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Page 23
"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!"
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