CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT SECRET

All that morning American infantry had been pa.s.sing through Delle over the Belfort road. The sun of noon saw no end to them.

The endless column of shadows, keeping pace with them, lengthened with the afternoon along their lengthening line.

Now and then John Recklow opened the heavy wooden door in his garden wall and watched them until duty called him to his telephone or to his room where maps and papers littered the long table. But he always returned to the door in the garden wall when duty permitted and leaned at ease there, smoking his pipe, keen-eyed, impa.s.sive, gazing on the unbroken line of young men--men of his own race, sun-scorched, dusty, swinging along the Belfort road, their right elbows brushing Switzerland, their high sun-reddened pillar of dust drifting almost into Germany, and their heavy tread thundering through that artery of France like the prophetic pulse of victory.

A rich September sunset light streamed over them; like a moving shaft of divine fire the ruddy dust marched with them upon their right hand; legions of avenging shadows led them forward where, for nearly half a century beyond the barriers of purple hills, naked and shackled, the martyr-daughters of the Motherland stood waiting--Alsace and Lorraine.

"We are on our way!" laughed the Yankee bugles.

The Fortress of Metz growled "Nein!"

Recklow went back to his telephone. For a long while he remained there very busy with Belfort and Verdun. When again he returned to the green door in his garden wall, the Yankee infantry had pa.s.sed; and of their pa.s.sing there remained no trace save for the smouldering pillar of fire towering now higher than the eastern horizon and leagthened to a wall that ran away into the north as far as the eye could see.

His cats had come out into the garden for "the cats' hour"--that mysterious compromise between day and evening when all things feline awake and stretch and wander or sit motionless, alert, listening to occult things. And in the enchantment of that lovely liaison which links day and night--when the gold and rose soften to mauve as the first star is born--John Recklow raised his quiet eyes and saw two dead souls come into his garden by the little door in the wall.

"Is it you, Kay McKay?" he said at last.

But the shock of the encounter still fettered him so that he walked very slowly to the woman who was now moving toward him across the gra.s.s.

"Evelyn Erith," he said, taking her thin hands in his own, which were trembling now.

"It's a year," he complained unsteadily.

"More than a year," said McKay in his dead voice.

With his left hand, then, John Recklow took McKay's gaunt hand, and stood so, mute, looking at him and at the girl beside him.

"G.o.d!" he said blankly. Then, with no emphasis: "It's rather more than a year!... They sent me two fire-charred skulls--the head of a man and the head of a woman.... That was a year ago.... After your pigeon arrived... I found the scorched skulls wrapped in a Swiss newspaper-lying inside the garden wall--over there on the gra.s.s!...

And the swine had written your names on the skulls...."

Into Evelyn Erith's eyes there came a vague light--the spectre of a smile. And as Recklow looked at her he remembered the living glory she had once been; and wrath blazed wildly within him. "What have they done to you?" he asked in an unsteady voice. But McKay laid his hand on Recklow's arm:

"Nothing. It is what they have not done--fed her. That's all she needs--and sleep."

Recklow gazed heavily upon her. But if the young fail rapidly, they also respond quickly.

"Come into the house,"

Perhaps it was the hot broth with wine in it that brought a slight colour back into her ghastly face--the face once so youthfully lovely but now as delicate as the mask of death itself.

Candles twinkled on the little table where the girl now lay back listlessly in the depths of an armchair, her chin sunk on her breast.

Recklow sat opposite her, writing on a pad in shorthand. McKay, resting his ragged elbows on the cloth, his haggard face between both hands, went on talking in a colourless, mechanical voice which an iron will alone flogged into speech:

"Killed two of them and took their clothes and papers," he continued monotonously; "that was last August--near the end of the month....

The Boche had tens of thousands working there. AND EVERY ONE OF THEM WAS INSANE."

"What!"

"Yes, that is the way they were operating--the only way they dared operate. I think all that enormous work has been done by the insane during the last forty years. You see, the Boche have nothing to dread from the insane. Anyway the majority of them died in harness.

Those who became useless--intractable or crippled--were merely returned to the asylums from which they had been drafted. And the Hun government saw to it that n.o.body should have access to them.

"Besides, who would believe a crazy man or woman if they babbled about the Great Secret?"

He covered his visage with his bony hands and rested so for a few moments, then, forcing himself again:

"The Hun for forty years has drafted the insane from every asylum in the Empire to do this gigantic work for him. Men, women, even children, chained, guarded, have done the physical work.... The Pyramids were builded so, they say.... And in this manner is being finished that colossal engineering work which is never spoken of among the Huns except when necessary, and which is known among them as The Great Secret.... Recklow, it was conceived as a vast engineering project forty-eight years ago--in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. It was begun that same year.... And it is practically finished. Except for one obstacle."

Recklow's lifted eyes stared at him over his pad.

"It is virtually finished," repeated McKay in his toneless, unaccented voice which carried such terrible conviction to the other man. "Forty-eight years ago the Hun planned a huge underground highway carrying four lines of railroad tracks. It was to begin east of the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Zell, slant into the bowels of the earth, pa.s.s deep under the Rhine, deep under the Swiss frontier, deep, deep under Mount Terrible and under the French frontier, and emerge in France BEHIND Belfort, Toul, Nancy, and Verdun."

Recklow laid his pad on the table and looked intently at McKay. The latter said in his ghost of a voice: "You are beginning to suspect my sanity." He turned with an effort and fixed his hollow eyes on Evelyn Erith.

"We are sane," he said. "But I don't blame you, Recklow. We have lived among the mad for more than a year--among thousands and thousands and thousands of them--of men and women and even children in whose minds the light of reason had died out.... Thirty thousand dying minds in which only a dreadful twilight reigned!... I don't know how we endured it--and retained our reason.... Do you, Yellow-hair?"

The girl did not reply. He spoke to her again, then fell silent. For the girl slept, her delicate, deathly face dropped forward on her breast.

Presently McKay turned to Recklow once more; and Recklow picked up his pad with a slight shudder.

"Forty-eight years," repeated McKay--"and the work of the Hun is nearly done--a wide highway under the earth's surface flanked by four lines of rails--broad-gauge tracks--everything now working, all rolling-stock and electric engines moving smoothly and swiftly....

Two tracks carry troops; two carry ammunition and munitions. A highway a hundred feet wide runs between.

"Ten miles from the Rhine, under the earth, there is a Hun city, with a garrison of sixty thousand men!... There are other cities along the line--"

"Deep down!"

"Deep under the earth."

"There must be shafts!" said Recklow hoa.r.s.ely.

"None."

"No shafts to the surface?"

"Not one."

"No pipe? No communication with the outer air?"