'I've got you now,' he said quietly; 'and don't imagine that the Herr Gruppenfuhrer will come to your assistance this time, I've already dealt with him.'
She stared at him like a small, ferocious, trapped animal for a moment, then she murmured: 'I thought—I thought . . .'
'Yes,' Gregory went on for her, 'you thought that I was dead, but I survived your hospitality and I've come back from the gates of Death to claim you.'
'What—what d'you mean to do?' she breathed. 'Are you going to kill me?'
He nodded. 'As the price of your treachery you no doubt anticipate great rewards from your Fuehrer, but you're not going to get them. You are the woman who sold France to her enemies, and for that you are going to die.'
A new expression came into her face, neither resignation nor fear, nor determination to fight for her life, but a strange spiritual flame that lit up her whole countenance, as she cried in ringing protest: 'That's a lie!
I did not sell France; and I shall go down in history not as the woman who betrayed France but as the woman who saved her.'
Gregory was so taken aback by this extraordinary declaration that he could only stammer: 'You—you've done your damnedest to ensure that France shall surrender and desert her Ally.'
'Her Ally!' she sneered. 'For nearly a thousand years England was our hereditary enemy, and the Entente Cordiale is a thing of yesterday, based on false premises. That unnatural alliance will pass as swiftly as it came and will soon be forgotten. Deep down in you the truth is as plain to you as it is to me. The French and the English neither like nor understand each other and their paths lie in opposite directions. For a few decades Britain has used France as the weaker partner to be her bulwark against Germany. France suffered inconceivably more than Britain in the last war and, once again, she is being martyred in this one, while the English sit at home in their cities, safe and secure. But that is finished. Henceforth Britain must fight her own battles and France will go back as an integral part of the Continent to which she belongs.'
'I see,' snapped Gregory. 'It's not, after all, that you're pro-Hitler but that you're anti-British. Yet you worked on Leopold, who was just as much France's Ally as Britain's, to make him throw his hand in; and you helped to persuade Mussolini to stab France in the back. Your hatred of the English must have unbalanced your brain if just for the sake of making things difficult for us you've gone to the length of betraying France to the Nazis. Damn it, you must be crazy!'
'You fool!' she spat at him. 'I tell you I have saved France— saved her from herself—and if you knew the things that I know you would realise it.'
A sudden spate of words poured from her scarlet lips. 'France in our time has become decadent, vile, rotten to the core. Look at our great families—the aristocrats and the intelligentsia who should think for and lead the nation—how do they spend their lives? Money-grabbing at the expense of the workers so that Communism has become rife throughout the land. At all times in history the ruling caste has had its own code of morals, yet used a cloak of some decency to screen its love affairs. But not these people.
They are not even content to sleep with one another openly, like dogs and bitches rutting in a field. Half of them are perverts, homosexuals, Lesbians, and they have so little shame that they proclaim their vices from the housetops. The other half are so degraded that they marry only as a matter of convenience, and their idea of amusement is to take their own wives to a brothel to witness every vile practice that the mind can conceive. A desire for children, the home, real love, have become things to snigger at. Dope, gambling, and the private cinema at which even bestiality is shown, have taken their place as the occupations of the rich. And what the rich do today the masses do tomorrow. That is why the ruling caste of France must die the death. It is to bring about their downfall that men like Weygand and Baudouin have striven with me. France must be purged for ever of this scum in order that the spirit of France which lives on in the common people may revivify her and make her once again a great nation.'
Hardly pausing for breath, she raced on: 'Communism could not do that; but National Socialism could.
And however much you English may hate Hitler, I know him to be a great man. For a year—two years, perhaps—France will be occupied by a conqueror, but what is such a period in the hundreds of years of her history? Hitler will know how to deal with the real traitors; the wealthy parasites who have battened on the resources of the nation and paved the way for her downfall by the vile example they have set to her other classes. He will know, too, how to deal with the Communists and dangerous visionaries who preach their unworkable theories that all men are equal, which is fundamentally untrue.
'Out of chaos will come order. Under National Socialism we shall re-establish the ideal of the Family and reorganise our industrial resources so that the greatest good comes to the greatest number. For a time France must know the weight of a captive's chains in order that she may know how to utilise her freedom when she regains it once more. The people may suffer bitterness, humiliation, misery, but these things will pass, and when the time is ripe a new France will arise, reborn from the ashes of the old—a France clean in mind, strong in spirit and conscious of her glorious destiny.
'It is for this that I have lied and tricked and soiled my hands with blood, but you know that I speak the truth and you dare not call me a traitor now.'
For a moment Gregory did not reply. Her torrent of words had come crashing on to his brain, revealing her to be an utterly different personality from what he had thought her. Right or wrong, according to her own lights this small dark woman was a great patriot.
He knew that what she had said of the Entente Cordiale being an unnatural alliance was true. He knew that what she had said of the degeneracy of French society was true. He knew that any German occupation of France could not last indefinitely; and, however appalling it might sound, the Baroness's plan was, perhaps, the one and only way of restoring health and a new vitality to the moribund French nation. Yet he also knew that she had made one vital miscalculation.
'Do you realise,' he asked, 'that your vision of a new France will remain only a vision unless Hitler can secure Peace? For without Peace it will be impossible for him to reorganise Europe,'
She shrugged. 'With Hitler as master of Europe from northern Norway to the Pyrenees, Britain will not be able to carry on the war alone.'
Gregory shook his head. 'You're wrong there. Every man, woman and child in Britain knows that we dare not make a patched-up peace. Now that the war is on we are determined to fight it to a finish, because if we gave Hitler even a few months' breathing-space we should be completely at his mercy later on. You're much too clever a woman, Baroness, not to realise the truth of that.'
She shrugged again. 'Yes. You may fight on for a little, but what chance have you got? With the whole coast of France in his hands Hitler will be able to wear you down with intensive bombings until you are so weak that you will not be able to resist an invasion.'
'No, Baroness; there you're wrong again. He can bomb our cities but we shall stand up to the bombing somehow, even if we have to live in holes in the ground; and as long as the British Navy is paramount upon the seas he will never be able to land an invading force of sufficient strength to quell us. No threats, no terror, will be great enough to break the heart of Britain. And the worse things get the more determined we shall become to see matters through.'