We had a whole day to fill in before we could get any news of Dawson's vigil in the Malplaquet, and I have never known a day as drearily long. Cary and I were both restless as peas on a hot girdle, and could not settle down to talk or to read or to write. Cary sought vainly to persuade me to read and pass judgment upon his Navy Book. In spite of my interest in the subject my soul revolted at the forbidding pile of manuscript. I promised to read the proofs and criticise them with severity, but as for the M.S.—no, thanks. Poor Cary needed all his sweet patience to put up with me. By eleven o'clock we had become unendurable to one another, and I gladly welcomed his suggestion to adjourn to his club, have lunch there, and try to inveigle the Commander of the Malplaquet into our net. "I know him," said Cary. "He is a fine fellow; and though he must be pretty busy, he will be glad to lunch somewhere away from the ship. If we have luck we will go back with him and look over the Malplaquet ourselves."
"If you can manage that, Cary, you will have my blessing."
He did manage to work the luncheon part by telephoning to the yard where the Malplaquet was fitting out, and we left the rest to our personal charms.
Cary was right. The Commander was a very fine fellow, an English naval officer of the best type. He confirmed the views I had frequently heard expressed by others of his profession that no hatred exists between English and German sailors. They leave that to middle-aged civilians who write for newspapers. The German Navy, in his opinion, was "a jolly fine Service," worthy in high courage and skill to contest with us the supremacy of the seas. He had been through the China troubles as a lieutenant in the Monmouth—afterwards sunk by German shot off Coronel—knew von Spee, von Mueller, and other officers of the Pacific Squadron, and spoke of them with enthusiasm. "They sunk some of our ships and we wiped out theirs. That was all in the way of business. We loved them in peace and we loved them in war. They were splendidly loyal to us out in China—von Spee actually transferred some of his ships to the command of our own senior officer so as to avoid any clash of control—and when it came to fighting, they fought like gentlemen. I grant you that their submarine work against merchant ships has been pretty putrid, but I don't believe that was the choice of their Navy. They got their orders from rotten civilians like Kaiser Bill." Imagine if you can the bristling moustache of the Supreme War Lord could he have heard himself described as a civilian!
Our guest had commanded a destroyer in the Jutland battle, and assured us that the handling of the German battle squadrons had been masterly. "They punished us heavily for just so long as they were superior in strength, and then they slipped away before Jellicoe could get his blow in. They kept fending us off with torpedo attacks until the night came down, and then clean vanished. We got in some return smacks after dark at stragglers, but it was very difficult to say how much damage we did. Not much, I expect. Still it was a good battle, as decisive in its way as Trafalgar. It proved that the whole German Fleet could not fight out an action against our full force and have the smallest hope of success. I am just praying for the chance of a whack at them in the Malplaquet. My destroyer was a bonny ship, the best in the flotilla, but the Malplaquet is a real peach. You should see her."
"We mean to," said Cary. "This very afternoon. You shall take us back with you."
The Commander opened his eyes at this cool proposal, but we prevailed upon him to seek the permission of the Admiral-Superintendent, who, a good deal to my surprise, proved to be quite pliable. Cary's reputation for discretion must be very high in the little village where he lives if it is able to guarantee so disreputable a scribbler as Bennet Copplestone! The Admiral, fortunately, had not read any of my Works before they had been censored. When printed in Cornhill they were comparatively harmless.
I must not describe the Malplaquet. Her design was not new to me—I had seen more than one of her type—but as she is now a unit in Beatty's Fleet her existence is not admitted to the world. As we went up and down her many steep narrow ladders, and peered into dark corners, I looked everywhere for a Marine sentry whom I could identify by mark of ear as Dawson. I never saw him, but Trehayne passed me twice, and I found myself again admiring his splendid young manhood. He was not big, being rather slim and wiry than strongly built, but in sheer beauty of face and form he was almost perfectly fashioned. "Do you know that man?" I asked of our commander, indicating Trehayne. "No," said he. "He is one of the shore party. But I should like to have him with me. He is one of the smartest looking petty officers that I have ever seen."
We were shown everything that we desired to see except the transmission room and the upper conning tower—the twin holy of holies in a commissioned ship—and slipped away, escaping the Captain by a bare two minutes. Which was lucky, as he would probably have had us thrown into the "ditch."
The end of the day was as weariful as the beginning, and we were all glad—especially, I expect, Mrs. Cary—to go early to bed. That ill-used lady, to whom we could disclose nothing of our anxieties, must have found us wretched company.
We had finished breakfast the next morning—the Saturday of Dawson's gamble—and were sitting on Cary's big fireguard talking of every subject, except the one which had kept us awake at night, when a servant entered and announced that a soldier was at the door with a message from Mr. Dawson. "Show him in," almost shouted Cary, and I jumped to my feet, stirred for once into a visible display of eagerness.
A Marine came in, dressed in the smart blue sea kit that I love; upon his head the low flat cap of his Corps. He gave us a full swinging salute, and jumped to attention with a click of his heels. He looked about thirty-five, and wore a neatly trimmed dark moustache. His hair, also very dark, was cropped close to his head. Standing there with his hands upon the red seams of his trousers, his chest well filled out, and his face weather tanned, he looked a proper figure of a sea-going soldier. "Mr. Cary, sir," he said, in a flat, monotonous orderly's voice, "Major Boyle's compliments, and could you and your friend come down to the Police Station to meet him and Chief Inspector Dawson. I have a taxi-cab at the door, sir."
"Certainly," cried Cary; "in two minutes we shall be ready."
"Oh, no, we shan't," I remarked calmly, for I had moved to a position of tactical advantage on the Marine's port beam. "We will have the story here, if you don't mind, Dawson."
He stamped pettishly on the floor, whipped off his cap, and spun it across the room. "Confound you, Mr. Copplestone!" he growled. "How the—how the—do you do it?" He could not think of an expletive mild enough for Mrs. Cary's ears. "There's something about me that I can't hide. What is it? If you don't tell, I will get you on the Regulation compelling all British subjects to answer questions addressed to them by a competent naval or military authority."
"You don't happen to be either, Dawson," said I unkindly. "And, beside, there was never yet a law made which could compel a man to speak or a woman to hold her tongue. Some day perhaps, if you are good, I will show you how the trick is done. But not yet. I want to have something to bargain with when you cast me into jail. Out with the story; we are impatient. If I mistake not, you come to us Dawson triumphant. You haven't the air of a broken man."
"I have been successful," he answered gravely, "but I am a long, long way from feeling triumphant. No, thank you, Mrs. Cary, I have had my breakfast, but if I might trouble you for a cup of coffee? Many thanks."
Dawson sat down, and Cary moved about inspecting him from every angle. "No," declared he at last, "I cannot see the smallest resemblance, not the smallest. You were thin; now you are distinctly plump. Your hair was nearly white. Your cheeks had fallen in as if your back teeth were missing. Your lower lip stuck out." Dawson smiled, highly gratified. "I took in all my people at the office this morning," he said. "They all thought, and think still, that I was a messenger from the Malplaquet, which, by the way, is well down the river safe and sound. Just wait a minute." He walked into a corner of the room, moved his hands quickly between his side pockets and his face, and then returned. Except for the dark hair and moustache and the brown skin, he had become the Dawson of the Thursday afternoon. "It is as simple for me to change," said the artist, with a nasty look in my direction, "as it seems to be for Mr. Copplestone here to spot me. It will take a day or two to get the dye out of my hair and the tan off my skin. I am going to have a sharp touch of influenza, which is a useful disease when one wants to lie in. Since Sunday I have only been twice to bed."
We filled him up with coffee and flattery—as one fills a motor car with petrol and oil—but asked him no questions until we were safely in Cary's study and Mrs. Cary had gone about her household duties. "Your good lady," remarked Dawson to Cary, "is as little curious as any woman I have met, and we will leave her at that if you don't mind. The best thing about our women is that they don't care tuppence about naval and military details. If they did, and once started prying with that keen scent and indomitable persistence of theirs, we might as well chuck up. Even my own bright team of charmers never know and never ask the meaning of the information that they ferret out for me. Their curiosity is all personal—about men and women, never about things. Women—"
I cut Dawson short. He tended to become tedious.
"Quite so," I observed politely. "And to revert to one big female creature, let us hear something of the Malplaquet."
"You at any rate are curious enough for a dozen. It would serve you right to keep you hopping a bit longer. But I have a kindly eye for human weakness, though you might not think it. I joined the ship on Thursday afternoon, slipping in as one of a detachment of fifty R.M.L.I. who had been wired for from Chatham. They were an emergency lot; we hadn't enough in the ship for the double sentry go that I wanted. All my plans were made with the Commander and Major Boyle, and they both did exactly what I told them. It isn't often that a private of Marines has the ordering about of two officers. But Dawson is Dawson; no common man. They did as I told them, and were glad to do it. I had extra light bulbs put on all over the lower decks and every dark corner lit up—except one. Just one. And this one was where the four gun-cables ran out of the switch-room and lay alongside one another before they branched off to the fore and after turrets and to the port and starboard side batteries. That was the most likely spot which any one wanting to cut the gun-wires would mark down, and I meant to watch it pretty closely myself. We had double sentries at the magazines. The Malplaquet is an oil-fired ship, so we hadn't any bothering coal bunkers to attract fancy bombs. I was pretty sure that after the Antinous and the Antigone we had mostly wire-cutting to fear. When a man has done one job successfully, and repeated it almost successfully, he is pretty certain to have a third shot. Besides, if one is out to delay a ship, cutting wires is as good a way as any. I had an idea that my man was not a bomber."
"I thought that you scorned theories," I put in dryly. "When they are wrong they mislead you, and when they are right they are no help."
"We were in no danger from the lighting, heating, and telephone wires, for any defect would have been visible at once. It was the gun and gunnery control cables that were the weak spots. So I had L.T.O.'s posted in the spotting top, the conning tower, the transmission room, the four turrets, and at the side batteries. Every few minutes they put through tests which would have shown up at once any wires that had been tampered with. After the shore party had cleared out about nine o'clock on the Thursday, no officer or man was allowed to leave the ship without a special permit from the Commander. This was all dead against the sanitary regulations of the harbour, but I had the Admiral's authority to break any rules I pleased. By the way, you two ought never to have been allowed on board yesterday afternoon—I saw you, though you didn't see me; it was contrary to my orders. I spoke to the Admiral pretty sharp last night. 'Who is responsible for the ship?' says I. 'You or me?' 'You,' says he. 'I leave it at that,' says I."
"One moment, Dawson," I put in. "If the shore party had all gone, how was it that I saw Petty Officer Trehayne in the ship?"
"He had orders to stay and keep watch—though he didn't know I was on board myself. Two pairs of police eyes are better than one pair, and fifty times better than all the Navy eyes in the ship. Of all the simple-minded, unsuspicious beggars in the world, give me a pack of naval ratings! I wouldn't have one of them for sentries—that is why the fifty emergency Marines were sent for." Dawson's limitless pride in his old Service, and deep contempt for the mere sailor, had come back in full flood with the uniform of his Corps.
"I started my own sentry duty in the dark corner I told you of as soon as I had seen to the arrangements all over the Malplaquet, and I was there, with very few breaks of not more than five minutes each for a bite of food, for twenty-six hours. Two Marine sentries took my place whenever I was away. I had my rifle and bayonet, and stood back in a corner of a bulkhead where I couldn't be seen. The hours were awful long; I stood without hardly moving. All the pins and needles out of Redditch seemed to dance up and down me, but I stuck it out—and I had my reward, I had my reward. I did my duty, but it's a sick and sorry man that I am this day."
"There was nothing else to be done," I said. "What you feel now is a nervous reaction."
"That's about it. I watched and watched, never feeling a bit like sleep though my eyes burned something cruel and my feet—they were lumps of prickly wood, not feet. Dull lumps with every now and then a stab as if a tin tack had been driven into them. Beyond me in the open alley-way the light was strong, and I could see men pass frequently, but no one came into my corner till the end, and no one saw me. I heard six bells go in the first watch ('Eleven p.m.,' whispered Cary) on Friday evening, though there was a good bit of noise of getting ready to go out in the early morning, and I was beginning to think that all my trouble might go for naught, when a man in a Navy cap and overalls stopped just opposite my dark hole between two bulkheads. His face was turned from me, as he looked carefully up and down the lighted way. He stood there quite still for some seconds, and then stepped backwards towards me. I could see him plain against the light beyond. He listened for another minute or so, and, satisfied that no one was near, spun on his heels, whipped a tool from his dungaree overalls, and reached up to the wires which ran under the deck beams overhead. In spite of my aching joints and sore feet I was out in a flash and had my bayonet up against his chest. He didn't move till my point was through his clothes and into his flesh. I just shoved till he gave ground, and so, step by step, I pushed him with the point of my bayonet till he was under the lights. His arms had come down, he dropped the big shears with insulated handles which he had drawn from his pocket, but he didn't speak a word to me and I did not speak to him. I just held him there under the lights, and we looked at one another without a word spoken. There was no sign of surprise or fear in his face, just a queer little smile. Suddenly he moved, made a snatch at the front of his overalls, and put something into his mouth. I guessed what it was, but did not try to stop him; it was the best thing that he could do."
Dawson stopped and pulled savagely at his cigar. He jabbed the end with his knife, though the cigar was drawing perfectly well, and gave forth a deep growl which might have been a curse or a sob.
"Have you ever watched an electric bulb fade away when the current is failing?" he asked. "The film pales down from glowing white to dull red, which gets fainter and fainter, little by little, till nothing but the memory of it lingers on your retina. His eyes went out exactly like that bulb. They faded and faded out of his face, which still kept up that queer, twisted smile. I've seen them ever since; wherever I turn. I shall be glad of that bout of influenza, and shall begin it with a stiff dose of veronal…. When the light had nearly gone out of his eyes and he was rocking on his feet, I spoke for the first time. I spoke loud too. 'Good-bye,' I called out; 'I'm Dawson.' He heard me, for his eyes answered with a last flash; then they faded right out and he fell flat on the steel deck. He had died on his feet; his will kept him upright to the end; that was a Man. He lived a Man's life, doing what he thought his duty, and he died a Man's death…. I blew my whistle twice; up clattered a Sergeant with the Marine Guard and stopped where that figure on the deck barred their way. 'Get a stretcher,' I said, 'and send for the doctor. But it won't be any use. The man's dead.' The Sergeant asked sharply for my report, and sent off a couple of men for a stretcher. 'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said, in my best detective officer voice, 'I will report direct to your Major and the Commander. I am Chief Inspector Dawson.' He showed no surprise nor doubt of my word—if you want to understand discipline, gentlemen, get the Marines to teach you—he asked no questions. With one word he called the guard to attention, and himself saluted me—me a private! I handed him my rifle—there was an inch of blood at the point of the bayonet—and hobbled off to the nearest ladder. My word, I could scarcely walk, and as for climbing a ship's ladder—I could never have done if some one hadn't given me a boost behind and some one else a hand at the top. The Commander and the Major of Marines were both in the wardroom; I walked in, saluted them as a self-respecting private should do, and told them the whole story."
"It was Petty Officer Trehayne," said I calmly—and waited for a sensation.
"Of course," replied Dawson, greatly to my annoyance. He might have shown some astonishment at my wonderful intuition; but he didn't, not a scrap. Even Cary was at first disappointing, though he warmed up later, and did me full justice. "Trehayne a spy!" cried Cary. "He looked a smart good man."
"I am not saying that he wasn't," snapped Dawson, whose nerves were very badly on edge. "He was obeying the orders of his superiors as we all have to do. He gave his life, and it was for his country's service. Nobody can do more than that. Don't you go for to slander Trehayne. I watched him die—on his feet."
Cary turned to me. "What made you think it was Trehayne?" he asked. This was better. I looked at Dawson, who was brooding in his chair with his thoughts far away. He was still seeing those eyes fading out under the glare of the electrics between the steel decks of the Malplaquet!
"It was a sheer guess at first," said I, preserving a decent show of modesty. "When I heard how the enemy plotted and Dawson counter-plotted with all those skilled workmen in his detective service, it occurred to me that an enemy with imagination might counter-counterplot by getting men inside Dawson's defences. I couldn't see how one would work it, but if German agents, say, could manage to become trusted servants of Dawson himself, they would have the time of their lives. So far I was guessing at a possibility, however improbable it might seem. Then when Dawson told us that he had sent Trehayne into the Antigone and that he was the one factor common to both vessels—the workmen and the maintenance part were all different—I began to feel that my wild theory might have something in it. I didn't say anything to you, Cary, or to Dawson—he despises theories. Afterwards Trehayne came in and I spoke to him, and he to me, in French. He did not utter a dozen words altogether, but I was absolutely certain that his French had not been learned at an English public school and during short trips on the Continent. I know too much of English school French and of one's opportunities to learn upon Continental trips. It took me three years of hard work to recover from the sort of French which I learned at school, and I am not well yet. The French spoken by Trehayne was the French of the nursery. It was almost, if not quite, his mother tongue, just as his English was. Trehayne's French accent did not fit into Trehayne's history as retailed to us by Dawson. From that moment I plumped for Trehayne as the cutter of gun wires."
Dawson had been listening, though he showed no interest in my speech. When I had quite finished, and was basking in the respectful admiration emanating from dear old Cary, he upset over me a bucket of very cold water.
"Very pretty," said he. "But answer one question. Why did I send Trehayne to the Antigone?"
"Why? How can I tell? You said it was to make sure that the shore party were all off the ship."
"I said! What does it matter what I say! What I do matters a heap, but what I say—pouf! I sent Trehayne to the Antigone to test him. I sent him expecting that he would try to cut her wires, and he did. Then when I was sure, though I had no evidence for a law court, I sent him to the Malplaquet, and I set my trap there for him to walk into. How did I guess? I don't guess; I watch. The more valuable a man is to me, the more I watch him, for he might be even more valuable to somebody else. Trehayne was an excellent man, but he had not been with me a month before I was watching him as closely as any cat. I hadn't been a Marine and served ashore and afloat without knowing a born gentleman when I see one, and knowing, too, the naval stamp. Trehayne was too much of a gentleman to have become a workman in the Vernon and at Greenock without some very good reason. He said that he was an orphan—yes; he said his parents left him penniless, and he had to earn his living the best way he could—yes. Quite good reasons, but they didn't convince me. I was certain sure that somewhere, some time, Trehayne had been a naval officer. I had seen too many during my service to make any mistake about that. So when I stood there waiting in that damned cold corner behind that bulkhead, it was for Trehayne that I was waiting. I meant to take him or to kill him. When he killed himself, I was glad. As I watched his eyes fade out, it was as if my own son was dying on his feet in front of me. But it was better so than to die in front of a firing party. For I—I loved him, and I wished him 'Good-bye,'"
Dawson pitched his cigar into the fire, got up, and walked away to the far side of the room. I had never till that moment completely reverenced the penetrative, infallible judgment of Little Jane.
Dawson came back after a few minutes, picked up another cigar from Cary's box, and sat down. "You see, I have a letter from him. I found it in his quarters where I went straight from the Malplaquet."
"May we read it?" I asked gently. "I was greatly taken with Trehayne myself. He was a clean, beautiful boy. He was an enemy officer on Secret Service; there is no dishonour in that. If he were alive, I could shake his hand as the officer of the firing party shook the hand of Lody before he gave the last order."
Dawson took a paper from his pocket, and handed it to me. "Read it out," said he; "I can't."
