The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (25 page)

It was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest seemed to him so offensive—so disproportionately offensive—that he hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.

“Nonsense,” he interrupted with a forced laugh,
“Unsinn!
You must forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. But I was a pupil there myself. I was at school there. There was no place like it. I cannot believe that anything serious could have happened to—to take away its character. The devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere—”

He broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly and that the man at the far end of the table might understand German; and at the same moment he looked up and saw that this individual’s eyes were fixed upon his face intently. They were peculiarly bright. Also they were rather wonderful eyes, and the way they met his own served in some way he could not understand to convey both a reproach and a warning. The whole face of the stranger, indeed, made a vivid impression upon him, for it was a face, he now noticed for the first time, in whose presence one would not willingly have said or done anything unworthy. Harris could not explain to himself how it was he had not become conscious sooner of its presence.

But he could have bitten off his tongue for having so far forgotten himself. The little priest lapsed into silence. Only once he said, looking up and speaking in a low voice that was not intended to be overheard, but that evidently
was
overheard, “You will find it different.” Presently he rose and left the table with a polite bow that included both the others, and, after him, from the far end rose also the figure in the tweed suit, leaving Harris by himself.

He sat on for a bit in the darkening room, sipping his coffee and smoking his fifteen-pfennig cigar, till the girl came in to light the oil lamps. He felt vexed with himself for his lapse from good manners, yet hardly able to account for it. Most likely, he reflected, he had been annoyed because the priest had unintentionally changed the pleasant character of his dream by introducing a jarring note. Later he must seek an opportunity to make amends. At present, however, he was too impatient for his walk to the school, and he took his suck and hat and passed out into the open air.

And, as he crossed before the Gasthaus, he noticed that the priest and the man in the tweed suit were engaged already in such deep conversation that they hardly noticed him as he passed and raised his hat.

He started off briskly, well remembering the way, and hoping to reach the village in time to have a word with one of the Brüder. They might even ask him in for a cup of coffee. He felt sure of his welcome, and the old memories were in full possession once more. The hour of return was a matter of no consequence whatever.

It was then just after seven o’clock, and the October evening was drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. The road plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a very few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell dead and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. It was very black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. He walked smartly, swinging his holly stick. Once or twice he passed a peasant on his way to bed, and the guttural “Gruss Got,” unheard for so long, emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. A fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. Again the figures of former schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side, whispering of the doings of long ago. One reverie stepped hard upon the heels of another. Every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest, he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. He enjoyed himself thoroughly.

He marched on and on. There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the forest caverns across the years.

Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing. He walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church next to the Gasthof der Brüdcrgemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school building, blocked castle-like with deep shadows in the moonlight, standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more than a quarter of a century.

He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him prisoner for two years—two unbroken years of discipline and homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces crowded to the windows to greet him—closed windows that really reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.

This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the corners. For a long time he stood and stared.

Then, presently, he came to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in the windows of the
Brüderstube.

He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.

Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut something of a figure?

“I’ll try once more,” he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.

A tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in silence.

“I must apologize—it is somewhat late,” he began a trifle pompously, “but the fact is I am an old pupil. I have only just arrived and really could not restrain myself.” His German seemed not quite so fluent as usual. “My interest is so great. I was here in ‘70.”

The other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of genuine welcome.

“I am Brüder Kalkmann,” he said quietly in a deep voice. “I myself was a master here about that time. It is a great pleasure always to welcome a former pupil.” He looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then added, “I think, too, it is splendid of you to come—very splendid.”

“It is a very great pleasure,” Harris replied, delighted with his reception.

The dimly-lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the familiar sound of a German voice echoing through it—with the peculiar intonation the Brothers always used in speaking—all combined to lift him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten days. He stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. He almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of having lost his liberty.

Harris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor.

“The boys have retired,” he explained, “and, as you remember, we keep early hours here. But, at least, you will join us for a little while in the
Brüderstube
and enjoy a cup of coffee.” This was precisely what the silk merchant had hoped, and he accepted with an alacrity that he intended to be tempered by graciousness. “And to-morrow,” continued the Brüder, “you must come and spend a whole day with us. You may even find acquaintances, for several pupils of your day have come back here as masters.”

For one brief second there passed into the man’s eyes a look that made the visitor start. But it vanished as quickly as it came. It was impossible to define. Harris convinced himself it was the effect of a shadow cast by the lamp they had just passed on the wall. He dismissed it from his mind.

“You are very kind, I’m sure,” he said politely. “It is perhaps a greater pleasure to me than you can imagine to see the place again. Ah”—he stopped short opposite a door with the upper half of glass and peered in—“surely there is one of the music rooms where I used to practise the violin. How it comes back to me after all these years!”

Brüder Kalkmann stopped indulgently, smiling, to allow his guest a moment’s inspection.

“You still have the boy’s orchestra? I remember I used to play
‘zweite Geige’
in it. Brüder Schliemann conducted at the piano. Dear me, I can see him now with his long black hair and—and—” He stopped abruptly. Again the odd, dark look passed over the stern face of his companion. For an instant it seemed curiously familiar.

“We still keep up the pupils’ orchestra,” he said, “but Brüder Schliemann, I am sorry to say—” he hesitated an instant, and then added, “Brüder Schliemann is dead.”

“Indeed, indeed,” said Harris quickly. “I am sorry to hear it.” He was conscious of a faint feeling of distress, but whether it arose from the news of his old music teacher’s death, or—from something else—he could not quite determine. He gazed down the corridor that lost itself among shadows. In the street and village everything had seemed so much smaller than he remembered, but here, inside the school building, everything seemed so much bigger. The corridor was loftier and longer, more spacious and vast, than the mental picture he had preserved. His thoughts wandered dreamily for an instant.

He glanced up and saw the face of the Brüder watching him with a smile of patient indulgence.

“Your memories possess you,” he observed gently, and the stern look passed into something almost pitying.

“You are right,” returned the man of silk, “they do. This was the most wonderful period of my whole life in a sense. At the time I hated it—” He hesitated, not wishing to hurt the Brother’s feelings.

“According to English ideas it seemed strict, of course,” the other said persuasively, so that he went on.

“—Yes, partly that; and partly the ceaseless nostalgia, and the solitude which came from never being really alone. In English schools the boys enjoy peculiar freedom, you know.”

Brüder Kalkmann, he saw, was listening intently.

“But it produced one result that I have never wholly lost,” he continued self-consciously, “and am grateful for.”

“Ack! Wie so, denn!”

“The constant inner pain threw me headlong into your religious life, so that the whole force of my being seemed to project itself towards the search for a deeper satisfaction—a real resting place for the soul. During my two years here I yearned for God in my boyish way as perhaps I have never yearned for anything since. Moreover, I have never quite lost that sense of peace and inward joy which accompanied the search. I can never quite forget this school and the deep things it taught me.”

He paused at the end of his long speech, and a brief silence fell between them. He feared he had said too much, or expressed himself clumsily in the foreign language, and when Brüder Kalkmann laid a hand upon his shoulder, he gave a little involuntary start.

“So that my memories perhaps do possess me rather strongly,” he added apologetically; “and this long corridor, these rooms, that barred and gloomy front door, all touch chords that—that—” His German failed him and he glanced at his companion with an explanatory smile and gesture. But the Brother had removed hand from his shoulder and was standing with his back to him, looking down the passage.

“Naturally, naturally so,” he said hastily without turning round.
“Es ist doch selbstverständlich.
We shall all understand.”

Then he turned suddenly, and Harris saw that his face had turned most oddly and disagreeably sinister. It may only have been the shadows again playing their tricks with the wretched oil lamps on the wall, for the dark expression passed instantly as they retraced their steps down the corridor, but the Englishman somehow got the impression that he had said something to give offence, something that was not quite to the other’s taste. Opposite the door of the
Brüderstube
they stopped. Harris realised that it was late and he had possibly steady talking too long. He made a tentative effort to leave, but his companion would not hear of it.

“You must have a cup of coffee with us,” he said firmly as though he meant it, “and my colleagues will be delighted to see you. Some of them will remember you, perhaps.”

The sound of voices came pleasantly through the door, men’s voices talking together. Brüder Kalkmann turned the handle and they entered a room ablaze with light and full of people.

“Ah—but your name?” he whispered, bending down to catch the reply; “you have not told me your name yet.”