The Terror: A Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER VII

  _The Case of the Hidden Germans_

  Lewis gasped for a moment, silent in contemplation of the magnificenceof rumor. The Germans already landed, hiding underground, striking bynight, secretly, terribly, at the power of England! Here was aconception which made the myth of "The Russians" a paltry fable; beforewhich the Legend of Mons was an ineffectual thing.

  It was monstrous. And yet--

  He looked steadily at Merritt; a square-headed, black-haired, solid sortof man. He had symptoms of nerves about him for the moment, certainly,but one could not wonder at that, whether the tales he told were true,or whether he merely believed them to be true. Lewis had known hisbrother-in-law for twenty years or more, and had always found him asure man in his own small world. "But then," said the doctor to himself,"those men, if they once get out of the ring of that little world oftheirs, they are lost. Those are the men that believed in MadameBlavatsky."

  "Well," he said, "what do you think yourself? The Germans landed andhiding somewhere about the country: there's something extravagant in thenotion, isn't there?"

  "I don't know what to think. You can't get over the facts. There are thesoldiers with their rifles and their guns at the works all overStratfordshire, and those guns go off. I told you I'd heard them. Thenwho are the soldiers shooting at? That's what we ask ourselves atMidlingham."

  "Quite so; I quite understand. It's an extraordinary state of things."

  "It's more than extraordinary; it's an awful state of things. It'sterror in the dark, and there's nothing worse than that. As that youngfellow I was telling you about said, 'At the front you do know whatyou're up against.'"

  "And people really believe that a number of Germans have somehow gotover to England and have hid themselves underground?"

  "People say they've got a new kind of poison-gas. Some think that theydig underground places and make the gas there, and lead it by secretpipes into the shops; others say that they throw gas bombs into thefactories. It must be worse than anything they've used in France, fromwhat the authorities say."

  "The authorities? Do _they_ admit that there are Germans in hiding aboutMidlingham?"

  "No. They call it 'explosions.' But we know it isn't explosions. We knowin the Midlands what an explosion sounds like and looks like. And weknow that the people killed in these 'explosions' are put into theircoffins in the works. Their own relations are not allowed to see them."

  "And so you believe in the German theory?"

  "If I do, it's because one must believe in something. Some say they'veseen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night likea black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of thetrees by Dunwich Common."

  The light of an ineffable amazement came into Lewis's eyes. The night ofRemnant's visit, the trembling vibration of the air, the dark tree thathad grown in his garden since the setting of the sun, the strangeleafage that was starred with burning, with emerald and ruby fires, andall vanished away when he returned from his visit to the Garth; and sucha leafage had appeared as a burning cloud far in the heart of England:what intolerable mystery, what tremendous doom was signified in this?But one thing was clear and certain: that the terror of Meirion wasalso the terror of the Midlands.

  Lewis made up his mind most firmly that if possible all this should bekept from his brother-in-law. Merritt had come to Porth as to a city ofrefuge from the horrors of Midlingham; if it could be managed he shouldbe spared the knowledge that the cloud of terror had gone before him andhung black over the western land. Lewis passed the port and said in aneven voice:

  "Very strange, indeed; a black cloud with sparks of fire?"

  "I can't answer for it, you know; it's only a rumor."

  "Just so; and you think or you're inclined to think that this and allthe rest you've told me is to be put down to the hidden Germans?"

  "As I say; because one must think something.

  "I quite see your point. No doubt, if it's true, it's the most awfulblow that has ever been dealt at any nation in the whole history ofman. The enemy established in our vitals! But is it possible, after all?How could it have been worked?"

  Merritt told Lewis how it had been worked, or rather, how people said ithad been worked. The idea, he said, was that this was a part, and a mostimportant part, of the great German plot to destroy England and theBritish Empire.

  The scheme had been prepared years ago, some thought soon after theFranco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England (inthe ordinary sense of the term invasion) presented very greatdifficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the innermilitary and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion inthese quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England wouldinvolve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in theposition of the _tertius gaudens_. This was the state of affairs when avery high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor,Huvelius.

  Thus Merritt, and here I would say in parenthesis that this Huvelius wasby all accounts an extraordinary man. Considered personally and apartfrom his writings he would appear to have been a most amiableindividual. He was richer than the generality of Swedes, certainly farricher than the average university professor in Sweden. But his shabby,green frock-coat, and his battered, furry hat were notorious in theuniversity town where he lived. No one laughed, because it was wellknown that Professor Huvelius spent every penny of his private means anda large portion of his official stipend on works of kindness andcharity. He hid his head in a garret, some one said, in order thatothers might be able to swell on the first floor. It was told of himthat he restricted himself to a diet of dry bread and coffee for a monthin order that a poor woman of the streets, dying of consumption, mightenjoy luxuries in hospital.

  And this was the man who wrote the treatise "De Facinore Humano"; toprove the infinite corruption of the human race.

  Oddly enough, Professor Huvelius wrote the most cynical book in theworld--Hobbes preaches rosy sentimentalism in comparison--with the veryhighest motives. He held that a very large part of human misery,misadventure, and sorrow was due to the false convention that the heartof man was naturally and in the main well disposed and kindly, if notexactly righteous. "Murderers, thieves, assassins, violators, and allthe host of the abominable," he says in one passage, "are created by thefalse pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. A lion in a cage isa fierce beast, indeed; but what will he be if we declare him to be alamb and open the doors of his den? Who will be guilty of the deaths ofthe men, women and children whom he will surely devour, save those whounlocked the cage?" And he goes on to show that kings and the rulers ofthe peoples could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast extent byacting on the doctrine of human wickedness. "War," he declares, "whichis one of the worst of evils, will always continue to exist. But a wiseking will desire a brief war rather than a lengthy one, a short evilrather than a long evil. And this not from the benignity of his hearttowards his enemies, for we have seen that the human heart is naturallymalignant, but because he desires to conquer, and to conquer easily,without a great expenditure of men or of treasure, knowing that if hecan accomplish this feat his people will love him and his crown will besecure. So he will wage brief victorious wars, and not only spare hisown nation, but the nation of the enemy, since in a short war the lossis less on both sides than in a long war. And so from evil will comegood."

  And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars to be waged? The wise prince, hereplies, will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptibleand infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chiefcharacteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in thevery councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing thewealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth,and winning the poor by swelling words. "For, contrary to the commonopinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populaceare to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god.And so much are they enchanted
by the words liberty, freedom, and suchlike, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little theyhave, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and theirvotes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment whichthey have received is called liberty."

  Guided by these principles, says Huvelius, the wise prince will entrenchhimself in the country that he desires to conquer; "nay, with but littletrouble, he may actually and literally throw his garrisons into theheart of the enemy country before war has begun."

  * * * * *

  This is a long and tiresome parenthesis; but it is necessary asexplaining the long tale which Merritt told his brother-in-law, hehaving received it from some magnate of the Midlands, who had traveledin Germany. It is probable that the story was suggested in the firstplace by the passage from Huvelius which I have just quoted.

  Merritt knew nothing of the real Huvelius, who was all but a saint; hethought of the Swedish professor as a monster of iniquity, "worse," ashe said, "than Neech"--meaning, no doubt, Nietzsche.

  So he told the story of how Huvelius had sold his plan to the Germans; aplan for filling England with German soldiers. Land was to be bought incertain suitable and well-considered places, Englishmen were to bebought as the apparent owners of such land, and secret excavations wereto be made, till the country was literally undermined. A subterraneanGermany, in fact, was to be dug under selected districts of England;there were to be great caverns, underground cities, well drained, wellventilated, supplied with water, and in these places vast stores both offood and of munitions were to be accumulated, year after year, till "theDay" dawned. And then, warned in time, the secret garrison would leaveshops, hotels, offices, villas, and vanish underground, ready to begintheir work of bleeding England at the heart.

  "That's what Henson told me," said Merritt at the end of his long story."Henson, head of the Buckley Iron and Steel Syndicate. He has been a lotin Germany."

  "Well," said Lewis, "of course, it may be so. If it is so, it isterrible beyond words."

  Indeed, he found something horribly plausible in the story. It was anextraordinary plan, of course; an unheard of scheme; but it did not seemimpossible. It was the Trojan Horse on a gigantic scale; indeed, hereflected, the story of the horse with the warriors concealed within itwhich was dragged into the heart of Troy by the deluded Trojansthemselves might be taken as a prophetic parable of what had happened toEngland--if Henson's theory were well founded. And this theory certainlysquared with what one had heard of German preparations in Belgium and inFrance: emplacements for guns ready for the invader, Germanmanufactories which were really German forts on Belgian soil, thecaverns by the Aisne made ready for the cannon; indeed, Lewis thought heremembered something about suspicious concrete tennis-courts on theheights commanding London. But a German army hidden under Englishground! It was a thought to chill the stoutest heart.

  And it seemed from that wonder of the burning tree, that the enemymysteriously and terribly present at Midlingham, was present also inMeirion. Lewis, thinking of the country as he knew it, of its wild anddesolate hillsides, its deep woods, its wastes and solitary places,could not but confess that no more fit region could be found for thedeadly enterprise of secret men. Yet, he thought again, there was butlittle harm to be done in Meirion to the armies of England or to theirmunitionment. They were working for panic terror? Possibly that might beso; but the camp under the Highway? That should be their first object,and no harm had been done there.

  Lewis did not know that since the panic of the horses men had diedterribly in that camp; that it was now a fortified place, with a deep,broad trench, a thick tangle of savage barbed wire about it, and amachine-gun planted at each corner.