The Man with the Clubfoot Part 1

CHAPTER I
I SEEK A BED IN ROTTERDAM

THE reception clerk looked up from the hotel register and shook his head firmly. "Very sorry, saire," he said, "not a bed in ze house." And he closed the book with a snap.

Outside the rain came down heavens hard. Every one who came into the brightly lit hotel vestibule entered with a gush of water. I felt I would rather die than face the wind-swept streets of Rotterdam again.

I turned once more to the clerk who was now busy at the key-rack.

"Haven't you really a corner? I wouldn't mind where it was, as it is only for the night. Come now.…"

"Very sorry, saire. We have two gentlemen sleeping in ze bathrooms already. If you had reserved…" And he shrugged his shoulders and bent towards a visitor who was demanding his key.

I turned away with rage in my heart. What a cursed fool I had been not to wire from Groningen! I had fully intended to, but the extraordinary conversation I had had with Dicky Allerton had put everything else out of my head. At every hotel I had tried it had been the same story—Cooman's, the Maas, the Grand, all were full even to the bathrooms. If I had only wired….

As I passed out into the porch I bethought myself of the porter. A hotel porter had helped me out of a similar plight in Breslau once years ago. This porter, with his red, drink-sodden face and tarnished gold braid, did not promise well, so far as a recommendation for a lodging for the night was concerned. Still…

I suppose it was my mind dwelling on my experience at Breslau that made me address the man in German. When one has been familiar with a foreign tongue from one's boyhood, it requires but a very slight mental impulse to drop into it. From such slight beginnings do great enterprises spring. If I had known the immense ramification of adventure that was to spread its roots from that simple question, I verily believe my heart would have failed me and I would have run forth into the night and the rain and roamed the streets till morning.

Well, I found myself asking the man in German if he knew where I could get a room for the night.

He shot a quick glance at me from under his reddened eyelids.

"The gentleman would doubtless like a German house?" he queried.

You may hardly credit it, but my interview with Dicky Allerton that afternoon had simply driven the war out of my mind. When one has lived much among foreign peoples, one's mentality slips automatically into their skin. I was now thinking in German—at least so it seems to me when I look back upon that night—and I answered without reflecting.

"I don't care where it is as long as I can get somewhere to sleep out of this infernal rain!"

"The gentleman can have a good, clean bed at the Hotel Sixt in the little street they call the Vos in't Tuintje, on the canal behind the Bourse. The proprietress is a good German, jawohl.… Frau Anna Schratt her name is. The gentleman need only say he comes from Franz at the Bopparder Hof."

I gave the man a gulden and bade him get me a cab.

It was still pouring. As we rattled away over the glistening cobble-stones, my mind travelled back over the startling events of the day. My talk with old Dicky had given me such a mental jar that I found it at first wellnigh impossible to concentrate my thoughts. That's the worst of shell-shock. You think you are cured, you feel fit and well, and then suddenly the machinery of your mind checks and halts and creaks. Ever since I had left hospital convalescent after being wounded on the Somme ("gunshot wound in head and cerebral concussion" the doctors called it), I had trained myself, whenever my brain was en panne, to go back to the beginning of things and work slowly up to the present by methodical stages.

Let's see then.… I was "boarded" at Millbank and got three months' leave; then I did a month in the Little Johns' bungalow in Cornwall. There I got the letter from Dicky Allerton, who, before the war, had been in partnership with my brother Francis in the motor business at Coventry. Dicky had been with the Naval Division at Antwerp and was interned with the rest of the crowd when they crossed the Dutch frontier in those disastrous days of October, 1914.

Dicky wrote from Groningen, just a line. Now that I was on leave, if I were fit to travel, would I come to Groningen and see him? "I have had a curious communication which seems to have to do with poor Francis," he added. That was all.

My brain was still halting, so I turned to Francis. Here again I had to go back. Francis, rejected on all sides for active service, owing to what he scornfully used to call "the shirkers' ailment, varicose veins," had flatly declined to carry on with his motor business after Dicky had joined up, although their firm was doing government work. Finally, he had vanished into the maw of the War Office and all I knew was that he was "something on the Intelligence." More than this not even he would tell me, and when he finally disappeared from London, just about the time that I was popping the parapet with my battalion at Neuve Chapelle, he left me his London chambers as his only address for letters.

Ah! now it was all coming back … Francis' infrequent letters to me about nothing at all, then his will, forwarded to me for safe keeping when I was home on leave last Christmas, and after that, silence. Not another letter, not a word about him, not a shred of information. He had utterly vanished.

I remembered my frantic inquiries, my vain visits to the War Office, my perplexity at the imperturbable silence of the various officials I importuned for news of my poor brother. Then there was that lunch at the Bath Club with Sonny Martin of the Heavies and a friend of his, some kind of staff captain in red tabs. I don't think I heard his name, but I know he was at the War Office, and presently over our cigars and coffee I laid before him the mysterious facts about my brother's case.

"Perhaps you knew Francis?" I said in conclusion. "Yes," he replied, "I know him well." "Know him," I repeated, "know him then … then you think … you have reason to believe he is still alive …?"

Red Tabs cocked his eye at the gilded cornice of the ceiling and blew a ring from his cigar. But he said nothing.

I persisted with my questions but it was of no avail. Red Tabs only laughed and said: "I know nothing at all except that your brother is a most delightful fellow with all your own love of getting his own way."

Then Sonny Martin, who is the perfection of tact and diplomacy—probably on that account he failed for the Diplomatic—chipped in with an anecdote about a man who was rating the waiter at an adjoining table, and I held my peace. But as Red Tabs rose to go, a little later, he held my hand for a minute in his and with that curious look of his, said slowly and with meaning:

"When a nation is at war, officers on active service must occasionally disappear, sometimes in their country's interest, sometimes in their own."

He emphasised the words "on active service."

In a flash my eyes were opened. How blind I had been! Francis was in Germany.

 

CHAPTER II
THE CIPHER WITH THE INVOICE

RED TABS' sphinx-like declaration was no riddle to me. I knew at once that Francis must be on secret service in the enemy's country and that country Germany. My brother's extraordinary knowledge of the Germans, their customs, life and dialects, rendered him ideally suitable for any such perilous mission. Francis always had an extraordinary talent for languages: he seemed to acquire them all without any mental effort, but in German he was supreme. During the year that he and I spent at Consistorial-Rat von Mayburg's house at Bonn, he rapidly outdistanced me, and though, at the end of our time, I could speak German like a German, Francis was able, in addition, to speak Bonn and Cologne patois like a native of those ancient cities—ay and he could drill a squad of recruits in their own language like the smartest Leutnant ever fledged from Gross-Lichterfelde.

He never had any difficulty in passing himself off as a German. Well I remember his delight when he was claimed as a fellow Rheinländer by a German officer we met, one summer before the war, combining golf with a little useful espionage at Cromer.

I don't think Francis had any ulterior motive in his study of German. He simply found he had this imitative faculty: philology had always interested him, so even after he had gone into the motor trade, he used to amuse himself on business trips to Germany by acquiring new dialects.

His German imitations were extraordinarily funny. One of his "star turns", was a noisy sitting of the Reichstag with speeches by Prince Bülow and August Bebel and "interruptions"; another, a patriotic oration by an old Prussian General at a Kaiser's birthday dinner. Francis had a marvellous faculty not only of seeming German, but even of almost looking like a German, so absolutely was he able to slip into the skin of the part.

Yet never in my wildest moments had I dreamt that he would try and get into Germany in war-time, into that land where every citizen is catalogued and pigeon-holed from the cradle. But Red Tabs' oracular utterance had made everything clear to me. Why a mission to Germany would be the very thing that Francis would give his eyes to be allowed to attempt! Francis with his utter disregard of danger, his love of taking risks, his impish delight in taking a rise out of the stodgy Hun … why, if there were Englishmen brave enough to take chances of that kind, Francis would be the first to volunteer.

Yes, if Francis were on a mission anywhere it would be to Germany. But what prospect had he of ever returning—with the frontiers closed and ingress and egress practically barred even to pro-German neutrals? Many a night in the trenches I had a mental vision of Francis, so debonair and so fearless, facing a firing-squad of Prussian privates.

From the day of the luncheon at the Bath Club to this very afternoon I had had no further inkling of my brother's whereabouts or fate. The authorities at home professed ignorance, as I knew, in duty bound, they would, and I had nothing to hang any theory on to until Dicky Allerton's letter came. Ashcroft at the F.O. fixed up my passports for me and I lost no time in exchanging the white gulls and red cliffs of Cornwall for the windmills and trim canals of Holland.

And now in my breast pocket lay, written on a small piece of cheap foreign notepaper, the tidings I had come to Groningen to seek. Yet so trivial, so nonsensical, so baffling was the message that I already felt my trip to Holland to have been a fruitless errand.

I found Dicky fat and bursting with health in his quarters at the internment camp. He only knew that Francis had disappeared. When I told him of my meeting with Red Tabs at the Bath Club, of the latter's words to me at parting and of my own conviction in the matter he whistled, then looked grave.

He went straight to the point in his bluff direct way.

"I am going to tell you a story first, Desmond," he said to me, "then I'll show you a piece of paper. Whether the two together fit in with your theory as to poor Francis' disappearance will be for you to judge. Until now—I must confess—I had felt inclined to dismiss the only reference this document appears to make to your brother as a mere coincidence in names, but what you have told me makes things interesting—by Jove, it does, though. Well, here's the yarn first of all.

"Your brother and I have had dealings in the past with a Dutchman in the motor business at Nymwegen, name of Van Urutius. He has often been over to see us at Coventry in the old days and Francis has stayed with him at Nymwegen once or twice on his way back from Germany—Nymwegen, you know, is close to the German frontier. Old Urutius has been very decent to me since I have been in gaol here and has been over several times, generally with a box or two of those nice Dutch cigars."

"Dicky," I broke in on him, "get on with the story. What the devil's all this got to do with Francis? The document.…"

"Steady, my boy!" was the imperturbable reply, "let me spin my yarn my own way. I'm coming to the piece of paper….

"Well, then, old Urutius came to see me ten days ago. All I knew about Francis I had told him, namely, that Francis had entered the army and was missing. It was no business of the old Mynheer if Francis was in the Intelligence, so I didn't tell him that. Van U. is a staunch friend of the English, but you know the saying that if a man doesn't know he can't split.

"My old Dutch pal, then, turned up here ten days ago. He was bubbling over with excitement. 'Mr. Allerton' he says, 'I haf a writing, a most mysterious writing—a I think, from Francis Okewood.'

"I sat tight. If there were any revelations coming they were going to be Dutch, not British. On that I was resolved.

"'I haf received;' the old Dutchman went on, from Gairemany a parcel of metal shields, plates—what you call 'em—of tin, hein? What I haf to advertise my business. They arrife las' week—I open the parcel myself and on the top is the envelope with the invoice.'

"Mynheer paused: he has a good sense of the dramatic.

"'Well', I said, 'did it bite you or say "Gott strafe England?" Or what?'

"Van Urutius ignored my flippancy and resumed. 'I open the envelope and there in the invoice I find this writing—here!'

"And here," said Dicky, diving into his pocket, "is the writing!"

And he thrust into my eagerly outstretched hand a very thin half-sheet of foreign notepaper, of that kind of cheap glazed notepaper you get in cafés on the Continent when you ask for writing materials.

Three lines of German, written in fluent German characters in purple ink beneath the name and address of Mynheer van Urutius … that was all.

My heart sank with disappointment and wretchedness as I read the inscription.

Here is the document:

⁠Herr Willem van Urutius,
⁠Automobilgeschäft,
⁠Nymwegen.
⁠Alexandtr-Straat 81 bis.

⁠Berlin, Iten Juli, 16.

O Eichenholz! O Eichenholz!
Wie leer sind deine Blätter.

Wie Achiles in dem Zelte.

Wo zweie sich zanken
Erfreut sich der Dritte.

(Translation.)

⁠Mr. Willem van Urutius,
⁠Automobile Agent,
⁠Nymwegen.
⁠81 bis Alexander-Straat.

⁠Berlin, 1st July, 16.

O Oak-tree! O Oak-tree,
How empty are thy leaves.

Like Achiles in the tent.

When two people fall out
The third party rejoices.

I stared at this nonsensical document in silence. My thoughts were almost too bitter for words.

At last I spoke.

"What's all this rigmarole got to do with Francis, Dicky?" I asked, vainly trying to suppress the bitterness in my voice. "This looks like a list of copybook maxims for your Dutch friend's advertisement cards…."

But I returned to the study of the piece of paper.

"Not so fast, old bird," Dicky replied coolly, "let me finish my story. Old Stick-in-the-mud is a lot shrewder than we think.

"'When I read the writing,' he told me, 'I think he is all robbish, but then I ask myself, Who shall put robbish in my invoices? And then I read the writing again and once again, and then I see he is a message.'"

"Stop, Dicky!" I cried, "of course, what an ass I am! Why Eichenholz…."

"Exactly," retorted Dicky, "as the old Mynheer was the first to see, Eichenholz translated into English is 'Oak-tree' or 'Oak-wood'—in other words, Francis."

"Then, Dicky…." I interrupted.

"Just a minute," said Dicky, putting up his hand. "I confess I thought, on first seeing this message or whatever it is, that there must be simply a coincidence of name and that somebody's idle scribbling had found its way into old van U.'s invoice. But now that you have told me that Francis may have actually got into Germany, then, I must say, it looks as if this might be an attempt of his to communicate with home."

"Where did the Dutchman's packet of stuff come from?" I asked.

"From the Berlin Metal Works in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin: he has dealt with them for years."

"But then what does all the rest of it mean … all this about Achilles and the rest?"

"Ah, Desmond!" was Dicky's reply, "that's where you've got not only me, but also Mynheer van Urutius."

"'O oakwood! O oakwood, how empty are thy leaves!'…. That sounds like a taunt, don't you think, Dicky?" said I.

"Or a confession of failure from Francis … to let us know that he has done nothing, adding that he is accordingly sulking 'like Achilles in his tent.'"

"But, see here, Richard Allerton," I said, "Francis would never spell 'Achilles' with one 'l' … now, would he?"

"By Jove!" said Dicky, looking at the paper again, "nobody would but a very uneducated person. I know nothing about German, but tell me, is that the hand of an educated German? Is it Francis' handwriting?"

"Certainly, it is an educated hand," I replied, "but I'm dashed if I can say whether it is Francis' German handwriting: it can scarcely be because, as I have already remarked, he spells 'Achilles' with one 'l.'"

Then the fog came down over us again. We sat helplessly and gazed at the fateful paper.

"There's only one thing for it, Dicky," I said finally, "I'll take the blooming thing back to London with me and hand it over to the Intelligence. After all, Francis may have a code with them. Possibly they will see light where we grope in darkness."

"Desmond," said Dicky, giving me his hand, "that's the most sensible suggestion you've made yet. Go home and good luck to you. But promise me you'll come back here and tell me if that piece of paper brings the news that dear old Francis is alive."

So I left Dicky but I did not go home. I was not destined to see my home for many a weary week.

CHAPTER III
A VISITOR IN THE NIGHT

AVOLLEY of invective from the box of the cab—bad language in Dutch is fearfully effective—aroused me from my musings. The cab, a small, uncomfortable box with a musty smell, stopped with a jerk that flung me forward. From the outer darkness furious altercation resounded above the plashing of the rain. I peered through the streaming glass of the windows but could distinguish nothing save the yellow blur of a lamp. Then a vehicle of some kind seemed to move away in front of us, for I heard the grating of wheels against the kerb, and my cab drew up to the pavement.

On alighting, I found myself in a narrow, dark street with high houses on either side. A grimy lamp with the word "Hôtel" in half-obliterated characters painted on it hung above my head, announcing that I had arrived at my destination. As I paid off the cabman another cab passed. It was apparently the one with which my Jehu had had words, for he turned round and shouted abuse into the night.

My cabman departed, leaving me with my bag on the pavement at my feet, gazing at a narrow dirty door, the upper half of which was filled in with frosted glass. I was at last awake to the fact that I, an Englishman, was going to spend the night in a German hotel to which I had been specially recommended by a German porter on the understanding that I was a German. I knew that, according to the Dutch neutrality regulations, my passport would have to be handed in for inspection by the police and that therefore I could not pass myself off as a German.

"Bah!" I said to give myself courage, "this is a free country, a neutral country. They may be offensive, they may overcharge you, in a Hun hotel, but they can't eat you. Besides, any bed in a night like this!" and I pushed open the door.

Within, the hotel proved to be rather better than its uninviting exterior promised. There was a small vestibule with a little glass cage of an office on one side and beyond it an old-fashioned flight of stairs, with a glass knob on the post at the foot, winding to the upper stories.

At the sound of my footsteps on the mosaic flooring, a waiter emerged from a little cubby-hole under the stairs. He had a blue apron girt about his waist, but otherwise he wore the short coat and the dicky and white tie of the Continental hotel waiter. His hands were grimy with black marks and so was his apron. He had apparently been cleaning boots.

He was a big, fat, blonde man with narrow, cruel little eyes. His hair was cut so short that his head appeared to be shaven. He advanced quickly towards me and asked me in German in a truculent voice what I wanted.

I replied in the same language, I wanted a room.

He shot a glance at me through his little slits of eyes on hearing my good Bonn accent, but his manner did not change.

"The hotel is full. The gentleman cannot have a bed here. The proprietress is out at present. I regret…." He spat this all out in the offhand insolent manner of the Prussian official.

"It was Franz, of the Bopparder Hof, who recommended me to come here," I said. I was not going out again into the rain for a whole army of Prussian waiters.

"He told me that Frau Schratt would make me very comfortable," I added.

The waiter's manner changed at once.

"So, so," he said—quite genially this time—"it was Franz who sent the gentleman to us. He is a good friend of the house, is Franz. Ja, Frau Schratt is unfortunately out just now, but as soon as the lady returns I will inform her you are here. In the meantime, I will give the gentleman a room."

He handed me a candlestick and a key.

"So," he grunted, "No. 31, the third floor."

A clock rang out the hour somewhere in the distance.

"Ten o'clock already," he said. "The gentleman's papers can wait till to-morrow, it is so late. Or perhaps the gentleman will give them to the proprietress. She must come any moment."

As I mounted the winding staircase I heard him murmur again:

"So, so, Franz sent him here! Ach, der Franz!"

As soon as I had passed out of sight of the lighted hall I found myself in complete darkness. On each landing a jet of gas, turned down low, flung a dim and flickering light a few yards around. On the third floor I was able to distinguish by the gas rays a small plaque fastened to the wall inscribed with an arrow pointing to the right above the figures: 46-30.

I stopped to strike a match to light my candle. The whole hotel seemed wrapped in silence, the only sound the rushing of water in the gutters without. Then from the darkness of the narrow corridor that stretched out in front of me, I heard the rattle of a key in a lock.

I advanced down the corridor, the pale glimmer of my candle showing me as I passed a succession of yellow doors, each bearing a white porcelain plate inscribed with a number in black. No. 46 was the first room on the right counting from the landing: the even numbers were on the right, the odd on the left: therefore I reckoned on finding my room the last on the left at the end of the corridor.

The corridor presently took a sharp turn. As I came round the bend I heard again the sound of a key and then the rattling of a door knob, but the corridor bending again, I could not see the author of the noise until I had turned the corner.

I ran right into a man fumbling at a door on the left-hand side of the passage, the last door but one. A mirror at the end of the corridor caught and threw back the reflection of my candle.

The man looked up as I approached. He was wearing a soft black felt hat and a black overcoat and on his arm hung an umbrella streaming with rain. His candlestick stood on the floor at his feet. It had apparently just been extinguished, for my nostrils sniffed the odour of burning tallow.

"You have a light?" the stranger said in German in a curiously breathless voice. "I have just come upstairs and the wind blew out my candle and I could not get the door open. Perhaps you could …" He broke off gasping and put his hand to his heart.

"Allow me," I said. The lock of the door was inverted and to open the door you had to insert the key upside-down. I did so and the door opened easily. As it swung back I noticed the number of the room was 33, next door to mine.

"Can I be of any assistance to you? Are you unwell?" I said, at the same time lifting my candle and scanning the stranger's features.

He was a young man with close-cropped black hair, fine dark eyes and an aquiline nose with a deep furrow between the eyebrows. The crispness of his hair and the high cheekbones gave a suggestion of Jewish blood. His face was very pale and his lips were blueish. I saw the perspiration glistening on his forehead.

"Thank you, it is nothing," the man replied in the same breathless voice. "I am only a little out of breath with carrying my bag up."

"You must have arrived just before I did," I said, remembering the cab that had driven away from the hotel as I drove up.

"That is so," he answered, pushing open his door as he spoke. He disappeared into the darkness of the room and suddenly the door shut with a slam that re-echoed through the house.

As I had calculated, my room was next door to his, the end room of the corridor. It smelt horribly close and musty and the first thing I did was to stride across to the windows and fling them back wide.

I found myself looking across a dark and narrow canal, on whose stagnant water loomed large the black shapes of great barges, into the windows of gaunt and weather-stained houses over the way. Not a light shone in any window. Away in the distance the same clock as I had heard before struck the quarter—a single, clear chime.

It was the regular bedroom of the maison meublée—worn carpet, discoloured and dingy wallpaper, faded rep curtains and mahogany bedstead with a vast édredon, like a giant pincushion. My candle, guttering wildly in the unaccustomed breeze blowing dankly through the chamber, was the sole illuminant. There was neither gas nor electric light laid on.

The house had relapsed into quiet. The bedroom had an evil look and this, combined with the dank air from the canal, gave my thoughts a sombre tinge.

"Well," I said to myself, "you're a nice kind of ass! Here you are, a British officer, posing as a brother Hun in a cut-throat Hun hotel, with a waiter who looks like the official Prussian executioner. What's going to happen to you, young feller my lad, when Madame comes along and finds you have a British passport? A very pretty kettle of fish, I must say!

"And suppose Madame takes it into her head to toddle along up here to-night and calls your bluff and summons the gentle Hans or Fritz or whatever that ruffianly waiter's name is to come upstairs and settle your hash! What sort of a fight are you going to put up in that narrow corridor out there with a Hun next door and probably on every side of you, and no exit this end? You don't know a living soul in Rotterdam and no one will be a penny the wiser if you vanish off the face of the earth … at any rate no one on this side of the water."

Starting to undress, I noticed a little door on the left-hand side of the bed. I found it opened into a small cabinet de toilette, a narrow slip of a room with a wash-hand stand and a very dirty window covered with yellow paper. I pulled open this window with great difficulty—it cannot have been opened for years—and found it gave on to a very small and deep interior court, just an air shaft round which the house was built. At the bottom was a tiny paved court not more than five foot square, entirely isolated save on one side where there was a basement window with a flight of steps leading down from the court through an iron grating. From this window a faint yellow streak of light was visible. The air was damp and chill and horrid odours of a dirty kitchen were wafted up the shaft. So I closed the window and set about turning in.

I took off my coat and waistcoat, then bethought me of the mysterious document I had received from Dicky. Once more I looked at those enigmatical words:

O Oak-wood! O Oak-wood (for that much was clear),
How empty are thy leaves.
Like Achiles (with one "l") in the tent.
When two people fall out
The third party rejoices.

What did it all mean? Had Francis fallen out with some confederate who, having had his revenge by denouncing my brother, now took this extraordinary step to announce his victim's fate to the latter's friends? "Like Achilles in the tent!" Why not in his tent"? Surely.…

A curious choking noise, the sound of a strangled cough, suddenly broke the profound silence of the house. My heart seemed to stop for a moment. I hardly dared raise my eyes from the paper which I was conning, leaning over the table in my shirt and trousers.

The noise continued, a hideous, deep-throated gurgling. Then I heard a faint foot-fall in the corridor without.

I raised my eyes to the door.

Someone or something was scratching the panels, furiously, frantically.

The door-knob was rattled loudly. The noise broke in raucously upon that horrid gurgling sound without. It snapped the spell that bound me.

I moved resolutely towards the door. Even as I stepped forward the gurgling resolved itself into a strangled cry.

"Ach! ich sterbe" were the words I heard.

Then the door burst open with a crash, there was a swooping rush of wind and rain through the room, the curtains flapped madly from the windows.

The candle flared up wildly.

Then it went out.

Something fell heavily into the room.

CHAPTER IV
DESTINY KNOCKS AT THE DOOR

THERE are two things at least that modern warfare teaches you, one is to keep cool in an emergency, the other is not to be afraid of a corpse. Therefore I was scarcely surprised to find myself standing there in the dark calmly reviewing the extraordinary situation in which I now found myself. That's the curious thing about shell-shock: after it a motor back-firing or a tyre bursting will reduce a man to tears, but in face of danger he will probably find himself in full possession of his wits as long as there is no sudden and violent noise connected with it.

Brief as the sounds without had been, I was able on reflection to identify that gasping gurgle, that rapid patter of the hands. Anyone who has seen a man die quickly knows them. Accordingly I surmised that somebody had come to my door at the point of death.

Then I thought of the man next door, his painful breathlessness, his blueish lips, when I found him wrestling with his key, and I guessed who was my nocturnal visitor lying prone in the dark at my feet.

Shielding the candle with my hand I rekindled it. Then I grappled with the flapping curtains and got the windows shut. Then only did I raise my candle until its beams shone down upon the silent figure lying across the threshold of the room.

It was the man from No. 33. He was quite dead. His face was livid and distorted, his eyes glassy between the half-closed lids, while his fingers, still stiffly clutching, showed paint and varnish and dust beneath the nails where he had pawed door and carpet in his death agony.

One did not need to be a doctor to see that a heart attack had swiftly and suddenly struck him down.

Now that I knew the worst I acted with decision. I dragged the body by the shoulders into the room until it lay in the centre of the carpet. Then I locked the door.

The foreboding of evil that had cast its black shadow over my thoughts from the moment I crossed the threshold of this sinister hotel came over me strongly again. Indeed, my position was, to say the least, scarcely enviable. Here was I, a British officer with British papers of identity, about to be discovered in a German hotel, into which I had introduced myself under false pretences, at dead of night alone with the corpse of a German or Austrian (for such the dead man apparently was)!

It was undoubtedly a most awkward fix.

I listened.

Everything in the hotel was silent as the grave.

I turned from my gloomy forebodings to look again at the stranger. In his crisp black hair and slightly protuberant cheekbones I traced again the hint of Jewish ancestry I had remarked before. Now that the man's eyes—his big, thoughtful eyes that had stared at me out of the darkness of the corridor—were closed, he looked far less foreign than before: in fact he might almost have passed as an Englishman.

He was a young man—about my own age, I judged—(I shall be twenty-eight next birthday) and about my own height, which is five feet ten. There was something about his appearance and build that struck a chord very faintly in my memory.

Had I seen the fellow before?

I remembered now that I had noticed something oddly familiar about him when I first saw him for that brief moment in the corridor.

I looked down at him again as he lay on his back on the faded carpet. I brought the candle down closer and scanned his features.

He certainly looked less foreign than he did before. He might not be a German after all: more likely a Hungarian or a Pole, perhaps even a Dutchman. His German had been too flawless for a Frenchman—for a Hungarian, either, for that matter.

I leant back on my knees to ease my cramped position. As I did so I caught a glimpse of the stranger's three-quarters face.

Why! He reminded me of Francis a little!

There certainly was a suggestion of my brother in the man's appearance. Was it the thick black hair, the small dark moustache? Was it the well-chiselled mouth? It was rather a hint of Francis than a resemblance to him.

The stranger was fully dressed. The jacket of his blue serge suit had fallen open and I saw a portfolio in the inner breast pocket. Here, I thought, might be a clue to the dead man's identity. I fished out the portfolio, then rapidly ran my fingers over the stranger's other pockets.

I left the portfolio to the last.

The jacket pockets contained nothing else except a white silk handkerchief unmarked. In the right-hand top pocket of the waistcoat was a neat silver cigarette case, perfectly plain, containing half a dozen cigarettes. I took one out and looked at it. It was a Melania, a cigarette I happen to know for they stock them at one of my clubs, the Dionysus, and it chances to be the only place in London where you can get the brand.

It looked as if my unknown friend had come from London.

There was also a plain silver watch of Swiss make.

In the trousers pocket was some change, a little English silver and coppers, some Dutch silver and paper money. In the right-hand trouser pocket was a bunch of keys.

That was all.

I put the different articles on the floor beside me. Then I got up, put the candle on the table, drew the chair up to it and opened the portfolio.

In a little pocket of the inner flap were visiting cards. Some were simply engraved with the name in small letters:

Dr. Semlin

Others were more detailed:

Dr. Semlin,⁠
Brooklyn, N.Y.

⁠The Halewright Mfg. Co., Ltd.

There were also half a dozen private cards:

Dr. Semlin,⁠
333 E. 73rd St.,
New York.

⁠Rivington Park House.

In the packet of cards was a solitary one, larger than the rest, an expensive affair on thick, highly glazed millboard, bearing in gothic characters the name:

OTTO VON STEINHARDT.

On this card was written in pencil, above the name:

"Hotel Sixt, Vos in't Tuintje," and in brackets, thus: "(Mme. Anna Schratt.)"

In another pocket of the portfolio was an American passport surmounted by a flaming eagle and sealed with a vast red seal, sending greetings to all and sundry on behalf of Henry Semlin, a United States citizen, travelling to Europe. Details in the body of the document set forth that Henry Semlin was born at Brooklyn on 31st March, 1886, that his hair was Black, nose Aquiline, chin Firm, and that of special marks he had None. The description was good enough to show me that it was undoubtedly the body of Henry Semlin that lay at my feet.

The passport had been issued at Washington three months earlier. The only visa it bore was that of the American Embassy in London, dated two days previously. With it was a British permit, issued to Henry Semlin, Manufacturer, granting him authority to leave the United Kingdom for the purpose of travelling to Rotterdam, further a bill for luncheon served on board the Dutch Royal mail steamer Koningin Regentes on yesterday's date.

In the long and anguishing weeks that followed on that anxious night in the Hotel of the Vos in't Tuintje, I have often wondered to what malicious promptings, to what insane impulse, I owed the idea that suddenly germinated in my brain as I sat fingering the dead man's letter-case in that squalid room. The impulse sprang into my brain like a flash and like a flash I acted on it, though I can hardly believe I meant to pursue it to its logical conclusion until I stood once more outside the door of my room.

The examination of the dead man's papers had shown me that he was an American business man, who had just come from London, having but recently proceeded to England from the United States.

What puzzled me was why an American manufacturer, seemingly of some substance and decently dressed, should go to a German hotel on the recommendation of a German, from his name, and the style of his visiting card, a man of good family.

Semlin might, of course, have been, like myself, a traveller benighted in Rotterdam, owing his recommendation to the hotel to a German acquaintance in the city. Still, Americans are cautious folk and I found it rather improbable that this American business man should adventure himself into this evil-looking house with a large sum of money on his person—he had several hundred pounds of money in Dutch currency notes in a thick wad in his portfolio.

I knew that the British authorities discouraged, as far as they could, neutrals travelling to and fro between England and Germany in war-time. Possibly Semlin wanted to do business in Germany on his European trip as well as in England. Knowing the attitude of the British authorities, he may well have made his arrangements in Holland for getting into Germany lest the British police should get wind of his purpose and stop him crossing to Rotterdam.

But his German was so flawless, with no trace of Americanism in voice or accent. And I knew what good use the German Intelligence had made of neutral passports in the past. Therefore I determined to go next door and have a look at Dr. Semlin's luggage. In the back of my mind was ever that harebrain resolve, half-formed as yet but none the less firmly rooted in my head.

Taking up my candle again, I stole out of the room. As I stood in the corridor and turned to lock the bedroom door behind me, the mirror at the end of the passage caught the reflection of my candle.

I looked and saw myself in the glass, a white, staring face.

I looked again. Then I fathomed the riddle that had puzzled me in the dead face of the stranger in my room.

It was not the face of Francis that his features suggested.

It was mine!

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

The next moment I found myself in No. 33. I could see no sign of the key of the room; Semlin must have dropped it in his fall, so it behoved me to make haste for fear of any untoward interruption. I had not yet heard eleven strike on the clock.

The stranger's hat and overcoat lay on a chair. The hat was from Scott's: there was nothing except a pair of leather gloves in the overcoat pockets.

A bag, in size something between a small kit-bag and a large handbag, stood open on the table. It contained a few toilet necessaries, a pair of pyjamas, a clean shirt, a pair of slippers, . . . nothing of importance and not a scrap of paper of any kind.

I went through everything again, looked in the sponge bag, opened the safety razor case, shook out the shirt, and finally took everything out of the bag and stacked the things on the table.

At the bottom of the bag I made a strange discovery. The interior of the bag was fitted with that thin yellow canvas-like material with which nearly all cheap bags, like this one was, are lined. At the bottom of the bag an oblong piece of the lining had apparently been torn clean out. The leather of the bag showed through the slit. Yet the lining round the edges of the gap showed no fraying, no trace of rough usage. On the contrary, the edges were pasted neatly down on the leather.

I lifted the bag and examined it. As I did so I saw lying on the table beside it an oblong of yellow canvas. I picked it up and found the under side stained with paste and the brown of the leather.

It was the missing piece of lining and it was stiff with something that crackled inside it.

I slit the piece of canvas up one side with my penknife. It contained three long fragments of paper, a thick, expensive, highly glazed paper. Top, bottom and left-hand side of each was trim and glossy: the fourth side showed a broken edge as though it had been roughly cut with a knife. The three slips of paper were the halves of three quarto sheets of writing, torn in two, lengthways, from top to bottom.

At the top of each slip was part of some kind of crest in gold, what, it was not possible to determine, for the crest had been in the centre of the sheet and the cut had gone right through it.

The letter was written in English but the name of the recipient as also the date was on the missing half.

Somewhere in the silence of the night I heard a door bang. I thrust the slips of paper in their canvas covering into my trousers pocket. I must not be found in that room. With trembling hands I started to put the things back in the bag. Those slips of paper, I reflected as I worked, at least rent the veil of mystery enveloping the corpse that lay stiffening in the next room. This, at any rate, was certain: German or American or hyphenate, Henry Semlin, manufacturer and spy, had voyaged from America to England not for the purposes of trade but to get hold of that mutilated document now reposing in my pocket. Why he had only got half the letter and what had happened to the other half was more than I could say . . . it sufficed for me to know that its importance to somebody was sufficient to warrant a journey on its behalf from one side to the other of the Atlantic.

As I opened the bag my fingers encountered a hard substance, as of metal, embedded in the slack of the lining in the joints of the mouth. At first I thought it was a coin, then I felt some kind of clasp or fastening behind it and it seemed to be a brooch. Out came my pocket knife again and there lay a small silver star, about as big as a regimental cap badge, embedded in the thin canvas. It bore an inscription. In stencilled letters I read:

O2 G

Abt. VII.

Here was Dr. Semlin's real visiting-card.

I held in my hand a badge of the German secret police.

You cannot penetrate far behind the scenes in Germany without coming across the traces of Section Seven of the Berlin Police Presidency, the section that is known euphemistically as that of the Political Police. Ostensibly it attends to the safety of the monarch, and of distinguished personages generally, and the numerous suite that used to accompany the Kaiser on his visits to England invariably included two or three top-hatted representatives of the section.

The ramifications of Abteilung Sieben are, in reality, much wider. It does such work in connection with the newspapers as is even too dirty for the German Foreign Office to touch, comprising everything from the launching of personal attacks in obscure blackmailing sheets against inconvenient politicians to the escorting of unpleasantly truthful foreign correspondents to the frontier. It is the obedient handmaiden of the Intelligence Department of both War Office and Admiralty in Germany, and renders faithful service to the espionage which is constantly maintained on officials, politicians, the clergy and the general public in that land of careful organisation.

Section Seven is a vast subterranean department. Always working in the dark, its political complexion is a handy cloak for blacker and more sinister activities. It is frequently entrusted with commissions of which it would be inexpedient for official Germany to have cognizance and of which, accordingly, official Germany can always safely repudiate when occasion demands.

I thrust the pin of the badge into my braces and fastened it there, crammed the rest of the dead man's effects into his bag, stuck his hat upon my head and threw his overcoat on my arm, picked up his bag and crept away. In another minute I was back in my room, my brain aflame with the fire of a great enterprise.

Here, to my hand, lay the key of that locked land which held the secret of my lost brother. The question I had been asking myself, ever since I had first discovered the dead man's American papers of identity, was this. Had I the nerve to avail myself of Semlin's American passport to get into Germany? The answer to that question lay in the little silver badge. I knew that no German official, whatever his standing, whatever his orders, would refuse passage to the silver star of Section Seven. It need only be used, too, as a last resource, for I had my papers as a neutral. Could I but once set foot in Germany, I was quite ready to depend on my wits to see me through. One advantage, I knew, I must forgo. That was the half-letter in its canvas case.

If that document was of importance to Section Seven of the German Police, then it was of equal, nay, of greater importance to my country. If I went, that should remain behind in safe keeping.

"Never before, since the war began," I told myself, "can any Englishman have had such an opportunity vouchsafed to him for getting easily and safely into that jealously guarded land as you have now! You have plenty of money, what with your own and this . . ." and I fingered Semlin's wad of notes, "and provided you can keep your head sufficiently to remember always that you are a German, once over the frontier you should be able to give the Huns the slip and try and follow up the trail of poor Francis.

"And maybe," I argued further (so easily is one's better judgment defeated when one is young and set on a thing), "maybe in German surroundings, you may get some sense into that mysterious jingle you got from Dicky Allerton as the sole existing clue to the disappearance of Francis."

Nevertheless, I wavered. The risks were awful. I had to get out of that evil hotel in the guise of Dr. Semlin, with, as the sole safeguard against exposure, should I fall in with the dead man's employers or friends, that slight and possibly imaginative resemblance between him and me: I had to take such measures as would prevent the fraud from being detected when the body was discovered in the hotel: above all, I had to ascertain, before I could definitely resolve to push on into Germany, whether Semlin was already known to the people at the hotel or whether—as I surmised to be the case—this was also his first visit to the house in the Vos in't Tuintje.

In any case, I was quite determined in my own mind that the only way to get out of the place with Semlin's document without considerable unpleasantness, if not grave danger, would be to transfer his identity and effects to myself and vice versa. When I saw the way a little clearer I could decide whether to take the supreme risk and adventure myself into the enemy's country.

Whatever I was going to do, there were not many hours of the night left in which to act, and I was determined to be out of that house of ill omen before day dawned. If I could get clear of the hotel and at the same time ascertain that Semlin was as much a stranger there as myself, I could decide on my further course of action in the greater freedom of the streets of Rotterdam. One thing was certain: the waiter had let the question of Semlin's papers stand over until the morning, as he had done in my case, for Semlin still had his passport in his possession.

After all, if Semlin was unknown at the hotel, the waiter had only seen him for the same brief moment as he had seen me.

Thus I reasoned and argued with myself, but in the meantime I acted. I had nothing compromising in my suit-case, so that caused no difficulty. My British passport and permit and anything bearing any relation to my personality, such as my watch and cigarette case, both of which were engraved with my initials, I transferred to the dead man's pockets. As I bent over the stiff, cold figure with its livid face and clutching fingers, I felt a difficulty which I had hitherto resolutely shirked forcing itself squarely into the forefront of my mind.

What was I going to do about the body?

At that moment came a low knocking.

With a sudden sinking at the heart I remembered I had forgotten to lock the door.

CHAPTER V
THE LADY OF THE VOS IN'T TUINTJE

HERE was Destiny knocking at the door. In that instant my mind was made up. For the moment, at any rate, I had every card in my hands. I would bluff these stodgy Huns: I would brazen it out: I would be Semlin and go through with it to the bitter end, aye, and if it took me to the very gates of Hell.

The knocking was repeated.

"May one come in?" said a woman's voice in German.

I stepped across the corpse and opened the door a foot or so.

There stood a woman with a lamp. She was a middle-aged woman with an egg-shaped face, fat and white and puffy, and pale, crafty eyes. She was in her outdoor clothes, with an enormous vulgar-looking hat and an old-fashioned sealskin cape with a high collar. The cape which was glistening with rain was half open, and displayed a vast bosom tightly compressed into a white silk blouse. In one hand she carried an oil lamp.

"Frau Schratt," she said by way of introduction, and raised the lamp to look more closely at me.

Then I saw her face change. She was looking past me into the room, and I knew that the lamplight was falling full upon the ghastly thing that lay upon the floor.

I realized the woman was about to scream, so I seized her by the wrist. She had disgusting hands, fat and podgy and covered with rings.

"Quiet!" I whispered fiercely in her ear, never relaxing my grip on her wrist. "You will be quiet and come in here, do you understand?"

She sought to shrink from me, but I held her fast and drew her into the room.

She stood motionless with her lamp, at the head of the corpse. She seemed to have regained her self-possession. The woman was no longer frightened. I felt instinctively that her fears had been all for herself, not for that livid horror sprawling on the floor. When she spoke her manner was almost business-like.

"I was told nothing of this," she said. "Who is it? What do you want me to do?"

Of all the sensations of that night, none has left a more unpleasant odour in my memory than the manner of that woman in the chamber of death. Her voice was incredibly hard. Her dull, basilisk eyes, seeking in mine the answers to her questions, gave me an eerie sensation that makes my blood run cold whenever I think of her.

Then suddenly her manner, arrogant, insolent, cruel, changed. She became polite. She was obsequious. Of the two, the first manner became her vastly better. She looked at me with a curious air, almost with reverence, as it seemed to me. She said, in a purring voice:

"Ach, so! I did not understand. The gentleman must excuse me."

And she purred again:

"So!"

It was then I noticed that her eyes were fastened upon my chest. I followed their direction.

They rested on the silver badge I had stuck in my braces.

I understood and held my peace. Silence was my only trump until I knew how the land lay. If I left this woman alone, she would tell me all I wanted to know.

In fact, she began to speak again.

"I expected you," she said, "but not . . . this. Who is it this time? A Frenchman, eh?"

I shook my head.

"An Englishman," I said curtly.

Her eyes opened in wonder.

"Ach, nein!" she cried—and you would have said her voice vibrated with pleasure—"An Englishman! Ei, ei!"

If ever a human being licked its chops, that woman did.

She wagged her head and repeated to herself: "Ei, ei!" adding, as if to explain her surprise, "he is the first we have had.

"You brought him here, eh! But why up here? Or did der Stelze send him?"

She fired this string of questions at me without pausing for a reply. She continued:

"I was out, but Karl told me. There was another came, too: Franz sent him."

"This is he," I said. "I caught him prying in my room and he died."

"Ach!" she ejaculated . . . and in her voice was all the world of admiration that a German woman feels for brute man. . . . "The Herr Englander came into your room and he died. So, so! But one must speak to Franz. The man drinks too much. He is always drunk. He makes mistakes. It will not do. I will. . . ."

"I wish you to do nothing against Franz," I said. "This Englishman spoke German well: Karl will tell you."

"As the gentleman wishes," was the woman's reply in a voice so silky and so servile that I felt my gorge rise.

"She looks like a slug!" I said to myself, as she stood there, fat and sleek and horrible.

"Here are his passport and other papers," I said, bending down and taking them from the dead man's pocket. "He was an English officer, you see?" And I unfolded the little black book stamped with the Royal Arms.

She leant forward and I was all but stifled with the stale odour of the patchouli with which her faded body was drenched.

Then, making a sheaf of passport and permit, I held them in the flame of the candle.

"But we always keep them!" expostulated the hotel-keeper.

"This passport must die with the man," I replied firmly. "He must not be traced. I want no awkward enquiries made, you understand. Therefore . . ." and I flung the burning mass of papers into the grate.

"Good, good!" said the German and put her lamp down on the table. "There was a telephone message for you," she added, "to say that der Stelze will come at eight in the morning to receive what you have brought."

The deuce! This was getting awkward. Who the devil was Stelze?

"Coming at eight is he?" I said, simply for the sake of saying something.

"Jawohl!" replied Frau Schratt. "He was here already this morning. He was nervous, oh! very, and expected you to be here. Already two days he is waiting here to go on."

"So," I said, "he is going to take . . . it on with him, is he?" (I knew where he was "going on" to, well enough: he was going to see that document safe into Germany.)

There was a malicious ring in the woman's voice when she spoke of Stelze. I thought I might profit by this. So I drew her out.

"So Stelze called to-day and gave you his orders, did he?" I said, "and . . . and took charge of things generally, eh?"

Her little eyes snapped viciously.

"Ach!" she said, "der Stelze is der Stelze. He has power; he has authority; he can make and unmake men. But I . . . I in my time have broken a dozen better men than he and yet he dares to tell Anna Schratt that . . . that . . ."

She raised her voice hysterically, but broke off before she could finish the sentence. I saw she thought she had said too much.

"He won't play that game with me," I said. Strength is the quality that every German, man, woman and child, respects, and strength alone. My safety depended on my showing this ignoble creature that I received orders from no one. "You know what he is. One runs the risk, one takes trouble, one is successful. Then he steps in and gathers the laurels. No, I am not going to wait for him."

The hotel-keeper sprang to her feet, her faded face all ravaged by the shadow of a great fear.

"You wouldn't dare!" she said.

"I would," I retorted. "I've done my work and I'll report to head-quarters and to no one else!"

My eyes fell upon the body.

"Now, what are we going to do with this?" I said. "You must help me, Frau Schratt. This is serious. This must not be found here."

She looked up at me in surprise.

"That?" she said, and she kicked the body with her foot. "Oh, that will be all right with die Schratt! 'It must not be found here'" (she mimicked my grave tone). "It will not be found here, young man!"

And she chuckled with all the full-bodied good humour of a fat person.

"You mean?"

"I mean what I mean, young man, and what you mean," she replied. "When they are in a difficulty, when there are complications, when there is any unpleasantness . . . like this . . . they remember die Schratt, 'die fesche Anna,' as they called me once, and it is 'gnadige Frau' here and 'gnädige Frau' there and a diamond bracelet or a pearl ring, if only I will do the little conjuring trick that will smooth everything over. But when all goes well, then I am 'old Schratt,' 'old hag,' 'old woman,' and I must take my orders and beg nicely and . . . bah!"

Her words ended in a gulp, which in any other woman would have been a sob.

Then she added in her hard harlot's voice:

"You needn't worry your head about him, there! Leave him to me! It's my trade!"

At those words, which covered God only knows what horrors of midnight disappearances, of ghoulish rites with packing-case and sack, in the dark cellars of that evil house, I felt that, could I but draw back from the enterprise to which I had so rashly committed myself, I would do so gladly. Only then did I begin to realize something of the utter ruthlessness, the cold, calculating ferocity, of the most bitter and most powerful enemy which the British Empire has ever had.

But it was too late to withdraw now. The die was cast. Destiny, knocking at my door, had found me ready to follow, and I was committed to whatever might befall me in my new personality.

The German woman turned to go.

"Der Stelze will be here at eight, then," she said. "I suppose the gentleman will take his early morning coffee before."

"I shan't be here," I said. "You can tell your friend I've gone."

She turned on me like a flash.

She was hard as flint again.

"Nein!" she cried. "You stay here!"

"No," I answered with equal force, "not I . . ."

". . . Orders are orders and you and I must obey!"

"But who is Stelze that he should give orders to me?" I cried.

"Who is. . .?" She spoke aghast.

". . . And you yourself," I continued, "were saying . . ."

"When an order has been given, what you or I think or say is of no account," the woman said. "It is an order: you and I know whose order. Let that suffice. You stay here! Good night!"

With that she was gone. She closed the door behind her; the key rattled in the lock and I realized that I was a prisoner. I heard the woman's footfalls die away down the corridor.

That distant clock cleaved the silence of the night with twelve ponderous strokes. Then the chimes played a pretty jingling little tune that rang out clearly in the still, rain-washed air.

I stood petrified and reflected on my next move.

Twelve o'clock! I had eight hours' grace before Stelze, the man of mystery and might, arrived to unmask me and hand me over to the tender mercies of Madame and of Karl. Before eight o'clock arrived I must—so I summed up my position—be clear of the hotel and in the train for the German frontier—if I could get a train—else I must be out of Rotterdam, by that hour.

But I must act and act without delay. There was no knowing when that dead man lying on the floor might procure me another visit from Madame and her myrmidons. The sooner I was out of that house of death the better.

The door was solid; the lock was strong. That I discovered without any trouble. In any case, I reflected, the front-door of the hotel would be barred and bolted at this hour of the night, and I could scarcely dare hope to escape by the front without detection, even if Karl were not actually in the entrance hall. There must be a back entrance to the hotel, I thought, for I had seen that the windows of my room opened on to the narrow street lining the canal which ran at the back of the house.

Escape by the windows was impossible. The front of the house dropped sheer down and there was nothing to give one a foothold. But I remembered the window in the cabinet de toilette giving on to the little air-shaft. That seemed to offer a slender chance of escape.

For the second time that night I opened the casement and inhaled the fetid odours arising from the narrow court. All the windows looking, like mine, upon the air-shaft were shrouded in darkness; only a light still burned in the window beneath the grating with the iron stair to the little yard. What was at the foot of the stair I could not descry, but I thought I could recognize the outline of a door.

From the window of the cabinet de toilette to the yard the sides of the house, cased in stained and dirty stucco, fell sheer away. Measured with the eye the drop from window to the pavement was about fifty feet. With a rope and something to break one's fall, it might, I fancied, be managed. . . .

From that on, things moved swiftly. First with my penknife I ripped the tailor's tab with my name from the inside pocket of my coat and burnt it in the candle; nothing else I had on was marked, for I had had to buy a lot of new garments when I came out of hospital. I took Semlin's overcoat, hat and bag into the cabinet de toilette and stood them in readiness by the window. As a precaution against surprise I pushed the massive mahogany bedstead right across the doorway and thus barricaded the entrance to the room.

From either side of the fireplace hung two bell-ropes, twisted silk cords of faded crimson with dusty tassels. Mounting on the mantelpiece I cut the bell-ropes off short where they joined the wire. Testing them I found them apparently solid—at any rate they must serve. I knotted them together.

Back to the cabinet de toilette I went to find a suitable object to which to fasten my rope. There was nothing in the little room save the washstand, and that was fragile and quite unsuited for the purpose. I noticed that the window was fitted with shutters on the outside fastened back against the wall. They had not been touched for years, I should say, for the iron peg holding them back was heavy with rust and the shutters were covered with dust. I closed the left-hand shutter and found that it fastened solidly to the window-frame by means of massive iron bolts, top and bottom.

Here was the required support for my rope. The poker thrust though the wooden slips of the shutter held the rope quite solidly. I attached my rope to the poker with an expert knot that I had picked up at a course in tying knots during a preposterously dull week I had spent at the base in France. Then I dragged from the bed the gigantic eiderdown pincushion and the two massive pillows, stripping off the pillow-slips lest their whiteness might attract attention whilst they were fulfilling the unusual mission for which I destined them.

At the window of the cabinet de toilette I listened a moment. All was silent as the grave. Resolutely I pitched out the eiderdown into the dark and dirty air shaft. It sailed gracefully earthwards and settled with a gentle plop on the stones of the tiny yard. The pillows followed. The heavier thud they would have made was deadened by the billowy mass of the édredon. Semlin's bag went next, and made no sound to speak of; then his overcoat and hat followed suit.

I noticed, with a grateful heart, that the eiderdown and pillows covered practically the whole of the flags of the yard.

I went back once more to the room and blew out the candle. Then, taking a short hold on my silken rope, I clambered out over the window ledge and started to let myself down, hand over hand, into the depths.

My two bell-ropes, knotted together, were about twenty feet long, so I had to reckon on a clear drop of something over thirty feet. The poker and shutter held splendidly firm, and I found little difficulty in lowering myself, though I barked my knuckles most unpleasantly on the rough stucco of the wall. As I reached the extremity of my rope I glanced downward. The red splash of the eiderdown, just visible in the light from the adjoining window, seemed to be a horrible distance below me. My spirit failed me. My determination began to ebb. I could never risk it.

The rope settled the question for me. It snapped without warning—how it had supported my weight up to then I don't know—and I fell in a heap (and, as it seemed to me at the time, with a most reverberating crash) on to the soft divan I had prepared for my reception.

I came down hard, very hard, but old Madame's plump eiderdown and pillows certainly helped to break my fall. I dropped square on top of the eiderdown with one knee on a pillow and, though shaken and jarred, I found I had broken no bones.

Nor did my sense leave me. In a minute I was up on my feet again. I listened. All was still silent. I cast a glance upwards. The window from which I had descended was still dark. I could see the broken bell-ropes dangling from the shutter, and I noted, with a glow of professional pride, that my expert join between the two ropes had not given. The lower rope had parted in the middle. . . .

I crammed Semlin's hat on my head, retrieved his bag and overcoat from the corner of the court where they had fallen and the next moment was tiptoeing down the ladder.

The iron stair ran down beside the window in which I had seen the light burning. The lower part of the window was screened off by a dirty muslin curtain. Through the upper part I caught a glimpse of a sort of scullery with a paraffin lamp standing on a wooden table. The room was empty. From top to bottom the window was protected by heavy iron bars.

At the foot of the iron stair stood, as I had anticipated, a door. It was my last chance of escape. It stood a dozen yards from the bottom of the ladder across a dank, little paved area where tins of refuse were standing—a small door with a brass handle.

I ducked low as I clambered down the iron ladder so as not to be seen from the window should anyone enter the scullery as I passed. Treading very softly I crept across the little area and, as quietly as I could, turned the handle of the door.

It turned round easily in my hand, but nothing happened.

The door was locked.

CHAPTER VI
I BOARD THE BERLIN TRAIN AND LEAVE A LAME GENTLEMAN ON THE PLATFORM

IWAS caught like a rat in a trap. I could not return by the way I had come and the only egress was closed to me. The area door and window were the only means of escape from the little court. The one was locked, the other barred. I was fairly trapped. All I had to do now was to wait until my absence was discovered and the broken rope found to show them where I was. Then they would come down to the area, I should be confronted with the man, Stelze, and my goose would be fairly cooked.

As quietly as I could I made a complete, thorough, rapid examination of the area. It was a dank, dark place, only lit where the yellow light streamed forth from the scullery. It had a couple of low bays hollowed out of the masonry under the little court-yard, the one filled with wood blocks, the other with broken packing-cases, old bottles and like rubbish. I explored these until my hands came in contact with the damp bricks at the back, but in vain. Door and window remained the only means of escape.

Four tall tin refuse tins stood in line in front of these two bays, a fifth was stowed away under the iron stair. They were all nearly full of refuse, so were useless as hiding places. In any case it accorded neither with the part I was playing nor with my sense of the ludicrous to be discovered by the hotel domestics hiding in a refuse bin.

I was at my wits' end to know what to do. I had dared so much, all had gone so surprisingly well, that it was heartbreaking to be foiled with liberty almost within my grasp. A great wave of disappointment swept over me until I felt my very heart sicken. Then I heard footsteps and hope revived within me.

I shrunk back into the darkness of the area behind the refuse bins standing in front of the bay nearest the door.

Within the house footsteps were approaching the scullery. I heard a door open, then a man's voice singing. He was warbling in a fine mellow baritone that popular German ballad:

"Das haben die Mädchen so gerne
Die im Stübchen und die im Salong."

The voice hung lovingly and wavered and trilled on that word "Salong": the effect was so much to the singer's liking that he sang the stave over again. A bumping and a rattle as of loose objects in an empty box formed the accompaniment to his song.

"A cheery fellow!" I said to myself. If only I could see who it was! But I dare not move into that patch of yellow light from which the only view into the scullery was afforded.

The singing stopped. Again I heard a door open. Was he going away?

Then I saw a thin shaft of light under the area door.

The next moment it was flung back and the waiter, Karl, appeared, still in his blue apron, a bucket in either hand.

He was coming to the refuse bins.

Pudd'n Head Wilson's advice came into my mind; "When angry count up to four; when very angry, swear." I was not angry but scared, terribly scared, scared so that I could hear my heart pulsating in great thuds in my ears. Nevertheless, I followed the advice of the sage of Dawson's Landing and counted to myself: one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four; while my heart hammered out: keep cool, keep cool, keep cool! And all the time I remained crouching behind the first two refuse bins nearest the door.

The waiter hummed to himself the melody of his little ditty in a deep bourdon as he paused a moment at the door. Then he advanced slowly across the area.

Would he stop at the refuse bins behind which I cowered?

No, he passed them.

The third? The fourth?

No!

He walked straight across the area and went to the bin beneath the stairs.

I muttered a blessing inwardly on the careful habits of the German who organizes even his refuse into separate tubs.

The man had his back to the door.

Now or never was my chance.

I crawled round my friendly garbage tins, reached the area door on tip-toe and stepped softly into the house. As I did so I heard the clank of tin as Karl replaced the lid of the tub.

A dark passage stretched out in front of me. Immediately to my right was the scullery door wide open. I must avoid the scullery at all costs. The man might remain there and I could not risk him driving me before him back to the entrance hall of the hotel.

I crept down the dark passage with hands outstretched. Presently they fell upon the latch of a door. I pressed it, the door opened inwards into the darkness and I passed through. As I softly closed the door behind me I heard Karl's heavy step and the grinding of the key as he locked the area door.

I stood in a kind of cupboard in pitch darkness, hardly daring to breathe.

Once more I heard the man singing his idiotic song. I did not dare look out from my hiding-place, for his voice sounded so near that I feared he might be still in the passage.

So I stood and waited.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

I must have stayed there for an hour in the dark. I heard the waiter coming and going in the scullery, listened to his heavy tramp, to his everlasting snatch of song, to the rattle of utensils, as he went about his work. Every minute of the time I was tortured by the apprehension that he would come to the cupboard in the passage.

It was cold in that damp subterranean place. The cupboard was roomy enough, so I thought I would put on the overcoat I was carrying. As I stretched out my arm, my hand struck hard against some kind of projecting hook in the wall behind me.

"Damn!" I swore savagely under my breath, but I put out my hand again to find out what had hurt me. My fingers encountered the cold iron of a latch. I pressed it and it gave.

A door swung open and I found myself in another little area with a flight of stone steps leading to the street.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

I was in a narrow lane driven between the tall sides of the houses. It was a cul-de-sac. At the open end I could see the glimmer of street lamps. It had stopped raining and the air was fresh and pleasant. Carrying my bag I walked briskly down the lane and presently emerged in a quiet thoroughfare traversed by a canal—probably the street, I thought, that I had seen from the windows of my bedroom. The Hotel Sixt lay to the right of the lane: I struck out to the left and in a few minutes found myself in an open square behind the Bourse.

There I found a cab-rank with three or four cabs drawn up in line, the horses somnolent, the drivers snoring inside their vehicles. I stirred up the first and bade the driver take me to the Café Tarnowski.

Everyone who has been to Holland knows the Café Tarnowski at Rotterdam. It is an immense place with hundreds of marble-topped tables tucked away among palms under a vast glazed roof. Day or night it never closes: the waiters succeed each other in shifts: day and night the great hall resounds to the cry of orders, the patter of the waiters' feet, the click of dominoes on the marble tables.

Delicious Dutch café au lait, a beefsteak and fried potatoes, most succulent of all Dutch dishes, crisp white bread, hot from the midnight baking, and appetizing Dutch butter, largely compensated for the thrills of the night. Then I sent for some more coffee, black this time, and a railway guide, and lighting a cigarette began to frame my plan of campaign.

The train for Berlin left Rotterdam at seven in the morning. It was now ten minutes past two, so I had plenty of time. From that night onward, I told myself, I was a German, and from that moment I set myself assiduously to feel myself a German as well as enact the part.

"It's no use dressing a part," Francis used to say to me; "you must feel it as well. If I were going to disguise myself as a Berliner, I should not be content to shave my head and wear a bowler hat with a morning coat and get my nails manicured pink. I should begin by persuading myself that I was the Lord of creation, that bad manners is a sign of manly strength and that dishonesty is the highest form of diplomacy."

Poor old Francis! How shrewd he was and how well he knew his Berliners!

There is nothing like newspapers for giving one an idea of national sentiment. I had not spoken to a German, save to a few terrified German rats, prisoners of war in France, since the beginning of the war and I knew that my knowledge of German thought must be rusty. So I sent the willing waiter for all the German papers and periodicals he could lay his hands on. He returned with stacks of them, Berliner Tageblatt, Kölnische Zeitung, Vorwärts; the alleged comic papers, Kladderadatsch, Lustige Blätter and Simplicissimus; the illustrated press, Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, Der Weltkrieg im Bild, and the rest: that remarkable café even took in such less popular publications as Harden's Zukunft and semi-blackmailing rags like Der Roland von Berlin.

For two hours I saturated myself with German contemporary thought as expressed in the German press. I deliberately laid my mind open to conviction; I repeated to myself over and over again: "We Germans are fighting a defensive war: the scoundrelly Grey made the world-war: Gott strafe England!" Absurd as this proceeding seems to me when I look back upon it, I would not laugh at myself at the time. I must be German, I must feel German, I must think German: on that would my safety in the immediate future depend.

I laid aside my reading in the end with a feeling of utter amazement. In every one of these publications, in peace-time so widely dissimilar in conviction and trend, I found the same mentality, the same outlook, the same parrot-like cries. What the Cologne Gazette shrieked from its editorial columns, the comic (God save the mark) press echoed in foul and hideous caricature. Here was organization with a vengeance, the mobilization of national thought, a series of gramophone records fed into a thousand different machines so that each might play the selfsame tune.

"You needn't worry about your German mentality," I told myself, "you've got it all here! You've only got to be a parrot like the rest and you'll be as good a Hun as Hindenburg!"

A Continental waiter, they say, can get one anything one chooses to ask for at any hour of the day or night. I was about to put this theory to the test.

"Waiter," I said (of course, in German), "I want a bag, a handbag. Do you think you could get me one?"

"Does the gentleman want it now?" the man replied.

"This very minute," I answered.

"About that size?"—indicating Semlin's.

"Yes, or smaller if you like: I am not particular."

"I will see what can be done."

In ten minutes the man was back with a brown leather bag about a size smaller than Semlin's. It was not new and he charged me thirty gulden (which is about fifty shillings) for it. I paid with a willing heart and tipped him generously to boot, for I wanted a bag and could not wait till the shops opened without missing the train for Germany.

I paid my bill and drove off to the Central Station through the dark streets with my two bags. The clocks were striking six as I entered under the great glass dome of the station hall.

I went straight to the booking-office, and bought a first-class ticket, single, to Berlin. One never knows what may happen and I had several things to do before the train went.

The bookstall was just opening. I purchased a sovereign's worth of books and magazines, English, French and German, and crammed them into the bag I had procured at the café. Thus laden I adjourned to the station buffet.

There I set about executing a scheme I had evolved for leaving the document which Semlin had brought from England in a place of safety, whence it could be recovered without difficulty, should anything happen to me. I knew no one in Holland save Dicky, and I could not send him the document, for I did not trust the post. For the same reason I would not post the document home to my bank in England: besides, I knew one could not register letters until eight o'clock, by which hour I hoped to be well on my way into Germany.

No, my bag, conveniently weighted with books and deposited at the station cloak-room, should be my safe. The comparative security of station cloak-rooms as safe deposits has long been recognized by jewel thieves and the like and this means of leaving my document behind in safety seemed to me to be better than any other I could think of.

So I dived into my bag and from the piles of literature it contained picked up a book at random. It was a German brochure: Gott strafe England! by Prof. Dr. Hugo Bischoff, of the University of Göttingen. The irony of the thing appealed to my sense of humour. "So be it!" I said. "The worthy Professor's fulminations against my country shall have the honour of harbouring the document which is, apparently, of such value to his country!" And I tucked the little canvas case away inside the pages of the pamphlet, stuck the pamphlet deep down among the books and shut the bag.

Seeing its harmless appearance the cloak-room receipt—I calculated—would, unlike Semlin's document, attract no attention if, by any mischance, it fell into wrong hands en route. I therefore did not scruple to commit it to the post. Before taking my bag of books to the cloak-room I wrote two letters. Both were to Ashcroft—Ashcroft of the Foreign Office, who got me my passport and permit to come to Rotterdam. Herbert Ashcroft and I were old friends. I addressed the envelopes to his private house in London. The Postal Censor, I knew, keen though he always is after letters from neutral countries, would leave old Herbert's correspondence alone.

The first letter was brief. "Dear Herbert," I wrote, "would you mind looking after the enclosed until you hear from me again? Filthy weather here. Yours, D. O." This letter was destined to contain the cloak-room receipt. To conceal the importance of an enclosure, it is always a good dodge to send the covering letter under separate cover.

"Dear Herbert," I said in my second letter, "If you don't hear from me within two months of this date regarding the enclosure you will have already received, please send someone, or, preferably, go yourself and collect my luggage at the cloak-room of the Rotterdam Central Station. I know how busy you always are. Therefore you will understand my reasons for making this inordinate claim upon your time. Yours, D. O." And, by way of a clue, I added, inconsequently enough: "Gott strafe England!"

I chuckled inwardly at the thought of Herbert's face on receiving this preposterous demand that he should abandon his dusty desk in Downing Street and betake himself across the North Sea to fetch my luggage. But he'd go all right. I knew my Herbert, dull and dry and conventional, but a most faithful friend.

I called a porter at the entrance of the buffet and handing him Semlin's bag and overcoat, bade him find me a first-class carriage in the Berlin train when it arrived. I would meet him on the platform. Then, at the cloak-room opposite, I gave in my bag of books, put the receipt in the first letter and posted it in the letter-box within the station. I went out into the streets with the second letter and posted it in a letter-box let into the wall of a tobacconist's shop in a quiet street a few turnings away. By this arrangement I reckoned Herbert would get the letter with the receipt before the covering letter arrived.

Returning to the railway station I noticed a kind of slop shop which despite the early hour was already open. A fat Jew in his shirt-sleeves, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, stood at the entrance framed in hanging overcoats and bats and boots. I had no umbrella and it struck me that a waterproof of some kind might not be a bad addition to my extremely scanty wardrobe. Moreover, I reflected that with the rubber shortage rain-coats must be at a premium in Germany.

So I followed the bowing son of Shem into his dark and dirty shop and emerged presently wearing an appallingly ugly green mackintosh reeking hideously of rubber. It was a shocking garment but I reflected that I was a German and must choose my garb accordingly.

Outside the shop I nearly ran into a little man who was loafing in the doorway. He was a wizened, scrubby old fellow wearing a dirty peaked cap with a band of tarnished gold. I knew him at once for one of those guides, half tout, half bully, that infest the railway termini of all great Continental cities.

"Want a guide, sir?" the man said in German.

I shook my head and hurried on. The man trotted beside me. "Want a good, cheap hotel, sir? Good, respectable house. . . Want a . . ."

"Ach! gehen sie zum Teufel!" I cried angrily. But the man persisted, running along beside me and reeling off his tout's patter in a wheezing, asthmatic voice. I struck off blindly down the first turning we came to, hoping to be rid of the fellow, but in vain. Finally, I stopped and held out a gulden.

"Take this and go away!" I said.

The old fellow waved the coin aside.

"Danke, danke," he said nonchalantly, looking at the same time to right and left.

Then he said in a calm English voice, utterly different from his whining accents of a moment before:

"You must be a dam' cool hand!"

But he didn't bluff me, staggered though I was. I said quickly in German:

"What do you want with me? I don't understand you. If you annoy me any more I shall call the police!"

Again he spoke in English and it was the voice of a well-bred Englishman that spoke:

"You're either a past master at the game or raving mad. Why! the whole station is humming after you! Yet you walked out of the buffet and through the whole lot of them without turning a hair. No wonder they never spotted you!"

Again I answered in German:

"Ich verstehe nicht!"

But he went on in English, without seeming to notice my observation:

"Hang it all, man, you can't go into Germany wearing a regimental tie!"

My hand flew to my collar and the blood to my head. What a cursed amateur I was, after all! I had entirely forgotten that I was wearing my regimental colours. I was crimson with vexation but also with a sense of relief. I felt I might trust this man. It would be a sharp German agent who would notice a small detail like that.

Still I resolved to stick to German: I would trust nobody.

But the guide had started his patter again. I saw two workmen approaching. When they had passed, he said, this time in English:

"You're quite right to be cautious with a stranger like me, but I want to warn you. Why, I've been following you round all the morning. Lucky for you it was me and not one of the others. . . ."

Still I was silent. The little man went on:

"For the past half-hour they have been combing that station for you. How you managed to escape them I don't know except that none of them seems to have a very clear idea of your appearance. You don't look very British, I grant you; but I spotted your tie and then I recognized the British officer all right.

"No, don't worry to tell me anything about yourself—it is none of my business to know, any more than you will find out anything about me. I know where you are going, for I heard you take your ticket; but you may as well understand that you have as much chance of getting into your train if you walk into the railway hall and up the stairs in the ordinary way as you have of flying across the frontier."

"But they can't stop me!" I said. "This isn't Germany. . . ."

"Bah!" said the guide. "You will be jostled, there will be an altercation, a false charge, and you will miss your train! They will attend to the rest!

"Damn it, man," he went on, "I know what I'm talking about. Here, come with me and I'll show you. You have twenty minutes before the train goes. Now start the German again!"

We went down the street together for all the world like a "mug" in tow of one of those black-guard guides. As we approached the station the guide said in his whining German:

"Pay attention to me now. I shall leave you here. Go to the suburban booking-office—the entrance is in the street to the left of the station hall. Go into the first-class waiting-room and look out of the window that gives on to the station hall. There you will see some of the forces mobilized against you. There is a regular cordon of guides—like me—drawn across the entrances to the main-line platforms—unostentatiously, of course. If you look you will see plenty of plain-clothes Huns, too. . . ."

"Guides?" I said.

He nodded cheerfully.

"Looks bad for me, doesn't it? But one gets better results by being one of them. Oh! it's all right. In any case you've got to trust me now.

"See here! When you have satisfied yourself that I'm correct in what I say, take a platform ticket and walk upstairs to platform No. 5. On that platform you will find a train. Go to the end where the metals run out of the station, where the engine would be coupled on, and get into the last first-class carriage. On no account move from there until you see me. Now then, I'll have that gulden!"

I gave him the coin. The old fellow looked at it and wagged his head, so I gave him another, whereupon he took off his cap, bowed low and hurried off.

In the suburban side waiting-room I peered out of the window on to the station hall. True enough, I saw one, two, four, six guides loafing about the barriers leading to the main-line platforms. There seemed to be a lot of people in the hall and certainly a number of the men possessed that singular taste in dress, those rotundities of contour, by which one may distinguish the German in a crowd.

I now had no hesitation in following the guide's instructions to the letter. Platform No. 5 was completely deserted as I emerged breathless from the long staircase and I had no difficulty in getting into the last first-class carriage unobserved. I sat down by the window on the far side of the carriage.

Alongside it ran the brown panels and gold lettering of a German restaurant car.

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to seven. There was no sign of my mysterious friend. I wondered vaguely, too, what had become of my porter. True, there was nothing of importance in Semlin's bag, but a traveller with luggage always commands more confidence than one without.

Five minutes to seven! Still no word from the guide. The minutes ticked away. By Jove! I was going to miss the train. But I sat resolutely in my corner. I had put my trust in this man. I would trust him to the last.

Suddenly his face appeared in the window at my elbow. The door was flung open.

"Quick!" he whispered in my ear, "follow me."

"My things . . ." I gasped with one foot on the foot-board of the other train. At the same moment the train began to move.

The guide pointed to the carriage into which I had clambered.

"The porter . . ." I cried from the open door, thinking he had not understood me.

The guide pointed towards the carriage again, then tapped himself on the chest with a significant smile.

The next moment he had disappeared and I had not even thanked him.

The Berlin train bumped ponderously out of the station. Peering cautiously out of the carriage, I caught a glimpse of the waiter, Karl, hurrying down the platform. With him was a swarthy, massively built man who leaned heavily on a stick and limped painfully as he ran. One of his feet, I could see, was misshapen and the sweat was pouring down his face.

I would have liked to wave my hand to the pair, but I prudently drew back out of sight of the platform.

Caution, caution, caution, must henceforward be my watchword.

CHAPTER VII
IN WHICH A SILVER STAR ACTS AS A CHARM

IHAVE often remarked in life that there are days when some benevolent deity seems to be guiding one's every action. On such days, do what you will, you cannot go wrong. As the Berlin train bumped thunderously over the culverts spanning the canals between the tall, grey houses of Rotterdam and rushed out imperiously into the plain of windmills and pollards beyond, I reflected that this must be my good day, so kindly had some fairy godmother shepherded my footsteps since I had left the café.

So engrossed had I been, indeed, in the great enterprise on which I was embarked, that my actions throughout the morning had been mainly automatic. Yet how uniformly had they tended to protect me! I had bought my ticket in advance; I had given my overcoat and bag to a porter that I now knew to have been my saviour in disguise; I had sallied forth from the station and thus given him an opportunity for safe converse with me. The omens were good: I could trust my luck to-day, I felt, and, greatly comforted, I began to look about me.

I found myself, the only occupant, in a first-class carriage. On the window was plastered a notice, in Dutch and German, to the effect that the carriage was reserved. Suddenly I thought of my bag and overcoat. They were nowhere to be seen. After a little search I found them beneath the seat. In the overcoat pocket was a black tie.

I lost no time in taking the hint. If any of you who read this tale should one day notice a ganger on the railway between Rotterdam and Dordrecht wearing the famous colours of a famous regiment round his neck you will understand how they got there. Then, wearied out with the fatigues of my sleepless night, I fell into a deep slumber, my verdant waterproof swathed round me, Semlin's overcoat about my knees.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

I was dreaming fitfully of a mad escape from hordes of wildly clutching guides, led by Karl the waiter, when the screaming of brakes brought me to my senses. The train was sensibly slackening speed. Outside the autumn sun was shining over pleasant brown stretches of moorland bright with heather. The next moment and before I was fully awake we had glided to a standstill at a very spick and span station and the familiar cry of "Alles aussteigen!" rang in my ears.

We were in Germany.

The realization fell upon me like a thunderclap. I was in the enemy's country, sailing under false colours, with only the most meagre information about the man whose place I had taken and no plausible tale, such as I had fully intended to have ready, to carry me through the rigorous scrutiny of the frontier police.

What was my firm? The Halewright Manufacturing Company. What did we manufacture? I had not the faintest idea. Why was I coming to Germany at all? Again I was at a loss.

The clink of iron-shod heels in the corridor and an officer, followed closely by two privates, the white cross of the Landwehr in their helmets, stood at the door.

"Your papers, please," he said curtly but politely.

I handed over my American passport.

"This has not been viséd," said the officer.

With a pang I realized that again I was at fault. Of course, the passport should have been stamped at the German Consulate at Rotterdam.

"I had no time," I said boldly. "I am travelling on most important business to Berlin. . . . I only reached Rotterdam last night, after the Consulate was closed."

The lieutenant turned to one of his guards.

"Take the gentleman to the Customs Hall," he said and went on to the next carriage.

The soldier appropriated my overcoat and bag and beckoned me to follow him. Outside the platform was railed off. Everyone, I noticed, was shepherded into a long narrow pen made with iron hurdles leading to a locked door over which was written: Zoll-Revision. I was going to take my place in the queue when the soldier prodded me with his elbow. He led me to a side door which opened in the gaunt, bare Customs Hall with its long row of trestles for the examination of the passengers' luggage. In a corner behind a desk was a large group of officers and subordinate officials, all in the grey-green uniform I knew so well from the life in the trenches. The principal seemed to be an immense man, inordinately gross and fat, with a bloated face and great gold spectacles. He was roaring in a loud, angry voice:

"He's not come! There you are! Again we shall have all the trouble for nothing!"

I thought he looked an extraordinarily bad-tempered individual and I fervently prayed that I should not be brought before him.

The doors were flung open. With a rush the hall was invaded with a heterogeneous mob of people huddled pellmell together and driven along before a line of soldiers. For an hour or more babel reigned. Officials bawled at the public: the place rang with the sounds of angry altercation. After a furious dispute one man, wildly gesticulating, was dragged away by two soldiers.

I never saw such a thorough examination in my life. People's bags were literally turned upside down and every single object pried into and besnuffled. After the customs' examination passengers were passed on to the searching-rooms, the men to one side, the women to the other. I caught sight of a female searcher lolling at a door . . . a monstrous and grim female who reminded me of those dreadful bathing women at the seaside in our early youth.

The fat official had vanished into an office leading off the Customs Hall. He was, I surmised, the last instance, for several passengers, including a very respectably dressed old lady, were driven into the side office and were seen no more.

During all this scene of confusion no one had taken any notice of me. My guard looked straight in front of him and said never a word. When the hall was all but cleared, a man came to the office door and made a sign to my sentinel.

At a table in the office which, despite the sunshine outside, was heated like a greenhouse, I found the fat official. Something had evidently upset him, for his brows were clouded with anger and his mastiff-like cheeks were trembling with irritation. He thrust a hand out as I entered.

"Your papers!" he grunted.

I handed over my passport.

Directly he had examined it, a red flush spread over his cheeks and forehead and he brought his hand down on the table with a crash. The sentry beside me winced perceptibly.

"It's not viséd," the fat official screamed in a voice shrill with anger. "It's worthless . . . what good do you think is this to me?"

"Excuse me . . ." I said in German.

"I won't excuse you," he roared. "Who are you? What do you want in Germany? You've been to London, I see by this passport."

"I had no time to get my passport stamped at the Consulate at Rotterdam," I said. "I arrived there too late in the evening. I could not wait. I am going to Berlin on most important business."

"That's nothing to do with it," the man shouted. He was working himself up into a fine frenzy. "Your passport is not in order. You're not a German. You're an American. We Germans know what to think of our American friends, especially those who come from London."

A voice outside shouted: "Nach Berlin alles einsteigen." I said as politely as I could, despite my growing annoyance:

"I don't wish to miss my train. My journey to Berlin is of the utmost importance. I trust the train can be held back until I have satisfied you of my good faith. I have here a card from Herr von Steinhardt."

I paused to let the name sink in. I was convinced he must be a big bug of some kind in the German service.

"I don't care a rap for Herr von Steinhardt or Herr von anybody else," the German cried. Then he said curtly to a cringing secretary beside him:

"Has he been searched?"

The secretary cast a frightened look at the sentry.

"No, Herr Major," said the secretary.

"Well, take him away and strip him and bring me anything you find!"

The sentry spun on his heel like an automaton.

The moment had come to play my last card, I felt: I could not risk being delayed on the frontier lest Stelze and his friends should catch up with me. I was surprised to find that apparently they had not telegraphed to have me stopped.

"One moment, Herr Major," I said.

"Take him away!" The fat man waved me aside.

"I warn you," I continued, "that I am on important business. I can convince you of that, too. Only . . ." and I looked round the office. "All these must go."

To my amazement the fat man's anger vanished utterly. He stared hard at me, then took off his spectacles and polished them with his handkerchief. After this he said nonchalantly: "Everybody get outside except this gentleman!" The sentry, who had spun round on his heel again, seemed about to speak: his voice expired before it came out of his mouth: he saluted, spun round again and followed the rest out of the room.

When the place was cleared I pulled my left brace out of the armhole of my waistcoat and displayed the silver star.

The fat man sprang up.

"The Herr Doktor must excuse me: I am overwhelmed: I had no idea that the Herr Doktor was not one of these tiresome American spies that are overrunning our country. The Herr Doktor will understand. . . . If the Herr Doktor had but said . . ."

"Herr Major," I said, endeavouring to put as much insolence as I could into my voice (that is what a German understands), "I am not in the habit of bleating my business to every fool I meet. Now I must go back to the train."

"The Berlin train has gone, Herr Doktor, but . . ."

"The Berlin train gone?" I said. "But my business brooks no delay. I tell you I must be in Berlin to-night!"

"There is no question of your taking the ordinary train, Herr Doktor," the fat man replied smoothly, "but unfortunately the special which I had ready for you has been countermanded. I thought you were not coming again."

A special? By Jove! I was evidently a personage of note. But a special would never do! Where the deuce was it going to take me?

"The Berlin train was to have been held back until your special was clear," the Major went on, "but we must stop her at Wesel until you have passed. I will attend to that at once!"

He gave some order down the telephone and after a brisk conversation turned to me with a beaming face:

"They will stop her at Wesel and the special will be ready in twenty-five minutes. But there is no hurry. You have an hour or more to spare. Might I offer the Herr Doktor a glass of beer and a sandwich at our officers' casino here?"

Well, I was in for it this time. A special bearing me Heaven knows whither on unknown business . . .! Perhaps I might be able to extract a little information out of my fat friend if I went with him, so I accepted his invitation with suitable condescension.

The Major excused himself for an instant and returned with my overcoat and bag.

"So!" he cried, "we can leave these here until we come back!" Behind him through the open door I saw a group of officials peering curiously into the room. As we walked through their midst, they fell back with precipitation. There was a positive reverence about their manner which I found extremely puzzling.

A waggonette, driven by an orderly, stood in the station yard, one of the Customs officials, hat in hand, at the door. We drove rapidly through very spick-and-span streets to a little square where the sentry at an iron gate denoted the Officers' Club. In the anteroom four or five officers in field-grey uniform were lounging. As we entered they sprang to their feet and remained stiffly standing while the Major presented them, Hauptmann Pfahl, Oberleutnant Meyer . . . a string of names. One of the officers had lost an arm, another was very lame, the remainder were obvious dug-outs.

"An American gentleman, a good friend of ours," was the form in which the Major introduced me to the company. Again I found myself mystified by the extraordinary demonstrations of respect with which I was received. Germans don't like Americans, especially since they took to selling shells to the Allies, and I began to think that all these officers must know more about me and my mission than I did myself. A stolid orderly, wearing white gloves, brought beer and some extraordinary nasty-looking sardine sandwiches which, on sampling, I realized to be made of "war bread."

While the beer was being poured out I glanced round the room, bare and very simply furnished. Terrible chromo-lithographs of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince hung on the walls above a glass filled with war trophies. With a horrible sickness at heart I recognized amongst other emblems a glengarry with a silver badge and a British steel helmet with a gaping hole through the crown. Then I remembered I was in the region of the VIIth Corps, which supplies some of our toughest opponents on the Western front.

Conversation was polite and perfunctory.

"It is on occasions such as these," said the lame officer, "that one recognizes how our brothers overseas are helping the German cause."

"Your work must be extraordinarily interesting," observed one of the dug-outs.

"All your difficulties are now over," said the Major, much in the manner of the chorus of a Greek play. "You will be in Berlin to-night, where your labours will be doubtless rewarded. American friends of Germany are not popular in London, I should imagine!"

I murmured: "Hardly."

"You must possess infinite tact to have aroused no suspicion," said the Major.

"That depends," I said.

"Pardon me," replied the Major, in whom I began to recognize all the signs of an unmitigated gossip, "I know something of the importance of your mission. I speak amongst ourselves, is it not so, gentlemen? There were special orders about you from the Corps Command at Münster. Your special has been waiting for you here for four days. The gentleman who came to meet you has been in a fever of expectation. He had already left the station this morning when ... when I met you, I sent word for him to pick you up here."

The plot was thickening. I most certainly was a personage of note.

"What part of America do you come from, Mr. Semlin?" said a voice in perfect English from the corner. The one-armed officer was speaking.

"From Brooklyn," I said stoutly, though my heart seemed turned to ice with the shock of hearing my own tongue.

"You have no accent," the other replied suavely.

"Some Americans," I retorted sententiously, "would regard that as a compliment. Not all Americans talk through their noses any more than we all chew or spit in public."

"I know," said the young man. "I was brought up there!"

We were surrounded by smiling faces. This officer who could speak English was evidently regarded as a bit of a wag by his comrades. I seized the opportunity to give them in German a humorous description of my simplicity in explaining to a man brought up in the United States that all Americans were not the caricatures depicted in the European comic press.

There was a roar of laughter from the room.

"Ach, dieser Schmalz!" guffawed the Major, beating his thigh in ecstasy. "Kolossal!" echoed one of the dug-outs. The lame man smiled wanly and said it was "incredible how humorous Schmalz could be."

I had hoped that the conversation might now be carried on again in German. Nothing of the kind. The room leant back in its chairs, as if expecting the fun to go on.

It did.

"You get your clothes in London," the young officer said.

He was a trimly built young man, very pale from recent illness, with flaxen hair and a bright, bold blue eye—the eye of a fighter. His left sleeve was empty and was fastened across his tunic, in a button-hole of which was twisted the black and white ribbon of the Iron Cross.

"Generally," I answered shortly, "when I go to England. Clothes are cheaper in London."

"You must have a good ear for languages," Schmalz continued; "you speak German like a German and English . . ." he paused appreciably, ". . . like an Englishman."

I felt horribly nervous. This young man never took his eyes off me: he had been staring at me ever since I had entered the room. His manner was perfectly calm and suave.

Still I kept my end up very creditably, I think.

"And not a bad accomplishment, either," I said, smiling brightly, "if one has to visit London in war-time."

Schmalz smiled back with perfect courtesy. But he continued to stare relentlessly at me. I felt scared.

"What is Schmalz jabbering about now?" said one of the dug-outs. I translated for the benefit of the company. My résumé gave the dug-out who had spoken the opportunity for launching out on an interminable anecdote about an ulster he had bought on a holiday at Brighton. The story lasted until the white-gloved orderly came and announced that "a gentleman" was there, asking for the Herr Major.

"That'll be your man," exclaimed the Major, starting up—I noticed he made no attempt to bring the stranger in. "Come, let us go to him!"

I stood up and took my leave. Schmalz came to the door of the anteroom with us.

"You are going to Berlin?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Where shall you be staying?" he asked again.

"Oh, probably at the Adlon!"

"I myself shall be in Berlin next week for my medical examination, and perhaps we may meet again. I should much like to talk more with you about America . . . and London. We must have mutual acquaintances."

I murmured something about being only too glad, at the same time making a mental note to get out of Berlin as soon as I conveniently could.

CHAPTER VIII
I HEAR OF CLUBFOOT AND MEET HIS EMPLOYER

AS we went down the staircase, the Major whispered to me:

"I don't think your man wished me to know his name, for he did not introduce himself when he arrived and he does not come to our Casino. But I know him for all that: it is the young Count von Boden, of the Uhlans of the Guard: his father, the General, is one of the Emperor's aides-de-camp: he was, for a time, tutor to the Crown Prince."

A motor-car stood at the door, in it a young man in a grey-blue military great-coat and a flat cap with a pink band round it. He sprang out as we appeared. His manner was most empressé. He completely ignored my companion.

"I am extremely glad to see you, Herr Doktor," he said. "You are most anxiously expected. I must present my apologies for not being at the station to welcome you, but, apparently, there was some misunderstanding. The arrangements at the station for your reception seem to have broken down completely . . ." and he stared through his monocle at the old Major, who flushed with vexation.

"If you will step into my car," the young man added, "I will drive you to the station. We need not detain this gentleman any longer."

I felt sorry for the old Major, who had remained silent under the withering insolence of this young lieutenant, so I shook hands with him cordially and thanked him for his hospitality. He was a jovial old fellow after all.

The young Count drove himself and chatted amiably as we whirled through the streets. "I must introduce myself," he said: "Lieutenant Count von Boden of the 2nd Uhlans of the Guard. I did not wish to say anything before that old chatterbox. I trust you have had a pleasant journey. Von Steinhardt, of our Legation at the Hague, was instructed to make all arrangements for your comfort on this side. But I was forgetting, you and he must be old acquaintances, Herr Doktor!"

I said something appropriate about von Steinhardt's invariable kindness. Inwardly, I noted the explanation of the visiting card in the portfolio in my pocket.

At the station we found two orderlies, one with my things, the other with von Boden's luggage and fur pélisse. The platforms were now deserted save for sentries: all life at this dreary frontier station seemed to die with the passing of the mail train.

I could not help noticing, after we had left the car and were strolling up and down the platform waiting for the special, that my companion kept casting furtive glances at my feet. I looked down at my boots: they wanted brushing, certainly, but otherwise I could see nothing wrong with them. They were brown, it is true, and I reflected that the German man about town has a way of regulating his tastes in footgear by the calendar, and that brown boots are seldom worn in Germany after September 1st.

Our special came in . . . an engine and tender, a brakesman's van, a single carriage and a guard's van. The stationmaster bid us a most ceremonious adieu, and the guard, cap in hand, helped me into the train.

It was a Pullman car in which I found myself, with comfortable arm-chairs and small tables. One of the orderlies was laying the table for luncheon, and here, presently, the young Count and I ate a meal, which, save for the inevitable "Kriegsbrod," showed few signs of the stringency of the British blockade. But by this time I had fully realized that, for some unknown reason, no pains were spared to do me honour, so probably the fare was something out of the common.

My companion was a bright, amusing fellow and delightfully typical of his class. He had seen a year's service with the cavalry on the Eastern front, had been seriously wounded and was now attached to the General Staff in Berlin in what I judged to be a decorative rather than a useful capacity, for, apart from what he had learnt in his own campaigning he seemed singularly ignorant of the development of the military situation. Particularly, his ignorance of conditions on the Western front was supreme. He was full to the brim with the most extraordinary fables about the British. He solemnly assured me, for example—on the faith of a friend of his who had seen them—that Japanese were fighting with the English in France, dressed as Highlanders—his friend had heard these Asiatic Scotsmen talking Japanese, he declared. I thought of the Gaelic-speaking battalions of the Camerons and could hardly suppress a smile.

Young von Boden was superbly contemptuous of the officers of the obscure and much reduced infantry battalion doing garrison duty at Goch, the frontier station we had just left, where—as he was careful to explain to me—he had spent four days of unrelieved boredom, waiting for me.

"Of course, in war time we are a united army and all that," he observed unsophistically, "but none of these fellows at Goch was a fit companion for a dashing cavalry officer. They were a dull lot. I wouldn't go near the Casino. I met some of them at the hotel one evening. That was enough for me. Why, only one of them knew anything at all about Berlin, and that was the lame fellow. Now, there is one thing we learn in the cavalry. . . ."

But I had ceased to listen. In his irresponsible chatter the boy used a word that struck a harsh note which went jarring through my brain. He had mentioned "the lame fellow," using a German word "der Stelze." In a flash I saw before me again that scene in the squalid bedroom in the Vos in't Tuintje—the candle guttering in the draught, the livid corpse on the floor and that sinister woman crying out: "Der Stelze has power, he has authority, he can make and unmake men!"

The mind has unaccountable lapses. The phrase had slipped out of my German vocabulary. I had not even recognized it until the boy had rapped it out in a context with which I was familiar and then it had come back. With it, it brought that tableau in the dimly lit room, but also another—a picture of a vast and massive man, swarthy and sinister, with a clubfoot, limping heavily after Karl, the waiter, on the platform at Rotterdam.

That, then, was why the young lieutenant had glanced down at my feet at the station at Goch, The messenger he had come to meet, the bearer of the document, the man of power and authority, was clubfooted, and I was he!

But seeing I was free of any physical deformity, to say nothing of the fact that I in no way resembled the clubfooted man I had seen on the platform at Rotterdam, why had the young lieutenant accepted me so readily? I hazarded the reason to be that he had orders to meet a person who had not been further designated to him except that he would arrive by a certain train. The Major at the station would be responsible for establishing my bona fides. Once that officer had turned me over to the emissary, the latter's sole responsibility consisted in conducting me to the unknown goal to which the special train was rapidly bearing us. Such are the marvels of discipline!

My companion was, indeed, the model of discretion in everything touching myself and my business. Curiosity about your neighhour's affairs is a cardinal German failing, yet the Count manifested not the slightest desire to learn anything about me or my mission to Berlin. You may be sure that I, for my part, did nothing to enlighten him. It was not, indeed, in my power to do so. Yet the young man's reserve was so marked that I was convinced he had his orders to avoid the topic.

As the train rushed through Westphalia, through busy stations with glimpses of sidings full of trucks loaded to the brim, past towns whose very outlines were blurred by the mirk of smoke from a hundred factory chimneys, my thoughts were busy with that swarthy cripple. I had broken away from him with one portion of a highly prized document, yet he had made no attempt to have me arrested at the frontier. Clearly, then, he must still look upon me as an ally and must therefore be yet in ignorance of the identity of the dead man lying in my chamber at the Hotel Sixt. The friendly guide had told me that the party "combing out" the station at Rotterdam for me did not appear to know what I looked like.

Was it possible, then, that Clubfoot did not know Semlin by sight?

The fact that Semlin had only recently crossed the Atlantic seemed to confirm this supposition.

Then the document. Semlin had half. Who had the other half? Surely Clubfoot. . . . Clubfoot who was to have called at the hotel that morning to receive what I had brought from England. Perhaps, after all, my random declaration to the hotel-keeper had not been so far wrong; Clubfoot wanted to take the whole document to Berlin and reap all the laurels at the cost of half the danger and labour. That would explain his present silence. He suspected Semlin of treachery, not to the common cause, but to him!

It looked as if I might have a free run until Clubfoot could reach Berlin. That, unless he also took a special, could not be until the next evening at earliest. But, more redoubtable than a meeting with the man of power and authority, hung over me, an ever-present nightmare, the interview which I felt awaited me at the end of my present journey . . . the interview at which I must render an account of my mission.

Evening was falling as we ran through the inhospitable region of sand and water and pine that engirdles Berlin. We glided at diminished speed through the trim suburbs, skirted the city, on whose tall buildings the electric sky-signs were already beginning to twinkle, crashed heavily over a vast network of metals at some great terminus, then tore off again into the gathering darkness. In a little, we slowed down again. We were running through wooded country. From the darkness ahead a lantern waved at us and the train stopped with a jerk at a little wayside station, a tiny box of an affair. A tall, solid figure, wearing a spiked helmet and grey military great-coat, stood in solitary grandeur in the centre of the little platform, the wavering rays of a flickering gas lamp reflected in his brilliantly polished top-boots.

"Here we are at last!" said my companion.

I stepped out to meet my fate.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

The young lieutenant was rigid at the salute before the figure on the platform.

I heard the end of a sentence as I alighted ". . . the gentleman I was to meet, Excellency!"

The other looked at me. He was a big man with a crimson face. He made no attempt at greeting, but said in a hoarse voice: "Have the goodness to come with me. The orderlies will attend to your things." And, with clinking spurs, he strode out through some big kind of anteroom, swathed in wrappings, into a yard beyond, where a big limousine was throbbing gently.

He stood aside to let me get in, then mounted himself, followed, rather to my surprise, by the young Count, whose responsibility for myself had ended, I imagined, on "delivering the goods." My surprise was of short duration, for once in the car the young Uhlan dropped all the formality he had displayed on the platform and addressed the elder officer as "papa." This, then, was old General von Boden, of whom the Major had spoken, Aide-de-Camp to the Kaiser and formerly tutor to the Crown Prince.

Father and son chatted in a desultory fashion across the car, and I took the opportunity of studying the old gentleman. His face was of the most prodigious purple hue, and so highly polished that it continually caught the reflection of the small electric lamp in the roof. Huge gold spectacles with glasses so thick that they distorted his eyes, straddled a great beak-like nose. He had doffed his helmet and was mopping his brow, and I saw a high perfectly bald dome-like head, brilliantly polished and almost as red as his face. He was clean shaven and by no means young, for the flesh hung in bags about his face. Long years of the habit of command had left their mark in an imperiousness of manner which might easily yield to ruthlessness I judged.

"I thought I should have had orders before I left the Villa," the General said to his son, "then you could have gone straight there. I suppose he means to see him here: that is why he wanted him brought to the Villa. But he's always the same: he never can make up his mind." And he grunted.

"Perhaps there will be something waiting at home," he added in his hoarse barrack-yard voice.

We drove through a white gate into a little drive which brought us up in front of a long, low villa. Neither father nor son had opened their lips to me during the drive from the station and I had not ventured to put a question to either of them, but I knew we were in Potsdam. The little station in the woods was Wild-Park, I suspected, the private station used by the Emperor on his frequent journeys and situated in the grounds of the New Palace. All the officials of the Prussian Court have villas at Potsdam, though why I had been brought there in connection with an affair that must surely rather interest the Wilhelm-Strasse or the Police Presidency was more than I could fathom.

There was a frightful scene in the hall. Without any warning the General turned on the orderly who had opened the door and screamed abuse at him. "Camel! Ox! Sheep's-head!" he roared, his face and shining pate deepening their vermilion hue. "Do I give orders that they shall be forgotten? What do you mean? You ass. . . ." He put his white-gloved hands on the man's shoulders and shook him until the fellow's teeth must have rattled in his head. The orderly, white to the lips, hung limp in the old man's grasp, muttering apologies: "Ach! Exzellenz! Exzellenz will excuse me. . . ."

It was a revolting spectacle, but it did not make the least impression on the son, who, putting down his cap and great-coat and unhooking his sword, led me into a kind of study. "These orderlies are such thickheads!" he said.

"Rudi! Rudi!" a hoarse, strident voice screamed from the hall. The lieutenant ran out.

"You've got to take the fellow to Berlin to-night. The message was here all the time—that numskull Heinrich forgot it. And we've got to keep the fellow here till then! An outrage, having the house used as a barrack for a rascally detective!" Thus much I heard, as the door had been left open. Then it closed and I heard no more.

As I had heard this much, there was a certain irony in the invitation to dinner subsequently conveyed to me by the young Uhlan. There was nothing for it but to accept. I knew I was caught deep in the meshes of Prussian discipline, every one had his orders and blindly carried them out, from the garrulous Major on the frontier to this preposterous Exzellenz, this Imperial aide-de-camp of Potsdam. I was already a tiny cog in a great machine. I should have to revolve or be crushed.

His Excellency left me in no doubt on this point. When I was ushered into his study, after a much-needed wash and a shave, he received me standing and said point-blank: "Your orders are to stay here until ten o'clock to-night, when you will be taken to Berlin by Lieutenant Count von Boden. I don't know you, I don't know your business, but I have received certain orders concerning you which I intend to carry out. For that reason you will dine with us here. After you have seen the person to whom you are to be taken to-night, Lieutenant Count von Boden will accompany you to the railway station at Spandau, where a special train will be in readiness in which he will conduct you back to the frontier. I wish you clearly to understand that the Lieutenant is responsible for seeing these orders carried out and will use all means to that end. Have I made myself clear?"

The old man's manner was indescribably threatening. "This is the machine we are out to smash," I had said to myself when I saw him savaging his servant in the hall and I repeated the phrase to myself now. But to the General I said: "Perfectly, Your Excellency!"

"Then let us go to dinner," said the General.

It was a nightmare meal. A faded and shrunken female, to whom I was not introduced—some kind of relative who kept house for the General, I supposed—was the only other person present. She never opened her lips save, with eyes glazed with terror, to give some whispered instruction to the orderly anent the General's food or wine. We dined in a depressing room with dark brown wallpaper decorated with dusty stags' antlers, an enormous green-tiled stove dominating everything. The General and his son ate solidly through the courses while the lady pecked furtively at her plate. As for myself I could not eat for sheer fright. Every nerve in my body was vibrating at the thought of the evening before me. If I could not avoid the interview, I was resolutely determined to give Master von Boden the slip rather than return to the frontier empty-handed. I had not braved all these perils to be packed off home without, at least, making an attempt to find Francis. Besides, I meant if I could to get the other half of that document.

There was some quite excellent Rhine wine, and I drank plenty of it. So did the General, with the result that, when the veins starting purple from his temples proclaimed that he had eaten to repletion, his temper seemed to have improved. He unbent sufficiently to present me with quite the worst cigar I have ever smoked.

I smoked it in silence whilst father and son talked shop. The female had faded away. Both men, I found to my surprise, were furious and bitter opponents of Hindenburg, as I have since learnt most of the old school of the Prussian Army are. They spoke little of England: their thoughts seemed to be centred on Russia as the arch-enemy. They pinned their faith on Falkenhayn and Mackensen. They had no words strong enough in their denunciation of Hindenburg, whom they always referred to as "the Drunkard" . . . "der Säufer." Nor were they sparing of criticism of what they called the Kaiser's "weakness" in letting him rise to power.

The humming of a car outside broke up our gathering. Remembering that I was but a humble servant before this great military luminary, I thanked the General with due servility for his hospitality. Then the Count and I went out to the car and presently drove forth into the night.

We entered Berlin from the west, as it seemed to me, but then struck off in a southerly direction and were soon in the commercial quarter of the city, all but deserted at that hour, save for the trams. Then I caught a glimpse of lamps reflected in water, and the next moment the car had stopped on a bridge over a canal or river. My companion sprang out and hurried me to a small gate in an iron railing enclosing a vast edifice looming black in the night, while the car moved off into the darkness.

The gate was open. Half a dozen yards from it was a small, slender tower with a pointed roof jutting out from the corner of the building. In the tower was a door which yielded easily to my companion's vigorous push as a clock somewhere within the building beat a double stroke—half-past ten.

The door led into a little vestibule brilliantly lit with electric light. There a man was waiting, a fine, upstanding bearded fellow in a kind of green hunting costume.

"So, Payer!" said the young Uhlan. "Here is the gentleman. I shall be at the west entrance afterwards. You will bring him down yourself to the car."

"Jawohl, Herr Graf!" answered the man in green, and the lieutenant vanished through the door into the night.

A terrifying, an incredible suspicion that had overwhelmed me directly I stepped out of the car now came surging through my brain. That vast, black edifice, that slender tower at the corner—did I not know them?

Mechanically, I followed the man in green. My suspicions deepened with every step. In a little, they became certainty. Up a shallow and winding stair, along a long and broad corridor, hung with rich tapestries, the polished parquet glistening faintly in the dim light, through splendid suites of gilded apartments with old pictures and splendid furniture . . . here a lackey with powdered hair yawning on a landing, there a sentry in field-grey immobile before a door{...|4}} I was in the Berlin Schloss.

The Castle seemed to sleep. A hushed silence lay over all. Everywhere lights were dim, staircases wound down into emptiness, corridors stretched away into dusky solitude. Now and then an attendant in evening dress tiptoed past us or an officer vanished round a corner, noiselessly save for a faint clink of spurs.

Thus we traversed, as it seemed to me, miles of silence and of twilight, and all the time my blood hammered at my temples and my throat grew dry as I thought of the ordeal that stood before me. To whom was I thus bidden, secretly, in the night?

We were in a broad and pleasant passage now, panelled in cheerful light brown oak with red hangings. After the desolation of the State apartments, this comfortable corridor had at least the appearance of leading to the habitation of man. A giant trooper in field-grey with a curious silver gorget suspended round his neck by a chain paced up and down the passage, his jackboots making no sound upon the soft, thick carpet with which the floor was covered.

The man in green stopped at the door. Holding up a warning hand to me, he bent his head and listened. There was a moment of absolute silence. Not a sound was to be heard throughout the whole Castle. Then the man in green knocked softly and was admitted, leaving me outside.

A moment later, the door swung open again. A tall, elegant man with grey hair and that indefinite air of good breeding that you find in every man who has spent a life at court, came out hurriedly. He looked pale and harassed.

On seeing me, he stopped short.

"Dr. Grundt? Where is Dr. Grundt?" he asked and his eyes dropped to my feet. He started and raised them to my face.

The trooper had drifted out of earshot. I could see him, immobile as a statue, standing at the end of the corridor. Except for him and us, the passage was deserted.

Again the elderly man spoke and his voice betrayed his anxiety.

"Who are you?" he asked almost in a whisper. "What have you done with Grundt? Why has he not come?"

Boldly I took the plunge.

"I am Semlin," I said.

"Semlin," echoed the other, "—ah yes! the Embassy in Washington wrote about you—but Grundt was to have come. . . ."

"Listen," I said, "Grundt could not come. We had to separate and he sent me on ahead. . . ."

"But . . . but . . ."—the man was stammering now in his anxiety—". . . you succeeded?"

I nodded.

He heaved a sigh of relief.

"It will be awkward, very awkward, this change in the arrangements," he said. "You will have to explain everything to him, everything. Wait there an instant."

He darted back into the room.

Once more I stood and waited in that silent place, so restful and so still that one felt oneself in a world far removed from the angry strife of nations. And I wondered if my interview—the meeting I had so much dreaded—was at an end.

"Pst, Pst!" The elderly man stood at the open door.

He led me through a room, a cosy place, smelling pleasantly of leather furniture, to a door. He opened it, revealing across a narrow threshold another door. On this he knocked.

"Herein!" cried a voice—a harsh, metallic voice.

My companion turned the handle and, opening the door, thrust me into the room. The door closed behind me.

I found myself facing the Emperor.

CHAPTER IX
I ENCOUNTER AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE WHO LEADS ME TO A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE

HE stood in the centre of the room, facing the door, his legs, straddled apart, planted firmly on the ground, one hand behind his back, the other, withered and useless like the rest of the arm, thrust into the side pocket of his tunic. He wore a perfectly plain undress uniform of field-grey, and the unusual simplicity of his dress, coupled with the fact that he was bare-headed, rendered him so unlike his conventional portraits in the full panoply of war that I doubt if I should have recognized him—paradoxical as it may seem—but for the havoc depicted in every lineament of those once so familiar features.

Only one man in the world to-day could look like that. Only one man in the world to-day could show, by the ravage in his face, the appalling weight of responsibility slowly crushing one of the most vigorous and resilient personalities in Europe. His figure, erstwhile erect and well-knit, seemed to have shrunk, and his withered arm, unnaturally looped away into his pocket, assumed a prominence that lent something sinister to that forbidding grey and harassed face.

His head was sunk forward on his breast. His face, always intensely sallow, almost Italian in its olive tint, was livid. All its alertness was gone; the features seemed to have collapsed, and the flesh hung flabbily, bulging in deep pouches under the eyes and in loose folds at the corners of the mouth. His head was grizzled an iron-grey but the hair at the temples was white as driven snow. Only his eyes were unchanged. They were the same grey, steely eyes, restless, shifting, unreliable, mirrors of the man's impulsive, wayward and fickle mind.

He lowered at me. His brow was furrowed and his eyes flashed malice. In the brief instant in which I gazed at him I thought of a phrase a friend had used after seeing the Kaiser in one of his angry moods—"His icy, black look."

I was so taken aback at finding myself in the Emperor's presence that I forgot my part and remained staring in stupefaction at the apparition. The other was seemingly too busy with his thoughts to notice my forgetfulness, for he spoke at once, imperiously, in the harsh staccato of a command.

"What is this I hear?" he said. "Why has not Grundt come? What are you doing here?"

By this time I had elaborated the fable I had begun to tell in the corridor without. I had it ready now: it was thin, but it must suffice.

"If your Majesty will allow me, I will explain," I said. The Emperor was rocking himself to and fro, in nervous irritability, on his feet. His eyes were never steady for an instant: now they searched my face, now they fell to the floor, now they scanned the ceiling.

"Dr. Grundt and I succeeded in our quest, dangerous though it was. As your Majesty is aware, the . . . the . . . the object had been divided. . . ."

"Yes, yes, I know! Go on!" the other said, pausing for a moment in his rocking.

"I was to have left England first with my portion. I could not get away. Everyone is searched for letters and papers at Tilbury. I devised a scheme and we tested it, but it failed."

"How? It failed?" the other cried.

"With no detriment to the success of our mission, Your Majesty."

"Explain! What was your stratagem?"

"I cut a piece of the lining from a hand-bag and in this I wrapped a perfectly harmless letter addressed to an English shipping agent in Rotterdam. I then pasted the fragment of the lining back in its place in the bottom of the bag. Grundt gave the bag to one of our number as an experiment to see if it would elude the vigilance of the English police."

A light of interest was growing in the Emperor's manner, banishing his ill-temper. Anything novel always appealed to him.

"Well?" he said.

"The ruse was detected, the letter was found and our man was fined twenty pounds at the police court. It was then that Dr. Grundt decided to send me. . . ."

"You've got it with you?" the other exclaimed eagerly.

"No, Your Majesty," I said. "I had no means of bringing it away. Dr. Grundt, on the other hand . . ." And I doubled up my leg and touched my foot.

The Emperor stared at me and the furrow reappeared between his eyes. Then a smile broke out on his face, a warm, attractive smile, like sunshine after rain, and he burst into a regular guffaw. I knew His Majesty's weakness for jokes at the expense of the physical deformities of others, but I had scarcely dared to hope that my subtle reference to Grundt's clubfoot as a hiding-place for compromising papers would have had such a success. For the Kaiser fairly revelled in the idea and laughed loud and long, his sides fairly shaking.

"Ach, der Stelze! Excellent! Excellent!" he cried. "Plessen, come and hear how we've diddled the Englander again!"

We were in a long room, lofty, with a great window at the far end, where the room seemed to run to the right and left in the shape of a T. From the big writing-desk with its litter of photographs in heavy silver frames, the little bronze busts of the Empress, the water-colour sea-scapes and other little touches, I judged this to be the Emperor's study.

At the monarch's call, a white-haired officer emerged from the further end of the room, that part which was hidden from my view.

The Kaiser put his hand on his shoulder.

"A great joke, Plessen!" he said, chuckling. Then, to me:

"Tell it again!"

I had warmed to my work now. I gave as drily humorous an account as I could of Dr. Grundt, fat and massive and podgy, hobbling on board the steamer at Tilbury, under the noses of the British police, with the document stowed away in his boot.

The Kaiser punctuated my story with gusty guffaws, and emphasized the fun of the dénouement by poking the General in the ribs.

Plessen laughed very heartily, as indeed he was expected to. Then he said suavely:

"But has the stratagem succeeded, Your Majesty?"

The monarch knit his brow and looked at me.

"Well, young man, did it work?"

". . . Because," Plessen went on, "if so, Grundt must be in Holland. In that case, why is he not here?"

My heart sank within me. Above all things, I knew I must keep my countenance. The least sign of embarrassment and I was lost. Yet I felt the blood fleeing from my face and I was glad I stood in the shadow.

A knock came to the door. The elderly chamberlain who had met me outside appeared.

"Your Majesty will excuse me . . . General Baron von Fischer is there to report. . . ."

"Presently, presently," was the answer in an irritable tone. "I am engaged just now. . . ."

The old courtier paused irresolutely for a moment.

"Well, what is it; what is it?"

"Despatches from General Head-quarters, Your Majesty! The General asked me to say the matter was urgent!"

The Kaiser wakened in an instant.

"Bring him in!" Then, to Plessen, he added in a voice from which all mirth had vanished, in accents of gloom:

"At this hour, Plessen? If things have again gone wrong on the Somme!"

An officer came in quickly, rigid with a frozen face, helmet on head, portfolio under his arm. The Kaiser walked the length of the room to his desk and sat down. Plessen and the other followed him. I remained where I was. They seemed to have forgotten all about me.

A murmur rose from the desk. The officer was delivering his report. Then the Kaiser seemed to question him, for I heard his hard, metallic voice:

"Contalmaison . . . Trones Wood . . . heavy losses . . . forced back . . . terrific artillery fire . . ." were words that reached me. The Kaiser's voice rose on a high note of irritability. Suddenly he dashed the papers on the desk from him and exclaimed:

"It is outrageous! I'll break him! Not another man shall he have if I must go myself and teach his men their duty!"

Plessen hurriedly left the desk and came to me. His old face was white and his hands were shaking.

"Get out of here!" he said to me in a fierce undertone. "Wait outside and I will see you later!" Still, from the desk, resounded that harsh, strident voice, running on in an ascending scale, pouring forth a foaming torrent of menace.

I had often heard of the sudden paroxysms of fury from which the Kaiser was said to suffer of recent years, but never in my wildest daydreams did I ever imagine I should assist at one.

Gladly enough did I exchange the highly charged electrical atmosphere of the Imperial study for the repose of the quiet corridor. Its perfect tranquillity was as balm to my quivering nerves. Of the man in green nothing was to be seen. Only the trooper continued his silent vigil.

Again I acted on impulse. I was wearing my grass-green raincoat, my hat I carried in my hand. I might therefore easily pass for one just leaving the Castle. Without hesitation, I turned to the left, the way I had come, and plunged once more into the labyrinth of galleries and corridors and landings by which the man in green had led me. I very soon lost myself, so I decided to descend the next staircase I should come to. I followed this plan and went down a broad flight of stairs, at the foot of which I found a night porter, clad in a vast overcoat bedizened with eagles and seated on a stool, reading a newspaper.

He stopped me and asked me my business. I told him I was coming from the Emperor's private apartments, whereupon he demanded my pass. I showed him my badge which entirely satisfied him, though he muttered something about "new faces" and not having seen me before. I asked him for the way out. He said that at the end of the gallery I should come to the west entrance. I felt I had had a narrow squeak of running into my mentor outside. I told the man I wanted the other entrance . . . I had my car there.

"You mean the south entrance?" he asked, and proceeded to give me directions which brought me, without further difficulty, out upon the open space in front of the great equestrian statue of the Emperor William I.

It was a clear, starry night and I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw the Schloss-Platz glittering in the cold light of the arc lamps. So pressing had been the danger threatening me that the atmosphere of the Castle seemed stifling in comparison with the keen night air. A new confidence filled my veins as I strode along, though the perils to which I was advancing were not a whit less than those I had just escaped. For I had burnt my boats. My disappearance from the Castle must surely arouse suspicion and it was only a matter of hours for the hue and cry to be raised after me. At best it might be delayed until Clubfoot presented himself at the Castle.

I could not remain in Berlin, that was clear. My American passport was not in order, and if I were to fall back upon my silver badge, I should instantly come into contact with the police with all kinds of unwelcome consequences. No, I must get out of Berlin at all costs. Well away from the capital, I might possibly utilize my silver badge or by its help procure identity papers that would give me a status of some kind.

But Francis? Baffled as I was by that obscure jingle of German, something seemed to tell me that it was a message from my brother. It was dated from Berlin, and I felt that the solution of the riddle, if riddle it were, must be found here.

I had reached Unter den Linden. I entered a café and ordered a glass of beer. The place was a blaze of light and dense with a blue cloud of tobacco smoke. A noisy band was crashing out popular tunes and there was a loud buzz of conversation rising from every table. It was all very cheerful and the noise and the bustle did me good after the strain of the night.

I drew from my pocket the slip of paper I had had from Dicky and fell to scanning it again. I had not been twelve hours in Germany, but already I was conscious that, for anyone acting a part, let anything go wrong with his identity papers and he could never leave the country. If he were lucky, he might lie doggo; but there was no other course.

Supposing, then, that this had happened to Francis (as, indeed, Red Tabs had hinted to me was the case) what course would he adopt? He would try and smuggle out a message announcing his plight. Yes, I think that is what I myself would do in similar circumstances.

Well, I would accept this as a message from Francis. Now to study it once more.

O Eichenholz! O Eichenholz!
Wie leer sind deine Blätter.
Wie Achiles in dem Zelte.
Wo zweie sich zanken
Erfreut sich der Dritte.

The message fell into three parts, each consisting of a phrase. The first phrase might certainly be a warning that Francis had failed in his mission.

"O Okewood! how empty are thy leaves!"

What, then, of the other two phrases?

They were short and simple. Whatever message they conveyed, it could not be a lengthy one. Nor was it likely that they contained a report of Francis' mission to Germany, whatever it had been. Indeed, it was not conceivable that my brother would send any such report to a Dutchman like van Urutius, a friendly enough fellow, yet a mere acquaintance and an alien at that.

The message carried in those two phrases must be, I felt sure, a personal one, relating to my brother's welfare. What would he desire to say? That he was arrested, that he was going to be shot? Possibly, but more probably his idea in sending out word was to explain his silence and also to obtain assistance.

My eye recurred continually to the final phrase: "When two people fall out, the third party rejoices."

Might not these numerals refer to the number of a street? Might not in these two phrases be hidden an address at which one might find Francis, or at the worst, hear news of him?

I sent for the Berlin Directory. I turned up the streets section and eagerly ran my eye down the columns of the "A's." I did not find what I was looking for, and that was an "Achilles-Strasse," either with two "l's" or with one.

Then I tried "Eichenholz." There was an "Eichenbaum-Allee" in the Berlin suburb called West-End, but that was all. I tried for a "Blätter" or a "Blatt-Strasse" with an equally negative result.

It was discouraging work, but I went back to the paper again. The only other word likely to serve as a street remaining in the puzzle was "Zelt."

"Wie Achiles in dem Zelte."

Wearily I opened the directory at the "Z's."

There, staring me in the face, I found the street called "In den Zelten."

I had struck the trail at last.

In den Zelten, I discovered, on referring to the directory again, derived its name "In the Tents," from the fact that in earlier days a number of open-air beer-gardens and booths had occupied the site which faces the northern side of the Tiergarten. It was not a long street. The directory showed but fifty-six houses, several of which, I noticed, were still beer-gardens. It appeared to be a fashionable thoroughfare, for most of the occupants were titled people. No. 3, I was interested to see, was still noted as the Berlin office of The Times.

The last phrase in the message decidedly gave the number. Two must refer to the number of the house: third to the number of the floor, since practically all dwelling-houses in Berlin are divided off into flats.

As for the "Achiles," I gave it up.

I looked at my watch. It was twenty past eleven: too late to begin my search that night. Then I suddenly realized how utterly exhausted I was. I had been two nights out of bed without sleep, for I had sat up on deck crossing over to Holland, and the succession of adventures that had befallen me since I left London had driven all thought of weariness from my mind. But now came the reaction and I felt myself yearning for a hot bath and for a nice comfortable bed. To go to an hotel at that hour of night, without luggage and with an American passport not in order, would be to court disaster. It looked as though I should have to hang about the cafés and night restaurants until morning, investigate the clue of the street called In den Zelten, and then get away from Berlin as fast as ever I could.

But my head was nodding with drowsiness. I must pull myself together. I decided I would have some black coffee, and I raised my eyes to find the waiter. They fell upon the pale face and elegant figure of the one-armed officer I had met at the Casino at Goch . . . the young lieutenant they had called Schmalz.

He had just entered the café and was standing at the door, looking about him. I felt a sudden pang of uneasiness at the sight of him, for I remembered his cross-examination of me at Goch. But I could not escape without paying my bill; besides, he blocked the way.

He settled my doubts and fears by walking straight over to my table.

"Good evening, Herr Doktor," he said in German, with his pleasant smile. "This indeed is an unexpected pleasure! So you are seeing how we poor Germans are amusing ourselves in war-time. You must admit that we do not take our pleasures sadly. You permit me?"

Without waiting for my reply, he sat down at my table and ordered a glass of beer.

"I wish you had appeared sooner," I exclaimed in as friendly a tone as I could muster, "for I am just going. I have had a long and tiring journey and am anxious to go to an hotel."

Directly I had spoken I realized my blunder.

"You have not got an hotel yet?" said Schmalz. "Why, how curious! Nor have I! As you are a stranger in Berlin, you must allow me to appoint myself your guide. Let us go to an hotel together, shall we?"

I wanted to demur, difficult as it was to find any acceptable excuse, but his manner was so friendly, his offer seemed so sincere, that I felt my resolution wavering. He had a winning personality, this frank, handsome boy. And I was so dog-tired!

He perceived my reluctance but also my indecision.

"We'll go to any hotel you like," he said brightly. "But you Americans are spoilt in the matter of luxurious hotels, I know. Still, I tell you we have not much to learn in that line in Berlin. Suppose we go to the Esplanade. It's a fine hotel . . . the Hamburg American line run it, you know. I am very well known there, quite the Hauskind . . . my uncle was a captain of one of their liners. They will make us very comfortable: they always give me a little suite, bedroom, sitting-room and bath, very reasonably: I'll make them do the same for you."

If I had been less weary—I have often thought since—I would have got up and fled from the café rather than have countenanced any such mad proposal. But I was drunk with sleep heaviness and I snatched at this chance of getting a good night's rest, for I felt that, under the ægis of this young officer, I could count on any passport difficulties at the hotel being postponed until morning. By that time, I meant to be out of the hotel and away on my investigations.

So I accepted Schmalz's suggestion.

"By the way," I said, "I have no luggage. My bag got mislaid somehow at the station and I don't really feel up to going after it to-night."

"I will fix you up," the other replied promptly, "and with pyjamas in the American fashion. By the by," he added, lowering his voice, "I thought it better to speak German. English is not heard gladly in Berlin just now."

"I quite understand," I said. Then, to change the subject, which I did not like particularly, I added:

"Surely, you have been very quick in coming down from the frontier. Did you come by train?"

"Oh, no!" he answered. "I found that the car in which you drove to the station . . . it belonged to the gentleman who came to meet you, you know . . . was being sent back to Berlin by road, so I got the driver to give me a lift."

He said this quite airily, with his usual tone of candour. But for a moment I regretted my decision to go to the Esplanade with him. What if he knew more than he seemed to know?

I dismissed the suspicion from my mind.

"Bah!" I said to myself, "you are getting jumpy. Besides, it is too late to turn back now!"

We had a friendly wrangle as to who should pay for the drinks, and it ended in my paying. Then, after a long wait, we managed to get a cab, an antique-looking "growler" driven by an octogenarian in a coat of many capes, and drove to the Esplanade.

It was a regular palace of a place, with a splendid vestibule with walls and pavement of different-hued marbles, with palm trees over-shadowing a little fountain tinkling in a jade basin, with servants in gaudy liveries. The reception clerk overwhelmed me with the cordiality of his welcome to my companion and "the American gentleman," and after a certain amount of coquettish protestations about the difficulty of providing accommodation, allotted us a double suite on the entresol, consisting of two bedrooms with a common sitting-room and bathroom.

In his immaculate evening dress, he was a Beau Brummell among hotel clerks, that man. The luggage of the American gentleman should be fetched in the morning. The gentleman's papers? There was no hurry: the Herr Leutnant would explain to his friend the forms that had to be filled in: they could be given to the waiter in the morning. Would the gentlemen take anything before retiring? A whisky-soda—ah! whisky was getting scarce. No? Nothing? He had the honour to wish the gentlemen pleasant repose.

We went to the lift in procession, Beau Brummell in front, then a waiter, then ourselves and the gold-braided hall porter bringing up the rear. One or two people were sitting in the lounge, attended by a platoon of waiters. The whole place gave an impression of wealth and luxury altogether out of keeping with British ideas of the stringency of life in Germany under the British blockade. I could not help reflecting to myself mournfully that Germany did not seem to feel the pinch very much.

At the lift the procession bowed itself away and we went up in charge of the liftman, a gorgeous individual who looked like one of the Pope's Swiss Guards. We reached the centresol in an instant. The Lieutenant led the way along the dimly lighted corridor.

"Here is the sitting-room," he said, opening a door. "This is my room, this the bathroom, and this," he flung open the fourth door, "is your room!"

He stood aside to let me pass. The lights in the room were full on. In an arm-chair a big man in an overcoat was sitting.

He had a heavy square face and a clubfoot.

CHAPTER X
A GLASS OF WINE WITH CLUBFOOT

IWALKED boldly into the room. All sense of fear had vanished in a wave of anger that swept over me, anger with myself for letting myself be trapped, anger with my companion for his treachery.

Schmalz stood at my elbow with a smile full of malice on his face.

"There now!" he cried, "you see, you are among friends! Am I not thoughtful to have prepared this little surprise for you? See, I have brought you to the one man you have crossed so many hundreds of miles of ocean to see! Herr Doktor! this is Dr. Semlin. Dr. Semlin: Dr. Grundt."

The other had by now heaved his unwieldy frame from the chair.

"Dr. Semlin?" he said, in a perfectly emotionless voice, une voix blanche, as the French say, "this is an unexpected pleasure. I never thought we should meet in Berlin. I had believed our rendezvous to have been fixed for Rotterdam. Still, better late than never!" And he extended to me a white, fat hand.

"Our friend, the Herr Leutnant," I answered carelessly, "omitted to inform me that he was acquainted with you, as, indeed, he failed to warn me that I should have the pleasure of seeing you here to-night."

"We owe that pleasure," Clubfoot replied with a smile that displayed a glitter of gold in his teeth, "to a purely fortuitous encounter at the Casino at Goch, as, indeed, it would appear, I am similarly indebted to chance for the unlooked-for boon of making your personal acquaintance here this evening."

He bowed to Schmalz as he said this.

"But come," he went on, "if I may make bold to offer you the hospitality of your own room, sit down and try a glass of this excellent Brauneberger. Rhine wine must be scarce where you come from. We have much to tell one another, you and I."

Again he bared his golden teeth in a smile.

"By all means," I said. "But I fear we keep our young friend from his bed. Doubtless, you have no secrets from him, but you will agree, Herr Doktor, that our conversation should best be tête-à-tête."

Schmalz, dear friend," Clubfoot exclaimed with a sigh of regret, "much as I should like . . . I am indeed truly sorry that we should be deprived of your company, but I cannot contest the profound accuracy of our friend's remark. If you could go to the sitting-room for a few minutes. . . ."

The young lieutenant flushed angrily.

"If you prefer my room to my company . . . by all means," he retorted gruffly, "but I think, in the circumstances, that I shall go to bed."

And he turned on his heel and walked out of the room, shutting the door with rather more force than was necessary, I thought.

Clubfoot sighed.

"Ach! youth! youth!" he cried, "the same impetuous youth that is at this very moment hacking out for Germany a world empire amidst the nations in arms. A wonderful race, a race of giants, our German youth, Herr Doktor . . . the mainspring of our great German machine—as they find who resist it. A glass of wine!"

The man's speech and manner boded ill for me, I felt. I would have infinitely preferred violent language and open threats to the subtle menace that lay concealed beneath all this suavity.

"You smoke?" queried Clubfoot. "No!"—he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, "you shall have a cigar—not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha! I repeat, by a member of the English Privy Council, to me, the Boche, the barbarian, the Hun! No hole and corner work for the old doctor. Der Stelze may be lame, Clubfoot may be past his work, but when he travels en mission, he travels en prince, the man of wealth and substance. There is none too high to do him honour, to listen to his views on poor, misguided Germany, the land of thinkers sold into bondage to the militarists! Bah! the fools!"

He snarled venomously. This man was beginning to interest me. His rapid change of moods was fascinating, now the kindly philosopher, now the Teuton braggart, now the Hun incorporate. As he limped across the room to fetch his cigar case from the mantelpiece, I studied him.

He was a vast man, not so much by reason of his height, which was below the medium, but his bulk, which was enormous. The span of his shoulders was immense, and, though a heavy paunch and a white flabbiness of face spoke of a gross, sedentary life, he was obviously a man of quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance . . . his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath the shaggy brows, that hinted at accesses of ape-like fury, uncontrollable and ferocious.

He gave me his cigar which, as he had said, was a good one, and, after a preliminary sip of his wine, began to speak.

"I am a plain man, Herr Doktor," he said, "and I like plain speaking. That is why I am going to speak quite plainly to you. When it became apparent to that person whom it is not necessary to name further greatly desired a certain letter to be recovered, I naturally expected that I, who am a past member in affairs of this order, notably, on behalf of the person concerned, would have been entrusted with the mission. It was I who discovered the author of the theft in an English internment camp; it was I who prevailed upon him to acquiesce in our terms; it was I who finally located the hiding place of the document . . . all this, mark you, without setting foot in England."

My thoughts flew back again to the three slips of paper in their canvas cover, the divided crest, the big, sprawling, upright handwriting. I should have known that hand. I had seen it often enough on certain photographs which were accorded the place of honour in the drawing room at Consistorial-Rat von Mayburg's at Bonn.

"I therefore had the prior claim," Clubfoot continued, "to be entrusted with the important task of fetching the document and of handing it back to the writer. But the gentleman was in a hurry; the gentleman always is; he could not wait for that old slowcoach of a Clubfoot to mature his plans for getting into England, securing the document, and getting out again.

"So Bernstorff is called into consultation, the head of an embassy that has made the German secret service the laughing-stock of the world, an ambassador that has his private papers filched by a common sneak-thief in the underground railway and is fool enough to send home the most valuable documents by a jackass of a military attaché who lets the whole lot be taken from him by a dunderheaded British customs officer at Falmouth! This was the man who was to replace me!

"Bernstorff is accordingly bidden to despatch one of his trusty servants to England, with all suitable precautions, to do my work. You are chosen, and I will pay you the compliment of saying that you fulfilled your mission in a manner that is singularly out of keeping with the usual method of procedure of that gentleman's emissaries.

"But, my dear Doktor . . . pray fill your glass. That cigar is good, is it not? I thought you would appreciate a good cigar. . . . As I was saying, you were handicapped from the first. When you reach the place indicated to you in your instructions, you find only half the document. The wily thief has sliced it in two so as to make sure of his money before parting with the goods. They didn't know, of course, that Clubfoot, the old slowcoach, who is past his work, was aware of this already, and had made his plans accordingly. But, in the end, they had to send for me. 'The good Clubfoot,' 'old chap,' 'sly old fox,' and all the rest of it—would run across to England and secure the other half, while Count Bernstorff's smart young man from America would wait in Rotterdam until Herr Dr. Grundt arrived and handed him the other portion.

"But Count Bernstorff's young man does nothing of the kind. He is one too many for the old fox. He does not wait for him. He runs away, after displaying unusual determination in dealing with a prying Englander—whose fate should be a lesson to all who interfere in other people's business—and goes to Germany, leaving poor old Clubfoot in the lurch. You must admit, Herr Doktor, that I have been hardly used—by yourself as well as by another person?"

My throat was dry with anxiety. What did the man mean by his veiled allusions to "all who interfere in other people's business?"

I cleared my throat to speak.

Clubfoot raised a great hand in deprecation.

"No explanation, Herr Doktor, I beg" (his tone was perfectly unconcerned and friendly), "let me have my say. When I found out that you had left Rotterdam—by the way, you must let me congratulate you on the remarkable fertility of resource you displayed in quitting Frau Schratt's hospitable house—when I found you were gone, I sat down and thought things out.

"I reflected that an astute American like yourself (believe me, you are very astute) would probably be accustomed to look at everything from the business standpoint. 'I will also consider the matter from the business standpoint,' I said to myself, and I decided that, in your place, I too would not be content to accept, as sole payment for the danger of my mission, the scarcely generous compensation that Count Bernstorff allots to his collaborators. No, I should wish to secure a little renown for myself, or, were that not possible, then some monetary gain proportionate with the risks I had run. You see, I have been at pains to put myself wholly in your place. I hope I have not said anything tactless. If so, I can at least acquit myself of any desire to offend."

"On the contrary, Herr Doktor," I replied, "you are the model of tact and diplomacy."

His eyes narrowed a little at this. I thought he wouldn't like that word "diplomacy."

"Another glass of wine? You may safely venture; there is not a headache in a bottle of it. Well, Herr Doktor, since you have followed me so patiently thus far, I will go further. I told you, when I first saw you this evening, that I was delighted at our meeting. That was no mere banality, but the sober truth. For, you see, I am the very person with whom, in the circumstances, you would wish to get in touch. Deprived of the honour, rightly belonging to me, of undertaking this mission single-handed and of fulfilling it alone, I find that you can enable me to carry out the mission to a successful conclusion, whilst I, for my part, am able and willing to recompense your services as they deserve and not according to Bernstorff's starvation scale.

"To make a long story short, Herr Doktor . . . how much?"

He brought his remarks to this abrupt anticlimax so suddenly that I was taken aback. The man was watching me intently for all his apparent nonchalance, and I felt more than ever the necessity for being on my guard. If I could only fathom how much he knew. Of two things I felt fairly sure: the fellow believed me to be Semlin and was under the impression that I still retained my portion of the document. I should have to gain time. The bargain he proposed over my half of the letter might give me an opportunity of doing that. Moreover, I must find out whether he really had the other half of the document, and in that case, where he kept it.

He broke the silence.

"Well, Herr Doktor," he said, "do you want me to start the bidding? You needn't be afraid. I am generous."

I leant forward earnestly in my chair.

"You have spoken with admirable frankness, Herr Doktor," I said, "and I will be equally plain, but I will be brief. In the first place, I wish to know that you are the man you profess to be: so far, you must remember, I have only the assurance of our excitable young friend."

"Your caution is most praiseworthy," said the other, "but I should imagine I carry my name written on my boot." And he lifted his hideous and deformed foot.

"That is scarcely sufficient guarantee," I answered, "in a matter of this importance. A detail like that could easily be counterfeited, or otherwise provided for."

"My badge," and the man produced from his waistcoat pocket a silver star identical with the one I carried on my braces, but bearing only the letter "G" above the inscription "Abt. VII."

"That, even," I retorted, "is not conclusive."

Clubfoot's mind was extraordinarily alert, however gross and heavy his body might be.

He paused for a moment in reflection, his hands crossed upon his great paunch.

"Why not?" he said suddenly, reached out for his cigar-case, beside him on the table, and produced three slips of paper highly glazed and covered with that unforgettable, sprawling hand, a portion of a gilded crest at the top—in short, the missing half of the document I had found in Semlin's bag. Clubfoot held them out fanwise for me to see, but well out of my reach, and he kept a great, spatulate thumb over the top of the first sheet where the name of the addressee should have been.

"I trust you are now convinced, Herr Doktor," he said, with a smile that bared his teeth, and, putting the pieces together, he folded them across, tucked them away in the cigar-case again, and thrust it into his pocket.

I must test the ground further.

"Has it occurred to you, Herr Doktor," I asked, "that we have very little time at our disposal? The person whom we serve must be anxiously waiting. . . ."

Clubfoot laughed and shook his head.

"I want that half-letter badly," he said, "but there's no violent hurry. So I fear you must leave that argument out of your presentation of the case, for it has no commercial value. The person you speak of is not in Berlin."

I had heard something of the Kaiser's sudden appearances and disappearances during the war, but I had not thought they could be so well managed as to be kept from the knowledge of one of his own trusted servants, for such I judged Clubfoot to be. Evidently, he knew nothing of my visit to the Castle that evening, and I was for a moment unpatriotic enough to wish I had kept my half of the letter that I might give it to Clubfoot now to save the coming exposure. "A thousand dollars!" Clubfoot said.

I remained silent.

"Two? Three? Four thousand? Man, you are greedy. Well, I will make it five thousand—twenty thousand marks. . . ."

"Herr Doktor," I said, "I don't want your money. I want to be fair with you. When the . . . the person we know of sends for you, we will go together. You shall tell the large part you have played in this affair. I only want credit for what I have done, nothing more. . . ."

A knock came at the door. The porter entered.

"A telegram for the Herr Doktor," he said, presenting a salver.

Somewhere near by a band was playing dance music . . . one of those rousing, splendidly accented Viennese waltzes. There seemed to be a ball on, for through the open door of the room, I heard, mingled with the strains of the music, the sound of feet and the hum of voices.

Then the door closed, shutting out the outer world again.

"You permit me," said Grundt curtly, as he broke the seal of the telegram. So as not to seem to observe him, I got up and walked across to the window, and leaned against the warm radiator.

"Well?" said a voice from the arm-chair.

"Well?" I echoed.

"I have made you my proposal, Herr Doktor: you have made yours. Yours is quite unacceptable. I have told you with great frankness why it is necessary that I should have your portion of the document and the sum I am prepared to pay for it. I set its value at five thousand dollars. I will pay you the money over in cash, here and now, in good German bank-notes, in exchange for those slips of paper."

The man's suavity had all but vanished: his voice was harsh and stern. His eyes glittered under his shaggy brows as he looked at me. Had I been less agitated, I should have noted this, as a portent of the coming storm, also his great ape's hands picking nervously at the telegram in his lap.

"I have already told you," I said firmly, "that I don't want your money. You know my terms!"

He rose up from his seat and his figure seemed to tower.

"Terms?" he cried in a voice that quivered with suppressed passion, "terms? Understand that I give orders. I accept terms from no man. We waste time here talking. Come, take the money and give me the paper."

I shook my head. My brain was clear, but I felt the crisis was coming. I took a good grip with my hands of the marble slab covering the radiator behind me to give me confidence. The slab yielded: I noted that it was loose.

The man in front of me was shaking with rage.

"Listen!" he said. "I'll give you one more chance. But mark my words well. Do you know what happened to the man that stole that document? The English took him out and shot him on account of what was found in his house when they raided it. Do you know what happened to the interpreter at the internment camp, who was our go-between, who played us false by cutting the document in half? The English shot him too, on account of what was found in letters that came to him openly through the post? And who settled Schulte? And who settled the other man? Who contrived the traps that sent them to their doom? It was I, Grundt, I, the cripple, I, the Clubfoot, that had these traitors despatched as an example to the six thousand of us who serve our Emperor and empire in darkness! You dog, I'll smash you!"

He was gibbering like an angry ape: his frame was shaking with fury: every hair in the tangle on his face and hands seemed to bristle with his Berserker frenzy.

But he kept away from me, and I saw that he was still fighting to preserve his self-control.

I maintained a bold front.

"This may do for your own people," I said contemptuously, "but it doesn't impress me, I'm an American citizen!"

He was calmer now, but his eyes glittered dangerously.

"An American citizen?" he said in an icy tone. Then he fairly hissed at me:

"You fool! Blind, besotted fool! Do you think you can trifle with the might of the German Empire? Ah! I've played a pretty game with you, you dirty English dog! I've watched you squirming and writhing whilst the stupid German told you his pretty little tale and plied you with his wine and his cigars. You're in our power now, you miserable English hound! Do you understand that? Now call on your fleet to come and save you!

"Listen! I'll be frank with you to the last. I've had my suspicions of you from the first, when they telephoned me that you had escaped from the hotel, but I wanted to make sure. Ever since you have been in this room it has been in my power to push that bell there and send you to Spandau, where they rid us of such dirty dogs as you.

"But the game amused me. I liked to see the Herr Englander playing the spy against me, the master of them all. Do you know, you fool, that old Schratt knows English, that she spent years of her harlot's life in London, and that when you allowed her a glimpse of that passport, your own passport, the one you so cleverly burned, she remembered the name? Ah! you didn't know that, did you?

"Shall I tell you what was in that telegram they just brought me? It was from Schratt, our faithful Schratt, who shall have a bangle for this night's work, to say that the corpse at the hotel has a chain round its neck with an identity disc in the name of Semlin. Ha! you didn't know that either, did you?

"And you would bargain and chaffer with me! You would dictate your terms, you scum! You with your head in a noose, a spy that has failed in his mission, a miserable wretch that I can send to his death with a flip of my little finger! You impudent hound! Well, you'll get your deserts this time, Captain Desmond Okewood . . . but I'll have that paper first!"

Roaring "Give it to me!" he rushed at me like some frenzied beast of the jungle. The veins stood out at his temples, his hairy nostrils opened and closed as his breath came faster, his long arms shot out and his great paws clutched at my throat.

But I was waiting for him. As he came at me, I heard his clubfoot stump once on the polished floor, then, from the radiator behind me, I raised high in my arms the heavy marble slab, and with every ounce of strength in my body brought it crashing down on his head.

He fell like a log, the blood oozing sluggishly from his head on to the parquet. I stopped an instant, snatched the cigar-case from the pocket where he had placed it, extracted the document and fled from the room.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.