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Page 31
I said something appropriate about von Steinhardt's invariable kindness.
Inwardly, I noted the explanation of the visiting card in the portfolio
in my pocket.
At the station we found two orderlies, one with my things, the other
with von Boden's luggage and fur _p�lisse_. The platforms were now
deserted save for sentries: all life at this dreary frontier station
seemed to die with the passing of the mail train.
I could not help noticing, after we had left the car and were strolling
up and down the platform waiting for the special, that my companion kept
casting furtive glances at my feet. I looked down at my boots: they
wanted brushing, certainly, but otherwise I could see nothing wrong with
them. They were brown, it is true, and I reflected that the German man
about town has a way of regulating his tastes in footgear by the
calendar, and that brown boots are seldom worn in Germany after
September 1st.
Our special came in, an engine and tender, a brakesman's van, a single
carriage and a guard's van. The stationmaster bid us a most ceremonious
adieu, and the guard, cap in hand, helped me into the train.
It was a Pullman car in which I found myself, with comfortable
arm-chairs and small tables. One of the orderlies was laying the table
for luncheon, and here, presently, the young Count and I ate a meal,
which, save for the inevitable "_Kriegsbrod_," showed few signs of the
stringency of the British blockade. But by this time I had fully
realized that, for some unknown reason, no pains were spared to do me
honour, so probably the fare was something out of the common.
My companion was a bright, amusing fellow and delightfully typical of
his class. He had seen a year's service with the cavalry on the Eastern
front, had been seriously wounded and was now attached to the General
Staff in Berlin in what I judged to be a decorative rather than a useful
capacity, for, apart from what he had learnt in his own campaigning he
seemed singularly ignorant of the development of the military situation.
Particularly, his ignorance of conditions on the Western front was
supreme. He was full to the brim with the most extraordinary fables
about the British. He solemnly assured me, for example--on the faith of
a friend of his who had seen them--that Japanese were fighting with the
English in France, dressed as Highlanders--his friend had heard these
Asiatic Scotsmen talking Japanese, he declared. I thought of the
Gaelic-speaking battalions of the Camerons and could hardly suppress a
smile.
Young von Boden was superbly contemptuous of the officers of the obscure
and much reduced infantry battalion doing garrison duty at Goch, the
frontier station we had just left, where--as he was careful to explain
to me--he had spent four days of unrelieved boredom, waiting for me.
"Of course, in war time we are a united army and all that," he observed
unsophistically, "but none of these fellows at Goch was a fit companion
for a dashing cavalry officer. They were a dull lot. I wouldn't go near
the Casino. I met some of them at the hotel one evening. That was
enough for me. Why, only one of them knew anything at all about Berlin,
and that was the lame fellow. Now, there is one thing we learn in the
cavalry...."
But I had ceased to listen. In his irresponsible chatter the boy used a
word that struck a harsh note which went jarring through my brain. He
had mentioned "the lame fellow," using a German word "der Stelze." In a
flash I saw before me again that scene in the squalid bedroom in the Vos
in't Tuintje--the candle guttering in the draught, the livid corpse on
the floor and that sinister woman crying out: "Der Stelze has power, he
has authority, he can make and unmake men!"
The mind has unaccountable lapses. The phrase had slipped out of my
German vocabulary. I had not even recognized it until the boy had rapped
it out in a context with which I was familiar and then it had come back.
With it, it brought that tableau in the dimly lit room, but also
another--a picture of a vast and massive man, swarthy and sinister, with
a clubfoot, limping heavily after Karl, the waiter, on the platform at
Rotterdam.
That, then, was why the young lieutenant had glanced down at my feet at
the station at Goch, The messenger he had come to meet, the bearer of
the document, the man of power and authority, was clubfooted, and I was
he!
But seeing I was free of any physical deformity, to say nothing of the
fact that I in no way resembled the clubfooted man I had seen on the
platform at Rotterdam, why had the young lieutenant accepted me so
readily? I hazarded the reason to be that he had orders to meet a person
who had not been further designated to him except that he would arrive
by a certain train. The Major at the station would be responsible for
establishing my _bona fides_. Once that officer had turned me over to
the emissary, the latter's sole responsibility consisted in conducting
me to the unknown goal to which the special train was rapidly bearing
us. Such are the marvels of discipline!
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