I said nothing. I merely saluted and set off upon his errand.
But I did not find the girl at the street corner he had mentioned. I went on, only a few hundred yards, to the store. There was a dim blue light in one of its windows, and I crept up and pressed my face against the glass, knowing that she was probably sitting up and waiting.
Yes, she was there—behind the counter with her shawl still over her head and her eyes fixed on the cheap wall clock. She could not see me in the darkness outside—not even when she turned her head and gave me a full view of her face, so that I could see how strangely pale and set it was, and how deeply lurking in her eyes was the fear of the moment.
I did not go in and tell her anything. I could not. The sight of her and the appeal of her thin, tragic little body sent me hurrying back with my errand uncompleted—and glad, madly glad that it was so.
I crept up to bed as soon as I was "in bounds" again. I wanted to avoid Sydney. Nor would I give him a chance to speak to me the next morning. I felt that I knew now, almost in its entirety, the scheme he was laying—and the climax which was fast approaching. And, after having seen her, as I did last night, I knew that I could never go walking with him again or have more to do with him, and that I must go back to her, some day soon, traitor-wise, and warn her against him who had been my best friend.
In the afternoon, after school was done, a crowd of us obtained permission to go swimming in a nearby lake. Sydney was among us: the leader of us, in fact. He tried to speak to me—perhaps he was going to apologize to me for having called me a Jew—I do not know. But, though I did not give him the chance, I remember well how tall and brave he looked, and how his hair waved back from his forehead like Steerforth's.
And like Steerforth, too, he was drowned.
Schoolboys are careless of their swimming. We did not notice until it was long too late that Sydney had disappeared. When his body was recovered, the doctors worked over it for fully two hours. But it was no use.
His funeral was held in the school parlor the next morning. But it had been a night of terrors, of whispering groups, of Death's shadow over us all—and we were but children. His empty bed, his dress uniform tossed carelessly over the back of a chair, the knowledge of his insensible presence in the undertaker's shop at the other end of town ... brought fear and wakefulness to us all.