Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/201

poison gas! Here it was again. The same mysterious allusion. First Professor Kreutzer had spoken of it, and now the baron.

But what did they mean? What did it signify?

Finally, obeying the suggestion of the dusty laboratory windows looking down on him from their stone frames, Takagawa reentered the building and went straight to Professor Kreutzer's lecture room.

He found the latter seated at his desk, his chin cupped in his hands, his haggard face flushed and congested. The man seemed to be laboring under an excitement which played on every quivering nerve of his body; the hand supporting the lean chin showed the high-swelling veins, and trembled.

He looked up as Takagawa entered, and broke into a harsh bellow of laughter. "Come back, have you, you stunted yellow peril!"

"Yes. I want to ask you about—about the gas."

Again the professor laughed boisterously.

"The gas!" he cried. "The poison gas! To be sure! Not quite as innocent as you made yourself out to be a while back, are you? Well, by God, I'll tell you about the poison gas! Got a remarkable sort of brain, haven't you? Retentive faculty abnormally developed—don't need written notes or any other sort of asses bridge, eh? Just as good! Couldn't take anything written out of Germany. But your brain—your tenacious Oriental brain—they can't put that to the acid test! All right! Listen to me!"

Professor Kreutzer did not stop to dissect himself or his motives. He obeyed, not a feeling, a sudden impulse, but a pathological mood which was the growth of forty years. For forty years he had hated autocratic, imperial Germany. For forty years he had