bedstead with a vast _édredon_, like a giant pincushion. My candle,
guttering wildly in the unaccustomed breeze blowing dankly through the
chamber, was the sole illuminant. There was neither gas nor electric
light laid on.

The house had relapsed into quiet. The bedroom had an evil look and
this, combined with the dank air from the canal, gave my thoughts a
sombre tinge.

"Well," I said to myself, "you're a nice kind of ass! Here you are, a
British officer, posing as a brother Hun in a cut-throat Hun hotel, with
a waiter who looks like the official Prussian executioner. What's going
to happen to you, young feller my lad, when Madame comes along and finds
you have a British passport? A very pretty kettle of fish, I must say!

"And suppose Madame takes it into her head to toddle along up here
to-night and calls your bluff and summons the gentle Hans or Fritz or
whatever that ruffianly waiter's name is to come upstairs and settle
your hash! What sort of a fight are you going to put up in that narrow
corridor out there with a Hun next door and probably on every side of
you, and no exit this end? You don't know a living soul in Rotterdam and
no one will be a penny the wiser if you vanish off the face of the
earth ... at any rate no one on this side of the water."

Starting to undress, I noticed a little door on the left-hand side of
the bed. I found it opened into a small _cabinet de toilette_, a narrow
slip of a room with a wash-hand stand and a very dirty window covered
with yellow paper. I pulled open this window with great difficulty--it
cannot have been opened for years--and found it gave on to a very small
and deep interior court, just an air shaft round which the house was