The Man with the Clubfoot by Valentine Williams (best books to read in your 20s TXT) 📖

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!

My companion was, indeed, the model of discretion in everything touching myself and my business. Curiosity about your neighhour's affairs is a cardinal German failing, yet the Count manifested not the slightest desire to learn anything about me or my mission to Berlin. You may be sure that I, for my part, did nothing to enlighten him. It was not, indeed, in my power to do so. Yet the young man's reserve was so marked that I was convinced he had his orders to avoid the topic.

As the train rushed through Westphalia, through busy stations with glimpses of sidings full of trucks loaded to the brim, past towns whose very outlines were blurred by the mirk of smoke from a hundred factory chimneys, my thoughts were busy with that swarthy cripple. I had broken away from him with one portion of a highly prized document, yet he had made no attempt to have me arrested at the frontier. Clearly, then, he must still look upon me as an ally and must therefore be yet in ignorance of the identity of the dead man lying in my chamber at the Hotel Sixt. The friendly guide had told me that the party "combing out" the station at Rotterdam for me did not appear to know what I looked like.

Was it possible, then, that Clubfoot did not know Semlin by sight?

The fact that Semlin had only recently crossed the Atlantic seemed to confirm this supposition.

Then the document. Semlin had half. Who had the other half? Surely Clubfoot.... Clubfoot who was to have called at the hotel that morning to receive what I had brought from England. Perhaps, after all, my random declaration to the hotel-keeper had not been so far wrong; Clubfoot wanted to take the whole document to Berlin and reap all the laurels at the cost of half the danger and labour. That would explain his present silence. He suspected Semlin of treachery, not to the common cause, but to him!

It looked as if I might have a free run until Clubfoot could reach Berlin. That, unless he also took a special, could not be until the next evening at earliest. But, more redoubtable than a meeting with the man of power and authority, hung over me, an ever-present nightmare, the interview which I felt awaited me at the end of my present journey ... the interview at which I must render an account of my mission.

Evening was falling as we ran through the inhospitable region of sand and water and pine that engirdles Berlin. We glided at diminished speed through the trim suburbs, skirted the city, on whose tall buildings the electric sky-signs were already beginning to twinkle, crashed heavily over a vast network of metals at some great terminus, then tore off again into the gathering darkness. In a little, we slowed down again. We were running through wooded country. From the darkness ahead a lantern waved at us and the train stopped with a jerk at a little wayside station, a tiny box of an affair. A tall, solid figure, wearing a spiked helmet and grey military great-coat, stood in solitary grandeur in the centre of the little platform, the wavering rays of a flickering gas lamp reflected in his brilliantly polished top-boots.

"Here we are at last!" said my companion.

I stepped out to meet my fate.

The young lieutenant was rigid at the salute before the figure on the platform.

I heard the end of a sentence as I alighted "... the gentleman I was to meet, Excellency!"

The other looked at me. He was a big man with a crimson face. He made no attempt at greeting, but said in a hoarse voice: "Have the goodness to come with me. The orderlies will attend to your things." And, with clinking spurs, he strode out through some big kind of anteroom, swathed in wrappings, into a yard beyond, where a big limousine was throbbing gently.

He stood aside to let me get in, then mounted himself, followed, rather to my surprise, by the young Count, whose responsibility for myself had ended, I imagined, on "delivering the goods." My surprise was of short duration, for once in the car the young Uhlan dropped all the formality he had displayed on the platform and addressed the elder officer as "papa." This, then, was old General von Boden, of whom the Major had spoken, Aide-de-Camp to the Kaiser and formerly tutor to the Crown Prince.

Father and son chatted in a desultory fashion across the car, and I took the opportunity of studying the old gentleman. His face was of the most prodigious purple hue, and so highly polished that it continually caught the reflection of the small electric lamp in the roof. Huge gold spectacles with glasses so thick that they distorted his eyes, straddled a great beak-like nose. He had doffed his helmet and was mopping his brow, and I saw a high perfectly bald dome-like head, brilliantly polished and almost as red as his face. He was clean shaven and by no means young, for the flesh hung in bags about his face. Long years of the habit of command had left their mark in an imperiousness of manner which might easily yield to ruthlessness I judged.

"I thought I should have had orders before I left the Villa," the General said to his son, "then you could have gone straight there. I suppose he means to see him here: that is why he wanted him brought to the Villa. But he's always the same: he never can make up his mind." And he grunted.

"Perhaps there will be something waiting at home," he added in his hoarse barrack-yard voice.

We drove through a white gate into a little drive which brought us up in front of a long, low villa. Neither father nor son had opened their lips to me during the drive from the station and I had not ventured to put a question to either of them, but I knew we were in Potsdam. The little station in the woods was Wild-Park, I suspected, the private station used by the Emperor on his frequent journeys and situated in the grounds of the New Palace. All the officials of the Prussian Court have villas at Potsdam, though why I had been brought there in connection with an affair that must surely rather interest the Wilhelm-Strasse or the Police Presidency was more than I could fathom.

There was a frightful scene in the hall. Without any warning the General turned on the orderly who had opened the door and screamed abuse at him. "Camel! Ox! Sheep's-head!" he roared, his face and shining pate deepening their vermilion hue. "Do I give orders that they shall be forgotten? What do you mean? You ass...." He put his white-gloved hands on the man's shoulders and shook him until the fellow's teeth must have rattled in his head. The orderly, white to the lips, hung limp in the old man's grasp, muttering apologies: "Ach! Exzellenz! Exzellenz will excuse me...."

It was a revolting spectacle, but it did not make the least impression on the son, who, putting down his cap and great-coat and unhooking his sword, led me into a kind of study. "These orderlies are such thickheads!" he said.

"Rudi! Rudi!" a hoarse, strident voice screamed from the hall. The lieutenant ran out.

"You've got to take the fellow to Berlin to-night. The message was here all the time—that numskull Heinrich forgot it. And we've got to keep the fellow here till then! An outrage, having the house used as a barrack for a rascally detective!" Thus much I heard, as the door had been left open. Then it closed and I heard no more.

As I had heard this much, there was a certain irony in the invitation to dinner subsequently conveyed to me by the young Uhlan. There was nothing for it but to accept. I knew I was caught deep in the meshes of Prussian discipline, every one had his orders and blindly carried them out, from the garrulous Major on the frontier to this preposterous Exzellenz, this Imperial aide-de-camp of Potsdam. I was already