"I go on to Brussels," he said. "Desire you to accompany me?" I did
not know how to ask him in French not to make me laugh. I saw the
great Palace of Justice that towers above the city with the same
emotions that one beholds the Statue of Liberty, but not until we had
reached the inner boulevards did I feel safe. There I bade my friend a
grateful but hasty adieu, and in a taxicab, unwashed and unbrushed, I
drove straight to the American legation. To Mr. Whitlock I told this
story, and with one hand that gentleman reached for his hat and with
the other for his stick. In the automobile of the legation we raced to
the Hôtel de Ville. There Mr. Whitlock, as the moving-picture people
say, "registered" indignation. Mr. Davis was present, he made it
understood, not as a ticket-of-leave man, and because he had been
ordered to report, but in spite of that fact. He was there as the friend
of the American minister, and the word "Spion" must be removed
from his papers.

And so, on the pass that Rupert gave me, below where he had
written that I was to be treated as a spy, they wrote I was "not at all,"
"gar nicht," to be treated as a spy, and that I was well known to the
American minister, and to that they affixed the official seal.

That ended it, leaving me with one valuable possession. It is this:
should any one suggest that I am a spy, or that I am not a friend of
Brand Whitlock, I have the testimony of the Imperial German
Government to the contrary.




Chapter III