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“We got that to-day,” said his chief unexpectedly.

The startled Heckstall stared at him for the second time and slowly coloured to his eyes.

“It came in the diplomatic bag from the British Embassy in Berlin to-day,” the Foreign Office

man went on. “It was written—or rather, typed—on British Embassy notepaper, enclosed in an

official envelope, and tied up with a number of confidential documents about another rather

important matter which we’d rather they hadn’t read. And all this in spite of the fact that not only

was the bag not tampered with—and it was not left unwatched for a single instant—but no

attempt was made at any time to approach it. The King’s Messenger assures me of that.”

“Reminds me of Maskelyne and Devant,” said the Colonel.

“I suppose,” said Wilcox, who had been rubbing his hand over his head till his hair stood

straight on end like a scrubbing-brush, “the Messenger is all right?”

“I’ll have him watched, shall I?” said his harassed superior. “And the Ambassador too,

while I’m about it? Wilcox, I haven’t seen you do that since ’17.”

“I’ve had no occasion,” said Wilcox. “Any suggestions, Colonel?”

“No,” said the War Office man slowly. “Only—Reck used to keep silkworms.”

There was a German Naval Hospital at the top of the Avenue de la Reine in Ostende in

the latter part of the Great War, and in January 1918 a man was brought in, completely

unconscious, and clad only in his underwear. He had been picked up on the beach, having

evidently swum or floated ashore, and in addition to suffering from exhaustion and exposure, he

was wounded in the head. When they had cleaned, dried and patched him up they stood round

his bed and looked at him.

“The injury at the back of the skull,” said the senior house-surgeon, “may give us trouble,

it is impossible to say how much damage has been done to the brain. The facial injuries are

trivial.”

“He’ll have a couple of lovely duelling scars when they heal up,” said the medical

student. “Simply too Heidelberg for words.”

“One is prompted to wonder how he received them,” said the ward sister in her prim

voice. “The contused wound in the occipital region is more easily explicable.”

“He can hardly have been fighting a duel in the sea,” said the surgeon, who had a literal

mind.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the student. “Two fellows desiring to shun publicity while they

settle their differences, what could be better? Hop on a raft and shove off, loser’s body is

automatically and hygienically disposed of by the conger of the deep, winner paddles happily

ashore, what?”

“He would appear to have thrown both the seconds to the conger-eels too, my good

Muller,” said the surgeon.

“Of course, and while he was dealing with one of them, the other clouted him with the

paddle, hence the contused wound in the occipital region.”

“One is perhaps permitted to doubt whether the explanation is meant to be taken

seriously,” said the ward sister.

“No doubt at all, it isn’t,” said Muller, “but it’s a dashed good one.”

Their patient stirred suddenly, mumbled something, and then said in a clear, commanding

voice, “Look at that, you insubordinate hound!” He shifted uneasily, and the sister slipped her

arm behind his shoulder lest he should slide down and disarrange the dressings on his head.

“If he is going to be restless,” said the surgeon, “he will have to be watched. He may

have a morphia injection.”

“Yes, sir,” said the ward sister.

“He is certainly an officer,” said Muller. “All that insubordinate hound business is quite

definitely Potsdam.”

“I think he may have received his injuries from a bursting shell,” said the surgeon, “when

there was all that firing from the coastal batteries early this morning—a mysterious light

offshore, I understand. As to how he came to be swimming about out there, I have no conjecture

to offer, unless he was washed off a submarine.”

“Or escaped from Donington Hall and just swam across,” suggested Muller.

“I think your remarks are regrettably frivolous,” said the house-surgeon, who always

disciplined with difficulty. “No doubt he will tell us all about himself in the morning.”

But the surgeon was wrong, for his patient was quite unable to give any account of

himself in the morning. While he was being dragged unwillingly back from the fringes of

pneumonia, he talked incessantly in the German of the educated classes, but there was never

enough continuity in his remarks to give them any clue as to what or who he was. In fact, apart

from telling them in a wonderful variety of well-chosen phrases what he thought of some

gunners and their shooting, he did not refer to his past at all. So things went on until the day

came when the stranger opened his eyes and looked about him intelligently.

The ward sister was informed of it and came to bend over him and give him the usual

encouragement. “There now,” she said cheerfully, “you are a lot better this morning, aren’t

you?”

Her patient made an effort to speak, and she expected the usual “Where am I?” but to her

surprise he said, “Who am I?” instead. She thought she must have misunderstood him, and

answered, “You are in the Ostende Naval Hospital. You’ll have some nice soup now and go to

sleep again, you’ll be—”

“I see it’s a hospital,” he whispered feebly. “What I said was, ‘Who am I?’”

“Never mind that now,” she said, “you’ll remember presently when you are stronger.”

The nurse who brought his soup smiled at him and said, “I’ll help you to drink it, shall

I?” but instead of thanking her he stared at her and asked, “Who am I?”

“You poor dear,” she said. “Don’t worry about it now. Drink this and go to sleep. I

expect you’ll remember when you wake up again.”

He obeyed her and dropped at once into the sudden easy sleep of weakness, but neither

when he awoke again, nor the next day, nor for very many days to come did he remember who

he was. He soon left off asking his pathetic question, but there remained in his eyes the puzzled,

hurt expression of a child to whom some inexplicable unkindness has been done, though he was

plainly a man in the late twenties. Once the senior house-surgeon, Lehmann, passing through the

ward very late at night, heard small uneasy sounds from the direction of the stranger’s bed, and

discovered him awake and struggling with a frightful attack of panic.

“My dear fellow,” said Lehmann kindly, “what is the matter?”

“I don’t know—I’m frightened. I don’t know who I am. Oh, God! Tell me who I am!”

“Hush, gently,” said the surgeon, taking a firm hold of the hot hands which clung to him

for comfort. “Don’t wake the others. Try to calm yourself; you will make yourself ill again.

There is nothing to be afraid of.”

“But there is! You see, I don’t know what I’ve done, do I? I may be some criminal—and

some day somebody may walk up to me and say, ‘Ha! Got you at last!’ and they’ll put me in

prison for years and perhaps hang me, and I’ll never know what it’s all about. Oh, God—”

“Listen to me,” said Lehmann in a tone of authority. “You are frightening yourself with

shadows. Do you think that we, whose lives are spent in seeing mankind in its worst moments,

do not know good from bad? I don’t know who you are, but I will stake every penny I have that

you are perfectly all right. Even when you were most delirious you never said anything brutal or

base, and in your utmost weakness you were courteous and unwilling to give trouble. You a

criminal? Nonsense! Turn over and go to sleep again, you are torturing yourself for nothing,

believe me.”

“But,” objected his patient, still only half-convinced, “some criminals are delightful

people, I believe. Even a murderer might be. It doesn’t mean you’re all evil if you have killed

somebody—if you have killed somebody you—I can’t remember—”

“Stop that at once,” said Lehmann. “As for killing somebody, since there is a war on and

you are of military age, I should think it’s quite probable you have. You must pull yourself

together. I am going to get you something to drink, and then you will lie down and go to sleep

again, and we will have no more of this. In the meantime, think this over. You may or may not

have killed somebody, has it occurred to you that it’s more likely that you have married

somebody?”

In the abysmal silence which followed this appalling suggestion, Lehmann disengaged

himself and went away. When he returned with a glass in his hand he found his patient lying

quietly back on his pillows murmuring to himself.

“Margareta. Marie. Julie. Helene. Susanne. Elsa—Elsa. No, I don’t think so. Klara.

Anna.” He looked up with a sparkle of fun in his eyes. “Do I look married?”

“Not particularly,” said Lehmann, “and you don’t wear a wedding-ring. But men don’t

always wear one, and besides you might have lost it. Drink this.”

“Fancy me with a wife,” said the stranger, between sips. “This stuff is rather nice. I

wonder what she’s like.”

“I should think you’d be a good picker,” said the surgeon judicially, “I have noticed you

betraying a certain discrimination in the matter of nurses.”

“You are extraordinarily good to me. I wish I had a name, though.”

“You can have mine if you like,” said Lehmann diffidently, “till you find your own. I am

quite sure it will be safe with you.”

“If you’re so damned decent to me,” said his patient chokily, “I shall blub on your

shoulder in a minute. I say, d-do you think I’ve got a family?”

“I should say at least eight,” said the surgeon, patting his shoulder.

“All with noses that want blowing?”

“Oh, go to sleep—Lehmann,” said Lehmann senior, and went away laughing to himself.

The next day a committee of nurses round the stranger’s bed christened him, after

discussion, Klaus, because he came from the sea and Nikolaus is the patron saint of sailors, and

Klaus Lehmann, feeling already that he had the beginning of an identity again, started life afresh.

When he was well enough to be discharged from hospital they sent him to Hamburg on

the assumption that if, as seemed likely, he had been in the Imperial Navy, he was more likely to

come across someone who knew him in a Naval base than anywhere else in Germany. He said

good-bye to the only people whom he knew in all the world, and set out for Hamburg in a state

of trepidation which he knew he had felt before somewhere, and when he was thinking of

something else the memory-returned to him. He had felt like that when he was a small boy and

was sent, all by himself, to the dentist.

This was so wonderful that his spirits rose with a leap. Then his memory was not

destroyed, only stunned, and one day some door would reopen in his brain and he would be a

person again, with a home and friends and relations of his own. He still shied at the thought of a

wife, probably because he was still too weak to bear the thought of responsibility. He tried to

remember more about the dentist, but that was a failure. Never mind, it was a beginning. “When

I was a little boy,” he said to an imaginary hearer—the carriage being empty—”I used to be sent

to the dentist all by myself. Spartan training, what?” Splendid.

He was so uplifted that he stepped out of the train at Hamburg with his chin well up and

his chest thrown out, and began to run up the steps which led to the road level, when suddenly to

his rage and disgust his knees bent beneath him and he found himself sitting abruptly and

watching his little suit-case bumping away down the stairs again, right to the bottom, miles away

.... He closed his eyes and clutched the banisters. Six people rushed instantly to his assistance,

three of them tried to pick him up while the other three patted him and told him to sit still and

take it easy. Four more people brought him his suit-case, and a porter came with a glass of water.

“Thank you a thousand times,” said poor Klaus, feeling horribly conspicuous. “I am sorry

—so stupid of me, my legs gave way.”

“It is no wonder, my poor man. You have been wounded.”

“But only in the head, gracious lady.”

“The head controls the legs, or should do so. Lean on my arm.”

“Let me help you on this other side.”

“Take it easy, these stairs are steep.”

“I have your suit-case, it is safe with me.”

“My brother has attacks, just like this.”

“My sister’s husband also, but he turns quite blue.”

“There we are at the top. Would you like to rest a moment?”

“Where do you wish to go?”

“I think you should have some coffee. It is a stimulant.”

“I think he should go and lie down quite flat. My brother always does.”

“My sister’s husband, on the other hand—”

“I think I will take a cab,” said Klaus, who felt he would really like to be alone, “the air

will restore me.”

“You may be right, if the movement does not upset you.”

“Have you far to go?”

“Are you going to friends?”

“It is plain to me, gracious lady,” said Klaus, “that in the city of Hamburg everyone is a

friend.”

They chose him the cab with the steadiest-looking horse on the rank, commended him to