The passport

Front matter

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Chapter I

Richard Warden, third, sat at the window of his lofty and comfortable apartment looking across the river at the little lights.

There were myriads of them, flickering in the remnant of a gale that was blowing, with a few stray raindrops, late comers in an afternoon shower, ticking monotonously against the windows.

He was Richard Warden, third , because his father, also Richard, was still living — as was his grandfather. He would have been Richard Warden, tenth or eleventh, but for the fact that the grandfather was the last living of the earlier Richard Wardens.

His college mates had used the distinguishing additum as a sobriquet and he secretly enjoyed the historical pleasantry, while not at all in sympathy with the character of the cruel and vindictive Duke of Gloucester.

Gentle in thought and manner, he was strong in mental and physical development and, although scarcely turned into his twenties, he had studied earnestly the history of the world and had formed opinions and come to conclusions far in advance of his five and twenty years.

He had the soul of the dreamer combined with the capabilities of the leader and was, in every way, that composite alloy of the melting pot that goes to make the perfect human metal.

For several hours he had been watching the lights across the river. The landscape, hidden in the shadows of the early evening, assumed the outlines of a huge battle-ground with the tiny lights taking form as signals with growing regularity and intensity. An electric advertising sign flared up like the torch of a war king.

In his mind he saw the struggling hordes, the moving of huge bodies of men in the shadows, the flare of the cannon, with the shrieks of the victory-maddened and the dying mingled in one awful, devilish ensemble. It all seemed so real, so much like that which was happening elsewhere on this earth.

As he sat there and mused, the strains of martial music reached him from the broad thoroughfare below. He left his apartment and took the elevator to the street floor.

Down the avenue came a brilliant procession, a pageant typical of cosmopolitan New York. There were horsemen and paraders on foot, carriages and gayly decorated floats. The chief executive of the city rode proudly in the leading carriage, to the music of an enlivening march.

Among the civic bodies in the parade he noticed some five hundred men, shoulders thrown back and marching with a military precision quite unlike the haphazard strides of the other groups on foot. A banner, carried by the leader, informed him that this five hundred constituted a German sharpshooter’s club. There were a number of such clubs in New York.

Both sides of the thoroughfare were packed with people, acclaiming the officials, the pageantry and the martial music. It was all very enthusing and he stood there, dreaming, imagining how he himself would feel returning as a hero, acclaimed by his fellow men, embraced by the women in the ecstacy of hysterical enthusiasm and lauded for having conquered others of his fellow men, conquered them by killing, slaughtering, exterminating them.

Then, his mind diverted into less sanguinary channels, he thought how much nobler it would be to return a victorious peacemaker! Fellow men and women would acclaim just as heartily — just as hysterically.

Yet it had never been done.

The returning hero must always be a killer — whether of beast or man, it did not matter. But his prowess must needs be measured by his power to exterminate, his passion and his ability to take life, never to preserve it.

Still occupied with this waking dream, he re-entered the big, grey-stone apartment house, a building emblematic of peace and industry. Again in his eyry, he once more looked out over the dark river at the twinkling, flickering lights. He surveyed the scene as a giant would survey it — as a man surveys a village of bustling, tireless ants.

The Great War had much affected Richard Warden, third. He had no bias and was prejudiced only in the overflowing sympathy he felt for those whose homes were being invaded and ravaged. He made a mental comparison between the wide stretch of land and water under his eyes and the great expanse of territory ruined and robbed by the omnipresent Teutons on the other side of the Atlantic.

How easy it would be for a giant, standing as high as he now stood above the earth, to scatter the ruthless invaders !

Once he had turned away an army of hostile ants who, seemingly, were bent upon violating the peaceful industries of a little village in his garden. The invaders were big, red ants and the smaller, black insects in the village were, apparently, taken by surprise and valiantly defended their domain. He had scattered the invaders with a twig and had the satisfaction of seeing the village again pursuing its normal activities.

Oh, for some Brobdingnaigan to do for the Belgians and the French what he had done for his little friends in the garden!

As he thought of it now, those big, red ants, with their fat, well-rounded bodies, brought vividly to his mind the Kaiser’s stout, well-fed warriors, with their shining helmets, as he had seen them on the parade grounds at Potsdam and at Metz during a summer’s sojourn abroad.

A giant, with his head as high above the surrounding country as his own was now, with a giant’s twig that would, undoubtedly, seem as monstrous a weapon to the German invaders as his own little twig must have seemed to the big, red ants, would be able to clear the invaded territory in a moment, poke over huge cannon, howitzers and great fortifications, just as he had poked over the earth on the outskirts of the ant village, and transform stricken Belgium and Northern France into a peaceful, if devastated land.

The subject of proportion fascinated him. It all seemed to end with Man.

In the wars of the insects, of the birds, of the smaller animals, there was always some larger insect, bird or animal that’ could stop the work of extermination between the smaller belligerents and scatter them. The final physical tribunal was — Man. But Man, in his own wars, found himself helpless except through the superiority of numbers and of cruel weapons and then only by a terrific sacrifice of blood. The natural law of proportion stopped with Man.

There was no giant to do for Man what he, Richard Warden, third, had done for the ants. The result had always been appalling and it never was more so than in this Twentieth Century struggle that had placed an innocent community at the mercy of an unscrupulous, barbarous invader and laid waste a fair and peaceful land.

Faint echoes of the martial airs in the street below brought him back to his thoughts of the returning conqueror; the victorious return of the hero who, by reason of having put to death sufficient numbers of his fellow men, had succeeded in liberating his own land or else make it the master of another!

It was always killing, killing!

It had been thus since the beginning of Time and the hope that the ancient practices were gradually but surely undergoing a change had been ruthlessly shattered at the very zenith of an enlightened age!

The lights still flickered across the river.

On the water other skimmering little flashes took on the shapes of bursting shells.

Closing his eyes, he could see the thousands of uniformed, helmeted human ants on the embankment opposite, laying waste the land below upon which he was gazing as a giant would.

He felt the tremors of the earth as the shells found their mark, saw the crumbling marble piles along the beautiful river drive, saw the city all about him in flames, terror upon all faces, men and women and children being buried at every step under mountains of falling stone and twisted steel.

Were he as tall as the building at the window of which he stood, six strides would bring him to the other embankment and one sweep of both arms would scatter that hostile army, with the bullets from their puny weapons rattling against him as impotently as hail stones during an autumn storm.

The desire to help Belgium’s stricken people became an obsession with him.

He sat at the window, in deep reflection, until late. Then he tried to interest himself in a book but, instead, picked up the day’s late editions and was soon poring over the more or less detailed accounts of what was happening on the battlefields.

The dispatches were not, from the viewpoint of one desiring to see the German war lord rebuked for his insolence, reassuring. The Mailed Fist was being driven further and further through the allied lines and the alternating forward and retrograde movements of the opposing forces in Belgium were gradually reducing that country to a bleak, charred plain. In Northern France, too, the ground once covered by beautiful vineyards was being prepared, by Wilhelm The Insatiable, for the withering heat of the blast furnaces where Krupps could be made for conquests still to

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All this he saw prophesied in the daily prints and the idea of scattering the fat, red ants of Germania became more and more thoroughly inculcated in his mind.

To upset the plans of those who considered themselves invincible did not present itself to the young man as a grotesque proposition. There had been men before him who had made the world do their bidding and the only difference between them and himself lay in the fact that his predecessors had been master by the torch and sword while he desired to be master without recourse to arms or bloodshed. He felt that, in his sub-conscious self, there was hidden a way, if only he could bring it to the surface.

Deeply interested in physic phenomena, to which he had devoted much time, Warden knew that, through his subjective mind, there would present itself a solution of the apparently gigantic problem before him. He set himself to the task of concentrating his thoughts upon the subject and it became so absolute a part of his waking as well as his sleeping hours that he soon appeared peculiar and incomprehensible to those with whom he was thrown in contact.

“A fortune awaits the man who can find the way to send the interned Germans in America back to Germany,” said a friend to him one day.

“ A greater fortune and much greater fame awaits the man who finds the way to make it unnecessary for them to go back to Germany,” he replied. And usually he would turn the conversation and resume his faraway look and silent meditation.

While he had taken a course in applied chemistry, he had half regretted his self-outlined career after quitting college, much to the disappointment of his father, who had planned for the son a brilliant future in the profession that had dealt so generously with himself. It was with keen pleasure, therefore, that the elder Warden received word from the young collegian saying that the latter had decided to actively take up his chosen profession and would devote himself to experiments for a time, in the laboratory of his father in the Warden home, beautifully situated in one of the garden spots of New England.

The time intervening between the sending of the letter to his father and the giving up of his comfortable bachelor quarters in New York, he spent largely in the great libraries. Day after day, engrossed in scientific books, he would sit there making copious notes and memoranda, grudgingly snatching a few moments for his meals and totally ignoring his social obligations, notably so in the case of the charming Miss Mary Berwin, which particular social obligation had, in fact, been relegated to positive oblivion from the moment that he had begun, as his friends pleasantly described it, to have “the bug in his brain.” He would spend the evenings looking over the river at the flickering lights — when he was not going over his notes and data — and the last thing he did before retiring was to set his mind intently upon THE WAY, so that he might fall asleep with brain predisposed, and possibly bring forth, out of his subconsciousness, a realization of his hopes — a logical release of his captive dream.

His determination to pursue the profession for which he had studied was, to some extent, due to the fact that the young man was well aware that the continued brooding over his pet ideal might lead to serious consequences, if he did not otherwise occupy his mind. In this way he proved, to his own satisfaction at least, that he was well-balanced mentally and intended to remain so. The friendly jibes of his friends — upon the rare occasions that he met them — did not disturb him in the least.

“If there is a bug in my brain,” he would say smilingly, “it is the liveliest bug that ever was and it is keeping my brain active. It may claim public attention, some day, in a manner you little dream of now!”

Finally, the day arrived when he gave up his New York lodgings. The evening before he had gazed for the last time upon the little lights across the river, had seen in his mind’s eye the human ants massing on the ridge opposite, the bursting of the shells, the devastation, the coming of the giant and then — Peace!

CHAPTER n

His arrival in the little New England hamlet, nestled at the foot of the picturesque Berkshires, was not regarded with any degree of lively interest by the villagers. Prone to ascribe eccentricity to anyone engaged in any form of study or occupation above their own powers of understanding, the natives classed the younger Warden with his pater, and commented upon his home-coming merely as a case of “another bug come to town.”

To the elderly Elizabeth, acting as housekeeper in the home of her brother, his coming was a matter of the utmost importance, however. The good soul pictured her nephew bringing order out of chaos on the “f&rm” and she could already see the grounds surrounding the old Warden homestead transformed into a beautiful estate under his energetic supervision. The chickens, that now looked as if they were suffering from the mange, the poultry runs that had fallen into decay and the delapidated fences, would now all be attended to and the place made habitable, a state of affairs that had not been in effect since Grandfather Warden became too old to look after the property and young Richard’s father had become a sort of passive head of the household.

Vases for flowers and urns for autumn leaves had been put in one of the choice rooms of the house which had been set aside for Richard’s use by his aunt. A pink bow here and there on the lace curtains, the clothes hamper and the whiskbroom, carried out the good lady’s idea of a perfectly normal male college graduate’s needs, an idea that was further emphasized by a profusion of dainty white covers on table, dresser, book-case and rocking chair as well as by an exquisite white pillow sham interlaced along the edges with a pink ribbon.

Aunt Elizabeth gazed with ill-concealed satisfaction on the scene of her activity as she ushered Richard into the room and then hied herself to the lower floor where she busied herself over a formidable list of necessary changes and improvements in the property which, she felt sure, would prove to Richard a long-felt want.

She received her first shock the next morning at breakfast. An expressman had brought a ponderous box to the house before her nephew came downstairs. It was addressed to the latter and undoubtedly contained his library and bachelor-den paraphernalia. When he came down and told his aunt that the box contained chemicals and apparatus for chemical experiments she was sorely disappointed, for her brother had told her nothing of Richard’s intentions to follow chemistry as his career.

Her second shock came when she went upstairs while her nephew was breakfasting. She found that two of the vases contained a dark, brackish fluid, while the flowers were in the waste-paper basket. The autumn leaves were lying on the window sill and their places in the urns had been given over to various small bags and boxes with uncipherable marks. A cane, with the crook stuck into the loop, adorned the curtain bow and some colored powder had successfully put the stamp of ruin on the white coverlet on the center table.

After breakfast, Aunt Elizabeth rather hesitatingly suggested a walk through the grounds with her young relative. He assented readily enough, somewhat to her surprise. He did not, however, appear to show the requisite amount of enthusiasm over the proposed improvements. He agreed with his aunt that the fences looked bad and that the chickens resembled animated feather dusters that had seen better days, but he did not commit himself on the proposition that he should be the one to remedy these faults.

He inspected the small building used as a chicken shelter with greater attention than any of the other places to which his aunt led him. This caused the worthy woman to believe she had finally succeeded in interesting her nephew, although she could not account for his devoting himself specially to the chicken house since it was in far better condition than any of the other structures on the property.

Her perplexity was dissipated that same afternoon when she found her dishevelled chickens enjoying an unwonted outing in the vegetable garden nearby and Nephew Richard busy putting up shelves in the little building which the man-of-all-work, under his direction, had broomed clean and painted an immaculate white within. At the moment that his aunt entered the place, the helper was running an electric light wire into the hennery, making Aunt Elizabeth’s query, as to whether it was being improved for the chickens, quite unnecessary.

Within a week from the time that he had installed himself in the chicken house, the village began to talk of the queer things that were happening on the Warden “farm.” Often, when the entire community was wrapped in slumber, some of the village rounders, coming home late from a neighboring dance, had seen mysterious lights in the Warden hennery and on several occasions flashes of blue flame had sent small parties of the more timid women dancers scurrying home along the dark road with a due amount of creepy shivers under their wraps.

One morning, while the aunt was disconsolately viewing the fast gathering ruin over the farm, the good woman was frightened speechless by a terrific explosion and, as she turned, there came a crash of glass when the window in the chicken house burst outward accompanied by a great cloud of smoke. About the same time Richard came out of the building, his face and hands blackened, but seemingly unmindful of the disturbance he had caused as he made his way to the Warden dwelling.

“It’s alright, Aunt Bessie!” he said as he passed the frightened woman, “I think I have found what I have been looking for.”

“Lands sake, it made noise enough!” commented his aunt. She was too much overcome to say more but helplessly watched her begrimed nephew enter the house and go up to his room.

It was a few days after this incident that Walter Nast, a neighbor, came in to tell Richard’s father about the peculiar accident that had befallen his herd of prize Jerseys.

“When I came to the pasture this morning,” said Nast, “everyone of my ninety cows was lying as dead on the field. Those that I examined were warm and they did not appear to be dead but they weren’t sleeping nat’ral, either, for some were all in a heap as if they had been overcome by sickness. I hurried to get

Doctor Bell, the veterinary, but he was out and by the time I came back to the village, about four hours later, all the cows seemed to be slowly getting alright again.”

Aunt Elizabeth listened to this recital of local news with open-mouthed amazement. Richard, who was present during the telling of Nast’s troubles, was apparently greatly interested, as was his father, the latter suggesting the taking of blood specimen of the cattle for analysis, while Grandfather Warden, in the inevitable rocker, opined that the cattle had probably partaken of some poisonous weeds and that Neighbor Nast had better have the pasture looked over.

There was a wistful look in young Warden’s face that gradually changed into an expression of exultation. To Nast the ailment of the ninety cows was a mystery. To the elder Warden it suggested a purely bacteriological problem. To Grandfather Warden the solution lay in the pasture weeds. Richard knew that the temporary indisposition of these Berkshire cattle would lead to the saving of thousands, yea, millions of human lives, and at no distant day.

At the breakfast table some mornings afterward, he announced that he would go back to New York for a short stay. The decision elicited no comment from his father but it was received with an involuntary sigh of relief by his aunt, for the young man had, in some way, greatly disturbed the spinster’s equanimity during the fortnight or so that he had been with them in the Berkshire home.

An hour later he was on a train, with two cumbersome valises. Once settled in his seat there was an expression of deep thought mingled with satisfaction on his face as he sat, wrapped in his meditations, entirely unmindful of the beautiful scenery that swept by in a l°ng panorama and he sat there, without stirring, until his train rolled into the New York terminal.

After arranging for a room at a small hotel in the vicinity of the station, and depositing his luggage there, he bethought himself of Miss Berwin, whom he had not seen in a month, part of which time the young lady had spent in Washington with her parents. Finding that Mary was in town, he went to her home in one of the big uptown hotels, determined to settle one other momentous matter besides the one that had brought him to the city.

The weather being mild, with a glorious late afternoon sun adding its lustre to the feeling of exhilaration at being out of doors, he climbed to the upper deck of one of the top-heavy motor omnibuses that thread their way as if by magic through the maze of traffic in New York’s congested streets and proceeded to enjoy a pipe and the human passing show on his journey uptown.

He secured a seat on the one bench remaining vacant, immediately behind two portly, florid-faced men whom he found were Germans. They conversed mostly in German although sometimes reverting to broken English, the latter with a strong German flavor. Perfectly conversant with the language, he was able to overhear much of what was being said, especially since, owing to the rumbling of the ’bus, the two men spoke in voices loud enough at times to carry to the seat behind them. After listening to the first few words that were spoken, he realized that the drift of the conversation was most significant. It gave him a startling insight into another phase of the subject in which he was so deeply interested.

From what was said he gathered that one of the men had been for many years officially connected, as a counselor, with the German Embassy at Washiijgton but was, in reality, a German secret service officer with a roving commission in the United States. The other man was named Bachman, or Backman, who lived in one of the suburbs and who, seemingly, was exceedingly well posted on the exact numbers and the condition of Germans and their descendants in New York and its environs.

“The time is not yet come,” said the counselor. “If this country had taken sides with us against England, we could have had two million men, armed to the teeth, across the border into Canada by now.”

“Yes,” commented the other, “we could have easily sent a couple of hundred thousand men from New York alone. They are all ready, with first class rifles and plenty of ammunition. We have ten thousand rifles stored away with which to arm those I. W. W. ruffians, who are ready to do our bidding for a small price and the privilege of looting. They have been thoroughly canvassed, without their knowing what job they are wanted for but they are keen for it, whatever it is. Of the regulars, we have five hundred of our own people in my district alone at the last election. They are all naturalized voters but solid for our cause to a man. We are drilling right along among four hundred and odd groups that hold private smokers and masquerades once a week. The men are as fine a body of soldiers as His Majesty could wish for in Germany to-day.”

“Did you get the disbursement through without trouble?” the counselor asked.

“We got it in five installments through five different German banking houses here,” was the reply. “The distribution among the different houses was done so as not to cause any talk. All the clerks in these houses that they were not entirely sure of have been dropped. There came near being a leak at one time, when the first installment came through. A hundred thousand for a shuetzen corps, especially at this time, is liable to cause comment !”

“The situation is equally good all through the country,” broke in the counselor again. “If these fools in the American papers don’t shut up and if those other fools in Washington don’t do something very soon, His Majesty may be depended upon to make a move that will bring these crazy Yankees to their senses. Drilling is going on all over the country and all our halls are stocked with full equipment. Thanks to His Majesty’s spirit, which pervades all of us, we have a better standing army right here in the United States than any of the European states have over there, except our own. As for the Yankees, bah ! They have less than a hundred thousand regulars all told and the state militias are a rabble, just a rabble of clerks, compared to our seasoned men. Did you know ”

The jolting of the ’bus over a cobbled cross-street, the noise of its horn and the shouting of an angry cab driver, drowned the rest of the sentence for Warden, the more since the counselor had leaned over toward his companion and had finished the sentence in a more subdued tone.

However, he caught the reply from the other man, who was evidently much astounded at the information conveyed.

“You don’t mean it?”

The counselor answered in the affirmative, as the inclination of his head indicated.

Warden’s eavesdropping had been productive, however, even without this final piece of information, which he had missed. He was so intent upon listening to everything the two Germans were saying that he had not noticed, in a seat across the aisle on the ’bus deck, a black-mustached man who was watching him closely. At the moment of the break in the conversation — for Warden — this man leaned over the counselor, with his mouth close to the latter’s ear and whispered something to him. The counselor at once repeated what was said to him, to his friend, also in a whisper and then neither could refrain from glancing quickly back of them at Warden. He, in the meanwhile, had settled himself back against the railing, something having told him that the black-mustached man’s whisper had to do with his eavesdropping.

A few moments later the ’bus, now near Grant’s Tomb, stopped at the street where Miss Berwin lived and he alighted, with a number of other passengers.

As he walked rapidly eastward he did not see that the man with the black mustache was on the other side of the street, watching him.

Chapter III

In appearance, Mary Berwin was typically an American girl, just as Warden was a typical American boy. There was no suggestion of that foreign touch about her manner of acting or speaking which, as a general rule, immediately brands the alien. Yet he knew her as the daughter of a former Englishman and his wife, naturalized some ten years, but whose tender age at the time of coming to the New World — she was then only ten years old — had caused Mary to acclimate quickly and grow up into American young womanhood. Tall and fair, the girl had been blessed with more than average beauty and she had a quiet graciousness of manner that quickly won for her a large circle of friends, both in official Washington and unofficial New York, the two places between which William Frederick Berwin spent most of his time.

“I had really begun to believe I was not to see you again,” pouted Miss Berwin when he was ushered into the apartment. “I have had a perfectly lovely time in Washington but that does not absolve you from having to explain why you did not come up during the fortnight that we were still here.”

He made the best excuses that he could think of at the moment without actually telling the girl the reason of his neglecting her. He was burning to tell her of his plans, of his ambitions, but put it off from moment to moment, as a cat puts off the killing of the mouse, although he could, like most young men of his age, well imagine himself leading this sweet creature to the altar and from it, and together facing the deliciously thrilling career that he had mapped out for himself.