Part 2 (1/2)

”Dad wanted to tell you,” she said, ”but it was I who made him promise not to. I was afraid you would be disagreeable about it. We arranged it all with the Wendercombes, but as a matter of fact I did not even start with them. For the last eight months, I have been living part of the time in Berlin and part of the time in a country house near the Black Forest.”

”Alone?”

”Not a bit of it! I have been governess to the two daughters of Herr Essendorf.”

”Essendorf, the President of the German Republic?”

Lady Maggie nodded.

”He isn't a bit like his pictures. He is a huge fat man and he eats a great deal too much. Oh, the horror of those meals!” she added, with a little shudder. ”Think of me, dear Nigel, who never eat more than an omelette and some fruit for luncheon, compelled to sit down every day to a _mittagessen_! I wonder I have any digestion left at all.”

”Do you mean that you were there under your own name?” he asked incredulously.

She shook her head.

”I secured some perfectly good testimonials before I left,” she said.

”They referred to a Miss Brown, the daughter of Prebendary Brown. I was Miss Brown.”

”Great Heavens!” Nigel muttered under his breath. ”You heard about Atcheson?”

She nodded.

”Poor fellow, they got him all right. You talk about thrills, Nigel,”

she went on. ”Do you know that the last night before I left for my vacation, I actually heard that fat old Essendorf chuckling with his wife about how his clever police had laid an English spy by the heels, and telling her, also, of the papers which they had discovered and handed over. All the time the real dispatch, written by Atcheson when he was dying, was sewn into my corsets. How's that for an exciting situation?”

”It's a man's job, anyhow,” Nigel declared.

She shrugged her shoulders and abandoned the personal side of the subject.

”Have you been in Germany lately, Nigel?” she enquired.

”Not for many years,” he answered.

She stretched herself out upon the couch and lit a cigarette.

”The Germany of before the war of course I can't remember,” she said pensively. ”I imagine, however, that there was a sort of instinctive jealous dislike towards England and everything English, simply because England had had a long start in colonisation, commerce and all the rest of it. But the feeling in Germany now, although it is marvellously hidden, is something perfectly amazing. It absolutely vibrates wherever you go. The silence makes it all the more menacing. Soon after I got to Berlin, I bought a copy of the Treaty of Peace and read it. Nigel, was it necessary to have been so bitterly cruel to a beaten enemy?”

”Logically it would seem not,” Nigel admitted. ”Actually, we cannot put ourselves back into the spirit of those days. You must remember that it was an unprovoked war, a war engineered by Germany for the sheer purposes of aggression. That is why a punitive spirit entered into our subsequent negotiations.”

She nodded.

”I expect history will tell us some day,” she continued, ”that we needed a great statesman of the Beaconsfield type at the Peace table. However, that is all ended. They sowed the seed at Versailles, and I think we are going to reap the harvest.”

”After all,” Nigel observed thoughtfully, ”it is very difficult to see what practical interference there could be with the peace of the world.

I can very well believe that the spirit is there, but when it comes to hard facts--well, what can they do? England can never be invaded. The war of 1914 proved that. Besides, Germany now has a representative on the League of Nations. She is bound to toe the line with the rest.”

”It is not in Germany alone that we are disliked,” Maggie reminded him.

”We seem somehow or other to have found our way into the bad books of every country in Europe. Clumsy statesmans.h.i.+p is it, or what?”