"I am very sure of it," he said gravely.
"Yes, you would be. You"d believe in me anyway, even with the terrible evidence against me.... I don"t suppose you"d think me guilty if I tell you that I am not--in spite of what they might say about me--might prove, apparently."
She withdrew her hands, clasped them, her gaze lost in retrospection for a few moments. Then, coming to herself with a gesture of infinite weariness:
"There is no use, Garry. I should never be believed. There are those who, base enough to entrap me, now are preparing to destroy me because they are cowardly enough to be afraid of me while I am alive. Yes, trapped, exiled, utterly discredited as I am to-day, they are still afraid of me."
"Who are you, Thessa?" he asked, deeply disturbed.
"I am what you first saw me--a dancer, Garry, and nothing worse."
"It seems strange that a European Government should desire your destruction," he said.
"If I really were what this Government believes me to be, it would not seem strange to you."
She sat thinking, worrying her under lip with delicate white teeth; then:
"Garry, do you believe that your country is going to be drawn into this war?"
"I don"t know what to think," he said bitterly. "The _Lusitania_ ought to have meant war between us and Germany. Every brutal Teutonic disregard of decency since then ought to have meant war--every unarmed ship sunk by their U-boats, every outrage in America perpetrated by their spies and agents ought to have meant war. I don"t know how much more this Administration will force us to endure--what further flagrant insult Germany means to offer. They"ve answered the President"s last note by canning Von Tirpitz and promising, conditionally, to sink no more unarmed ships without warning. But they all are liars, the Huns. So that"s the way matters stand, Thessa, and I haven"t the slightest idea of what is going to happen to my humiliated country."
"Why does not your country prepare?" she asked.
"G.o.d knows why. Washington doesn"t believe in it, I suppose."
"You should build ships," she said. "You should prepare plans for calling out your young men."
He nodded indifferently:
"There was a preparedness parade. I marched in it. But it only irritated Washington. Now, finally, the latest Mexican insult is penetrating official stupidity, and we are mobilising our State Guardsmen for service on the border. And that"s about all we are doing. We are making neither guns nor rifles; we are building no ships; the increase in our regular army is of little account; some of the most vital of the great national departments are presided over by rogues, clowns, and fools--pacifists all!--stupid, dull, grotesque and impotent. And you ask me what my country is going to do. And I tell you that I don"t know. For real Americans, Thessa, these last two years have been years of shame. For we should have armed and mobilised when the first rifle-shot cracked across the Belgian frontier at Longwy; and we should have declared war when the first Hun set his filthy hoof on Belgian soil.
"In our hearts we real Americans know it. But we had no leader--n.o.body of faith, conviction, vision, action, to do what was the only thing to do. No; we had only talkers to face the supreme crisis of the world--only the shallow noise of words was heard in answer to G.o.d"s own summons warning all mankind that h.e.l.l"s deluge was at hand."
The intense bitterness of what he said had made her very grave. She listened silently, intent on his every expression. And when he ended with a gesture of hopelessness and disgust, she sat gazing at him out of her lovely dark eyes, deep in reflection.
"Garry," she said at length, "do you know anything about the European systems of intelligence?"
"No--only what I read in novels."
"Do you know that America, to-day, is fairly crawling with German spies?"
"I suppose there are some here."
"There are a hundred thousand paid German spies within an hour"s journey of this city."
He looked up incredulously.
"Let me tell you," she said, "how it is arranged here. The German Amba.s.sador is the master spy in America. Under his immediate supervision are the so-called diplomatic agents--the personnel of the emba.s.sy and members of the consular service. These people do not cla.s.s themselves as agents or as spies; they are the directors of spies and agents.
"Agents gather information from spies who perform the direct work of investigating. Spies usually work alone and report, through local agents, to consular or diplomatic agents. And these, in turn, report to the Amba.s.sador, who reports to Berlin.
"It is all directed from Berlin. The personal source of all German espionage is the Kaiser. He is the supreme master spy."
"Where have you learned these things, Thessa?" he asked in a troubled voice.
"I have learned, Garry."
"Are you--a spy?"
"No."
"Have you been?"
"No, Garry."
"Then how----"
"Don"t ask me; just listen. There are men here in your city who are here for no good purpose. I do not mean to say that merely because they seek also to injure me--destroy me, perhaps,--G.o.d knows what they wish to do to me!--but I say it because I believe that your country will declare war on Germany some day very soon. And that you ought to watch these spies who move everywhere among you!
"Germany also believes that war is near. And this is why she strives to embroil your country with j.a.pan and Mexico. That is why she discredits you with Holland, with Sweden. It is why she instructs her spies here to set fires in factories and on ships, blow up powder mills and great industrial plants which are manufacturing munitions for the Allies of the Triple Entente.
"America may doubt that there is to be war between her and Germany, but Germany does not doubt it.
"Let me tell you what else Germany is doing. She is spreading insidious propaganda through a million disloyal Germans and pacifist Americans, striving to poison the minds of your people against England. She secretly buys, owns, controls newspapers which are used as vehicles for that propaganda.
"She is debauching the Irish here who are discontented with England"s rule; she spends vast sums of money in teaching treachery in your schools, in arousing suspicion among farmers, in subsidising mercantile firms.
"Garry, I tell you that a Hun is always a Hun; a Boche is always a Boche, call him what else you will.
"The Germans are the monkeys of the world; they have imitated the human race. But, Garry, they are still what they always have been at heart, barbarians who have no business in Europe.
"In their hearts--and for all their priests and clergymen and cathedrals and churches--they still believe in their old G.o.ds which they themselves created--fierce, b.e.s.t.i.a.l supermen, more cruel, more powerful, more treacherous, more beastly than they themselves.
"That is the German. That is the Hun under all his disguises. No white man can meet him on his own ground; no white man can understand him, appeal to anything in common between himself and the Boche. He is brutal and contemptuous to women; he is tyrannical to the weak, cringing to the strong, fundamentally b.e.s.t.i.a.l, utterly selfish, intolerant of any civilisation which is not his conception of civilisation--his monkey-like conception of Christ--whom, in his pagan soul, he secretly sneers at--not always secretly, now!"
She straightened up with a quick little gesture of contempt. Her face was brightly flushed; her eyes brilliant with scorn.
"Garry, has not America heard enough of "the good German," the "kindly Teuton," the harmless, sentimental and "excellent citizen," whose morally edifying origin as a model emigrant came out of his own sly mouth, and who has, by his own propaganda alone, become an accepted type of good-natured thrift and erudition in your Republic?
"Let me say to you what a French girl thinks! A hundred years ago you were a very small nation, but you were h.o.m.ogeneous and the average of culture was far higher in America then than it is at present. For now, your people"s cultivation and civilisation is diluted by the ignorance of millions of foreigners to whom you have given hospitality. And, of these, the Germans have done you the most deadly injury, vulgarising public taste in art and literature, affronting your clean, sane intelligence by the new decadence and perversion in music, in painting, in ill.u.s.tration, in fiction.
"Whatever the normal Hun touches he vulgarises; whatever the decadent Boche touches he soils and degrades and transforms into a horrible abomination. This he has done under your eyes in art, in literature, in architecture, in modern German music.
"His filthy touch is even on your domestic life--this Barbarian who feeds grossly, whose personal habits are a by-word among civilised and cultured people, whose raw ferocity is being now revealed to the world day by day in Europe, whose proverbial clumsiness and stupidity have long furnished your stage with its oafs and clowns.
"This is the thing that is now also invading you with thousands of spies, betraying you with millions of traitors, and which will one day turn on you and tear you and trample you like an enraged hog, unless you and your people awake to what is pa.s.sing in the world you live in!"
She was on her feet now, flushed, lovely, superb in her deep and controlled excitement.