In Secret

Here, too, bloomed the livid, over-rated edelweiss, dear to the maudlin and sentimental side of an otherwise wolfish race, its rather ghastly flowers starring the rocks.

As at the entrance to a tomb the girl stood straining her frightened eyes to pierce the darkness; then, feeling her way with outstretched pistol-hand, she entered.

The man-fashioned way was smooth. Or Hun or Swiss, whoever had wrought this Via Mala out of the eternal rock, had wrought accurately and well. The grade was not steep; the corridor descended by easy degrees, twisting abruptly to turn again on itself, but always leading downward in thick darkness.

No doubt that those accustomed to travel the Via Mala always carried lights; the air was clean and dry and any lighted torch could have lived in such an atmosphere. But Evelyn Erith carried no lights—had thought of none in the haste of setting out.

Years seemed to her to pass in the dreadful darkness of that descent as she felt her way downward, guided by the touch of her feet and the contact of her hand along the unseen wall.

Again and again she stopped to rest and to check the rush of sheerest terror that threatened at moments her consciousness.

There was no sound in the Via Mala. The thick darkness was like a fabric clogging her movements, swathing her, brushing across her so that she seemed actually to feel the horrible obscurity as some concrete thing impeding her and resting upon her with an increasing weight that bent her slender figure.

There was something grey ahead…. There was light—a sickly pin-point. It seemed to spread but grow duller. A pallid patch widened, became lighter again. And from an infinite distance there came a deadened roaring—the hollow menace of water rushing through depths unseen.

She stood within the shadow zone inside the tunnel and looked out upon the gorge where, level with the huge bowlders all around her, an alpine river raged and dashed against cliff and stone, flinging tons of spray into the air until the whole gorge was a driving sea of mist. Here was the floor of the canon; here was the way they had searched for. Her task was done. And now, on bleeding little feet, she must retrace her steps; the Via Mala must become the Via Dolorosa, and she must turn and ascend that Calvary to the dreadful crest.

She was very weak. Privation had sapped the young virility that had held out so long. She had not eaten for a long while—did not, indeed, crave food any longer. But her thirst raged, and she knelt at a little pool within the cavern walls and bent her bleeding mouth to the icy fillet of water. She drank little, rinsed her mouth and face and dried her lips on her sleeve. And, kneeling so, closed her eyes in utter exhaustion for a moment.

And when she opened them she found herself looking up at two men.

Before she could move one of the men kicked her pistol out of her nerveless hand, caught her by the shoulder and dragged the trench-knife from her convulsive grasp. Then he said in English:

"Get up." And the other, the signalman, struck her across her back with the furled flags so that she lost her balance and fell forward on her face. They got her to her feet and pushed her out among the bowlders, through the storming spray, and across the floor of the ravine into the sunlight of a mossy place all set with trees. And she saw butterflies flitting there through green branches flecked with sunshine.

The officer seated himself on a fallen tree and crossed his heavy feet on a carpet of wild flowers. She stood erect, the signaller holding her right arm above the elbow.

After the officer had leisurely lighted a cigarette he asked her who she was. She made no answer.

"You are the Erith woman, are you not?" he demanded.

She was silent.

"You Yankee slut," he added, nodding to himself and staring up into her bloodless face.

Her eyes wandered; she looked at, but scarcely saw the lovely wildflowers under foot, the butterflies flashing their burnished wings among the sunbeams.

"Drop her arm." The signaller let go and stood at attention.

"Take her knife and pistol and your flags and go across the stream to the hut."

The signaller saluted, gathered the articles mentioned, and went away in that clumping, rocking gait of the land peasant of Hundom.

"Now," said the officer, "strip off your coat!"

She turned scarlet, but he sprang to his feet and tore her coat from her. She fought off every touch; several times he struck her—once so sharply that the blood gushed from her mouth and nose; but still she fought him; and when he had completed his search of her person, he was furious, streaked with sweat and all smeared with her blood.

"Damned cat of a Yankee!" he panted, "stand there where you are or I'll blow your face off!"

But as he emptied the pockets of her coat she seized it and put it on, sobbing out her wrath and contempt of him and his threats as she covered her nearly naked body with the belted jacket and buttoned it to her throat.

He glanced at the papers she had carried, at the few poor articles that had fallen from her pockets, tossed them on the ground beside the log and resumed his seat and cigarette.

"Where's McKay?"

No answer.

"So you tricked us, eh?" he sneered. "You didn't get your rat-poison at the spring after all. The Yankees are foxes after all!" He laughed his loud, nasal, nickering laugh—"Foxes are foxes but men are men. Do you understand that, you damned vixen?"

"Will you let me kill myself?" she asked in a low but steady voice.

He seemed surprised, then realising why she had asked that mercy, showed all his teeth and smirked at her out of narrow-slitted eyes.

"Where is McKay?" he repeated.

She remained mute.

"Will you tell me where he is to be found?"

"No!"

"Will you tell me if I let you go?"

"No."

"Will you tell me if I give you back your trench-knife?"

The white agony in her face interested and amused him and he waited her reply with curiosity.

"No!" she whispered.

"Will you tell me where McKay is to be found if I promise to shoot you before—"

"No!" she burst out with a strangling sob.

He lighted another cigarette and, for a while, considered her musingly as he sat smoking. After a while he said: "You are rather dirty—all over blood. But you ought to be pretty after you're washed." Then he laughed.

The girl swayed where she stood, fighting to retain consciousness.

"How did you discover the Via Mala?" he inquired with blunt curiosity.

"You showed it to me!"

"You slut!" he said between his teeth. Then, still brutishly curious: "How did you know that spring had been poisoned? By those dead birds and animals, I suppose…. And that's what I told everybody, too. The wild things are bound to come and drink. But you and your running-mate are foxes. You made us believe you had gone over the cliff. Yes, even I believed it. It was well done—a true Yankee trick. All the same, foxes are only foxes after all. And here you are."

He got up; she shrank back, and he began to laugh at her.

"Foxes are only foxes, my pretty, dirty one!—but men are men, and a Prussian is a super-man. You had forgotten that, hadn't you, little Yankee?"

He came nearer. She sprang aside and past him and ran for the river; but he caught her at the edge of a black pool that whirled and flung sticky chunks of foam over the bowlders. For a while they fought there in silence, then he said, breathing heavily, "A fox can't drown. Didn't you know that, little fool?"

Her strength was ebbing. He forced her back to the glade and stood there holding her, his inflamed face a sneering, leering mask for the hot hell that her nearness and resistance had awakened in him. Suddenly, still holding her, he jerked his head aside and stared behind him. Then he pushed her violently from him, clutched at his holster, and started to run. And a pistol cracked and he pitched forward across the log upon which he had sat, and lay so, dripping dark blood, and fouling the wild-flowers with the flow.

"Kay!" she said in a weak voice.

McKay, his pack strapped to his back, his blood-shot eyes brilliant in his haggard visage, ran forward and bent over the thing. Then he shot him again, behind the ear.

The rage of the river drowned the sound of the shots; the man in the hut across the stream did not come to the door. But McKay caught sight of the shack; his fierce eyes questioned the girl, and she nodded.

He crossed the stream, leaping from bowlder to bowlder, and she saw him run up to the door of the hut, level his weapon, then enter. She could not hear the shots; she waited, half-dead, until he came out again, reloading his pistol.

She struggled desperately to retain her senses—to fight off the deadly faintness that assailed her. She could scarcely see him as he came swiftly toward her—she put out her arms blindly, felt his fierce clasp envelop her, passed so into blessed unconsciousness.

A drop or two of almost scalding broth aroused her. He held her in his arms and fed her—not much—and then let her stretch out on the sun-hot moss again.

Before sunset he awakened her again, and he fed her—more this time.

Afterward she lay on the moss with her golden-brown eyes partly open. And he had constructed a sponge of clean, velvety moss, and with this he washed her swollen mouth and bruised cheek, and her eyes and throat and hands and feet.

After the sun went down she slept again: and he stretched out beside her, one arm under her head and about her neck.

Moonlight pierced the foliage, silvering everything and inlaying the earth with the delicate tracery of branch and leaf.

Moonlight still silvered her face when she awoke. After a while the shadow slipped from his face, too.

"Kay?" she whispered.

"Yes, Yellow-hair."

And, after a little while she turned her face to his and her lips rested on his.

Lying so, unstirring, she fell asleep once more.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT SECRET

All that morning American infantry had been passing through Delle over the Belfort road. The sun of noon saw no end to them.

The endless column of shadows, keeping pace with them, lengthened with the afternoon along their lengthening line.

Now and then John Recklow opened the heavy wooden door in his garden wall and watched them until duty called him to his telephone or to his room where maps and papers littered the long table. But he always returned to the door in the garden wall when duty permitted and leaned at ease there, smoking his pipe, keen-eyed, impassive, gazing on the unbroken line of young men—men of his own race, sun-scorched, dusty, swinging along the Belfort road, their right elbows brushing Switzerland, their high sun-reddened pillar of dust drifting almost into Germany, and their heavy tread thundering through that artery of France like the prophetic pulse of victory.

A rich September sunset light streamed over them; like a moving shaft of divine fire the ruddy dust marched with them upon their right hand; legions of avenging shadows led them forward where, for nearly half a century beyond the barriers of purple hills, naked and shackled, the martyr-daughters of the Motherland stood waiting—Alsace and Lorraine.

"We are on our way!" laughed the Yankee bugles.

The Fortress of Metz growled "Nein!"

Recklow went back to his telephone. For a long while he remained there very busy with Belfort and Verdun. When again he returned to the green door in his garden wall, the Yankee infantry had passed; and of their passing there remained no trace save for the smouldering pillar of fire towering now higher than the eastern horizon and leagthened to a wall that ran away into the north as far as the eye could see.

His cats had come out into the garden for "the cats' hour"—that mysterious compromise between day and evening when all things feline awake and stretch and wander or sit motionless, alert, listening to occult things. And in the enchantment of that lovely liaison which links day and night—when the gold and rose soften to mauve as the first star is born—John Recklow raised his quiet eyes and saw two dead souls come into his garden by the little door in the wall.

"Is it you, Kay McKay?" he said at last.

But the shock of the encounter still fettered him so that he walked very slowly to the woman who was now moving toward him across the grass.

"Evelyn Erith," he said, taking her thin hands in his own, which were trembling now.

"It's a year," he complained unsteadily.

"More than a year," said McKay in his dead voice.

With his left hand, then, John Recklow took McKay's gaunt hand, and stood so, mute, looking at him and at the girl beside him.

"God!" he said blankly. Then, with no emphasis: "It's rather more than a year!… They sent me two fire-charred skulls—the head of a man and the head of a woman…. That was a year ago…. After your pigeon arrived… I found the scorched skulls wrapped in a Swiss newspaper-lying inside the garden wall—over there on the grass!… And the swine had written your names on the skulls…."

Into Evelyn Erith's eyes there came a vague light—the spectre of a smile. And as Recklow looked at her he remembered the living glory she had once been; and wrath blazed wildly within him. "What have they done to you?" he asked in an unsteady voice. But McKay laid his hand on Recklow's arm:

"Nothing. It is what they have not done—fed her. That's all she needs—and sleep."

Recklow gazed heavily upon her. But if the young fail rapidly, they also respond quickly.

"Come into the house,"

Perhaps it was the hot broth with wine in it that brought a slight colour back into her ghastly face—the face once so youthfully lovely but now as delicate as the mask of death itself.

Candles twinkled on the little table where the girl now lay back listlessly in the depths of an armchair, her chin sunk on her breast.

Recklow sat opposite her, writing on a pad in shorthand. McKay, resting his ragged elbows on the cloth, his haggard face between both hands, went on talking in a colourless, mechanical voice which an iron will alone flogged into speech:

"Killed two of them and took their clothes and papers," he continued monotonously; "that was last August—near the end of the month…. The Boche had tens of thousands working there. AND EVERY ONE OF THEM WAS INSANE."

"What!"

"Yes, that is the way they were operating—the only way they dared operate. I think all that enormous work has been done by the insane during the last forty years. You see, the Boche have nothing to dread from the insane. Anyway the majority of them died in harness. Those who became useless—intractable or crippled—were merely returned to the asylums from which they had been drafted. And the Hun government saw to it that nobody should have access to them.

"Besides, who would believe a crazy man or woman if they babbled about the Great Secret?"

He covered his visage with his bony hands and rested so for a few moments, then, forcing himself again:

"The Hun for forty years has drafted the insane from every asylum in the Empire to do this gigantic work for him. Men, women, even children, chained, guarded, have done the physical work…. The Pyramids were builded so, they say…. And in this manner is being finished that colossal engineering work which is never spoken of among the Huns except when necessary, and which is known among them as The Great Secret…. Recklow, it was conceived as a vast engineering project forty-eight years ago—in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. It was begun that same year…. And it is practically finished. Except for one obstacle."

Recklow's lifted eyes stared at him over his pad.

"It is virtually finished," repeated McKay in his toneless, unaccented voice which carried such terrible conviction to the other man. "Forty-eight years ago the Hun planned a huge underground highway carrying four lines of railroad tracks. It was to begin east of the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Zell, slant into the bowels of the earth, pass deep under the Rhine, deep under the Swiss frontier, deep, deep under Mount Terrible and under the French frontier, and emerge in France BEHIND Belfort, Toul, Nancy, and Verdun."

Recklow laid his pad on the table and looked intently at McKay. The latter said in his ghost of a voice: "You are beginning to suspect my sanity." He turned with an effort and fixed his hollow eyes on Evelyn Erith.

"We are sane," he said. "But I don't blame you, Recklow. We have lived among the mad for more than a year—among thousands and thousands and thousands of them—of men and women and even children in whose minds the light of reason had died out…. Thirty thousand dying minds in which only a dreadful twilight reigned!… I don't know how we endured it—and retained our reason…. Do you, Yellow-hair?"

The girl did not reply. He spoke to her again, then fell silent. For the girl slept, her delicate, deathly face dropped forward on her breast.

Presently McKay turned to Recklow once more; and Recklow picked up his pad with a slight shudder.

"Forty-eight years," repeated McKay—"and the work of the Hun is nearly done—a wide highway under the earth's surface flanked by four lines of rails—broad-gauge tracks—everything now working, all rolling-stock and electric engines moving smoothly and swiftly…. Two tracks carry troops; two carry ammunition and munitions. A highway a hundred feet wide runs between.

"Ten miles from the Rhine, under the earth, there is a Hun city, with a garrison of sixty thousand men!… There are other cities along the line—"

"Deep down!"

"Deep under the earth."

"There must be shafts!" said Recklow hoarsely.

"None."

"No shafts to the surface?"

"Not one."

"No pipe? No communication with the outer air?"

Then McKay's sunken eyes glittered and he stiffened up, and his wasted features seemed to shrink until the parting of his lips showed his teeth. It was a dreadful laughter—his manner, now, of expressing mirth.

"Recklow," he said, "in 1914 that vast enterprise was scheduled to be finished according to plan. With the declaration of war in August the Hun was to have blasted his way to the surface of French soil behind the barrier forts! He was prepared to do it in half an hour's time.

"Do you understand? Do you see how it was planned? For forty-eight years the Hun had been preparing to seize France and crush Europe.

"When the Hun was ready he murdered the Austrian archduke—the most convenient solution of the problem for the Hun Kaiser, who presented himself with the pretext for war by getting rid of the only Austrian with whom he couldn't do business."

Again McKay laughed, silently, showing his discoloured teeth.

"So the archduke died according to plan; and there was war—according to plan. And then, Recklow, GOD'S HAND MOVED!—very slightly—indolently—scarcely stirring at all…. A drop of icy water percolated the limestone on Mount Terrible; other drops followed; linked by these drops a thin stream crept downward in the earth along the limestone fissures, washing away glacial sands that had lodged there since time began."… He leaned forward and his brilliant, sunken eyes peered into Recklow's:

"Since 1914," he said, "the Staubbach has fallen into the bowels of the earth and the Hun has been fighting it miles under the earth's surface.

"They can't operate from the glacier on the white Shoulder of Thusis; whenever they calk it and plug it and stop it with tons of reinforced waterproof concrete—whenever on the surface of the world they dam it and turn it into new channels, it evades them. And in a new place its icy water bursts through—as though every stratum in the Alps dipped toward their underground tunnel to carry the water from the Glacier of Thusis into it!"

He clenched his wasted hands and struck the table without a sound:

"God blocks them, damn them!" he said in his ghost of a voice. "God bars the Boche! They shall not pass!"

He leaned nearer, twisting his clenched fingers together: "We saw them, Recklow. We saw the Staubbach fighting for right of way; we saw the Hun fighting the Staubbach—Darkness battling with Light!—the Hun against the Most High!—miles under the earth's crust, Recklow…. Do you believe in God?"

"Yes."

"Yes…. We saw Him at work—that young girl asleep there, and I—month after month we watched Him check and dismay the modern Pharaoh—we watched Him countermine the Nibelungen and mock their filthy Gott! And Recklow, we laughed, sometimes, where laughter among clouded minds means nothing—nothing even to the Hun—nor causes suspicion nor brings punishment other than the accustomed kick and blow which the Hun reserves for all who are helpless."… He bowed his head in his hands. "All who are weak and stricken," he whispered to himself.

Recklow said: "Did they harm—HER?" And, McKay looked up at that, baring his teeth in a swift snarl:

"No—you see her clipped hair—and the thin body…. In her blouse she passed for a boy, unquestioned, unnoticed. There were thousands of us, you see…. Some of the insane women were badly treated—all of the younger ones…. But she and I were together…. And I had my pistol in reserve—for the crisis!—always in reserve—always ready for her." Recklow nodded. McKay went on:

"We fought the Staubbach in shifts…. And all through those months of autumn and winter there was no chance for us to get away. It is not cold under ground…. It was like a dark, thick dream. We tried to realise that war was going on, over our heads, up above us somewhere in daylight—where there was sun and where stars were…. It was like a thick dream, Recklow. The stars seemed very far…."

"You had passed as inmates of some German asylum?"

"We had killed two landwehr on the Staubbach. That was a year ago last August—" He looked at the sleeping girl beside him: "My little comrade and I undressed the swine and took their uniforms…. After a long while—privations had made us both light-headed I think—we saw a camp of the insane in the woods—a fresh relay from Mulhaus. We talked with their guards—being in Landwehr uniform it was easy. The insane were clothed like miners. Late that night we exchanged clothes with two poor, demented creatures who retained sufficient reason, however, to realise that our uniforms meant freedom…. They crept away into the forest. We remained…. And marched at dawn—straight into the jaws of the Great Secret!"

Recklow had remained at the telephone until dawn. And now Belfort was through with him and Verdun understood, and Paris had relayed to Headquarters and Headquarters had instructed John Recklow.

Before Recklow went to bed he parted his curtain and looked out at the misty dawn.

In the silvery dusk a cock-pheasant was crowing somewhere on a wheat-field's edge. A barnyard chanticleer replied. Clear and truculent rang out the challenge of the Gallic cock in the dawn, warning his wild neighbour to keep to the wilds. So the French trumpets challenge the shrill, barbaric fanfares of the Hun, warning him back into the dull and shadowy wilderness from whence he ventured.

Recklow was awake, dressed, and had breakfasted by eight o'clock.

McKay, in his little chamber on the right, still slept. Evelyn Erith, in the tiny room on the left, slept deeply.

So Recklow went out into his garden, opened the wooden door in the wall, seated himself, lighted his pipe, and watched the Belfort road.

About ten o'clock two American electricians came buzzing up on motor-cycles. Recklow got up and went to the door in the wall as they dismounted. After a short, whispered consultation they guided their machines into the garden, through a paved alley to a tiled shed. Then they went on duty, one taking the telephone in Recklow's private office, the other busying himself with the clutter of maps and papers. And Recklow went back to the door in the wall. About eleven an American motor ambulance drove up. A nurse carrying her luggage got out, and Recklow met her.

After another whispered consultation he picked up the nurse's luggage, led her into the house, and showed her all over it.

"I don't know," he said, "whether they are too badly done in to travel as far as Belfort. There'll be a Yankee regimental doctor here to-day or to-morrow. He'll know. So let 'em sleep. And you can give them the once-over when they wake, and then get busy in the kitchen."

The girl laughed and nodded.

"Be good to them," added Recklow. "They'll get crosses and legions enough but they've got to be well to enjoy them. So keep them in bed until the doctor comes. There are bathrobes and things in my room."