CHAPTER IV.

THE AFFAIR OF MISTER HAYNES

In February, 1915, there occurred an event which I cannot pretend did not give me a certain amount of satisfaction, tragic and ever-to-be regretted as that event proved. I had constantly urged both upon the naval and military Intelligence Departments in Berlin that the work in England should be left entirely in my hands, and that I should not be badgered or embarrassed by amateurs being sent to operate in my territory, independent of my control and very often without my being acquainted with their presence or purpose.

I have already shown how lamentable can be the results if the illustrious Excellencies who direct our operations (in a manner, I hasten to add, which reflects the greatest credit to themselves, and brings the greatest profit to the Fatherland) take the work out of the hands of the skilled and intimately-understanding officials who have made Great Britain a life-long study, who appreciate the psychology, and have an insight into the habits and customs of the people whom Paoli (and not Napoleon) described as “Sono Mercanti,” or “a nation of shopkeepers.”

For I pride myself that I understand not only British character but British institutions. I am deeply intimate with the political sects and with the system of British journalism, and although the affair of Mister Haynes may seem to dispose of this latter claim, yet I think my friends, for whom this memoir is designed, will agree that the circumstances in the case of Mister Haynes were unusual. The event I refer to was the arrest of Herr Blaumberg, who was sent from America without my knowledge to secure an accurate list--“accurate” mark you!--of the warships which the British were laying down, especially in reference to the super-X battleships which were destined to prove Mr. Churchill’s happiest experiment.

Herr Blaumberg had no sooner landed than he was arrested. I received an inquiry from Wilhelmstrasse which was the first information I had of Herr Blaumberg’s foolish attempt to meddle in matters which he obviously did not understand. The second intimation was the official notice in the English papers:

“This morning a man, tried and convicted of espionage at the Central Criminal Court, was executed in the Tower of London.”

This, I believe, was Herr Blaumberg, and in my note to my superiors I could not refrain from urging the unwisdom of entrusting delicate and important work to any but those tried and trusted officials, who were acquainted with every move of the game and able not only to circumvent, but to anticipate the action of the official police.

Of course, the people in Berlin very emphatically restated their old parrot cry that there was a formidable secret service in existence and they sent me a cock-and-bull story (as the British say), that Herr Blaumberg had been shadowed from the moment he left America to the moment he arrived in the Mersey; that all his documents had been scientifically burgled and the fullest particulars of his mission had been transmitted by wireless long before he had reached England.

Thus do incompetent bureaucrats excuse their own lack of foresight!

I was in London when the news came, firmly established in my rôle of Chilian importer, and so well did I play my part, that I had secured certain little Government orders and was even assisted by Government officials, all unknowing, you may be sure, to the pursuit of my investigations.

It was on the very day that I read this doleful news of Herr Blaumberg’s sad end, that I made the acquaintance of Mister Haynes. I saw him standing on the corner of Bouverie and Fleet Streets--a tall, young, unshaven man, wearing pince-nez, and a very shabby suit. With one quick, comprehensive glance I sized him up. The bundle of various coloured pencils and the fountain-pen in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, the absence of watch and chain, the hat carelessly balanced on the back of his head, the hands thrust into his trousers pockets, the drooping cigarette and the listless eyes, which watched the traffic passing up and down, told me as plainly as though his biography had been handed to me, all the history I wished to know.

His linen was not clean, his collar was two or three days old, his boots were down at heel.

With that decision which has always marked my actions I walked up to him with a smile.

“I think I have met you before, have I not?” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me from the crown of my hat to the soles of my boots.

“I daresay,” he said.

“Come and have a drink,” said I briskly, and he obeyed with alacrity.

We turned into the private bar of a public house, ordered our drinks and withdrew to a little round table and a couple of chairs in a corner of the saloon bar.

“I don’t remember your name,” said I, “but I know you are a newspaper man and if I remember rightly you have not had a great deal of luck lately?”

“You have a good memory,” he said, “and if mine was as good I could tell you your name, your age, the place of your birth and the state of your banking account, but, unfortunately, my memory is a little groggy.”

He lifted his drink with a shaking hand. I saw the whole story.

Here was what is commonly called in England, a “liner,” or a free-lance, a man not attached to any newspaper but contributing whatever stories, interviews or articles that come his way. They are not so common in Fleet Street as they used to be when I first came to London. The great news agencies have killed them. The new system of journalism has passed them by. But occasionally you meet a man with that hungry, hard-up look, with a grievance against the world, and a pretty taste in whisky-and-soda, and this was such a one.

Under the genial influence of a second drink he confirmed my diagnosis. He had a grievance against all the papers and admitted that he was on the black-list of three or four for sending in contributions which were not exactly true.

I asked him why he had not enlisted and his lips curved in a sneer. He said he was an Irishman, and that he hated England anyway, and that he hated the army more poisonously than he hated anything else. He hated the war, he hated the Northworths and a long string of other newspaper proprietors, but most of all he hated Fleet Street, its editors, sub-editors, reporters, advertisement managers; in fact, his hatred extended to the very newsboys on the streets.

This was the man for my money. I explained to him that in addition to being a Chilian importer I was running a Chinese news agency to collect and distribute news pertaining or of interest to Europeans in China, and when I told him that I was short of a reporter for news collection and offered him £6 a week, he nearly jumped into the air with delight.

In engaging him I was putting into practice a plan which I had long formed. Here was an opportunity for collecting news without arousing suspicion. A newspaper reporter can ask questions which none of my agents would dare to frame. He can go up and down the country without exciting suspicion, and the mere fact that he is a reporter, is sufficient to give him an entrée into circles, admission to which we could only risk at grave danger to ourselves. An ordinary reporter might have been valueless, but a man with a grievance, a man who was “broke to the wide,” to use Mister Haynes’s own expressive idiom, was especially valuable.

I took him down to the news agency office, and there he had tangible proof of the solidity and bonâ-fides of the agency. The two rooms in Fleet Street, which I had fitted up, were well furnished. The name of the agency was painted on the windows and on the glass panels of the office door, the files of the newspapers were carefully kept by the boy I employed. There were telephones and a “tape machine”--in fact, it was the most convincing environment that German forethought could design. I never saw a man so content as he was when I sat him down at a new desk within reach of the telephone, handed him a £5 note on account of expenses, and outlined the plan of inquiry.

“Do you speak any foreign language?” I asked.

He said he spoke French indifferently and German not at all, which was excellent news.

“My principals,” I explained, “are very anxious, of course, to receive news of the war. The London hospitals are filled with wounded, and I have no doubt that you would be able to obtain admission to the wards and collect the personal narratives of the men as they come home.”

“I get you, Steve,” he said. “You want stories of heroism in battle?”

“Exactly,” I said, “but don’t dwell so much upon the romantical side of the war. Encourage the men to speak not of their own battalions but of the gallant fellows who were fighting on their left and on their right. Find out what other regiments are in their divisions. Learn something about their officers. Who are the most popular and who are the most unpopular. What sort of men are their colonels. We want to see the war at a new angle,” I went on hurriedly, for he looked a little dubious and disappointed, “and we can only do that if we get off the beaten track. When you have written your matter you will hand it to me and I will embody it in my weekly letter to--er--China.”

From the very first my scheme was a success. Not a day passed but Mister Haynes brought into me precisely the information which Headquarters required.

You must understand that unless you take prisoners it is almost impossible to discover what is your enemy’s order of battle. Once you have discovered where certain divisions fit in and what places particular battalions take, you will no longer be in the dark in any subsequent actions in which those divisions take part. For instance, if the Wessex are on the right of the 99th Division and the Royal Hertfordshires are in the centre, and you know the positions of every other battalion, you have only to pick up one prisoner from one battalion at any point of the line to know exactly the disposition of the others.

And here is another matter. A soldier coming back wounded from the front will perhaps tell you that whilst his battalion stood the brunt of an offensive, the battalion on his left did not resist with the same resolution and he will probably give you the reason for this. It may be that the weak battalion has a weak commanding officer, or that the discipline is slack, and once our staff know this they also know where to thrust the arrowhead of subsequent attacks.

The information which was given to the Great General Staff by the indiscriminate publication of soldiers’ letters cannot be exaggerated, and I for one deeply regretted the decision of the English War Office to prohibit their publication.

Mister Haynes brought information of the first class, but nothing so enthralling as that which he brought one afternoon about three weeks after he had started working. I remember the occasion so well. I can see him almost as tangibly as though he stood before me leaning against the desk, his rusty hat on the back of his head, his hands as usual in his pockets.

“I got a queer story from one of those chaps at the London Hospital,” he said, “I don’t know whether I can use it.”

“What is it?” I asked carelessly.

“This man said that every night our front line near Bois Grenier is evacuated to save the men from the effect of the German shelling. As soon as it gets dark the whole line on a front of six miles is withdrawn to the support trenches, and he said he was wounded through being ordered back to the front line before the German’s artillery strafe had finished.”

“That is very interesting,” said I, “on a front of six miles you say?”

“That’s right,” he said, “from Bois Grenier down to Festubert. Do you think I had better use the story?”

“I think not,” I said shaking my head, “I don’t think it would be patriotic. Those horrid Germans might get hold of the information and use it to destroy our brave soldiers.”

“That is what I thought,” said Mister Haynes, though he did not seem very enthusiastic, and indeed, as he told me, his reluctance to impart the information had less to do with the safety of the soldiers than with his own. “I don’t want three months’ hard labour under the Defence of the Realm Act,” he said.

You may be sure that I was not very long in coding this news, though it was some time before I could get my telegram to Stockholm. Apparently the British Government were holding up all messages for forty-eight hours, but this did not worry me so long as it reached its destination eventually.

Naturally I received a reply in a much shorter space of time. In fact, Berlin acknowledged my message within twelve hours of its receipt.

You will remember that in the first week of February we Germans delivered a sudden and fierce attack upon the British front line positions between Festubert and Bois Grenier. Owing to some unhappy and unfortunate change of plan the front lines of the English position were filled with soldiers, but this was probably due to the carelessness of General von Klaus who had assembled his troops for the offensive in broad daylight under the eyes of the British airmen. Von Klaus himself denied this, but that is the theory which I have formed, because Mister Haynes afterwards told me that he had had his story confirmed from three independent sources, and gave me the names of his informants, and even showed me the photograph of one of them.

Klein, who was up on a brief visit to London--he was very busy in South Wales on propaganda work with his friend Mr. Craigmair--was anxious that I should send Mister Haynes to the West of England where certain experiments were being made with a new kind of armoured car. He had attempted to get into the camp, which was guarded as carefully as any prison, and had narrowly escaped being arrested.

It is a well-known fact that long before the famous Tank--that atrocious and unfair weapon which the English used, contrary to the laws of the Hague Convention--came upon the scene, secret experiments were being made. Potsdam had heard of these, and I had received instructions to prosecute my investigations with the greatest vigour.

Naturally rumours were rife, and there were many mares’ nests before, by a lucky chance, our good Klein heard of this experimental camp. I had no difficulty in concocting a story for Mister Haynes. My suggestion was that he should write an article on the marvellous mechanical contrivances which the genius of Britain had brought into being and I despatched him, with Klein, hot upon the scent to investigate and report.

They left by the night train from Paddington and I saw them off. Klein was very decorous, the picture of an English gentleman in his check cap and his long travelling coat, his neat-gloved hands and his English magazine, and Mister Haynes, as untidy as ever, curled up in the corner of the carriage and, I should imagine, asleep before he left the station.

What happened was told me by Klein on the telephone. It was a happening so disconcerting, so mysterious, that I must confess that I regarded the unlooked-for outcome of this adventure with more than ordinary disquietude, even had there not been the more terrible sequel.

They reached their destination, a small West Country town, in the early hours of the morning and went to their hotel where they were joined by Posser, who was working with Klein, and who, deeply conscious of the importance of finding out details of this particular machine, had been spending that day in making judicious inquiries.

They had breakfasted together the next morning, when, of course, no mention was made of the camp or the new armoured car, Klein introducing Posser as his secretary. I might explain that Klein was posing as a Swedish mining engineer who had a patent for sale connected with coal haulage. I had sent Mister Haynes on the same train and in company with Klein, on the pretext that, as Mr. Klein was a friend and was going to the same town, they might travel together and that Mr. Klein might possibly give my reporter certain introductions which would be useful.

Mister Haynes spoke about his mission quite openly, though Klein advised him, laughingly, not to mention his business if he wanted to secure the information he required. Apparently Mister Haynes met with little success, and came back to the hotel to dinner and said that all his efforts to induce any of the soldiers attached to the camp to give him information or to secure admission had been fruitless.

Klein was not greatly perturbed. In fact, he was very much elated because Posser had told him secretly that he intended making his way into the camp that night in the guise of one of the waiters at the officers’ mess. They all ostensibly went to bed soon after ten o’clock. Mister Haynes went to his room and Klein went to his, though not to sleep. He made himself comfortable and took up a book and began reading. Presently he heard a scraping on his door, and smiled, for it was the agreed-on signal that Posser was stealing out into the night to secure his information.

The house was wrapt in sleep at eleven o’clock, and Klein read on.

At one o’clock he heard a tap on the door. His room was next to Mister Haynes, and thinking that Posser could not have returned at so early an hour and that it was Haynes who was knocking, he opened the door. And to his amazement and delight, for he saw success shining on his comrade’s honest face, he admitted Posser.

“I’ve got it!” whispered our good Posser.

“Wait,” said Klein, in the same tone, and kicking off his slippers he went into the corridor, softly opened Haynes’s door and listened. He heard the regular breathing of the reporter, closed the door as softly and came back.

“Now tell me,” he said quickly.

Posser explained how he had walked boldly into the camp in the darkness, and how he had reached the shed, crawling through the sentries, and had seen “the most remarkable machine that the war has produced.”

“It is a triumph, my dear Klein,” he said, his eyes shining, “I have in my head,” he tapped the good, broad German forehead, “the whole construction of this engine. In twelve hours I will give you a drawing and notes which----”

“Hush, hush,” said Klein, for in his natural excitement, Posser’s voice had risen.

“Here is the rough idea.” Posser rapidly sketched a now familiar shape briefly, outlined with rough squares and oblongs the position of the engine and the guns.

“I will keep this,” said Klein. “You must get to work at once, my dear fellow, and give us a more detailed drawing. But first we will drink mutual congratulations.”

Klein got out a bottle of champagne, pulled out the cork, and these two fine fellows, true and loyal sons of the Fatherland, drank in a whisper to the destruction of civilization’s enemy--England!

Klein accompanied Posser to his room. They pulled down the blinds before they switched on the light. Quickly the drawing pads, the rulers, the T-squares and the compasses were taken out of Posser’s suit-case and arrayed on the table.

“Now I will leave you,” said Klein, shook hands heartily with the hero of that night’s adventure and left the room, as he said, without a sound.

He had scarcely got into his own room and shut the door when he heard the click of the lock on Posser’s door and smiled his approval. It was at a quarter to two when he went to bed and at half-past seven the maid brought him a cup of coffee and some biscuits. He drank his coffee and rose, slipped into his dressing-gown and went over to Posser’s room anxious to know what was the result of the night’s work. He tapped at the door. There was no answer. He tapped again. There was still no answer. He tried the handle, remembering at the same time that Herr Posser had locked the door. He was a little surprised to find that the door yielded.

The room was in semi-darkness, the blinds were still drawn and he walked to the window and let the blinds up with a crash.

What he saw, or rather what he did not see, struck him with amazement. The bed had not been slept in. All the drawing material had been cleared. Posser’s trunks were still in the position where he had left them, but there was no sign of Posser.

He went back to his room and rang the bell. The night porter was summoned, but neither he nor any of the servants had seen Posser, who from that moment vanished from the earth as completely as though the ground had opened and swallowed him, and not only vanished but had taken with him whatever drawings he had made.

In his perturbation Klein went to the room of Mister Haynes, who was still in bed and sleeping soundly.

“Get up!” said Klein testily; “have you seen Mr.----my secretary?”

Mister Haynes sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

“What’s the time?” he asked.

“Confound it,” said Klein angrily, “what does it matter what the time is? Have you seen my friend?”

“Why should I have seen your friend?” growled Haynes. “What has happened to him?”

“He has disappeared,” said Klein.

“Gone out for a walk, I expect; it is a beautiful morning.”

“On the contrary, it is raining and blowing,” said Klein angrily; “why should he go out on a morning like this?”

Haynes rose and dressed himself leisurely, spending an unconscionable time in the bathroom for a man whom I never suspected of washing, and turned up at breakfast, wholly unconcerned in his callous English fashion as to what had happened to poor Posser.

Klein, who was all nerves, could eat nothing. He had questioned everybody in the hotel, but nobody had heard a sound in the night and the night-porter supplemented his previous statement, declaring that it was impossible for Posser to leave the house except with his knowledge.

Klein was not satisfied and made an examination of the outside of the hotel, hoping to pick up some trace of his comrade.

Outside Posser’s window he made a discovery. A line of bushes grew within a foot of the house-wall, and beneath Posser’s window these had been broken as though by some heavy body having jumped or fallen upon them. Moreover, he discovered a small pair of dividers which he recognized as Posser’s.

Pursuing his investigations beyond the grounds of the hotel, he came upon the track of motor-car wheels which he followed to the outskirts of the town where he made another discovery. The road here was undergoing repair and owing to the wetness of the morning the night watchman was still on duty, not having been relieved as usually is the case at the hour when the men started work.

This old man Klein questioned.

“Yes,” said the watchman, “I saw a motor-car. It was an ambulance with green lights. It went past here a little after one this morning and came back a little after two. It stopped very near the hotel, because I could see its tail lights and I saw it turn round.”

Klein went back to the hotel with his nerves shaken and his usually well-ordered mind in a condition of chaos.

“I am going back to town by the ten o’clock train,” he told Mister Haynes. “I suppose you will be staying?”

“No,” said Mister Haynes with another yawn. “I shall go back, too. There is nothing to be got out of this place.”

And so, much to the disgust of Klein, who in his state of mind would have preferred to have been alone, they went back together.

They had to change at Basingstoke, and there finding that he would have half an hour to wait, Klein crossed to the nearest hotel and got me on the ’phone.

It was in this way that he related to me as far as he could with safety the extraordinary happenings of the previous night.

“It is inexplicable, my dear Heine,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “I am bewildered, stunned.”

I no less was agitated.

“Did he not communicate anything to you?” I asked.

“Yes, thank our good Gott!” said Klein’s voice; “he gave me a rough sketch which may be sufficient. Whatever has happened to him the good fellow’s work is not fruitless.”

Then suddenly his voice sank and he spoke hurriedly.

“I cannot say more,” he said, “that infernal reporter of yours is outside the box. Does he understand Spanish?”

“He understands no language except bad French,” I replied, and heard the click of the telephone receiver being hung up.

So distressed and puzzled was I that I went down to the station to meet my friend.

I walked along the platform as the train came to a slow standstill, and the first person I met was Mister Haynes, looking more untidy than ever.

“Where is my friend?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Haynes, yawning; “he went over to the hotel to telephone to somebody at Basingstoke and left before I did. In fact, I had to run to catch the train,” he explained. “He is here somewhere.”

But there was no Klein. If he had been left behind he would have telephoned me. I made inquiries of the guard.

“A gentleman in a check cap and a long ulster?” said that official. “Yes, I remember him. He got on to the train at Basingstoke, first-class passenger, wasn’t he? I particularly noticed he was in a carriage by himself and was reading. This is the carriage,” he said, pulling the door open, “here is his magazine.”

On the rack above was Klein’s suit-case. It was evident that it had been rifled because the collars and night-shirt, brushes and combs, were all mixed together in confusion.

I stared at Haynes and Haynes looked at me.

“How extraordinary!” said Mister Haynes.

It was not until that night that Klein’s body was recovered, lying in a ditch by the side of the railway, shot through the heart, with every pocket turned inside out, and yet, curiously enough, with all his money, his watch and the rings left intact.

Of the rough drawing which he had promised to deliver me there was no sign. Close at hand was his revolver with one chamber discharged.

Mister Haynes was in the office when the news came. He had been out all the afternoon and had, he said, met with an accident, for his arm was bandaged and in a sling. I was so upset by my anxiety over Klein that I had barely noticed Mister Haynes’s injury, but now I looked at him narrowly.

“What is the nature of your injury?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Mr. Cannelli,” he said, “I don’t know very much about you. You may be a very honest man, the tool of very dishonest men.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It may be,” he went on, without taking any notice of my question, “that you are being duped and that it is only coincidence that you have friends who pursue extraordinary inquiries. All the records we have of you,” my heart gave a throb and I could feel my hands trembling, “all the records we have of you,” he repeated, “seem to be in good order. I will give you two pieces of advice. The first is to be careful in your choice of acquaintances. The second is to refrain from allowing your very natural anxieties to lead you into further inquiries as to the fate of Mr. Adolph Klein, alias Simpson, and if I would add a third,” he said, looking out of the window and speaking in his slow drawl, “it is to advise your friends in communicating with you to avoid both the telephone and the Spanish language. Good afternoon.”

He picked up his hat and went out, the picture of a broken-down journalist, and I did not see him again until one day in Whitehall I passed an officer, wearing the badge of the Intelligence Department, who smiled and waved his hand to me. It was my reporter.