The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole

"Sit down, Frederick," said his sister. "What can I do for you?"

It seemed that he had come simply to talk to her. He was going down to Little Roseberry that evening, but he had an hour to spare. The fact was that he was besieged, invaded, devastated by horrors of which he could not rid himself.

If he gave them to someone else might they not leave him? At any rate he would share them—he would share them with his sister. It appeared that an officer, liberated from Germany after the Armistice, had sought him out and given him some last details about his son's death.

These "details" were not nice. There are, as we all know, German prisons and German prisons. Young Morganhurst seemed to have been sent to one of the poorer sort. He had been rebellious and had been punished; he had been starved, shut up for days in solitary darkness ... at the end he had found a knife somewhere and had killed himself.

The old man's mind was like a haystack, and many details lost their way in the general confusion. He told what he could to his sister. It must have been a strange meeting: the shabby old man sitting in one of those gaudy chairs trying to rid himself of his horror and terror and, above all, of his loneliness. Here was the only relation, the only link, the only hope of something human to comfort him in his darkness; and he did not know her, could not see how to appeal to her or to touch her ... she was as strange to him as a bird of paradise. She on her side, as I now can see, had her own horror to fight. Here at last was the thing that throughout the war she had struggled to keep away from her. She knew, and she alone, how susceptible she was! But she could not turn him away; he was her brother, and she hated him for coming—shabby old man—but she must hear him out.

She sat there, the dog clutched, shivering to her skinny breast. I don't suppose that she said very much, but she listened. Against her will she listened, and it must have been with her as it is with some traveller when, in the distance, he hears the rushing of the avalanche that threatens to overwhelm him. But she didn't close her ears. From what she said afterwards one knows that she must have heard everything that he said.

He very quickly, I expect, forgot that he had an audience at all. The words poured out. There was some German officer who had been described to him and he had grown, in his mind, to be the very devil himself. He was a brute, I daresay, but there are brutes in every country....

"He had done simply nothing—just spoken back when they insulted him. They took his clothes off him—everything. He was quite naked. And they mocked him like that, pricking him with their swords.... They put him into darkness ... a filthy place, no sanitation, nothing.... They twisted his arms. They made him imagine things, horrible things. When he had dysentery they just left him.... They made him drink ... forced it down his throat...."

How much of it was true? Very little, I daresay. Even as the old man told it details gathered and piled up. "He had always been such a good boy. Very gentle and quiet—never any trouble at school.... I was hoping that he would be ordained, as you know, Dahlia. He always loved life ... one of the happiest boys. What did they do it for? He hadn't done them any harm. They must have made him very angry for him to say what he did—and he didn't say very much.... And he was all alone. He hadn't any of his friends with him. And they kept his parcels and letters from him. I'd just sent him one or two little things...."

This, more than anything else, distressed the old man: that they'd kept the letters from the boy. It was the loneliness that seemed to him the most horrible of all.