The nearness of the German frontier began to rise like a wall in front of him. This question had to be answered: Did he want to cross it after all?
His answer was to mount the steps of the local gendarmerie.
His Prussian severity of countenance, now that he was dressed in every point like a vagabond, without hat and his hair disordered, five days’ beard on his chin—this sternness of the German warrior gave him the appearance of a scowling ruffian. The agent on duty, who barred his passage brutally before the door of the inner office, scowling too, classed him as a depraved cut-throat vagabond, and considered his voluntary entrance into the police-station as an act not only highly suspicious and unaccountable in itself, but of the last insolence.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il te faut?”
“Foir le Commissaire,” returned Kreisler.
“Tu ne peux pas le voir. Il n’y est pas.”
A few more laconic sentences followed, the agent reiterating sulkily that the magistrate was not there. But he was eyeing Kreisler doubtfully and turning something over in his mind.
The day before, two Germans had been arrested in the neighbourhood as spies, and were now locked up in this building until further evidence should be collected on the affair. It is extremely imprudent for a German to loiter on the frontier on entering France. It is much wiser for him to push on at once—neither looking to right nor left—pretending especially not to notice hills, unnatural military-looking protuberances, ramparts, etc.—to hurry on as rapidly as possible to the interior. But the two men in question were carpenters by profession, and both carried huge foot-rules in their pockets. The local authorities on this discovery were in a state of the deepest consternation. They shut them up, with their implements, in the most inaccessible depths of the local police-station. And it was in the doorway of this building—all the intermittant inhabitants of which were in a state of hysterical speculation, that Kreisler had presented himself.
The agent, who had recognized a German by his accent and manner, at last turned and disappeared through the door, telling him to wait. He reappeared with several superiors. All of them crowded in the doorway and surveyed Kreisler blankly. One asked in a voice of triumphant suspicion: