“For they are blest that have not much to rue--
That have not oft misheard the prompter's cue.”
The gale was apparently at its height--that is to say, it was blowing
harder than it had blown all through the night. But those whose business
is on the great waters know that a gale usually finishes its wrath in
a few wild squalls. “'Tis getting puffy,” the sailors say; “'tis nearly
over.”
A man hurrying through the narrow main street of Yport was thrown
against the shutters of the little baker's shop on the left-hand side,
and stood there gasping for breath.
“Mon Dieu!” he muttered. “It's a dog's night.”
And he wiped the rain from his face. The wind, which blew from a wild
north-west, roared against the towering cliffs, and from east and west
concentrated itself funnel-wise on the gap where Yport lies. Out seaward
there was a queer, ghostly light lying on the face of the waters--the
storm-light--and landsmen rarely see it. For the sea was beaten into
unbroken foam. The man, who was clad in oilskins, was in the neck of the
funnel. Overhead, he heard the wind roaring through the pines far up on
the slope of the narrow valley--close at hand, a continuous whistle told
of its passage across the housetops. The man steadied himself with his
left hand. He had but one, and he cursed the empty sleeve which flapped
across his face.
“Provided,” he muttered, “that I can waken that cure.”
He crept on, while the gale paused to take breath, and a moment later
cowered in the porch of a little yellow house. He kicked the door with
his heel and then waited, with his ear to the great keyhole. Surely the
cure must have been a good man to sleep in such a night. The street had
naturally been deserted, for it was nearly three o'clock in the morning,
and dawn could not be far off.
“A one-armed man and a priest!” said the man to himself, with an
expressive jerk of the head. And, indeed, all the men of Yport had
sailed for the Northern fisheries, leaving the village to the women and
children, and the maimed.
Within the house there were sounds of some one astir.
“One comes!” cried a cheery voice belonging assuredly to some one who
was brave, for none expects to be called from his bed to hear good news.
A single bolt was drawn and the door thrown open. The cure--a little
man--stood back, shading the candle with his hand.
“Ah, Jean Belfort! it is you.”
“Yes, I and my one arm,” replied the man, coming in and closing the
door. The rain dripped from his oilskins to the clean floor.
“Ah, but this is no night to complain. Better be on shore with one arm
than at sea with two to-night.”
The little cure looked at his visitor with bright eyes, and a shake of
the head. A quick-spoken man this, with a little square mouth, a soft
heart, a keen sense of humour.
“Why have you got me from my bed, malcontent?” he asked.
“Because there are some out there that want your prayers,” replied
Belfort, jerking his head towards the sea. He was an unbeliever, this
maimed sailor, who read the Petit Journal, and talked too loudly in the
Cafe de la Marine of an evening. He spoke mockingly now.
“One can pray in the morning. Come with me while I get on some
clothes--if it is a wreck,” said the priest, simply.
The man followed him to a little bare room, of which the walls were
decorated by two cheap sacred prints and a crucifix, such as may be
bought for ten sous at any fair on the coast.
“Never mind your hat,” said the priest, seeing the man's fingers at the
strings of his sou'wester. “Give me my great boots from the cupboard. A
wreck is it? The summer storms are always the worst. Is it a boat?”
“Who knows?” replied the man. “It is my wife who looked from the window
an hour ago, and saw a light at sea two points to the east of north--a
red light and then a green and then the masthead light.”
“A steamer.”
“So it would appear; and now there are no lights. That is all.”
The priest was dressed, and now pulled on a great oilskin coat. There
are men who seem compact in mind and body, impressing their fellows with
a sense of that restfulness which comes of assured strength. This little
priest was one of these, and the mental impress that he left upon all
who came in contact with him was to the effect that there is nothing
in a human life that need appal, no sorrow beyond the reach of
consolation--no temptation too strong to be resisted. The children ran
after him in the streets, their faces expectant of a joke. The women in
the doorways gave a little sigh as he passed. A woman will often sigh
at the thought of that which another woman has lost, and this touches a
whole gamut of thoughts which are above the reach of a man's mind.
The priest tied the strings of a sou'wester under his pink chin. He was
little more than a boy after all--or else he was the possessor of a very
young heart.
“Between us we make a whole man--you and I,” he said cheerily. “Perhaps
we can do something.”
They went out into the night, the priest locking the door and pausing
to hide the key under the mat in the porch. They all keep the house-door
key under the mat at Yport. In the narrow street, which forms the whole
village, running down the valley to the sea, they met the full force of
the gale, and stood for a moment breathlessly fighting against it. In a
lull they pushed on.
“And the tide?” shouted the priest.
“It is high at four o'clock--a spring tide, and the wind in the
north-west--not standing room on the shore against the cliff for a man
from here to Glainval.”
At high tide the waves beat against the towering cliff all along this
grim coast, and a man standing on the turf may not recognize his son
on the rocks below, while the human voice can only span the distance in
calmest weather. There are spaces of three and four miles between the
gaps in the great and inaccessible bluffs. An evil lee-shore to have
under one's quarter--one of the waste places of the world which
Nature has set apart for her own use. When Nature speaks it is with no
uncertain voice.
“There is old Loisette,” shouted the cure. “He may have gone to bed
sober.”
“There is no reason to suppose it,” shouted the man in reply. “No, my
father, if there is aught to be done, you and I must do it.”
What with the wind and the flannel ear-flaps of the sou'wester, it was
hard to make one's self heard, and the two faces almost touched--the
unbeliever who knew so little, and the priest who knew not only books
but men. They made their way to the little quay, or, rather, the few
yards of sea-wall that protect the houses at the corner of the street.
But here they could not stand, and were forced to retire to the lee side
of the Hotel de la Plage, which, as all know, stands at the corner,
with two timorous windows turned seaward, and all the rest seeking the
comfort of the street.
In a few words Belfort explained where the light had been seen, and
where, according to his judgment, the steamer must have taken the rocks.
“If the good God has farther use for any of them, he will throw them on
the shore a kilometre to the east of us, where the wire rope descends
from the cliff to the shore for the seaweed,” said the priest.
The other nodded.
“What must be done must be done quickly. Let us go,” said the little
cure in his rather bustling manner, at which the great, slow-limbed
fishermen were wont to laugh.
“Where to?”
“Along the shore.”
“With a rising tide racing in before a north-westerly wind?” said
Belfort, grimly, and shook his head.
“Why not? You have your two legs, and there is Some One--up there!”
“I shouldn't have thought it,” answered the man, glancing up at the
storm-driven clouds. “However, where a priest can go a one-armed man can
surely follow. We need lanterns and a bottle of brandy.”
“Yes; I will wait and watch here while you fetch them.”
The priest, left alone, peered round the corner, shading his eyes with
his soft, white hand, upon which the cold rain pattered. To the east of
him he knew that there were three miles of almost impassable shore, of
unbroken, unscalable cliff. To the west of him the same. On the one
hand Fecamp, five miles away by a cliff path that none would attempt by
night, nine miles by road. On the other hand Etretat, still further by
road and cliff path. Inland a few farms and many miles of forest. He and
Belfort had stumbled over the fallen telegraph wires as they struggled
down the village street. No; if there was a wreck out there in the
darkness, and men, clinging half-drowned to the rigging, were looking
towards the shore, they had better look elsewhere. The sea, like the
wind, treated Yport as the mouth of a funnel, and a hundred cross
currents were piling up such waves as no boat could pass, though the
Yport women were skilful as any man with oar or sail.
Presently Belfort returned carrying two lanterns.
“I have told her that we will not quit the seawall,” he said with a
short laugh.
And straightway they both clambered over the wall and down the iron
ladder to the beach. A meandering, narrow pathway is worn on the
weed-grown chalk from the village to the washing-ground on the beach, a
mile to the eastward, where, at low tide, a spring of fresh water wells
up amid the shingle and the rock. Along this pathway the two men made
their way, the cure following on his companion's heel. They stumbled
and fell many times. At every step they slipped, for their boots were
soaked, and the chalk was greasy and half decomposed by the salt water.
At times they paused to listen, and through the roar of the wind and sea
came the distant note of a bell clanging continuously.
“It is the bell on Fecamp pier,” said Belfort. “The mist is coming
before the dawn.”
To the east the long arm of Fecamp light swung slowly round the horizon,
from the summit of the great bluff of Notre Dame du Salut, as if
sweeping the sea and elbowing away all that dared approach so grim a
coast.
“Ah!” exclaimed the priest, “I am in the water--the tide is coming up.”
To their left a wall of foam and spray shut off all view of the sea. On
the right the cliff rose, a vast barrier, and cut the sky in two. These
two men had nothing in common. They had, indeed, standing between them
that sword which was brought into the world nineteen hundred years ago,
and is still unsheathed. But neither thought of turning back. It had
been agreed between them that they should make what speed they could
along the shore, and only turn back at the last moment, searching the
sea and beach as they returned in the light of dawn.
Belfort, the leader, the expert in night and tide and wind, led the way
with one eye on the sea, the other on the eastern sky, which was now
showing grey through tossing clouds.
“Here we must turn,” he said suddenly, “and the last half-mile to the
sea-wall we shall have to wade.”
They paused and looked up to the sky. In half an hour the day would
come, but in seventy minutes the breakers must beat against the sheer
cliff.
“None has reached the shore alive and with his senses,” said Belfort,
looking out to sea. “He would have seen our lights and come to us, or
called if he had broken limbs. It is useless to search the shore
too closely. We shall find them here at the edge, half in, half out,
especially those with life belts, such as we find any winter morning
after bad weather.”
He spoke grimly, as one who knew that it is not the deep sea that must
be paid its toll, but the shoal water where the rocks and quicksands and
crabs and gulls are waiting. They made their way back in silence,
and slowly a new grey day crept into life. At last they could see the
horizon and read the face of the water still torn into a seething chaos
of foam. There was no ship upon them. If there had been a wreck the
storm had done its work thoroughly. Belfort climbed to the summit of a
rock, and looked back towards Fecamp. Then he turned and searched the
shore towards Yport.
“There is one,” he cried, “half in, half out, as I said. We shall cheat
the crabs at all events, my father.”
And clambering down, he stumbled on with a reckless haste that
contrasted strangely with his speech. For, whatever our words may be,
a human life must ever command respect. Any may (as some have done) die
laughing, but his last sight must necessarily be of grave faces.
“This one is not dead,” said the priest, when they had turned the
man over and dragged him to dry land. Belfort cut away the life-belt,
examining it as he did so.
“No name,” he said. “They will have to wait over there in London, till
he can tell them what ship it was. See, he has been struck on the head.
But he is alive--a marvel.”
He looked up, meeting the priest's eyes, and, remembering his words
spoken under the lee of the wall of the Hotel de la Plage, he laughed
as a fencer may laugh who has been touched beyond doubt by a skilful
adversary.
“He is a small-made man and light enough to carry--some town mouse this,
my father--who has never had a wet jacket before--see his face how white
it is, and his little arms and hands. We can carry him, turn and turn
about, and shall reach the sea-wall before the tide is up, provided we
find no more.”
It was full daylight when they at length reached the weed-grown steps
at the side of the sea-wall, and the smoke was already beginning to rise
from the chimneys of Yport. The gale was waning as the day came, but the
sea was at its highest, and all the houses facing northward had their
wooden shutters up. The waves were breaking over the sea-wall, but the
two men with their senseless burden took no heed of it. They were all
past thinking of salt water.
In answer to their summons, the Mother Senneville came hastily enough to
the back door of the Hotel de la Plage--a small inn of no great promise.
The Mother Senneville was a great woman, six feet high, with the
carriage of a Grenadier, the calm eye of some ruminating animal, the
soft, deep voice, and perhaps the soft heart, of a giant.
“Already!” she said simply, as she held the door back for them to pass
in. “I thought there would likely be some this morning without the money
in their pockets.”
“This one will not call too loud for his coffee,” replied Belfort, with
a cynicism specially assumed for the benefit of the cure. “And now,” he
added, as they laid their burden on the wine-stained table, “if he has
papers that will tell us the name of the ship, I will walk to Fecamp, to
Lloyds' agents there, with the news. It will be a five-franc piece in my
pocket.”
They hastily searched the dripping clothing, and found a crumpled
envelope, which, however, told them all they desired to know. It was
addressed to Mr. Albert Robinson, steamship Ocean Waif, Southampton.
“That will suffice,” said Belfort. “I take this and leave the rest to
you and Mother Senneville.”
“Send the doctor from Fecamp,” said the woman--“the new one in the Rue
du Bac. It is the young ones that work best for nothing, and here is no
payment for any of us.”
“Not now,” said the priest.
“Ah!” cried Belfort, tossing off the brandy, which the Mother Senneville
had poured out for him. “You--you expect so much in the Hereafter, Mr.
the Cure.”
“And you--you expect so much in the present, Mr. the one-armed
malcontent,” replied the priest, with his comfortable little laugh.
“Come, Madame Senneville. Let me get this man to bed.”
“It is an Englishman, of course,” said the Mother Senneville, examining
the placid white face. “They throw their dead about the world like
cigar-ends.”
By midday the news was in the London streets, and the talk was all of
storms and wrecks and gallant rescues. And a few whose concern it was
noted the fact that the Ocean Waif, of London, on a voyage from Antwerp
and Southampton to the River Plate, had supposedly been wrecked off
the north coast of France. Sole survivor, Albert Robinson, apparently
a fireman or a steward, who lay at the Hotel de la Plage at Yport,
unconscious, and suffering from a severe concussion of the brain. By
midday, also, the cure was established as sick nurse in the back bedroom
of the little hotel with an English conversation-book, borrowed from the
schoolmaster, protruding from the pocket of his soutane, awaiting the
return of Albert Robinson's inner consciousness.
“Are you feeling better?” the cure had all ready to fire off at him as
soon as he awoke. To which the conversation-book made reply: “Yes, but
I have caught a severe chill on the mountain,” which also the cure had
made ready to understand--with modifications.
But the day passed away without any use having been found for the
conversation-book. And sundry persons, whose business it was, came
and looked at Albert Robinson, and talked to the priest and to Jean
Belfort--who, to tell the truth, made much capital and a number of free
glasses of red wine out of the incident--and went away again.
The cure passed that night on the second bed of the back bedroom of the
Hotel de la Plage, and awoke only at daylight, full of self-reproach,
to find his charge still unconscious, still placid like a statue, with
cheeks a little hollower, and lips a little whiter. The young doctor
came and shook his head, and discoursed of other cases of a similar
nature which he had read up since the previous day, and pretended now
to have remembered among his experiences. He also went away again, and
Yport seemed to drop out of the world once more into that oblivion to
which a village with such a poor sea front and no railway station, or
lodging houses, or hotels where there are waiters, must expect to be
consigned.
The cure had just finished his dejeuner of fish and an omelette--the day
being Friday--when a carriage rattled down the village street, leaving
behind it doorways suddenly occupied by the female population of Yport
wiping its hands upon its apron.
“It is Francois Morin's carriage from Fecamp,” said the Mother
Senneville, “with a Parisienne, who has a parasol, if you please.”
“No,” corrected the cure; “that is an Englishwoman. I saw several last
year in Rouen.”
And he hurried out, hatless, conversation-book in hand. He was rather
taken aback--never having spoken to a person so well-dressed as this
English girl, who nodded quickly in answer to his salutation.
“Is this the hotel? Is he here? Is he conscious yet?” she asked in
tolerable French.
“Yes--madam. He is here, but he is not conscious yet. The doctor--”
“I am not madam--I am mademoiselle. I am his sister,” said the
girl, quickly descending from the carriage and frankly accepting the
assistance of the cure's rather timid hand.
He followed her meekly, wondering at her complete self-possession--at
an utter lack of ceremony--at a certain blunt frankness which was new to
Yport. She nodded to Madame Senneville.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Monsieur le Cure will show you. It is he who has saved his life.”
The young lady turned and looked into the priest's pink face, which grew
pinker. This was not the material of which gallant rescuers are usually
made.
“Thank you, Monsieur le Cure,” she said, with a sudden gentleness.
“Thank you. It is so difficult--is it not?--to thank any one.”
“There is not the necessity,” murmured the little cure, rather
confusedly; and he led the way upstairs.
Once in the sick-room he found his tongue again, and explained matters
volubly enough. Besides, she made it easy. She was so marvellously
natural, so free from a certain constraint which in some French
circles is mistaken for good manners. She asked every detail, and made
particular inquiry as to who had seen the patient.
“No one must be allowed to see him,” she said, in her decisive way. “He
must be kept quite quiet. No one must approach this room, only you and
I, Monsieur le Cure.”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” he said slowly. “Yes.”
“You have been so good--you have done such wonders, that I rely upon you
to help me;” and a sudden, sharp look of anxiety swept across her face.
“We shall be good friends--n'est ce pas?” she said, turning to look at
him as he stood near the door.
“It will be easy, I think, mademoiselle.”
Then he turned to Madame Senneville, who was carrying the baggage
upstairs.
“It is his sister, Madame Senneville,” he said. “She will, of course,
stay in the hotel.”
“Yes, and I have no room ready,” replied the huge woman,
pessimistically. “One never knows what a summer storm may bring to one.”
“No, Mother Senneville, no; one never knows,” he said rather absently,
and went out into the street. He was thinking of the strange young
person upstairs, who was unlike any woman he had met or imagined. Those
in her station in life whom he had seen during his short thirty years
were mostly dressed-up dolls, to whom one made banal remarks without
meaning. The rest were almost men, doing men's work, leading a man's
life.
That same evening the injured man recovered consciousness, and it was
the cure who sent off the telegram to the doctor at Fecamp. For the wire
had been repaired with the practical rapidity with which they manage
such affairs in France.
Through the slow recovery it was the cure who was ever at the beck and
call of the two strangers, divining their desires, making quite easy a
situation which otherwise might have been difficult enough. Not only the
cure, but the whole village soon became quite reconciled to the hitherto
unheard-of position assumed by this young girl, without a guardian or a
chaperon, who lived a frank, fearless life among them, making every
day terrible assaults upon that code of feminine behaviour which hedges
Frenchwomen about like a wall.
In the intimacy of the sick-room the little priest soon learnt to talk
with the Englishwoman and her brother quite freely, as man to man, as he
had talked to his bosom friend by selection at St. Omer. And there
was in his heart that ever-abiding wonder that a woman may thus be a
companion to a man, sharing his thoughts, nay, divining them before he
had shaped them in his own mind. It was all very wonderful and new
to this little priest, who had walked, as it were, on one side of the
street of life since boyhood without a thought of crossing the road.
When the three were together they were merry enough; indeed, the
Englishman's mistakes in French were sufficient to cause laughter in
themselves without that re-action which lightens the atmosphere of
a sick-room when the danger is past. But while he was talking to the
Mother Senneville downstairs, or waiting a summons to come up, the cure
never heard laughter in the back bedroom. There seemed to be some shadow
there which fled before his cheery smile when he went upstairs. When he
and the girl were together when she walked on the sea-wall with him for
a breath of air, she was grave enough too, as if now that she knew
him better she no longer considered it necessary to assume a
light-heartedness she did not feel.
“Are you sure there is nothing I can do to make your life easier here?”
he asked suddenly one day.
“Quite sure,” she answered without conviction.
“Have you all that you want, mademoiselle?”
“Oh yes.”
But he felt that there was some anxiety weighing upon her. He was always
at or near the Hotel de la Plage now, so that she could call him from
the window or the door. One day--a day of cloud and drizzle, which are
common enough at Yport in the early summer--he went into the little
front room, which the Mother Senneville fondly called her salon, to
read the daily office from the cloth-bound book he ever carried in his
pocket. He was engaged in this devout work when the Englishwoman came
hastily into the room, closing the door and standing with her back
against it.
“There is a gendarme in the street,” she said, in little more than a
whisper, her eyes glittering. She was breathless.
“What of it, mademoiselle? It is my old friend the Sergeant Grall. It is
I who christen his children.”
“Why is he here?”
“It is his duty, mademoiselle. The village is peaceful enough now that
the men are away at the fisheries. You have nothing to fear.”
She glanced round the room with a hunted look in her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, “I cannot keep it up any longer. You must have
guessed--you who are so quick--that my brother is a great criminal. He
has ruined thousands of people. He was escaping with the money he had
stolen when the steamer was wrecked.”
The cure did not say whether this news surprised him or not, but walked
to the window and looked thoughtfully out to sea. The windows were dull
and spray-ridden.
“Ah!” the girl cried, “you must not judge hastily. You cannot know his
temptation.”
“I will not judge at all, mademoiselle. No man may judge of another's
temptation. But--he can restore the money.”
“No. It was all lost in the steamer.”
She had approached the other window, and stood beside the little priest
looking out over the grey sea.
“It was surely my duty to come here and help him, whatever he had done.”
“Assuredly, mademoiselle.”
“But he says you can give him up if you like.”
She glanced at him and caught her breath. The priest shook his head.
“Why not? Because you are too charitable?” she whispered; and again
he shook his head. “Then, why not?” she persisted with a strange
pertinacity.
“Because he is your brother, mademoiselle.”
And they stood for some moments looking out over the sea, through the
rime-covered windows, in a breathless silence. The cure spoke at length.
“You must get him removed to Havre,” he said, in his cheery way, “as
soon as possible. There he can take a steamer to America. I will impress
upon the doctor the necessity of an early departure.”
It was not lately, but many years ago, that the Ocean Waif was wrecked
in a summer storm. And any who penetrate to Yport to-day will probably
see in the sunlight on the sea-wall a cheery little cure, who taps his
snuff-box, while he exchanges jokes with the idlers there. Yport has
slowly crept into the ken of the traveller, and every summer sees
English tourists pass that way. They are not popular with the rough
natives, who, after all, are of the same ancestry as ourselves; but the
little cure is quick and kind with information or assistance to all
who seek it. When the English tongue is spoken he draws near and
listens--snuff-box in hand; when the travellers speak in French his
eyes travel out to sea with a queer look, as if the accent aroused some
memory.
And in an obscure English watering-place there lives a queer little old
maid--churchy and prim--who does charitable work, gives her opinion very
freely concerning the administration of matters parochial, thinks the
vicar very self-indulgent and idle--and in her own heart has the abiding
conviction that there are none on earth like the Roman clergy.
“GOLOSSA-A-L”
“Golossa-a-l!” I heard him say. “Golossa-a-l, these Englishmen! Are they
not everywhere?”
A moment later I was introduced to him, and he rose to shake hands--a
tall, fair, good-natured German student. Heavy if you will--but clean
withal, and of a cleanly mind.
“Honour,” he muttered politely. “It is not often we have an English
student at Gottingen--but perhaps we can teach you something--eh?” And
he broke into a boyish laugh. “You will take beer?” he added, drawing
forward an iron chair--for we were in the Brauerei Garden.
“Thank you.”
“A doctor of medicine--the Herr Professor tells me,” he said pleasantly.
“Prosit,” he added, as he raised his great mug to his lips.
“Prosit! Yes, a doctor of medicine--of the army.”
“Ah, of the army, that is good. I also I hope, some day! And you come to
pass our Gottingen examination. Yes, but it is hard--ach Gott!--devilish
hard.”
There was a restrained shyness about the man which I liked. Shy men are
so rare. And, although he could have cleared the Brauerei Garden in five
minutes, there was no bluster about this Teutonic Hercules. His loud,
good-natured laugh was perhaps the most striking characteristic of Carl
von Mendebach. Next to that, his readiness to be surprised at everything
or anything, and to class it at once as colossal. Hence the nickname
by which he was known amongst us. The term was applied to me a thousand
times--figuratively. For I am a small man, as I have had reason to
deplore more than once while carrying the wounded out of action. It
takes so much longer if one is small.
I cannot exactly say why Carl von Mendebach and I became close friends;
but I do not think that Lisa von Mendebach had anything to do with it.
I was never in love with Lisa, although I admired her intensely, and I
never see a blue-eyed, fair-haired girl to this day without thinking of
Lischen. But I was not in love with her. I was never good-looking. I did
not begin by expecting much from the other sex, and I have never been in
love with anybody. I wonder if Lisa remembers me.
The students were pleasant enough fellows. It must be recollected that I
speak of a period dating back before the war of 1870--before there was a
German Empire. I soon made a sort of place for myself at the University,
and I was tolerated good-naturedly. But Carl did more than tolerate
me. He gave me all the friendship of his simple heart. Without being
expansive--for he was a Hanoverian--he told me all about himself, his
thoughts and his aims, an open-hearted ambition and a very Germanic
contentment with a world which contained beer and music. Then at last he
told me all about his father, General von Mendebach, and Lisa. Finally
he took me to his house one evening to supper.
“Father,” he said in his loud, cheery way, “here is the Englishman--a
good friend of mine--a great scholar--golossa-a-l.”
The General held out his hand and Lisa bowed, prettily formal, with a
quaint, prim smile which I can see still.
I went to the house often--as often, indeed, as I could. I met the Von
Mendebachs at the usual haunts--the theatre, an occasional concert, the
band on Sunday afternoon, and at the houses of some of the professors.
It was Lisa who told me that another young Briton was coming to live in
Gottingen--not, however, as a student at the University. He turned out
to be a Scotsman--one Andrew Smallie, the dissolute offspring of a prim
Edinburgh family. He had been shipped off to Gottingen, in the hope that
he might there drink himself quietly to death. The Scotch do not keep
their skeletons at home in a cupboard. They ship them abroad and give
them facilities.
Andrew Smallie soon heard that there was an English student in
Gottingen, and, before long, procured an introduction. I disliked him at
once. I took good care not to introduce him to any friends of mine.
“Seem to lead a quiet life here,” he said to me one day when I had
exhausted all conversation and every effort to get him out of my rooms.
“Very,” I replied.
“Don't you know anybody? It's a deuced slow place. I don't know a
soul to talk to except yourself. Can't take to these beer-drinking,
sausage-eating Germans, you know. Met that friend of yours, Carl von
Mendebach, yesterday, but he didn't seem to see me.”
“Yes,” I answered. “It is possible he did not know you. You have never
been introduced.”
“No,” he answered dubiously. “Shouldn't think that would matter in an
out-of-the-way place like this.”
“It may seem out of the way to you,” I said, without looking up from my
book. “But it does not do so to the people who live here.”
“D--d slow lot, I call them,” he muttered. He lighted a cigar and stood
looking at me for some time and then he went away.
It was about this time that Carl von Mendebach fought his first student
duel, and he was kind enough to ask me to be his surgeon. It was, of
course, no quarrel of his own, but a point of honour between two clubs;
and Carl was selected to represent his “corps.” He was delighted, and
the little slit in his cheek which resulted from the encounter gave him
infinite satisfaction. I had been elected to the “corps” too, and wore
my cap and colours with considerable pride. But, being an Englishman, I
was never asked to fight. I did not then, and I do not now, put forward
any opinion on student duelling. My opinion would make no difference,
and there is much to be said on both sides.
It was a hard winter, and I know few colder places than Gottingen. An
ice fete was organized by the University. I believe Carl and I were
among the most energetic of the organizers. I wish I had never had
anything to do with it.
I remember to this day the pleasure of skating with Lisa's warmly gloved
little hands in my own--her small furred form touching me lightly each
time we swung over to the left on the outside edge. I saw Andrew Smallie
once or twice. Once he winked at me, knowingly, as I passed him with
Lisa--and I hated him for it. That man almost spoilt Gottingen for me.
Britons are no friends of mine out of their own country. They never
get over the fallacy that everywhere except London is an out-of-the-way
place where nothing matters.
As the evening wore on, some of the revellers became noisy in a harmless
German way. They began to sing part songs with a skill which is not
heard out of the Fatherland. Parties of young men and maidens joined
hands and swung round the lake in waltz time to the strain of the
regimental band.
Lisa was tired, so she sought a seat with the General, leaving Carl and
me to practise complicated figures. They found a seat close to us--a
seat somewhat removed from the lamps. In the dusk it was difficult to
distinguish between the townspeople and the gentlefolk.
We were absorbed in our attempts when I heard a voice I knew--and hated.
“Here, you, little girl in the fur jacket--come and have a turn with
me,” it was saying in loud, rasping, intoxicated tones.
I turned sharply. Smallie was standing in front of Lisa with a leer
in his eyes. She was looking up at him--puzzled, frightened--not
understanding English. The General was obesely dumfounded.
“Come along--my dear,” Andrew Smallie went on. He reached out his hand,
and, grasping her wrist, tried to drag her towards him.
Then I went for him. I am, as I have confessed, a small man. But if a
man on skates goes for another, he gathers a certain impetus. I gave it
to him with my left, and Andrew Smallie slid along the ice after he had
fallen.
The General hustled Lisa away, muttering oaths beneath his great white
moustache.
When Andrew Smallie picked himself up, Carl von Mendebach was standing
over him.
“Tell him,” said Carl in German, “that that was my sister.”