CHAPTER V.\
FROM THAT WHICH IS WRITTEN
1
For several moments I was dumbfounded. Suspect B had shown his hand! In spite of all my precautions, I had been tracked. We confronted one another in silence, then:
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, “and I can’t imagine where you have sprung from.”
“Easy answered.” Kluster rolled the unlighted cigar from one end of his flexible mouth to the other. “I mean we both belong in the same camp. And I didn’t spring from any place; I just walked up.”
“Walked up?”
“You said it. I came along beside the baby canyon. That was your route.”
“But I heard no sound.”
“I don’t make any sound when I don’t want to. Besides, you were busy.”
“Do you mean,” I demanded angrily, “that you have been following me?”
“No, sir. I got here first.”
“What!”
“You passed me by the little old cave back there. As soon as you were all set I crept up on you.”
Anger left me. The man’s imperturbable ill-humour was defeating. If, in spite of his surly friendliness, he “belonged” in the enemy camp, at least he was a comprehensible flesh-and-blood American citizen. Really, I hadn’t a scrap of evidence connecting him with the purpose of my journey, except his friendship with Mme. Yburg. After all, the Devil’s Elbow was open to the public; and amid all this phantasmagoria it was good to get to grips with sanity; therefore:
“At the moment, Mr. Kluster,” I said, “you definitely have the advantage. I don’t know how you got here, and I don’t know why you came here. I don’t even know who you are, except that your name is Kluster——”
As I spoke, he had been regarding me under drooping lids—lids which concealed a pair of lancet-keen gray eyes. Now, he interrupted, and:
“Wrong!” said he: “it isn’t! That’s the name in my passport, but Washington knows different.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“It’s easy. Your job’s covering the Felsenweir circus-newspaper commission, I guess. Mine’s the same—United States Secret Service. Name of Lonergan—John Lonergan. We might as well work together. I don’t want publicity at the wrong time.”
“But”—I was temporarily at a loss for words—“might I ask what Felsenweir has to do with the United States?”
“You might,” he returned sourly. “A newspaper man might ask any damn thing. Are you the Brian Woodville who went up the Rio Negro for the New York Bulletin?”
“I am.”
“Glad to know you better,” said this extraordinary individual. “How are you fixed from now on? We ought to pool notes.”
Perhaps, as coldly recorded, there would seem to be nothing in this interview on the Devil’s Elbow to have convinced any but a credulous fool that Mr. Aldous P. Kluster was what he now claimed to be. Yet, for my part, I never doubted him. I saw the man in a new light. Much that had been obscure became obvious. I experienced an intense curiosity; and:
“I am meeting Mme. Yburg for tea,” I replied truthfully, “and I am dining with M. Paul. Shall we meet somewhere later?”
“You bet we shall,” he replied. He glanced down at the Zeiss glasses. “Seen anything fresh?” he asked.
And, at the question, realizing that I stood on the brink of a precipice with a stranger—probably armed; how only one other knew of my presence there—the chauffeur, a suspicious character—I suffered a revulsion of sentiment.
“I’ve watched for hours,” Kluster (or Lonergan) went on. “Not from here. This look-out is a hundred per cent right. From three parts up the Mercuriusberg. I’ve seen the figures patrolling, but not a damn thing else.”
I laughed to hide embarrassment—silently cursing my cowardly qualms.
“I saw them to-day for the first time.”
He nodded, rolling the cigar between his lips.
“Didn’t know why you were coming here,” he murmured. “Plain enough now. I covered you early this morning. The gink driving the car fell for ten dollars and brought me here first! Listen. Mme. Yburg is clever. Play for safety. Paul beats me. But tell him nothing. Got it clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“I’ll go first, if it’s all the same to you, and send the car back. Don’t let the driver know you’re wise to him. And do your look-out from farther beyond where the sun doesn’t get your lenses. I don’t know what kind of things live in Felsenweir, but I guess they can see. Ten o’clock outside the Kurhaus. Some table left of the steps. I’ll look for you.”
2
When I joined Mme. Yburg at the Casino, her manner struck me as odd. She was charming as ever, conveying that sense of coolness, physical as well as mental, which was part and parcel of her personality. She wore green, with a little tight-fitting hat which for some reason set me thinking of gnomes and fairies—and so brought back a memory of the grotto under the Devil’s Elbow.
Her beautiful, calm eyes studied me with disturbing frankness, as the waiter brought tea.
“Has your busy day been successful?” she asked.
“Not entirely,” I replied. “And yours?”
“I had lunch on the Mercuriusberg,” she said, removing a handbag to make room for the tea tray. “Very much like a tripper, as you call it; but I adore the view.”
“It must be a familiar view?”
She smiled, and glanced aside as the band began to play again. Her long, psychic hands fascinated.
“My husband had a villa here. But we were rarely in Baden.”
“I’m sorry. Have I stirred up unhappy memories?”
“Not at all.” Her regard became fixed upon me once more. “My marriage was not entirely happy—what marriage is? And if I had any regrets, time has softened them. My husband has been dead for eleven years.”
“The war?” I suggested gently.
She nodded.
Upon my sympathy, my natural sympathy with any victim of that ghastly international tragedy, came hot-foot the most poisonous suspicions. She played cleverly. A beautiful widow bereaved by one’s own countrymen or allies—it might be, by one’s own hand—is a distractingly appealing figure. “Mme. Yburg is clever”—the strident voice seemed to ring in my ears. “Play for safety.…” Had she been to the Mercuriusberg?
A number of dancers took the floor, and:
“Shall we dance?” I asked.
Mme. Yburg, watching me with those calm eyes in which lay so old and so dearly bought a wisdom as well as a smile which irritated whilst it caressed, shook her head slightly.
“You don’t really want to, do you?”
“Frankly, I don’t. I should rather talk here.”
“So should I.”
As a result, we talked—about a hundred and one things. But never about the Black Forest and its secrets. Mme. Yburg knew the world almost as well as I knew it. My only advantage was in respect of inaccessible spots right off the map. Europe, Asia, Africa, America—she had travelled them all. Her knowledge of human character left me miles behind. She made me feel like an infant. Only when—out of pity, I think, for my masculine inferiority—she led me on to talk of the Sahara and of the unexplored country up the Rio Negro, did I recover my poise. At last:
“There are still a lot of jobs,” she said—she spoke vernacular English in a fascinating unfamiliar way—“which only a man can do.”
Her words awakened me to the passage of time. I had been absorbed in that most delightful task—talking about myself to an attractive and sympathetic woman. The band had ceased, and departed. I glanced at my wrist watch, and:
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Please forgive me! We have barely time to dress!”
“You are forgiven,” said Mme. Yburg. “You have made me forget.…”
3
It was all of a quarter to seven when I joined M. Paul in the bar. His resplendence was difficult to define: but he made me feel dowdy. He wore dinner kit which would have caused the editor of the Tailor and Cutter to scream with joy; but I was well turned out, too, for that matter. It was the personality of the man, plus his faultless clothes, which created the impression.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, and leaped from his stool, regardless of the criticism of other occupants of the bar. “It is you—on the very tick of time!”
“A couple of ticks behind, to be exact,” I murmured.
I had previously grappled with the problem of what it was about the Frenchman’s mode of speech which intrigued me. At this moment I grasped it. He used the latest slang with facility—but gave the terms a new quality. In other words, reported, much of his conversation would have read like that of an Englishman; heard, it was peculiarly different.
He swept aside my natural suggestion with dramatic scorn.
“No, no!” he cried. “To-night I am host!”
Host he was—and a number-one host he proved himself to be. He had ordered dinner at the Kurhaus—not, he explained, because he regarded the cuisine there as superior to that of the Regal, but “because it is always a change.”
I perceived, when we had taken our places at a reserved window table where we could both see and hear the excellent orchestra, that M. Paul was a gourmet of discrimination. He had ordered a dinner—upon which he invited my amateur comments—that displayed Teutonic cookery to its greatest advantage. This evidenced genius. So many people order a French meal in a German restaurant.
Any doubts I had had respecting my later appointment at the Kurhaus were speedily removed by M. Paul.
“I hope it does not mean loneliness for you,” he said. “But at half-past nine I must run away.”
It suited me very well and I said so.
“Good,” said M. Paul. “Then we can enjoy our dinner.”
He talked of many things, and entertainingly, but ere long, as I had anticipated, touched upon Mme. Yburg, to whom he referred as “your charming little friend.”
I took him up on that, knowing the expression, translated into the speaker’s tongue, to possess a subtly different meaning.
“Mme. Yburg is certainly charming,” I agreed; “and we are friends. But only friends. We met a week ago.”
His keen, handsome, actor’s face registered a momentary surprise which I could have sworn was real. But believing, as I did, that M. Paul and Mme. Yburg were allies in a thus far incomprehensible conspiracy, I challenged my own judgment. In the woman’s society, that afternoon, I had certainly forgotten, or had dismissed, those mediæval ideas which I had built up around her. Now, I asked myself if I was in the company of a dupe or of an accomplice.
Mme. Yburg was fascinating; I had experienced the thrall of her peculiar personality. Was this brilliant Frenchman, with his feverishly bright eyes and pale skin, a discarded fly? Had the spider bled him white and cast him away? And was the poor infatuated victim jealously searching the horizon for who should be his successor? Or… ?
“You surprise me, Mr. Woodville,” he said—and his sincerity one would have set beyond dispute. “I quite thought you were old friends.”
He looked at me in a new way, and began to talk about Paris.
I was nonplussed, and I fenced so badly in my subsequent attempts to draw the conversation into desired channels that I began to wonder if all my theories about M. Paul were wrong! A welcome turn was given to a very aimless conversation by my companion.
Gazing rapturously over my left shoulder:
“Ah, name of a good little man,” he murmured—“how exquisite! No! it cannot be that she is German.”
His racial prejudice made me laugh, but:
“Laugh, my friend, if you wish,” he said. “But the goddess Diana is reborn a mortal. See, here is our coffee. You may move your chair. Please select a cigar”—the head waiter had brought a case—“and share with me the joy of looking at a beautiful girl.”
I declined the cigar—I never smoke them—but lighted a cigarette and turned as M. Paul suggested. The object of his interest was unmistakable. She sat at a table not far removed, in the company of a plain, elderly lady than whom a more formidable duenna could not well be imagined.
Perhaps it was “written,” as the Moslems have it; but, at the moment of my turning, the girl was looking in our direction. I found myself meeting a grave regard from the most liquid, frank, yet searching blue eyes I had ever seen.
Their glance held me. I stared too long for courtesy. “Diana reborn” was not so extravagant as I had supposed. The subject of M. Paul’s poetry was deliciously tanned as one would imagine that divinity to have been. Her perfect arms and shoulders seemed to have absorbed the glow of sunlight. She was joyously, naïvely youthful, and her hair was a golden bronze such as surely must have crowned the Greek goddess.
No doubt my honest admiration was all too apparent. The girl flushed and glanced aside. I found myself focussed by a pair of black-rimmed spectacles worn by the duenna, which resembled dragon’s eyes.
Embarrassed by my own bad form, I turned to M. Paul. But he was dreamily gazing over my left shoulder. The orchestra outside in the gardens began to play, and:
“Was I not right?” he murmured. “They are playing the Fire Music. See! it calls to her—the grandeur of Germany’s only genius! She has a beautiful soul in a beautiful body!”