"but I believe you'll as lief speak as you were
taught before you're through with this city. An English accent is not
healthy in Berlin at present, Mister Meyer, sir, and you'd best learn to
talk like the rest of us if you want to keep on staying in this house.

"I'm in no state to be worried just now and I've no notion of having
the police in here because some of their dam' plain-clothes men have
heard my attendant saying 'charnce' and 'darnce' like any
Britisher--especially with this English spy running round loose. By the
way, you'll have to be registered? Has my sister seen about it yet?"

I said she was attending to it.

"I want to know if she's done it. I'm a helpless cripple and I can't get
a thing done for me. Have you given her your papers? Yes, or no?"

This was a bad fix. With all the persistence of the invalid, the man was
harping on his latest whim.

So I lied. The Countess had my papers, I said.

Instantly he rang the bell and demanded Monica and had fretted himself
into a fine state by the time she appeared.

"What's this I hear, Monica?" he cried in his high-pitched, querulous
voice. "Hasn't Meyer been registered with the police yet?"

"I'm going to see to it myself in the morning, Gerry," she said.

"In the morning. In the morning!" he cried, throwing up his hands. "Good
God, how can you be so shiftless? A law is a law. The man's papers must
be sent in to-day ... this instant."

Monica looked appealingly at me.

"I'm afraid I'm to blame, sir," I said. "The fact is, my passport is
not quite in order and I shall have to take it to the embassy before I
send it to the police."

Then I saw Josef standing by the bed, a salver in his hand.

"Zom letters, sir," he said to Gerry. I wondered how long he had been in
the room.

Gerry waved the letters aside and burst into a regular screaming fit.
He wouldn't have things done that way in the house; he wouldn't
have unknown foreigners brought in, with the city thick with
spies--especially people with an English accent--his nerves wouldn't
stand it: Monica ought to know better, and so on and so forth. The long
and the short of it was that I was ordered to produce my passport
immediately. Monica was to ring up the embassy to ask them to stretch a
point and see to it out of office hours, then Josef should take me round
to the police.

I don't know how we got out of that room. It was Monica, with her sweet
womanly tact, who managed it. I believe the mad