Grant left Washington with a curious mixture of impressions. He had spent a fortnight in the political capital of his country and yet he came away with a strange conviction that he had been somewhere on the edge of real things, that he had talked of vital events with men whose interest in them was chiefly academic. Washington might be the furnace, but impulse took him where the fuel lay. He spent four days in Chicago. He went on to St. Louis and Minneapolis. Then he crossed the continent to Boston, where he breathed an entirely different atmosphere. The editors of two great newspapers believed in him and were ready to preach his doctrine. Nevertheless when, after six weeks’ absence, he found himself back in New York, it was with a feeling rather of discomfiture than of self-satisfaction that he viewed his progress. The magnificent self-assurance of his country seemed impregnable. Even where he had been listened to most kindly he felt that he was receiving the indulgence accorded to a crank.
Arrived in the sitting room of his hotel he took up his pile of letters and sorted them through. One by one he passed them by. He had commenced his task with a sinking heart. He finished it with a curious admixture of feeling. There was no letter from Gertrude. He rang up the Ambassadeurs. They had received no news of any projected visit from the Princess. He felt himself face to face with a new situation. The problems with which he had expected to be confronted seemed to have melted away. Yet to him there was something ominous and disconcerting in this state of negation, something which seemed like the corollary of his own threatened failure in the larger enterprise which he had embraced. He was not an abnormally temperamental person but a fit of black depression suddenly swept over him. The thought of Susan, her sweet, girlish charm, her ingenuous appeal, tugged at his heart strings with swift and passionate little bursts of memory. He cursed himself for the hesitation which had kept him that last night at the Villa, when they had stood alone upon the balcony, and the chance had been his, from taking her into his arms. That one kiss which he had craved from her would have clad him in the armour of a gigantic selfishness towards every other claim or appeal. She had been right. The difference between their ages was a trifling matter, something to be reckoned with if she had been a simpering schoolgirl of her years, but for Susan—with her understanding, her insight, her delightful womanliness—a thing not worthy of consideration. What was she thinking of him now, he wondered? There had been a certain guardedness in the Press but the story of Gertrude’s flight had blazed along the Riviera, the more ardently believed in because of the mystery surrounding it. Lord Yeovil’s letters, kindly still and even friendly, betrayed signs of it. There was no mention of Susan or any message from her, a certain restraint in dealing in any way with personal topics. Grant moved restlessly to the window. Although it was his own city, the loneliness of a stranger in New York seemed to have enveloped him in a cloud of deepening depression. The magnitude, the sombre magnificence of it all, the towering buildings, the height from which he looked down at the streets like illuminated belts, the tangle of distant lights upon the river, the dull roar of ever proceeding traffic, seemed almost terrifying. A city honeycombed with people, moving on at the hand of destiny; a contemplation for the philosopher, an invitation towards lunacy to the lonely individual. Grant momentarily lost his courage. He seemed cut off from his friends, the destroyer of his own happiness. The sight of a familiar face, the sound of a cheery voice at that moment, would have been a joy to him. He answered almost eagerly the knocking at his door. A man entered, a man with the two things for which he had felt himself craving—a smile and a cheerful face—but the last person in the world from whom he was expecting to receive a visit. “Blunn!” he exclaimed.
The newcomer laughed cheerfully as he deposited his silk hat and Malacca cane upon the table and withdrew his evening gloves.
“Well, well,” he said, “I thought we might meet over here. I’m not offering to shake hands although I’d be very glad to. I’ve come for a chat, though, and when I chat, I like to be comfortable. May I have an easy-chair, a whisky and White Rock, and a cigar? I have just left the Opera, and I am a little exhausted with the wonder of it. Your new prima donna is marvellous.”
Grant rang for the waiter.
“What on earth have you come to see me about, Blunn?” he asked.
“My dear fellow, what a question!” the other replied, looking round the room and finally selecting his chair. “Enemies always visit one another. It lends spice to combat. Now the one of us with the keener brain will leave this interview the gainer. Which of us will it be, I wonder? A most interesting speculation. By the bye, might I suggest a little ice with the whisky and White Rock?”
Grant gave the order. He was in the frame of mind to welcome the presence even of Mr. Blunn.
“After your magnificent banquet in Monte Carlo my last evening there,” he observed, “I think that you are making very slight demands upon my hospitality.”
“I shall make larger ones upon your patience, perhaps,” Blunn declared. “You’re not looking well, Mr. Slattery. This rushing around from one big city to another, these alarmist conclaves in Washington, do not agree with you so well as the sunshine of the Riviera.”
“You seem pretty well-informed as to my movements.”
“Naturally. We do not keep a large and expensive Secret Service going here for nothing. I could give you a most faithful record of your movements on every day since your arrival, starting with your visit to your friend Stoneham of the New York, your luncheon at the club and your subsequent visit to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs and winding up with the telephone message which called you to Washington.”
“Wonderful!” Grant murmured, affecting unconcern, but in reality a little staggered. “Here’s your whisky and White Rock,” he added, as the waiter entered. “Will you help yourself?”
Mr. Blunn prepared his highball with care, lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.
“I am thankful,” he confessed, “that prohibition in this country was before my time. It did some good, they tell me. Swept away the saloons and kept the alcoholic strength of spirits down. On the whole, however, it must have been very uncomfortable.”
“The statute was modified almost out of existence before I took an interest in such things,” Grant remarked.
Blunn was silent for a moment or two. He had completely the air of a man steeped in the atmosphere of the music he has enjoyed and dropping in for some slight refreshment with a friend.
“Mr. Slattery,” he said, a little abruptly, “one of the objects of my visit is to congratulate you upon your failure.”
“My failure,” Grant repeated.
“Precisely. At Monte Carlo you scored a daring and well-deserved victory. There were a dozen ways by which we could have outwitted you, but luck was on your side. You brought off one of the crudest pieces of amateur, melodramatic brigandage I ever remember to have read of in the pages of your most flamboyant novelists. Still, you brought it off. You scored the trick. Dazzled a little, shall we say, by success, you start off now to attempt the impossible. Here, my young friend, you are, in plain parlance, up against a hopeless proposition. You want to drive home to the statesmen and people of the United States the fact that a certain combination of forces, with Germany, of course, as the villain of the play, is planning a warlike enterprise of some sort or another against this country in revenge for their intervention in nineteen-seventeen. You cannot do it.”
“Can’t I?” Grant murmured.
Cornelius Blunn smiled. Very reluctantly he knocked the ash from his cigar.
“Well, ask yourself how far you have succeeded at present,” he went on. “You have had every possible advantage. You have visited Washington as a persona grata, you have talked with officials and statesmen to whom you are personally well known, and whom your high character and reputation must influence largely in your favour. You had a very pleasant time socially, everybody was very nice to you. How much progress did you make?”
“Go on, please.”
“You have since visited most of the principal cities in the States. You have interviewed a great many newspaper proprietors. You have given four lectures. The only place where you really created an impression was in Boston and there the ground was already prepared for you. I do not think that I am far from the mark when I offer you my congratulations upon your failure.”
“But why congratulations?” Grant asked. “Why not sympathy?”
Mr. Blunn pinched his cigar and smiled thoughtfully.
“If you had been a real danger to us,” he confided, “we should have had to take steps—very regretful steps. You can scarcely imagine that a completely organised Secret Service, of whose existence I have just given you proof, can be without agents who are prepared to go to any lengths which necessity might demand.”
“You mean that you would have had me assassinated?”
Blunn shrugged his shoulders.
“We should have tried to avoid melodrama. You would probably have met with an accident.”
“This is very interesting,” Grant admitted. “I am alive on sufferance, then—?”
“Don’t put it like that, I beg you.”
“Supposing I become dangerous?”
“Why conjure up these disagreeable possibilities,” Cornelius Blunn expostulated. “I do not see any immediate prospect of your becoming dangerous. You have no organisation, no definite propaganda, no real evidence of the things which you fear. For your information I may tell you this. Short of an absolute upheaval, there is not the slightest doubt but that the Senate will refuse their sanction to the President to accept this invitation of the Pact of Nations.”
“Why are you so anxious that America should not join the Pact?” Grant asked.
Mr. Blunn smiled.
“If you knew that,” he announced, “then perhaps we should have to label you dangerous, which, as I have previously explained, would not be good for your health. Now, my young friend, we have had a pleasant talk. Shall I tell you what I really came to see you about?”
Grant glanced at the clock. It was long past midnight.
“Perhaps it would be as well.”
“I came,” Blunn said, “to ask whether you can give me any information as to the whereabouts of my friend Von Diss’s wife.”
“I have not the slightest idea as to her whereabouts,” Grant assured him coolly. “In any case, why come to me?”
“There is an impression upon the Riviera and elsewhere that the Princess left Monaco on your yacht.”
“The impression is ridiculous,” Grant declared.
“Is it?” Blunn murmured. “Well, well! The Princess—”
Grant stopped him with an imperative gesture.
“Do you mind leaving the Princess out of this conversation?” he interrupted. “I do not care, at any time, about discussing women. The Princess is an old friend of mine, a new friend of yours. Some other subject of conversation, if you please, or I shall be forced to remind you that the hour is late.”
“Quite a sound attitude,” Mr. Blunn remarked reflectively. “Still, you might remember that I am her husband’s oldest friend, and domestic relations in Germany are treated, I think, a little more sacredly than in most countries. I might even go so far as to say that I represent the Prince.”
“As to the Prince’s representative,” Grant retorted, “there is the door. To Mr. Cornelius Blunn, my enemy, I know, but whose conversation and sense of humour attract me, I would suggest another whisky and White Rock.”
Blunn helped himself sparingly and rose to his feet. He knew his man, and the ostensible object of his visit remained unfulfilled.
“A propos of our former subject of conversation, Mr. Slattery,” he said, “take my advice. Don’t become too prominent in your propaganda, and, above all, don’t be too inquisitive. There are some things which you would give a great deal to discover, but the discovery of which would mean death. You are a young man and reasonably fond of living, I am sure.”
“Not only that,” Grant replied, “but I mean to live until my work is done.”
Mr. Blunn finished his highball slowly and thoughtfully. Then he rose, put on his hat, and hung his overcoat over his arm.
“A very pleasant chat, Mr. Slattery,” he concluded. “I like you, you know. You are a young man of imagination and spirit. I wish that you were a German.”
Grant held open the door.
“If you had been endowed with a conscience at your birth, you wouldn’t have made a bad American,” he reciprocated.