Return to the hotel," he commanded, "And in two months you can rejoin your regiment."
On the morning after the invasion the New York Republic published a map of Great Britain that covered three columns and a wood-cut of Ford that was spread over five. Beneath it was printed: "Lester Ford, our London correspondent, captured by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to warn the English people."
On the same morning, In an editorial in The Times of London, appeared this paragraph:
"The Germans were first seen by the Hon. Arthur Herbert, the eldest son of Lord Cinaris; Mr. Patrick Headford Birrell--both of Balliol College, Oxford; and Mr. Lester Ford, the correspondent of the New York Republic.
These gentlemen escaped from the landing party that tried to make them prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor-car over roads infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of Norfolk, warning the authorities. Should the war office fail to recognize their services, the people of Great Britain will prove that they are not ungrateful."
A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of the Savoy.
"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle that we three, and we three alone, were the invaders?"
"That"s hardly correct," said Ford, "as we now know there were two hundred thousand invaders. We were the only three who got ash.o.r.e."
"I vote we don"t tell him," said Birrell. "Let him think with everybody else that the Germans blundered; that an advance party landed too soon and gave the show away. If we talk," he argued, "We"ll get credit for a successful hoax. If we keep quiet, everybody will continue to think we saved England. I"m content to let it go at that."
Chapter 4. BLOOD WILL TELL
David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company.
The manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the New York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as easily as into a piece of pie. David"s duty was to explain these different punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman.
But David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he even succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly because he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous. But to David the possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight.
He had possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had existed, but it was not until David"s sister Anne married a doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David emerged as a Son of Washington.
It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear a distaff pin in her shirtwaist, who discovered the revolutionary ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no doubt. That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record. To enter a society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors.
He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of "Neck or Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton. David"s life had lacked color. The day he carried his certificate of membership to the big jewelry store uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his two coats, was the proudest of his life.
The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As Wyckoff, one of Burdett"s flying squadron of travelling salesmen, said, "All grandfathers look alike to me, whether they"re great, or great-great-great. Each one is as dead as the other. I"d rather have a live cousin who could loan me a five, or slip me a drink. What did your great-great dad ever do for you?"
"Well, for one thing," said David stiffly, "he fought in the War of the Revolution. He saved us from the shackles of monarchical England; he made it possible for me and you to enjoy the liberties of a free republic."
"Don"t try to tell me your grandfather did all that," protested Wyckoff, "because I know better. There were a lot of others helped. I read about it in a book."
"I am not grudging glory to others," returned David; "I am only saying I am proud that I am a descendant of a revolutionist."
Wyckoff dived into his inner pocket and produced a leather photograph frame that folded like a concertina.
"I don"t want to be a descendant," he said; "I"d rather be an ancestor.
Look at those." Proudly he exhibited photographs of Mrs. Wyckoff with the baby and of three other little Wyckoffs. David looked with envy at the children.
"When I"m married," he stammered, and at the words he blushed, "I hope to be an ancestor."
"If you"re thinking of getting married," said Wyckoff, "you"d better hope for a raise in salary."
The other clerks were as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when David showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt insignia with on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the other a Continental soldier, they admitted it was dead swell. They even envied him, not the grandfather, but the fact that owing to that distinguished relative David was constantly receiving beautifully engraved invitations to attend the monthly meetings of the society; to subscribe to a fund to erect monuments on battle-fields to mark neglected graves; to join in joyous excursions to the tomb of Washington or of John Paul Jones; to inspect West Point, Annapolis, and Bunker Hill; to be among those present at the annual "banquet" at Delmonico"s. In order that when he opened these letters he might have an audience, he had given the society his office address.
In these communications he was always addressed as "Dear Compatriot,"
and never did the words fail to give him a thrill. They seemed to lift him out of Burdett"s salesrooms and Broadway, and place him next to things uncommercial, untainted, high, and n.o.ble. He did not quite know what an aristocrat was, but he believed being a compatriot made him an aristocrat. When customers were rude, when Mr. John or Mr. Robert was overbearing, this idea enabled David to rise above their ill-temper, and he would smile and say to himself: "If they knew the meaning of the blue rosette in my b.u.t.ton-hole, how differently they would treat me! How easily with a word could I crush them!"
But few of the customers recognized the significance of the b.u.t.ton.
They thought it meant that David belonged to the Y. M. C. A. or was a teetotaler. David, with his gentle manners and pale, ascetic face, was liable to give that impression.
When Wyckoff mentioned marriage, the reason David blushed was because, although no one in the office suspected it, he wished to marry the person in whom the office took the greatest pride. This was Miss Emily Anthony, one of Burdett and Sons" youngest, most efficient, and prettiest stenographers, and although David did not cut as dashing a figure as did some of the firm"s travelling men, Miss Anthony had found something in him so greatly to admire that she had, out of office hours, accepted his devotion, his theatre tickets, and an engagement ring.
Indeed, so far had matters progressed, that it had been almost decided when in a few months they would go upon their vacations they also would go upon their honeymoon. And then a cloud had come between them, and from a quarter from which David had expected only sunshine.
The trouble befell when David discovered he had a great-great-grandfather. With that fact itself Miss Anthony was almost as pleased as was David himself, but while he was content to bask in another"s glory, Miss Anthony saw in his inheritance only an incentive to achieve glory for himself.
From a hard-working salesman she had asked but little, but from a descendant of a national hero she expected other things. She was a determined young person, and for David she was an ambitious young person. She found she was dissatisfied. She found she was disappointed.
The great-great-grandfather had opened up a new horizon--had, in a way, raised the standard. She was as fond of David as always, but his tales of past wars and battles, his accounts of present banquets at which he sat shoulder to shoulder with men of whom even Burdett and Sons spoke with awe, touched her imagination.
"You shouldn"t be content to just wear a b.u.t.ton," she urged. "If you"re a Son of Washington, you ought to act like one."
"I know I"m not worthy of you," David sighed.
"I don"t mean that, and you know I don"t," Emily replied indignantly.
"It has nothing to do with me! I want you to be worthy of yourself, of your grandpa Hiram!"
"But HOW?" complained David. "What chance has a twenty-five dollar a week clerk--"
It was a year before the Spanish-American War, while the patriots of Cuba were fighting the mother country for their independence.
"If I were a Son of the Revolution," said Emily, "I"d go to Cuba and help free it."
"Don"t talk nonsense," cried David. "If I did that I"d lose my job, and we"d never be able to marry. Besides, what"s Cuba done for me? All I know about Cuba is, I once smoked a Cuban cigar and it made me ill."
"Did Lafayette talk like that?" demanded Emily. "Did he ask what have the American rebels ever done for me?"
"If I were in Lafayette"s cla.s.s," sighed David, "I wouldn"t be selling automatic punches."
"There"s your trouble," declared Emily "You lack self-confidence. You"re too humble, you"ve got fighting blood and you ought to keep saying to yourself, "Blood will tell," and the first thing you know, it WILL tell!
You might begin by going into politics in your ward. Or, you could join the militia. That takes only one night a week, and then, if we DID go to war with Spain, you"d get a commission, and come back a captain!"
Emily"s eyes were beautiful with delight. But the sight gave David no pleasure. In genuine distress, he shook his head.
"Emily," he said, "you"re going to be awfully disappointed in me."
Emily"s eyes closed as though they shied at some mental picture. But when she opened them they were bright, and her smile was kind and eager.
"No, I"m not," she protested; "only I want a husband with a career, and one who"ll tell me to keep quiet when I try to run it for him."
"I"ve often wished you would," said David.
"Would what? Run your career for you?"
"No, keep quiet. Only it didn"t seem polite to tell you so."
"Maybe I"d like you better," said Emily, "if you weren"t so darned polite."