From the hall I heard a steady gentle voice talking, talking, talking. “Mr. Solslog,” I hailed him. The voice stopped. He must have stepped swiftly from the thick carpet to the tiled floor of the hall, for he came like a man running.
“You-all here, suh,” he asked, without an interrogative lift to the question. “Let me--let me hold on to your hand for a minute. I--I’m right glad to see you. They’ve just--I’ve just got out.” He gathered his voice and breath for a tremendous effort. His next sentence came like a blast of prophecy. “Oh, may God damn the Germans!” he screamed.
“Leon,” I shouted, “bring brandy, quick!”
“Oh, no, suh; not for me. I don’t use it.” Mr. Solslog gently released my hands and walked beside me into the reception room. His face was whiter than before, the lines in it deeper, and the pathetic, patient eyes stranger than when I had seen him last; but the fever fit of passion passed and left him calm as usual.
“I haven’t found my sistah--it isn’t that,” he explained in his slow, drawling voice. “I’ve jist got out of prison here in Antwerp, suh. I told the German officer if I ever see him again I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him if I ever see him again. I’m going to----”
“Yes, yes,” I said soothingly. The monotonous recitative I had heard on first entering the house had begun.
“I told him I’d kill him, I’d kill him, suh, kill him, I’d kill him----”
“Oh, yes.” He gathered himself together. “I went to Brussels and Charleyroy--I say I’ll kill him--and Maw-booge. She ain’t there--at none of those places. I dream about her all the time, I see her and hear her. Preehaps you don’t altogether understand me. Suh--they’re chokin’ her--and--and mistreatin’ her, the Germans are, suh; and she’s callin’ to me--screamin’ and callin’--I told him I’d kill him! Then I come back to Malines. I got a paper from the burgomaster to go out and see ’em diggin’ up the dead Belgian soldiers and buryin’ ’em in new cemeteries.” Some wild, morbid impulse must have led him to do this thing. “And the Germans caught me, suh. They said my passport was expired. I cain’t read German, suh, so how was I to know? They drug me up here to Antwerp, and a German officer--I told him I’d kill him--and in the police place, he said I was an English spy. They stripped me, suh. They searched my skin. They took photygraphs of my clothes and looked at my collar against a light. They even went over my money with a microscope and looked under my hair to see if anything was tattooed on to me. I told that officer I’d kill him!