The Sleuth of St. James's Square, Melville Davisson Post [learn to read activity book .txt] 📗

“Besides, we have his word that, after what happened in the cabin, everything else that occurred that morning on the transport was a blank to the man; was walled off from his consciousness, and these words were the first impulse of one returning to a realization of events.”

Sir Henry Marquis reflected.

“I think they were,” he continued. “They have the mark of spontaneity; of the first disgust of one grasping the fact that he was being threatened.”

The Baronet paused.

“The event had a great effect on England,” he said. “And it helped to restore our shattered respect for a desperate enemy. The Hun commander didn't sink the transport, and he didn't shoot St. Alban. It's true there was a sort of gentleman's agreement among the enemies that hospital transports should not be sunk.

“But anything was likely to happen just then. The Hun had failed to subjugate the world, and he was a barbarous, mad creature. England believed that something noble in St. Alban worked the miracle.

“'You're a brave man!'

“Some persons on the transport testified to such a comment from the submarine commander. At any rate, he went back to his U-boat and the undersea.

“That's the last they saw of him. The transport came on into Dover.

“England thought the affair was one of the adventures of the sea. A chance thing, that happened by accident. But there was one man in England who knew better.”

“You?” I said.

The Baronet shrugged his shoulders.

“St. Alban,” he answered.

He got up and began to walk about the terrace. I sat with the cup of tea cooling before me. The big man walked slowly with his fingers linked behind him. Finally he stopped. His voice was deep and reflective.

“'Man is altogether the sport of fortune!'... I read that in Herodotus, in a form at Rugby. I never thought about it again. But it's God's truth. St. Alban was at Rugby. I often wonder if he remembered it. My word, he lived to verify it! Herodotus couldn't cite a case to equal him. And the old Greek wasn't hemmed in by the truth. I maintain that the man's case has no parallel.

“To have all the painstaking labor of years negatived by one enveloping, vicious misfortune; to be beaten out of life by it, and at the same time to gain that monument out yonder and one's niche as hero by the grim device of an enemy's satire; by the acting of a scene that one would never have taken part in if one had realized it, is beyond any complication of tragedy known to the Greek.

“Look at the three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled in the legends of any people.”

The Baronet went on in a deep level voice.

“There was a vicious vitality behind the whole desperate business. Every visible impression of the thing was wrong. Every conception of it held today by the English people is wrong!

“The German submarine didn't overhaul the hospital transport in the Channel by accident. The Hun commander didn't fail to sink the transport out of any humane motives. He didn't fail to shoot St. Alban because he was moved by the heroism of the man. It was all grim calculation!

“He thought it was safe to let St. Alban go ahead. And he would have been right if St. Alban had been the great egotist that he was.

“The commander of that submarine was Plutonburg of Prussia. He was the right-hand man of old Von Tirpitz. He was the one man in the German navy who never ceased to urge its Admiralty to sink everything. He loathed every fiber of the English people. We had all sorts of testimony to that. The trawlers and freightboat captains brought it in. He staged his piracies to a theatrical frightfulness. 'Old England!' he would say, when he climbed up out of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and looked about him at the sailors, 'Old, is right, old and rotten!' Then he would smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke. 'But in a world that the Prussian inhabits a nation, old and rotten, may endure for a time, but it shall not endure forever!'

“Plutonburg didn't let St. Alban and the transport go ahead out of the promptings of a noble nature. He did it because he hated England, and he wanted St. Alban to live on in the hell he had trapped him into. He counted on his keeping silent. But the Hun made a mistake.

“St. Alban didn't measure up to the standard of Prussian egoism by which Plutonburg estimated him.”

Sir Henry continued in the same even voice. The levels of emotion in his narrative did not move him.

“Did you ever see the picture of Plutonburg, in Munich? He had a face like Chemosh. And he dressed the part. Other under-boat commanders wore the conventional naval cap, but Plutonburg always wore a steel helmet with a corrugated earpiece. Some artist under the frightfulness dogma must have designed it for him. It framed his face down to the jaw. The face looked like it was set in iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy, menacing face; the sort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a threatening war-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him. One thinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagine anything human in it, except a cruel satanic humor.

“He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on the transport, when he let St. Alban go on.”

The Baronet looked down at me.

“Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg that England applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece of sheer, hellish malignity, if there ever was an instance.”

Sir Henry took a turn across the terrace, for a moment silent. Then he went on:

“And in fact, everything in the heroic event on the deck of the transport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St. Alban. As I have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort of hell he wanted him in, and he didn't propose to let him out with a bullet. And St. Alban ought to have known it, unless, as he afterwards said, the whole thing from the first awful moment in the cabin was simply walled out of his consciousness, until he began dimly to realize up there in the sun, in the crowd, that he was being threatened and blurted out his words from a sort of awful disgust.”

Again he paused.

“Plutonburg was right about having St. Alban in the crater of the pit. But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard. St. Alban came on to London. He got the heads of the War Office together and told them. I was there. It was the devil's own muddle of a contrast. Outside, London was