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Page 2
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.
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