“Good Lord,” Richard broke in; “I believe you enjoy feeling like that.”
And David laughed: “I believe I do. It’s our heritage—this succulent style of melancholy, like seaweed swelling richly under water, compared with which all other sorrow is like seaweed, hard and stale and crackly, on the dry sand.”
“Can’t say that either is my style. I just get damned sick about things. I’m damned sick at not being able to join up in the Flying Corps.”
“You’re only a semi-Jew, Marcus, in spite of the rich promise of your face.”
“I am only a semi-Jew; my mother was a Christian. And what’s wrong with my face?” Richard demanded truculently. “I say—where are you taking me?” as David swerved into a narrow street of tall dingy-looking buildings.
“It’s all right. I just want to bring them these books.” He ran up some steps of a house with the “To Let” board forlornly plastering the windows; and as the bell dangled broken from its socket, and no knocker was in evidence, banged with his fist on the panels of the front door.
“Rum,” thought Richard.
A tall, heavy-featured girl opened the door, and in silence led them to an unfurnished room littered with books and packing-cases and piles of tinned food. A babble of tongues struck harshly upon the ear.... For a second’s space of time Richard was walking up the wide twilit streets of Dorzheim—a dado of pines lowering blackly on the horizon—crowds brushing past, chattering—noisy guttural chatter from the pavements and cafés.... “You will see how many take off their hats to me....”
“This is my pal,” Redbury explained carelessly to the room at large. “He’s one of us——”
All Richard’s being uprose in a growl of contradiction. “One of us?” Why, these people were Germans—talking German, the whole gang of them—about eight or nine.... If he had been a tom-cat, he would have stiffened his fur and spat. As it was, he responded churlishly to salutations, and retired to a window-seat in the corner, from there to watch from beneath humped eyebrows the mysterious proceedings of these friends of David.