The Man with the Clubfoot - Valentine Williams (top 100 books to read TXT) 📗

it was actually this circumstance which afforded me the chance of getting my ticket for Düsseldorf without leaving any clue behind.

A big, bearded Landsturm man with a kind face was at the pigeon-hole.

"I am very late for my train, my friend," I said, "would you get me a third-class single for Düsseldorf?" I handed him a twenty-mark note.

"Right you are," he answered readily.

"There," he said, handing me my ticket and a handful of change, "and lucky you are to be going to the Rhine. I'm from the Rhine myself and now I'm going back to guarding the bridges in Belgium!"

I thanked him and wished him luck. Here at least was a witness who was not likely to trouble me. And with a thankful heart I bolted on to the platform and caught the train.

Third-class travel in Germany is not a hobby to be cultivated if your means allow the luxury of better accommodation. The travelling German has a habit of taking off his boots when he journeys in the train by night—and a carriageful of lower middle-class Huns, thus unshod, in the temperature at which railway compartments are habitually kept in Germany, is an environment which makes neither for comfort nor for sleep.

The atmosphere, indeed, was so unbearable that I spent most of the night in the corridor. Here I was able to destroy the papers of Julius Zimmermann, waiter ... I felt I was in greater danger whilst I had them on me ... and to assure myself that my precious document was in its usual place—in my portfolio. It was then I made the discovery, annihilating at the first shock, that my silver badge had disappeared. I could not remember what I had done with it in the excitement of my escape from Haase's. I remembered having it in my hand and showing it to the police at the top of the stairs, but after that my mind was a blank. I could only imagine I must have carried it unconsciously in my hand and then dropped it unwittingly. I looked at the place where it had been clasped on my braces: it was not there and I searched all my pockets for it in vain.

I had relied upon it as a stand-by in case there were trouble at the station in Düsseldorf. Now I found myself defenceless if I were challenged. It was a hard knock, but I consoled myself by the reflection that, by now, Clubfoot knew I had this badge ... it would doubtless figure in any description circulated about me.

It was a most unpleasant journey. There was some kind of choral society on the train, occupying seven or eight compartments of the third-class coach in which I was travelling. For the first few hours they made night hideous with part-songs, catches and glees chanted with a volume of sound that in that confined place was simply deafening. Then the noise abated as one by one the singers dropped off to sleep. Presently silence fell, while the train rushed forward in the darkness bearing me towards fresh perils, fresh adventures.

A gust of fresh air in my face, the trample of feet, loud greetings in guttural German, awoke me with a start. It was broad daylight and through my compartment, to which I had crept in the night, weary with standing, filed the jovial members of the choral society, with bags in their hands and huge cockades in their buttonholes. There was a band on the platform and a huge choir of men who bawled a stentorian-voiced hymn of greeting. "Düsseldorf" was the name printed on the station lamps.

All the passengers, save the members of the choral society, had left the train, apparently, for every carriage door stood open. I sprang to my feet and let myself go with the stream of men. Thus I swept out of the train and right into the midst of the jostling crowd of bandsmen, singers and spectators on the platform. I stood with the new arrivals until the hymn was ended and thus solidly encadrés by the Düsseldorfers, we drifted out through the barrier into the station courtyard. There brakes were waiting into which the jolly choristers, guests and hosts, clambered noisily. But I walked straight on into the streets, scarcely able to realize that no one had questioned me, that at last, unhindered, I stood before my goal.

Düsseldorf is a bright, clean town with a touch of good taste in its public buildings to remind one that this busy, industrial city has found time even while making money to have called into being a school of art of its own. It was a delightful morning with dazzling sunshine and an eager nip in the air that spoke of the swift, deep river that bathes the city walls. I revelled in the clear, cold atmosphere after the foulness of the drinking-den and the stifling heat of the journey. I exulted in the sense of liberty I experienced at having once more eluded the grim clutches of Clubfoot. Above all, my heart sang within me at the thought of an early meeting with Francis. In the mood I was in, I would admit no possibility of disappointment now. Francis and I would come together at last.

I came upon a public square presently and there facing me was a great, big café, white and new and dazzling, with large plate-glass windows and rows of tables on a covered verandah outside. It was undoubtedly a "kolossal" establishment after the best Berlin style. So that there might be no mistake about the name it was placarded all over the front of the place in gilt letters three feet high on glass panels—Café Regina.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning and at that early hour I had the place to myself. I felt very small, sitting at a tiny table, with tables on every side of me, stretching away as it were into the Ewigkeit, in a vast white room with mural paintings of the crassest school of impressionism.

I ordered a good, substantial breakfast and whiled away the time while it was coming by glancing at the morning paper which the waiter brought me.

My eyes ran down the columns without my heeding what I read, for my thoughts were busy with Francis. When did he come to the café? How was he living at Düsseldorf?

Suddenly, I found myself looking at a name I knew ... it was in the personal paragraphs.

"Lieut.-General Count von Boden," the paragraph ran, "Aide-de-Camp to H.M. the Emperor, has been placed on the retired list owing to ill-health. General von Boden has left for Abbazia, where he will take up his permanent residence." There followed the usual biographical notes.

Of a truth, Clubfoot was a power in the land.

I ate my breakfast at a table by the open door, and surveyed the busy life of the square where the pigeons circled in the sunshine. A waiter stood on the verandah idly watching the birds as they pecked at the stones. I was struck with the profound melancholy depicted in his face. His cheeks were sunken and he had a pinched look which I had observed in the features of most of the customers at Haase's. I set it down to the insufficient feeding which is general among the lower classes in Germany to-day.

But in addition to this man's wasted appearance, his eyes were hollow, there were deep lines about his mouth and he wore a haggard look that had something strangely pathetic about it. His air of brooding sadness seemed to attract me, and I found my eyes continually wandering back to his face.

And then, without warning, through some mysterious whispering of the blood, the truth came to me that this was my brother. I don't know whether it was a passing mood reflected in his face or the shifting lights and shadows in his eyes that lifted the veil. I only know that through those features ravaged by care and suffering and in spite of them I caught a glimpse of the brother I had come to seek.

I rattled a spoon on the table and called softly out to the verandah.

"Kellner!"

The man turned.

I beckoned to him. He came over to my table. He never recognized me, so dull was he with disappointment ... me with my unshaven, unkempt appearance and in my mean German shoddy ... but stood silently, awaiting my bidding.

"Francis," I said softly ... and I spoke in German ... "Francis, don't you know me?"

He was magnificent, strong and resourceful in his joy at our meeting as he had been in his months of weary waiting.

Only his mouth quivered a little as instantly his hands busied themselves with clearing away my breakfast.

"Jawohl!" he answered in a perfectly emotionless voice.

And then he smiled and in a flash the old Francis stood before me.

"Not a word now," he said in German as he cleared away the breakfast. "I am off this afternoon. Meet me on the river promenade by the Schiller statue at a quarter past two and we'll go for a walk. Don't stay here now but come back and lunch in the restaurant ... it's always crowded and pretty safe!"

Then he called out into the void:

"Twenty-six wants to pay!"

Such was my meeting with my brother.

CHAPTER XVI A HAND-CLASP BY THE RHINE

That afternoon Francis and I walked out along the banks of the swiftly flowing Rhine until we were far beyond the city. Anxious though I was that he should reveal to me that part of his life which lay hidden beneath those lines of suffering in his face, he made me tell my story first. So I unfolded to him the extraordinary series of adventures that had befallen me since the night I had blundered upon the trail of a great secret in that evil hotel at Rotterdam.

Francis did not once interrupt the flow of my narrative. He listened with the most tense interest but with a growing concern which betrayed itself clearly on his face. At the end of my story, I silently handed to him the half of the stolen letter I had seized from Clubfoot at the Hotel Esplanade.

"Keep it, Francis," I said. "It's safer with a respectable waiter like you than with a hunted outcast like myself!"

My brother smiled wanly, but his face assumed the look of grave anxiety with which he had heard my tale. He scrutinized the slips of paper very closely, then tucked them away in a letter-case, which he buttoned up in his hip pocket.

"Fortune is a strange goddess, Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, something that has filled my thoughts, sleeping and waking, for more than half a year. What you have told me throws a good deal of light upon the mystery which I came to this cursed country to elucidate, but it also deepens the darkness which still envelops many points in the affair.

"You know there are issues in this game of ours, old man, that stand even higher than the confidence that there has always been between us two. That is why I wrote to you so seldom out in France—I could tell you nothing about my work: that is one of the rules of our game. But now you have broken into the scramble yourself, I feel that we are partners, so I will tell you all I know.

"Listen, then. Some time about the beginning of the year a letter written by a German interned at one of the camps in England was stopped by the Camp Censor. This German went by the name of Schulte: he was arrested at a house in Dalston the day after we declared war on Germany. There was a good reason