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<h1> THE SPY </h1>
<p><br/></p>
<h2> By Richard Harding Davis </h2>
<hr />
<p><br/></p>
<p>My going to Valencia was entirely an accident. But the more often I stated
that fact, the more satisfied was everyone at the capital that I had come
on some secret mission. Even the venerable politician who acted as our
minister, the night of my arrival, after dinner, said confidentially,
“Now, Mr. Crosby, between ourselves, what's the game?”</p>
<p>“What's what game?” I asked.</p>
<p>“You know what I mean,” he returned. “What are you here for?”</p>
<p>But when, for the tenth time, I repeated how I came to be marooned in
Valencia he showed that his feelings were hurt, and said stiffly: “As you
please. Suppose we join the ladies.”</p>
<p>And the next day his wife reproached me with: “I should think you could
trust your own minister. My husband NEVER talks—not even to me.”</p>
<p>“So I see,” I said.</p>
<p>And then her feelings were hurt also, and she went about telling people I
was an agent of the Walker-Keefe crowd.</p>
<p>My only reason for repeating here that my going to Valencia was an
accident is that it was because Schnitzel disbelieved that fact, and to
drag the hideous facts from me followed me back to New York. Through that
circumstance I came to know him, and am able to tell his story.</p>
<p>The simple truth was that I had been sent by the State Department to
Panama to “go, look, see,” and straighten out a certain conflict of
authority among the officials of the canal zone. While I was there the
yellow-fever broke out, and every self-respecting power clapped a
quarantine on the Isthmus, with the result that when I tried to return to
New York no steamer would take me to any place to which any white man
would care to go. But I knew that at Valencia there was a direct line to
New York, so I took a tramp steamer down the coast to Valencia. I went to
Valencia only because to me every other port in the world was closed. My
position was that of the man who explained to his wife that he came home
because the other places were shut.</p>
<p>But, because, formerly in Valencia I had held a minor post in our
legation, and because the State Department so constantly consults our firm
on questions of international law, it was believed I revisited Valencia on
some mysterious and secret mission.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, had I gone there to sell phonographs or to start a
steam laundry, I should have been as greatly suspected. For in Valencia
even every commercial salesman, from the moment he gives up his passport
on the steamer until the police permit him to depart, is suspected,
shadowed, and begirt with spies.</p>
<p>I believe that during my brief visit I enjoyed the distinction of
occupying the undivided attention of three: a common or garden Government
spy, from whom no guilty man escapes, a Walker-Keefe spy, and the spy of
the Nitrate Company. The spy of the Nitrate Company is generally a man you
meet at the legations and clubs. He plays bridge and is dignified with the
title of “agent.” The Walker-Keefe spy is ostensibly a travelling salesman
or hotel runner. The Government spy is just a spy—a scowling,
important little beast in a white duck suit and a diamond ring. The limit
of his intelligence is to follow you into a cigar store and note what
cigar you buy, and in what kind of money you pay for it.</p>
<p>The reason for it all was the three-cornered fight which then was being
waged by the Government, the Nitrate Trust, and the Walker-Keefe crowd for
the possession of the nitrate beds. Valencia is so near to the equator,
and so far from New York, that there are few who studied the intricate
story of that disgraceful struggle, which, I hasten to add, with the fear
of libel before my eyes, I do not intend to tell now.</p>
<p>Briefly, it was a triangular fight between opponents each of whom was in
the wrong, and each of whom, to gain his end, bribed, blackmailed, and
robbed, not only his adversaries, but those of his own side, the end in
view being the possession of those great deposits that lie in the rocks of
Valencia, baked from above by the tropic sun and from below by volcanic
fires. As one of their engineers, one night in the Plaza, said to me:
“Those mines were conceived in hell, and stink to heaven, and the
reputation of every man of us that has touched them smells like the
mines.”</p>
<p>At the time I was there the situation was “acute.” In Valencia the
situation always is acute, but this time it looked as though something
might happen. On the day before I departed the Nitrate Trust had cabled
vehemently for war-ships, the Minister of Foreign Affairs had refused to
receive our minister, and at Porto Banos a mob had made the tin sign of
the United States consulate look like a sieve. Our minister urged me to
remain. To be bombarded by one's own war-ships, he assured me, would be a
thrilling experience.</p>
<p>But I repeated that my business was with Panama, not Valencia, and that if
in this matter of his row I had any weight at Washington, as between
preserving the nitrate beds for the trust, and preserving for his country
and various sweethearts one brown-throated, clean-limbed bluejacket, I was
for the bluejacket.</p>
<p>Accordingly, when I sailed from Valencia the aged diplomat would have
described our relations as strained.</p>
<p>Our ship was a slow ship, listed to touch at many ports, and as early as
noon on the following day we stopped for cargo at Trujillo. It was there I
met Schnitzel.</p>
<p>In Panama I had bought a macaw for a little niece of mine, and while we
were taking on cargo I went ashore to get a tin cage in which to put it,
and, for direction, called upon our consul. From an inner room he entered
excitedly, smiling at my card, and asked how he might serve me. I told him
I had a parrot below decks, and wanted to buy a tin cage.</p>
<p>“Exactly. You want a tin cage,” the consul repeated soothingly. “The State
Department doesn't keep me awake nights cabling me what it's going to do,”
he said, “but at least I know it doesn't send a thousand-dollar-a-minute,
four-cylinder lawyer all the way to this fever swamp to buy a tin cage.
Now, honest, how can I serve you?” I saw it was hopeless. No one would
believe the truth. To offer it to this friendly soul would merely offend
his feelings and his intelligence.</p>
<p>So, with much mystery, I asked him to describe the “situation,” and he did
so with the exactness of one who believes that within an hour every word
he speaks will be cabled to the White House.</p>
<p>When I was leaving he said: “Oh, there's a newspaper correspondent after
you. He wants an interview, I guess. He followed you last night from the
capital by train. You want to watch out he don't catch you. His name is
Jones.” I promised to be on my guard against a man named Jones, and the
consul escorted me to the ship. As he went down the accommodation ladder,
I called over the rail: “In case they SHOULD declare war, cable to
Curacoa, and I'll come back. And don't cable anything indefinite, like
'Situation critical' or 'War imminent.' Understand? Cable me, 'Come back'
or 'Go ahead.' But whatever you cable, make it CLEAR.”</p>
<p>He shook his head violently and with his green-lined umbrella pointed at
my elbow. I turned and found a young man hungrily listening to my words.
He was leaning on the rail with his chin on his arms and the brim of his
Panama hat drawn down to conceal his eyes.</p>
<p>On the pier-head, from which we now were drawing rapidly away, the consul
made a megaphone of his hands.</p>
<p>“That's HIM,” he called. “That's Jones.”</p>
<p>Jones raised his head, and I saw that the tropical heat had made Jones
thirsty, or that with friends he had been celebrating his departure. He
winked at me, and, apparently with pleasure at his own discernment and
with pity for me, smiled.</p>
<p>“Oh, of course!” he murmured. His tone was one of heavy irony. “Make it
'clear.' Make it clear to the whole wharf. Shout it out so's everybody can
hear you. You're 'clear' enough.” His disgust was too deep for ordinary
words. “My uncle!” he exclaimed.</p>
<p>By this I gathered that he was expressing his contempt.</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon?” I said.</p>
<p>We had the deck to ourselves. Its emptiness suddenly reminded me that we
had the ship, also, to ourselves. I remembered the purser had told me
that, except for those who travelled overnight from port to port, I was
his only passenger.</p>
<p>With dismay I pictured myself for ten days adrift on the high seas—alone
with Jones.</p>
<p>With a dramatic gesture, as one would say, “I am here!” he pushed back his
Panama hat. With an unsteady finger he pointed, as it was drawn dripping
across the deck, at the stern hawser.</p>
<p>“You see that rope?” he demanded. “Soon as that rope hit the water I
knocked off work. S'long as you was in Valencia—me, on the job. Now,
YOU can't go back, I can't go back. Why further dissim'lation? WHO AM I?”</p>
<p>His condition seemed to preclude the possibility of his knowing who he
was, so I told him.</p>
<p>He sneered as I have seen men sneer only in melodrama.</p>
<p>“Oh, of course,” he muttered. “Oh, of course.”</p>
<p>He lurched toward me indignantly.</p>
<p>“You know perfec'ly well Jones is not my name. You know perfec'ly well who
I am.”</p>
<p>“My dear sir,” I said, “I don't know anything about you, except that your
are a damned nuisance.”</p>
<p>He swayed from me, pained and surprised. Apparently he was upon an
outbreak of tears.</p>
<p>“Proud,” he murmured, “AND haughty. Proud and haughty to the last.”</p>
<p>I never have understood why an intoxicated man feels the climax of insult
is to hurl at you your name. Perhaps because he knows it is the one charge
you cannot deny. But invariably before you escape, as though assured the
words will cover your retreat with shame, he throws at you your full
title. Jones did this.</p>
<p>Slowly and mercilessly he repeated, “Mr.—George—Morgan—Crosby.
Of Harvard,” he added. “Proud and haughty to the last.”</p>
<p>He then embraced a passing steward, and demanded to be informed why the
ship rolled. He never knew a ship to roll as our ship rolled.</p>
<p>“Perfec'ly satisfact'ry ocean, but ship—rolling like a
stone-breaker. Take me some place in the ship where this ship don't roll.”</p>
<p>The steward led him away.</p>
<p>When he had dropped the local pilot the captain beckoned me to the bridge.</p>
<p>“I saw you talking to Mr. Schnitzel,” he said. “He's a little under the
weather. He has too light a head for liquors.”</p>
<p>I agreed that he had a light head, and said I understood his name was
Jones.</p>
<p>“That's what I wanted to tell you,” said the captain. “His name is
Schnitzel. He used to work for the Nitrate Trust in New York. Then he came
down here as an agent. He's a good boy not to tell things to. Understand?
Sometimes I carry him under one name, and the next voyage under another.
The purser and he fix it up between 'em. It pleases him, and it don't hurt
anybody else, so long as I tell them about it. I don't know who he's
working for now,” he went on, “but I know he's not with the Nitrate
Company any more. He sold them out.”</p>
<p>“How could he?” I asked. “He's only a boy.”</p>
<p>“He had a berth as typewriter to Senator Burnsides, president of the
Nitrate Trust, sort of confidential stenographer,” said the captain.
“Whenever the senator dictated an important letter, they say, Schnitzel
used to make a carbon copy, and when he had enough of them he sold them to
the Walker-Keefe crowd. Then, when Walker-Keefe lost their suit in the
Valencia Supreme Court I guess Schnitzel went over to President Alvarez.
And again, some folks say he's back with the Nitrate Company.”</p>
<p>“After he sold them out?”</p>
<p>“Yes, but you see he's worth more to them now. He knows all the
Walker-Keefe secrets and Alvarez's secrets, too.”</p>
<p>I expressed my opinion of every one concerned.</p>
<p>“It shouldn't surprise YOU,” complained the captain. “You know the
country. Every man in it is out for something that isn't his. The pilot
wants his bit, the health doctor must get his, the customs take all your
cigars, and if you don't put up gold for the captain of the port and the
alcalde and the commandant and the harbor police and the foreman of the
cargadores, they won't move a lighter, and they'll hold up the ship's
papers. Well, an American comes down here, honest and straight and willing
to work for his wages. But pretty quick he finds every one is getting his
squeeze but him, so he tries to get some of it back by robbing the natives
that robbed him. Then he robs the other foreigners, and it ain't long
before he's cheating the people at home who sent him here. There isn't a
man in this nitrate row that isn't robbing the crowd he's with, and that
wouldn't change sides for money. Schnitzel's no worse than the president
nor the canteen contractor.”</p>
<p>He waved his hand at the glaring coast-line, at the steaming swamps and
the hot, naked mountains.</p>
<p>“It's the country that does it,” he said. “It's in the air. You can smell
it as soon as you drop anchor, like you smell the slaughter-house at
Punta-Arenas.”</p>
<p>“How do YOU manage to keep honest,” I asked, smiling.</p>
<p>“I don't take any chances,” exclaimed the captain seriously. “When I'm in
their damned port I don't go ashore.”</p>
<p>I did not again see Schnitzel until, with haggard eyes and suspiciously
wet hair, he joined the captain, doctor, purser, and myself at breakfast.
In the phrases of the Tenderloin, he told us cheerfully that he had been
grandly intoxicated, and to recover drank mixtures of raw egg, vinegar,
and red pepper, the sight of which took away every appetite save his own.
When to this he had added a bottle of beer, he declared himself a new man.
The new man followed me to the deck, and with the truculent bearing of one
who expects to be repelled, he asked if, the day before, he had not made a
fool of himself.</p>
<p>I suggested he had been somewhat confidential. At once he recovered his
pose and patronized me.</p>
<p>“Don't you believe it,” he said. “That's all part of my game. 'Confidence
for confidence' is the way I work it. That's how I learn things. I tell a
man something on the inside, and he says: 'Here's a nice young fellow.
Nothing standoffish about him,' and he tells me something he shouldn't.
Like as not what I told him wasn't true. See?”</p>
<p>I assured him he interested me greatly.</p>
<p>“You find, then, in your line of business,” I asked, “that apparent
frankness is advisable? As a rule,” I explained, “secrecy is what a—a
person in your line—a—”</p>
<p>To save his feelings I hesitated at the word.</p>
<p>“A spy,” he said. His face beamed with fatuous complacency.</p>
<p>“But if I had not known you were a spy,” I asked, “would not that have
been better for you?”</p>
<p>“In dealing with a party like you, Mr. Crosby,” Schnitzel began
sententiously, “I use a different method. You're on a secret mission
yourself, and you get your information about the nitrate row one way, and
I get it another. I deal with you just like we were drummers in the same
line of goods. We are rivals in business, but outside of business hours
perfect gentleman.”</p>
<p>In the face of the disbelief that had met my denials of any secret
mission, I felt to have Schnitzel also disbelieve me would be too great a
humiliation. So I remained silent.</p>
<p>“You make your report to the State Department,” he explained, “and I make
mine to—my people. Who they are doesn't matter. You'd like to know,
and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but—that's MY secret.”</p>
<p>My only feelings were a desire to kick Schnitzel heavily, but for
Schnitzel to suspect that was impossible. Rather, he pictured me as shaken
by his disclosures.</p>
<p>As he hung over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up
his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of
any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes the vacant, half-crooked
mind.</p>
<p>Schnitzel was smiling to himself with a smile of complete
self-satisfaction. In the light of his later conduct, I grew to understand
that smile. He had anticipated a rebuff, and he had been received, as he
read it, with consideration. The irony of my politeness he had entirely
missed. Instead, he read in what I said the admiration of the amateur for
the professional. He saw what he believed to be a high agent of the
Government treating him as a worthy antagonist. In no other way can I
explain his later heaping upon me his confidences. It was the vanity of a
child trying to show off.</p>
<p>In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one could
not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a
fellow-passenger as Schnitzel. His parents were German and still lived in
Germany. But he himself had been brought up on the East Side. An uncle who
kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the public schools
and then to a “business college,” where he had developed remarkable
expertness as a stenographer. He referred to his skill in this difficult
exercise with pitying contempt. Nevertheless, from a room noisy with
type-writers this skill had lifted him into the private office of the
president of the Nitrate Trust. There, as Schnitzel expressed it, “I saw
'mine,' and I took it.” To trace back the criminal instinct that led
Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of his employer was not
difficult. In all of his few early years I found it lying latent. Of every
story he told of himself, and he talked only of himself, there was not one
that was not to his discredit. He himself never saw this, nor that all he
told me showed he was without the moral sense, and with an instinctive
enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean, and underhand. That, as I read it,
was his character.</p>
<p>In appearance he was smooth-shaven, with long locks that hung behind wide,
protruding ears. He had the unhealthy skin of bad blood, and his eyes, as
though the daylight hurt them, constantly opened and shut. He was like
hundreds of young men that you see loitering on upper Broadway and making
predatory raids along the Rialto. Had you passed him in that neighborhood
you would have set him down as a wire-tapper, a racing tout, a would-be
actor.</p>
<p>As I worked it out, Schnitzel was a spy because it gave him an importance
he had not been able to obtain by any other effort. As a child and as a
clerk, it was easy to see that among his associates Schnitzel must always
have been the butt. Until suddenly, by one dirty action, he had placed
himself outside their class. As he expressed it: “Whenever I walk through
the office now, where all the stenographers sit, you ought to see those
slobs look after me. When they go to the president's door, they got to
knock, like I used to, but now, when the old man sees me coming to make my
report after one of these trips he calls out, 'Come right in, Mr.
Schnitzel.' And like as not I go in with my hat on and offer him a cigar.
An' they see me do it, too!”</p>
<p>To me, that speech seemed to give Schnitzel's view of the values of his
life. His vanity demanded he be pointed at, if even with contempt. But the
contempt never reached him—he only knew that at last people took
note of him. They no longer laughed at him, they were afraid of him. In
his heart he believed that they regarded him as one who walked in the dark
places of world politics, who possessed an evil knowledge of great men as
evil as himself, as one who by blackmail held public ministers at his
mercy.</p>
<p>This view of himself was the one that he tried to give me. I probably was
the first decent man who ever had treated him civilly, and to impress me
with his knowledge he spread that knowledge before me. It was sale,
shocking, degrading.</p>
<p>At first I took comfort in the thought that Schnitzel was a liar. Later, I
began to wonder if all of it were a lie, and finally, in a way I could not
doubt, it was proved to me that the worst he charged was true.</p>
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