Fay’s knowledge of German was limited. He knew no Dutch at all. He labored under the delusion that the language of the Fatherland would serve for Holland. The presence of the German soldier had seemed to carry this out.
The maid’s stupid stare told him that he had not been understood. He turned toward the German deserter. It seemed irony that he should use such a man for the furtherance of his purpose.
“Here, Heinrich,� he said, passing over a gold piece, “get busy! Drinks all around and then a motor car. Ask these people if there is one in the burg.�
The German was not too drunk to know the color of gold. He said something to the girl in Dutch, snatched up his stein, drained it and hurried out through the doorway. Fay tasted the bitter beer brought to him by the maid, lifted his eyes over the edge of the stein and strained his ears.
A hoarse siren blared the night. The ship was leaving the quay. The hour was not yet ten. Fay darted swift glances over the drinkers. He studied a picture which might have been painted by Rubens or Franz Hals. A slow fire burned in a great open fireplace. The crude tables, the broad-faced roisterers, the silent girls with their long pig-tails and meek eyes held him until a sound was driven through a quarter-open window. This sound was the exhaust from an open muffler. It had an American suggestion in its sharp notes.
Fay carefully avoided the nearest table, bowed to
the maid as he drew his coat about his knees, and pressed open the door. He stood under the front thatch of the inn. He smiled with quick appreciation as the round, moon-like discs of two headlamps burned through the fog, shot off across the Lowland, then steadied and grew brighter.
“A flivver!â€� he exclaimed. “By all that’s holy—it’s from the States.â€�
A Dutch boy in an impossible make-up of leathern coat and bright, peaked cap drove up and almost catapulted the drunken German to the road’s cobbles as the brake went on with a protesting squeak.
Fay lifted the German soldier from the dashboard and steadied him on his wobbling legs, where he stood like a limp mannikin ready to topple over.