The woman burst into tears, while Otto blinked his watery eyes in terror.  I sat and looked at my plate, my heart too full for words.  It was bitter to have dared so much to get this far and then find the path blocked, as it seemed, by an insuperable barrier.  They were after me all right:  the mention of Clubfoot’s name, the swift, stern retribution that had befallen Kore, made that certain—­and I could do nothing.  That cellar was a cul-de-sac, a regular trap, and I knew that if I stirred a foot from the house I should fall into the hands of those men keeping their silent vigil in the street.

Therefore, I must wait, as calmly as I might, and see what the evening would bring forth.  Gradually the cellar filled up as people drifted in, but many familiar faces, I noticed, were missing.  Evidently the ill tidings had spread.  Once a man looked in for a glass of beer and drifted out again, leaving the door open.  As I was closing it, I heard a muffled exclamation and the sound of a scuffle at the head of the stairs.  It was so quietly done that nobody below, save myself, knew what had happened.  The incident showed me that the watch was well kept.

The evening wore on—­interminably, as it seemed to me.  I darted to and fro from the bar, laden with mugs of beer and glasses of schnaps, incessantly, up and down.  But I never failed, whenever there came a pause in the orders, to see that my journey finished somewhere in the neighbourhood of the door.  A faint hope was glimmering in my brain.

Until the end of my life, that interminable evening in the beer-cellar will remain stamped in my memory.  I can still see the scene in its every detail, and I know I shall carry the picture with me to the grave; the long, low room with its blackened ceiling, the garish yellow gaslight, the smoke haze, the crowded tables, Otto, shuffling hither and hither with his mean and sulky air, Frau Hedwig, preoccupied at her desk, red-eyed, a graven image of woe, and Haase, presiding over the beer-engine, silent, defiant, calm, but watchful every time the door opened.

When at last the blow fell, it came suddenly.  A trampling of feet on the stairs, a great blowing of whistles ... then the door was burst open just as everybody in the cellar sprang to their feet amid exclamations and oaths from the men and shrill screams from the women.  Outlined in the doorway stood Clubfoot, majestic, authoritative, wearing some kind of little skull-cap, such as duelling students wear, over a black silk handkerchief bound about his head.  At the sight of the man the hubbub ceased on the instant.  All were still save Haase, whose bull-like voice roaring for silence broke on the quiet of the room with the force of an explosion.

I was in my corner by the door, pressed back against the coats and hats hanging on the wall.  In front of me a frieze of frightened faces screened me from observation.  Quickly, I slipped off my apron.