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Page 8
"Can I be of any assistance to you? Are you unwell?" I said, at 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 meubl�e_--worn carpet,
discoloured and dingy wallpaper, faded rep curtains and mahogany
bedstead with a vast _�dredon_, 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._
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