The Man with the Clubfoot | Page 8

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, probably to seek
assistance.
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