e, meeting all obstacles with fierce welcome, forcing his
way onward, indifferent to the misery and destruction caused by his
progress, his eyes never swerving from their goal; yet not without a
sense of rough justice, not altogether without kindliness when it could
be indulged in without danger.

One afternoon he took me with him into the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam,
and threading his way without hesitation through its maze of unsavoury
slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house overlooking a
stagnant backwater.

"The room I was born in," he explained. "Window with the broken pane
on the second floor. It has never been mended."

I stole a glance at him. His face betrayed no suggestion of sentiment,
but rather of amusement. He offered me a cigar, which I was glad of,
for the stench from the offal-laden water behind us was distracting,
and for a while we both smoked in silence: he with his eyes
half-closed; it was a trick of his when working out a business problem.

"Curious, my making such a choice," he remarked. "A butcher's
assistant for my father and a consumptive buttonhole-maker for my
mother. I suppose I knew what I was about. Quite the right thing for
me to have done, as it turned out."

I stared at him, wondering whether he was speaking seriously or in grim
jest. He was given at times to making odd remarks. There was a vein
of the fantastic in him that was continually cropping out and
astonishing me.

"It was a bit risky," I suggested. "Better choose something a little
safer next time."

He looked round at me sharply, and, not quite sure of his mood, I kept
a grave face.

"Perhaps you are right," he agreed, with a laugh. "We must have a talk
about it one day."

After that visit to the Goortgasse he was less reserved with me, and
would often talk to me on subjects that I should never have guessed
would have interested him. I found him a curious mixture. Behind the
shrewd, cynical man of business I caught continual glimpses of the
visionary.

I parted from him at The Hague. He paid my fare back to London, and
gave me an extra pound for travelling expenses, together with the
ten-pound note he had promised me. He had packed off "Mrs. Horatio
Jones" some days before, to the relief, I imagine, of both of them, and
he himself continued his journey to Berlin. I never expected to see
him again, although for the next few months I often thought of him, and
even tried to discover him b