The Spy Paramount

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “Read it to me,” he begged. “My eyes are blind with the horrors they have looked upon.”

  “It is my first report to headquarters,” Dumesnil confided.

  “I have to report that ten apparently enemy aeroplanes endeavoured to cross the frontier to-night at varying distances. All ten machines were at once destroyed and all pilots are believed to have perished. I regret also to announce that Air-Marshal Luigi Bastani, one of the observers selected by the Italian War Office, having left the shelter provided, was killed by the falling fragments of one of the planes.

  “Dumesnil,

  “Colonel.”

  “The Air-Marshal’s body was brought in a few minutes ago,” the Colonel announced…. “My orderly has prepared coffee in the messroom.”

  A soldier servant threw open the door of the next room. Somehow or other everyone staggered in that direction. The windows looked across the precipice to the mountains eastward. As they sank into their places the first rays of the rising sun in ribald beauty moved across the snows.

  Chapter XXX

  Fawley reached Berlin a tired man with the firm determination, however, to sleep for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time he came back into the world, submitted himself to the full ministrations of an adequate coiffeur, and sent round a note asking for an interview with Heinrich Behrling. There seemed to be some slight hesitation about granting his request, but in the end it was acceded to. Behrling, now established in a palace, received him a little coolly.

  “You lacked confidence in me, I fear, Major Fawley,” Behrling remarked, motioning him towards a chair but making no effort to shake hands. “Well, you see what has happened. I suppose you know? Some of the newspapers have done their best to hide their heads in the sand, but the truth is all the time there.”

  “I never lacked confidence in you,” Fawley said. “I never doubted your star. You have triumphed as you deserve to triumph. I have come here to make sure that you retain all that you have won.”

  Behrling moved uneasily in his chair.

  “What do you mean—retain what I have won?” he demanded harshly. “There is no question about that.”

  “Perhaps not,” Fawley replied. “At the same time it is necessary that you should forget the satisfaction of small triumphs. You must rise above them. Italy, if she turned towards anyone, would turn towards you. Any idea of a treaty signed by anyone else on behalf of Germany has been washed out. On the other hand, the treaty itself has vanished.”

  Behrling looked keenly at his visitor. During the last few weeks the former’s appearance had changed. He was wearing well-tailored clothes, his untidy moustache was close cropped, his hair was no longer an unkempt mass; it conformed in its smooth backward brushing to the fashion of the times. Success had agreed with him and he seemed to have gained in dignity and confidence.

  “The treaty has been washed out,” he repeated meditatively.

  “The War Office of Italy has abandoned its scheme,” Fawley confided. “I dare say you know that already. If they had made their alliance with Krust and the monarchists, as at one time seemed probable, they would have remained a vassal state for another thirty years. A merciful Providence—I ask your forgiveness for a somewhat slang phrase—put them on a winner. They distrusted Von Salzenburg, and Krust and Berati were never on good terms.”

  “There was some other happening, though?” Behrling asked, his voice hardening.

  “There was never any intention of keeping you in the dark,” Fawley assured him, “but naturally they did not want the press to get hold of it. France issued a private challenge to Italy and Italy accepted it. What happened will always remain a chapter of secret history, but it was a very wonderful chapter. France and Italy have shaken hands. There will be no war.”

  “Between France and Italy?”

  “There will be no war at all.”

  Behrling sat motionless in his chair. The lines of thought were deeply engraved on his face. He drummed with his fist upon the table. His eyes never left his visitor’s. They seemed as though they were trying to bore their way into the back of his mind.

  “Germany has yet to speak,” he reminded Fawley at last.

  “There is no one who knows better than you yourself,” the latter said calmly, “that Germany cannot go to war without the alliance of another nation.”

  “A million of the finest young men any race has ever produced—”

  Fawley, who was rarely impetuous in conversation, interrupted almost savagely.

  “The most reckless military fanatic who ever breathed, Herr Behrling, would never dare to sacrifice the whole youth of his country in an unequal struggle to gain—God knows what. You are without munitions, a sufficiency of guns, you have not even rifles, you have not the food to support an army, you have not an established commissariat, you have no navy to follow your movements at sea. You cannot make war, Herr Behrling.”

  Behrling’s face was dark with passion.

  “Who are you who come here to tell me what I can and cannot do?” he demanded furiously. “You appear first as an envoy of Italy. You are an American who bargains in Downing Street. You were at the Quai d’Orsay a week ago. Whose agent are you? For whom do you work?”

  “The time has come for me to answer that question,” Fawley replied. “I am glad that you have asked it. I work for no nation. I work for what people have called a dream but which is soon to become reality. I work for the peace of civilised countries and for the peace of Europe.”

  “You take your instructions from someone,” Behrling insisted.

  “From no one. Nor do I give instructions. I am here, though, to tell you why there will be no war, if you care to listen.”

  “There have been rumours of a pact,” Behrling remarked cynically. “Pacts I am sick of. They start with acclamation. When the terms are announced, enthusiasm dwindles. In a month or two they are just a pile of parchment.”

  “The pact I am speaking of has survived all these troubles.”

  Behrling squared his shoulders.

  “Well, tell me about it,” he invited with resignation. “I warn you I am no sympathetic listener. I am sick of promises and treaties. The bayonet is the only real olive-branch.”

  “You will have to forget those crisp little journalistic epigrams if you stay where you are, Behrling,” his visitor said firmly.

  Behrling was furious. He rose to his feet and pointed towards the door. Fawley shook his head.

  “Too late, my friend,” he declared. “The pact I am offering you is one already signed at Washington, at Windsor and Downing Street. It has been signed by the President of France and the Premier. It has been signed by the King of Italy and Berati’s master. It only remains to have your signature and Hindenburg’s.”

  “Signed?” Behrling repeated incredulously.

  “Absolutely. It is the simplest of all pacts that has ever been recorded. The secondary tabulated formula of minor conditions will be issued shortly, but they will none of them affect the main point. America, England, France and Italy have entered into a compact that under no circumstances will they go to war. It is to be a five-Power pact. You are the man for whose signature we are waiting now and the thing is finished.”

  “Under no circumstances are we to go to war!” Behrling muttered in dazed fashion.

  “Well, you see you cannot go to war,” Fawley pointed out with a smile, “if there is no one to go to war with.”

  Behrling waved his hand towards the east window with a sweeping gesture and his companion nodded understandingly.

  “Quite so,” he admitted. “There is Soviet Russia, but Soviet Russia came into the world spouting peace. With America and the four civilised nations of Europe united she will scarcely blacken the pages of history by attempting a bellicose attitude. If she did, there is a special clause which would mean for her economic destruction.”

>   Behrling rose from his place and walked restlessly up and down the room. His pride was hurt, his dreams of the future dimmed. The promises he had made his people were to become, then, impossible. He swung round and faced Fawley.

  “Look here,” he said. “This pact of yours. Well enough for England to sign it—she has all that she needs. Well enough for France—she bled the world in 1919. Well enough for Italy, who could not even conquer Austria and is laden with spoils. What about us? Stripped of everything. The pact comes to us at an evil moment. Peace is great. Peace is a finer condition than warfare—I grant you that; but peace should come at the right moment. It is the wrong moment for Germany.”

  “Others beside you,” Fawley acknowledged, “have seen the matter from that point of view, Behrling. England and America have both discussed it with sympathy. I bring you a great offer—an offer which you can announce as the result of your own policy—a great triumph to salve the humiliation of the country. In consideration of your signing the pact, England will restore to you your colonies.”

  Behrling resumed his perambulations of the room. His heart was lighter. This man with the quiet voice and the indescribable sense of power spoke the truth. War was an impossibility. Here was something to send the people crazy with delight, to make them forget the poison of Versailles. Behrling knew as well as any German how, apart from their intrinsic value, the thought of foreign possessions had always thrilled his country-people. The Polish Corridor—nothing. A matter of arrangement. But the colonies back again! The jewels set once more in her crown, and he—Behrling—the man to proclaim this great happening as the result of his own diplomacy. He resumed his seat.

  “Major Fawley,” he said, “I suppose in all history there has never been a case of an unknown ambassador like you speaking with a voice of such colossal authority. You are known to the world only as an American Secret Service agent who became a free lance and betrayed the country for whom he worked.”

  “In her own interests,” his visitor reminded him, “and in the interests of the world. That is true. But I do not ask you to take my word. It is not I who will bring you the treaty or lead you to it. You will find it at the English Ambassador’s or the American Embassy, I am not sure which. Five minutes will tell us. You can sign it to-day. You can lunch with Martin Green, the American Ambassador, where you will probably meet Lord Inglewood, the Englishman. You can sign it to-day and issue your proclamation to the German people this afternoon. You will have the largest crowd that Germany has ever known shouting outside your residence tonight. The coming of peace to the world, after all, Behrling, is the greatest boon that could happen. I only deal with superficials. You will meet the councillors at both Embassies during the day. You will understand much that I cannot tell you. But nothing can dim the truth. This is peace. And however you may talk, Behrling,” Fawley went on, after a momentary break in his voice, “of the military spirit, the grand sense of patriotism that comes from the souls of the German people, you know and they all know in their calm moments that they too are fathers, they too have their own little circle of friends and shudder at the thought of being robbed of them. War may have its glories. They fade away into blatant vapours if you compare them with the splendours of the peaceful, well-ordered life—the arts progressing, manufactories teeming with work and life, the peoples of every nation blessed without ever-haunting anxiety.”

  Behrling smiled and there was little of the grimness left in his face.

  “You are eloquent, my doyen of Secret Service men,” he observed.

  Fawley smiled back.

  “I think,” he said, “that it is the longest speech I ever made in my life.”

  Behrling was holding the telephone in his hand. He touched a bell and demanded the presence of his secretary. Already he was on fire, yet even in that moment he seemed scarcely able to take his eyes off his visitor.

  “After all,” he remarked, with a smile half-whimsical, half-jealous at the corners of his lips, “you will be the outstanding figure in this business.”

  Fawley shook his head.

  “My name will never be heard,” he declared. “I shall remain what I have been all my life—the Secret Service agent.”

  Chapter XXXI

  The Marchese Marius di Vasena, Italian Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, threw himself into an easy-chair with a sigh of relief. This was the moment for which he had been waiting more or less patiently since the night when he had sheltered Martin Fawley, and Fawley in return had taken him a little way into his confidence, had raised for him with careful and stealthy fingers the curtain which shrouded a Utopian future…. From outside the folding doors came the sound of floods of music distant and near at hand, the shuffling of feet, the subdued hum of happy voices, the fluttering of women’s dresses like the winged passage of a flock of doves.

  “We make history, my friends,” the Marchese exclaimed, with a gesture which would have been dramatic if he himself, like most of the diplomats and politicians of the five countries, had not been somewhat overtired.

  “What sort of a chapter in the world’s history, I wonder,” Prince von Fürstenheim, German Ambassador, speculated. “I have been present at many functions organised to celebrate the launching of a new war. I have never yet heard of a great entertainment like this given to celebrate the coming of perpetual peace. How can there be perpetual peace? Is it not that we mock ourselves?”

  “I do not think so,” Willoughby Johns declared. “There has never before been such a unanimous and vociferous European Press. This pact of ours, through its sheer simplicity, seems to have touched the imagination of millions.”

  The great ball at the American Embassy to celebrate the formal signing of the greatest of written documents since the Magna Charta was in full swing. The Marchese, however, felt that he had done his duty. A young Prince connected with the Royal House, whom he had been asked to look after, was safely established in the ballroom outside. He himself had kissed the fingers of his hostess and paid his devoirs to the Ambassador some time ago. He was forming one now of a parti carré with the Right Honourable Willoughby Johns, the English Premier, Prince von Fürstenheim, German Ambassador, and Monsieur Vallauris, the newly appointed delegate of his country from the Quai d’Orsay.

  “I tell you what it is,” the last-named remarked in an outburst half-cynical, half-humorous. “We ambassadors have cut our own throats. What I mean is this. There is no work to be done—no reason for our small army of secretaries and typists. Diplomacy will become a dead letter. Commerce! Commerce! Commerce! That is all our people, at any rate, think about. My visitors, my correspondents, all have to do with matters which concern our consular department.”

  “Capital!” Willoughby Johns commented. “I always thought that the two establishments—diplomatic and commercial—should be joined up.”

  “Nowadays,” Von Fürstenheim pronounced, “there is as much diplomacy in dealing with the commerce of our country as was ever required in the settlement of weightier affairs.”

  “It is a new era upon which we enter,” the Marchese declared.

  “I ask myself and you,” Vallauris propounded, “what is to be the reward which will be offered to this almost unknown person who first of all conceived the idea of the Pact and then carried it through?”

  “Perhaps I can answer that question,” Willoughby Johns observed, lighting a fresh cigarette. “It has been rather a trouble to all of us. What are you to do with a man who is himself a multi-millionaire, who cannot accept a title because he is an American and whose sole desire seems to be to step back into obscurity? However, between us—the Marchese and me—we have done all that is humanly possible. I, or rather my Cabinet, we have presented him with an island and the Marchese has given him a wife.”

  “An island?” Vallauris repeated, a trifle bewildered.

  Willoughby Johns nodded assent.

  “The island,” he confided
, “is the most beautiful one—although of course it is very small—ever owned by the British Government, and the Princess Elida di Rezco di Vasena, the niece of our friend here, is, I think, quite one of the most beautiful of his country-people I have ever seen.”

  “An island,” the Frenchman, who like most of his compatriots was of a social turn of mind, repeated incredulously. “Fancy wanting to live on an island!”

  The Marchese smiled. There was a strange look in his eyes, for he, too, had known romance.

  “You have never met my niece, Monsieur Vallauris,” he observed.

  Epilogue

  Through the driving grey mists of the Channel, battling her way against the mountainous seas of the Bay of Biscay, emerging at last into the rolling waters of the Straits and the sunshine of Gibraltar, the famous yacht Espérance seemed in a sense to be making one of those allegorical voyages of the Middle Ages dimly revealed in ancient volumes of fable and verse. Something of the same spirit had, perhaps, already descended upon her two passengers—Martin Fawley and Elida—as they passed into the warm tranquillity of the Mediterranean. After the turmoil of the last few months a sort of dreaming inertia seemed to have gathered them into her bosom. They were never tired of sitting in their favourite corner on deck, searching the changing sea by day and the starlit or cloud-bespattered sky by night, indulging in odd little bursts of spasmodic conversation, sometimes breaking a silence Elida, for her part declared, with the sole purpose of assuring herself that the whole affair was not a dream.

  In the long daylight hours a new gaiety seemed to have come to her. She was restless with her happiness. She moved about the ship the very spirit of joy—light-footed, a miracle of grace and fantastic devotion to her very little more sedate lover. With the coming of night, however, her mood changed. She needed reassurance—Martin’s arm and lips, the deep obscurity of their retired resting-place. There was excitement in the very throbbing of the engines. There were times when she felt herself shivering with the tremors of repressed passion. Martin surprised himself at the effortless facility with which, at such times, he played the part of lover and husband. With him, too, it seemed, after the hurricane of a stormy life, the opening of the great book of peace and romance….