CHAPTER XVIII

THE GAME IS UP

The farmhouse door was opened by a girl of about sixteen, who turned back into the kitchen to call her mother, a woman whom incessant toil seemed to have aged beyond her years.

“May I speak to your husband?” I asked politely.

“He’s not at home.”

“Do you expect him soon?”

“No; he’s away,”--hesitating--“at Haltern.”

“Well, it’s this way. I am with a friend. We came from Bremen yesterday, and we’re on our way to Cologne for a holiday. We’ve relatives living at Klein Recken, and thought of spending a few days with them. We tried to walk there last night from Haltern, but in the awful weather we lost the road. My friend fell ill, too. Fortunately, we found your barn, and slept in the straw. We’ll pay, of course, for what damage we did. But the question is this: Can you put us up for a day or two, until my friend gets really better? We’ll pay you well, if you would.”

“You can’t stay here that long, but you may come into the kitchen and warm yourself. You may stay until twelve o’clock.”

I reflected. A few hours’ grace! We had better take it and see how things turned out.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll fetch my friend and our knapsacks.”

With the assistance of the son of the house, a strong lad about fifteen years of age, I got Wallace into the kitchen. We were given seats in front of the roaring kitchener. My friend seemed much better.

Our arrival was obviously an extraordinary event, as well it might be; but if the people did conjecture at all, they showed it only in a suppressed kind of excitement. There was no atmosphere of suspicion, and the few curious questions the woman asked us were easily parried.

There were three girls and the boy in the family, all approaching maturity. While the woman bustled about preparing a breakfast for us, two of the girls and the boy made ready to go out. I did not like that, and tried to find out where they were going.

“You’re going to church, I suppose?” This to the eldest girl.

“Yes,” shyly.

“Have you got one near by?”

“No. We go to Haltern to church. My sister will be back soon from the first service.” So there was a fourth girl!

“Did she go to Haltern, too?”

“Yes.”

“It seems a long way to walk on a day like this.”

Silence.

“You do get up early, even on Sundays, don’t you? I thought I heard you about very early, this morning.”

“We get up at five o’clock,” broke in the old woman.

“You don’t say so. I always thought there was little farm work to be done in winter. You don’t seem to take advantage of your slack time.”

“There’s lots to do.” And she ran through a list of duties.

“Do you feel the war as much as we do in town? How are you off for food?”

“We manage all right.”

“Well, we don’t. We’re chemists in an ammunition factory, and we’re worked to death and don’t get much to eat. There’s nothing one can buy. We applied for a holiday, being tired of the everlasting long hours, and got three weeks. A bit too late for Muller, here. He oughtn’t to have come, feeling as he did.”

The coffee was brewed, and bread, butter, and a plate of cut sausage were on the table. Both of us went at it cheerfully. In the middle of the meal the fourth girl, the eldest, came in, and the boy and his two sisters left. This was about half-past nine.

When I had an opportunity, I whispered to Wallace: “We’ve got to get away from here soon after eleven. Play up.” Then I addressed him aloud: “What do you think we’d better do?”

“I hardly know. I feel pretty rotten still.”

Turning to the woman, I asked: “It’s about two and a half hours to Klein Recken, isn’t it?”

“About that.”

“Do you think you can manage that, Muller?” I looked seriously at Wallace, who understood and answered, equally serious:

“No; I’m afraid it would be too much for me.”

“Well, then, we had better go back to Haltern and on to Cologne from there. Let me see what train we can catch.” Luckily we had kept our time-table. It came in handy now.

“There’s a train at eleven-fifty-four to Cologne. We might catch that, don’t you think?”

“Anything you like, Erhardt.”

“Right-o.” To the woman: “How long do you reckon to the station in Haltern from here?”

“You can do it in a little over three quarters of an hour.”

“That’s what I make it. We’ll leave here at eleven.”

* * * * *

A dollar and a quarter seemed to satisfy the old woman. Indeed, she obviously had not expected so much, but she quickly hid the money in her purse. Then we took our leave.

The weather had cleared somewhat. It was freezing slightly. The clouds were thinning here and there, and an occasional ray of sunshine drifted over the landscape. It was a regular Christmas picture. Two or three inches of snow covered the ground, reflecting strongly the dispersed light from the sky. Black and sharply defined, the woods were outlined against it or the unblemished white of the fields, where they stretched up the hillsides behind them. Each branch had a ridge of snow on its upper surface, and looked as if it had been drawn with India ink and a sharp-pointed pen on glazed paper. The boughs of the dark-green pines were bending under masses of downy white, lumps of which slid to the ground as we passed. Then the boughs, relieved from part of their load, swayed upward.

“You see why I wanted to be off,” I explained to Wallace as soon as we were out of earshot, glad to drop back into English, since nobody was about. “Our unexpected appearance at the farm was sufficiently extraordinary to make the girls serve it up hot and strong to their friends in Haltern. It’ll fly round the town like bazaar talk, and we’d have had the police coming for us in a couple of shakes. But what now?”

We talked it over. Again Wallace asked me to leave him, but my stern answer silenced his arguments. Again it was he who urged “carrying on,” although he admitted that to walk any distance was out of the question for him. He submitted a plan which did not strike me as particularly hopeful, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances.

We were to go back to a certain town in Germany, get help there, and rest in security until Wallace’s condition and the weather had improved sufficiently to make another attempt feasible.

Our exchequer was at low water, and I had my doubts whether we could reach the town. But we might try.

Sundry groups of people were coming from Haltern; some of them stared rather hard at us. Wallace was improving, and enjoyed the walk, but he seemed very weak, and his feet hurt him so that he limped painfully along.

The weather changed again for the worse, and as we approached the station it began to snow. I took tickets to a junction not far off. During the twenty minutes until the train was due we intended to wait on the platform.

“Why don’t you wait in the waiting-room? It’s beastly on the platform,” said the ticket-collector.

“Might as well,” I said indifferently, and turned back.

We took our seats and ordered coffee. At the counter opposite us stood a young lieutenant in the long green, peace frock-coat of a rifleman. We saw the ticket-collector come in and address him, whereupon the lieutenant walked straight up to us.

“Where do you come from?”

“We walked in from Klein Recken this morning,” I answered.

“Show me your papers!”

I smiled and addressed Wallace in English: “Game’s up, old man!” He nodded glumly. The lieutenant stared. Then I explained.

The officer did not seem very much surprised, and the miraculous way in which an armed soldier appeared at his elbow showed that he had been expecting a dénouement.

“I’ll have to send you to the guard-room at present,” he said. “Don’t try any tricks. My men are hellishly sharp.” I reflected a moment. Escape was out of the question for the present. Wallace’s condition, the tracks we should leave in the snow, etc., would make an attempt absurd.

“I don’t know whether you will accept our word that we sha’n’t run away while in your charge. We’ll give it, if you like. That’s right, Wace, isn’t it?” I turned to my friend with the last words. Wallace nodded.

The lieutenant had been in the act of turning away, but wheeled sharply when I had spoken. Looking us over carefully, he said: “Right, I will. Are you hungry?”

“We could do with something to eat,” Wallace spoke up for the first time. The officer turned to his soldier:

“You will take these men to the guard-room. Leave your rifle here. They are to have double rations of whatever you get.”

“Besten Dank, Herr Leutnant!” we acknowledged.

With a salute we turned and followed the soldier across the railway lines to the guard-room. It was in a wooden hut, and similar to all other guard-rooms. We had a wash and made ourselves as presentable as possible. Wallace shaved. I was still wearing a beard.

About five o’clock the lieutenant came over to search us. Warning us to give up everything of importance, he merely asked us to hand him what we had in our pockets, and glanced through our knapsacks.

At six o’clock we were taken to his office in the station building, escorted by two armed soldiers.

“You gave me your word that you were not going to make another attempt!” the lieutenant reminded us.

“Yes, sir, as long as we are in your charge, or that of your men.”

“Good. I shall have to send you to prison now. I can’t keep you in the guard-room. Don’t let the warder search you. I’ve done that. You are military prisoners, not under civil authority. If you prefer it, try to make him give you a cell where you can be together. Tell him I said you were to have one. You’ll be here for a few days before an escort can be got for you. Good-by.”

He called our escort in while we stood outside, nobody, seemingly, heeding us in the least. When he had finished with the two soldiers, we marched off. They were particularly nice chaps from the Rhine, not proper Prussians, and largely influenced by socialistic ideas. They twitted us good-humoredly about having been caught. Laughing and joking, we arrived at our destination.

* * * * *

The old prison building in a narrow side street near the market-place looked particularly uninviting. After much ringing of the bell and, at last, thumping with the butt end of a rifle, the door opened, and we were confronted by a large, flabby-looking man in uniform, with the placid, unlined face of a person whose life had flowed past him like a pleasant, quiet stream. He was something between a policeman and a warder, as it appeared. At the moment he was smoking a long pipe with a porcelain bowl.

Our arrival agitated him as much as his natural phlegm and his military training would permit. For a time he seemed undecided what to do, and repeated over and over again every one of his sentences. This was a trick of his, which amused us considerably during the days we were under his care, but made conversation slow and unprofitable. As he collected his wits, he became more official.

“So, two Englishmen, are they? They are two Englishman, they are. You’ve brought two Englishmen. Well, well, well! Where are their papers? Have you got their papers? You must give me their papers. They are not quite in order; no, no; they are not in order; no, they are not in order.”

The soldiers explained patiently that they were.

“Well, well, well! Do they speak German? They speak German, I hope.” To us: “Do you speak German?

“Well, well, I must search you, my men. I must search you, I must; I must search you.”

“Hold on,” said one of our escort, “the lieutenant says they are not to be searched. The lieutenant saw to that. And you’ve got to do the best you can for them, and you are to put them in a cell together. Orders from the lieutenant!”

“Well, I must search them,” repeated the warder helplessly. “I must search them, you know; prison rules, you know. I must search them for concealed weapons!”

“Nothing of the sort. They were searched, and we’ve got orders to see that you don’t bother them again.”

“Have you any knives, pistols, revolvers, or other weapons on you?” Stubbornly the warder had turned to us. The habit of years is not so easily discarded.

“Oh, let’s give him our pocket-knives, Wace, and get it over,” I said, half laughing, half annoyed.

“Come into this room; come in here; come into this room. Now I’ll enter the articles in this book; yes, I’ll enter them in this book.” He began to write, speaking the words aloud: “No. 000000, one ivory-handled pocketknife. No. 000001, one horn-handled pocketknife.… Now, I’ll give them back to you when you leave, you see; I’ll give them back to you when you leave; yes, I’ll give them back to you.”

“Yes, but we want to get back ourselves,” said one of the soldiers. “Hurry up and show us their cell. We are to have a look at it, the lieutenant said.”

“All right, all right, all right! I’ve got a single cell will do for the two of them; a single cell for the two; yes, for the two.”

At last we were in the cell, which was of course as dark as the nether regions, having taken quite an affectionate farewell of our escort.