The Man with the Clubfoot

shook his head firmly. "Very sorry, saire," he said, "no

brightly lit hotel vestibule entered with a gush of water. I felt I

the clerk who was no

ouldn't mind where it was, as it

rooms already. If you had reserved..." And he shrugged his sh

the extraordinary conversation I had had with Dicky Allerton had put everything else out of my head. At every hotel I had

milar plight in Breslau once years ago. This porter, with his red, drink-sodden face and tarnished gold b

res but a very slight mental impulse to drop into it. From such slight beginnings do great enterprises spring. If I had known the immense ramification of adventure that was to spr

man in German if he knew where I

ce at me from under

doubtless like a Germ

mind. When one has lived much among foreign peoples, one's mentality slips automatically into their skin. I was no

ng as I can get somewhere to sl

s in't Tuintje, on the canal behind the Bourse. The proprietress is a good German, jawohl ... Fra

gulden and bade

concentrate my thoughts. That's the worst of shell-shock. You think you are cured, you feel fit and well, and then suddenly the machinery of your mind checks and halts and creaks. Ever since I had left hospital convalescent after being w

etter from Dicky Allerton, who, before the war, had been in partnership with my brother Francis in the motor business at Coventry. Dicky had been with

t to travel, would I come to Groningen and see him? "I have had a curious comm

to carry on with his motor business after Dicky had joined up, although their firm was doing government work. Finally, he had vanished into the maw of the War Office and all I knew was that he was "something on the Intelligence." More

ll, forwarded to me for safe keeping when I was home on leave last Christmas, and after that, sile

y poor brother. Then there was that lunch at the Bath Club with Sonny Martin of the Heavies and a friend of his, some kind of staff captain in red tabs. I don't th

d, "I know him well." "Know him," I repeated, "know him then ... t

cornice of the ceiling and blew a ri

aughed and said: "I know nothing at all except that your brother is a

d in with an anecdote about a man who was rating the waiter at an adjoining table, and I held my peace. But as Red Tabs ros

vice must occasionally disappear, sometimes in t

the words "on

pened. How blind I had be