The Man with the Clubfoot | Page 7

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.