Satire of the Sea
"What was the mystery about St. Alban?" I asked.The Baronet did not at once reply. He looked out over theEnglish country through the ancient oak-trees, above the sweep ofmeadow across the dark, creeping river, to the white shaft risingbeyond the wooded hills into the sky.The war was over. I was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for aweek-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemeda sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been thesecret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was madea Baronet and put at the head of England's Secret Service atScotland Yard.A servant brought out the tea and we were alone on the grassterrace before the great oak-trees. He remained for some momentsin reflection, then he replied:"Do you mean the mystery of his death?""Was there any other mystery?" I said.He looked at me narrowly across the table."There was hardly any mystery about his death," he said. "Theman shot himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above themantel in his library. The family, when they found him, put thepistol back on the nail and fitted the affair with the stockproperties of a mysterious assassin."The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in thepublic mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after hiscareer, should by every canon of the tragic muse, go that way."He made a careless gesture with his fingers."I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had beenmoved, the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powdermarks on the muzzle."But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destinyof the man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was allfated, as the Gaelic people say . . . . I saw no reason todisturb it.""Then there was some other mystery?" I ventured.He nodded his big head slowly."There is an ancient belief," he said, "that the hunted thingalways turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this worldon whom the hunted thing awfully turned, it was St. Alban."He put out his hand."Look at the shaft yonder," he said, "lifted to his memory,towering over the whole of this English country, and cut on itsbase with his services to England and the brave words he said onthat fatal morning on the Channel boat. Every schoolboy knowsthe words"`Don't threaten, fire if you like!'"First-class words for the English people to remember. Nobravado, just the thing any decent chap would say. But the wordsare persistent. They remain in the memory. And it was athrilling scene they fitted into. One must never forge that: Thelittle hospital transport lying in the Channel in a choppy seathat ran streaks of foam; the grim turret and the long whalebackof a Uboat in the foam scruff; and the sun lying on the scrubbeddeck of the jumping transport."Everybody was crowded about. St. Alban was in the center of thehuman pack, in a pace or two of clear deck, his injured arm in asling; his split sleeve open around it; his shoulders thrownback; his head lifted; and before him, the Hun commander with hisbig automatic pistol."It's a wonderful, spirited picture, and it thrilled England. Itwas in accord with her legends. England has little favor ofeither the gods of the hills or the gods of the valleys. Butalways, in all her wars, the gods of the seas back her."The big Baronet paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted itand set it down on the table."That's a fine monument," he said, indicating the white shaftthat shot up into the cloudless evening sky. "The road makes asharp turn by it. You have got to slow up, no matter how youtravel. The road rises there. It's built that way; to make thepasser go slow enough to read the legends on the base of themonument. It's a clever piece of business. Everybody is boundto give his tribute of attention to the conspicuous memorial."There are two faces to the monument that you must look at if yougo that road. One recounts the man's services to England, andthe other face bears his memorable words"`Don't threaten, fire if you like!'"The Baronet fingered the handle of his teacup."The words are precisely suited to the English people," he said."No heroics, no pretension, that's the whole spirit of England.It's the English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and wedon't wish to be threatened by another. Let them fire if theylike, - that's all in the game. But don't swing a gun on us witha threat. St. Alban was lucky to say it. He got the reserve,the restraint, the commonplace understatement that Englandaffects, into the sentence. It was a piece of good fortune tocatch the thing like that."The monument is tremendous. One can't avoid it. It's alwaysbefore the eye here, like the White Horse of Alfred on the chalkhill in Berkshire. All the roads pass it through thiscountryside. But every mortal thing that travels, motor andcart, must slow up around the monument."He stopped for a moment and looked at the white needle shimmeringin the evening sun."But St. Alban's greatest monument," he said, "was the luckysentence. It stuck in the English memory and it will never goout of it. One wouldn't give a half-penny for a monument if onecould get a phrase fastened in a people's memory like that."Sir Henry moved in his chair."I often wonder," he said, "whether the thing was an inspirationof St. Alban's that morning on the deck of the hospitaltransport, or had he thought about it at some other time? Wasthe sentence stored in the man's memory, or did it come with thefirst gleam of returning consciousness from a soul laid open bydisaster? I think racial words, simple and unpretentious, maylies in any man close to the bone like that to be rived out witha mortal hurt. That's what keeps me wondering about the words heused. And he did use them."I don't doubt that a lot of our hero stuff has been edited afterthe fact. But this sentence wasn't edited. That's what he said,precisely. A hundred wounded soldiers on the hospital transportheard it. They were crowding round him. And they told the storywhen they got ashore. The story varied in trifling details asone would expect among so many witnesses to a tragic event likethat. But it didn't vary about what the man said when the Huncommander was swinging his automatic pistol on him."There was no opportunity to edit a brave sentence to fit theaffair. St. Alban said it. And he didn't think it up as heclimbed out of the cabin of the transport. If he had been in acondition to think, he had enough of the devil's business tothink about just then; a brave sentence would hardly haveconcerned him, as I said awhile ago."Besides, we have his word that, after what happened in thecabin, everything else that occurred that morning on thetransport was a blank to the man; was walled off from hisconsciousness, and these words were the first impulse of onereturning to a realization of events."Sir Henry Marquis reflected."I think they were," he continued. "They have the mark ofspontaneity; of the first disgust of one grasping the fact thathe was being threatened."The Baronet paused."The event had a great effect on England," he said. "And ithelped to restore our shattered respect for a desperate enemy.The Hun commander didn't sink the transport, and he didn't shootSt. Alban. It's true there was a sort of gentleman's agreementamong the enemies that hospital transports should not be sunk."But anything was likely to happen just then. The Hun had failedto subjugate the world, and he was a barbarous, mad creature.England believed that something noble in St. Alban worked themiracle."`You're a brave man!'"Some persons on the transport testified to such a comment fromthe submarine commander. At any rate, he went back to his U-boatand the undersea.That's the last they saw of him. The transport came on intoDover."England thought the affair was one of the adventures of the sea.A chance thing, that happened by accident. But there was one manin 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 thecup of tea cooling before me. The big man walked slowly with hisfingers linked behind him. Finally he stopped. His voice wasdeep and reflective."`Man is altogether the sport of fortune!' . . . I read that inHerodotus, 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 ifhe remembered it. My word, he lived to verify it! Herodotuscouldn't cite a case to equal him. And the old Greek wasn'themmed in by the truth. I maintain that the man's case has noparallel."To have all the painstaking labor of years negatived by oneenveloping, vicious misfortune; to be beaten out of life by it,and at the same time to gain that monument out yonder and one'sniche as hero by the grim device of an enemy's satire; by theacting of a scene that one would never have taken part in if onehad realized it, is beyond any complication of tragedy known tothe Greek."Look at the three strange phases of it: To be a mediocreEnglishman with no special talent; to die in horrible despair;and to leave behind a glorious legend. And for all these threethings to contradict one another in the same life is unequaled inthe legends of any people."The Baronet went on in a deep level voice."There wag a vicious vitality behind the whole desperatebusiness. 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 inthe Channel by accident. The Hun commander didn't fail to sinkthe transport out of any humane motives. He didn't fail to shootSt. Alban because he was moved by the heroism of the man. It wasall grim calculation!"He thought it was safe to let St. Alban go ahead. And he wouldhave been right if St. Alban had been the great egotist that hewas."The commander of that submarine was Plutonburg of Prussia. Hewas the right-hand man of old Von Tirpitz. He was the one man inthe German navy who never ceased to urge its Admiralty to sinkeverything. He loathed every fiber of the English people. Wehad all sorts of testimony to that. The trawlers and freightboatcaptains brought it in. He staged his piracies to a theatricalfrightfulness. `Old England!' he would say, when he climbed upout of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and looked abouthim at the sailors, `Old, is right, old and rotten!' Then hewould smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke.`But in a world that the Prussian inhabits a nation, old androtten, may endure for a time, but it shall not endure forever!'"Plutonburg didn't let St. Alban and the transport go ahead outof the promptings of a noble nature. He did it because he hatedEngland, and he wanted St. Alban to live on in the hell he hadtrapped him into. He counted on his keeping silent. But the Hunmade a mistake."St. Alban didn't measure up to the standard of Prussian egoismby which Plutonburg estimated him."Sir Henry continued in the same even voice. The levels ofemotion in his narrative did not move him."Did you ever see the picture of Plutonburg, in Munich? He had aface like Chemosh. And he dressed the part. Other under-boatcommanders wore the conventional naval cap, but Plutonburg alwayswore a steel helmet with a corrugated earpiece. Some artistunder the frightfulness dogma must have designed it for him. Itframed his face down to the jaw. The face looked like it was setin iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy, menacing face; thesort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a threateningwar-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him. Onethinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagineanything human in it, except a cruel satanic humor."He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on thetransport, when he let St. Alban go on."The Baronet looked down at me."Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg thatEngland applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece ofsheer, 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 thetransport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St.Alban. As I have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort ofhell he wanted him in, and he didn't propose to let him out witha bullet. And St. Alban ought to have known it, unless, as heafterwards said, the whole thing from the first awful moment inthe cabin was simply walled out of his consciousness, until hebegan dimly to realize up there in the sun, in the crowd, that hewas being threatened and blurted out his words from a sort ofawful disgust."Again he paused."Plutonburg was right about having St. Alban in the crater of thepit. But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard.St. Alban came on to London. He got the heads of the War Officetogether and told them. I was there. It was the devil's ownmuddle of a contrast. Outside, London was ringing with the man'sstriking act of personal heroism. And inside of the ForeignOffice three or, four amazed persons were listening to the bittertruth."The Baronet spread out his hands with a sudden gesture."I shall always remember the man's strange, livid face; hisfingers that jumped about the cuff of his coat sleeve; and hisshaking jaw."Sir Henry went over and sat down at the table. For a good whilehe was silent. The sun filtering through the limbs of the greatoak-trees made mottled spots on his face. He seemed to turn awayfrom the thing he had been concerned with, and to see somethingelse, something wholly apart and at a distance from St. Alban'saffairs."You must have wondered like everybody else," he said, "why theAllied drive on the Somme accomplished so little at first. BothEngland and France had made elaborate preparations for it over along period of time. Every detail had been carefully, workedout. Every move had been estimated with; mathematical exactness."The French divisions had been equipped and strategicallygrouped. England had put a million of fresh troops into France.And the line of the drive had been mapped. The advance, when itwas opened on the first day of July, ought to have gone forwardirresistibly from cog to cog like a wheel of a machine on theindentations of a track. But the thing didn't happen that way.The drive sagged and stuck."The big Englishman pressed the table with his clinched hand."My word!" he said, "is it any wonder that the devil, Plutonburg,grinned when he put up his automatic pistol? Why shoot theEnglishman? He would do it himself soon enough. He was rightabout that. If he had only been right about his measure of St.Alban, the drive on the Somme would have been a ghastlycatastrophe for the Allied armies."I hesitated to interrupt Sir Henry. But he had got my interestdesperately worked up about what seemed to me great unjointedsegments of this affair, that one couldn't understand till theywere put together. I ventured a query."How did St. Alban come to be on the hospital transport?" I said."Was he in the English army in France?""Oh, no," he said. "When the war opened St. Alban was in theHome Office, and, he set out to make England spy-proof. Heorganized the Confidential Department, and he went to work totake every precaution. He wasn't a great man in any direction,but he was a careful, thorough man. And with tireless,never-ceasing, persistent effort, he very nearly swept Englandclean of German espionage."Sir Henry spoke with vigor and decision."Now, that's what St. Alban did in England - not because he was aman of any marked ability, but because he was a persistent persondominated by a single consuming idea. He started out to ridEngland of every form of espionage. And when he had accomplishedthat, as the cases of Ernest, Lody, and Schultz eloquentlyattest, he determined to see that every move of the Englishexpeditionary force on the Continent should be guarded fromGerman espionage."Sir Henry paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it. Itwas cold, and he put the cup down on the table."That's how St. Alban came to be in France," he said. "The greatdrive on the Somme had been planned at a meeting of militaryleaders in Paris. The French were confident that they could keeptheir plans secret from German espionage. They admitted franklythat signals were wirelessed out of France. But they had takensuch precautions that only the briefest signals could go out."The Government radio stations were always alert. And they atonce negatived any unauthorized wireless so that German spiescould only snap out a signal or two at any time. They could dothis, however."They had a wireless apparatus inside a factory chimney atAuteuil. It wasn't located until the war was nearly over."The French didn't undertake to say that they could make theircountry spy-proof. They knew that there were German agents inFrance that nobody could tell from innocent French people. Butthey did undertake to say that nothing could be carried over intothe German lines. And they justified that promise. They did seethat nothing was carried out of France." The Baronet looked atme across the table."Now, that's what took St. Alban across the Channel," he said."The English authorities wanted to be certain that there was noGerman espionage. And there was no man in England able to becertain of that except St. Alban. He went over to make sure. Ifthe plans for the Somme drive should get out of France, theyshould not get out through any English avenue."The Baronet paused."St. Alban went about the thing in his thorough, persistentmanner. He didn't trust to subordinates. He went himself.That's what took him out on the English line. And that's how hecame to be wounded in the elbow."It wasn't very much of a wound - a piece of shrapnel nearlyspent when it hit him. But the French hospital service was verymuch concerned. It gave him every attention."The man came into Paris when he had finished. The Frenchauthorities put him up at the Hotel Meurice. You know the HotelMeurice. It's on the Rue de la Rivoli. It looks out over thegarden of the Tuileries. St. Alban was satisfied with thecondition of affairs in France, and he was anxious to go back toLondon. Arrangements had been made for him to go on the hospitaltransport."He was in his room at the Meurice waiting for the train toCalais. He was, in fact, fatigued with the attention the Frenchauthorities had given him. Everything that one could think ofhad been anticipated, he said. He thought there could be nothingmore. Then there was a timid knock, and a nurse came in to saythat she had been sent to see that the dressing on his arm wasall right. He said that he had found it easier to submit to theFrench attentions than to undertake to explain that he didn'tneed them."He was busy with some final orders, so he put out his arm andallowed the nurse to take the pins out of the split sleeve andadjust the dressing. She put on some bandages, made a littletimid curtsey and went out."St. Alban didn't think of it again until the German Uboatstopped the transport the next morning in the Channel. He wasn'tdisturbed when the submarine commander came into his cabin. Heknew enough not to carry any papers about with him. ButPlutonburg didn't bother himself about luggage. He'd had hissignal from the factory chimney at Auteuil. He stood theregrinning in the cabin before St. Alban; that Satanic, Chemoshgrin that the artist got in the Munich picture."`I used to be something of a surgeon,' he said, `Doctor Ulrichvon Plutonburg, if you will remember. I'll take a look at yourarm.'"tit, Alban said he thought the man might be moved by some humaneconsideration, so he put out his arm."Plutonburg took the pins out of the sleeve and removed thebandage that the nurse had put on in the Hotel Meurice. Then heheld it up. The long, cotton bandage was lined with glazedcambric, and on it, in minute detail, was the exact position ofall the Allied forces along the whole front in the region of theSomme, precisely as they had been massed for the drive on Julyfirst!"I cried out in astonishment. "So that's what you meant," I said,"by the trailed thing turning on him!""Precisely," replied the Baronet. "The very thing that St. Albanlabored to prevent another from doing, he did awfully himself!"The big Englishman's fingers drummed on the table."It was a great moment for Plutonburg," he said. "No living manbut that Prussian could have put the Satanic humor into the restof the affair."He paused as under the pressure of the memory."St. Alban always maintained that from the moment he saw the longmap on the bandage everything blurred around him, and began toclear only when he spoke on the deck. He used to curse thisblur. It made him a national figure and immortal, but itprevented him, he said, from striking the Prussian in the face."
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