r door.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Essen Barges

I lay for four days like a log in that garret bed. The storm died
down, the thaw set in, and the snow melted. The children played about
the doors and told stories at night round the fire. Stumm's myrmidons
no doubt beset every road and troubled the lives of innocent wayfarers.
But no one came near the cottage, and the fever worked itself out while
I lay in peace.

It was a bad bout, but on the fifth day it left me, and I lay, as weak
as a kitten, staring at the rafters and the little skylight. It was a
leaky, draughty old place, but the woman of the cottage had heaped
deerskins and blankets on my bed and kept me warm. She came in now and
then, and once she brought me a brew of some bitter herbs which greatly
refreshed me. A little thin porridge was all the food I could eat, and
some chocolate made from the slabs in my rucksack.

I lay and dozed through the day, hearing the faint chatter of children
below, and getting stronger hourly. Malaria passes as quickly as it
comes and leaves a man little the worse, though this was one of the
sharpest turns I ever had. As I lay I thought, and my thoughts
followed curious lines. One queer thing was that Stumm and his doings
seemed to have been shot back into a lumber-room of my brain and the
door locked. He didn't seem to be a creature of the living present,
but a distant memory on which I could look calmly. I thought a good
deal about my battalion and the comedy of my present position. You see
I was getting better, for I called it comedy now, not tragedy.

But chiefly I thought of my mission. All that wild day in the snow it
had seemed the merest farce. The three words Harry Bullivant had
scribbled had danced through my head in a crazy fandango. They were
present to me now, but coolly and sanely in all their meagreness.

I remember that I took each one separately and chewed on it for hours.
_Kasredin_--there was nothing to be got out of that. _Cancer_--there
were too many meanings, all blind. _V. I._--that was the worst
gibberish of all.

Before this I had always taken the I as the letter of the alphabet. I
had thought the v. must stand for von, and I had considered the German
names beginning with I--Ingolstadt, Ingeburg, Ingenohl, and all the
rest of them. I had made a list of about seventy at the British Museum
before I left London.

Now I suddenly found myself taking the I as the numeral One. Idly, not