“Yes. But still... you didn’t get anything this time, did you?”
“I was too late. I hadn’t a pencil. I only got this — I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.” She pushed the paper across. SOSPIC. “I know it might easily be coincidence — that it does seem to make a kind of word.”
“An odd word.”
“Mightn’t it be a man’s name?”
The officer in tweeds was looking at it, she suddenly realized, with real interest — as if it was a rare kind of pheasant. He said, “Excuse me a moment,” and left her. She could hear him telephoning to somebody from another room: the little ting of the bell, silence, and then a low voice she couldn’t overhear. Then he returned, and she could tell at once from his face that all was well.
He sat down and fiddled with a fountain-pen: he was obviously embarrassed. He started a sentence and stopped it. Then he brought out in an embarrassed gulp, “We’ll all have to apologize to your husband.”
“It meant something?”
He was obviously making his mind up about something difficult and out of the way: he was not in the habit of confiding in members of the public. But she had ceased to be a member of the public.
“My dear Mrs. Bishop,” he said, “I’ve got to ask a great deal from you.”
“Of course. Anything.”
He seemed to reach a decision and stopped fiddling. “A neutral ship called the Pic was sunk this morning at 4 A.M., with a loss of two hundred lives. S.O.S. Pic. If we’d had your husband’s warning, we could have got destroyers to her in time. I’ve been speaking to the Admiralty.”
Mary Bishop said in a tone of fury, “The things they are writing about David. Is there one of them who’d have the courage...?”
“That’s the worst part of it, Mrs. Bishop. They must go on writing. Nobody must know, except my department and yourself.”
“His mother?”
“You mustn’t even tell her.”
“But can’t you make them just leave him alone?”
“This afternoon I shall ask them to intensify their campaign — in order to discourage others. An article on the legal aspect of treason.”
“And if I refuse to keep quiet?”
“Your husband’s life won’t be worth much, will it?”
“So he’s just got to go on?”
“Yes. Just go on.”
He went on for four weeks. Every night now she tuned in to Zeesen with a new horror — that he would be off the air. The code was a child’s code. How could they fail to detect it? But they did fail. Men with complicated minds can be deceived by simplicity. And every night, too, she had to listen to her mother-in-law’s indictment; every episode which she thought discreditable out of a child’s past was brought out — the tiniest incident. Women in the last war had found a kind of pride in “giving” their sons: this, too, was a gift on the altar of a warped patriotism. But now young Mrs. Bishop didn’t cry: she just held on — it was relief enough to hear his voice.
It wasn’t often that he had information to give — the phrase “the fact of the matter is” was a rare one in his talks: sometimes there were the numbers of the regiments passing through Berlin, or of men on leave: very small details, which might be of value to military intelligence, but to her seemed hardly worth the risk of a life. If this was all he could do, why, why hadn’t he allowed them simply to intern him?
At last she could bear it no longer. She visited the War Office again. The man in tweeds was still there, but this time for some reason he was wearing a black tail coat and a black stock as if he had been to a funeraclass="underline" he must have been to a funeral, and she thought with more fear than ever of her husband.
“He’s a brave man, Mrs. Bishop,” he said.
“You needn’t tell me that,” she cried bitterly.
“We shall see that he gets the highest possible decoration...”
“Decorations!”
“What do you want, Mrs. Bishop? He’s doing his duty.”
“So are other men. But they come home on leave. Sometime. He can’t go on for ever. Soon they are bound to find out.”
“What can we do?”
“You can get him out of there. Hasn’t he done enough for you?”
He said gently: “It’s beyond our power. How can we communicate with him?”
“Surely you have agents.”
“Two lives would be lost. Can’t you imagine how they watch him?”
Yes. She could imagine all that clearly. She had spent too many holidays in Germany — as the Press had not failed to discover — not to know how men were watched, telephone lines tapped, table companions scrutinized.
He said, “If there was some way we could get a message to him, it might be managed. We do owe him that.”
Young Mrs. Bishop said quickly before he could change his mind: “Well, the code works both ways. The fact of the matter is... We have news broadcast in German. He might one day listen in.”
“Yes. There’s a chance.”
She became privy to the plan because again they needed her help. They wanted to attract his notice first by some phrase peculiar to her. For years they had spoken German together on their annual holiday. That phrase was to be varied in every broadcast, and elaborately they worked out a series of messages which would convey to him the same instructions — to go to a certain station on the Cologne-Wesel line and contact there a railway worker who had already helped five men and two women to escape from Germany.
Mary Bishop felt she knew the place well — the small country station which probably served only a few dozen houses and a big hotel where people went in the old days for cures. The opportunity was offered him, if he could only take it, by an elaborate account of a railway accident at that point — so many people killed — sabotage — arrests. It was plugged in the news as relentlessly as the Germans repeated the news of false sinkings, and they answered indignantly back that there had been no accident.
It seemed more horrible than ever to Mary Bishop — those nightly broadcasts from Zeesen. The voice was in the room with her, and yet he couldn’t know whether any message for which he risked his life reached home, and she couldn’t know whether their messages to him just petered out unheard or unrecognized.
Old Mrs. Bishop said, “Well, we can do without David to-night, I should hope.” It was a new turn in her bitterness: now she would simply wipe him off the air. Mary Bishop protested. She said she must hear — then at least she would know that he was well.
“It serves him right if he’s not well.”
“I’m going to listen,” Mary Bishop persisted.
“Then I’ll go out of the room. I’m tired of his lies.”
“You’re his mother, aren’t you?”
“That’s not my fault. I didn’t choose — like you did. I tell you I won’t listen to it.”
Mary Bishop turned the knob. “Then stop your ears,” she cried in a sudden fury, and heard David’s voice coming over.
“The lies,” he was saying, “put over by the British capitalist Press. There has not even been a railway accident — leave alone any sabotage — at the place so persistently mentioned in the broadcasts from England. To-morrow I am leaving myself for the so-called scene of the accident, and I propose in my broadcast the day after to-morrow to give you an impartial observer’s report, with records of the very rail-waymen who are said to have been shot for sabotage. To-morrow, therefore, I shall not be on the air...”
“Oh, thank God, thank God,” Mary Bishop said.
The old woman grumbled by the fire. “You haven’t much to thank Him for.”
“You don’t know how much.”