THE MAN WITH THE CLUBFOOT
BY VALENTINE WILLIAMS
AUTHOR OF "THE SECRET HAND," "THE YELLOW STREAK," "THE RETURN OF
CLUBFOOT," "THE ORANGE DIVAN," "CLUBFOOT THE AVENGER"
1918
WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT
"The Man with the Clubfoot" is one of the most ingenious and sinister
secret agents in Europe. It is to him that the task is assigned of
regaining possession of an indiscreet letter written by the Kaiser.
Desmond Okewood, a young British officer with a genius for secret
service work, sets out to thwart this man and, incidentally, discover
the whereabouts of his brother.
He penetrates into Germany disguised, and meets with many thrilling
adventures before he finally achieves his mission.
In "The Man with the Clubfoot," Valentine Williams has written a
thrilling romance of mystery, love and intrigue, that in every sense of
the word may be described as "breathless."
CHAPTER
I. I seek a Bed in Rotterdam
II. The Cipher with the Invoice
III. A Visitor in the Night
IV. Destiny knocks at the Door
V. The Lady of the Vos in't Tuintje
VI. I board the Berlin Train and leave a Lame Gentleman on the
Platform
VII. In which a Silver Star acts as a Charm
VIII. I hear of Clubfoot and meet his Employer
IX. I encounter an old Acquaintance who leads me to a delightful
Surprise
X. A Glass of Wine with Clubfoot
XI. Miss Mary Prendergast risks her Reputation
XII. His Excellency the General is worried
XIII. I find Achilles in his Tent
XIV. Clubfoot comes to Haase's
XV. The Waiter at the Café Regina
XVI. A Hand-clasp by the Rhine
XVII. Francis takes up the Narrative
XVIII. I go on with the Story
XIX. We have a Reckoning with Clubfoot
XX. Charlemagne's Ride
XXI. Red Tabs explains
The Man with the Clubfoot
CHAPTER I
I SEEK A BED IN ROTTERDAM
The reception clerk looked up from the hotel register and shook his head
firmly. "Very sorry, saire," he said, "not a bed in ze house." And he
closed the book with a snap.
Outside the rain came down heavens hard. Every one who came into the
brightly lit hotel vestibule entered with a gush of water. I felt I
would rather die than face the wind-swept streets of Rotterdam again.
I turned once more to the clerk who was now busy at the key-rack.
"Haven't you really a corner? I wouldn't mind where it was, as it is
only for the night. Come now..."
"Very sorry, saire. We have two gentlemen sleeping in ze bathrooms
already. If you had reserved..." And he shrugged his shoulders and bent
towards a visitor who was demanding his key.
I turned away with rage in my heart. What a cursed fool I had been not
to wire from Groningen! I had fully intended to, but the extraordinary
conversation I had had with Dicky Allerton had put everything else out
of my head. At every hotel I had tried it had been the same
story--Cooman's, the Maas, the Grand, all were full even to the
bathrooms. If I had only wired....
As I passed out into the porch I bethought myself of the porter. A hotel
porter had helped me out of a similar plight in Breslau once years ago.
This porter, with his red, drink-sodden face and tarnished gold braid,
did not promise well, so far as a recommendation for a lodging for the
night was concerned. Still...
I suppose it was my mind dwelling on my experience at Breslau that made
me address the man in German. When one has been familiar with a foreign
tongue from one's boyhood, it requires 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
spread its roots from that simple question, I verily believe my heart
would have failed me and I would have run forth into the night and the
rain and roamed the streets till morning.
Well, I found myself asking the man in German if he knew where I could
get a room for the night.
He shot a quick glance at me from under his reddened eyelids.
"The gentleman would doubtless like a German house?" he queried.
You may hardly credit it, but my interview with Dicky Allerton that
afternoon had simply driven the war out of my mind. When one has lived
much among foreign peoples, one's mentality slips automatically into
their skin. I was now thinking in German--at least so it seems to me
when I look back upon that night--and I answered without reflecting.
"I don't care where it is as long as I can get somewhere to sleep out of
this infernal rain!"
"The gentleman can have a good, clean bed at the Hotel Sixt in the
little street they call the Vos in't Tuintje, on the canal behind the
Bourse. The proprietress is a good German, jawohl ... Frau Anna Schratt
her name is. The gentleman need only say he comes from Franz at the
Bopparder Hof."
I gave the man a gulden and bade him get me a cab.
It was still pouring. As we rattled away over the glistening
cobble-stones, my mind travelled back over the startling events of the
day. My talk with old Dicky had given me such a mental jar that I found
it at first wellnigh impossible to 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 wounded
on the Somme ("gunshot wound in head and cerebral concussion" the
doctors called it), I had trained myself, whenever my brain was _en
panne_, to go back to the beginning of things and work slowly up to the
present by methodical stages.
Let's see then--I was "boarded" at Millbank and got three months' leave;
then I did a month in the Little Johns' bungalow in Cornwall. There I
got the letter 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 the Naval Division at Antwerp and was interned with
the rest of the crowd when they crossed the Dutch frontier in those
disastrous days of October, 1914.
Dicky wrote from Groningen, just a line. Now that I was on leave, if I
were fit to travel, would I come to Groningen and see him? "I have had a
curious communication which seems to have to do with poor Francis," he
added. That was all.
My brain was still halting, so I turned to Francis. Here again I had to
go back. Francis, rejected on all sides for active service, owing to
what he scornfully used to call "the shirkers' ailment, varicose veins,"
had flatly declined 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 than this not even _he_ would
tell me, and when he finally disappeared from London, just about the
time that I was popping the parapet with my battalion at Neuve Chapelle,
he left me his London chambers as his only address for letters.
Ah! now it was all coming back--Francis' infrequent letters to me about
nothing at all, then his will, forwarded to me for safe keeping when I
was home on leave last Christmas, and after that, silence. Not another
letter, not a word about him, not a shred of information. He had utterly
vanished.
I remembered my frantic inquiries, my vain visits to the War Office, my
perplexity at the imperturbable silence of the various officials I
importuned for news of my 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 think I heard his name, but I
know he was at the War Office, and presently over our cigars and coffee
I laid before him the mysterious facts about my brother's case.
"Perhaps you knew Francis?" I said in conclusion. "Yes," he replied, "I
know him well." "_Know_ him," I repeated, "_know_ him then ... then you
think ... you have reason to believe he is still alive...?"
Red Tabs cocked his eye at the gilded cornice of the ceiling and blew a
ring from his cigar. But he said nothing.
I persisted with my questions but it was of no avail. Red Tabs only
laughed and said: "I know nothing at all except that your brother is a
most delightful fellow with all your own love of getting his own way."
Then Sonny Martin, who is the perfection of tact and diplomacy--probably
on that account he failed for the Diplomatic--chipped 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 rose to go, a little later, he held
my hand for a minute in his and with that curious look of his, said
slowly and with meaning:
"When a nation is at war, officers on _active service_ must occasionally
disappear, sometimes in their country's interest, sometimes in their
own."
He emphasised the words "on active service."
In a flash my eyes were opened. How blind I had been! Francis was in
Germany.