Not until it became positively known at Harmony, towards the middle of
October, that the members of the Secret Committee had been sent away to
Bermuda, did Mrs. van Warmelo and Hansie breathe freely again.
The suspense of five full weeks was over at last, a suspense not to be
described, and never to be forgotten by those who endured it.
It
did not seem possible to grasp the fact that those brave men had escaped
with their lives, and Hansie, looking up at the stars that night, felt that
she had learnt something of unspeakable value in the relief and gratitude
with which that period of concentrated suffering had been followed.
Carlo looked up at the stars too, for he invariably followed his young
mistress's gaze, but on this occasion, seeing nothing unusual in that vast
expanse, he stood up on his hind legs before her and gave a short bark of
inquiry.
"They have gone, Carlo," she said. "I know you won't believe it, but they
have really gone, and if 'Gentleman Jim' knew anything about this, he would
surely say, 'I 'spose their time hadn't come yet, little missie.' That's it,
Carlo. Their time had not come yet. But they have left things in a fearful
muddle, and we will have to work as we never worked before. The first thing
to be done to-morrow morning will be——"
She stopped suddenly—not even to her faithful Carlo could she confide the
secret plan which she had made for reorganising and re-establishing on a
safer footing the Secret Service of the Boers in town.
She would form a new Committee, of five women this time, who would carry on
the work on the same lines which had been adopted by the Secret Committee,
and this plan, when she unfolded it to her mother that night, was received
with warm approval.
The first and last meeting was held at Harmony on October 15th and was
attended by Mrs. Malan, Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Honey, Mrs. van Warmelo, and
Hansie, who was appointed secretary.
Bound together by the sacred oath of fidelity and secrecy, these five women
vowed to serve their country and people, as an organised body of workers, as
long as they had the power to do so.
On
the occasion of his next visit to the capital Captain Naudé was to be
informed of the formation of the new Committee, but for the rest its very
existence was to be kept a dead secret.
Mrs. van Warmelo told the members that she was in a position to communicate
with the President in Holland by every mail, and that the methods employed
by her would be revealed to them after the war. With this they expressed
themselves satisfied, willingly leaving the matter of sending away
dispatches from the field in Mrs. van Warmelo's capable hands.
It
was felt that the greatest responsibility resting on them at the time was to
have a suitable place of refuge ready to receive the Captain when next he
entered the town.
There was no house free from suspicion since the arrest of the Committee,
except—except—Harmony!
Harmony, surrounded as it was by British officers and their staffs, by
British troops and Military Mounted Police—Harmony was at last chosen as the
most suitable, the only spot in Pretoria in which the Captain of the Secret
Service could be harboured with any degree of safety.
It
was arranged that he would immediately be brought to Harmony when he came
again, and in the meantime the Committee would be on the look-out for an
opportunity to send a warning and instructions out to him not to approach
the houses hitherto frequented by him.
For many weeks no spies belonging to his set came into town. No war news of
any description reached his friends, except one day the information,
conveyed we know not how, of the safe arrival at the Skurvebergen of young
Els, the spy who had been fired upon and was missing from his companions on
that eventful September 12th. That this news gave his relatives and friends
great joy and relief after the intense anxiety gone through on his account,
my readers will readily understand.
The discovery of the White Envelope was not always a source of unmixed
satisfaction.
One of them, containing news of the betrayal and arrest of the Committee,
and sent to Alphen in the ordinary way, failed to reach its destination.
This caused the senders so much anxiety that for some time they did not dare
risk the sending of another. The letter might have fallen into the hands of
the censors and the secret be discovered by them, in which event they were
probably waiting quietly to catch up further information.
It
may have been only a coincidence, but at this time the plotters at Harmony
observed that the censorship on their post had been withdrawn altogether.
They knew only too well what this meant! And their hearts sank when they
thought of the White Envelope!
It
meant, good reader, that there was a most disquieting increase in the
vigilance of the censor; it meant that their letters were opened by steam,
to throw them off their guard, and to encourage them to write with greater
frankness to their absent friends.
Mother and daughter felt the hair rising on their heads when they thought of
one of their precious White Envelopes being subjected to a treatment of
steam by the censor, and of his exultation on beholding the result.
As
the days went by, their dread of him and his evil machinations increased,
for hardly a letter reached them that did not betray traces of his
handiwork—or unhandiwork, for he was not always judicious in the quantity of
glue used by him in reclosing the envelopes. He should have been a little
more economical in the use of Government property if he really wished to
hoodwink his enemies, and he would have saved Mrs. van Warmelo the trouble
of damping the envelopes afterwards where they stuck, on the inside, to the
letters.
While the steaming process was being carried on at the General Post Office,
no White Envelopes were taken to the censor, but they were posted at
Johannesburg by friends, and in this way the distant correspondents were
warned of danger, until it became evident that the steam-censorship had been
withdrawn and the old reassuring order of things been established once more.
A
week or two later another White Envelope from Holland reached Harmony in
safety, by which it was known that the secret was still undiscovered, but
the fate of the missing envelope remained a mystery to the end, and was a
constant reminder and warning to the conspirators to be careful in the use
of their priceless secret.
I
am sure the Post Office officials had plenty to do during the war, but there
is no doubt that their labours were considerably lightened by the
"smugglers" who chose to dispense with the services of the censors entirely.
And then we must not forget the activities of the spies and of their
fellow-workers in town.
Quite a large private postal service was carried on by them, as we all know,
and every week, before the entry into Pretoria became so difficult and
dangerous, hundreds of letters were carried backwards and forwards, to and
from the commandos.
One man in town was in the habit of receiving great batches of these
smuggled letters, which he distributed to the various addresses, until one
day he was very nearly caught. He had just received a packet of
communications "from the front" and had opened it on his writing-table in
his quiet study, when the doors were opened unceremoniously and some
officials entered with a warrant to search his house. Carpets were taken up,
walls were tapped, furniture was overturned and examined, books were removed
from their shelves and every cranny inspected with the greatest
thoroughness, but the pile of letters lying open on his writing-table, over
which they had found him bending when they entered the room, was passed over
without so much as a glance.
This may sound a bit unreal, unlikely, but there are similar cases on
record, which we know to be true beyond a doubt, and one of these I must
relate, because it so closely concerned our friends at Harmony and so very
nearly proved to be their undoing. They did not know it at the time, but
were told by Mrs. Cloete, after the war, that she had sent all their
uncensored, their "smuggled" letters, to her friend at Capetown, Mrs.
Koopmans de Wet, with instructions to read and return them to her as soon as
possible, which Mrs. Koopmans had done, with the alarming news that her
house had been thoroughly searched for documents while the pile of letters
was lying open on her writing-table.
The authorities must have been "struck blind," she had said, for though they
had overhauled the place and had taken away with them every
suspicious-looking document, they had passed and repassed the papers on her
table without a word and with nothing more than a superficial glance.
This information had alarmed Mrs. Cloete so much that she had immediately
packed every incriminating letter and all her White Envelopes into a tin,
which she secretly buried, with the help of her German nurse, under one of
the trees at Alphen.
And there they, or what is left of them after ten years, still lie, for the
spot has never again been found, although every effort was made to do so.
