Part 8 (1/2)
”How _very_ kind of you!” she said. ”Yes, I shall come myself if you are sure I shall not be giving you too much trouble.”
”A pleasure, I a.s.sure you,” bowing with great gallantry, and Hansie went home to tell her mother what had happened.
After this interview with the censor, he allowed their letters to pa.s.s with unfailing regularity.
True to her promise, Hansie took her European mail to him herself every week, and this brought her into contact with him frequently. He was always affable (hatefully affable) and obliging, and the thought of this man made it more and more difficult for her to write, especially those letters destined for the north of Holland.
One day she asked her mother to think of some plan by which she could use the censor for her own purposes, without his knowledge, and this set Mrs. van Warmelo's active mind and resourceful brain working, with what result we shall see in our next chapter.
CHAPTER VIII
OUTWITTING THE CENSOR
If the method of writing between the lines in chemicals presented itself to Mrs. van Warmelo's mind for a moment, it was dismissed as too crude and well-known, and, in consequence, too dangerous.
And yet she found her thoughts reverting persistently to chemicals as the only solution to the problem before her. One day she took the strained juice of a lemon and wrote a few words with it on a sheet of white paper. When dry, there was no trace of the written words to be seen until she had pa.s.sed a hot iron over them. Imagine her joy and satisfaction when they showed up clear and distinct, in a colour of yellowish brown. Well satisfied with her experiment, she sought and found a square white envelope of thick paper and good quality, which she carefully opened out, by inserting and rolling the thin end of a penholder along the part that was glued. Spreading the envelope before her on the table, she wrote some sentences in lemon juice on the _inside_, folding it into shape again and pasting it down with great care and neatness. This envelope she placed in Hansie's hands, with an expectant look, when the latter came home that afternoon.
Hansie turned it over, examined it on all sides and shook her head, puzzled.
”Open it,” her mother suggested, ”and look inside.”
Hansie opened it and, peering into it, shook her head again, more mystified than ever.
”I give it up, mother,” she said. ”Come, don't be so mysterious--tell me what it all means.”
Mrs. van Warmelo then took the envelope, opened it with the penholder again, and, producing the hot iron which she had been keeping in readiness for the psychological moment, she ironed out the flattened sheet and revealed to the astonished gaze of her daughter the written words within.
At first Hansie was speechless with admiration; then she threw her arms round her mother and hugged her vigorously.
”Really, mother,” she exclaimed, ”I am proud of you. How we shall be able to dupe 'Miserable Renegade' now!”
The full importance of this discovery was not realised at the time, for all their smuggling had hitherto been carried on merely for pleasure and they had had no information of any importance to communicate to their friends across the seas; but, in the light of after-events, they realised that they had been led to make their preparations and to have their methods in full working order before the time came to use them in conveying dispatches from the Boer Secret Service to President Kruger in Holland.
They were now in the possession of a scheme which defied detection, and the next thing to be done was to inform some distant conspirator of this valuable discovery and instruct him in the use of it.
That this could not be done through the post, my reader will understand, and as reliable opportunities were becoming more rare, Hansie had to wait some months and to possess her soul in patience until at last some trusted friend, leaving the country, could be persuaded to convey the important instructions.
When and how they were eventually sent I cannot tell with positive certainty. There is a difference of opinion on this point between Mrs.
van Warmelo and her daughter, and there is no way of settling the dispute, because Hansie's diary contains no word about the White Envelope, for reasons which it will hardly be necessary to explain.
Mrs. van Warmelo says the instructions were dispatched in a false double-bottom of an ordinary safety match-box. Hansie thinks they were either hidden behind a photo-frame or in a tin of insect-powder, both these methods having been employed on various occasions, but at present we are only concerned with the fact that the instructions reached their destination safely, and from that day until the end of the war a gloriously free and uninterrupted communication was kept up between Harmony and Alphen and one spot in the north of Holland, of which we shall hear more as our story unfolds itself.
Further experimenting showed that the lemon-juice became visible after a few days when written on certain papers, while on others there was nothing to be seen after many weeks, and this danger was immediately communicated to Holland as a very serious one, for it stands to reason that the danger connected with the sending of the White Envelope _from_ South Africa was nothing compared to the danger of receiving one and having it censored three weeks after it had been written.
One had to keep in mind that letters leaving the country would be censored immediately and would not be subjected to further scrutiny in Europe, whereas letters for South Africa ran every risk of being betrayed on examination, after a three-weeks' journey by land and sea.
When the smuggled instructions were well on their way, the first White Envelope was written to Holland, and carelessly thrust amongst a pile of other letters by the quaking Hansie when next she handed her mail to ”Miserable Renegade.”