"There is a man who would see you, Boris Petrovitch," he said, using the familiar address of Russian servants.
CHAPTER V
THE GERMANS
Boris jumped up.
"That is good!" he said. "I have been hoping he would come."
"You do not know who it is," said the servant. "Boris Petrovitch, do not see this man. He is a German. He looks to me like one of their spies."
"I will look at him first," said Boris, with a smile. "But, Vladimir, I think your eyes are getting feeble. It is time you were sent to the place in the Crimea to rest, like the old horses that can no longer do their share of the work."
Vladimir bridled indignantly. But then a slow smile came over his face.
"Is it Ivan?" he asked.
"It should be," said Boris. "I shall know as soon as I see him."
The newcomer was waiting in the great hall. Boris, with Fred at his heels, got a glimpse of him; then without ceremony he ran down the polished staircase.
"So you have come at last!" he cried.
Ivan was a loutish German in appearance, and only his eyes betrayed the fact that he was not as stupid as he looked. At the sight of Boris he smiled, and the act changed his whole expression. But Fred thought he had never dreamed of so splendid a disguise. This man, he guessed, must have come many miles through Germany, in a country where the closest possible watch was being kept for spies, and for all, indeed, who might even be suspected of espionage. And it was easy to see how he had been able to do it. Fred knew that he must be a Russian. Yet in every detail of his appearance he was German. His clothes, his bearing, his every little mannerism, were carefully studied. Fred guessed that this was no servant, but a secret agent of much skill and experience. He was to learn the truth of his surmise before many days had pa.s.sed.
"Ivan Feodorovitch!" said Boris. "So you really got through! Have you brought the--"
He stopped at a forbidding look in the man"s eye. For a moment he seemed to be puzzled. Then he understood that it was the presence of Fred, a stranger, that was bothering Ivan.
"Oh!" he cried, with a laugh. "Ivan, you may speak before this stranger as freely as before me. Let him be a stranger to you no longer. He is my cousin from America--the son of Marie Feodorovna, who went away to be married before I was born!"
Fred was not prepared for what followed. There was an outcry, first of all, from the half dozen servants in the great hall. They crowded forward curiously to look at him. And as for Ivan, he stared blankly for a moment, and then plumped down on one knee and, to Fred"s unspeakable embarra.s.sment, seized his hand and kissed it.
"He and all of them are old, old retainers of our house," Boris explained swiftly. "To them one of our blood ranks second only to the Czar himself. My father saw to it always that here we were surrounded only by such faithful ones. These people and their ancestors before them have been in the service of us and of our ancestors for many, many generations--since before the freeing of the serfs, of course."
It was Boris who brought Ivan back to the errand that had caused his sudden appearance.
"Have you brought the parts for the wireless?" he asked. "It was as my father foresaw. The first thing the Germans did was to come here and render the installation useless, as they supposed."
"It need not remain useless," said Ivan. "Everything needful I have brought. The station may be working by to-night. Except that there can not be anything worth sending for a few hours, it might be set up now.
Better not to use it and risk betraying our secret until there is real need of it."
Boris turned to Fred to explain.
"We have spies all through East Prussia, and through Galicia and Silesia, too, of course," he said. "They can find out a good many things of interest and importance to our army. But it is one thing to obtain such knowledge and quite another to find some means of sending it back to our people. We hope, if we are not sent away from here too soon, that we can make this house very useful that way. It stands high, you see, and we have a very powerful wireless. The Germans knew this and they thought they had made it useless."
"Oh, that"s great!" said Fred. "Perhaps I can help, too, because I can send by wireless. I don"t know whether I would be much good with the Continental code, because I"ve learned only with Morse. But I might be of some use."
"Another operator will be of the greatest use," said Boris. "I know a little, a very little, about it. And there is a man here. But I am afraid that they will come very soon and take every man who is of fighting age away."
"But your men aren"t soldiers!"
"Most of them have served their term in the army. But, even if they had not, the Germans would take every able-bodied man. That is all right.
We are probably keeping back all Germans who might go home and go into the army, and all the other countries will do the same with men of a nation with which they are at war."
"Vladimir has all that I brought," said Ivan, breaking in now. "As for me, I must go again."
"Go? Now? Aren"t you going to stay?"
"No! I have much to do. I may be back. But if I return, I shall come through the cellar--you understand? There are strange movements of troops in this region that I cannot understand at all. There are far fewer soldiers here than I thought there would be. I have not been able to find traces of more than a single corps of Germans--and we had expected them to have three or four, at the very least, concentrated in East Prussia as soon as the war broke out. At Augustowo they were even expecting an attack."
"Then if there are so few as that, won"t we advance?"
"Ah, that I don"t know! The Austrians, I hear, are very busy. They say they are moving already in great strength across the border, but that is far away from here, and it is not our concern. It is for us to keep the Germans so busy here that they will not be able to crush France before England can get her army into action. At the beginning it does not matter so much whether we win victories or not, so long as we can force the Germans to send many corps here instead of using them to invade France. But I have talked enough. Now--good-bye, and may G.o.d be with you here!"
"Good-bye," said Boris, and Fred repeated Ivan"s wish in Russian. Ivan seemed astonished.
"So your mother taught you her mother tongue!" he said. "Ah, but that is splendid!"
Then he was off.
"Ivan might have been a great actor, I believe," said Boris. "See, isn"t he the German to the life as he goes, there? No wonder he can deceive them so!"
"It"s pretty dangerous work for him, though, I should think," said Fred.
"They wouldn"t waste much time on him if they caught him, would they?"
"Only the time they needed for a drumhead court-martial. After that, if he was lucky, he would be shot instead of being hung. But he is ready, you see. It is his part. Oh, we Russians are all united now, if we never were before! Germany has threatened us for years. She has set Austria against us. This time we had to fight, and you will see that all Russia will be behind the Czar. We learned our lessons against the j.a.panese.
That was not a popular war. It was not made by the people, but by a few who forced the Czar"s hand. Now we shall make the world see that though Russia may be beaten, she has the power to rise from defeat."
"What will happen here if they do take the men away?"
"They won"t take them all. Only the younger ones. There will be enough left to look after the place and after us. Though if they come, I shall have to hide you, my cousin! I am just thinking of that. I shouldn"t wonder if those stupid people would have sent word to someone. We had better be prepared. Come with me--I will show you something."
Fred followed Boris, and in a few minutes found himself in a great room that was obviously the dining-room of the house. In this room there were many pictures, and the walls were panelled in oak, blackened by smoke and age. Boris looked about to make sure that they were not observed, then he touched a spot in one of the panels, and it slid open. Beyond this, however, was revealed an unbroken wall. Again Boris touched a certain spot, and now this wall, seemingly solid and unbroken, gave way, just as the oaken panel had done.
"Even if they discovered the panel, you see, they would not have the secret," said Boris. "I will show you the exact spots you must touch.
Then if they come, you can reach this place by yourself. Once in here, you will be safe. Carry an electric torch always with you. I will give you one later. You will find two sets of arrows marked every few feet through the pa.s.sages to which this leads. The upper ones point to the outside door that is at the end of a pa.s.sage far beyond the house. The lower ones, if you follow their course, will bring you back to these panels. So you cannot lose your way."
"By George, that certainly sounds mysterious! Have you always planned for something like this?"
"Oh, these pa.s.sages are very old. This house, you see, was built at a time when intrigue was more common than now. But when my father began to see, as he did years ago, that Germany was sure to force war upon us, and that it would probably come in his lifetime, he made many changes.
This is not really a private house at all--it is a little outpost of Russia, here in the midst of an enemy"s country. And it is not the only one. In Silesia and in Galicia we have places like it."
"Perhaps the Germans will find that Russia is not so slow after all!"