Number 70, Berlin: A Story of Britain's Peril

The two men shook hands warmly, whereupon Trustram expressed his great pleasure at meeting a man so famous as Lewin Rodwell.

“I came here this afternoon, Mr Rodwell, on purpose to meet you,” he assured him. “Lady Kenworthy told me you were coming, and I know the committee of the Anti-Teuton Alliance, of which I’m a member, are most eager to enlist your influence.”

“I’ll be most delighted,” declared Rodwell, in his charmingly affable manner. “I think the movement is a really excellent one. Without a doubt the question has become very serious indeed. There are Germans and German influence in our midst in quarters quite unexpected and undiscovered – high official quarters too. Can we, therefore, be surprised if things don’t always go as they should?”

“Exactly,” said the Admiralty official, as they both took seats together on a couch against the wall. “There’s no doubt that the Germans, as part of their marvellous preparedness, made an audacious attempt to weave a network of vile treachery in our Government Departments and, above all, in the War Office and Admiralty. As an official I can tell you, in strictest confidence of course, that I have, several times of late, had my suspicions seriously aroused. Information leaks out. How – nobody – not even our Intelligence Department itself can discover.”

“My dear sir,” exclaimed Rodwell confidentially, “is it really to be wondered at when men of German birth and German descent are employed in nearly all the various departments in Whitehall? After all, are we not to-day fighting for our country’s life and freedom? Certainly those who come after us would never forgive us – you and I – those who, if born into a Germanised world and held under the iron yoke of barbaric ‘Kultur,’ looked back to our conduct of the war that sealed their fate and found that, besides supplying the enemy with war material – cotton and the like – we actually harboured Germans in our camp and gave them knowledge, power and position vital to the enemy’s success. And I assert to-day, Mr Trustram, that we treat Germany as the ‘most-favoured nation,’ even though the flower of our land are being sacrificed by thousands and thousands upon the fields of Flanders. Yes, it is an outrageous scandal – a disgrace to our nation. As I said in a speech at Liverpool last week, we are daily being misled, misguided, and lured to our destruction. And for that reason,” the great man added – “for that reason I’m only too ready and anxious to help the Anti-Teuton Alliance in their splendid crusade against this canker-worm in England’s heart.”

Lady Betty, seated quite near, talking to a dowager-duchess, overheard him. He had purposely spoken loudly and emphatically, with that object.

“Good! Mr Rodwell,” her ladyship cried. “Excellent! I am so delighted that you thoroughly approve of our efforts. We are trying to do our share, in this terrible crisis. You are such a busy man that I almost feared to ask you to help us.”

“I am never too busy, Lady Kenworthy, to help in such a good cause as this,” he assured her, in that suave manner of his which stood him in such good stead at times. “True, I am rather a busy man, as everyone has to be in these days. We, in the City, have to bear our share in finance, for we know that one day – sooner or later – the Government will require a big loan to carry on the war. And when they do, we hope to be as ready to meet it as the industrial population of the country will no doubt be. Still, to us it means much thought. We have no time nowadays for any idle week-ends, or golf by the sea.”

At mention of golf Lady Betty smiled. She knew well that it was the great man’s habit to play golf at Sunningdale or Walton Heath with various important personages.

The conversation regarding the aims and aspirations of the Anti-Teuton Alliance grew general, and everyone was much gratified to hear Mr Lewin Rodwell’s reiterated approval of it, especially the half-dozen ascetic, hard-faced women who made “movements” the chief object of their lives.

Lewin Rodwell smiled inwardly at them all, sipped the cup of China tea offered him by a slim, dark-haired, loosely-clad girl who secretly regarded him as a hero, and then talked loudly, airing his opinion of “what the Government really ought to do.” To him, the huge farce was amusing. Lady Betty was, of course, “a good sort,” but he knew quite well that her association with the Anti-Teuton movement was merely for the sake of advertisement and notoriety – in order to go one better than the Countess of Chesterbridge, who had, for years, been her rival on the face of the social barometer – which, after all, was the personal columns of the daily newspapers.

After an hour, when most of the guests had left, Rodwell rose at last and said to Trustram, with whom he had had a long and very intimate chat:

“I really do wish you’d run in and see me, Mr Trustram. I’d be so awfully delighted. I’m sure we can do something together in order to expose this terrible scandal. Will you?”

“Most certainly. I’ll be most pleased.”

“Good. Can’t you dine with me – say on Tuesday?”

His newly-found friend reflected a moment, and then replied in the affirmative.

“Excellent. Tuesday at eight – eh? You know my address.”

“Yes – in Bruton Street.”

“Right – that’s an appointment,” Rodwell exclaimed cheerily; and then, after bending low over Lady Betty’s thin white hand, he left.

Chapter Two.

The Suspicions of Elise

At nine o’clock that same evening, in a well-furnished drawing-room half-way up Fitzjohn’s Avenue, in Hampstead, a pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired girl of twenty-one sat at the piano alone, playing a gay French chanson, to pass away the time.

Dressed in a dainty little dinner-gown of carnation pink, and wearing in her well-dressed hair a touch of velvet to match, she presented a pretty picture beneath the shaded electric-light which fell over the instrument set in a corner.

Her mother, Mrs Shearman, a charming, grey-haired lady, had just gone out, while her father, Daniel Shearman, a rich tool-manufacturer, whose works were outside Birmingham, was away at the factory, as was his habit three days each week.

Elise Shearman was just a typical athletic English girl. In her early youth her parents were “making their way in the world,” but at fourteen she had been sent abroad to school, first to Lausanne, and afterwards to Dresden, where she had studied music, as so many English girls have done.

On her return to Hampstead, whither her father had removed from the grime and toil of work-a-day Birmingham, she found her home very dull. Because the Shearmans were manufacturers, the snobbishness of Hampstead, with its “first Thursdays,” would have nothing to do with them; though, if the truth were told, Dan Shearman could have bought up most of his neighbours in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and was a sterling good Englishman into the bargain – which could not be said of some of those slippery, smooth-tongued City adventurers who resided behind the iron railings of that select thoroughfare.

Running her slim white hands over the keys, she began the gay refrain of one of the chansonettes which she had learned in Paris – one of the gay songs of the boulevards, which was, perhaps, not very apropos for young ladies, but which she often sang because of its gay, blithe air – Belloche’s “L’Eventail Parisien.”

In her sweet, musical treble she sang gaily —

Dès qu’arrivent les grand’s chaleurs,
À la terrass’ des brasseries
Les éventails de tout’s couleurs
Viennent bercer nos rêveries.
Car, pour allécher le client,
Le camelot toujours cocasse
En s’éventant d’un air bonasse
Envoi’ ce petit boniment:

And then, with a swing and go, she sang the chorus —

Ça va, ça vient,
Ça donn’ de l’air, ça fait du bien.
C’est vraiment magnifique.
Quel instrument magique!
Ça va, ça vient,
Ca donn’ de l’air et du maintien
Et ça ne coûte presque rien:
Voici l’éventail parisien!

Hardly had she concluded the final line when the door opened and a tall, dark-haired, good-looking young man entered, crossed to her, and, placing his hand upon her shoulder, bent and kissed her fondly.

“Why, Jack, dear – you really are late!” the girl exclaimed. “Were you kept at the office?”

“Yes, dearest,” was his answer. “Or rather I had some work that I particularly wanted to finish, so I stayed behind.”

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a pair of keen, merry brown eyes, a handsome face with high, intelligent brow, as yet unlined by care, a small, dark moustache, and a manner as courteous towards a woman as any diplomat accredited to the Court of St. James.

Jack Sainsbury, though merely an employee of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, a man who went by “Tube” to the City each morning and returned each night to the modest little flat in Heath Street, at which his sister Jane acted as housekeeper for him, was an honest, upright Englishman who had, in the first month of the war, done his duty and gone to the recruiting office of the Honourable Artillery Company to enlist.

A defective elbow-joint had prevented him passing the doctor. And though no one in the office knew he had tried to join the new army, he had returned to the City and continued his soul-killing avocation of adding figures and getting out totals.

His meeting with Elise Shearman was not without its romantic side.

One Sunday morning, two years before, he had been riding his motor-cycle up to Hatfield, as was his habit, to meet at the Red Lion – that old inn that is the rendezvous of all motor-cyclists – the men and women who come out there each Sunday morning, wet or fine, from London. Fine cars, driven by their owners, turn into the inn-yard all the morning, but the motor-cyclist ignores them. It is the meeting-place of the man on the cycle.

One well-remembered Sunday morning Elise, who was advanced enough to put on a Burberry with a leather strap around her waist and sit astride on a motor-cycle, was careering up the North Road beyond Barnet when, of a sudden, she swerved to avoid a cart, and ran headlong into a ditch.

At the moment Jack Sainsbury, who chanced to be behind her, stopped, sprang off, and went to her assistance.

She lay in the ditch with her arm broken. Quickly he obtained medical aid, and eventually brought her home to Fitzjohn’s Avenue, where he had, with her father’s knowledge and consent, been a constant visitor ever since.

Jack Sainsbury, whose father, and his family before him, had been gentlemen-farmers for two centuries in Leicestershire, was, above all, a thorough-going Englishman. He was no smug, get-on-at-all-hazards person of the consumptive type one meets at every turn in the City. On the contrary, he was a well-set-up, bold, straightforward, fearless fellow who, though but a clerk in a City office, was one of that clean-limbed, splendid type which any girl would have welcomed as her hero.