He had
nearly three hours to wait.  His companion comfortably rolled himself a
cigarette.

"What do you say to a little supper?" he asked.  "I'm as hungry as a
wolf."

The thought of food sickened Ashenden, but he was terribly thirsty.  He
did not want to go out with the Hairless Mexican, but neither did he
want to stay in that hotel by himself.

"Where could one go at this hour?"

"Come along with me.  I'll find you a place."

Ashenden put on his hat and took his dispatch-case in his hand.  They
went downstairs.  In the hall the porter was sleeping soundly on a
mattress on the floor.  As they passed the desk, walking softly in
order not to wake him, Ashenden noticed in the pigeon-hole belonging to
his room a letter.  He took it out and saw that it was addressed to
him.  They tiptoed out of the hotel and shut the door behind them.
Then they walked quickly away.  Stopping after a hundred yards or so
under a lamp-post Ashenden took the letter out of his pocket and read
it; it came from the Consulate and said: _The enclosed telegram arrived
to-night and in case it is urgent I am sending it round to your hotel
by messenger_.  It had apparently been left some time before midnight
while Ashenden was sitting in his room.  He opened the telegram and saw
that it was in code.

"Well, it'll have to wait," he said, putting it back in his pocket.

The Hairless Mexican walked as though he knew his way through the
deserted streets and Ashenden walked by his side.  At last they came to
a tavern in a blind alley, noisome and evil, and this the Mexican
entered.

"It's not the Ritz," he said, "but at this hour of the night it's only
in a place like this that we stand a chance of getting something to
eat."

Ashenden found himself in a long sordid room at one end of which a
wizened young man sat at a piano; there were tables standing out from
the wall on each side and against them benches.  A number of persons,
men and women, were sitting about.  They were drinking beer and wine.
The women were old, painted, and hideous; and their harsh gaiety was at
once noisy and lifeless.  When Ashenden and the Hairless Mexican came
in they all stared and when they sat down at one of the tables Ashenden
looked away in order not to meet the leering eyes, just ready to break
into a smile, that sought his insinuatingly.  The wizened pianist
strummed a tune and several couples got up and began to dance.  Since
there were not enough men to go round some of the women danced
together.  The General ordered two plates of spaghetti and a bottle of
Capri wine.  When the wine was brought he drank a glassful greedily and
then waiting for the _pasta_ eyed the women who were sitting at the
other tables.

"Do you dance?" he asked Ashenden.  "I'm going to ask one of these
girls to have a turn with me."

He got up and Ashenden watched him go up to one who had at least
flashing eyes and white teeth to recommend her; she rose and he put his
arm round her.  He danced well.  Ashenden saw him begin talking; the
woman laughed and presently the look of indifference with which she had
accepted his offer changed to one of interest.  Soon they were chatting
gaily.  The dance came to an end and putting her back at her table he
returned to Ashenden and drank another glass of wine.

"What do you think of my girl?" he asked.  "Not bad, is she?  It does
one good to dance.  Why don't you ask one of them?  This is a nice
place, is it not?  You can always trust me to find anything like this.
I have an instinct."

The pianist started again.  The woman looked at the Hairless Mexican
and when with his thumb he pointed to the floor she jumped up with
alacrity.  He buttoned up his coat, arched his back and standing up by
the side of the table waited for her to come to him.  He swung her off,
talking, smiling, and already he was on familiar terms with everyone in
the room.  In fluent Italian, with his Spanish accent, he exchanged
badinage with one and the other.  They laughed at his sallies.  Then
the waiter brought two heaped platefuls of macaroni and when the
Mexican saw them he stopped dancing without ceremony and, allowing his
partner to get back to her table as she chose, hurried to his meal.

"I'm ravenous," he said.  "And yet I ate a good dinner.  Where did you
dine?  You're going to eat some macaroni, aren't you?"

"I have no appetite," said Ashenden.

But he began to eat and to his surprise found that he was hungry.  The
Hairless Mexican ate with huge mouthfuls, enjoying himself vastly; his
eyes shone and he was loquacious.  The woman he had danced with had in
that short time told him all about herself and he repeated now to
Ashenden what she had said.  He stuffed huge pieces of bread into his
mouth.  He ordered another bottle of wine.

"Wine?" he cried scornfully.  "Wine is not a drink, only champagne; it
does not even quench your thirst.  Well, _amigo_, are you feeling
better?"

"I'm bound to say I am," smiled Ashenden.

"Practice, that is all you want, practice."

He stretched out his hand to pat Ashenden on the arm.

"What's that?" cried Ashenden with a start.  "What's that stain on your
cuff?"

The Hairless Mexican gave his sleeve a glance.

"That?  Nothing.  It's only blood.  I had a little accident and cut
myself."

Ashenden was silent.  His eyes sought the clock that hung over the door.

"Are you anxious about your train?  Let me have one more dance and then
I'll accompany you to the station."

The Mexican got up and with his sublime self-assurance seized in his
arms the woman who sat nearest to him and danced away with her.
Ashenden watched him moodily.  He was a monstrous, terrible figure with
that blond wig and his hairless face, but he moved with a matchless
grace; his feet were small and seemed to hold the ground like the pads
of a cat or a tiger; his rhythm was wonderful and you could not but see
that the bedizened creature he danced with was intoxicated by his
gestures.  There was music in his toes and in the long arms that held
her so firmly, and there was music in those long legs that seemed to
move strangely from the hips.  Sinister and grotesque though he was,
there was in him now a feline elegance, even something of beauty, and
you felt a secret, shameful fascination.  To Ashenden he suggested one
of those sculptures of the pre-Aztec hewers of stone, in which there is
barbarism and vitality, something terrible and cruel, and yet withal a
brooding and significant loveliness.  All the same he would gladly have
left him to finish the night by himself in that sordid dance-hall, but
he knew that he must have a business conversation with him.  He did not
look forward to it without misgiving.  He had been instructed to give
Manuel Carmona certain sums in return for certain documents.  Well, the
documents were not forthcoming, and as for the rest--Ashenden knew
nothing about that; it was no business of his.  The Hairless Mexican
waved gaily as he passed him.

"I will come the moment the music stops.  Pay the bill and then I shall
be ready."

Ashenden wished he could have seen into his mind.  He could not even
make a guess at its workings.  Then the Mexican, with his scented
handkerchief wiping the sweat from his brow, came back.

"Have you had a good time, General?" Ashenden asked him.

"I always have a good time.  Poor white trash, but what do I care?  I
like to feel the body of a woman in my arms and see her eyes grow
languid and her lips part as her desire for me melts the marrow in her
bones like butter in the sun.  Poor white trash, but women."

They sallied forth.  The Mexican proposed that they should walk and in
that quarter, at that hour, there would have been little chance of
finding a cab; but the sky was starry.  It was a summer night and the
air was still.  The silence walked beside them like the ghost of a dead
man.  When they neared the station the houses seemed on a sudden to
take on a greyer, more rigid line, and you felt that the dawn was at
hand.  A little shiver trembled through the night.  It was a moment of
apprehension and the soul for an instant was anxious; it was as though,
inherited down the years in their countless millions, it felt a witless
fear that perhaps another day would not break.  But they entered the
station and the night once more enwrapped them.  One or two porters
lolled about like stage-hands after the curtain has rung down and the
scene is struck.  Two soldiers in dim uniforms stood motionless.

The waiting-room was empty, but Ashenden and the Hairless Mexican went
to sit in the most retired part of it.

"I still have an hour before my train goes.  I'll just see what this
cable's about."

He took it out of his pocket and from the dispatch-case got his code.
He was not then using a very elaborate one.  It was in two parts, one
contained in a skin book and the other, given him on a sheet of paper
and destroyed by him before he left allied territory, committed to
memory.  Ashenden put on his spectacles and set to work.  The Hairless
Mexican sat in a corner of the seat, rolling himself cigarettes and
smoking; he sit there placidly, taking no notice of what Ashenden did,
and enjoyed his well-earned repose.  Ashenden deciphered the groups of
numbers one by one and as he got it out jotted down each word on a
piece of paper.  His method was to abstract his mind from the sense
till he had finished, since he had discovered that if you took notice
of the words as they came along you often jumped to a conclusion and
sometimes were led into error.  So he translated quite mechanically,
without paying attention to the words as he wrote them one after the
other.  When at last he had done he read the complete message.  It ran
as follows:

_Constantine Andreadi has been detained by illness at Pirus.  He will
be unable to sail.  Return Geneva and await instructions_.

At first Ashenden could not understand.  He read it again.  He shook
from head to foot.  Then, for once robbed of his self-possession, he
blurted out, in a hoarse, agitated and furious whisper:

"You bloody fool, you've killed the wrong man."




VII

_A Trip To Paris_

Ashenden was in the habit of asserting that he was never bored.  It was
one of his notions that only such persons were as had no resources in
themselves and it was but the stupid that depended on the outside world
for their amusement.  Ashenden had no illusions about himself and such
success in current letters as had come to him had left his head
unturned.  He distinguished acutely between fame and the notoriety that
rewards the author of a successful novel or a popular play; and he was
indifferent to this except in so far as it was attended with tangible
benefits.  He was perfectly ready to take advantage of his familiar
name to get a better state-room on a ship than he had paid for, and if
a Customs-house officer passed his luggage unopened because he had read
his short stories Ashenden was pleased to admit that the pursuit of
literature had its compensations.  He sighed when eager young students
of the drama sought to discuss its technique with him, and when gushing
ladies tremulously whispered in his ear their admiration of his books
he often wished he was dead.  But he thought himself intelligent and so
it was absurd that he should be bored.  It was a fact that he could
talk with interest to persons commonly thought so excruciatingly dull
that their fellows fled from them as though they owed them money.  It
may be that here he was but indulging the professional instinct that
was seldom dormant in him; they, his raw material, did not bore him any
more than fossils bore the geologist.  And now he had everything that a
reasonable man could want for his entertainment.  He had pleasant rooms
in a good hotel and Geneva is one of the most agreeable cities in
Europe to live in.  He hired a boat and rowed on the lake or hired a
horse and trotted sedately, for in that neat and orderly canton it is
difficult to find a stretch of turf where you can have a good gallop,
along the macadamised roads in the environs of the town.  He wandered
on foot about its old streets, trying among those grey stone houses, so
quiet and dignified, to recapture the spirit of a past age.  He read
again with delight Rousseau's _Confessions_, and for the second or
third time tried in vain to get on with _La Nouvelle Hlose_.  He
wrote.  He knew few people, for it was his business to keep in the
background, but he had picked up a chatting acquaintance with several
persons living in his hotel and he was not lonely.  His life was
sufficiently filled, it was varied, and when he had nothing else to do
he could enjoy his own reflections; it was absurd to think that under
these circumstances he could possibly be bored and yet, like a little
lonely cloud in the sky, he did see in the offing the possibility of
boredom.  There is a story that Louis XIV, having summoned a courtier
to attend him on a ceremonial occasion, found himself ready to go as
the courtier appeared; he turned to him and with icy majesty said,
_j'ai failli attendre_, of which the only translation I can give, but a
poor one, is, I have but just escaped waiting: so Ashenden might have
admitted that he now but just escaped being bored.

It might be, he mused, as he rode along the lake on a dappled horse
with a great rump and a short neck, like one of those prancing steeds
that you see in old pictures, but this horse never pranced and he
needed a firm jab with the spur to break even into a smart trot; it
might be, he mused, that the great chiefs of the secret service in
their London offices, their hands on the throttle of this great
machine, led a life full of excitement; they moved their pieces here
and there, they saw the pattern woven by the multitudinous threads
(Ashenden was lavish with his metaphors), they made a picture out of
the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle; but it must be confessed that
for the small fry like himself to be a member of the secret service was
not as adventurous an affair as the public thought.  Ashenden's
official existence was as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk's.  He
saw his spies at stated intervals and paid them their wages; when he
could get hold of a new one he engaged him, gave him his instructions
and sent him off to Germany; he waited for the information that came
through and dispatched it; he went into France once a week to confer
with his colleague over the frontier and to receive his orders from
London; he visited the market-place on market-day to get any message
the old butter-woman had brought him from the other side of the lake;
he kept his eyes and ears open; and he wrote long reports which he was
convinced no one read, till having inadvertently slipped a jest into
one of them he received a sharp reproof for his levity.  The work he
was doing was evidently necessary, but it could not be called anything
but monotonous.  At one moment for something better to do he had
considered the possibility of a flirtation with the Baroness von
Higgins.  He was confident now that she was an agent in the service of
the Austrian Government and he looked forward to a certain
entertainment in the duel he foresaw.  It would be amusing to set his
wits against hers.  He was quite aware that she would lay snares for
him and to avoid them would give him something to keep his mind from
rusting.  He found her not unwilling to play the game.  She wrote him
gushing little notes when he sent her flowers.  She went for a row with
him on the lake and letting her long white hand drag through the water
talked of Love and hinted at a Broken Heart.  They dined together and
went to see a performance, in French and in prose, of _Romeo and
Juliet_.  Ashenden had not made up his mind how far he was prepared to
go when he received a sharp note from R. to ask him what he was playing
at: information "had come to hand" that he (Ashenden) was much in the
society of a woman calling herself the Baroness de Higgins, who was
known to be an agent of the Central Powers and it was most undesirable
that he should be on any terms with her but those of frigid courtesy.
Ashenden shrugged his shoulders.  R. did not think him as clever as he
thought himself.  But he was intrigued to discover, what he had not
known before, that there was someone in Geneva part of whose duties at
all events was to keep an eye on him.  There was evidently someone who
had orders to see that he did not neglect his work or get into
mischief.  Ashenden was not a little amused.  What a shrewd,
unscrupulous old thing was R.!  He took no risks; he trusted nobody; he
made use of his instruments, but high or low, had no opinion of them.
Ashenden looked about to see whether he could spot the person who had
told R. what he was doing.  He wondered if it was one of the waiters in
the hotel.  He knew that R. had a great belief in waiters; they had the
chance of seeing so much and could so easily get into places where
information was lying about to be picked up.  He even wondered whether
R. had got his news from the Baroness herself; it would not be so
strange if after all she was employed by the secret service of one of
the Allied nations.  Ashenden continued to be polite to the Baroness,
but ceased to be attentive.

He turned his horse and trotted gently back to Geneva.  An ostler from
the riding-stables was waiting at the hotel door and slipping out of
the saddle Ashenden went into the hotel.  At the desk the porter handed
him a telegram.  It was to the following effect:

_Aunt Maggie not at all well.  Staying at Htel Lotti, Paris.  If
possible please go and see her.  Raymond._

Raymond was one of R.'s facetious _noms de guerre_, and since Ashenden
was not so fortunate as to possess an Aunt Maggie he concluded that
this was an order to go to Paris.  It had always seemed to Ashenden
that R. had spent much of his spare time in reading detective fiction
and especially when he was in a good humour he found a fantastic
pleasure in aping the style of the shilling shocker.  If R. was in a
good humour it meant that he was about to bring off a _coup_, for when
he had brought one off he was filled with depression and then vented
his spleen on his subordinates.

Ashenden, leaving his telegram with deliberate carelessness on the
desk, asked at what time the express left for Paris.  He glanced at the
clock to see whether he had time to get to the Consulate before it
closed and secure his visa.  When he went upstairs to fetch his
passport the porter, just as the lift doors were closed, called him.

"_Monsieur_ has forgotten his telegram," he said.

"How stupid of me," said Ashenden.

Now Ashenden knew that if an Austrian baroness by any chance wondered
why he had so suddenly gone to Paris she would discover that it was
owing to the indisposition of a female relative.  In those troublous
times of war it was just as well that everything should be clear and
above board.  He was known at the French Consulate and so lost little
time there.  He had told the porter to get him a ticket and on his
return to the hotel bathed and changed.  He was not a little excited at
the prospect of this unexpected jaunt.  He liked the journey.  He slept
well in a sleeping-car and was not disturbed if a sudden jolt waked
him; it was pleasant to lie a while smoking a cigarette and to feel
oneself in one's little cabin so enchantingly alone; the rhythmical
sound as the wheels rattled over the points was an agreeable background
to the pattern of one's reflections, and to speed through the open
country and the night made one feel like a star speeding through space.
And at the end of the journey was the unknown.

When Ashenden arrived in Paris it was chilly and a light rain was
falling; he felt unshaved and he wanted a bath and clean linen; but he
was in excellent spirits.  He telephoned from the station to R. and
asked how Aunt Maggie was.

"I'm glad to see that your affection for her was great enough to allow
you to waste no time in getting here," answered R., with the ghost of a
chuckle in his voice.  "She's very low, but I'm sure it'll do her good
to see you."

Ashenden reflected that this was the mistake the amateur humorist, as
opposed to the professional, so often made; when he made a joke he
harped on it.  The relations of the joker to his joke should be as
quick and desultory as those of a bee to its flower.  He should make
his joke and pass on.  There is of course no harm if, like the bee
approaching the flower, he buzzes a little; for it is just as well to
announce to a thick-headed world that a joke is intended.  But
Ashenden, unlike most professional humorists, had a kindly tolerance
for other people's humour and now he answered R. on his own lines.

"When would she like to see me, do you think?" he asked.  "Give her my
love, won't you?"

Now R. quite distinctly chuckled.  Ashenden sighed.

"She'll want to titivate a little before you come, I expect.  You know
what she is, she likes to make the best of herself.  Shall we say
half-past ten, and then when you've had a talk to her we might go out
and lunch together somewhere."

"All right," said Ashenden.  "I'll come to the Lotti at ten-thirty."

When Ashenden, clean and refreshed, reached the hotel an orderly whom
he recognised met him in the hall and took him up to R.'s apartment.
He opened the door and showed Ashenden in.  R. was standing with his
back to a bright log fire dictating to his secretary.

"Sit down," said R. and went on with his dictation.

It was a nicely furnished sitting-room and a bunch of roses in a bowl
gave the impression of a woman's hand.  On a large table was a litter
of papers.  R. looked older than when last Ashenden had seen him.  His
thin yellow face was more lined and his hair was greyer.  The work was
telling on him.  He did not spare himself.  He was up at seven every
morning and he worked late into the night.  His uniform was spick and
span, but he wore it shabbily.

"That'll do," he said.  "Take all this stuff away and get on with the
typing.  I'll sign before I go out to lunch."  Then he turned to the
orderly.  "I don't want to be disturbed."

The secretary, a sub-lieutenant in the thirties, obviously a civilian
with a temporary commission, gathered up a mass of papers and left the
room.  As the orderly was following R. said:

"Wait outside.  If I want you I'll call."

"Very good, sir."

When they were alone R. turned to Ashenden with what for him was
cordiality.

"Have a nice journey up?"

"Yes, sir."

"What do you think of this?" he asked, looking round the room.  "Not
bad, is it?  I never see why one shouldn't do what one can to mitigate
the hardships of war."

While he was idly chatting R. gazed at Ashenden with a singular fixity.
The stare of those pale eyes of his, too closely set together, gave you
the impression that he looked at your naked brain and had a very poor
opinion of what he saw there.  R. in rare moments of expansion made no
secret of the fact that he looked upon his fellow men as fools or
knaves.  That was one of the obstacles he had to contend with in his
calling.  On the whole he preferred them knaves; you knew then what you
were up against and could take steps accordingly.  He was a
professional soldier and had spent his career in India and the
Colonies.  At the outbreak of the war he was stationed in Jamaica and
someone in the War Office who had had dealings with him, remembering
him, brought him over and put him in the Intelligence Department.  His
astuteness was so great that he very soon occupied an important post.
He had an immense energy and a gift for organisation, no scruples, but
resource, courage and determination.  He had perhaps but one weakness.
Throughout his life he had never come in contact with persons,
especially women, of any social consequence; the only women he had ever
known were the wives of his brother officers, the wives of Government
officials and of business men; and when, coming to London at the
beginning of the war, his work brought him into contact with brilliant,
beautiful and distinguished women he was unduly dazzled.  They made him
feel shy, but he cultivated their society; he became quite a lady's
man, and to Ashenden, who knew more about him than R. suspected, that
bowl of roses told a story.

Ashenden knew that R. had not sent for him to talk about the weather
and the crops, and wondered when he was coming to the point.  He did
not wonder long.

"You've been doing pretty well in Geneva," he said.

"I'm glad you think that, sir," replied Ashenden.

Suddenly R. looked very cold and stern.  He had done with idle talk.

"I've got a job for you," he said.

Ashenden made no reply, but he felt a happy little flutter somewhere
about the pit of his stomach.

"Have you ever heard of Chandra Lal?"

"No, sir."

A frown of impatience for an instant darkened the Colonel's brow.  He
expected his subordinates to know everything he wished them to know.

"Where have you been living all these years?"

"At 36, Chesterfield Street, Mayfair," returned Ashenden.

The shadow of a smile crossed R.'s yellow face.  The somewhat
impertinent reply was after his own sardonic heart.  He went over to
the big table and opened a dispatch-case that lay upon it.  He took out
a photograph and handed it to Ashenden.

"That's him."

To Ashenden, unused to Oriental faces, it looked like any of a hundred
Indians that he had seen.  It might have been the photograph of one or
other of the Rajahs who come periodically to England and are portrayed
in the illustrated papers.  It showed a fat-faced, swarthy man, with
full lips and a fleshy nose; his hair was black, thick and straight,
and his very large eyes even in the photograph were liquid and
cow-like.  He looked ill-at-ease in European clothes.

"Here he is in native dress," said R., giving Ashenden another
photograph.

This was full-length, whereas the first had shown only the head and
shoulders, and it had evidently been taken some years earlier.  He was
thinner and his great, serious eyes seemed to devour his face.  It was
done by a native photographer in Calcutta and the surroundings were
navely grotesque.  Chandra Lal stood against a background on which had
been painted a pensive palm tree and a view of the sea.  One hand
rested on a heavily carved table on which was a rubber-plant in a
flower-pot.  But in his turban and long, pale tunic he was not without
dignity.

"What d'you think of him?" asked R.

"I should have said he was a man not without personality.  There is a
certain force there."

"Here's his dossier.  Read it, will you?"

R. gave Ashenden a couple of typewritten pages and Ashenden sat down.
R. put on his spectacles and began to read the letters that awaited his
signature.  Ashenden skimmed the report and then read it a second time
more attentively.  It appeared that Chandra Lal was a dangerous
agitator.  He was a lawyer by profession, but had taken up politics and
was bitterly hostile to the British rule in India.  He was a partisan
of armed force and had been on more than one occasion responsible for
riots in which life had been lost.  He was once arrested, tried and
sentenced to two years' imprisonment; but he was at liberty at the
beginning of the war and seizing his opportunity began to foment active
rebellion.  He was at the heart of plots to embarrass the British in
India and so prevent them from transferring troops to the seat of war
and with the help of immense sums given to him by German agents he was
able to cause a great deal of trouble.  He was concerned in two or
three bomb outrages which, though beyond killing a few innocent
bystanders they did little harm, yet shook the nerves of the public and
so damaged its morale.  He evaded all attempts to arrest him, his
activity was formidable, he was here and there; but the police could
never lay hands on him, and they only learned that he had been in some
city when, having done his work, he had left it.  At last a high reward
was offered for his arrest on a charge of murder, but he escaped the
country, got to America, from there went to Sweden and eventually
reached Berlin.  Here he busied himself with schemes to create
disaffection among the native troops that had been brought to Europe.
All this was narrated dryly, without comment or explanation, but from
the very frigidity of the narrative you got a sense of mystery and
adventure, of hairbreadth escapes and dangers dangerously encountered.
The report ended as follows:

"C. has a wife in India and two children.  He is not known to have
anything to do with women.  He neither drinks nor smokes.  He is said
to be honest.  Considerable sums of money have passed through his hands
and there has never been any question as to his not having made a
proper (!) use of them.  He has undoubted courage and is a hard worker.
He is said to pride himself on keeping his word."

Ashenden returned the document to R.

"Well?"

"A fanatic."  Ashenden thought there was about the man something rather
romantic and attractive, but he knew that R. did not want any nonsense
of that sort from him.  "He looks like a very dangerous fellow."

"He is the most dangerous conspirator in or out of India.  He's done
more harm than all the rest of them put together.  You know that
there's a gang of these Indians in Berlin; well, he's the brains of it.
If he could be got out of the way I could afford to ignore the others;
he's the only one who has any guts.  I've been trying to catch him for
a year, I thought there wasn't a hope; but now at last I've got a
chance, and by God, I'm going to take it."

"And what'll you do then?"

R. chuckled grimly.

"Shoot him and shoot him damn quick."

Ashenden did not answer.  R. walked once or twice across the small room
and then, again with his back to the fire, faced Ashenden.  His thin
mouth was twisted by a sarcastic smile.

"Did you notice at the end of that report I gave you, it said he wasn't
known to have anything to do with women?  Well, that _was_ true, but it
isn't any longer.  The damned fool has fallen in love."

R. stepped over to his dispatch-case and took out a bundle tied up with
pale blue ribbon.

"Look, here are his love-letters.  You're a novelist, it might amuse
you to read them.  In fact you should read them, it will help you to
deal with the situation.  Take them away with you."

R. flung the neat little bundle back into the dispatch-case.

"One wonders how an able man like that can allow himself to get
besotted over a woman.  It was the last thing I ever expected of him."

Ashenden's eyes travelled to that bowl of beautiful roses that stood on
the table, but he said nothing.  R. who missed little saw the glance
and his look suddenly darkened.  Ashenden knew that he felt like asking
him what the devil he was staring at.  At that moment R. had no
friendly feelings towards his subordinate, but he made no remark.  He
went back to the subject on hand.

"Anyhow that's neither here nor there.  Chandra has fallen madly in
love with a woman called Giulia Lazzari.  He's crazy about her."

"Do you know how he picked her up?"

"Of course I do.  She's a dancer, and she does Spanish dances, but she
happens to be an Italian.  For stage purposes she calls herself La
Malaguena.  You know the kind of thing.  Popular Spanish music and a
mantilla, a fan and a high comb.  She's been dancing all over Europe
for the last ten years."

"Is she any good?"

"No, rotten.  She's been in the provinces in England and she's had a
few engagements in London.  She never got more than ten pounds a week.
Chandra met her in Berlin in a Tingel-tangel, you know what that is, a
cheap sort of music-hall.  I take it that on the Continent she looked
upon her dancing chiefly as a means to enhance her value as a
prostitute."

"How did she get to Berlin during the war?"

"She'd been married to a Spaniard at one time; I think she still is
though they don't live together, and she travelled on a Spanish
passport.  It appears Chandra made a dead set for her."  R. took up the
Indian's photograph again and looked at it thoughtfully.  "You wouldn't
have thought there was anything very attractive in that greasy little
nigger.  God, how they run to fat!  The fact remains that she fell very
nearly as much in love with him as he did with her.  I've got her
letters too, only copies, of course, he's got the originals and I
daresay he keeps them tied up in pink ribbon.  She's mad about him.
I'm not a literary man, but I think I know when a thing rings true;
anyhow you'll be reading them, and you can tell me what you think.  And
then people say there's no such thing as love at first sight."

R. smiled with faint irony.  He was certainly in a good humour this
morning.

"But how did you get hold of all these letters?"

"How did I get hold of them?  How do you imagine?  Owing to her Italian
nationality Giulia Lazzari was eventually expelled from Germany.  She
was put over the Dutch frontier.  Having an engagement to dance in
England she was granted a visa and"--R. looked up a date among the
papers--"and on the twenty-fourth of October last sailed from Rotterdam
to Harwich.  Since then she has danced in London, Birmingham,
Portsmouth and other places.  She was arrested a fortnight ago at Hull."

"What for?"

"Espionage.  She was transferred to London and I went to see her myself
at Holloway."

Ashenden and R. looked at one another for a moment without speaking and
it may be that each was trying his hardest to read the other's
thoughts.  Ashenden was wondering where the truth in all this lay and
R. wondered how much of it he could advantageously tell him.

"How did you get on to her?"

"I thought it odd that the Germans should allow her to dance quite
quietly in Berlin for weeks and then for no particular reason decide to
put her out of the country.  It would be a good introduction for
espionage.  And a dancer who was not too careful of her virtue might
make opportunities of learning things that it would be worth somebody's
while in Berlin to pay a good price for.  I thought it might be as well
to let her come to England and see what she was up to.  I kept track of
her.  I discovered that she was sending letters to an address in
Holland two or three times a week and two or three times a week was
receiving answers from Holland.  Hers were written in a queer mixture
of French, German and English; she speaks English a little and French
quite well, but the answers were written entirely in English; it was
good English, but not an Englishman's English, flowery and rather
grandiloquent; I wondered who was writing them.  They seemed to be just
ordinary love-letters, but they were by way of being rather hot stuff.
It was plain enough that they were coming from Germany and the writer
was neither English, French nor German.  Why did he write in English?
The only foreigners who know English better than any continental
language are Orientals, and not Turks or Egyptians either; they know
French.  A Jap would write English and so would an Indian.  I came to
the conclusion that Giulia's lover was one of that gang of Indians that
were making trouble for us in Berlin.  I had no idea it was Chandra Lal
till I found the photograph."

"How did you get that?"

"She carried it about with her.  It was a pretty good bit of work,
that.  She kept it locked up in her trunk, with a lot of theatrical
photographs, of comic singers and clowns and acrobats; it might easily
have passed for the picture of some music-hall artiste in his stage
dress.  In fact, later, when she was arrested and asked who the
photograph represented she said she didn't know, it was an Indian
conjuror who had given it her and she had no idea what his name was.
Anyhow I put a very smart lad on the job and he thought it queer that
it should be the only photograph in the lot that came from Calcutta.
He noticed that there was a number on the back, and he took it, the
number, I mean; of course the photograph was replaced in the box."

"By the way, just as a matter of interest how did your very smart lad
get at the photograph at all?"

R.'s eyes twinkled.

"That's none of your business.  But I don't mind telling you that he
was a good-looking boy.  Anyhow it's of no consequence.  When we got
the number of the photograph we cabled to Calcutta and in a little
while I received the grateful news that the object of Giulia's
affections was no less a person than the incorruptible Chandra Lal.
Then I thought it my duty to have Giulia watched a little more
carefully.  She seemed to have a sneaking fondness for naval officers.
I couldn't exactly blame her for that; they are attractive, but it is
unwise for ladies of easy virtue and doubtful nationality to cultivate
their society in war-time.  Presently I got a very pretty little body
of evidence against her."

"How was she getting her stuff through?"

"She wasn't getting it through.  She wasn't trying to.  The Germans had
turned her out quite genuinely; she wasn't working for them, she was
working for Chandra.  After her engagement was through in England she
was planning to go to Holland again and meet him.  She wasn't very
clever at the work; she was nervous, but it looked easy; no one seemed
to bother about her, it grew rather exciting; she was getting all sorts
of interesting information without any risk.  In one of her letters she
said: 'I have so much to tell you, _mon petit chou_ darling, and what
you will be _extrmement intress_ to know,' and she underlined the
French words."

R. paused and rubbed his hands together.  His tired face bore a look of
devilish enjoyment of his own cunning.

"It was espionage made easy.  Of course I didn't care a damn about her,
it was him I was after.  Well, as soon as I'd got the goods on her I
arrested her.  I had enough evidence to convict a regiment of spies."

R. put his hands in his pockets and his pale lips twisted to a smile
that was almost a grimace.

"Holloway's not a very cheerful place, you know."

"I imagine no prison is," remarked Ashenden.

"I left her to stew in her own juice for a week before I went to see
her.  She was in a very pretty state of nerves by then.  The wardress
told me she'd been in violent hysterics most of the time.  I must say
she looked like the devil."

"Is she handsome?"

"You'll see for yourself.  She's not my type.  I daresay she's better
when she's made up and that kind of thing.  I talked to her like a
Dutch uncle.  I put the fear of God into her.  I told her she'd get ten
years.  I think I scared her, I know I tried to.  Of course she denied
everything, but the proofs were there, I assured her she hadn't got a
chance.  I spent three hours with her.  She went all to pieces and at
last she confessed everything.  Then I told her that I'd let her go
scot-free if she'd get Chandra to come to France.  She absolutely
refused, she said she'd rather die; she was very hysterical and
tiresome, but I let her rave.  I told her to think it over and said I'd
see her in a day or two and we'd have another talk about it.  In point
of fact I left her for a week.  She'd evidently had time to reflect,
because when I came again she asked me quite calmly what it was exactly
that I proposed.  She'd been in gaol a fortnight then and I expect
she'd had about enough of it.  I put it to her as plainly as I could
and she accepted."

"I don't think I quite understand," said Ashenden.

"Don't you?  I should have thought it was clear to the meanest
intelligence.  If she can get Chandra to cross the Swiss frontier and
come into France she's to go free, either to Spain or to South America,
with her passage paid."

"And how the devil is she to get Chandra to do that?"

"He's madly in love with her.  He's longing to see her.  His letters
are almost crazy.  She's written to him to say that she can't get a
visa to Holland (I told you she was to join him there when her tour was
over), but she can get one for Switzerland.  That's a neutral country
and he's safe there.  He jumped at the chance.  They've arranged to
meet at Lausanne."

"Yes."

"When he reaches Lausanne he'll get a letter from her to say that the
French authorities won't let her cross the frontier and that she's
going to Thonon, which is just on the other side of the lake from
Lausanne, in France, and she's going to ask him to come there."

"What makes you think he will?"

R. paused for an instant.  He looked at Ashenden with a pleasant
expression.

"She must make him if she doesn't want to go to penal servitude for ten
years."

"I see."

"She's arriving from England this evening in custody and I should like
you to take her down to Thonon by the night train."

"Me?" said Ashenden.

"Yes, I thought it the sort of job you could manage very well.
Presumably you know more about human nature than most people.  It'll be
a pleasant change for you to spend a week or two at Thonon.  I believe
it's a pretty little place, fashionable too--in peace-time.  You might
take the baths there."

"And what do you expect me to do when I get the lady down to Thonon?"

"I leave you a free hand.  I've made a few notes that may be useful to
you.  I'll read them to you, shall I?"

Ashenden listened attentively.  R.'s plan was simple and explicit.
Ashenden could not but feel unwilling admiration for the brain that had
so neatly devised it.

Presently R. suggested that they should have luncheon and he asked
Ashenden to take him to some place where they could see smart people.
It amused Ashenden to see R. so sharp, sure of himself and alert in his
office, seized as he walked into the restaurant with shyness.  He
talked a little too loud in order to show that he was at his ease and
made himself somewhat unnecessarily at home.  You saw in his manner the
shabby and commonplace life he had led till the hazards of war raised
him to a position of consequence.  He was glad to be in that
fashionable restaurant cheek by jowl with persons who bore great or
distinguished names, but he felt like a schoolboy in his first top-hat,
and he quailed before the steely eye of the _maitre d'htel_.  His
quick glance darted here and there and his sallow face beamed with a
self-satisfaction of which he was slightly ashamed.  Ashenden drew his
attention to an ugly woman in black, with a lovely figure, wearing a
long row of pearls.

"That is Madame de Brides.  She is the mistress of the Grand Duke
Theodore.  She's probably one of the most influential women in Europe,
she's certainly one of the cleverest."

R.'s clever eyes rested on her and he flushed a little.

"By George, this is life," he said.

Ashenden watched him curiously.  Luxury is dangerous to people who have
never known it and to whom its temptations are held out too suddenly.
R., that shrewd, cynical man, was captivated by the vulgar glamour and
the shoddy brilliance of the scene before him.  Just as the advantage
of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction, so
the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with
a proper contumely.

But when they had eaten their luncheon and were drinking their coffee
Ashenden, seeing that R. was mellowed by the good meal and his
surroundings, went back to the subject that was in his thoughts.

"That Indian fellow must be a rather remarkable chap," he said.

"He's got brains, of course."

"One can't help being impressed by a man who had the courage to take on
almost single-handed the whole British power in India."

"I wouldn't get sentimental about him if I were you.  He's nothing but
a dangerous criminal."

"I don't suppose he'd use bombs if he could command a few batteries and
half a dozen battalions.  He uses what weapons he can.  You can hardly
blame him for that.  After all, he's aiming at nothing for himself, is
he?  He's aiming at freedom for his country.  On the face of it it
looks as though he were justified in his actions."

But R. had no notion of what Ashenden was talking.

"That's very far-fetched and morbid," he said.  "We can't go into all
that.  Our job is to get him and when we've got him to shoot him."

"Of course.  He's declared war and he must take his chance.  I shall
carry out your instructions, that's what I'm here for, but I see no
harm in realising that there's something to be admired and respected in
him."

R. was once more the cool and astute judge of his fellows.

"I've not yet made up my mind whether the best men for this kind of job
are those who do it with passion or those who keep their heads.  Some
of them are filled with hatred for the people we're up against and when
we down them it gives them a sort of satisfaction like satisfying a
personal grudge.  Of course they're very keen on their work.  You're
different, aren't you?  You look at it like a game of chess and you
don't seem to have any feeling one way or the other.  I can't quite
make it out.  Of course for some sort of jobs it's just what one wants."

Ashenden did not answer.  He called for the bill and walked back with
R. to the hotel.




VIII

_Giulia Lazzari_

The train started at eight.  When he had disposed of his bag Ashenden
walked along the platform.  He found the carriage in which Giulia
Lazzari was, but she sat in a corner, looking away from the light, so
that he could not see her face.  She was in charge of two detectives
who had taken her over from English police at Boulogne.  One of them
worked with Ashenden on the French side of the Lake Geneva, and as
Ashenden came up he nodded to him.

"I've asked the lady if she will dine in the restaurant-car, but she
prefers to have dinner in the carriage, so I've ordered a basket.  Is
that quite correct?"

"Quite," said Ashenden.

"My companion and I will go into the diner in turn so that she will not
remain alone."

"That is very considerate of you.  I will come along when we've started
and have a chat with her."

"She's not disposed to be very talkative," said the detective.

"One could hardly expect it," replied Ashenden.

He walked on to get his ticket for the second service and then returned
to his own carriage.  Giulia Lazzari was just finishing her meal when
he went back to her.  From a glance at the basket he judged that she
had not eaten with too poor an appetite.  The detective who was
guarding her opened the door when Ashenden appeared and at Ashenden's
suggestion left them alone.

Giulia Lazzari gave him a sullen look.

"I hope you've had what you wanted for dinner," he said as he sat down
in front of her.

She bowed slightly, but did not speak.  He took out his case.

"Will you have a cigarette?"

She gave him a glance, seemed to hesitate, and then, still without a
word, took one.  He struck a match, and lighting it, looked at her.  He
was surprised.  For some reason he had expected her to be fair, perhaps
from some notion that an Oriental would be more likely to fall for a
blonde; but she was almost swarthy.  Her hair was hidden by a
close-fitting hat, but her eyes were coal-black.  She was far from
young, she might have been thirty-five, and her skin was lined and
sallow.  She had at the moment no make-up on and she looked haggard.
There was nothing beautiful about her but her magnificent eyes.  She
was big, and Ashenden thought she must be too big to dance gracefully;
it might be that in Spanish costume she was a bold and flaunting
figure, but there in the train, shabbily dressed, there was nothing to
explain the Indian's infatuation.  She gave Ashenden a long, appraising
stare.  She wondered evidently what sort of man he was.  She blew a
cloud of smoke through her nostrils and gave it a glance, then looked
back at Ashenden.  He could see that her sullenness was only a mask,
she was nervous and frightened.  She spoke in French with an Italian
accent.

"Who are you?"

"My name would mean nothing to you, madame.  I am going to Thonon.  I
have taken a room for you at the Htel de la Place.  It is the only one
open now.  I think you will find it quite comfortable."

"Ah, it is you the Colonel spoke to me of.  You are my jailer."

"Only as a matter of form.  I shall not intrude upon you."

"All the same you are my jailer."

"I hope not for very long.  I have in my pocket your passport with all
the formalities completed to permit you to go to Spain."

She threw herself back into the corner of the carriage.  White, with
those great black eyes, in the poor light, her face was suddenly a mask
of despair.

"It's infamous.  Oh, I think I could die happy if I could only kill
that old Colonel.  He has no heart.  I'm so unhappy."

"I am afraid you have got yourself into a very unfortunate situation.
Did you not know that espionage was a dangerous game?"

"I never sold any of the secrets.  I did no harm."

"Surely only because you had no opportunity.  I understand that you
signed a full confession."

Ashenden spoke to her as amiably as he could, a little as though he
were talking to a sick person, and there was no harshness in his voice.

"Oh, yes, I made a fool of myself.  I wrote the letter the Colonel said
I was to write.  Why isn't that enough?  What is to happen to me if he
does not answer?  I cannot force him to come if he does not want to."

"He has answered," said Ashenden.  "I have the answer with me."

She gave a gasp and her voice broke.

"Oh, show it to me, I beseech you to let me see it."

"I have no objection to doing that.  But you must return it to me."

He took Chandra's letter from his pocket and gave it to her.  She
snatched it from his hand.  She devoured it with her eyes, there were
eight pages of it, and as she read the tears streamed down her cheeks.
Between her sobs she gave little exclamations of love, calling the
writer by pet names French and Italian.  This was the letter that
Chandra had written in reply to hers telling him, on R.'s instructions,
that she would meet him in Switzerland.  He was mad with joy at the
prospect.  He told her in passionate phrases how long the time had
seemed to him since they were parted, and how he had yearned for her,
and now that he was to see her again so soon he did not know how he was
going to bear his impatience.  She finished it and let it drop to the
floor.

"You can see he loves me, can't you?  There's no doubt about that.  I
know something about it, believe me."

"Do you really love him?" asked Ashenden.

"He's the only man who's ever been kind to me.  It's not very gay the
life one leads in these music-halls, all over Europe, never resting,
and men--they are not much the men who haunt those places.  At first I
thought he was just like the rest of them."

Ashenden picked up the letter and replaced it in his pocket-book.

"A telegram was sent in your name to the address in Holland to say that
you would be at the Htel Gibbons at Lausanne on the 14th."

"That is to-morrow."

"Yes."

She threw up her head and her eyes flashed.

"Oh, it is an infamous thing that you are forcing me to do.  It is
shameful."

"You are not obliged to do it," said Ashenden.

"And if I don't?"

"I'm afraid you must take the consequences."

"I can't go to prison," she cried out suddenly, "I can't, I can't; I
have such a short time before me; he said ten years.  Is it possible I
could be sentenced to ten years?"

"If the Colonel told you so it is very possible."

"Oh, I know him.  That cruel face.  He would have no mercy.  And what
should I be in ten years?  Oh, no no."

At that moment the train stopped at a station and the detective waiting
in the corridor tapped on the window.  Ashenden opened the door and the
man gave him a picture-postcard.  It was a dull little view of
Pontarlier, the frontier station between France and Switzerland, and
showed a dusty _place_ with a statue in the middle and a few plane
trees.  Ashenden handed her a pencil.

"Will you write this postcard to your lover?  It will be posted at
Pontarlier.  Address it to the hotel at Lausanne."

She gave him a glance, but without answering took it and wrote as he
directed.

"Now on the other side write: 'Delayed at frontier but everything all
right.  Wait at Lausanne.'  Then add whatever you like, _tendresses_,
if you like."

He took the postcard from her, read it to see that she had done as he
directed and then reached for his hat.

"Well, I shall leave you now, I hope you will have a sleep.  I will
fetch you in the morning when we arrive at Thonon."

The second detective had now returned from his dinner and as Ashenden
came out of the carriage the two men went in.  Giulia Lazzari huddled
back into her corner.  Ashenden gave the postcard to an agent who was
waiting to take it to Pontarlier and then made his way along the
crowded train to his sleeping-car.

It was bright and sunny, though cold, next morning when they reached
their destination.  Ashenden, having given his bags to a porter, walked
along the platform to where Giulia Lazzari and the two detectives were
standing.  Ashenden nodded to them.

"Well, good morning.  You need not trouble to wait."

They touched their hats, gave a word of farewell to the woman, and
walked away.

"Where are they going?" she asked.

"Off.  You will not be bothered with them any more."

"Am I in your custody then?"

"You're in nobody's custody.  I'm going to permit myself to take you to
your hotel and then I shall leave you.  You must try to get a good
rest."

Ashenden's porter took her hand-luggage and she gave him the ticket for
her trunk.  They walked out of the station.  A cab was waiting for them
and Ashenden begged her to get in.  It was a longish drive to the hotel
and now and then Ashenden felt that she gave him a sidelong glance.
She was perplexed.  He sat without a word.  When they reached the hotel
the proprietor--it was a small hotel, prettily situated at the corner
of a little promenade and it had a charming view--showed them the room
that had been prepared for Madame Lazzari.  Ashenden turned to him.

"That'll do very nicely, I think.  I shall come down in a minute."

The proprietor bowed and withdrew.

"I shall do my best to see that you are comfortable, _Madame_," said
Ashenden.  "You are here absolutely your own mistress and you may order
pretty well anything you like.  To the proprietor you are just a guest
of the hotel like any other.  You are absolutely free."

"Free to go out?" she asked quickly.

"Of course."

"With a policeman on either side of me, I suppose."

"Not at all.  You are as free in the hotel as though you were in your
own house and you are free to go out and come in when you choose.  I
should like an assurance from you that you will not write any letters
without my knowledge or attempt to leave Thonon without my permission."

She gave Ashenden a long stare.  She could not make it out at all.  She
looked as though she thought it a dream.

"I am in a position that forces me to give you any assurance you ask.
I give you my word of honour that I will not write a letter without
showing it to you or attempt to leave this place."

"Thank you.  Now I will leave you.  I will do myself the pleasure of
coming to see you to-morrow morning."

Ashenden nodded and went out.  He stopped for five minutes at the
police-station to see that everything was in order and then took the
cab up the hill to a little secluded house on the outskirts of the town
at which on his periodical visits to this place he stayed.  It was
pleasant to have a bath and a shave and get into slippers.  He felt
lazy and spent the rest of the morning reading a novel.

Soon after dark--for even at Thonon, though it was in France, it was
thought desirable to attract attention to Ashenden as little as
possible--an agent from the police-station came to see him.  His name
was Flix.  He was a little dark Frenchman with sharp eyes and an
unshaven chin, dressed in a shabby grey suit and rather down at heel,
so that he looked like a lawyer's clerk out of work.  Ashenden offered
him a glass of wine and they sat down by the fire.

"Well, your lady lost no time," he said.  "Within a quarter of an hour
of her arrival she was out of the hotel with a bundle of clothes and
trinkets that she sold in a shop near the market.  When the afternoon
boat came in she went down to the quay and bought a ticket to Evian."

Evian, it should be explained, was the next place along the lake in
France and from there, crossing over, the boat went to Switzerland.

"Of course she hadn't a passport, so permission to embark was denied
her."

"How did she explain that she had no passport?"

"She said she'd forgotten it.  She said she had an appointment to see
friends in Evian and tried to persuade the official in charge to let
her go.  She attempted to slip a hundred francs into his hand."

"She must be a stupider woman than I thought," said Ashenden.

But when next day he went about eleven in the morning to see her he
made no reference to her attempt to escape.  She had had time to
arrange herself, and now, her hair elaborately done, her lips and
cheeks painted, she looked less haggard than when he had first seen her.

"I've brought you some books," said Ashenden.  "I'm afraid the time
hangs heavy on your hands."

"What does that matter to you?"

"I have no wish that you should suffer anything that can be avoided.
Anyhow, I will leave them and you can read them or not as you choose."

"If you only knew how I hated you."

"It would doubtless make me very uncomfortable.  But I really don't
know why you should.  I am only doing what I have been ordered to do."

"What do you want of me now?  I do not suppose you have come only to
ask after my health."

Ashenden smiled.

"I want you to write a letter to your lover telling him that owing to
some irregularity in your passport the Swiss authorities would not let
you cross the frontier, so you have come here, where it is very nice
and quiet, so quiet that one can hardly realise there is a war, and you
propose that Chandra should join you."

"Do you think he is a fool?  He will refuse."

"Then you must do your best to persuade him."

She looked at Ashenden a long time before she answered.  He suspected
that she was debating within herself whether by writing the letter and
so seeming docile she could not gain time.

"Well, dictate and I will write what you say."

"I should prefer you to put it in your own words."

"Give me half an hour and the letter shall be ready."

"I will wait here," said Ashenden.

"Why?"

"Because I prefer to."

Her eyes flashed angrily, but controlling herself she said nothing.  On
the chest of drawers were writing materials.  She sat down at the
dressing-table and began to write.  When she handed Ashenden the letter
he saw that even through her rouge she was very pale.  It was the
letter of a person not much used to expressing herself by means of pen
and ink, but it was well enough, and when towards the end, starting to
say how much she loved the man, she had been carried away and wrote
with all her heart, it had really a certain passion.

"Now add: 'The man who is bringing this is Swiss, you can trust him
absolutely.  I didn't want the censor to see it.'"

She hesitated an instant, but then wrote as he directed.

"How do you spell 'absolutely'?"

"As you like.  Now address an envelope and I will relieve you of my
unwelcome presence."

He gave the letter to the agent who was waiting to take it across the
lake.  Ashenden brought her the reply the same evening.  She snatched
it from his hands and for a moment pressed it to her heart.  When she
read it she uttered a little cry of relief.

"He won't come."

The letter, in the Indian's flowery, stilted English, expressed his
bitter disappointment.  He told her how intensely he had looked forward
to seeing her and implored her to do everything in the world to smooth
the difficulties that prevented her from crossing the frontier.  He
said that it was impossible for him to come, impossible; there was a
price on his head, and it would be madness for him to think of risking
it.  He attempted to be jocular, she did not want her little fat lover
to be shot, did she?

"He won't come," she repeated, "he won't come."

"You must write and tell him that there is no risk.  You must say that
if there were you would not dream of asking him.  You must say that if
he loves you he will not hesitate."

"I won't.  I won't."

"Don't be a fool.  You can't help yourself."

She burst into a sudden flood of tears.  She flung herself on the floor
and seizing Ashenden's knees implored him to have mercy on her.

"I will do anything in the world for you if you will let me go."

"Don't be absurd," said Ashenden.  "Do you think I want to become your
lover?  Come, come, you must be serious.  You know the alternative."

She raised herself to her feet and changing on a sudden to fury flung
at Ashenden one foul name after another.

"I like you much better like that," he said.  "Now will you write or
shall I send for the police?"

"He will not come.  It is useless."

"It is very much to your interest to make him come."

"What do you mean by that?  Do you mean that if I do everything in my
power and fail, that..."

She looked at Ashenden with wild eyes.

"Yes, it means either you or him."

She staggered.  She put her hand to her heart.  Then without a word she
reached for pen and paper.  But the letter was not to Ashenden's liking
and he made her write it again.  When she had finished she flung
herself on the bed and burst once more into passionate weeping.  Her
grief was real, but there was something theatrical in the expression of
it that prevented it from being peculiarly moving to Ashenden.  He felt
his relation to her as impersonal as a doctor's in the presence of a
pain that he cannot alleviate.  He saw now why R. had given him this
peculiar task; it needed a cool head and an emotion well under control.

He did not see her next day.  The answer to the letter was not
delivered to him till after dinner, when it was brought to Ashenden's
little house by Flix.

"Well, what news have you?"

"Our friend is getting desperate," smiled the Frenchman.  "This
afternoon she walked up to the station just as a train was about to
start for Lyons.  She was looking up and down uncertainly, so I went to
her and asked if there was anything I could do.  I introduced myself as
an agent of the Sret.  If looks could kill I should not be standing
here now."

"Sit down, _mon ami_," said Ashenden.

"_Merci_.  She walked away, she evidently thought it was no use to try
to get on the train, but I have something more interesting to tell you.
She has offered a boatman on the lake a thousand francs to take her
across to Lausanne."

"What did he say to her?"

"He said he couldn't risk it."

"Yes?"

The little agent gave his shoulders a slight shrug and smiled.

"She's asked him to meet her on the road that leads to Evian at ten
o'clock to-night so that they can talk of it again, and she's given him
to understand that she will not repulse too fiercely the advances of a
lover.  I have told him to do what he likes so long as he comes and
tells me everything that is of importance."

"Are you sure you can trust him?" asked Ashenden.

"Oh, quite.  He knows nothing, of course, but that she is under
surveillance.  You need have no fear about him.  He is a good boy.  I
have known him all his life."

Ashenden read Chandra's letter.  It was eager and passionate.  It
throbbed strangely with the painful yearning of his heart.  Love?  Yes,
if Ashenden knew anything of it there was the real thing.  He told her
how he spent the long, long hours walking by the lakeside and looking
towards the coast of France.  How near they were and yet so desperately
parted!  He repeated again and again that he could not come, and begged
her not to ask him; he would do everything in the world for her, but
that he dared not do, and yet if she insisted how could he resist her?
He besought her to have mercy on him.  And then he broke into a long
wail at the thought that he must go away without seeing her, he asked
her if there were not some means by which she could slip over, he swore
that if he could ever hold her in his arms again he would never let her
go.  Even the forced and elaborate language in which it was written
could not dim the hot fire that burned the pages; it was the letter of
a madman.

"When will you hear the result of her interview with the boatman?"
asked Ashenden.

"I have arranged to meet him at the landing-stage between eleven and
twelve."

Ashenden looked at his watch.

"I will come with you."

They walked down the hill and reaching the quay for shelter from the
cold wind stood in the lea of the custom-house.  At last they saw a man
approaching and Flix stepped out of the shadow that hid them.

"Antoine."

"_Monsieur Flix_?  I have a letter for you; I promised to take it to
Lausanne by the first boat to-morrow."

Ashenden gave the man a brief glance, but did not ask what had passed
between him and Giulia Lazzari.  He took the letter and by the light of
Flix's electric torch read it.  It was in faulty German.

"_On no account come.  Pay no attention to my letters.  Danger.  I love
you.  Sweetheart.  Don't come._"

He put it in his pocket, gave the boatman fifty francs, and went home
to bed.  But the next day when he went to see Giulia Lazzari he found
her door locked.  He knocked for some time, there was no answer.  He
called her.

"Madame Lazzari, you must open the door.  I want to speak to you."

"I am in bed.  I am ill and can see no one."

"I am sorry, but you must open the door.  If you are ill I will send
for a doctor."

"No, go away.  I will see no one."

"If you do not open the door I shall send for a locksmith and have it
broken open."

There was a silence and then he heard the key turned in the lock.  He
went in.  She was in a dressing-gown and her hair was dishevelled.  She
had evidently just got out of bed.

"I am at the end of my strength.  I can do nothing more.  You have only
to look at me to see that I am ill.  I have been sick all night."

"I shall not keep you long.  Would you like to see a doctor?"

"What good can a doctor do me?"

He took out of his pocket the letter she had given the boatman and
handed it to her.

"What is the meaning of this?" he asked.

She gave a gasp at the sight of it and her sallow face went green.

"You gave me your word that you would neither attempt to escape nor
write a letter without my knowledge."

"Did you think I would keep my word?" she cried, her voice ringing with
scorn.

"No.  To tell you the truth it was not entirely for your convenience
that you were placed in a comfortable hotel rather than in the local
jail, but I think I should tell you that though you have your freedom
to go in and out as you like you have no more chance of getting away
from Thonon than if you were chained by the leg in a prison cell.  It
is silly to waste your time writing letters that will never be
delivered."

"_Cochon_."

She flung the opprobrious word at him with all the violence that was in
her.

"But you must sit down and write a letter that _will_ be delivered."

"Never.  I will do nothing more.  I will not write another word."

"You came here on the understanding that you would do certain things."

"I will not do them.  It is finished."

"You had better reflect a little."

"Reflect!  I have reflected.  You can do what you like; I don't care."

"Very well, I will give you five minutes to change your mind."

Ashenden took out his watch and looked at it.  He sat down on the edge
of the unmade bed.

"Oh, it has got on my nerves, this hotel.  Why did you not put me in
the prison?  Why, why?  Everywhere I went I felt that spies were on my
heels.  It is infamous what you are making me do.  Infamous!  What is
my crime?  I ask you, what have I done?  Am I not a woman?  It is
infamous what you are asking me to do.  Infamous."

She spoke in a high shrill voice.  She went on and on.  At last the
five minutes were up.  Ashenden had not said a word.  He rose.

"Yes, go, go," she shrieked at him.

She flung foul names at him.

"I shall come back," said Ashenden.

He took the key out of the door as he went out of the room and locked
it behind him.  Going downstairs he hurriedly scribbled a note, called
the boots and dispatched him with it to the police-station.  Then he
went up again.  Giulia Lazzari had thrown herself on her bed and turned
her face to the wall.  Her body was shaken with hysterical sobs.  She
gave no sign that she heard him come in.  Ashenden sat down on the
chair in front of the dressing-table and looked idly at the odds and
ends that littered it.  The toilet things were cheap and tawdry and
none too clean.  There were little shabby pots of rouge and cold-cream
and little bottles of black for the eyebrows and eyelashes.  The
hairpins were horrid and greasy.  The room was untidy and the air was
heavy with the smell of cheap scent.  Ashenden thought of the hundreds
of rooms she must have occupied in third-rate hotels in the course of
her wandering life from provincial town to provincial town in one
country after another.  He wondered what had been her origins.  She was
a coarse and vulgar woman, but what had she been when young?  She was
not the type he would have expected to adopt that career, for she
seemed to have no advantages that could help her, and he asked himself
whether she came of a family of entertainers (there are all over the
world families in which for generations the members have become dancers
or acrobats or comic singers) or whether she had fallen into the life
accidentally through some lover in the business who had for a time made
her his partner.  And what men must she have known in all these years,
the comrades of the shows she was in, the agents and managers who
looked upon it as a perquisite of their position that they should enjoy
her favours, the merchants or well-to-do tradesmen, the young sparks of
the various towns she played in, who were attracted for the moment by
the glamour of the dancer or the blatant sensuality of the woman!  To
her they were the paying customers and she accepted them indifferently
as the recognised and admitted supplement to her miserable salary, but
to them perhaps she was romance.  In her bought arms they caught sight
for a moment of the brilliant world of the capitals, and ever so
distantly and however shoddily of the adventure and the glamour of a
more spacious life.

There was a sudden knock at the door and Ashenden immediately cried out:

"_Entrez_."

Giulia Lazzari sprang up in bed to a sitting posture.

"Who is it?" she called.

She gave a gasp as she saw the two detectives who had brought her from
Boulogne and handed her over to Ashenden at Thonon.

"You!  What do you want?" she shrieked.

"_Allons, levez-vous_," said one of them, and his voice had a sharp
abruptness that suggested that he would put up with no nonsense.

"I'm afraid you must get up, Madame Lazzari," said Ashenden.  "I am
delivering you once more to the care of these gentlemen."

"How can I get up!  I'm ill, I tell you.  I cannot stand.  Do you want
to kill me?"

"If you won't dress yourself, we shall have to dress you, and I'm
afraid we shouldn't do it very cleverly.  Come, come, it's no good
making a scene."

"Where are you going to take me?"

"They're going to take you back to England."

One of the detectives took hold of her arm.

"Don't touch me, don't come near me," she screamed furiously.

"Let her be," said Ashenden.  "I'm sure she'll see the necessity of
making as little trouble as possible."

"I'll dress myself."

Ashenden watched her as she took off her dressing-gown and slipped a
dress over her head.  She forced her feet into shoes obviously too
small for her.  She arranged her hair.  Every now and then she gave the
detectives a hurried, sullen glance.  Ashenden wondered if she would
have the nerve to go through with it.  R. would call him a damned fool,
but he almost wished she would.  She went up to the dressing-table and
Ashenden stood up in order to let her sit down.  She greased her face
quickly and then rubbed off the grease with a dirty towel, she powdered
herself and made up her eyes.  But her hand shook.  The three men
watched her in silence.  She rubbed the rouge on her cheeks and painted
her mouth.  Then she crammed a hat down on her head.  Ashenden made a
gesture to the first detective and he took a pair of handcuffs out of
his pocket and advanced towards her.

At the sight of them she started back violently and flung her arms wide.

"_Non, non, non_.  _Je ne veux pas_.  No, not them.  No.  No."

"Come, _ma fille_, don't be silly," said the detective roughly.

As though for protection (very much to his surprise) she flung her arms
round Ashenden.

"Don't let them take me, have mercy on me, I can't, I can't."

Ashenden extricated himself as best he could.

"I can do nothing more for you."

The detective seized her wrists and was about to affix the handcuffs
when with a great cry she threw herself down on the floor.

"I will do what you wish.  I will do everything."

On a sign from Ashenden the detectives left the room.  He waited for a
little till she had regained a certain calm.  She was lying on the
floor, sobbing passionately.  He raised her to her feet and made her
sit down.

"What do you want me to do?" she gasped.

"I want you to write another letter to Chandra."

"My head is in a whirl.  I could not put two phrases together.  You
must give me time."

But Ashenden felt that it was better to get her to write a letter while
she was under the effect of her terror.  He did not want to give her
time to collect herself.

"I will dictate the letter to you.  All you have to do is to write
exactly what I tell you."

She gave a deep sigh, but took the pen and the paper and sat down
before them at the dressing-table.

"If I do this and ... and you succeed, how do I know that I shall be
allowed to go free?"

"The Colonel promised that you should.  You must take my word for it
that I shall carry out his instructions."

"I _should_ look a fool if I betrayed my friend and then went to prison
for ten years."

"I'll tell you your best guarantee of our good faith.  Except by reason
of Chandra you are not of the smallest importance to us.  Why should we
put ourselves to the bother and expense of keeping you in prison when
you can do us no harm?"

She reflected for an instant.  She was composed now.  It was as though,
having exhausted her emotion, she had become on a sudden a sensible and
practical woman.

"Tell me what you want me to write."

Ashenden hesitated.  He thought he could put the letter more or less in
the way she would naturally have put it, but he had to give it
consideration.  It must be neither fluent nor literary.  He knew that
in moments of emotion people are inclined to be melodramatic and
stilted.  In a book or on the stage this always rings false and the
author has to make his people speak more simply and with less emphasis
than in fact they do.  It was a serious moment, but Ashenden felt that
there were in it elements of the comic.

"I didn't know I loved a coward," he started.  "If you loved me you
couldn't hesitate when I ask you to come....  Underline _couldn't_
twice."  He went on.  "When I promise you there is no danger.  If you
don't love me, you are right not to come.  Don't come.  Go back to
Berlin where you are in safety.  I am sick of it.  I am alone here.  I
have made myself ill by waiting for you and every day I have said he is
coming.  If you loved me you would not hesitate so much.  It is quite
clear to me that you do not love me.  I am sick and tired of you.  I
have no money.  This hotel is impossible.  There is nothing for me to
stay for.  I can get an engagement in Paris.  I have a friend there who
has made me serious propositions.  I have wasted long enough over you
and look what I have got from it.  It is finished.  Good-bye.  You will
never find a woman who will love you as I have loved you.  I cannot
afford to refuse the proposition of my friend, so I have telegraphed to
him and as soon as I shall receive his answer I go to Paris.  I do not
blame you because you do not love me, that is not your fault, but you
must see that I should be a stupid to go on wasting my life.  One is
not young for ever.  Good-bye.  Giulia."

When Ashenden read over the letter he was not altogether satisfied.
But it was the best he could do.  It had an air of verisimilitude which
the words lacked because, knowing little English, she had written
phonetically, the spelling was atrocious and the handwriting like a
child's; she had crossed out words and written them over again.  Some
of the phrases he had put in French.  Once or twice tears had fallen on
the pages and blurred the ink.

"I leave you now," said Ashenden.  "It may be that when next you see me
I shall be able to tell you that you are free to go where you choose.
Where do you want to go?"

"Spain."

"Very well, I will have everything prepared."

She shrugged her shoulders.  He left her.

There was nothing now for Ashenden to do but wait.  He sent a messenger
to Lausanne in the afternoon, and next morning went down to the quay to
meet the boat.  There was a waiting-room next to the ticket-office and
here he told the detectives to hold themselves in readiness.  When a
boat arrived the passengers advanced along the pier in line and their
passports were examined before they were allowed to go ashore.  If
Chandra came and showed his passport, and it was very likely that he
was travelling with a false one, issued probably by a neutral nation,
he was to be asked to wait and Ashenden was to identify him.  Then he
would be arrested.  It was with some excitement that Ashenden watched
the boat come in and the little group of people gathered at the
gangway.  He scanned them closely but saw no one who looked in the
least like an Indian.  Chandra had not come.  Ashenden did not know
what to do.  He had played his last card.  There were not more than
half a dozen passengers for Thonon, and when they had been examined and
gone their way he strolled slowly along the pier.

"Well, it's no go," he said to Flix, who had been examining the
passports.  "The gentleman I expected hasn't turned up."

"I have a letter for you."

He handed Ashenden an envelope addressed to Madame Lazzari on which he
immediately recognised the spidery handwriting of Chandra Lal.  At that
moment the steamer from Geneva which was going to Lausanne and the end
of the lake hove in sight.  It arrived at Thonon every morning twenty
minutes after the steamer going in the opposite direction had left.
Ashenden had an inspiration.

"Where is the man who brought it?"

"He's in the ticket-office."

"Give him the letter and tell him to return to the person who gave it
to him.  He is to say that he took it to the lady and she sent it back.
If the person asks him to take another letter he is to say that it is
not much good as she is packing her trunk and leaving Thonon."

He saw the letter handed over and the instructions given and then
walked back to his little house in the country.

The next boat on which Chandra could possibly come arrived about five
and having at that hour an important engagement with an agent working
in Germany, he warned Flix that he might be a few minutes late.  But
if Chandra came he could easily be detained; there was no great hurry
since the train in which he was to be taken to Paris did not start till
shortly after eight.  When Ashenden had finished his business he
strolled leisurely down to the lake.  It was light still and from the
top of the hill he saw the steamer pulling out.  It was an anxious
moment and instinctively he quickened his steps.  Suddenly he saw
someone running towards him and recognised the man who had taken the
letter.

"Quick, quick," he cried.  "He's there."

Ashenden's heart gave a great thud against his chest.

"At last."

He began to run too and as they ran the man, panting, told him how he
had taken back the unopened letter.  When he put it in the Indian's
hand he turned frightfully pale ("I should never have thought an Indian
could turn that colour," he said), and turned it over and over in his
hand as though he could not understand what his own letter was doing
there.  Tears sprang to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.  ("It was
grotesque, he's fat, you know.")  He said something in a language the
man did not understand and then in French asked him when the boat went
to Thonon.  When he got on board he looked about, but did not see him,
then he caught sight of him, huddled up in an ulster with his hat drawn
down over his eyes, standing alone in the bows.  During the crossing he
kept his eyes fixed on Thonon.

"Where is he now?" asked Ashenden.

"I got off first and Monsieur Flix told me to come for you."

"I suppose they're holding him in the waiting-room."

Ashenden was out of breath when they reached the pier.  He burst into
the waiting-room.  A group of men, talking at the top of their voices
and gesticulating wildly, were clustered round a man lying on the
ground.

"What's happened?" he cried.

"Look," said Monsieur Flix.

Chandra Lal lay there, his eyes wide open and a thin line of foam on
his lips, dead.  His body was horribly contorted.

"He's killed himself.  We've sent for the doctor.  He was too quick for
us."

A sudden thrill of horror passed through Ashenden.

When the Indian landed Flix recognised from the description that he
was the man they wanted.  There were only four passengers.  He was the
last.  Flix took an exaggerated time to examine the passports of the
first three, and then took the Indian's.  It was a Spanish one and it
was all in order.  Flix asked the regulation questions and noted them
on the official sheet.  Then he looked at him pleasantly and said:

"Just come into the waiting-room for a moment.  There are one or two
formalities to fulfil."

"Is my passport not in order?" the Indian asked.

"Perfectly."

Chandra hesitated, but then followed the official to the door of the
waiting-room.  Flix opened it and stood aside.

"_Entrez_."

Chandra went in and the two detectives stood up.  He must have
suspected at once that they were police-officers and realised that he
had fallen into a trap.

"Sit down," said Flix.  "I have one or two questions to put to you."

"It is hot in here," he said, and in point of fact they had a little
stove there that kept the place like an oven.  "I will take off my coat
if you permit."

"Certainly," said Flix graciously.

He took off his coat, apparently with some effort, and he turned to put
it on a chair, and then before they realised what had happened they
were startled to see him stagger and fall heavily to the ground.  While
taking off his coat Chandra had managed to swallow the contents of a
bottle that was still clasped in his hand.  Ashenden put his nose to
it.  There was a very distinct odour of almonds.

For a little while they looked at the man who lay on the floor.  Flix
was apologetic.

"Will they be very angry?" he asked nervously.

"I don't see that it was your fault," said Ashenden.  "Anyhow, he can
do no more harm.  For my part I am just as glad he killed himself.  The
notion of his being executed did not make me very comfortable."

In a few minutes the doctor arrived and pronounced life extinct.

"Prussic acid," he said to Ashenden.

Ashenden nodded.

"I will go and see Madame Lazzari," he said.  "If she wants to stay a
day or two longer I shall let her.  But if she wants to go to-night of
course she can.  Will you give the agents at the station instructions
to let her pass?"

"I shall be at the station myself," said Flix.

Ashenden once more climbed the hill.  It was night now, a cold, bright
night with an unclouded sky and the sight of the new moon, a white
shining thread, made him turn three times the money in his pocket.
When he entered the hotel he was seized on a sudden with distaste for
its cold banality.  It smelt of cabbage and boiled mutton.  On the
walls of the hall were coloured posters of railway companies
advertising Grenoble, Carcassonne and the bathing places of Normandy.
He went upstairs and after a brief knock opened the door of Giulia
Lazzari's room.  She was sitting in front of her dressing-table,
looking at herself in the glass, just idly or despairingly, apparently
doing nothing, and it was in this that she saw Ashenden as he came in.
Her face changed suddenly as she caught sight of his and she sprang up
so vehemently that the chair fell over.

"What is it?  Why are you so white?" she cried.

She turned round and stared at him and her features were gradually
twisted to a look of horror.

"_Il est pris_," she gasped.

"_Il est mort_," said Ashenden.

"Dead!  He took the poison.  He had the time for that.  He's escaped
you after all."

"What do you mean?  How did you know about the poison?"

"He always carried it with him.  He said that the English should never
take him alive."

Ashenden reflected for an instant.  She had kept that secret well.  He
supposed the possibility of such a thing should have occurred to him.
How was he to anticipate these melodramatic devices?

"Well, now you are free.  You can go wherever you like and no obstacle
shall be put in your way.  Here are your ticket and your passport and
here is the money that was in your possession when you were arrested.
Do you wish to see Chandra?"

She started.

"No, no."

"There is no need.  I thought you might care to."

She did not weep.  Ashenden supposed that she had exhausted all her
emotion.  She seemed apathetic.

"A telegram will be sent to-night to the Spanish frontier to instruct
the authorities to put no difficulties in your way.  If you will take
my advice you will get out of France as soon as you can."

She said nothing, and since Ashenden had no more to say he made ready
to go.

"I am sorry that I have had to show myself so hard to you.  I am glad
to think that now the worst of your troubles are over and I hope that
time will assuage the grief that I know you must feel for the death of
your friend."

Ashenden gave her a little bow and turned to the door.  But she stopped
him.

"One little moment," she said.  "There is one thing I should like to
ask.  I think you have some heart."

"Whatever I can do for you, you may be sure I will."

"What are they going to do with his things?"

"I don't know.  Why?"

Then she said something that confounded Ashenden.  It was the last
thing he expected.

"He had a wrist-watch that I gave him last Christmas.  It cost twelve
pounds.  Can I have it back?"




IX

_Gustav_

When Ashenden, given charge of a number of spies working from
Switzerland, was first sent there, R., wishing him to see the sort of
reports that he would be required to obtain, handed him the
communications, a sheaf of typewritten documents, of a man known in the
secret service as Gustav.

"He's the best fellow we've got," said R. "His information is always
very full and circumstantial.  I want you to give his reports your very
best attention.  Of course Gustav is a clever little chap, but there's
no reason why we shouldn't get just as good reports from the other
agents.  It's merely a question of explaining exactly what we want."

Gustav, who lived at Basle, represented a Swiss firm with branches at
Frankfort, Mannheim and Cologne, and by virtue of his business was able
to go in and out of Germany without risk.  He travelled up and down the
Rhine, and gathered material about the movement of troops, the
manufacture of munitions, the state of mind of the country (a point on
which R. laid stress) and other matters upon which the Allies desired
information.  His frequent letters to his wife hid an ingenious code
and the moment she received them in Basle she sent them to Ashenden in
Geneva, who extracted from them the important facts and communicated
these in the proper quarter.  Every two months Gustav came home and
prepared one of the reports that served as models to the other spies in
this particular section of the secret service.

His employers were pleased with Gustav and Gustav had reason to be
pleased with his employers.  His services were so useful that he was
not only paid more highly than the others, but for particular scoops
had received from time to time a handsome bonus.

This went on for more than a year.  Then something aroused R.'s quick
suspicions; he was a man of an amazing alertness, not so much of mind,
as of instinct, and he had suddenly a feeling that some hanky-panky was
going on.  He said nothing definite to Ashenden (whatever R. surmised
he was disposed to keep to himself), but told him to go to Basle,
Gustav being then in Germany, and have a talk with Gustav's wife.  He
left it to Ashenden to decide the tenor of the conversation.

Having arrived at Basle, and leaving his bag at the station, for he did
not yet know whether he would have to stay or not, he took a tram to
the corner of the street in which Gustav lived and, with a quick look
to see that he was not followed, walked along to the house he sought.
It was a block of flats that gave you the impression of decent poverty
and Ashenden conjectured that they were inhabited by clerks and small
tradespeople.  Just inside the door was a cobbler's shop and Ashenden
stopped.

"Does Herr Grabow live here?" he asked in his none too fluent German.

"Yes, I saw him go up a few minutes ago.  You'll find him in."

Ashenden was startled, for he had but the day before received through
Gustav's wife a letter addressed from Mannheim in which Gustav by means
of his code gave the numbers of certain regiments that had just crossed
the Rhine.  Ashenden thought it unwise to ask the cobbler the question
that rose to his lips, so thanked him and went up to the third floor on
which he knew already that Gustav lived.  He rang the bell and heard it
tinkle within.  In a moment the door was opened by a dapper little man
with a close-shaven round head and spectacles.  He wore carpet slippers.

"Herr Grabow?" asked Ashenden.

"At your service," said Gustav.

"May I come in?"

Gustav was standing with his back to the light and Ashenden could not
see the look on his face.  He felt a momentary hesitation and gave the
name under which he received Gustav's letters from Germany.

"Come in, come in.  I am very glad to see you."

Gustav led the way into a stuffy little room, heavy with carved oak
furniture, and on the large table covered with a table-cloth of green
velveteen was a typewriter.  Gustav was apparently engaged in composing
one of his invaluable reports.  A woman was sitting at the open window
darning socks, but at a word from Gustav rose, gathered up her things
and left.  Ashenden had disturbed a pretty picture of connubial bliss.

"Sit down, please.  How very fortunate that I was in Basle!  I have
long wanted to make your acquaintance.  I have only just this minute
returned from Germany."  He pointed to the sheets of paper by the
typewriter.  "I think you will be pleased with the news I bring.  I
have some very valuable information."  He chuckled.  "One is never
sorry to earn a bonus."

He was very cordial, but to Ashenden his cordiality rang false.  Gustav
kept his eyes, smiling behind the glasses, fixed watchfully on
Ashenden, and it was possible that they held a trace of nervousness.

"You must have travelled quickly to get here only a few hours after
your letter, sent here and then sent on by your wife, reached me in
Geneva."

"That is very probable.  One of the things I had to tell you is that
the Germans suspect that information is getting through by means of
commercial letters and so they have decided to hold up all mail at the
frontier for eight-and-forty hours."

"I see," said Ashenden amiably.  "And was it on that account that you
took the precaution of dating your letter forty-eight hours after you
sent it?"

"Did I do that?  That was very stupid of me.  I must have mistaken the
day of the month."

Ashenden looked at Gustav with a smile.  That was very thin; Gustav, a
business man, knew too well how important in his particular job was the
exactness of a date.  The circuitous routes by which it was necessary
to get information from Germany made it difficult to transmit news
quickly and it was essential to know precisely on what days certain
events had taken place.

"Let me look at your passport a minute," said Ashenden.

"What do you want with my passport?"

"I want to see when you went into Germany and when you came out."

"But you do not imagine that my comings and goings are marked on my
passport?  I have methods of crossing the frontier."

Ashenden knew a good deal of this matter.  He knew that both the
Germans and the Swiss guarded the frontier with severity.

"Oh?  Why should you not cross in the ordinary way?  You were engaged
because your connection with a Swiss firm supplying necessary goods to
Germany made it easy for you to travel backwards and forwards without
suspicion.  I can understand that you might get past the German
sentries with the connivance of the Germans, but what about the Swiss?"

Gustav assumed a look of indignation.

"I do not understand you.  Do you mean to suggest that I am in the
service of the Germans?  I give you my word of honour ...  I will not
allow my straight-forwardness to be impugned."

"You would not be the only one to take money from both sides and
provide information of value to neither."

"Do you pretend that my information is of no value?  Why then have you
given me more bonuses than any other agent has received?  The Colonel
has repeatedly expressed the highest satisfaction with my services."

It was Ashenden's turn now to be cordial.

"Come, come, my dear fellow, do not try to ride the high horse.  You do
not wish to show me your passport and I will not insist.  You are not
under the impression that we leave the statements of our agents without
corroboration or that we are so foolish as not to keep track of their
movements?  Even the best of jokes cannot bear an indefinite
repetition.  I am in peace-time a humorist by profession and I tell you
that from bitter experience."  Now Ashenden thought the moment had
arrived to attempt his bluff; he knew something of the excellent but
difficult game of poker.  "We have information that you have not been
to Germany now, nor since you were engaged by us, but have sat here
quietly in Basle, and all your reports are merely due to your fertile
imagination."

Gustav looked at Ashenden and saw a face expressive of nothing but
tolerance and good humour.  A smile slowly broke on his lips and he
gave his shoulders a little shrug.

"Did you think I was such a fool as to risk my life for fifty pounds a
month?  I love my wife."

Ashenden laughed outright.

"I congratulate you.  It is not everyone who can flatter himself that
he has made a fool of our secret service for a year."

"I had the chance of earning money without any difficulty.  My firm
stopped sending me into Germany at the beginning of the war, but I
learned what I could from the other travellers.  I kept my ears open in
restaurants and beer-cellars, and I read the German papers.  I got a
lot of amusement out of sending you reports and letters."

"I don't wonder," said Ashenden.

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing.  What can we do?  You are not under the impression that we
shall continue to pay you a salary?"

"No, I cannot expect that."

"By the way, if it is not indiscreet, may I ask if you have been
playing the same game with the Germans?"

"Oh, no," Gustav cried vehemently.  "How can you think it?  My
sympathies are absolutely pro-ally.  My heart is entirely with you."

"Well, why not?" asked Ashenden.  "The Germans have all the money in
the world and there is no reason why you should not get some of it.  We
could give you information from time to time that the Germans would be
prepared to pay for."

Gustav drummed his fingers on the table.  He took up a sheet of the now
useless report.

"The Germans are dangerous people to meddle with."

"You are a very intelligent man.  And after all, even if your salary is
stopped, you can always earn a bonus by bringing us news that can be
useful to us.  But it will have to be substantiated; in future we pay
only by results."

"I will think of it."

For a moment or two Ashenden left Gustav to his reflections.  He lit a
cigarette and watched the smoke he had inhaled fade into the air.  He
thought too.

"Is there anything particular you want to know?" asked Gustav suddenly.

Ashenden smiled.

"It would be worth a couple of thousand Swiss francs to you if you
could tell me what the Germans are doing with a spy of theirs in
Lucerne.  He is an Englishman and his name is Grantley Caypor."

"I have heard the name," said Gustav.  He paused a moment.  "How long
are you staying here?"

"As long as necessary.  I will take a room at the hotel and let you
know the number.  If you have anything to say to me you can be sure of
finding me in my room at nine every morning and at seven every night."

"I should not risk coming to the hotel.  But I can write."

"Very well."

Ashenden rose to go and Gustav accompanied him to the door.

"We part without ill-feeling then?" he asked.

"Of course.  Your reports will remain in our archives as models of what
a report should be."

Ashenden spent two or three days visiting Basle.  It did not much amuse
him.  He passed a good deal of time in the book-shops turning over the
pages of books that would have been worth reading if life were a
thousand years long.  Once he saw Gustav in the street.  On the fourth
morning a letter was brought up with his coffee.  The envelope was that
of a commercial firm unknown to him and inside it was a typewritten
sheet.  There was no address and no signature.  Ashenden wondered if
Gustav was aware that a typewriter could betray its owner as certainly
as a handwriting.  Having twice carefully read the letter, he held the
paper up to the light to see the watermark (he had no reason for doing
this except that the sleuths of detective novels always did it), then
struck a match and watched it burn.  He scrunched up the charred
fragments in his hand.

He got up, for he had taken advantage of his situation to breakfast in
bed, packed his bag and took the next train to Berne.  From there he
was able to send a code telegram to R.  His instructions were given to
him verbally two days later, in the bedroom of his hotel at an hour
when no one was likely to be seen walking along a corridor, and within
twenty-four hours, though by a circuitous route, he arrived at Lucerne.




X

_The Traitor_

Having taken a room at the hotel at which he had been instructed to
stay, Ashenden went out; it was a lovely day, early in August, and the
sun shone in an unclouded sky.  He had not been to Lucerne since he was
a boy and but vaguely remembered a covered bridge, a great stone lion
and a church in which he had sat, bored yet impressed, while they
played an organ; and now wandering along a shady quay (and the lake
looked just as tawdry and unreal as it looked on the picture-postcards)
he tried not so much to find his way about a half-forgotten scene as to
reform in his mind some recollection of the shy and eager lad, so
impatient for life (which he saw not in the present of his adolescence
but only in the future of his manhood) who so long ago had wandered
there.  But it seemed to him that the most vivid of his memories was
not of himself, but of the crowd; he seemed to remember sun and heat
and people; the train was crowded and so was the hotel, the lake
steamers were packed and on the quays and in the streets you threaded
your way among the throng of holiday makers.  They were fat and old and
ugly and odd, and they stank.  Now, in wartime, Lucerne was as deserted
as it must have been before the world at large discovered that
Switzerland was the playground of Europe.  Most of the hotels were
closed, the streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked idly
at the water's edge and there was none to take them, and in the avenues
by the lake the only persons to be seen were serious Swiss taking their
neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.  Ashenden felt
exhilarated by the solitude, and sitting down on a bench that faced the
water, surrendered himself deliberately to the sensation.  It was true
that the lake was absurd, the water was too blue, the mountains too
snowy, and its beauty, hitting you in the face, exasperated rather than
thrilled; but all the same there was something pleasing in the
prospect, an artless candour, like one of Mendelssohn's _Songs without
Words_, that made Ashenden smile with complacency.  Lucerne reminded
him of wax flowers under glass cases and cuckoo clocks and fancy work
in Berlin wool.  So long at all events as the fine weather lasted he
was prepared to enjoy himself.  He did not see why he should not at
least try to combine pleasure to himself with profit to his country.
He was travelling with a brand-new passport in his pocket, under a
borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new
personality.  He was often slightly tired of himself and it diverted
him for a while to be merely a creature of R.'s facile invention.  The
experience he had just enjoyed appealed to his acute sense of the
absurd.  R., it is true, had not seen the fun of it: what humour R.
possessed was of a sardonic turn and he had no facility for taking in
good part a joke at his own expense.  To do that you must be able to
look at yourself from the outside and be at the same time spectator and
actor in the pleasant comedy of life.  R. was a soldier and regarded
introspection as unhealthy, un-English and unpatriotic.

Ashenden got up and strolled slowly to his hotel.  It was a small
German hotel, of the second class, spotlessly clean, and his bedroom
had a nice view; it was furnished with brightly varnished pitch-pine,
and though on a cold wet day it would have been wretched, in that warm
and sunny weather it was gay and pleasing.  There were tables in the
hall and he sat down at one of these and ordered a bottle of beer.  The
landlady was curious to know why in that dead season he had come to
stay and he was glad to satisfy her curiosity.  He told her that he had
recently recovered from an attack of typhoid and had come to Lucerne to
get back his strength.  He was employed in the Censorship Department
and was taking the opportunity to brush up his rusty German.  He asked
her if she could recommend to him a German teacher.  The landlady was a
blonde and blowsy Swiss, good-humoured and talkative, so that Ashenden
felt pretty sure that she would repeat in the proper quarter the
information he gave her.  It was his turn now to ask a few questions.
She was voluble on the subject of the war on account of which the
hotel, in that month so full that rooms had to be found for visitors in
neighbouring houses, was nearly empty.  A few people came in from
outside to eat their meals _en pension_, but she had only two lots of
resident guests.  One was an old Irish couple who lived in Vevey and
passed their summers in Lucerne and the other was an Englishman and his
wife.  She was a German and they were obliged on that account to live
in a neutral country.  Ashenden took care to show little curiosity
about them--he recognised in the description Grantley Caypor--but of
her own accord she told him that they spent most of the day walking
about the mountains.  Herr Caypor was a botanist and much interested in
the flora of the country.  His lady was a very nice woman and she felt
her position keenly.  Ah, well, the war could not last for ever.  The
landlady bustled away and Ashenden went upstairs.

Dinner was at seven, and, wishing to be in the dining-room before
anyone else so that he could take stock of his fellow-guests as they
entered, he went down as soon as he heard the bell.  It was a very
plain, stiff, whitewashed room, with chairs of the same shiny pitchpine
as in his bedroom, and on the walls were oleographs of Swiss lakes.  On
each little table was a bunch of flowers.  It was all neat and clean
and presaged a bad dinner.  Ashenden would have liked to make up for it
by ordering a bottle of the best Rhine-wine to be found in the hotel,
but did not venture to draw attention to himself by extravagance (he
saw on two or three tables half-empty bottles of table hock, which made
him surmise that his fellow-guests drank thriftily), and so contented
himself with ordering a pint of lager.  Presently one or two persons
came in, single men with some occupation in Lucerne and obviously
Swiss, and sat down each at his own little table and untied the napkins
that at the end of luncheon they had neatly tied up.  They propped
newspapers against their water-jugs and read while they somewhat
noisily ate their soup.  Then entered a very old tall bent man, with
white hair and a drooping white moustache, accompanied by a little old
white-haired lady in black.  These were certainly the Irish colonel and
his wife of whom the landlady had spoken.  They took their seats and
the colonel poured out a thimbleful of wine for his wife and a
thimbleful for himself.  They waited in silence for their dinner to be
served to them by the buxom, hearty maid.

At last the persons arrived for whom Ashenden had been waiting.  He was
doing his best to read a German book and it was only by an exercise of
self-control that he allowed himself only for one instant to raise his
eyes as they came in.  His glance showed him a man of about forty-five
with short dark hair, somewhat grizzled, of middle height, but
corpulent, with a broad red clean-shaven face.  He wore a shirt open at
the neck, with a wide collar, and a grey suit.  He walked ahead of his
wife, and of her Ashenden only caught the impression of a German woman
self-effaced and dusty.  Grantley Caypor sat down and began in a loud
voice explaining to the waitress that they had taken an immense walk.
They had been up some mountain the name of which meant nothing to
Ashenden, but which excited in the maid expressions of astonishment and
enthusiasm.  Then Caypor, still in fluent German but with a marked
English accent, said that they were so late they had not even gone up
to wash, but had just rinsed their hands outside.  He had a resonant
voice and a jovial manner.

"Serve me quick, we're starving with hunger, and bring beer, bring
three bottles.  _Lieber Gott_, what a thirst I have!"

He seemed to be a man of exuberant vitality.  He brought into that
dull, overclean dining-room the breath of life and everyone in it
appeared on a sudden more alert.  He began to talk to his wife, in
English, and everything he said could be heard by all; but presently
she interrupted him with a remark made in an undertone.  Caypor stopped
and Ashenden felt that his eyes were turned in his direction.  Mrs.
Caypor had noticed the arrival of a stranger and had drawn her
husband's attention to it.  Ashenden turned the page of the book he was
pretending to read, but he felt that Caypor's gaze was fixed intently
upon him.  When he addressed his wife again it was in so low a tone
that Ashenden could not even tell what language he used, but when the
maid brought them their soup Caypor, his voice still low, asked her a
question.  It was plain that he was enquiring who Ashenden was.
Ashenden could catch of the maid's reply but the one word _Lnder_.

One or two people finished their dinner and went out picking their
teeth.  The old Irish colonel and his old wife rose from their table
and he stood aside to let her pass.  They had eaten their meal without
exchanging a word.  She walked slowly to the door; but the colonel
stopped to say a word to a Swiss who might have been a local attorney,
and when she reached it she stood there, bowed and with a sheep-like
look, patiently waiting for her husband to come and open it for her.
Ashenden realised that she had never opened a door for herself.  She
did not know how to.  In a minute the colonel with his old, old gait
came to the door and opened it; she passed out and he followed.  The
little incident offered a key to their whole lives, and from it
Ashenden began to reconstruct their histories, circumstances and
characters; but he pulled himself up: he could not allow himself the
luxury of creation.  He finished his dinner.

When he went into the hall he saw tied to the leg of table a
bull-terrier and in passing mechanically put down his hand to fondle
the dog's drooping, soft ears.  The landlady was standing at the foot
of the stairs.

"Whose is this lovely beast?" asked Ashenden.

"He belongs to Herr Caypor.  Fritzi, he is called.  Herr Caypor says he
has a longer pedigree than the King of England."

Fritzi rubbed himself against Ashenden's leg and with his nose sought
the palm of his hand.  Ashenden went upstairs to fetch his hat, and
when he came down saw Caypor standing at the entrance of the hotel
talking with the landlady.  From the sudden silence and their
constrained manner he guessed that Caypor had been making enquiries
about him.  When he passed between them, into the street, out of the
corner of his eye he saw Caypor give him a suspicious stare.  That
frank, jovial red face bore then a look of shifty cunning.

Ashenden strolled along till he found a tavern where he could have his
coffee in the open and to compensate himself for the bottle of beer
that his sense of duty had urged him to drink at dinner ordered the
best brandy the house provided.  He was pleased at last to have come
face to face with the man of whom he had heard so much and in a day or
two hoped to become acquainted with him.  It is never very difficult to
get to know anyone who has a dog.  But he was in no hurry; he would let
things take their course: with the object he had in view he could not
afford to be hasty.

Ashenden reviewed the circumstances.  Grantley Caypor was an
Englishman, born according to his passport in Birmingham, and he was
forty-two years of age.  His wife, to whom he had been married for
eleven years, was of German birth and parentage.  That was public
knowledge.  Information about his antecedents was contained in a
private document.  He had started life, according to this, in a
lawyer's office in Birmingham and then had drifted into journalism.  He
had been connected with an English paper in Cairo and with another in
Shanghai.  There he got into trouble for attempting to get money on
false pretences and was sentenced to a short term of imprisonment.  All
trace of him was lost for two years after his release, when he
reappeared in a shipping-office in Marseilles.  From there, still in
the shipping business, he went to Hamburg, where he married, and to
London.  In London he set up for himself, in the export business, but
after some time failed and was made a bankrupt.  He returned to
journalism.  At the outbreak of war he was once more in the shipping
business, and in August, 1914, was living quietly with his German wife
at Southampton.  In the beginning of the following year he told his
employers that owing to the nationality of his wife his position was
intolerable; they had no fault to find with him and, recognising that
he was in an awkward fix, granted his request that he should be
transferred to Genoa.  Here he remained till Italy entered the war, but
then gave notice and with his papers in perfect order crossed the
border and took up his residence in Switzerland.

All this indicated a man of doubtful honesty and unsettled disposition,
with no background and of no financial standing; but the facts were of
no importance to anyone till it was discovered that Caypor, certainly
from the beginning of the war and perhaps sooner, was in the service of
the German Intelligence Department.  He had a salary of forty pounds a
month.  But though dangerous and wily no steps would have been taken to
deal with him if he had contented himself with transmitting such news
as he was able to get in Switzerland.  He could do no great harm there
and it might even be possible to make use of him to convey information
that it was desirable to let the enemy have.  He had no notion that
anything was known of him.  His letters, and he received a good many,
were closely censored; there were few codes that the people who dealt
with such matters could not in the end decipher and it might be that
sooner or later through him it would be possible to lay hands on the
organisation that still flourished in England.  But then he did
something that drew R.'s attention to him.  Had he known it none could
have blamed him for shaking in his shoes: R. was not a very nice man to
get on the wrong side of.  Caypor scraped acquaintance in Zrich with a
young Spaniard, Gomez by name, who had lately entered the British
secret service, by his nationality inspired him with confidence, and
managed to worm out of him the fact that he was engaged in espionage.
Probably the Spaniard, with a very human desire to seem important, had
done no more than talk mysteriously; but on Caypor's information he was
watched when he went to Germany and one day caught just as he was
posting a letter in a code that was eventually deciphered.  He was
tried, convicted and shot.  It was bad enough to lose a useful and
disinterested agent, but it entailed besides the changing of a safe and
simple code.  R. was not pleased.  But R. was not the man to let any
desire of revenge stand in the way of his main object, and it occurred
to him that if Caypor was merely betraying his country for money it
might be possible to get him to take more money to betray his
employers.  The fact that he had succeeded in delivering into their
hands an agent of the Allies must seem to them an earnest of his good
faith.  He might be very useful.  But R. had no notion what kind of man
Caypor was, he had lived his shabby, furtive life obscurely, and the
only photograph that existed of him was one taken for a passport.
Ashenden's instructions were to get acquainted with Caypor and see
whether there was any chance that he would work honestly for the
British: if he thought there was, he was entitled to sound him and if
his suggestions were met with favour to make certain propositions.  It
was a task that needed tact and a knowledge of men.  If on the other
hand Ashenden came to the conclusion that Caypor could not be bought,
he was to watch and report his movements.  The information he had
obtained from Gustav was vague, but important; there was only one point
in it that was interesting, and this was that the head of the German
Intelligence Department in Berne was growing restive at Caypor's lack
of activity.  Caypor was asking for a higher salary and Major von P.
had told him that he must earn it.  It might be that he was urging him
to go to England.  If he could be induced to cross the frontier
Ashenden's work was done.

"How the devil do you expect _me_ to persuade him to put his head in a
noose?" asked Ashenden.

"It won't be a noose, it'll be a firing squad," said R.

"Caypor's clever."

"Well, be cleverer, damn your eyes."

Ashenden made up his mind that he would take no steps to make Caypor's
acquaintance, but allow the first advances to be made by him.  If he
was being pressed for results it must surely occur to him that it would
be worth while to get into conversation with an Englishman who was
employed in the Censorship Department.  Ashenden was prepared with a
supply of information that it could not in the least benefit the
Central Powers to possess.  With a false name and a false passport he
had little to fear that Caypor would guess that he was a British agent.

Ashenden did not have to wait long.  Next day he was sitting in the
doorway of the hotel, drinking a cup of coffee and already half asleep
after a substantial _Mittagessen_, when the Caypors came out of the
dining-room.  Mrs. Caypor went upstairs and Caypor released his dog.
The dog bounded along and in a friendly fashion leaped up against
Ashenden.

"Come here, Fritzi," cried Caypor, and then to Ashenden: "I'm so sorry.
But he's quite gentle."

"Oh, that's all right.  He won't hurt me."

Caypor stopped at the doorway.

"He's a bull-terrier.  You don't often see them on the Continent."  He
seemed while he spoke to be taking Ashenden's measure; he called to the
maid: "A coffee, please, _Frulein_.  You've just arrived, haven't you?"

"Yes, I came yesterday."

"Really?  I didn't see you in the dining-room last night.  Are you
making a stay?"

"I don't know.  I've been ill and I've come here to recuperate."

The maid came with the coffee and seeing Caypor talking to Ashenden put
the tray on the table at which he was sitting.  Caypor gave a laugh of
faint embarrassment.

"I don't want to force myself upon you.  I don't know why the maid put
my coffee on your table."

"Please sit down," said Ashenden.

"It's very good of you.  I've lived so long on the Continent that I'm
always forgetting that my countrymen are apt to look upon it as
confounded cheek if you talk to them.  Are you English, by the way, or
American?"

"English," said Ashenden.

Ashenden was by nature a very shy person, and he had in vain tried to
cure himself of a failing that at his age was unseemly, but on occasion
he knew how to make effective use of it.  He explained now in a
hesitating and awkward manner the facts that he had the day before told
the landlady and that he was convinced she had already passed on to
Caypor.

"You couldn't have come to a better place than Lucerne.  It's an oasis
of peace in this war-weary world.  When you're here you might almost
forget that there is such a thing as a war going on.  That is why I've
come here.  I'm a journalist by profession."

"I couldn't help wondering if you wrote," said Ashenden, with an
eagerly timid smile.

It was clear that he had not learnt that 'oasis of peace in a war-weary
world' at the shipping-office.

"You see, I married a German lady," said Caypor gravely.

"Oh, really?"

"I don't think anyone could be more patriotic than I am.  I'm English
through and through and I don't mind telling you that in my opinion the
British Empire is the greatest instrument for good that the world has
ever seen, but having a German wife I naturally see a good deal of the
reverse of the medal.  You don't have to tell me that the Germans have
faults, but frankly I'm not prepared to admit that they're devils
incarnate.  At the beginning of the war my poor wife had a very rough
time in England and I for one couldn't have blamed her if she'd felt
rather bitter about it.  Everyone thought she was a spy.  It'll make
you laugh when you know her.  She's the typical German _Hausfrau_ who
cares for nothing but her house and her husband and our only child
Fritzi."  Caypor fondled his dog and gave a little laugh.  "Yes,
Fritzi, you are our child, aren't you?  Naturally it made my position
very awkward.  I was connected with some very important papers, and my
editors weren't quite comfortable about it.  Well, to cut a long story
short, I thought the most dignified course was to resign and come to a
neutral country till the storm blew over.  My wife and I never discuss
the war, though I'm bound to tell you that it's more on my account than
hers; she's much more tolerant than I am and she's more willing to look
upon this terrible business from my point of view than I am from hers."

"That is strange," said Ashenden.  "As a rule women are so much more
rabid than men."

"My wife is a very remarkable person.  I should like to introduce you
to her.  By the way, I don't know if you know my name.  Grantley
Caypor."

"My name is Somerville," said Ashenden.

He told him then of the work he had been doing in the Censorship
Department, and he fancied that into Caypor's eyes came a certain
intentness.  Presently he told him that he was looking for someone to
give him conversation-lessons in German so that he might rub up his
rusty knowledge of the language; and as he spoke a notion flashed
across his mind: he gave Caypor a look and saw that the same notion had
come to him.  It had occurred to them at the same instant that it would
be a very good plan for Ashenden's teacher to be Mrs. Caypor.

"I asked our landlady if she could find me someone and she said she
thought she could.  I must ask her again.  It ought not to be very hard
to find a man who is prepared to come and talk German to me for an hour
a day."

"I wouldn't take anyone on the landlady's recommendation," said Caypor.
"After all you want someone with a good North-German accent and she
only talks Swiss.  I'll ask my wife if she knows anyone.  My wife's a
very highly educated woman and you could trust her recommendation."

"That's very kind of you."

Ashenden observed Grantley Caypor at his ease.  He noticed how the
small, grey-green eyes, which last night he had not been able to see,
contradicted the red good-humoured frankness of the face.  They were
quick and shifty, but when the mind behind them was seized by an
unexpected notion they were suddenly still.  It gave one a peculiar
feeling of the working of the brain.  They were not eyes that inspired
confidence; Caypor did that with his jolly, good-natured smile, the
openness of his broad, weather-beaten face, his comfortable obesity and
the cheeriness of his loud, deep voice.  He was doing his best now to
be agreeable.  While Ashenden talked to him, a little shyly still but
gaining confidence from that breezy, cordial manner, capable of putting
anyone at his ease, it intrigued him to remember that the man was a
common spy.  It gave a tang to his conversation to reflect that he had
been ready to sell his country for no more than forty pounds a month.
Ashenden had known Gomez, the young Spaniard whom Caypor had betrayed.
He was a high-spirited youth, with a love of adventure, and he had
undertaken his dangerous mission not for the money he earned by it, but
from a passion for romance.  It amused him to outwit the clumsy German
and it appealed to his sense of the absurd to play a part in a shilling
shocker.  It was not very nice to think of him now six feet underground
in a prison yard.  He was young and he had a certain grace of gesture.
Ashenden wondered whether Caypor had felt a qualm when he delivered him
up to destruction.

"I suppose you know a little German?" asked Caypor, interested in the
stranger.

"Oh, yes, I was a student in Germany, and I used to talk it fluently,
but that is long ago and I have forgotten.  I can still read it very
comfortably."

"Oh, yes, I noticed you were reading a German book last night."

Fool!  It was only a little while since he had told Ashenden that he
had not seen him at dinner.  He wondered whether Caypor had observed
the slip.  How difficult it was never to make one!  Ashenden must be on
his guard; the thing that made him most nervous was the thought that he
might not answer readily enough to his assumed name of Somerville.  Of
course there was always the chance that Caypor had made the slip on
purpose to see by Ashenden's face whether he noticed anything.  Caypor
got up.

"There is my wife.  We go for a walk up one of the mountains every
afternoon.  I can tell you some charming walks.  The flowers even now
are lovely."

"I'm afraid I must wait till I'm a bit stronger," said Ashenden, with a
little sigh.

He had naturally a pale face and never looked as robust as he was.
Mrs. Caypor came downstairs and her husband joined her.  They walked
down the road, Fritzi bounding round them, and Ashenden saw that Caypor
immediately began to speak with volubility.  He was evidently telling
his wife the results of his interview with Ashenden.  Ashenden looked
at the sun shining so gaily on the lake; the shadow of a breeze
fluttered the green leaves of the trees; everything invited to a
stroll: he got up, went to his room and throwing himself on his bed had
a very pleasant sleep.

He went into dinner that evening as the Caypors were finishing, for he
had wandered melancholy about Lucerne in the hope of finding a cocktail
that would enable him to face the potato salad that he foresaw, and on
their way out of the dining-room Caypor stopped and asked him if he
would drink coffee with them.  When Ashenden joined them in the hall
Caypor got up and introduced him to his wife.  She bowed stiffly and no
answering smile came to her face to respond to Ashenden's civil
greeting.  It was not hard to see that her attitude was definitely
hostile.  It put Ashenden at his ease.  She was a plainish woman,
nearing forty, with a muddy skin and vague features; her drab hair was
arranged in a plait round her head like that of Napoleon's Queen of
Prussia; and she was squarely built, plump rather than fat, and solid.
But she did not look stupid; she looked, on the contrary, a woman of
character and Ashenden, who had lived enough in Germany to recognise
the type, was ready to believe that though capable of doing the
housework, cooking the dinner and climbing a mountain, she might be
also prodigiously well-informed.  She wore a white blouse that showed a
sun-burned neck, a black skirt and heavy walking boots.  Caypor
addressing her in English told her in his jovial way, as though she did
not know it already, what Ashenden had told him about himself.  She
listened grimly.

"I think you told me you understood German," said Caypor, his big red
face wreathed in polite smiles but his little eyes darting about
restlessly.

"Yes, I was for some time a student in Heidelberg."

"Really?" said Mrs. Caypor in English, an expression of faint interest
for a moment chasing away the sullenness from her face.  "I know
Heidelberg very well.  I was at school there for one year."

Her English was correct, but throaty, and the mouthing emphasis she
gave her words was disagreeable.  Ashenden was diffuse in praise of the
old university town and the beauty of the neighbourhood.  She heard
him, from the standpoint of her Teutonic superiority, with toleration
rather than with enthusiasm.

"It is well known that the valley of the Neckar is one of the beauty
places of the whole world," she said.

"I have not told you, my dear," said Caypor then, "that Mr. Somerville
is looking for someone to give him conversation lessons while he is
here.  I told him that perhaps you could suggest a teacher."

"No, I know no one whom I could conscientiously recommend," she
answered.  "The Swiss accent is hateful beyond words.  It could do Mr.
Somerville only harm to converse with a Swiss."

"If I were in your place, Mr. Somerville, I would try and persuade my
wife to give you lessons.  She is, if I may say so, a very cultivated
and highly educated woman."

"_Ach_, Grantley, I have not the time.  I have my own work to do."

Ashenden saw that he was being given his opportunity.  The trap was
prepared and all he had to do was to fall in.  He turned to Mrs. Caypor
with a manner that he tried to make shy, deprecating and modest.

"Of course it would be too wonderful if you would give me lessons.  I
should look upon it as a real privilege.  Naturally I wouldn't want to
interfere with your work.  I am just here to get well, with nothing in
the world to do, and I would suit my time entirely to your convenience."

He felt a flash of satisfaction pass from one to the other and in Mrs.
Caypor's blue eyes he fancied that he saw a dark glow.

"Of course it would be a purely business arrangement," said Caypor.
"There's no reason that my good wife shouldn't earn a little pin-money.
Would you think ten francs an hour too much?"

"No," said Ashenden, "I should think myself lucky to get a first-rate
teacher for that."

"What do you say, my dear?  Surely you can spare an hour, and you would
be doing this gentleman a kindness.  He would learn that all Germans
are not the devilish fiends that they think them in England."

On Mrs. Caypor's brow was an uneasy frown and Ashenden could not but
think with apprehension of that hour's conversation a day that he was
going to exchange with her.  Heaven only knew how he would have to rack
his brain for subjects of discourse with that heavy and morose woman.
Now she made a visible effort.

"I shall be very pleased to give Mr. Somerville conversation lessons."

"I congratulate you, Mr. Somerville," said Caypor noisily.  "You're in
for a treat.  When will you start, to-morrow at eleven?"

"That would suit me very well if it suits Mrs. Caypor."

"Yes, that is as good an hour as another," she answered.

Ashenden left them to discuss the happy outcome of their diplomacy.
But when, punctually at eleven next morning, he heard a knock at his
door (for it had been arranged that Mrs. Caypor should give him his
lesson in his room) it was not without trepidation that he opened it.
It behoved him to be frank, a trifle indiscreet, but obviously wary of
a German woman, sufficiently intelligent, and impulsive.  Mrs. Caypor's
face was dark and sulky.  She plainly hated having anything to do with
him.  But they sat down and she began, somewhat peremptorily, to ask
him questions about his knowledge of German literature.  She corrected
his mistakes with exactness and when he put before her some difficulty
in German construction explained it with clearness and precision.  It
was obvious that though she hated giving him a lesson she meant to give
it conscientiously.  She seemed to have not only an aptitude for
teaching, but a love of it, and as the hour went on she began to speak
with greater earnestness.  It was already only by an effort that she
remembered that he was a brutal Englishman.  Ashenden, noticing the
unconscious struggle within her, found himself not a little
entertained; and it was with truth that, when later in the day Caypor
asked him how the lesson had gone, he answered that it was highly
satisfactory; Mrs. Caypor was an excellent teacher and a most
interesting person.

"I told you so.  She's the most remarkable woman I know."

And Ashenden had a feeling that when in his hearty, laughing way Caypor
said this he was for the first time entirely sincere.

In a day or two Ashenden guessed that Mrs. Caypor was giving him
lessons only in order to enable Caypor to arrive at a closer intimacy
with him, for she confined herself strictly to matters of literature,
music and painting; and when Ashenden, by way of experiment, brought
the conversation round to the war, she cut him short.

"I think that is a topic that we had better avoid, Herr Somerville,"
she said.

She continued to give her lessons with the greatest thoroughness, and
he had his money's worth, but every day she came with the same sullen
face and it was only in the interest of teaching that she lost for a
moment her instinctive dislike of him.  Ashenden exercised in turn, but
in vain, all his wiles.  He was ingratiating, ingenuous, humble,
grateful, flattering, simple and timid.  She remained coldly hostile.
She was a fanatic.  Her patriotism was aggressive, but disinterested,
and obsessed with the notion of the superiority of all things German,
she loathed England with a virulent hatred because in that country she
saw the chief obstacle to their diffusion.  Her ideal was a German
world in which the rest of the nations under a hegemony greater than
that of Rome should enjoy the benefits of German science and German art
and German culture.  There was in the conception a magnificent
impudence that appealed to Ashenden's sense of humour.  She was no
fool.  She had read much, in several languages, and she could talk of
the books she had read with good sense.  She had a knowledge of modern
painting and modern music that not a little impressed Ashenden.  It was
amusing once to hear her before luncheon play one of those silvery
little pieces of Debussy; she played it disdainfully because it was
French and so light, but with an angry appreciation of its grace and
gaiety.  When Ashenden congratulated her she shrugged her shoulders.

"The decadent music of a decadent nation," she said.  Then with
powerful hands she struck the first resounding chords of a sonata by
Beethoven; but she stopped.  "I cannot play, I am out of practice, and
you English, what do you know of music?  You have not produced a
composer since Purcell!"

"What do you think of that statement?" Ashenden, smiling, asked Caypor
who was standing near.

"I confess its truth.  The little I know of music my wife taught me.  I
wish you could hear her play when she is in practice."  He put his fat
hand, with its square, stumpy fingers, on her shoulder.  "She can wring
your heart-strings with pure beauty."

"_Dummer Kerl_," she said, in a soft voice, "Stupid fellow," and
Ashenden saw her mouth for a moment quiver, but she quickly recovered.
"You English, you cannot paint, you cannot model, you cannot write
music."

"Some of us can at times write pleasing verses," said Ashenden, with
good humour, for it was not his business to be put out, and, he did not
know why, two lines occurring to him he said them:

  "Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
  Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West."


"Yes," said Mrs. Caypor, with a strange gesture, "you can write poetry.
I wonder why."

And to Ashenden's surprise she went on, in her guttural English, to
recite the next two lines of the poem he had quoted.

"Come, Grantley, _Mittagessen_ is ready, let us go into the
dining-room."

They left Ashenden reflective.

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness.  People
sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in
others than attached to them, and even in the few to whom he was
attached his eyes saw with equal clearness the merits and the defects.
When he liked people it was not because he was blind to their faults;
he did not mind their faults, but accepted them with a tolerant shrug
of the shoulders, or because he ascribed to them excellencies that they
did not possess; and since he judged his friends with candour they
never disappointed him and so he seldom lost one.  He asked from none
more than he could give.  He was able to pursue his study of the
Caypors without prejudice and without passion.  Mrs. Caypor seemed to
him more of a piece and therefore the easier of the two to understand;
she obviously detested him; though it was so necessary for her to be
civil to him her antipathy was strong enough to wring from her now and
then an expression of rudeness; and had she been safely able to do so
she would have killed him without a qualm.  But in the pressure of
Caypor's chubby hand on his wife's shoulder and in the fugitive
trembling of her lips Ashenden had divined that this unprepossessing
woman and that mean fat man were joined together by a deep and sincere
love.  It was touching.  Ashenden assembled the observations that he
had been making for the past few days and little things that he had
noticed but to which he had attached no significance returned to him.
It seemed to him that Mrs. Caypor loved her husband because she was of
a stronger character than he and because she felt his dependence on
her; she loved him for his admiration of her, and you might guess that
till she met him this dumpy, plain woman with her dullness, good sense
and want of humour could not have much enjoyed the admiration of men;
she enjoyed his heartiness and his noisy jokes, and his high spirits
stirred her sluggish blood; he was a great big bouncing boy and he
would never be anything else and she felt like a mother towards him;
she had made him what he was, and he was her man and she was his woman,
and she loved him, notwithstanding his weakness (for with her clear
head she must always have been conscious of that), she loved him--_ach!
was_--as Isolde loved Tristan.  But then there was the espionage.  Even
Ashenden with all his tolerance for human frailty could not but feel
that to betray your country for money is not a very pretty proceeding.
Of course she knew of it, indeed it was probably through her that
Caypor had first been approached; he would never have undertaken such
work if she had not urged him to it.  She loved him and she was an
honest and an upright woman.  By what devious means had she persuaded
herself to force her husband to adopt so base and dishonourable a
calling?  Ashenden lost himself in a labyrinth of conjecture as he
tried to piece together the actions of her mind.

Grantley Caypor was another story.  There was little to admire in him,
but at that moment Ashenden was not looking for an object of
admiration; but there was much that was singular and much that was
unexpected in that gross and vulgar fellow.  Ashenden watched with
entertainment the suave manner in which the spy tried to inveigle him
in his toils.  It was a couple of days after his first lesson that
Caypor, after dinner, his wife having gone upstairs, threw himself
heavily into a chair by Ashenden's side.  His faithful Fritzi came up
to him and put his long muzzle with its black nose on his knee.

"He has no brain," said Caypor, "but a heart of gold.  Look at those
little pink eyes.  Did you ever see anything so stupid?  And what an
ugly face, but what incredible charm!"

"Have you had him long?" asked Ashenden.

"I got him in 1914, just before the outbreak of war.  By the way, what
do you think of the news to-day?  Of course my wife and I never discuss
the war.  You can't think what a relief to me it is to find a
fellow-countryman to whom I can open my heart."

He handed Ashenden a cheap Swiss cigar and Ashenden, making a rueful
sacrifice to duty, accepted it.

"Of course they haven't got a chance, the Germans," said Caypor, "not a
dog's chance.  I knew they were beaten the moment we came in."

His manner was earnest, sincere and confidential.  Ashenden made a
commonplace rejoinder.

"It's the greatest grief of my life that owing to my wife's nationality
I was unable to do any war work.  I tried to enlist the day war broke
out, but they wouldn't have me on account of my age, but I don't mind
telling you, if the war goes on much longer, wife or no wife, I'm going
to do something.  With my knowledge of languages I ought to be of some
service in the Censorship Department.  That's where you were, wasn't
it?"

That was the mark at which he had been aiming and in answer now to his
well-directed questions Ashenden gave him the information that he had
already prepared.  Caypor drew his chair a little nearer and dropped
his voice.

"I'm sure you wouldn't tell me anything that anyone shouldn't know, but
after all these Swiss are absolutely pro-German and we don't want to
give anyone the chance of overhearing."

Then he went on another tack.  He told Ashenden a number of things that
were of a certain secrecy.

"I wouldn't tell this to anybody else, you know, but I have one or two
friends who are in pretty influential positions, and they know they can
trust me."

Thus encouraged Ashenden was a little more deliberately indiscreet and
when they parted both had reason to be satisfied.  Ashenden guessed
that Caypor's typewriter would be kept busy next morning and that
extremely energetic Major in Berne would shortly receive a most
interesting report.

One evening, going upstairs after dinner, Ashenden passed an open
bathroom.  He caught sight of the Caypors.

"Come in," cried Caypor in his cordial way.  "We're washing our Fritzi."

The bull-terrier was constantly getting himself very dirty, and it was
Caypor's pride to see him clean and white.  Ashenden went in.  Mrs.
Caypor with her sleeves turned up and a large white apron was standing
at one end of the bath, while Caypor, in a pair of trousers and a
singlet, his fat, freckled arms bare, was soaping the wretched hound.

"We have to do it at night," he said, "because the Fitzgeralds use this
bath and they'd have a fit if they knew we washed the dog in it.  We
wait till they go to bed.  Come along, Fritzi, show the gentleman how
beautifully you behave when you have your face scrubbed."

The poor brute, woebegone but faintly wagging his tail to show that
however foul was this operation performed on him he bore no malice to
the god who did it, was standing in the middle of the bath in six
inches of water.  He was soaped all over and Caypor, talking the while,
shampooed him with his great fat hands.

"Oh, what a beautiful dog he's going to be when he's as white as the
driven snow.  His master will be as proud as Punch to walk out with him
and all the little lady-dogs will say: good gracious, who's that
beautiful aristocratic-looking bull-terrier walking as though he owned
the whole of Switzerland?  Now stand still while you have your ears
washed.  You couldn't bear to go out into the street with dirty ears,
could you? like a nasty little Swiss schoolboy.  _Noblesse oblige_.
Now the black nose.  Oh, and all the soap is going into his little pink
eyes and they'll smart."

Mrs. Caypor listened to this nonsense with a good-humoured sluggish
smile on her broad, plain face, and presently gravely took a towel.

"Now he's going to have a ducking.  Upsie-daisy."

Caypor seized the dog by the fore-legs and ducked him once and ducked
him twice.  There was a struggle, a flurry and a splashing.  Caypor
lifted him out of the bath.

"Now go to mother and she'll dry you."

Mrs. Caypor sat down and taking the dog between her strong legs rubbed
him till the sweat poured off her forehead.  And Fritzi, a little
shaken and breathless, but happy it was all over, stood, with his sweet
stupid face, white and shining.

"Blood will tell," cried Caypor exultantly.  "He knows the names of no
less than sixty-four of his ancestors, and they were all nobly born."

Ashenden was faintly troubled.  He shivered a little as he walked
upstairs.

Then, one Sunday, Caypor told him that he and his wife were going on an
excursion and would eat their luncheon at some little mountain
restaurant; and he suggested that Ashenden, each paying his share,
should come with them.  After three weeks at Lucerne Ashenden thought
that his strength would permit him to venture the exertion.  They
started early, Mrs. Caypor businesslike in her walking boots and
Tyrolese hat and alpenstock, and Caypor in stockings and plus-fours
looking very British.  The situation amused Ashenden and he was
prepared to enjoy his day; but he meant to keep his eyes open; it was
not inconceivable that the Caypors had discovered what he was and it
would not do to go too near a precipice; Mrs. Caypor would not hesitate
to give him a push and Caypor for all his jolliness was an ugly
customer.  But on the face of it there was nothing to mar Ashenden's
pleasure in the golden morning.  The air was fragrant.  Caypor was full
of conversation.  He told funny stories.  He was gay and jovial.  The
sweat rolled off his great red face and he laughed at himself because
he was so fat.  To Ashenden's astonishment he showed a peculiar
knowledge of the mountain flowers.  Once he went out of the way to pick
one he saw a little distance from the path and brought it back to his
wife.  He looked at it tenderly.

"Isn't it lovely?" he cried, and his shifty grey-green eyes for a
moment were as candid as a child's.  "It's like a poem by Walter Savage
Landor."

"Botany is my husband's favourite science," said Mrs. Caypor.  "I laugh
at him sometimes.  He is devoted to flowers.  Often when we have hardly
had enough money to pay the butcher he has spent everything in his
pocket to bring me a bunch of roses."

"_Qui fleurit sa maison fleurit son coeur_," said Grantley Caypor.

Ashenden had once or twice seen Caypor, coming in from a walk, offer
Mrs. Fitzgerald a nosegay of mountain flowers with an elephantine
courtesy that was not entirely displeasing; and what he had just
learned added a certain significance to the pretty little action.  His
passion for flowers was genuine and when he gave them to the old Irish
lady he gave her something he valued.  It showed a real kindness of
heart.  Ashenden had always thought botany a tedious science, but
Caypor, talking exuberantly as they walked along, was able to impart to
it life and interest.  He must have given it a good deal of study.

"I've never written a book," he said.  "There are too many books
already and any desire to write I have is satisfied by the more
immediately profitable and quite ephemeral composition of an article
for a daily paper.  But if I stay here much longer I have half a mind
to write a book about the wild flowers of Switzerland.  Oh, I wish
you'd been here a little earlier.  They were marvellous.  But one wants
to be a poet for that, and I'm only a poor newspaper man."

It was curious to observe how he was able to combine real emotion with
false fact.

When they reached the inn, with its view of the mountains and the lake,
it was good to see the sensual pleasure with which he poured down his
throat a bottle of ice-cold beer.  You could not but feel sympathy for
a man who took so much delight in simple things.  They lunched
deliciously off scrambled eggs and mountain trout.  Even Mrs. Caypor
was moved to an unwonted gentleness by her surroundings; the inn was in
an agreeably rural spot, it looked like a picture of a Swiss chalet in
a book of early nineteenth-century travels; and she treated Ashenden
with something less than her usual hostility.  When they arrived she
had burst into loud German exclamations on the beauty of the scene, and
now, softened perhaps too by food and drink, her eyes, dwelling on the
grandeur before her, filled with tears.  She stretched out her hand.

"It is dreadful and I am ashamed, notwithstanding this horrible and
unjust war I can feel in my heart at the moment nothing but happiness
and gratitude."

Caypor took her hand and pressed it and, an unusual thing with him,
addressing her in German, called her little pet-names.  It was absurd,
but touching.  Ashenden, leaving them to their emotions, strolled
through the garden and sat down on a bench that had been prepared for
the comfort of the tourist.  The view was of course spectacular, but it
captured you; it was like a piece of music that was obvious and
meretricious, but for the moment shattered your self-control.

And as Ashenden lingered idly in that spot he pondered over the mystery
of Grantley Caypor's treachery.  If he liked strange people he had
found in him one who was strange beyond belief.  It would be foolish to
deny that he had amiable traits.  His joviality was not assumed, he was
without pretence a hearty fellow, and he had real good nature.  He was
always ready to do a kindness.  Ashenden had often watched him with the
old Irish Colonel and his wife who were the only other residents of the
hotel; he would listen good-humouredly to the old man's tedious stories
of the Egyptian war, and he was charming with her.  Now that Ashenden
had arrived at terms of some familiarity with Caypor he found that he
regarded him less with repulsion than with curiosity.  He did not think
that he had become a spy merely for the money; he was a man of modest
tastes and what he had earned in a shipping-office must have sufficed
to so good a manager as Mrs. Caypor; and after war was declared there
was no lack of remunerative work for men over the military age.  It
might be that he was one of those men who prefer devious ways to
straight for some intricate pleasure they get in fooling their fellows;
and that he had turned spy, not from hatred of the country that had
imprisoned him, not even from love of his wife, but from a desire to
score off the big-wigs who never even knew of his existence.  It might
be that it was vanity that impelled him, a feeling that his talents had
not received the recognition they merited, or just a puckish, impish
desire to do mischief.  He was a crook.  It is true that only two cases
of dishonesty had been brought home to him, but if he had been caught
twice it might be surmised that he had often been dishonest without
being caught.  What did Mrs. Caypor think of this?  They were so united
that she must be aware of it.  Did it make her ashamed, for her own
uprightness surely none could doubt, or did she accept it as an
inevitable kink in the man she loved?  Did she do all she could to
prevent it or did she close her eyes to something she could not help?

How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white and
how much simpler it would be to act in regard to them!  Was Caypor a
good man who loved evil or a bad man who loved good?  And how could
such unreconcilable elements exist side by side and in harmony within
the same heart?  For one thing was clear, Caypor was disturbed by no
gnawing of conscience; he did his mean and despicable work with gusto.
He was a traitor who enjoyed his treachery.  Though Ashenden had been
studying human nature more or less consciously all his life, it seemed
to him that he knew as little about it now in middle age as he had done
when he was a child.  Of course R. would have said to him: why the
devil do you waste your time with such nonsense?  The man's a dangerous
spy and your business is to lay him by the heels.

That was true enough.  Ashenden had decided that it would be useless to
attempt to make any arrangement with Caypor.  Though doubtless he would
have no feeling about betraying his employers he could certainly not be
trusted.  His wife's influence was too strong.  Besides,
notwithstanding what he had from time to time told Ashenden, he was in
his heart convinced that the Central Powers must win the war, and he
meant to be on the winning side.  Well, then Caypor must be laid by the
heels, but how he was to effect that Ashenden had no notion.  Suddenly
he heard a voice.

"There you are.  We've been wondering where you had hidden yourself."

He looked round and saw the Caypors strolling towards him.  They were
walking hand in hand.

"So this is what has kept you so quiet," said Caypor as his eyes fell
on the view.  "What a spot!"

Mrs. Caypor clasped her hands.

"_Ach Gott, wie schn!_" she cried.  "_Wie schn_.  When I look at that
blue lake and those snowy mountains I feel inclined, like Goethe's
Faust, to cry to the passing moment: tarry."

"This is better than being in England with the excursions and alarums
of war, isn't it?" said Caypor.

"Much," said Ashenden.

"By the way, did you have any difficulty in getting out?"

"No, not the smallest."

"I'm told they make rather a nuisance of themselves at the frontier
nowadays."

"I came through without the smallest difficulty.  I don't fancy they
bother much about the English.  I thought the examination of passports
was quite perfunctory."

A fleeting glance passed between Caypor and his wife.  Ashenden
wondered what it meant.  It would be strange if Caypor's thoughts were
occupied with the chances of a journey to England at the very moment
when he was himself reflecting on its possibility.  In a little while
Mrs. Caypor suggested that they had better be starting back and they
wandered together in the shade of trees down the mountain paths.

Ashenden was watchful.  He could do nothing (and his inactivity irked
him) but wait with his eyes open to seize the opportunity that might
present itself.  A couple of days later an incident occurred that made
him certain something was in the wind.  In the course of his morning
lesson Mrs. Caypor remarked:

"My husband has gone to Geneva to-day.  He had some business to do
there."

"Oh," said Ashenden, "will he be gone long?"

"No, only two days."

It is not everyone who can tell a lie and Ashenden had the feeling, he
hardly knew why, that Mrs. Caypor was telling one then.  Her manner
perhaps was not quite as indifferent as you would have expected when
she was mentioning a fact that could be of no interest to Ashenden.  It
flashed across his mind that Caypor had been summoned to Berne to see
the redoubtable head of the German secret service.  When he had the
chance he said casually to the waitress:

"A little less work for you to do, _Frulein_.  I hear that Herr Caypor
has gone to Berne."

"Yes.  But he'll be back to-morrow."

That proved nothing, but it was something to go upon.  Ashenden knew in
Lucerne a Swiss who was willing on emergency to do odd jobs and,
looking him up, asked him to take a letter to Berne.  It might be
possible to pick up Caypor and trace his movements.  Next day Caypor
appeared once more with his wife at the dinner-table, but merely nodded
to Ashenden and afterwards both went straight upstairs.  They looked
troubled.  Caypor, as a rule so animated, walked with bowed shoulders
and looked neither to the right nor to the left.  Next morning Ashenden
received a reply to his letter: Caypor had seen Major von P.  It was
possible to guess what the Major had said to him.  Ashenden well knew
how rough he could be; he was a hard man and a brutal, clever and
unscrupulous, and he was not accustomed to mince his words.  They were
tired of paying Caypor a salary to sit still in Lucerne and do nothing;
the time was come for him to go to England.  Guess-work?  Of course it
was guess-work, but in that trade it mostly was; you had to deduce the
animal from its jaw-bone.  Ashenden knew from Gustav that the Germans
wanted to send someone to England.  He drew a long breath; if Caypor
went he would have to get busy.

When Mrs. Caypor came in to give him his lesson she was dull and
listless.  She looked tired and her mouth was set obstinately.  It
occurred to Ashenden that the Caypors had spent most of the night
talking.  He wished he knew what they had said.  Did she urge him to go
or did she try to dissuade him?  Ashenden watched them again at
luncheon.  Something was the matter, for they hardly spoke to one
another and as a rule they found plenty to talk about.  They left the
room early, but when Ashenden went out he saw Caypor sitting in the
hall by himself.

"Hulloa," he cried jovially, but surely the effort was patent, "how are
you getting on?  I've been to Geneva."

"So I heard," said Ashenden.

"Come and have your coffee with me.  My poor wife's got a headache.  I
told her she'd better go and lie down."  In his shifty green eyes was
an expression that Ashenden could not read.  "The fact is, she's rather
worried, poor dear; I'm thinking of going to England."

Ashenden's heart gave a sudden leap against his ribs, but his face
remained impassive:

"Oh, are you going for long?  We shall miss you."

"To tell you the truth, I'm fed up with doing nothing.  The war looks
as though it were going on for years and I can't sit here indefinitely.
Besides, I can't afford it, I've got to earn my living.  I may have a
German wife, but I am an Englishman, hang it all, and I want to do my
bit.  I could never face my friends again if I just stayed here in ease
and comfort till the end of the war and never attempted to do a thing
to help the country.  My wife takes her German point of view and I
don't mind telling you that she's a bit upset.  You know what women
are."

Now Ashenden knew what it was that he saw in Caypor's eyes.  Fear.  It
gave him a nasty turn.  Caypor didn't want to go to England, he wanted
to stay safely in Switzerland; Ashenden knew now what the major had
said to him when he went to see him in Berne.  He had got to go or lose
his salary.  What was it that his wife had said when he told her what
had happened?  He had wanted her to press him to stay, but, it was
plain, she hadn't done that; perhaps he had not dared tell her how
frightened he was; to her he had always been gay, bold, adventurous and
devil-may-care; and now, the prisoner of his own lies, he had not found
it in him to confess himself the mean and sneaking coward he was.

"Are you going to take your wife with you?" asked Ashenden.

"No, she'll stay here."

It had been arranged very neatly.  Mrs. Caypor would receive his
letters and forward the information they contained to Berne.

"I've been out of England so long that I don't quite know how to set
about getting war-work.  What would you do in my place?"

"I don't know; what sort of work are you thinking of?"

"Well, you know, I imagine I could do the same thing as you did.  I
wonder if there's anyone in the Censorship Department that you could
give me a letter of introduction to."

It was only by a miracle that Ashenden saved himself from showing by a
smothered cry or by a broken gesture how startled he was; but not by
Caypor's request, by what had just dawned upon him.  What an idiot he
had been!  He had been disturbed by the thought that he was wasting his
time at Lucerne, he was doing nothing, and though in fact, as it turned
out, Caypor was going to England it was due to no cleverness of his.
He could take to himself no credit for the result.  And now he saw that
he had been put in Lucerne, told how to describe himself and given the
proper information, so that what actually had occurred should occur.
It would be a wonderful thing for the German secret service to get an
agent into the Censorship Department; and by a happy accident there was
Grantley Caypor, the very man for the job, on friendly terms with
someone who had worked there.  What a bit of luck!  Major von P. was a
man of culture and, rubbing his hands, he must surely have murmured:
_stultum facit fortuna quem vult perdere_.  It was a trap of that
devilish R. and the grim major at Berne had fallen into it.  Ashenden
had done his work just by sitting still and doing nothing.  He almost
laughed as he thought what a fool R. had made of him.

"I was on very good terms with the chief of my department, I could give
you a note to him if you liked."

"That would be just the thing."

"But of course I must give the facts.  I must say I've met you here and
only known you a fortnight."

"Of course.  But you'll say what else you can for me, won't you?"

"Oh, certainly."

"I don't know yet if I can get a visa.  I'm told they're rather fussy."

"I don't see why.  I shall be very sick if they refuse me one when I
want to go back."

"I'll go and see how my wife is getting on," said Caypor suddenly,
getting up.  "When will you let me have that letter?"

"Whenever you like.  Are you going at once?"

"As soon as possible."

Caypor left him.  Ashenden waited in the hall for a quarter of an hour
so that there should appear in him no sign of hurry.  Then he went
upstairs and prepared various communications.  In one he informed R.
that Caypor was going to England; in another he made arrangements
through Berne that wherever Caypor applied for a visa it should be
granted to him without question; and these he despatched forthwith.
When he went down to dinner he handed Caypor a cordial letter of
introduction.

Next day but one Caypor left Lucerne.

Ashenden waited.  He continued to have his hour's lesson with Mrs.
Caypor and under her conscientious tuition began now to speak German
with ease.  They talked of Goethe and Winckelmann, of art and life and
travel.  Fritzi sat quietly by her chair.

"He misses his master," she said, pulling his ears.  "He only really
cares for him, he suffers me only as belonging to him."

After his lesson Ashenden went every morning to Cook's to ask for his
letters.  It was here that all communications were addressed to him.
He could not move till he received instructions, but R. could be
trusted not to leave him idle long; and meanwhile there was nothing for
him to do but have patience.  Presently he received a letter from the
consul in Geneva to say that Caypor had there applied for his visa and
had set out for France.  Having read this Ashenden went on for a little
stroll by the lake and on his way back happened to see Mrs. Caypor
coming out of Cook's office.  He guessed that she was having her
letters addressed there too.  He went up to her.

"Have you had news of Herr Caypor?" he asked her.

"No," she said.  "I suppose I could hardly expect to yet."

He walked along by her side.  She was disappointed, but not yet
anxious; she knew how irregular at that time was the post.  But next
day during the lesson he could not but see that she was impatient to
have done with it.  The post was delivered at noon and at five minutes
to she looked at her watch and him.  Though Ashenden knew very well
that no letter would ever come for her he had not the heart to keep her
on tenter-hooks.

"Don't you think that's enough for the day?  I'm sure you want to go
down to Cook's," he said.

"Thank you.  That is very amiable of you."

When a little later he went there himself he found her standing in the
middle of the office.  Her face was distraught.  She addressed him
wildly.

"My husband promised to write from Paris.  I am sure there is a letter
for me, but these stupid people say there's nothing.  They're so
careless, it's a scandal."

Ashenden did not know what to say.  While the clerk was looking through
the bundle to see if there was anything for him she came up to the desk
again.

"When does the next post come in from France?" she asked.

"Sometimes there are letters about five."

"I'll come then."

She turned and walked rapidly away.  Fritzi followed her with his tail
between his legs.  There was no doubt of it, already the fear had
seized her that something was wrong.  Next morning she looked dreadful;
she could not have closed her eyes all night; and in the middle of the
lesson she started up from her chair.

"You must excuse me, Herr Somerville, I cannot give you a lesson
to-day, I am not feeling well."

Before Ashenden could say anything she had flung nervously from the
room, and in the evening he got a note from her to say that she
regretted that she must discontinue giving him conversation lessons.
She gave no reason.  Then Ashenden saw no more of her; she ceased
coming in to meals; except to go morning and afternoon to Cook's she
spent apparently the whole day in her room.  Ashenden thought of her
sitting there hour after hour with that hideous fear gnawing at her
heart.  Who could help feeling sorry for her?  The time hung heavy on
his hands too.  He read a good deal and wrote a little, he hired a
canoe and went for long leisurely paddles on the lake; and at last one
morning the clerk at Cook's handed him a letter.  It was from R.  It
had all the appearance of a business communication, but between the
lines he read a good deal.

_Dear Sir_, it began, _The goods, with accompanying letter, despatched
by you from Lucerne have been duly delivered.  We are obliged to you
for executing our instructions with such promptness_.

It went on in this strain.  R. was exultant.  Ashenden guessed that
Caypor had been arrested and by now had paid the penalty of his crime.
He shuddered.  He remembered a dreadful scene.  Dawn.  A cold, grey
dawn, with a drizzling rain falling.  A man, blindfolded, standing
against a wall, an officer very pale giving an order, a volley, and
then a young soldier, one of the firing-party, turning round and
holding on to his gun for support, vomiting.  The officer turned paler
still, and he, Ashenden, feeling dreadfully faint.  How terrified
Caypor must have been!  It was awful when the tears ran down their
faces.  Ashenden shook himself.  He went to the ticket-office and
obedient to his orders bought himself a ticket for Geneva.

As he was waiting for his change Mrs. Caypor came in.  He was shocked
at the sight of her.  She was blowsy and dishevelled and there were
heavy rings round her eyes.  She was deathly pale.  She staggered up to
the desk and asked for a letter.  The clerk shook his head.

"I'm sorry, madam, there's nothing yet."

"But look, look.  Are you sure?  Please look again."

The misery in her voice was heart-rending.  The clerk with a shrug of
the shoulders took out the letters from a pigeon-hole and sorted them
once more.

"No, there's nothing, madam."

She gave a hoarse cry of despair and her face was distorted with
anguish.

"Oh, God, oh, God," she moaned.

She turned away, the tears streaming from her weary eyes, and for a
moment she stood there like a blind man groping and not knowing which
way to go.  Then a fearful thing happened, Fritzi, the bull-terrier,
sat down on his haunches and threw back his head and gave a long, long
melancholy howl.  Mrs. Caypor looked at him with terror; her eyes
seemed really to start from her head.  The doubt, the gnawing doubt
that had tortured her during those dreadful days of suspense, was a
doubt no longer.  She knew.  She staggered blindly into the street.




XI

_Behind the Scenes_

When Ashenden was sent to X and looked about him he could not but see
that his situation was equivocal.  X was the capital of an important
belligerent state; but a state divided against itself; there was a
large party antagonistic to the war and revolution was possible if not
imminent.  Ashenden was instructed to see what under the circumstances
could best be done; he was to suggest a policy and, if it was approved
by the exalted personages who had sent him, to carry it out.  A vast
amount of money was put at his disposal.  The ambassadors of Great
Britain and the United States had been directed to afford him such
facilities as were at their command, but Ashenden had been told
privately to keep himself to himself; he was not to make difficulties
for the official representatives of the two powers by divulging to them
facts that it might be inconvenient for them to know; and since it
might be necessary for him to give support under cover to a party that
was at daggers drawn with that in office and with which the relations
of the United States and Great Britain were extremely cordial it was
just as well that Ashenden should keep his own counsel.  The exalted
personages did not wish the ambassadors to suffer the affront of
discovering that an obscure agent had been sent to work at
cross-purposes with them.  On the other hand it was thought just as
well to have a representative in the opposite camp, who in the event of
a sudden upheaval would be at hand with adequate funds and in the
confidence of the new leaders of the country.

But ambassadors are sticklers for their dignity and they have a keen
nose to scent any encroachment on their authority.  When Ashenden on
his arrival at X paid an official call on Sir Herbert Witherspoon, the
British ambassador, he was received with a politeness to which no
exception could be taken, but with a frigidity that would have sent a
little shiver down the spine of a polar bear.  Sir Herbert was a
diplomat _de carrire_ and he cultivated the manner of his profession
to a degree that filled the observer with admiration.  He did not ask
Ashenden anything about his mission because he knew that Ashenden would
reply evasively, but he allowed him to see that it was a perfectly
foolish one.  He talked with acidulous tolerance of the exalted
personages who had sent Ashenden to X.  He told Ashenden that he had
instructions to meet any demands for help that he made and stated that
if Ashenden at any time desired to see him he had only to say so.

"I have received the somewhat singular request to despatch telegrams
for you in a private code which I understand has been given to you and
to hand over to you telegrams in code as they arrive."

"I hope they will be few and far between, sir," answered Ashenden.  "I
know nothing so tedious as coding and decoding."

Sir Herbert paused for an instant.  Perhaps that was not quite the
answer he expected.  He rose.

"If you will come into the Chancellery I will introduce you to the
Counsellor and to the Secretary to whom you can take your telegrams."

Ashenden followed him out of the room, and after handing him over to
the Counsellor the ambassador gave him a limp hand to shake.

"I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again one of these
days," he said, and with a curt nod left him.

Ashenden bore his reception with composure.  It was his business to
remain in obscurity and he did not wish any official attentions to
attract notice to him.  But when on the afternoon of the same day he
made his call at the American Embassy he discovered why Sir Herbert
Witherspoon had shown him so much coldness.  The American ambassador
was Mr. Wilbur Schfer; he came from Kansas City and had been given his
post when few suspected that a war was on the point of breaking out, as
a reward for political services.  He was a big stout man, no longer
young, for his hair was white, but well-preserved and exceedingly
robust.  He had a square, red face, clean-shaven, with a little snub
nose and a determined chin.  His face was very mobile and he twisted it
continually into odd and amusing grimaces.  It looked as though it were
made out of the red india-rubber from which they make hot-water
bottles.  He greeted Ashenden with cordiality.  He was a hearty fellow.

"I suppose you've seen Sir Herbert.  I reckon you've got his dander up.
What do they mean in Washington and London by telling us to despatch
your code telegrams without knowing what they're all about?  You know,
they've got no right to do that."

"Oh, Your Excellency, I think it was only done to save time and
trouble," said Ashenden.

"Well, what is this mission anyway?"

This of course was a question that Ashenden was not prepared to answer,
but not thinking it politic to say so, he determined to give a reply
from which the ambassador could learn little.  He had already made up
his mind from the look of him that Mr. Schfer, though doubtless
possessed of the gifts that enable a man to swing a presidential
election this way or that, had not, at least nakedly for all men to
see, the acuteness that his position perhaps demanded.  He gave you the
impression of a bluff, good-humoured creature who liked good cheer.
Ashenden would have been wary when playing poker with him, but where
the matter in hand was concerned felt himself fairly safe.  He began to
talk in a loose, vague way of the world at large and before he had gone
far managed to ask the ambassador his opinion of the general situation.
It was the sound of the trumpet to the war-horse: Mr. Schfer made him
a speech that lasted without a break for twenty-five minutes, and when
at last he stopped in exhaustion, Ashenden with warm thanks for his
friendly reception was able to take his leave.

Making up his mind to give both the ambassadors a wide berth, he set
about his work and presently devised a plan of campaign.  But by chance
he was able to do Sir Herbert Witherspoon a good turn and so was thrown
again into contact with him.  It has been suggested that Mr. Schfer
was more of a politician than a diplomat, and it was his position
rather than his personality that gave weight to his opinions.  He
looked upon the eminence to which he had risen as an opportunity to
enjoy the good things of life and his enthusiasm led him to lengths
that his constitution could ill support.  His ignorance of foreign
affairs would in any case have made his judgment of doubtful value, but
his state at meetings of the allied ambassadors so often approached the
comatose that he seemed hardly capable of forming a judgment at all.
He was known to have succumbed to the fascination of a Swedish lady of
undoubted beauty, but of antecedents that from the point of view of a
secret service agent were suspect.  Her relations with Germany were
such as to make her sympathy with the Allies dubious.  Mr. Schfer saw
her every day and was certainly much under her influence.  Now it was
noticed that there was from time to time a leakage of very secret
information and the question arose whether Mr. Schfer did not in these
daily interviews inadvertently say things that were promptly passed on
to the headquarters of the enemy.  No one could have doubted Mr.
Schfer's honesty and patriotism, but it was permissible to be
uncertain of his discretion.  It was an awkward matter to deal with,
but the concern was as great in Washington as in London and Paris, and
Ashenden was instructed to deal with it.  He had of course not been
sent to X without help to do the work he was expected to do, and among
his assistants was an astute, powerful and determined man, a Galician
Pole, named Herbartus.  After consultation with him it happened by one
of those fortunate coincidences that occasionally come about in the
secret service that a maid in the service of the Swedish lady fell ill
and in her place the countess (for such she was) was very luckily able
to engage an extremely respectable person from the neighbourhood of
Cracow.  The fact that before the war she had been secretary to an
eminent scientist made her doubtless no less competent a housemaid.

The result of this was that Ashenden received every two or three days a
neat report upon the goings-on at this charming lady's apartment, and
though he learned nothing that could confirm the vague suspicions that
had arisen he learned something else of no little importance.  From
conversations held at the cosy little _tte--tte_ dinners that the
countess gave the ambassador it appeared that his excellency was
harbouring a bitter grievance against his English colleague.  He
complained that the relations between himself and Sir Herbert were
deliberately maintained on a purely official level.  In his blunt way
he said he was sick of the frills that damned Britisher put on.  He was
a he-man and a hundred-per-cent American and he had no more use for
protocol and etiquette than for a snowball in hell.  Why didn't they
get together, like a couple of regular fellows, and have a good old
crack?  Blood was thicker than water, he'd say and they'd do more
towards winning the war by sitting down in their shirt-sleeves and
talking things out over a bottle of rye than by all their diplomacy and
white spats.  Now it was obviously very undesirable that there should
not exist between the two ambassadors a perfect cordiality, so Ashenden
thought it well to ask Sir Herbert whether he might see him.

He was ushered into Sir Herbert's library.

"Well, Mr. Ashenden, what can I do for you?  I hope you're quite
satisfied with everything.  I understand that you've been keeping the
telegraph lines busy."

Ashenden, as he sat down, gave the ambassador a glance.  He was
beautifully dressed in a perfectly cut tail-coat that fitted his slim
figure like a glove, in his black silk tie was a handsome pearl, there
was a perfect line in his grey trousers, with their quiet and
distinguished stripe, and his neat, pointed shoes looked as though he
had never worn them before.  You could hardly imagine him sitting in
his shirt-sleeves over a whisky high-ball.  He was a tall, thin man,
with exactly the figure to show off modern clothes, and he sat in his
chair, rather upright, as though he were sitting for an official
portrait.  In his cold and uninteresting way he was really a very
handsome fellow.  His neat grey hair was parted on one side, his pale
face was clean-shaven, he had a delicate, straight nose and grey eyes
under grey eyebrows, his mouth in youth might have been sensual and
well-shaped, but now it was set to an expression of sarcastic
determination and the lips were pallid.  It was the kind of face that
suggested centuries of good breeding, but you could not believe it
capable of expressing emotion.  You would never expect to see it break
into the hearty distortion of laughter, but at the most be for a moment
frigidly moved by an ironic smile.

Ashenden was uncommonly nervous.

"I'm afraid you'll think I'm meddling in what doesn't concern me, sir.
I'm quite prepared to be told to mind my own business."

"We'll see.  Pray go on."

Ashenden told his story and the ambassador listened attentively.  He
did not turn his cold, grey eyes from Ashenden's face, and Ashenden
knew that his embarrassment was obvious.

"How did you find out all this?"

"I have means of getting hold of little bits of information that are
sometimes useful," said Ashenden.

"I see."

Sir Herbert maintained his steady gaze, but Ashenden was surprised to
see on a sudden in the steely eyes a little smile.  The bleak,
supercilious face became for an instant quite attractive.

"There is another little bit of information that perhaps you'd be good
enough to give me.  What does one do to be a regular fellow?"

"I am afraid one can do nothing, Your Excellency," replied Ashenden
gravely.  "I think it is a gift of God."

The light vanished from Sir Herbert's eyes, but his manner was slightly
more urbane than when Ashenden was brought into the room.  He rose and
held out his hand.

"You did quite right to come and tell me this, Mr. Ashenden.  I have
been very remiss.  It is inexcusable on my part to offend that
inoffensive old gentleman.  But I will do my best to repair my error.
I will call at the American Embassy this afternoon."

"But not in too great state, sir, if I may venture a suggestion."

The ambassador's eyes twinkled.  Ashenden began to think him almost
human.

"I can do nothing but in state, Mr. Ashenden.  That is one of the
misfortunes of my temperament."  Then as Ashenden was leaving he added:
"Oh, by the way, I wonder if you'd care to come to dinner with me
tomorrow night.  Black tie.  At eight-fifteen."

He did not wait for Ashenden's assent, but took it for granted, and
with a nod of dismissal sat down once more at his great writing-table.




XII

_His Excellency_

Ashenden looked forward with misgiving to the dinner to which Sir
Herbert Witherspoon had invited him.  The black tie suggested a small
party, perhaps only Lady Anne, the ambassador's wife, whom Ashenden did
not know, or one or two young secretaries.  It did not presage a
hilarious evening.  It was possible that they might play bridge after
dinner, but Ashenden knew that professional diplomats do not play
bridge with skill: it may be supposed that they find it difficult to
bend their great minds to the triviality of a parlour game.  On the
other hand he was interested to see a little more of the ambassador in
circumstances of less formality.  For it was evident that Sir Herbert
Witherspoon was not an ordinary person.  He was in appearance and
manner a perfect specimen of his class and it is always entertaining to
come upon good examples of a well-known type.  He was exactly what you
expected an ambassador to be.  If any of his characteristics had been
ever so slightly exaggerated he would have been a caricature.  He
escaped being ridiculous only by a hair's breadth and you watched him
with a kind of breathlessness as you might watch a tight-rope dancer
doing perilous feats at a dizzy height.  He was certainly a man of
character.  His rise in the diplomatic service had been rapid and
though doubtless it had helped him to be connected by marriage with
powerful families his rise had been due chiefly to his merit.  He knew
how to be determined when determination was necessary and conciliatory
when conciliation was opportune.  His manners were perfect; he could
speak half a dozen languages with ease and accuracy; he had a clear and
logical brain.  He was never afraid to think out his thoughts to the
end, but was wise enough to suit his actions to the exigencies of the
situation.  He had reached his post at X at the early age of
fifty-three and had borne himself in the exceedingly difficult
conditions created by the war and contending parties within the state
with tact, confidence and once at least with courage.  For on one
occasion a riot having arisen a band of revolutionaries forced their
way into the British Embassy and Sir Herbert from the head of his
stairs had harangued them and notwithstanding revolvers flourished at
him had persuaded them to go to their homes.  He would end his career
in Paris.  That was evident.  He was a man whom you could not but
admire but whom it was not easy to like.  He was a diplomat of the
school of those Victorian ambassadors to whom could confidently be
entrusted great affairs and whose self-reliance, sometimes it must be
admitted tinctured with arrogance, was justified by its results.

When Ashenden drove up to the doors of the Embassy they were flung open
and he was received by a stout and dignified English butler and three
footmen.  He was ushered up that magnificent flight of stairs on which
had taken place the dramatic incident just related and shown into an
immense room, dimly lit with shaded lamps, in which at the first glance
he caught sight of large pieces of stately furniture and over the
chimney-piece an immense portrait in coronation robes of King George
IV.  But there was a bright fire blazing on the hearth and from a deep
sofa by the side of it his host, as his name was announced, slowly
rose.  Sir Herbert looked very elegant as he came towards him.  He wore
his dinner-jacket, the most difficult costume for a man to look well
in, with incredible distinction.

"My wife has gone to a concert, but she'll come in later.  She wants to
make your acquaintance.  I haven't asked anybody else.  I thought I
would give myself the pleasure of enjoying your company _en
tte--tte_."

Ashenden murmured a civil rejoinder, but his heart sank.  He wondered
how he was going to pass at least a couple of hours alone with this man
who made him, he was bound to confess, feel extremely shy.

The door was opened again and the butler and a footman entered bearing
very heavy silver salvers.

"I always have a glass of sherry before my dinner," said the
ambassador, "but in case you have acquired the barbarous custom of
drinking cocktails I can offer you what I believe is called a dry
Martini."

Shy though he might be Ashenden was not going to give in to this sort
of thing with complete lameness.

"I move with the times," he replied.  "To drink a glass of sherry when
you can get a dry Martini is like taking a stage-coach when you can
travel by the Orient Express."

A little desultory conversation after this fashion was interrupted by
the throwing open of two great doors and the announcement that His
Excellency's dinner was served.  They went into the dining-room.  This
was a vast apartment in which sixty people might have comfortably
dined, but there was now only a small round table in it so that Sir
Herbert and Ashenden sat intimately.  There was an immense mahogany
sideboard on which were massive pieces of gold plate, and above it,
facing Ashenden, was a fine picture by Canaletto.  Over the
chimney-piece was a three-quarter length portrait of Queen Victoria as
a girl with a little gold crown on her small, prim head.  Dinner was
served by the corpulent butler and the three very tall English footmen.
Ashenden had the impression that the ambassador enjoyed in his
well-bred way the sensation of ignoring the pomp in which he lived.
They might have been dining in one of the great country houses of
England; it was a ceremony they performed, sumptuous without
ostentation, and it was saved from a trifling absurdity only because it
was in a tradition; but the experience gained for Ashenden a kind of
savour from the thought that dwelt with him that on the other side of
the wall was a restless, turbulent population that might at any moment
break into bloody revolution, while not two hundred miles away men in
the trenches were sheltering in their dug-outs from the bitter cold and
the pitiless bombardment.

Ashenden need not have feared that the conversation would proceed with
difficulty and the notion he had had that Sir Herbert had asked him in
order to question him about his secret mission was quickly dispelled.
The ambassador behaved to him as though he were a travelling Englishman
who had presented a letter of introduction and to whom he desired to
show civility.  You would hardly have thought that a war was raging,
for he made to it only such references as showed that he was not
deliberately avoiding a distressing subject.  He spoke of art and
literature, proving himself to be a diligent reader of catholic taste,
and when Ashenden talked to him, from personal acquaintance, of the
writers whom Sir Herbert knew only through their works, he listened
with the friendly condescension which the great ones of the earth
affect towards the artist.  (Sometimes, however, they paint a picture
or write a book, and then the artist gets a little of his own back.)
He mentioned in passing a character in one of Ashenden's novels, but
did not make any other reference to the fact that his guest was a
writer.  Ashenden admired his urbanity.  He disliked people to talk to
him of his books, in which indeed, once written, he took small
interest, and it made him self-conscious to be praised or blamed to his
face.  Sir Herbert Witherspoon flattered his self-esteem, by showing
that he had read him, but spared his delicacy by withholding his
opinion of what he had read.  He spoke too of the various countries in
which during his career he had been stationed and of various persons,
in London and elsewhere, that he and Ashenden knew in common.  He
talked well, not without a pleasant irony that might very well have
passed for humour, and intelligently.  Ashenden did not find his dinner
dull, but neither did he find it exhilarating.  He would have been more
interested if the ambassador had not so invariably said the right, wise
and sensible thing upon every topic that was introduced.  Ashenden was
finding it something of an effort to keep up with this distinction of
mind and he would have liked the conversation to get into its
shirt-sleeves, so to speak, and put its feet on the table.  But of this
there was no chance and Ashenden once or twice caught himself wondering
how soon after dinner he could decently take his leave.  At eleven he
had an appointment with Herbartus at the Htel de Paris.

The dinner came to an end and coffee was brought in.  Sir Herbert knew
good food and good wine and Ashenden was obliged to admit that he had
fared excellently.  Liqueurs were served with the coffee, and Ashenden
took a glass of brandy.

"I have some very old Benedictine," said the ambassador.  "Won't you
try it?"

"To tell you the honest truth I think brandy is the only liqueur worth
drinking."

"I'm not sure that I don't agree with you.  But in that case I must
give you something better than that."

He gave an order to the butler who presently brought in a cobwebbed
bottle and two enormous glasses.

"I don't really want to boast," said the ambassador as he watched the
butler pour the golden liquid into Ashenden's glass, "but I venture to
think that if you like brandy you'll like this.  I got it when I was
Counsellor for a short time in Paris."

"I've had a good deal to do lately with one of your successors then."

"Byring?"

"Yes."

"What do you think of the brandy?"

"I think it's marvellous."

"And of Byring?"

The question came so oddly on the top of the other that it sounded
faintly comic.

"Oh, I think he's a damned fool."

Sir Herbert leaned back in his chair, holding the huge glass with both
hands in order to bring out the aroma, and looked slowly round the
stately and spacious room.  The table had been cleared of superfluous
things.  There was a bowl of roses between Ashenden and his host.  The
servants switched off the electric light as they finally left the room
and it was lit now only by the candles that were on the table and by
the fire.  Notwithstanding its size it had an air of sober comfort.
The ambassador's eyes rested on the really distinguished portrait of
Queen Victoria that hung over the chimneypiece.

"I wonder," he said at last.

"He'll have to leave the diplomatic service."

"I'm afraid so."

Ashenden gave him a quick glance of enquiry.  He was the last man from
whom he would have expected sympathy for Byring.

"Yes, in the circumstances," he proceeded, "I suppose it's inevitable
that he should leave the service.  I'm sorry.  He's an able fellow and
he'll be missed.  I think he had a career before him."

"Yes, that is what I've heard.  I'm told that at the P.O. they thought
very highly of him."

"He has many of the gifts that are useful in this rather dreary trade,"
said the ambassador, with a slight smile, in his cold and judicial
manner.  "He's handsome, he's a gentleman, he has nice manners, he
speaks excellent French and he has a good head on his shoulders.  He'd
have done well."

"It seems a pity that he should waste such golden opportunities."

"I understand he's going into the wine business at the end of the war.
Oddly enough he's going to represent the very firm from whom I got this
brandy."

Sir Herbert raised the glass to his nose and inhaled the fragrance.
Then he looked at Ashenden.  He had a way of looking at people, when he
was thinking of something else perhaps, that suggested that he thought
them somewhat peculiar but rather disgusting insects.

"Have you ever seen the woman?" he asked.

"I dined with her and Byring at Larue's."

"How very interesting.  What is she like?"

"Charming."

Ashenden tried to describe her to his host, but meanwhile with another
part of his mind he recollected the impression she had made on him at
the restaurant when Byring had introduced him to her.  He had been not
a little interested to meet a woman of whom for some years he had heard
so much.  She called herself Rose Auburn, but what her real name was
few knew.  She had gone to Paris originally as one of a troupe of
dancers, called the Glad Girls, who performed at the Moulin Rouge, but
her astonishing beauty had soon caused her to be noticed and a wealthy
French manufacturer fell in love with her.  He gave her a house and
loaded her with jewels, but could not long meet the demands she made
upon him, and she passed in rapid succession from lover to lover.  She
became in a short time the best known courtesan in France.  Her
expenditure was prodigal and she ruined her admirers with cynical
unconcern.  The richest men found themselves unable to cope with her
extravagance.  Ashenden, before the war, had seen her once at Monte
Carlo lose a hundred and eighty thousand francs at a sitting and that
then was an important sum.  She sat at the big table, surrounded by
curious onlookers throwing down packets of thousand-franc notes with a
self-possession that would have been admirable if it had been her own
money that she was losing.

When Ashenden met her she had been leading this riotous life, dancing
and gambling all night, racing most afternoons a week, for twelve or
thirteen years and she was no longer very young; but there was hardly a
line on that lovely brow, scarcely a crow's-foot round those liquid
eyes, to betray the fact.  The most astonishing thing about her was
that notwithstanding this feverish and unending round of senseless
debauchery she had preserved an air of virginity.  Of course she
cultivated the type.  She had an exquisitely graceful and slender
figure, and her innumerable frocks were always made with a perfect
simplicity.  Her brown hair was very plainly done.  With her oval face,
charming little nose and large blue eyes she had all the air of one or
other of Anthony Trollope's charming heroines.  It was the keepsake
style raised to such rareness that it made you catch your breath.  She
had a lovely skin, very white and red, and if she painted it was not
from necessity but from wantonness.  She irradiated a sort of dewy
innocence that was as attractive as it was unexpected.

Ashenden had heard of course that Byring for a year or more had been
her lover.  Her notoriety was such that a hard light of publicity was
shed on everyone with whom she had any affair, but in this instance the
gossips had more to say than usual because Byring had no money to speak
of and Rose Auburn had never been known to grant her favours for
anything that did not in some way represent hard cash.  Was it possible
that she loved him?  It seemed incredible and yet what other
explanation was there?  Byring was a young man with whom any woman
might have fallen in love.  He was somewhere in the thirties, very tall
and good-looking with a singular charm of manner and of an appearance
so debonair that people turned round in the street to look at him; but
unlike most handsome men he seemed entirely unaware of the impression
he created.  When it became known that Byring was the _amant de coeur_
(a prettier phrase than our English 'fancy man') of this famous harlot
he became an object of admiration to many women and of envy to many
men; but when a rumour spread abroad that he was going to marry her
consternation seized his friends and ribald laughter everyone else.  It
became known that Byring's chief had asked him if it was true and he
had admitted it.  Pressure was put upon him to relinquish a plan that
could only end in disaster.  It was pointed out to him that the wife of
a diplomat has social obligations that Rose Auburn could not fulfil.
Byring replied that he was prepared to resign his post whenever by so
doing he would not cause inconvenience.  He brushed aside every
expostulation and every argument; he was determined to marry.

When first Ashenden met Byring he did not very much take to him.  He
found him slightly aloof.  But as the hazards of his work brought him
from time to time into contact with him he discerned that the distant
manner was due merely to shyness and as he came to know him better he
was charmed by the uncommon sweetness of his disposition.  Their
relations, however, remained purely official, so that it was a trifle
unexpected when Byring one day asked him to dinner to meet Miss Auburn,
and he could not but wonder whether it was because already people were
beginning to turn the cold shoulder on him.  When he went he discovered
that the invitation was due to the lady's curiosity.  But the surprise
he got on learning that she had found time to read (with admiration, it
appeared) two or three of his novels was not the only surprise he got
that evening.  Leading on the whole a quiet and studious life he had
never had occasion to penetrate into the world of the higher
prostitution and the great courtesans of the period were known to him
only by name.  It was somewhat astonishing to Ashenden to discover that
Rose Auburn differed so little in air and manner from the smart women
of Mayfair with whom through his books he had become more or less
intimately acquainted.  She was perhaps a little more anxious to please
(indeed one of her agreeable traits was the interest she took in
whomever she was talking to), but she was certainly no more made-up and
her conversation was as intelligent.  It lacked only the coarseness
that society has lately affected.  Perhaps she felt instinctively that
those lovely lips should never disfigure themselves with foul words;
perhaps only she was at heart still a trifle suburban.  It was evident
that she and Byring were madly in love with one another.  It was really
moving to see their mutual passion.  When Ashenden took his leave of
them, as he shook hands with her (and she held his hand a moment and
with her blue, starry eyes looked into his) she said to him:

"You will come and see us when we're settled in London, won't you?  You
know we're going to be married."

"I heartily congratulate you," said Ashenden.

"And him?" she smiled, and her smile was like an angel's; it had the
freshness of dawn and the tender rapture of a southern spring.

"Have you never looked at yourself in the glass?"

Sir Herbert Witherspoon watched him intently while Ashenden (he thought
not without a trace of humour) described the dinner-party.  No flicker
of a smile brightened his cold eyes.

"Do you think it'll be a success?" he asked now.

"No."

"Why not?"

The question took Ashenden aback.

"A man not only marries his wife, he marries her friends.  Do you
realise the sort of people Byring will have to mix with, painted women
of tarnished reputation and men who've gone down in the social scale,
parasites and adventurers?  Of course they'll have money, her pearls
must be worth a hundred thousand pounds, and they'll be able to cut a
dash in the smart Bohemia of London.  Do you know the gold fringe of
society?  When a woman of bad character marries she earns the
admiration of her set, she has worked the trick, she's caught a man and
become respectable, but he, the man, only earns its ridicule.  Even her
own friends, the old hags with their gigolos and the abject men who
earn a shabby living by introducing the unwary to tradesmen on a ten
per cent commission, even they despise him.  He is the mug.  Believe
me, to conduct yourself gracefully in such a position you need either
great dignity of character or an unparalleled effrontery.  Besides, do
you think there's a chance of its lasting?  Can a woman who's led that
wild career settle down to domestic life?  In a little while she'll
grow bored and restless.  And how long does love last?  Don't you think
Byring's reflections will be bitter when, caring for her no longer, he
compares what he is with what he might have been?"

Witherspoon helped himself to another drop of his old brandy.  Then he
looked up at Ashenden with a curious expression.

"I'm not sure if a man isn't wiser to do what he wants very much to do
and let the consequences take care of themselves."

"It must be very pleasant to be an ambassador," said Ashenden.

Sir Herbert smiled thinly.

"Byring rather reminds me of a fellow I knew when I was a very junior
clerk at the P.O.  I won't tell you his name because he's by way of
being very well-known now and highly respected.  He's made a great
success of his career.  There is always something a little absurd in
success."

Ashenden slightly raised his eyebrows at this statement, somewhat
unexpected in the mouth of Sir Herbert Witherspoon, but did not say
anything.

"He was one of my fellow clerks.  He was a brilliant creature, I don't
think anyone ever denied that, and everyone prophesied from the
beginning that he would go far.  I venture to say that he had pretty
well all the qualifications necessary for a diplomatic career.  He was
of a family of soldiers and sailors, nothing very grand, but eminently
respectable, and he knew how to behave in the great world without
bumptiousness or timidity.  He was well-read.  He took an interest in
painting.  I dare say he made himself a trifle ridiculous; he wanted to
be in the movement, he was very anxious to be modern, and at a time
when little was known of Gauguin and Czanne he raved over their
pictures.  There was perhaps a certain snobbishness in his attitude, a
desire to shock and astonish the conventional, but at heart his
admiration of the arts was genuine and sincere.  He adored Paris and
whenever he had the chance ran over and put up at a little hotel in the
Latin Quarter, where he could rub shoulders with painters and writers.
As is the habit with gentry of that sort they patronised him a little
because he was nothing but a diplomat and laughed at him a little
because he was evidently a gentleman.  But they liked him because he
was always ready to listen to their speeches, and when he praised their
works they were even willing to admit that, though a Philistine, he had
a certain instinct for the Right Stuff."

Ashenden noted the sarcasm and smiled at the fling at his own
profession.  He wondered what this long description was leading to.
The ambassador seemed to linger over it partly because he liked it, but
also because for some reason he hesitated to come to the point.

"But my friend was modest.  He enjoyed himself enormously and he
listened open-mouthed when these young painters and unknown scribblers
tore to pieces established reputations and talked with enthusiasm of
persons of whom the sober but cultured secretaries in Downing Street
had never even heard.  At the back of his mind he knew that they were
rather a common, second-rate lot, and when he went back to his work in
London it was with no regret, but with the feeling that he had been
witnessing an odd and diverting play; now the curtain had fallen he was
quite ready to go home.  I haven't told you that he was ambitious.  He
knew that his friends expected him to do considerable things and he had
no notion of disappointing them.  He was perfectly conscious of his
abilities.  He meant to succeed.  Unfortunately he was not rich, he had
only a few hundreds a year, but his father and mother were dead and he
had neither brother nor sister.  He was aware that this freedom from
close ties was an asset.  His opportunity to make connections that
would be of use to him was unrestricted.  Do you think he sounds a very
disagreeable young man?"

"No," said Ashenden in answer to the sudden question.  "Most clever
young men are aware of their cleverness, and there is generally a
certain cynicism in their calculations with regard to the future.
Surely young men should be ambitious."

"Well, on one of these little trips to Paris my friend became
acquainted with a talented young Irish painter called O'Malley.  He's
an R.A. now and paints highly paid portraits of Lord Chancellors and
Cabinet Ministers.  I wonder if you remember one he did of my wife,
which was exhibited a couple of years ago."

"No, I don't.  But I know his name."

"My wife was delighted with it.  His art always seems to me very
refined and agreeable.  He's able to put on canvas the distinction of
his sitters in a very remarkable way.  When he paints a woman of
breeding, you know that it is a woman of breeding and not a trollop."

"It is a charming gift," said Ashenden.  "Can he also paint a slut and
make her look like one?"

"He could.  Now doubtless he would scarcely wish to.  He was living
then in a small and dirty studio in the rue du Cherche-Midi with a
little Frenchwoman of the character you describe and he painted several
portraits of her which were extremely like."

It seemed to Ashenden that Sir Herbert was going into somewhat
excessive detail, and he asked himself whether the friend of whom he
was telling a story that till now seemed to lead no-whither was in
point of fact himself.  He began to give it more of his attention.

"My friend liked O'Malley.  He was good company, the type of the
agreeable rattle, and he had a truly Irish gift of the gab.  He talked
incessantly and in my friend's opinion brilliantly.  He found it very
amusing to go and sit in the studio while O'Malley was painting and
listen to him chattering away about the technique of his art.  O'Malley
was always saying that he would paint a portrait of him and his vanity
was tickled.  O'Malley thought him--far from plain and said it would do
him good to exhibit the portrait of someone who at least looked like a
gentleman."

"By the way, when was all this?" asked Ashenden.

"Oh, thirty years ago....  They used to talk of their future and when
O'Malley said the portrait he was going to paint of my friend would
look very well in the National Portrait Gallery, my friend had small
doubt in the back of his mind, whatever he modestly said, that it would
eventually find its way there.  One evening when my friend--shall we
call him Brown?--was sitting in the studio and O'Malley, desperately
taking advantage of the last light of day, was trying to get finished
for the Salon that portrait of his mistress which is now in the Tate
Gallery, O'Malley asked him if he would like to come and dine with
them.  He was expecting a friend of hers, she was called Yvonne by the
way, and he would be glad if Brown would make a fourth.  This friend of
Yvonne's was an acrobat and O'Malley was anxious to get her to pose for
him in the nude.  Yvonne said she had a marvellous figure.  She had
seen O'Malley's work and was willing enough to sit and dinner was to be
devoted to settling the matter.  She was not performing then, but was
about to open at the Gats Montparnasses and with her days free was
not disinclined to oblige a friend and earn a little money.  The notion
amused Brown, who had never met an acrobat, and he accepted.  Yvonne
suggested that he might find her to his taste and if he did she could
promise him that he would not find her very difficult to persuade.
With his grand air and English clothes she would take him for a _milord
anglais_.  My friend laughed.  He did not take the suggestion very
seriously.  '_On ne sait jamais_,' he said.  Yvonne looked at him with
mischievous eyes.  He sat on.  It was Easter time and cold, but the
studio was comfortably warm, and though it was small and everything was
higgledy-piggledy and the dust lay heavy on the rim of the window, it
was most friendly and cosy.  Brown had a tiny flat in Waverton Street,
in London, with very good mezzotints on the walls and several pieces of
early Chinese pottery here and there, and he wondered to himself why
his tasteful sitting-room had none of the comforts of home nor the
romance that he found in that disorderly studio.

"Presently there was a ring at the door and Yvonne ushered in her
friend.  Her name, it appeared, was Alix, and she shook hands with
Brown, uttering a stereotyped phrase, with the mincing politeness of a
fat woman in a bureau de tabac.  She wore a long cloak in imitation
mink and an enormous scarlet hat.  She looked incredibly vulgar.  She
was not even pretty.  She had a broad flat face, a wide mouth and an
upturned nose.  She had a great deal of hair, golden, but obviously
dyed, and large china-blue eyes.  She was heavily made up."

Ashenden began to have no doubt that Witherspoon was narrating an
experience of his own, for otherwise he could never have remembered
after thirty years what hat the young woman wore and what coat, and he
was amused at the ambassador's simplicity in thinking that so thin a
subterfuge could disguise the truth.  Ashenden could not but guess how
the story would end and it tickled him to think that this cold,
distinguished and exquisite person should ever have had anything like
an adventure.

"She began to talk away to Yvonne and my friend noticed that she had
one feature that oddly enough he found very attractive: she had a deep
and husky voice as though she were just recovering from a bad cold and,
he didn't know why, it seemed to him exceedingly pleasant to listen to.
He asked O'Malley if that was her natural voice and O'Malley said she
had had it as long as ever he had known her.  He called it a whisky
voice.  He told her what Brown said about it and she gave him a smile
of her wide mouth and said it wasn't due to drink, it was due to
standing so much on her head.  That was one of the inconveniences of
her profession.  Then the four of them went to a beastly little
restaurant off the boulevard St. Michel where for two francs fifty
including wine my friend ate a dinner that seemed to him more delicious
than any he had ever eaten at the Savoy or Claridge's.  Alix was a very
chatty young person and Brown listened with amusement, with amazement
even, while in her rich, throaty voice she talked of the varied
incidents of the day.  She had a great command of slang and though he
could not understand half of it, he was immensely tickled with its
picturesque vulgarity.  It was pungent of the heated asphalt, the zinc
bars of cheap taverns and racy of the crowded squares in the poorer
districts of Paris.  There was an energy in those apt and vivid
metaphors that went like champagne to his anmic head.  She was a
guttersnipe, yes, that's what she was, but she had a vitality that
warmed you like a blazing fire.  He was conscious that Yvonne had told
her that he was an unattached Englishman, with plenty of money; he saw
the appraising glance she gave him and then, pretending that he had
noticed nothing, he caught the phrase, _il n'est pas mal_.  It faintly
amused him: he had a notion himself that he was not so bad.  There were
places, indeed, where they went further than that.  She did not pay
much attention to him, in point of fact they were talking of things of
which he was ignorant and he could do little more than show an
intelligent interest, but now and again she gave him a long look,
passing her tongue quickly round her lips, that suggested to him that
he only had to ask for her to give.  He shrugged a mental shoulder.
She looked healthy and young, she had an agreeable vivacity, but beyond
her husky voice there was nothing particularly attractive in her.  But
the notion of having a little affair in Paris did not displease him, it
was life, and the thought that she was a music-hall artiste was mildly
diverting: in middle age it would doubtless amuse him to remember that
he had enjoyed the favours of an acrobat.  Was it La Rochefoucauld or
Oscar Wilde who said that you should commit errors in youth in order to
have something to regret in old age?  At the end of dinner (and they
sat over their coffee and brandy till late), they went out into the
street and Yvonne proposed that he should take Alix home.  He said he
would be delighted.  Alix said it was not far and they walked.  She
told him that she had a little apartment, of course mostly she was on
tour, but she liked to have a place of her own, a woman, you know, had
to be in her furniture, without that she received no consideration; and
presently they reached a shabby house in a bedraggled street.  She rang
the bell for the _concierge_ to open the door.  She did not press him
to enter.  He did not know if she looked upon it as a matter of course.
He was seized with timidity.  He racked his brains, but could not think
of a single thing to say.  Silence fell upon them.  It was absurd.
With a little click the door opened; she looked at him expectantly; she
was puzzled; a wave of shyness swept over him.  Then she held out her
hand, thanked him for bringing her to the door, and bade him good
night.  His heart beat nervously.  If she had asked him to come in he
would have gone.  He wanted some sign that she would like him to.  He
shook her hand, said good night, raised his hat and walked away.  He
felt a perfect fool.  He could not sleep; he tossed from side to side
of his bed, thinking for what a noodle she must take him, and he could
hardly wait for the day that would permit him to take steps to efface
the contemptible impression he must have made on her.  His pride was
lacerated.  Wanting to lose no time he went round to her house at
eleven to ask her to lunch with him, but she was out; he sent round
some flowers and later in the day called again.  She had been in, but
was gone out once more.  He went to see O'Malley on the chance of
finding her, but she was not there, and O'Malley facetiously asked him
how he had fared.  To save his face he told him that he had come to the
conclusion that she did not mean very much to him and so like a perfect
gentleman he had left her.  But he had an uneasy feeling that O'Malley
saw through his story.  He sent her a _pneumatique_ asking her to dine
with him next day.  She did not answer.  He could not understand it; he
asked the porter of his hotel a dozen times if there was nothing for
him, and at last, almost in desperation, just before dinner went to her
house.  The concierge told him she was in and he went up.  He was very
nervous, inclined to be angry because she had treated his invitation so
cavalierly, but at the same time anxious to appear at his ease.  He
climbed the four flights of stairs, dark and smelly, and rang at the
door to which he had been directed.  There was a pause, he heard sounds
within and rang again.  Presently she opened.  He had an absolute
certitude that she did not in the least know who he was.  He was taken
aback, it was a blow to his vanity; but he assumed a cheerful smile.

"'I came to find out if you were going to dine with me to-night.  I
sent you a _pneumatique_.'

"Then she recognised him.  But she stood at the door and did not ask
him in.

"'Oh, no, I can't dine with you to-night.  I have terrible megrim and I
am going to bed.  I couldn't answer your _pneumatique_, I mislaid it,
and I'd forgotten your name.  Thank you for the flowers.  It was nice
of you to send them."

'Then won't you come and dine with me to-morrow night?'

"'_Justement_, I have an engagement to-morrow night.  I'm sorry.'

"There was nothing more to say.  He had not the nerve to ask her to
anything else and so bade her good night and went.  He had the
impression that she was not vexed with him, but that she had entirely
forgotten him.  It was humiliating.  When he went back to London
without having seen her again, it was with a curious sense of
dissatisfaction.  He was not in the least in love with her, he was
annoyed with her, but he could not get her quite out of his mind.  He
was honest enough to realise that he was suffering from nothing more
than wounded vanity.

"During that dinner at the little restaurant off the Boul' Mich' she
had mentioned that her troupe was going to London in the spring and in
one of his letters to O'Malley he slipped in casually a phrase to the
effect that if his young friend Alix happened to be coming to town he
(O'Malley) might let him know and he would look her up.  He would like
to hear from her own ingenuous lips what she thought of the nude
O'Malley had painted of her.  When the painter some time afterwards
wrote and told him that she was appearing a week later at the
Metropolitan in the Edgware Road, he felt a sudden rush of blood to his
head.  He went to see her play.  If he had not taken the precaution to
go earlier in the day and look at the programme he would have missed
her, for her turn was the first on the list.  There were two men, a
stout one and a thin one, with large black moustaches, and Alix.  They
were dressed in ill-fitting pink tights with green satin trunks.  The
men did various exercises on twin trapezes while Alix tripped about the
stage, giving them handkerchiefs to wipe their hands on, and
occasionally turned a somersault.  When the fat man raised the thin one
on his shoulders she climbed up and stood on the shoulders of the
second, kissing her hand to the audience.  They did tricks with safety
bicycles.  There is often grace, and even beauty, in the performance of
clever acrobats, but this one was so crude, so vulgar that my friend
felt positively embarrassed.  There is something shameful in seeing
grown men publicly make fools of themselves.  Poor Alix, with a fixed
and artificial smile on her lips, in her pink tights and green satin
trunks, was so grotesque that he wondered how he could have let himself
feel a moment's annoyance because when he went to her apartment she had
not recognised him.  It was with a shrug of the shoulders,
condescendingly, that he went round to the stage door afterwards and
gave the door-keeper a shilling to take her his card.  In a few minutes
she came out.  She seemed delighted to see him.

"'Oh, how good it is to see the face of someone you know in this sad
city,' she said.  'Ah, now you can give me that dinner you asked me to
in Paris.  I'm dying of hunger.  I never eat before the show.  Imagine
that they should have given us such a bad place on the programme.  It's
an insult.  But we shall see the agent to-morrow.  If they think they
can put upon us like that they are mistaken.  _Ah, non, non et non_!
And what an audience!  No enthusiasm, no applause, nothing.'

"My friend was staggered.  Was it possible that she took her
performance seriously?  He almost burst out laughing.  But she still
spoke with that throaty voice that had such a queer effect on his
nerves.  She was dressed all in red and wore the same red hat in which
he had first seen her.  She looked so flashy that he did not fancy the
notion of asking her to a place where he might be seen and so suggested
Soho.  There were hansoms still in those days and the hansom was more
conducive to love-making, I imagine, than is the taxi of the present
time.  My friend put his arm round Alix's waist and kissed her.  It
left her calm, but on the other hand did not wildly excite him.  While
they ate a late dinner he made himself very gallant and she played up
to him agreeably; but when they got up to go and he proposed that she
should come round to his rooms in Waverton Street she told him that a
friend had come over from Paris with her and that she had to meet him
at eleven: she had only been able to dine with Brown because her
companion had a business engagement.  Brown was exasperated, but did
not want to show it, and when, as they walked down Wardour Street (for
she said she wanted to go to the Caf Monico), pausing in front of a
pawnbroker's to look at the jewellery in the window, she went into
ecstasies over a bracelet of sapphires and diamonds that Brown thought
incredibly vulgar, he asked her if she would like it.

"'But it's marked fifteen pounds,' she said.

"He went in and bought it for her.  She was delighted.  She made him
leave her just before they came to Piccadilly Circus.

"'Now listen, _mon petit_,' she said, 'I cannot see you in London
because of my friend, he is jealous as a wolf, that is why I think it
is more prudent for you to go now, but I am playing at Boulogne next
week, why do you not come over?  I shall be alone there.  My friend has
to go back to Holland, where he lives.'

"'All right,' said Brown, 'I'll come.'

"When he went to Boulogne--he had two days' leave--it was with the one
idea of salving the wound to his pride.  It was odd that he should
care.  I daresay to you it seems inexplicable.  He could not bear the
notion that Alix looked upon him as a fool and he felt that when once
he had removed that impression from her he would never bother about her
again.  He thought of O'Malley too, and of Yvonne.  She must have told
them and it galled him to think that people whom in his heart he
despised should laugh at him behind his back.  Do you think he was very
contemptible?"

"Good gracious, no," said Ashenden.  "All sensible people know that
vanity is the most devastating, the most universal and the most
ineradicable of the passions that afflict the soul of man, and it is
only vanity that makes him deny its power.  It is more consuming than
love.  With advancing years, mercifully, you can snap your fingers at
the terror and the servitude of love, but age cannot free you from the
thraldom of vanity.  Time can assuage the pangs of love, but only death
can still the anguish of wounded vanity.  Love is simple and seeks no
subterfuge, but vanity cozens you with a hundred disguises.  It is part
and parcel of every virtue: it is the mainspring of courage and the
strength of ambition; it gives constancy to the lover and endurance to
the stoic; it adds fuel to the fire of the artist's desire for fame and
is at once the support and the compensation of the honest man's
integrity; it leers even cynically in the humility of the saint.  You
cannot escape it, and should you take pains to guard against it, it
will make use of those very pains to trip you up.  You are defenceless
against its onslaught because you know not on what unprotected side it
will attack you.  Sincerity cannot protect you from its snare nor
humour from its mockery."

Ashenden stopped, not because he had said all he had to say, but
because he was out of breath.  He noticed also that the ambassador,
desiring to talk rather than to listen, heard him with a politeness
that was strained.  But he had made this speech not so much for his
host's edification as for his own entertainment.

"It is vanity finally that makes man support his abominable lot."

For a minute Sir Herbert was silent.  He looked straight in front of
him as though his thoughts lingered distressfully on some far horizon
of memory.

"When my friend came back from Boulogne he knew that he was madly in
love with Alix and he had arranged to meet her again in a fortnight's
time when she would be performing at Dunkirk.  He thought of nothing
else in the interval and the night before he was to start, he only had
thirty-six hours this time, he could not sleep, so devouring was the
passion that consumed him.  Then he went over for a night to Paris to
see her and once when she was disengaged for a week he persuaded her to
come to London.  He knew that she did not love him.  He was just a man
among a hundred others and she made no secret of the fact that he was
not her only lover.  He suffered agonies of jealousy but knew that it
would only excite her ridicule or her anger if he showed it.  She had
not even a fancy for him.  She liked him because he was a gentleman and
well dressed.  She was quite willing to be his mistress so long as the
claims he made on her were not irksome.  But that was all.  His means
were not large enough to enable him to make her any serious offers, but
even if they had been, liking her freedom, she would have refused."

"But what about the Dutchman?" asked Ashenden.

"The Dutchman?  He was a pure invention.  She made him up on the spur
of the moment because for one reason or another she did not just then
want to be bothered with Brown.  What should one lie more or less
matter to her?  Don't think he didn't struggle against his passion.  He
knew it was madness; he knew that a permanent connection between them
could only lead to disaster for him.  He had no illusions about her:
she was common, coarse and vulgar.  She could talk of none of the
things that interested him, nor did she try; she took it for granted
that he was concerned with her affairs and told him interminable
stories of her quarrels with fellow performers, her disputes with
managers and her wrangles with hotel-keepers.  What she said bored him
to death, but the sound of her throaty voice made his heart beat so
that sometimes he thought he would suffocate."

Ashenden sat uneasily in his chair.  It was a Sheraton chair very good
at look at, but hard and straight; and he wished that Sir Herbert had
had the notion of going back to the other room where there was a
comfortable sofa.  It was quite plain now that the story he was telling
was about himself and Ashenden felt a certain indelicacy in the man's
stripping his soul before him so nakedly.  He did not desire this
confidence to be forced upon him.  Sir Herbert Witherspoon meant
nothing to him.  By the light of the shaded candles Ashenden saw that
he was deathly pale and there was a wildness in his eyes that in that
cold and composed man was strangely disconcerting.  He poured himself
out a glass of water; his throat was dry so that he could hardly speak.
But he went on pitilessly.

"At last my friend managed to pull himself together.  He was disgusted
by the sordidness of his intrigue; there was no beauty in it, nothing
but shame; and it was leading to nothing.  His passion was as vulgar as
the woman for whom he felt it.  Now it happened that Alix was going to
spend six months in the North of Africa with her troupe and for that
time at least it would be impossible for him to see her.  He made up
his mind that he must seize the opportunity and make a definite break.
He knew bitterly that it would mean nothing to her.  In three weeks she
would have forgotten him.

"And then there was something else.  He had come to know very well some
people, a man and his wife, whose social and political connections were
extremely important.  They had an only daughter and, I don't know why,
she fell in love with him.  She was everything that Alix was not,
pretty in the real English way, with blue eyes and pink and white
cheeks, tall and fair; she might have stepped out of one of Du
Maurier's pictures in _Punch_.  She was clever and well-read, and since
she had lived all her life in political circles she could talk
intelligently of the sort of things that interested him.  He had reason
to believe that if he asked her to marry him she would accept.  I have
told you that he was ambitious.  He knew that he had great abilities
and he wanted the chance to use them.  She was related to some of the
greatest families in England and he would have been a fool not to
realise that a marriage of this kind must make his path infinitely
easier.  The opportunity was golden.  And what a relief to think that
he could put behind him definitely that ugly little episode, and what a
happiness, instead of that wall of cheerful indifference and
matter-of-fact good nature against which in his passion for Alix he had
vainly battered his head, what a happiness to feel that to someone else
he really meant something!  How could he help being flattered and
touched when he saw her face light up as he came into the room?  He
wasn't in love with her, but he thought her charming, and he wanted to
forget Alix and the vulgar life into which she had led him.  At last he
made up his mind.  He asked her to marry him and was accepted.  Her
family was delighted.  The marriage was to take place in the autumn,
since her father had to go on some political errand to South America
and was taking his wife and daughter with him.  They were to be gone
the whole summer.  My friend Brown was transferring from the P.O. to
the diplomatic service and had been promised a post at Lisbon.  He was
to go there immediately.

"He saw his fiance off.  Then it happened that owing to some hitch the
man whom Brown was going to replace was kept at Lisbon three months
longer and so for that period my friend found himself at a loose end.
And just when he was making up his mind what to do with himself he
received a letter from Alix.  She was coming back to France and had a
tour booked; she gave him a long list of the places she was going to,
and in her casual, friendly way said that they would have fun if he
could manage to run over for a day or two.  An insane, a criminal
notion seized him.  If she had shown any eagerness for him to come he
might have resisted; it was her airy, matter-of-fact indifference that
took him.  On a sudden he longed for her.  He did not care if she was
gross and vulgar, he had got her in his bones, and it was his last
chance.  In a little while he was going to be married.  It was now or
never.  He went down to Marseilles and met her as she stepped off the
boat that had brought her from Tunis.  His heart leaped at the pleasure
she showed on seeing him.  He knew he loved her madly.  He told her
that he was going to be married in three months and asked her to spend
the last of his freedom with him.  She refused to abandon her tour.
How could she leave her companions in the lurch?  He offered to
compensate them, but she would not hear of it; they could not find
someone to take her place at a moment's notice, nor could they afford
to throw over a good engagement that might lead to others in the
future; they were honest people, and they kept their word, they had
their duty to their managers and their duty to their public.  He was
exasperated; it seemed absurd that his whole happiness should be
sacrificed to that wretched tour.  And at the end of the three months?
What was to happen to her then?  Oh, no, he was asking something that
wasn't reasonable.  He told her that he adored her.  He did not know
till then how insanely he loved her.  Well, then, she said, why did he
not come with her and make the tour with them?  She would be glad of
his company; they could have a good time together and at the end of
three months he could go and marry his heiress and neither of them
would be any the worse.  For a moment he hesitated, but now that he saw
her again he could not bear the thought of being parted from her so
soon.  He accepted.  And then she said:

"'But listen, my little one, you mustn't be silly, you know.  The
managers won't be too pleased with me if I make a lot of _chichi_; I
have to think of my future, and they won't be so anxious to have me
back if I refuse to please old customers of the house.  It won't be
very often, but it must be understood that you are not to make me
scenes if now and then I give myself to someone whose fancy I take.  It
will mean nothing, that is business, you will be my _amant de coeur_.'

"He felt a strange, excruciating pain in his heart, and I think he went
so pale that she thought he was going to faint.  She looked at him
curiously.

"'Those are the terms,' she said.  'You can either take them or leave
them.'

"He accepted."

Sir Herbert Witherspoon leaned forward in his chair and he was so white
that Ashenden thought too that he was going to faint.  His skin was
drawn over his skull so that his face looked like a death's head, but
the veins on his forehead stood out like knotted cords.  He had lost
all reticence.  And Ashenden once more wished that he would stop, it
made him shy and nervous to see the man's naked soul: no one has the
right to show himself to another in that destitute state.  He was
inclined to cry:

"Stop, stop.  You mustn't tell me any more.  You'll be so ashamed."

But the man had lost all shame.

"For three months they travelled together from one dull provincial town
to another, sharing a filthy little bedroom in frowzy hotels; Alix
would not let him take her to good hotels, she said she had not the
clothes for them and she was more comfortable in the sort of hotel she
was used to; she did not want her companions in the business to say
that she was putting on side.  He sat interminable hours in shabby
cafs.  He was treated as a brother by members of the troupe, they
called him by his Christian name and chaffed him coarsely and slapped
him on the back.  He ran errands for them when they were busy with
their work.  He saw the good-humoured contempt in the eyes of managers
and was obliged to put up with the familiarity of stage-hands.  They
travelled third-class from place to place and he helped to carry the
luggage.  He with whom reading was a passion never opened a book
because Alix was bored by reading and thought that anyone who did was
just giving himself airs.  Every night he went to the music-hall and
watched her go through that grotesque and ignoble performance.  He had
to fall in with her pathetic fancy that it was artistic.  He had to
congratulate her when it had gone well and condole with her when some
feat of agility had gone amiss.  When she had finished he went to a
caf and waited for her while she changed, and sometimes she would come
in rather hurriedly and say:

"'Don't wait for me to-night, _mon chou_, I'm busy.'

"And then he would undergo agonies of jealousy.  He would suffer as he
never knew a man could suffer.  She would come back to the hotel at
three or four in the morning.  She wondered why he was not asleep.
Sleep!  How could he sleep with that misery gnawing at his heart?  He
had promised he would not interfere with her.  He did not keep his
promise.  He made her terrific scenes.  Sometimes he beat her.  Then
she would lose her patience and tell him she was sick of him, she would
pack her things to go, and then he would go grovelling to her,
promising anything, any submission, vowing to swallow any humiliation,
if she would not leave him.  It was horrible and degrading.  He was
miserable.  Miserable?  No, he was happier than he'd ever been in his
life.  It was the gutter that he wallowed in, but he wallowed in it
with delight.  Oh, he was so bored with the life he'd led hitherto, and
this one seemed to him amazing and romantic.  This was reality.  And
that frowzy, ugly woman with the whisky voice, she had such a splendid
vitality, such a zest for life that she seemed to raise his own to some
more vivid level.  It really did seem to him to burn with a pure,
gem-like flame.  Do people still read Pater?"

"I don't know," said Ashenden.  "I don't."

"There was only three months of it.  Oh, how short the time seemed and
how quickly the weeks sped by!  Sometimes he had wild dreams of
abandoning everything and throwing in his lot with the acrobats.  They
had come to have quite a liking for him and they said he could easily
train himself to take a part in the turn.  He knew they said it more in
jest than in earnest, but the notion vaguely tickled him.  But these
were only dreams and he knew that nothing would come of them.  He never
really chaffered with the thought that when the three months came to an
end he would not return to his own life with its obligations.  With his
mind, that cold, logical mind of his, he knew it would be absurd to
sacrifice everything for a woman like Alix; he was ambitious, he wanted
power; and besides, he could not break the heart of that poor child who
loved and trusted him.  She wrote to him once a week.  She was longing
to get back, the time seemed endless to her and he, he had a secret
wish that something would happen to delay her arrival.  If he could
only have a little more time!  Perhaps if he had six months he would
have got over his infatuation.  Already sometimes he hated Alix.

"The last day came.  They seemed to have little to say to one another.
They were both sad; but he knew that Alix only regretted the breaking
of an agreeable habit, in twenty-four hours she would be as gay and
full of spirits with her stray companion as though he had never crossed
her path; he could only think that next day he was going to Paris to
meet his fiance and her family.  They spent their last night in one
another's arms weeping.  If she'd asked him then not to leave her it
may be that he would have stayed; but she didn't, it never occurred to
her, she accepted his going as a settled thing, and she wept not
because she loved him, she wept because he was unhappy.

"In the morning she was sleeping so soundly that he had not the heart
to wake her to say good-bye.  He slipped out very quietly, with his bag
in his hand, and took the train to Paris."

Ashenden turned away his head, for he saw two tears form themselves in
Witherspoon's eyes and roll down his cheeks.  He did not even try to
hide them.  Ashenden lit another cigar.

"In Paris they cried out when they saw him.  They said he looked like a
ghost.  He told them he'd been ill and hadn't said anything about it in
order not to worry them.  They were very kind.  A month later he was
married.  He did very well for himself.  He was given opportunities to
distinguish himself and he distinguished himself.  His rise was
spectacular.  He had the well-ordered and distinguished establishment
that he had wanted.  He had the power for which he had craved.  He was
loaded with honours.  Oh, he made a success of life and there were
hundreds who envied him.  It was all ashes.  He was bored, bored to
distraction, bored by that distinguished, beautiful lady he had
married, bored by the people his life forced him to live with; it was a
comedy he was playing and sometimes it seemed intolerable to live for
ever and ever behind a mask; sometimes he felt he couldn't bear it.
But he bore it.  Sometimes he longed for Alix so fiercely that he felt
it would be better to shoot himself than to suffer such anguish.  He
never saw her again.  Never.  He heard from O'Malley that she had
married and left her troupe.  She must be a fat old woman now and it
doesn't matter any more.  But he had wasted his life.  And he never
even made that poor creature whom he married happy.  How could he go on
hiding from her year after year that he had nothing to give her but
pity?  Once in his agony he told her about Alix and she tortured him
ever after with her jealousy.  He knew that he should never have
married her; in six months she would have got over her grief if he had
told her he could not bear to, and in the end would have happily
married somebody else.  So far as she was concerned his sacrifice was
vain.  He was terribly conscious that he had only one life and it
seemed so sad to think that he had wasted it.  He could never surmount
his immeasurable regret.  He laughed when people spoke of him as a
strong man: he was as weak and unstable as water.  And that's why I
tell you that Byring is right.  Even though it only lasts five years,
even though he ruins his career, even though this marriage of his ends
in disaster, it will have been worth while.  He will have been
satisfied.  He will have fulfilled himself."

At that moment the door opened and a lady came in.  The ambassador
glanced at her and for an instant a look of cold hatred crossed his
face, but it was only for an instant; then, rising from the table, he
composed his ravaged features to an expression of courteous suavity.
He gave the incomer a haggard smile.

"Here is my wife.  This is Mr. Ashenden."

"I couldn't imagine where you were.  Why didn't you go and sit in your
study?  I'm sure Mr. Ashenden's been dreadfully uncomfortable."

She was a tall, thin woman of fifty, rather drawn and faded, but she
looked as though she had once been pretty.  It was obvious that she was
very well-bred.  She vaguely reminded you of an exotic plant, reared in
a hot-house, that had begun to lose its bloom.  She was dressed in
black.

"What was the concert like?" asked Sir Herbert.

"Oh, not bad at all.  They gave a Brahms' Concerto and the 'Fire-music'
from the _Walkre_, and some Hungarian dances of Dvork.  I thought
them rather showy."  She turned to Ashenden.  "I hope you haven't been
bored all alone with my husband.  What have you been talking about?
Art and Literature?"

"No, its raw material," said Ashenden.

He took his leave.




XIII

_The Flip of a Coin_

It was high time.  Snow had fallen in the morning, but now the sky was
clear and Ashenden, with a glance at the frosty stars, stepped out
quickly.  He feared that Herbartus, tired of waiting for him, might
have gone home.  He had at this interview to make a certain decision
and the hesitation he felt about it had lurked throughout the evening
at the back of his mind like a malaise that had only to become a little
more definite to be felt as pain.  For Herbartus, indefatigable and
determined, had been engaged in the arrangement of a scheme to blow up
certain munition factories in Austria.  It is not necessary to give
here the details of his plan, but it was ingenious and effective; its
drawback was that it entailed the death and mutilation of a good many
Galician Poles, his fellow countrymen, who were working in the
factories in question.  He had told Ashenden earlier in the day that
everything was ready and he had only to give the word.

"But please do not give it unless it is essential," he said in his
precise, somewhat throaty English.  "Of course we will not hesitate if
it is necessary, but we do not want to sacrifice our own people for
nothing."

"When do you want an answer?"

"To-night.  We have got someone who is starting for Prague to-morrow
morning."

It was then that Ashenden had made the appointment that he was now
hurrying to keep.

"You will not be late, will you?" Herbartus had said.  "I shall not be
able to catch the messenger after midnight."

Ashenden had qualms and he was conscious that it would be a relief if
on reaching the hotel he found that Herbartus had left.  That would
give him a respite.  The Germans had blown up factories in the Allied
countries and there was no reason why they should not be served in the
same manner.  It was a legitimate act of war.  It not only hindered the
manufacture of arms and munitions, but also shook the morale of the
non-combatants.  It was not of course a thing that the big-wigs cared
to have anything to do with.  Though ready enough to profit by the
activities of obscure agents of whom they had never heard, they shut
their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on
their hearts and congratulate themselves that they had never done
anything that was unbecoming to men of honour.  Ashenden thought with
cynical humour of an incident in his relations with R.  He had been
approached with an offer that he thought it his duty to put before his
chief.

"By the way," he said to him as casually as possible, "I've got a
sportsman who's willing to assassinate King B. for five thousand
pounds."

King B. was the ruler of a Balkan state which was on the verge through
his influence of declaring war against the Allies, and it was evident
that his disappearance from the scene would be extremely useful.  His
successor's sympathies were indefinite and it might be possible to
persuade him to keep his country neutral.  Ashenden saw from R.'s
quick, intent look that he was perfectly aware of the situation.  But
he frowned sulkily.

"Well, what of it?"

"I told him I'd transmit his offer.  I believe he's perfectly genuine.
He's pro-Ally and he thinks it would about bust his country if it went
in on the side of the Germans."

"What's he want five thousand pounds for, then?"

"It's a risk and if he does the Allies a good turn he doesn't see why
he shouldn't get something out of it."

R. shook his head energetically.

"It's not the kind of thing we can have anything to do with.  We don't
wage war by those methods.  We leave them to the Germans.  Damn it all,
we are gentlemen."

Ashenden did not reply, but watched R. with attention.  There was in
his eyes the curious reddish light that they sometimes had and that
gave them so sinister an expression.  He had always a slight tendency
to squint and now he was quite definitely cross-eyed.

"You ought to know better than to put up a proposition like that to me.
Why didn't you knock the man down when he made it?"

"I didn't think I could," said Ashenden.  "He was bigger than I.
Besides, it never occurred to me.  He was very civil and obliging."

"Of course it would be a damned good thing for the Allies if King B.
were out of the way.  I admit that.  But between that and countenancing
his assassination there's all the difference between black and white.
If the man were a patriot I should have thought he'd have gone straight
ahead and done what he thought right regardless."

"He may be thinking of his widow," said Ashenden.

"Anyhow, it's not a matter I'm prepared to discuss.  Different people
look at things in different ways and if anyone thought he was helping
the Allies by taking on his own shoulders a heavy responsibility that's
of course entirely his look-out."

It took Ashenden a moment to see what his chief meant.  Then he smiled
thinly.

"Don't think I'm going to pay the fellow five thousand pounds out of my
own pocket.  Not a chance."

"I don't think anything of the kind and you know I don't, and I shall
be obliged if you won't exercise your very deficient sense of humour on
me."

Ashenden shrugged his shoulders; and now, recalling the conversation,
he shrugged them again.  They were all like that.  They desired the
end, but hesitated at the means.  They were willing to take advantage
of an accomplished fact, but wanted to shift on to someone else the
responsibility of bringing it about.

Ashenden entered the caf of the Hotel de Paris and saw Herbartus
seated at a table facing the door.  He gave the little gasp that is
forced from you when you dive into water that is colder than you
expected.  There was no escape.  He must make the decision.  Herbartus
was drinking a glass of tea.  His heavy, clean-shaven face lit up when
he saw Ashenden and he stretched out a large, hairy hand.  He was a
big, dark fellow, of a powerful build, with fierce black eyes.
Everything about him suggested a massive strength.  He was hampered by
no scruples, and since he was disinterested he was ruthless.

"Well, how did your dinner go off?" he asked as Ashenden sat down.
"Did you say anything to the ambassador about our project?"

"No."

"I think you were wise.  It is best to leave those sort of people out
of serious matters."

Ashenden looked at Herbartus for a minute reflectively.  His face bore
a singular expression and he sat warily like a tiger about to spring.

"Have you ever read Balzac's _Pre Goriot_?" asked Ashenden suddenly.

"Twenty years ago, when I was a student."

"Do you remember that conversation between Rastignac and Vautrin where
they discuss the question whether, were you able by a nod to effect the
death of a mandarin in China and so bring yourself a colossal fortune,
you would give the nod?  It was a notion of Rousseau's."

Herbartus's large face coiled itself into a slow, large smile.

"It has nothing to do with the case.  You are uneasy at giving an order
that will cause the death of a considerable number of people.  Is it
for your own profit?  When a general orders an advance he knows that so
and so many men will be killed.  It is war."

"What a stupid war!"

"It will give my country freedom."

"What will your country do with it when it gets it?"

Herbartus did not answer.  He shrugged his shoulders.

"I warn you that if you do not take this opportunity it may not recur
very soon.  We cannot send a messenger over the frontier every day of
the week."

"Doesn't it make you a little uncomfortable to think of all those men
being suddenly blown to smithereens by an explosion?  And then it's not
only the dead, it's the maimed."

"I don't like it.  I said to you that on account of my fellow
countrymen who will be sacrificed we should do nothing unless it was
worth while.  I do not want those poor fellows to be killed, but if
they are I shall not sleep less soundly nor eat my dinner with less
appetite.  Will you?"

"I suppose not."

"Well, then?"

Ashenden thought on a sudden of those sharp-pointed stars on which for
a moment his eyes had rested as he walked through the frosty night.  It
seemed an age since he had sat in the spacious dining-room at the
embassy and listened to Sir Herbert Witherspoon's story of his
successful, wasted life.  Mr. Schfer's susceptibilities and his own
small intrigues, the love of Byring and Rose Auburn: how unimportant;
Man, with so short a time between the cradle and the grave, spent his
life in foolishness.  A trivial creature!  The bright stars shone in
the cloudless sky.

"I'm tired, I can't think with any clearness."

"I must go in a minute."

"Then let's toss for it, shall we?"

"Toss?"

"Yes," said Ashenden, taking a coin out of his pocket.  "If it comes
down heads tell your man to go ahead and if it comes down tails tell
him to do nothing."

"Very well."

Ashenden balanced the coin on his thumb-nail and flicked it neatly into
the air.  They watched it spin and when it fell back on the table
Ashenden put his hand over it.  They both leaned forward to look as
Ashenden very slowly withdrew his hand.  Herbartus drew a deep breath.

"Well, that's that," said Ashenden.




XIV

_A Chance Acquaintance_

When Ashenden went on deck and saw before him a low-lying coast and a
white town he felt a pleasant flutter of excitement.  It was early and
the sun had not long risen, but the sea was glassy and the sky was
blue; it was warm already and one knew that the day would be
sweltering.  Vladivostok.  It really gave one the sensation of being at
the end of the world.  It was a long journey that Ashenden had made
from New York to San Francisco, across the Pacific in a Japanese boat
to Yokohama, then from Tsuruki in a Russian boat, he the only
Englishman on board, up the Sea of Japan.  From Vladivostok he was to
take the Trans-Siberian to Petrograd.  It was the most important
mission that he had ever had and he was pleased with the sense of
responsibility that it gave him.  He had no one to give him orders,
unlimited funds (he carried in a belt next to his skin bills of
exchange for a sum so enormous that he was staggered when he thought of
them), and though he had been set to do something that was beyond human
possibility he did not know this and was prepared to set about his task
with confidence.  He believed in his own astuteness.  Though he had
both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he
had little respect for their intelligence: man has always found it
easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.

Ashenden did not much look forward to ten days on a Russian train, and
in Yokohama he had heard rumours that in one or two places bridges had
been blown up and the line cut.  He was told that the soldiers,
completely out of hand, would rob him of everything he possessed and
turn him out on the steppe to shift for himself.  It was a cheerful
prospect.  But the train was certainly starting and whatever happened
later (and Ashenden had always a feeling that things never turned out
as badly as you expected) he was determined to get a place on it.  His
intention on landing was to go at once to the British Consulate and
find out what arrangements had been made for him; but as they neared
the shore and he was able to discern the untidy and bedraggled town he
felt not a little forlorn.  He knew but a few words of Russian.  The
only man on the ship who spoke English was the purser and though he
promised Ashenden to do anything he could to help him, Ashenden had the
impression that he must not too greatly count upon him.  It was a
relief then, when they docked, to have a young man, small and with a
mop of untidy hair, obviously a Jew, come up to him and ask if his name
was Ashenden.

"Mine is Benedict.  I'm the interpreter at the British Consulate.  I've
been told to look after you.  We've got you a place on the train
to-night."

Ashenden's spirits went up.  They landed.  The little Jew looked after
his luggage and had his passport examined and then, getting into a car
that waited for them, they drove off to the Consulate.

"I've had instructions to offer you every facility," said the Consul,
"and you've only got to tell me what you want.  I've fixed you up all
right on the train, but God knows if you'll ever get to Petrograd.  Oh,
by the way, I've got a travelling companion for you.  He's a man called
Harrington, an American, and he's going to Petrograd for a firm in
Philadelphia.  He's trying to fix up some deal with the Provisional
Government."

"What's he like?" asked Ashenden.

"Oh, he's all right.  I wanted him to come with the American Consul to
luncheon, but they've gone for an excursion in the country.  You must
get to the station a couple of hours before the train starts.  There's
always an awful scrimmage and if you're not there in good time someone
will pinch your seat."

The train started at midnight and Ashenden dined with Benedict at the
station restaurant which was, it appeared, the only place in that
slatternly town where you could get a decent meal.  It was crowded.
The service was intolerably slow.  Then they went on to the platform,
where, though they had still two hours to spare, there was already a
seething mob.  Whole families, sitting on piles of luggage, seemed to
be camped there.  People rushed to and fro, or stood in little groups
violently arguing.  Women screamed.  Others were silently weeping.
Here two men were engaged in a fierce quarrel.  It was a scene of
indescribable confusion.  The light in the station was wan and cold and
the white faces of all those people were like the white faces of the
dead waiting, patient or anxious, distraught or penitent, for the
judgment of the last day.  The train was made up and most of the
carriages were already filled to overflowing.  When at last Benedict
found that in which Ashenden had his place a man sprang out of it
excitedly.

"Come in and sit down," he said.  "I've had the greatest difficulty in
keeping your seat.  A fellow wanted to come in here with a wife and two
children.  My Consul has just gone off with him to see the
station-master."

"This is Mr. Harrington," said Benedict.

Ashenden stepped into the carriage.  It had two berths in it.  The
porter stowed his luggage away.  He shook hands with his travelling
companion.

Mr. John Quincy Harrington was a very thin man of somewhat less than
middle height, he had a yellow, bony face, with large, pale-blue eyes
and when he took off his hat to wipe his brow wet from the perturbation
he had endured he showed a large, bald skull; it was very bony and the
ridges and protuberances stood out disconcertingly.  He wore a bowler
hat, a black coat and waistcoat, and a pair of striped trousers; a very
high white collar and a neat, unobtrusive tie.  Ashenden did not know
precisely how you should dress in order to take a ten days' journey
across Siberia, but he could not but think that Mr. Harrington's
costume was eccentric.  He spoke with precision in a high-pitched voice
and in an accent that Ashenden recognised as that of New England.

In a minute the station-master came accompanied by a bearded Russian,
suffering evidently from profound emotion, and followed by a lady
holding two children by the hand.  The Russian, tears running down his
face, was talking with quivering lips to the station-master and his
wife between her sobs was apparently telling him the story of her life.
When they arrived at the carriage the altercation became more violent
and Benedict joined in with his fluent Russian.  Mr. Harrington did not
know a word of the language, but being obviously of an excitable turn
broke in and explained in voluble English that these seats had been
booked by the Consuls of Great Britain and the United States
respectively, and though he didn't know about the King of England, he
could tell them straight and they could take it from him that the
President of the United States would never permit an American citizen
to be done out of a seat on the train that he had duly paid for.  He
would yield to force, but to nothing else, and if they touched him he
would register a complaint with the Consul at once.  He said all this
and a great deal more to the station-master, who of course had no
notion what he was talking about, but with much emphasis and a good
deal of gesticulation made him in reply a passionate speech.  This
roused Mr. Harrington to the utmost pitch of indignation, for shaking
his fist in the station-master's face, his own pale with fury, he cried
out:

"Tell him I don't understand a word he says and I don't want to
understand.  If the Russians want us to look upon them as a civilised
people, why don't they talk a civilised language?  Tell him that I am
Mr. John Quincy Harrington and I'm travelling on behalf of Messrs.
Crewe and Adams of Philadelphia with a special letter of introduction
to Mr. Kerensky and if I'm not left in peaceful possession of this
carriage Mr. Crewe will take the matter up with the Administration in
Washington."

Mr. Harrington's manner was so truculent and his gestures so menacing
that the station-master, throwing up the sponge, turned on his heel
without another word and walked moodily away.  He was followed by the
bearded Russian and his wife arguing heatedly with him and the two
apathetic children.  Mr. Harrington jumped back into the carriage.

"I'm terribly sorry to have to refuse to give up my seat to a lady with
two children," he said.  "No one knows better than I the respect due to
a woman and a mother, but I've got to get to Petrograd by this train if
I don't want to lose a very important order and I'm not going to spend
ten days in a corridor for all the mothers in Russia."

"I don't blame you," said Ashenden.

"I am a married man and I have two children myself.  I know that
travelling with your family is a difficult matter, but there's nothing
that I know to prevent you from staying at home."

When you are shut up with a man for ten days in a railway carriage you
can hardly fail to learn most of what there is to know about him, and
for ten days (for eleven to be exact) Ashenden spent twenty-four hours
a day with Mr. Harrington.  It is true that they went into the
dining-room three times a day for their meals, but they sat opposite to
one another; it is true that the train stopped for an hour morning and
afternoon so that they were able to have a tramp up and down the
platform, but they walked side by side.  Ashenden made acquaintance
with some of his fellow-travellers and sometimes they came into the
compartment to have a chat, but if they only spoke French or German Mr.
Harrington would watch them with acidulous disapproval and if they
spoke English he would never let them get a word in.  For Mr.
Harrington was a talker.  He talked as though it were a natural
function of the human being, automatically, as men breathe or digest
their food; he talked not because he had something to say, but because
he could not help himself, in a high-pitched, nasal voice, without
inflection, at one dead level of tone.  He talked with precision, using
a copious vocabulary and forming his sentences with deliberation; he
never used a short word when a longer one would do; he never paused.
He went on and on.  It was not a torrent, for there was nothing
impetuous about it, it was like a stream of lava pouring irresistibly
down the side of a volcano.  It flowed with a quiet and steady force
that overwhelmed everything that was in its path.

Ashenden thought he had never known as much about anyone as he knew
about Mr. Harrington, and not only about him, with all his opinions,
habits and circumstances, but about his wife and his wife's family, his
children and their schoolfellows, his employers and the alliances they
had made for three or four generations with the best families of
Philadelphia.  His own family had come from Devonshire early in the
eighteenth century and Mr. Harrington had been to the village where the
graves of his forebears were still to be seen in the churchyard.  He
was proud of his English ancestry, but proud too of his American birth,
though to him America was a little strip of land along the Atlantic
coast and Americans were a small number of persons of English or Dutch
origin whose blood had never been sullied by foreign admixture.  He
looked upon the Germans, Swedes, Irish and the inhabitants of Central
and Eastern Europe who for the last hundred years have descended upon
the United States as interlopers.  He turned his attention away from
them as a maiden lady who lived in a secluded manor might avert her
eyes from the factory chimneys that had trespassed upon her retirement.

When Ashenden mentioned a man of vast wealth who owned some of the
finest pictures in America Mr. Harrington said:

"I've never met him.  My great-aunt Maria Penn Warmington always said
his grandmother was a very good cook.  My great-aunt Maria was terribly
sorry when she left her to get married.  She said she never knew anyone
who could make an apple pancake as she could."

Mr. Harrington was devoted to his wife and he told Ashenden at
unbelievable length how cultivated and what a perfect mother she was.
She had delicate health and had undergone a great number of operations
all of which he described in detail.  He had had two operations
himself, one on his tonsils and one to remove his appendix and he took
Ashenden day by day through his experiences.  All his friends had had
operations and his knowledge of surgery was encyclopdic.  He had two
sons, both at school, and he was seriously considering whether he would
not be well-advised to have them operated on.  It was curious that one
of them should have enlarged tonsils, and he was not at all happy about
the appendix of the other.  They were more devoted to one another than
he had ever seen two brothers be and a very good friend of his, the
brightest surgeon in Philadelphia, had offered to operate on them both
together so that they should not be separated.  He showed Ashenden
photographs of the boys and their mother.  This journey of his to
Russia was the first time in their lives that he had been separated
from them and every morning he wrote a long letter to his wife telling
her everything that had happened and a good deal of what he had said
during the day.  Ashenden watched him cover sheet after sheet of paper
with his neat, legible and precise handwriting.

Mr. Harrington had read all the books on conversation and knew its
technique to the last detail.  He had a little book in which he noted
down the stories he heard and he told Ashenden that when he was going
out to dinner he always looked up half a dozen so that he should not be
at a loss.  They were marked with a G if they could be told in general
society and with an M (for men) if they were more fit for rough
masculine ears.  He was a specialist in that peculiar form of anecdote
that consists in narrating a long serious incident, piling detail upon
detail, till a comic end is reached.  He spared you nothing and
Ashenden foreseeing the point long before it arrived would clench his
hands and knit his brows in the strenuous effort not to betray his
impatience and at last force from his unwilling mouth a grim and hollow
laugh.  If someone came into the compartment in the middle Mr.
Harrington would greet him with cordiality.

"Come right in and sit down.  I was just telling my friend a story.
You must listen to it, it's one of the funniest things you ever heard."

Then he would begin again from the very beginning and repeat it word
for word, without altering a single apt epithet, till he reached the
humorous end.  Ashenden suggested once that they should see whether
they could find two people on the train who played cards so that they
might while away the time with a game of bridge, but Mr. Harrington
said he never touched cards and when Ashenden in desperation began to
play patience he pulled a wry face.

"It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing,
and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me
that solitaire is the worst.  It kills conversation.  Man is a social
animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes
part in social intercourse."

"There is a certain elegance in wasting time," said Ashenden.  "Any
fool can waste money, but when you waste time you waste what is
priceless.  Besides," he added with bitterness, "you can still talk."

"How can I talk when your attention is taken up by whether you are
going to get a black seven to put on a red eight?  Conversation calls
forth the highest powers of the intellect and if you have made a study
of it you have the right to expect that the person you're talking to
will give you the fullest attention he is capable of."

He did not say this acrimoniously, but with the good-humoured patience
of a man who has been much tried.  He was just stating a plain fact and
Ashenden could take it or leave it.  It was the claim of the artist to
have his work taken seriously.

Mr. Harrington was a diligent reader.  He read pencil in hand,
underlining passages that attracted his attention and on the margin
making in his neat writing comments on what he read.  This he was fond
of discussing and when Ashenden himself was reading and felt on a
sudden that Mr. Harrington, book in one hand and pencil in the other,
was looking at him with his large pale eyes he began to have violent
palpitations of the heart.  He dared not look up, he dared not even
turn the page, for he knew that Mr. Harrington would regard this as
ample excuse to break into a discourse, but remained with his eyes
fixed desperately on a single word, like a chicken with its beak to a
chalk line, and only ventured to breathe when he realised that Mr.
Harrington, having given up the attempt, had resumed his reading.  He
was then engaged on a History of the American Constitution in two
volumes and for recreation was perusing a stout volume that purported
to contain all the great speeches of the world.  For Mr. Harrington was
an after-dinner speaker and had read all the best books on speaking in
public.  He knew exactly how to get on good terms with his audience,
just where to put in the serious words that touched their hearts, how
to catch their attention by a few apt stories and finally with what
degree of eloquence, suiting the occasion, to deliver his peroration.

Mr. Harrington was very fond of reading aloud.  Ashenden had had
frequent occasion to observe the distressing propensity of Americans
for this pastime.  In hotel drawing-rooms at night after dinner he had
often seen the father of a family seated in a retired corner and
surrounded by his wife, his two sons and his daughter, reading to them.
On ships crossing the Atlantic he had sometimes watched with awe the
tall, spare gentleman of commanding aspect who sat in the centre of
fifteen ladies no longer in their first youth and in a resonant voice
read to them the history of Art.  Walking up and down the promenade
deck he had passed honeymooning couples lying on deck-chairs and caught
the unhurried tones of the bride as she read to her young husband the
pages of a popular novel.  It had always seemed to him a curious way of
showing affection.  He had had friends who had offered to read to him
and he had known women who had said they loved being read to, but he
had always politely refused the invitation and firmly ignored the hint.
He liked neither reading aloud nor being read aloud to.  In his heart
he thought the national predilection for this form of entertainment the
only flaw in the perfection of the American character.  But the
immortal gods love a good laugh at the expense of human beings and now
delivered him, bound and helpless, to the knife of the high priest.
Mr. Harrington flattered himself that he was a very good reader and he
explained to Ashenden the theory and practice of the art.  Ashenden
learned that there were two schools, the dramatic and the natural: in
the first you imitated the voices of those who spoke (if you were
reading a novel), and when the heroine wailed you wailed and when
emotion choked her you choked too; but in the other you read as
impassively as though you were reading the price-list of a mail-order
house in Chicago.  This was the school Mr. Harrington belonged to.  In
the seventeen years of his married life he had read aloud to his wife,
and to his sons as soon as they were old enough to appreciate them, the
novels of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, the Bront Sisters,
Thackeray, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne and W. D. Howells.
Ashenden came to the conclusion that it was second nature with Mr.
Harrington to read aloud and to prevent him from doing so made him as
uneasy as cutting off his tobacco made the confirmed smoker.  He would
take you unawares.

"Listen to this," he would say, "you must listen to this," as though he
were suddenly struck by the excellence of a maxim or the neatness of a
phrase.  "Now just tell me if you don't think this is remarkably well
put.  It's only three lines."

He read them and Ashenden was willing to give him a moment's attention,
but having finished them, without pausing for a moment to take breath,
he went on.  He went right on.  On and on.  In his measured
high-pitched voice, without emphasis or expression, he read page after
page.  Ashenden fidgeted, crossed and uncrossed his legs, lit
cigarettes and smoked them, sat first in one position, then in another.
Mr. Harrington went on and on.  The train went leisurely through the
interminable steppes of Siberia.  They passed villages and crossed
rivers.  Mr. Harrington went on and on.  When he finished a great
speech by Edmund Burke he put down the book in triumph.

"Now that in my opinion is one of the finest orations in the English
language.  It is certainly a part of our common heritage that we can
look upon with genuine pride."

"Doesn't it seem to you a little ominous that the people to whom Edmund
Burke made that speech are all dead?" asked Ashenden gloomily.

Mr. Harrington was about to reply that this was hardly to be wondered
at since the speech was made in the eighteenth century, when it dawned
upon him that Ashenden (bearing up wonderfully under affliction as any
unprejudiced person could not fail to admit) was making a joke.  He
slapped his knee and laughed heartily.

"Gee, that's a good one," he said.  "I'll write that down in my little
book.  I see exactly how I can bring it in one time when I have to
speak at our luncheon club."

Mr. Harrington was a highbrow; but that appellation, invented by the
vulgar as a term of abuse, he had accepted like the instrument of a
saint's martyrdom, the gridiron of Saint Laurence for instance or the
wheel of Saint Catherine, as an honorific title.  He gloried in it.

"Emerson was a highbrow," he said.  "Longfellow was a highbrow.  Oliver
Wendell Holmes was a highbrow.  James Russell Lowell was a highbrow."

Mr. Harrington's study of American literature had taken him no further
down the years than the period during which those eminent, but not
precisely thrilling authors, flourished.

Mr. Harrington was a bore.  He exasperated Ashenden, and enraged him;
he got on his nerves, and drove him to frenzy.  But Ashenden did not
dislike him.  His self-satisfaction was enormous but so ingenuous that
you could not resent it; his conceit was so childlike that you could
only smile at it.  He was so well-meaning, so thoughtful, so
deferential, so polite that though Ashenden would willingly have killed
him he could not but own that in that short while he had conceived for
Mr. Harrington something very like affection.  His manners were
exquisite, formal, a trifle elaborate perhaps (there is no harm in
that, for good manners are the product of an artificial state of
society and so can bear a touch of the powdered wig and the lace
ruffle), but though natural to his good breeding they gained a pleasant
significance from his good heart.  He was ready to do anyone a kindness
and seemed to find nothing too much trouble if he could thereby oblige
his fellow man.  He was eminently _serviable_.  And it may be that this
is a word for which there is no exact translation because the charming
quality it denotes is not very common among our practical people.  When
Ashenden was ill for a couple of days Mr. Harrington nursed him with
devotion.  Ashenden was embarrassed by the care he took of him and
though racked with pain could not help laughing at the fussy attention
with which Mr. Harrington took his temperature, from his neatly packed
valise extracted a whole regiment of tabloids and firmly doctored him;
and he was touched by the trouble he gave himself to get from the
dining-car the things that he thought Ashenden could eat.  He did
everything in the world for him but stop talking.

It was only when he was dressing that Mr. Harrington was silent, for
then his maidenly mind was singly occupied with the problem of changing
his clothes before Ashenden without indelicacy.  He was extremely
modest.  He changed his linen every day, neatly taking it out of his
suit-case and neatly putting back what was soiled; but he performed
miracles of dexterity in order during the process not to show an inch
of bare skin.  After a day or two Ashenden gave up the struggle to keep
neat and clean in that dirty train, with one lavatory for the whole
carriage, and soon was as grubby as the rest of the passengers; but Mr.
Harrington refused to yield to the difficulties.  He performed his
toilet with deliberation, notwithstanding the impatient persons who
rattled the door-handle, and returned from the lavatory every morning
washed, shining and smelling of soap.  Once dressed, in his black coat,
striped trousers and well-polished shoes, he looked as spruce as though
he had just stepped out of his tidy little red-brick house in
Philadelphia and was about to board the street-car that would take him
down town to his office.  At one point of the journey it was announced
that an attempt had been made to blow up a bridge and that there were
disturbances at the next station over the river; it might be that the
train would be stopped and the passengers turned adrift or taken
prisoners.  Ashenden, thinking he might be separated from his luggage,
took the precaution to change into his thickest clothes so that if he
had to pass the winter in Siberia he need suffer as little as necessary
from the cold; but Mr. Harrington would not listen to reason; he made
no preparations for the possible experience and Ashenden had the
conviction that if he spent three months in a Russian prison he would
still preserve that smart and natty appearance.  A troop of Cossacks
boarded the train and stood on the platform of each carriage with their
guns loaded, and the train rattled gingerly over the damaged bridge;
then they came to the station at which they had been warned of danger,
put on steam and dashed straight through it.  Mr. Harrington was mildly
satirical when Ashenden changed back into a light summer suit.

Mr. Harrington was a keen business man.  It was obvious that it would
need someone very astute to over-reach him and Ashenden was sure that
his employers had been well-advised to send him on this errand.  He
would safeguard their interests with all his might and if he succeeded
in driving a bargain with the Russians it would be a hard one.  His
loyalty to his firm demanded that.  He spoke of the partners with
affectionate reverence.  He loved them and was proud of them; but he
did not envy them because their wealth was great.  He was quite content
to work on a salary and thought himself adequately paid; so long as he
could educate his boys and leave his widow enough to live on, what was
money to him?  He thought it a trifle vulgar to be rich.  He looked
upon culture as more important than money.  He was careful of it and
after every meal put down in his note-book exactly what it had cost
him.  His firm might be certain that he would not charge a penny more
for his expenses than he had spent.  But having discovered that poor
people came to the station at the stopping places of the train to beg
and seeing that the war had really brought them to destitution he took
care before each halt to supply himself with ample small change and in
a shame-faced way, mocking himself for being taken in by such
impostors, distributed everything in his pocket.

"Of course I know they don't deserve it," he said, "and I don't do it
for them.  I do it entirely for my own peace of mind.  I should feel so
terribly badly if I thought some man really was hungry and I'd refused
to give him the price of a meal."

Mr. Harrington was absurd, but lovable.  It was inconceivable that
anyone should be rude to him, it would have seemed as dreadful as
hitting a child; and Ashenden, chafing inwardly but with a pretence of
amiability, suffered meekly and with a truly Christian spirit the
affliction of the gentle, ruthless creature's society.  It took eleven
days at that time to get from Vladivostok to Petrograd and Ashenden
felt that he could not have borne another day.  If it had been twelve
he would have killed Mr. Harrington.

When at last (Ashenden tired and dirty, Mr. Harrington neat, sprightly
and sententious) they reached the outskirts of Petrograd and stood at
the window looking at the crowded houses of the city, Mr. Harrington
turned to Ashenden and said:

"Well, I never would have thought that eleven days in the train would
pass so quickly.  We've had a wonderful time.  I've enjoyed your
company and I know you've enjoyed mine.  I'm not going to pretend I
don't know that I'm a pretty good conversationalist.  But now we've
come together like this we must take care to stay together.  We must
see as much of one another as we can while I'm in Petrograd."

"I shall have a great deal to do," said Ashenden.  "I'm afraid my time
won't be altogether my own."

"I know," answered Mr. Harrington cordially.  "I expect to be pretty
busy myself, but we can have breakfast together anyway and we'll meet
in the evening and compare notes.  It would be too bad if we drifted
apart now."

"Too bad," sighed Ashenden.




XV

_Love and Russian Literature_

When Ashenden found himself in his bedroom at the hotel and, for the
first time for it seemed an age, alone he sat down and looked about
him.  He had not the energy to start immediately to unpack.  How many
of these hotel bedrooms had he known since the beginning of the war,
grand or shabby, in one place and one land after another!  It seemed to
him that he had been living in his luggage for as long as he could
remember.  He was weary.  He asked himself how he was going to set
about the work that he had been sent to do.  He felt lost in the
immensity of Russia and very solitary.  He had protested when he was
chosen for this mission, it looked too large an order, but his protests
were ignored.  He was chosen not because those in authority thought him
particularly suited for the job, but because there was no one to be
found who was more suited.  There was a knock at the door and Ashenden,
pleased to make use of the few words of the language he knew, called
out in Russian.  The door was opened.  He sprang to his feet.

"Come in, come in," he cried.  "I'm awfully glad to see you."

Three men entered.  He knew them by sight, since they had travelled on
the same boat with him from San Francisco to Yokohama, but following
their instructions no communications had passed between them and
Ashenden.  They were Czechs, exiled from their country for their
revolutionary activity and long settled in America, who had been sent
over to Russia to help Ashenden in his mission and put him in touch
with Professor Z. whose authority over the Czechs in Russia was
absolute.  Their chief was a certain Dr. Egon Orth, a tall thin man,
with a little grey head; he was minister to some church in the Middle
West and a doctor of divinity; but had abandoned his cure to work for
the liberation of his country, and Ashenden had the impression that he
was an intelligent fellow who would not put too fine a point on matters
of conscience.  A parson with a fixed idea has this advantage over
common men, that he can persuade himself of the Almighty's approval for
almost any goings on.  Dr. Orth had a merry twinkle in his eye and a
dry humour.

Ashenden had had two secret interviews with him in Yokohama and had
learnt that Professor Z., though eager to free his country from the
Austrian rule and since he knew that this could only come about by the
downfall of the Central Powers with the allies body and soul, yet had
scruples; he would not do things that outraged his conscience, all must
be straightforward and above board, and so some things that it was
necessary to do had to be done without his knowledge.  His influence
was so great that his wishes could not be disregarded, but on occasion
it was felt better not to let him know too much of what was going on.

Dr. Orth had arrived in Petrograd a week before Ashenden and now put
before him what he had learned of the situation.  It seemed to Ashenden
that it was critical and if anything was to be done it must be done
quickly.  The army was dissatisfied and mutinous, the Government under
the weak Kerensky was tottering and held power only because no one else
had the courage to seize it, famine was staring the country in the face
and already the possibility had to be considered that the Germans would
march on Petrograd.  The ambassadors of Great Britain and the United
States had been apprised of Ashenden's coming, but his mission was
secret even from them, and there were particular reasons why he could
demand no assistance from them.  He arranged with Dr. Orth to make an
appointment with Professor Z. so that he could learn his views and
explain to him that he had the financial means to support any scheme
that seemed likely to prevent the catastrophe that the Allied
governments foresaw of Russia's making a separate peace.  But he had to
get in touch with influential persons in all classes.  Mr. Harrington
with his business proposition and his letters to Ministers of State
would be thrown in contact with members of the Government and Mr.
Harrington wanted an interpreter.  Dr. Orth spoke Russian almost as
well as his own language and it struck Ashenden that he would be
admirably suited to the post.  He explained the circumstances to him
and it was arranged that while Ashenden and Mr. Harrington were at
luncheon Dr. Orth should come in, greeting Ashenden as though he had
not seen him before, and be introduced to Mr. Harrington; then
Ashenden, guiding the conversation, would suggest to Mr. Harrington
that the heavens had sent in Dr. Orth the ideal man for his purpose.

But there was another person on whom Ashenden had fixed as possibly
useful to him and now he said: "Have you ever heard of a woman called
Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov?  She's the daughter of Alexander
Denisiev."

"I know all about him of course."

"I have reason to believe she's in Petrograd.  Will you find out where
she lives and what she's doing?"

"Certainly."

Dr. Orth spoke in Czech to one of the two men who accompanied him.
They were sharp-looking fellows, both of them, one was tall and fair
and the other was short and dark, but they were younger than Dr. Orth
and Ashenden understood that they were there to do as he bade them.
The man nodded, got up, shook hands with Ashenden and went out.

"You shall have all the information possible this afternoon."

"Well, I think there's nothing more we can do for the present," said
Ashenden.  "To tell you the truth I haven't had a bath for eleven days
and I badly want one."

Ashenden had never quite made up his mind whether the pleasure of
reflection was better pursued in a railway carriage or in a bath.  So
far as the act of invention was concerned he was inclined to prefer a
train that went smoothly and not too fast, and many of his best ideas
had come to him when he was thus traversing the plains of France; but
for the delight of reminiscence or the entertainment of embroidery upon
a theme already in his head he had no doubt that nothing could compare
with a hot bath.  He considered now, wallowing in soapy water like a
water-buffalo in a muddy pond, the grim pleasantry of his relations
with Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov.

In these stories no more than the barest suggestion has been made that
Ashenden was capable on occasions of the passion ironically called
tender.  The specialists in this matter, those charming creatures who
make a business of what philosophers know is but a diversion, assert
that writers, painters and musicians, all in short who are connected
with the arts, in the relation of love, cut no very conspicuous figure.
There is much cry but little wool.  They rave or sigh, make phrases and
strike many a romantic attitude, but in the end, loving art or
themselves (which with them is one and the same thing) better than the
object of their emotion, offer a shadow when the said object, with the
practical common sense of the sex, demands a substance.  It may be so
and this may be the reason (never before suggested) why women in their
souls look upon art with such a virulent hatred.  Be this as it may
Ashenden in the last twenty years had felt his heart go pit-a-pat
because of one charming person after another.  He had had a good deal
of fun and had paid for it with a great deal of misery, but even when
suffering most acutely from the pangs of unrequited love he had been
able to say to himself, albeit with a wry face, after all, it's grist
to the mill.

Anastasia Alexandrovna Leonidov was the daughter of a revolutionary who
had escaped from Siberia after being sentenced to penal servitude for
life and had settled in England.  He was an able man and had supported
himself for thirty years by the activity of a restless pen and had even
made himself a distinguished position in English letters.  When
Anastasia Alexandrovna reached a suitable age she married Vladimir
Semenovich Leonidov, also an exile from his native country, and it was
after she had been married to him for some years that Ashenden made her
acquaintance.  It was at the time when Europe discovered Russia.
Everyone was reading the Russian novelists, the Russian dancers
captivated the civilised world, and the Russian composers set shivering
the sensibility of persons who were beginning to want a change from
Wagner.  Russian art seized upon Europe with the virulence of an
epidemic of influenza.  New phrases became the fashion, new colours,
new emotions, and the highbrows described themselves without a moment's
hesitation as members of the intelligentsia.  It was a difficult word
to spell but an easy one to say.  Ashenden fell like the rest, changed
the cushions of his sitting-room, hung an eikon on the wall, read
Chekoff and went to the ballet.

Anastasia Alexandrovna was by birth, circumstances and education very
much a member of the intelligentsia.  She lived with her husband in a
tiny house near Regent's Park and here all the literary folk in London
might gaze with humble reverence at pale-faced bearded giants who
leaned against the wall like caryatids taking a day off; they were
revolutionaries to a man and it was a miracle that they were not in the
mines of Siberia.  Women of letters tremulously put their lips to a
glass of vodka.  If you were lucky and greatly favoured you might shake
hands there with Diaghileff and now and again, like a peach-blossom
wafted by the breeze, Pavlova herself hovered in and out.  At this time
Ashenden's success had not been so great as to affront the highbrows,
he had very distinctly been one of them in his youth, and though some
already looked askance, others (optimistic creatures with a faith in
human nature) still had hopes of him.  Anastasia Alexandrovna told him
to his face that he was a member of the intelligentsia.  Ashenden was
quite ready to believe it.  He was in a state when he was ready to
believe anything.  He was thrilled and excited.  It seemed to him that
at last he was about to capture that illusive spirit of romance that he
had so long been chasing.  Anastasia Alexandrovna had fine eyes and a
good, though for these days, too voluptuous figure, high cheek-bones
and a snub nose (this was very Tartar), a wide mouth full of large
square teeth and a pale skin.  She dressed somewhat flamboyantly.  In
her dark melancholy eyes Ashenden saw the boundless steppes of Russia,
and the Kremlin with its pealing bells, and the solemn ceremonies of
Easter at St. Isaac's, and forests of silver beeches and the Nevsky
Prospekt; it was astonishing how much he saw in her eyes.  They were
round and shining and slightly protuberant like those of a Pekinese.
They talked together of Alyosha in the _Brothers Karamazov_, of Natasha
in _War and Peace_, of Anna Karenina and of _Fathers and Sons_.

Ashenden soon discovered that her husband was quite unworthy of her and
presently learned that she shared his opinion.  Vladimir Semenovich was
a little man with a large, long head that looked as though it had been
pulled like a piece of liquorice, and he had a great shock of unruly
Russian hair.  He was a gentle, unobtrusive creature and it was hard to
believe that the Czarist government had really feared his revolutionary
activities.  He taught Russian and wrote for papers in Moscow.  He was
amiable and obliging.  He needed these qualities, for Anastasia
Alexandrovna was a woman of character: when she had a toothache
Vladimir Semenovich suffered the agonies of the damned and when her
heart was wrung by the suffering of her unhappy country Vladimir
Semenovich might well have wished he had never been born.  Ashenden
could not help admitting that he was a poor thing, but he was so
harmless that he conceived quite a liking for him, and when in due
course he had disclosed his passion to Anastasia Alexandrovna and to
his joy found it was returned he was puzzled to know what to do about
Vladimir Semenovich.  Neither Anastasia Alexandrovna nor he felt that
they could live another minute out of one another's pockets, and
Ashenden feared that with her revolutionary views and all that she
would never consent to marry him; but somewhat to his surprise, and
very much to his relief, she accepted the suggestion with alacrity.

"Would Vladimir Semenovich let himself be divorced, do you think?" he
asked, as he sat on the sofa, leaning against cushions the colour of
which reminded him of raw meat just gone bad, and held her hand.

"Vladimir adores me," she answered.  "It'll break his heart."

"He's a nice fellow, I shouldn't like him to be very unhappy.  I hope
he'll get over it."

"He'll never get over it.  That is the Russian spirit.  I know that
when I leave him he'll feel that he has lost everything that made life
worth living for him.  I've never known anyone so wrapped up in a woman
as he is in me.  But of course he wouldn't want to stand in the way of
my happiness.  He's far too great for that.  He'll see that when it's a
question of my own self-development I haven't the right to hesitate.
Vladimir will give me my freedom without question."

At that time the divorce law in England was even more complicated and
absurd than it is now and in case she was not acquainted with its
peculiarities Ashenden explained to Anastasia Alexandrovna the
difficulties of the case.  She put her hand gently on his.

"Vladimir would never expose me to the vulgar notoriety of the divorce
court.  When I tell him that I have decided to marry you he will commit
suicide."

"That would be terrible," said Ashenden.

He was startled, but thrilled.  It was really very much like a Russian
novel and he saw the moving and terrible pages, pages and pages, in
which Dostoievsky would have described the situation.  He knew the
lacerations his characters would have suffered, the broken bottles of
champagne, the visits to the gipsies, the vodka, the swoonings, the
catalepsy and the long, long speeches everyone would have made.  It was
all very dreadful and wonderful and shattering.

"It would make us horribly unhappy," said Anastasia Alexandrovna, "but
I don't know what else he could do.  I couldn't ask him to live without
me.  He would be like a ship without a rudder or a car without a
carburettor.  I know Vladimir so well.  He will commit suicide."

"How?" asked Ashenden, who had the realist's passion for the exact
detail.

"He will blow his brains out."

Ashenden remembered _Rosmerholm_.  In his day he had been an ardent
Ibsenite and had even flirted with the notion of learning Norwegian so
that he might, by reading the master in the original, get at the secret
essence of his thought.  He had once seen Ibsen in the flesh drink a
glass of Munich beer.

"But do you think we could ever pass another easy hour if we had the
death of that man on our conscience?" he asked.  "I have a feeling that
he would always be between us."

"I know we shall suffer, we shall suffer dreadfully," said Anastasia
Alexandrovna, "but how can we help it?  Life is like that.  We must
think of Vladimir.  There is his happiness to be considered too.  He
will prefer to commit suicide."

She turned her face away and Ashenden saw that the heavy tears were
coursing down her cheeks.  He was much moved.  For he had a soft heart
and it was dreadful to think of poor Vladimir lying there with a bullet
in his brain.

These Russians, what fun they have!

But when Anastasia Alexandrovna had mastered her emotion she turned to
him gravely.  She looked at him with her humid, round and slightly
protuberant eyes.

"We must be quite sure that we're doing the right thing," she said.  "I
should never forgive myself if I'd allowed Vladimir to commit suicide
and then found I'd made a mistake.  I think we ought to make sure that
we really love one another."

"But don't you know?" exclaimed Ashenden in a low, tense voice.  "I
know."

"Let's go over to Paris for a week and see how we get on.  Then we
shall know."

Ashenden was a trifle conventional and the suggestion took him by
surprise.  But only for a moment.  Anastasia was wonderful.  She was
very quick and she saw the hesitation that for an instant troubled him.

"Surely you have no bourgeois prejudices?" she said.

"Of course not," he assured her hurriedly, for he would much sooner
have been thought knavish than bourgeois, "I think it's a splendid
idea."

"Why should a woman hazard her whole life on a throw?  It's impossible
to know what a man is really like till you've lived with him.  It's
only fair to give her the opportunity to change her mind before it's
too late."

"Quite so," said Ashenden.

Anastasia Alexandrovna was not a woman to let the grass grow under her
feet and so having made their arrangements forthwith on the following
Saturday they started for Paris.

"I shall not tell Vladimir that I am going with you," she said.  "It
would only distress him."

"It would be a pity to do that," said Ashenden.

"And if at the end of the week I come to the conclusion that we've made
a mistake he need never know anything about it."

"Quite so," said Ashenden.

They met at Victoria Station.

"What class have you got?" she asked him.

"First."

"I'm glad of that.  Father and Vladimir travel third on account of
their principles, but I always feel sick on a train and I like to be
able to lean my head on somebody's shoulder.  It's easier in a
first-class carriage."

When the train started Anastasia Alexandrovna said she felt dizzy, so
she took off her hat and leaned her head on Ashenden's shoulder.  He
put his arm round her waist.

"Keep quite still, won't you?" she said.

When they got on to the boat she went down to the ladies' cabin and at
Calais was able to eat a very hearty meal, but when they got into the
train she took off her hat again and rested her head on Ashenden's
shoulder.  He thought he would like to read and took up a book.

"Do you mind not reading?" she said.  "I have to be held and when you
turn the pages it makes me feel all funny."

Finally they reached Paris and went to a little hotel on the Left Bank
that Anastasia Alexandrovna knew of.  She said it had atmosphere.  She
could not bear those great big grand hotels on the other side; they
were hopelessly vulgar and bourgeois.

"I'll go anywhere you like," said Ashenden, "as long as there's a
bathroom."

She smiled and pinched his cheek.

"How adorably English you are.  Can't you do without a bathroom for a
week?  My dear, my dear, you have so much to learn."

They talked far into the night about Maxim Gorki and Karl Marx, human
destiny, love and the brotherhood of man; and drank innumerable cups of
Russian tea, so that in the morning Ashenden would willingly have
breakfasted in bed and got up for luncheon; but Anastasia Alexandrovna
was an early riser.  When life was so short and there was so much to do
it was a sinful thing to have breakfast a minute after half-past eight.
They sat down in a dingy little dining-room the windows of which showed
no signs of having been opened for a month.  It was full of atmosphere.
Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

"Scrambled eggs," she said.

She ate heartily.  Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy
appetite.  He supposed it was a Russian trait: you could not picture
Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of
coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went
to the Luxembourg.  They dined early in order to go to the Comdie
Franaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced.  When
next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room
and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply
was:

"Scrambled eggs."

"But we had scrambled eggs yesterday," he expostulated.

"Let's have them again to-day," she smiled.

"All right."

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the
Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Muse Guimet instead of the
Luxembourg.  But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's enquiry
Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

"But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before," he said.

"Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again to-day?"

"No, I don't."

"Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this
morning?" she asked.  "I eat scrambled eggs every day.  It's the only
way I like them."

"Oh, very well.  In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs."

But the following morning he could not face them.

"Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?" he asked her.

"Of course," she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large
square teeth.

"All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried."

The smile vanished from her lips.

"Oh?"  She paused a moment.  "Don't you think that's rather
inconsiderate?  Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary
work?  You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as
machines.  Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the
same feelings and the same emotions?  How can you be surprised that the
proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you
are so monstrously selfish?"

"Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have
my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?"

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

"You don't understand.  It's the principle of the thing.  You think
it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke
as well as anyone, Chekoff was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but
don't you see what is involved?  Your whole attitude is wrong.  It's a
lack of feeling.  You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through
the events of 1905 in Petersburg.  When I think of the crowds in front
of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged
them, women and children!  No, no, no."

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain.  She
took Ashenden's hand.

"I know you have a good heart.  It was just thoughtless on your part
and we won't say anything more about it.  You have imagination.  You're
very sensitive.  I know.  You'll have your eggs done in the same way as
mine, won't you?"

"Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that.  The
waiter said: "_Monsieur aime les oeufs breuills_."  At the end of the
week they returned to London.  He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his
arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again
from Dover to London.  He reflected that the journey from New York to
San Francisco took five days.  When they arrived at Victoria and stood
on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round,
shining and slightly protuberant eyes.

"We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?" she said.

"Wonderful."

"I've quite made up my mind.  The experiment has justified itself.  I'm
willing to marry you whenever you like."

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the
rest of his life.  When he had put her in a cab, he called another for
himself, went to the Cunard office and took a berth on the first ship
that was going to America.  No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new
life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt
thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning
his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.




XVI

_Mr. Harrington's Washing_

Some years had passed since then and Ashenden had not seen Anastasia
Alexandrovna again.  He knew that on the outbreak of the revolution in
March she and Vladimir Semenovich had gone to Russia.  It might be that
they would be able to help him, in a way Vladimir Semenovich owed him
his life, and he made up his mind to write to Anastasia Alexandrovna to
ask if he might come to see her.

When Ashenden went down to lunch he felt somewhat rested.  Mr.
Harrington was waiting for him and they sat down.  They ate what was
put before them.

"Ask the waiter to bring us some bread," said Mr. Harrington.

"Bread?" replied Ashenden.  "There's no bread."

"I can't eat without bread," said Mr. Harrington.

"I'm afraid you'll have to.  There's no bread, no butter, no sugar, no
eggs, no potatoes.  There's fish and meat and green vegetables, and
that's all."

Mr. Harrington's jaw dropped.

"But this is war," he said.

"It looks very much like it."

Mr. Harrington was for a moment speechless; then he said: "I'll tell
you what I'm going to do, I'm going to get through with my business as
quick as I can and then I'm going to get out of this country.  I'm sure
Mrs. Harrington wouldn't like me to go without sugar or butter.  I've
got a very delicate stomach.  The firm would never have sent me here if
they'd thought I wasn't going to have the best of everything."

In a little while Dr. Egan Orth came in and gave Ashenden an envelope.
On it was written Anastasia Alexandrovna's address.  He introduced him
to Mr. Harrington.  It was soon clear that he was pleased with Dr. Egan
Orth and so without further to-do he suggested that here was the
perfect interpreter for him.

"He talks Russian like a Russian.  But he's an American citizen, so
that he won't do you down.  I've known him a considerable time and I
can assure you that he's absolutely trustworthy."

Mr. Harrington was pleased with the notion and after luncheon Ashenden
left them to settle the matter by themselves.  He wrote a note to
Anastasia Alexandrovna and presently received an answer to say that she
was going to a meeting, but would look in at his hotel about seven.  He
awaited her with apprehension.  Of course he knew now that he had not
loved her, but Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Stravinsky
and Bakst; but he was not quite sure if the point had occurred to her.
When between eight and half-past she arrived he suggested that she
should join Mr. Harrington and him at dinner.  The presence of a third
party, he thought, would prevent any awkwardness their meeting might
have; but he need not have had any anxiety, for five minutes after they
had sat down to a plate of soup it was borne in upon him that the
feelings of Anastasia Alexandrovna towards him were as cool as were his
towards her.  It gave him a momentary shock.  It is very hard for a
man, however modest, to grasp the possibility that a woman who has once
loved him may love him no longer, and though of course he did not
imagine that Anastasia Alexandrovna had languished for five years with
a hopeless passion for him, he did think that by a heightening of
colour, a flutter of the eyelashes, or a quiver of the lips she would
betray the fact that she had still a soft place in her heart for him.
Not at all.  She talked to him as though he were a friend she was very
glad to see again after an absence of a few days, but whose intimacy
with her was purely social.  He asked after Vladimir Semenovich.

"He has been a disappointment to me," she said.  "I never thought he
was a clever man, but I thought he was an honest one.  He's going to
have a baby."

Mr. Harrington, who was about to put a piece offish into his mouth,
stopped, his fork in the air, and stared at Anastasia Alexandrovna with
astonishment.  In extenuation it must be explained that he had never
read a Russian novel in his life.  Ashenden, slightly perplexed too,
gave her a questioning look.

"I'm not the mother," she said with a laugh.  "I am not interested in
that sort of thing.  The mother is a friend of mine and a well-known
writer on Political Economy.  I do not think her views are sound, but I
should be the last to deny that they deserve consideration.  She has a
good brain, quite a good brain."  She turned to Mr. Harrington.  "Are
you interested in Political Economy?"

For once in his life Mr. Harrington was speechless.  Anastasia
Alexandrovna gave them her views on the subject and they began to speak
on the situation in Russia.  She seemed to be on intimate terms with
the leaders of the various political parties and Ashenden made up his
mind to sound her on the possibility of her working with him.  His
infatuation had not blinded him to the fact that she was an extremely
intelligent woman.  After dinner he told Mr. Harrington that he wished
to talk business with Anastasia Alexandrovna and took her to a retired
corner of the lounge.  He told her all he thought necessary and found
her interested and anxious to help.  She had a passion for intrigue and
a desire for power.  When he hinted that he had command of large sums
of money she saw at once that through him she might acquire an
influence in the affairs of Russia.  It tickled her vanity.  She was
immensely patriotic, but like many patriots she had an impression that
her own aggrandisement tended to the good of her country.  When they
parted they had come to a working agreement.

"That was a very remarkable woman," said Mr. Harrington next morning
when they met at breakfast.

"Don't fall in love with her," smiled Ashenden.

This, however, was not a matter on which Mr. Harrington was prepared to
jest.

"I have never looked at a woman since I married Mrs. Harrington," he
said.  "That husband of hers must be a bad man."

"I could do with a plate of scrambled eggs," said Ashenden,
irrelevantly, for their breakfast consisted of a cup of tea without
milk and a little jam instead of sugar.

With Anastasia Alexandrovna to help him and Dr. Orth in the background,
Ashenden set to work.  Things in Russia were going from bad to worse.
Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, was devoured by
vanity and dismissed any minister who gave evidence of a capacity that
might endanger his own position.  He made speeches.  He made endless
speeches.  At one moment there was a possibility that the Germans would
make a dash for Petrograd.  Kerensky made speeches.  The food shortage
grew more serious, the winter was approaching and there was no fuel.
Kerensky made speeches.  In the background the Bolsheviks were active,
Lenin was hiding in Petrograd, it was said that Kerensky knew where he
was, but dared not arrest him.  He made speeches.

It amused Ashenden to see the unconcern with which Mr. Harrington
wandered through this turmoil.  History was in the making and Mr.
Harrington minded his own business.  It was uphill work.  He was made
to pay bribes to secretaries and underlings under the pretence that the
ear of great men would be granted to him.  He was kept waiting for
hours in antechambers and then sent away without ceremony.  When at
last he saw the great men he found they had nothing to give him but
idle words.  They made him promises and in a day or two he discovered
that the promises meant nothing.  Ashenden advised him to throw in his
hand and return to America; but Mr. Harrington would not hear of it;
his firm had sent him to do a particular job, and, by gum, he was going
to do it or perish in the attempt.  Then Anastasia Alexandrovna took
him in hand.  A singular friendship had arisen between the pair.  Mr.
Harrington thought her a very remarkable and deeply wronged woman; he
told her all about his wife and his two sons, he told her all about the
Constitution of the United States; she on her side told him all about
Vladimir Semenovich, and she told him about Tolstoi, Turgenev and
Dostoievsky.  They had great times together.  He said he couldn't
manage to call her Anastasia Alexandrovna, it was too much of a
mouthful; so he called her Delilah.  And now she placed her
inexhaustible energy at his service and they went together to the
persons who might be useful to him.  But things were coming to a head.
Riots broke out and the streets were growing dangerous.  Now and then
armoured cars filled with discontented reservists careered wildly along
the Nevsky Prospekt and in order to show that they were not happy took
pot-shots at the passers-by.  On one occasion when Mr. Harrington and
Anastasia Alexandrovna were in a tram together shots peppered the
windows and they had to lie down on the floor for safety.  Mr.
Harrington was highly indignant.

"An old fat woman was lying right on top of me and when I wriggled to
get out Delilah caught me a clip on the side of the head and said,
'Stop still, you fool.'  I don't like your Russian ways, Delilah."

"Anyhow you stopped still," she giggled.

"What you want in this country is a little less art and a little more
civilisation."

"You are bourgeoisie, Mr. Harrington, you are not a member of the
intelligentsia."

"You are the first person who's ever said that, Delilah.  If I'm not a
member of the intelligentsia I don't know who is," retorted Mr.
Harrington with dignity.

Then one day when Ashenden was working in his room there was a knock at
the door and Anastasia Alexandrovna stalked in followed somewhat
sheepishly by Mr. Harrington.  Ashenden saw that she was excited.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Unless this man goes back to America he'll get killed.  You really
must talk to him.  If I hadn't been there something very unpleasant
might have happened to him."

"Not at all, Delilah," said Mr. Harrington, with asperity.  "I'm
perfectly capable of taking care of myself and I wasn't in the smallest
danger."

"What is it all about?" asked Ashenden.

"I'd taken Mr. Harrington to the Lavra of Alexander Nevsky to see
Dostoievsky's grave," said Anastasia Alexandrovna, "and on our way back
we saw a soldier being rather rough with an old woman."

"Rather rough!" cried Mr. Harrington.  "There was an old woman walking
along the side-walk with a basket of provisions on her arm.  Two
soldiers came up behind her and one of them snatched the basket from
her and walked off with it.  She burst out screaming and crying, I
don't know what she was saying, but I can guess, and the other soldier
took his gun and with the butt-end of it hit her over the head.  Isn't
that right, Delilah?"

"Yes," she answered, unable to help smiling.  "And before I could
prevent it Mr. Harrington jumped out of the cab and ran up to the
soldier who had the basket, wrenched it from him and began to abuse the
pair of them like pickpockets.  At first they were so taken aback they
didn't know what to do and then they got in a rage.  I ran after Mr.
Harrington and explained to them that he was a foreigner and drunk."

"Drunk?" cried Mr. Harrington.

"Yes, drunk.  Of course a crowd collected.  It looked as though it
wasn't going to be very nice."

Mr. Harrington smiled with those large, pale-blue eyes of his.

"It sounded to me as though you were giving them a piece of your mind,
Delilah.  It was as good as a play to watch you."

"Don't be stupid, Mr. Harrington," cried Anastasia, in a sudden fury,
stamping her foot.  "Don't you know that those soldiers might very
easily have killed you and me too, and not one of the bystanders would
have raised a finger to help us?"

"Me?  I'm an American citizen, Delilah.  They wouldn't dare touch a
hair of my head."

"They'd have difficulty in finding one," said Anastasia Alexandrovna,
who when she was in a temper had no manners.  "But if you think Russian
soldiers are going to hesitate to kill you because you're an American
citizen you'll get a big surprise one of these days."

"Well, what happened to the old woman?" asked Ashenden.

"The soldiers went off after a little and we went back to her."

"Still with the basket?"

"Yes.  Mr. Harrington clung on to that like grim death.  She was lying
on the ground with the blood pouring from her head.  We got her into
the cab and when she could speak enough to tell us where she lived we
drove her home.  She was bleeding dreadfully and we had some difficulty
in staunching the blood."

Anastasia Alexandrovna gave Mr. Harrington an odd look and to his
surprise Ashenden saw him turn scarlet.

"What's the matter now?"

"You see, we had nothing to bind her up with.  Mr. Harrington's
handkerchief was soaked.  There was only one thing about me that I
could get off quickly and so I took off my..."

But before she could finish Mr. Harrington interrupted her.

"You need not tell Mr. Ashenden what you took off.  I'm a married man
and I know ladies wear them, but I see no need to refer to them in
general society."

Anastasia Alexandrovna giggled.

"Then you must kiss me, Mr. Harrington.  If you don't I shall say."

Mr. Harrington hesitated a moment, considering evidently the pros and
cons of the matter, but he saw that Anastasia Alexandrovna was
determined.

"Go on then, you may kiss me, Delilah, though I'm bound to say I don't
see what pleasure it can be to you."

She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on both cheeks, then
without a word of warning burst into a flood of tears.

"You're a brave little man, Mr. Harrington.  You're absurd but
magnificent," she sobbed.

Mr. Harrington was less surprised than Ashenden would have expected him
to be.  He looked at Anastasia with a thin, quizzical smile and gently
patted her.

"Come, come, Delilah, pull yourself together.  It gave you a nasty
turn, didn't it?  You're quite upset.  I shall have terrible rheumatism
in my shoulder if you go on weeping all over it."

The scene was ridiculous and touching.  Ashenden laughed, but he had
the beginnings of a lump in his throat.

When Anastasia Alexandrovna had left them Mr. Harrington sat in a brown
study.

"They're very queer, these Russians.  Do you know what Delilah did?" he
said, suddenly.  "She stood up in the cab, in the middle of the street,
with people passing on both sides, and took her pants off.  She tore
them in two and gave me one to hold while she made a bandage of the
other.  I was never so embarrassed in my life."

"Tell me what gave you the idea of calling her Delilah?" smiled
Ashenden.

Mr. Harrington reddened a little.

"She's a very fascinating woman, Mr. Ashenden.  She's been deeply
wronged by her husband and I naturally felt a great deal of sympathy
for her.  These Russians are very emotional people and I did not want
her to mistake my sympathy for anything else.  I told her I was very
much attached to Mrs. Harrington."

"You're not under the impression that Delilah was Potiphar's wife?"
asked Ashenden.

"I don't know what you mean by that, Mr. Ashenden," replied Mr.
Harrington.  "Mrs. Harrington has always given me to understand that
I'm very fascinating to women, and I thought if I called our little
friend Delilah it would make my position quite clear."

"I don't think Russia's any place for you, Mr. Harrington," said
Ashenden smiling.  "If I were you I'd get out of it as quick as I
could."

"I can't go now.  I've got them to agree to my terms at last and we're
going to sign next week.  Then I shall pack my grip and go."

"I wonder if your signatures will be worth the paper they're written
on," said Ashenden.

He had at length devised a plan of campaign.  It took him twenty-four
hours' hard work to code a telegram in which he put his scheme before
the persons who had sent him to Petrograd.  It was accepted and he was
promised all the money he needed.  Ashenden knew he could do nothing
unless the Provisional Government remained in power for another three
months; but winter was at hand and food was getting scarcer every day.
The army was mutinous.  The people clamoured for peace.  Every evening
at the Europe Ashenden drank a cup of chocolate with Professor Z. and
discussed with him how best to make use of his devoted Czechs.
Anastasia Alexandrovna had a flat in a retired spot and here he had
meetings with all manner of persons.  Plans were drawn up.  Measures
were taken.  Ashenden argued, persuaded, promised.  He had to overcome
the vacillation of one and wrestle with the fatalism of another.  He
had to judge who was resolute and who was self-sufficient, who was
honest and who was infirm of purpose.  He had to curb his impatience
with the Russian verbosity; he had to be good-tempered with people who
were willing to talk of everything but the matter in hand; he had to
listen sympathetically to ranting and rhodomontade.  He had to beware
of treachery.  He had to humour the vanity of fools and elude the greed
of the ambitious.  Time was pressing.  The rumours grew hot and many of
the activities of the Bolsheviks.  Kerensky ran hither and thither like
a frightened hen.

Then the blow fell.  On the night of November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks
rose, Kerensky's ministers were arrested and the Winter Palace was
sacked by the mob; the reins of power were seized by Lenin and Trotsky.

Anastasia Alexandrovna came to Ashenden's room at the hotel early in
the morning.  Ashenden was coding a telegram.  He had been up all
night, first at the Smolny, and then at the Winter Palace.  He was
tired out.  Her face was white and her shining brown eyes were tragic.

"Have you heard?" she asked Ashenden

He nodded.

"It's all over then.  They say Kerensky has fled.  They never even
showed fight."  Rage seized her.  "The buffoon!" she screamed.

At that moment there was a knock at the door and Anastasia Alexandrovna
looked at it with sudden apprehension.

"You know the Bolsheviks have got a list of people they've decided to
execute.  My name is on it, and it may be that yours is too."

"If it's they and they want to come in they only have to turn the
handle," said Ashenden, smiling, but with ever so slightly odd a
feeling at the pit of his stomach.  "Come in."

The door was opened and Mr. Harrington stepped into the room.  He was
as dapper as ever, in his short black coat and striped trousers, his
shoes neatly polished and a derby on his bald head.  He took it off
when he saw Anastasia Alexandrovna.

"Oh, fancy finding you here so early.  I looked in on my way out, I
wanted to tell you my news.  I tried to find you yesterday evening, but
couldn't.  You didn't come in to dinner."

"No, I was at a meeting," said Ashenden.

"You must both congratulate me, I got my signatures yesterday, and my
business is done."

Mr. Harrington beamed on them, the picture of self-satisfaction, and he
arched himself like a bantam-cock who has chased away all rivals.
Anastasia Alexandrovna burst into a sudden shriek of hysterical
laughter.  He stared at her in perplexity.

"Why, Delilah, what is the matter?" he said.

Anastasia laughed till the tears ran from her eyes and then began to
sob in earnest.  Ashenden explained.

"The Bolsheviks have overthrown the Government.  Kerensky's ministers
are in prison.  The Bolsheviks are out to kill.  Delilah says her name
is on the list.  Your minister signed your documents yesterday because
he knew it did not matter what he did then.  Your contracts are worth
nothing.  The Bolsheviks are going to make peace with Germany as soon
as they can."

Anastasia Alexandrovna had recovered her self-control as quickly as she
had lost it.

"You had better get out of Russia as soon as you can, Mr. Harrington.
It's no place for a foreigner now and it may be that in a few days you
won't be able to."

Mr. Harrington looked from one to the other.

"O my!" he said.  "O my!"  It seemed inadequate.  "Are you going to
tell me that that Russian minister was just making a fool of me?"

Ashenden shrugged his shoulders.

"How can one tell what he was thinking of?  He may have a keen sense of
humour and perhaps he thought it funny to sign a fifty-million-dollar
contract yesterday when there was every chance of his being stood
against the wall and shot to-day.  Anastasia Alexandrovna's right, Mr.
Harrington, you'd better take the first train that'll get you to
Sweden."

"And what about you?"

"There's nothing for me to do here any more.  I'm cabling for
instructions and I shall go as soon as I get leave.  The Bolsheviks
have got in ahead of us and the people I was working with will have
their work cut out to save their lives."

"Boris Petrovich was shot this morning," said Anastasia Alexandrovna
with a frown.

They both looked at Mr. Harrington and he stared at the floor.  His
pride in this achievement of his was shattered and he sagged like a
pricked balloon.  But in a minute he looked up.  He gave Anastasia
Alexandrovna a little smile and for the first time Ashenden noticed how
attractive and kindly his smile was.  There was something peculiarly
disarming about it.

"If the Bolsheviks are after you, Delilah, don't you think you'd better
come with me?  I'll take care of you and if you like to come to America
I'm sure Mrs. Harrington would be glad to do anything she could for
you."

"I can see Mrs. Harrington's face if you arrived in Philadelphia with a
Russian refugee," laughed Anastasia Alexandrovna.  "I'm afraid it would
need more explaining than you could ever manage.  No, I shall stay
here."

"But if you're in danger?"

"I'm a Russian.  My place is here.  I will not leave my country when
most my country needs me."

"That is the bunk, Delilah," said Mr. Harrington very quietly.

Anastasia Alexandrovna had spoken with deep emotion, but now with a
little start she shot a sudden quizzical look at him.

"I know it is, Samson," she answered.  "To tell you the truth I think
we're all going to have a hell of a time, God knows what's going to
happen, but I want to see; I wouldn't miss a minute of it for the
world."

Mr. Harrington shook his head.

"Curiosity is the bane of your sex, Delilah," he said.

"Go along and do your packing, Mr. Harrington," said Ashenden, smiling,
"and then we'll take you to the station.  The train will be besieged."

"Very well, I'll go.  And I shan't be sorry either.  I haven't had a
decent meal since I came here and I've done a thing I never thought I
should have to do in my life, I've drunk my coffee without sugar and
when I've been lucky enough to get a little piece of black bread I've
had to eat it without butter.  Mrs. Harrington will never believe me
when I tell her what I've gone through.  What this country wants is
organisation."

When he left them Ashenden and Anastasia Alexandrovna talked over the
situation.  Ashenden was depressed because all his careful schemes had
come to nothing, but Anastasia Alexandrovna was excited and she
hazarded every sort of guess about the outcome of this new revolution.
She pretended to be very serious, but in her heart she looked upon it
all very much as a thrilling play.  She wanted more and more things to
happen.  Then there was another knock at the door and before Ashenden
could answer Mr. Harrington burst in.

"Really the service at this hotel is a scandal," he cried heatedly.
"I've been ringing my bell for fifteen minutes and I can't get anyone
to pay the smallest attention to me."

"Service?" exclaimed Anastasia Alexandrovna.  "There is not a servant
left in the hotel."

"But I want my washing.  They promised to let me have it back last
night."

"I'm afraid you haven't got much chance of getting it now," said
Ashenden.

"I'm not going to leave without my washing.  Four shirts, two union
suits, a pair of pyjamas, and four collars.  I wash my handkerchiefs
and socks in my room.  I want my washing and I'm not going to leave
this hotel without it."

"Don't be a fool," cried Ashenden.  "What you've got to do is to get
out of here while the going's good.  If there are no servants to get it
you'll just have to leave your washing behind you."

"Pardon me, sir, I shall do nothing of the kind.  I'll go and fetch it
myself.  I've suffered enough at the hands of this country and I'm not
going to leave four perfectly good shirts to be worn by a lot of dirty
Bolsheviks.  No, sir.  I do not leave Russia till I have my washing."

Anastasia Alexandrovna stared at the floor for a moment; then with a
little smile looked up.  It seemed to Ashenden that there was something
in her that responded to Mr. Harrington's futile obstinacy.  In her
Russian way she understood that Mr. Harrington could not leave
Petrograd without his washing.  His insistence had given it the value
of a symbol.

"I'll go downstairs and see if I can find anybody about who knows where
the laundry is and if I can, I'll go with you and you can bring your
washing away with you."

Mr. Harrington unbent.  He answered with that sweet and disarming smile
of his.

"That's terribly kind of you, Delilah.  I don't mind if it's ready or
not, I'll take it just as it is."

Anastasia Alexandrovna left them.

"Well, what do you think of Russia and the Russians now?" Mr.
Harrington asked Ashenden.

"I'm fed up with them.  I'm fed up with Tolstoi, I'm fed up with
Turgenev and Dostoievsky, I'm fed up with Chekoff.  I'm fed up with the
Intelligentsia.  I hanker after people who know their mind from one
minute to another, who mean what they say an hour after they've said
it, whose word you can rely on; I'm sick of fine phrases, and oratory
and attitudinising."

Ashenden, bitten by the prevailing ill, was about to make a speech when
he was interrupted by a rattle as of peas on a drum.  In the city, so
strangely silent, it sounded abrupt and odd.

"What's that?" asked Mr. Harrington.

"Rifle firing.  On the other side of the river, I should think."

Mr. Harrington gave a funny little look.  He laughed, but his face was
a trifle pale; he did not like it, and Ashenden did not blame him.

"I think it's high time I got out.  I shouldn't so much mind for
myself, but I've got a wife and children to think of.  I haven't had a
letter from Mrs. Harrington for so long I'm a bit worried."  He paused
an instant.  "I'd like you to know Mrs. Harrington, she's a very
wonderful woman.  She's the best wife a man ever had.  Until I came
here I'd not been separated from her for more than three days since we
were married."

Anastasia Alexandrovna came back and told them that she had found the
address.

"It's about forty minutes' walk from here and if you'll come now I'll
go with you," she said.

"I'm ready."

"You'd better look out," said Ashenden.  "I don't believe the streets
are very healthy to-day."

Anastasia Alexandrovna looked at Mr. Harrington.

"I must have my washing, Delilah," he said.  "I should never rest in
peace if I left it behind me and Mrs. Harrington would never let me
hear the last of it."

"Come on then."

They set out and Ashenden went on with the dreary business of
translating into a very complicated code the shattering news he had to
give.  It was a long message, and then he had to ask for instructions
upon his own movements.  It was a mechanical job and yet it was one in
which you could not allow your attention to wander.  The mistake of a
single figure might make a whole sentence incomprehensible.

Suddenly his door was burst open and Anastasia Alexandrovna flung into
the room.  She had lost her hat and was dishevelled.  She was panting.
Her eyes were starting out of her head and she was obviously in a state
of great excitement.

"Where's Mr. Harrington?" she cried.  "Isn't he here?"

"No."

"Is he in his bedroom?"

"I don't know.  Why, what's the matter?  We'll go and look if you like.
Why didn't you bring him along with you?"

They walked down the passage and knocked at Mr. Harrington's door;
there was no answer; they tried the handle; the door was locked.

"He's not there."

They went back to Ashenden's room.  Anastasia Alexandrovna sank into a
chair.

"Give me a glass of water, will you?  I'm out of breath.  I've been
running."

She drank the water Ashenden poured out for her.  She gave a sudden sob.

"I hope he's all right.  I should never forgive myself if he was hurt.
I was hoping he would have got here before me.  He got his washing all
right.  We found the place.  There was only an old woman there and they
didn't want to let us take it, but we insisted.  Mr. Harrington was
furious because it hadn't been touched.  It was exactly as he had sent
it.  They'd promised it last night and it was still in the bundle that
Mr. Harrington had made himself.  I said that was Russia and Mr.
Harrington said he preferred coloured people.  I'd led him by side
streets because I thought it was better, and we started to come back
again.  We passed at the top of a street and at the bottom of it I saw
a little crowd.  There was a man addressing them.

"'Let's go and hear what he's saying,' I said.

"I could see they were arguing.  It looked exciting.  I wanted to know
what was happening.

"'Come along, Delilah,' he said.  'Let us mind out own business.'

"'You go back to the hotel and do your packing.  I'm going to see the
fun,' I said.

"I ran down the street and he followed me.  There were about two or
three hundred people there and a student was addressing them.  There
were some working men and they were shouting at him.  I love a row and
I edged my way into the crowd.  Suddenly we heard the sound of shots
and before you could realise what was happening two armoured cars came
dashing down the street.  There were soldiers in them and they were
firing as they went.  I don't know why.  For fun, I suppose, or because
they were drunk.  We all scattered like a lot of rabbits.  We just ran
for our lives.  I lost Mr. Harrington.  I can't make out why he isn't
here.  Do you think something has happened to him?"

Ashenden was silent for a while.

"We'd better go out and look for him," he said.  "I don't know why the
devil he couldn't leave his washing."

"I understand, I understand so well."

"That's a comfort," said Ashenden irritably.  "Let's go."

He put on his hat and coat, and they walked downstairs.  The hotel
seemed strangely empty.  They went out into the street.  There was
hardly anyone to be seen.  They walked along.  The trams were not
running and the silence in the great city was uncanny.  The shops were
closed.  It was quite startling when a motor-car dashed by at breakneck
speed.  The people they passed looked frightened and downcast.  When
they had to go through a main thoroughfare they hastened their steps.
A lot of people were there and they stood about irresolutely as though
they did not know what to do next.  Reservists in their shabby grey
were walking down the middle of the roadway in little bunches.  They
did not speak.  They looked like sheep looking for their shepherd.
Then they came to the street down which Anastasia Alexandrovna had run,
but they entered it from the opposite end.  A number of windows had
been broken by the wild shooting.  It was quite empty.  You could see
where the people had scattered, for strewn about were articles they had
dropped in their haste, books, a man's hat, a lady's bag and a basket.
Anastasia Alexandrovna touched Ashenden's arm to draw his attention:
sitting on the pavement, her head bent right down to her lap, was a
woman and she was dead.  A little way on two men had fallen together.
They were dead too.  The wounded, one supposed, had managed to drag
themselves away or their friends had carried them.  Then they found Mr.
Harrington.  His derby had rolled in the gutter.  He lay on his face,
in a pool of blood, his bald head, with its prominent bones, very
white; his neat black coat smeared and muddy.  But his hand was
clenched tight on the parcel that contained four shirts, two union
suits, a pair of pyjamas and four collars.  Mr. Harrington had not let
his washing go.



THE END



      *      *      *      *      *




  _Books by W. Somerset Maugham_

  LIZA OF LAMBETH
  MRS. CRADDOCK
  THE MAGICIAN
  OF HUMAN BONDAGE
  THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
  THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF
  ON A CHINESE SCREEN
  THE PAINTED VEIL
  THE CASUARINA TREE
  ASHENDEN
  THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR
  CAKES AND ALE
  FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
  THE NARROW CORNER
  AH KING
  DON FERNANDO
  COSMOPOLITANS
  THEATRE
  THE SUMMING UP
  CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
  BOOKS AND YOU
  THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE
  UP AT THE VILLA
  STRICTLY PERSONAL
  THE RAZOR'S EDGE
  THEN AND NOW
  CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE
  CATALINA
  HERE AND THERE (_Collection of Short Stories_)
  QUARTET (_Four Short Stories with Film Script_)
  A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK
  TRIO (_Three Short Stories with Film Scripts_)
  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES (_3 Vols._)
  ENCORE (_Three Short Stories with Film Scripts_)
  THE VAGRANT MOOD
  THE COLLECTED PLAYS (_3 Vols._)
  THE SELECTED NOVELS (_3 Vols._)
  THE PARTIAL VIEW
  TEN NOVELS AND THEIR AUTHORS
  THE TRAVEL BOOKS
  POINTS OF VIEW






[End of Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham]
