The Man with the Clubfoot | Page 7

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 upstairs. That's
all."

"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