The Leaning Tower

EARLY one morning on his sixth day in Berlin, on the twenty-seventh of December, 1931, Charles Upton left his dull little hotel in Hedemanstrasse and escaped to the café across the street. The air of the hotel was mysteriously oppressive to him; a yellow-faced woman and an ill-tempered looking fat man were the proprietors, and they seemed to be in perpetual conspiracy of some sort before open linen closets, in a corner of the dining room, along the halls, or over the account books behind a varnished desk in the lobby. His room was dark, airless, cold, and once when he had supper there, small white worms had come squirming out of the liver sausage on his plate. It was too expensive for him, besides, and he had decided to change. The café was dull, too, but with a look of thrifty cheerfulness, and Charles had pleasant associations with it. He had spent his first Christmas Eve in Europe there, among a small company of amiable noisy people who all seemed, by their conversation, to work in the same factory. No one but the old waiter had spoken to him, but the others talked heartily among themselves in what Charles recognized already as the Berlin accent, blunt, full of a wooden kind of clucking and quacking and explosive hissing. During his voyage on a German boat, the German passengers had taken occasion to praise each his own province in the matter of speech, but not one of them said a good word for Berlin in the matter, not even the Berliners themselves. Charles, who had learned his German partly from textbooks, partly from phonograph records, a little from listening to the Germans in his native town, heard with pleasure the tough speech, drank his beer slowly, the good dark beer that already had spoiled his taste for any other, and rather determinedly began to persuade himself that he had not made a mistake. Yes, Germany was the right place for him, Berlin was the city, Kuno had been right and would be glad if he could know his friend was here at last.

He had thought, fitfully, of Kuno all that Christmas Eve, instead of his parents, who wrote long letters timed to reach him at the holiday saying how gloomy they would be without him. He had sent them a cable and had meant to think of them constantly, but he had not. Again, sitting in the café in the morning, with a map of the city and a pamphlet for tourists containing a list of pensions with prices, he found himself remembering Kuno in rather sudden, unexpected pictures, even seeing himself as he was then, and these flashes of memory came against still other flashes, and back somewhere in the dark of his mind was the whole story, whatever it was. He and Kuno did not remember when they had not known each other. Their first recollection was of standing next each other in a row of children like themselves, singing, or some such nonsense—it must have been kindergarten. They had lived and had gone to school together in an old small city in Texas settled early by the Spaniards. Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, and Americans mostly from Kentucky had mingled there more or less comfortably for several generations, and though they were all equally citizens, the Spaniards, who were mainly rich and showy, went back to visit Spain from time to time. The Germans went back to Germany and the Mexicans, who lived mostly by themselves in the old quarter, went back to Mexico when they could afford it. Only the Kentuckians stayed where they were, rarely did any of them even go back to Kentucky, and though Charles heard them talk about the place often and lovingly, it seemed farther away and less desirable than Germany, because Kuno went there with his parents.

Though Kuno’s mother was said to be a Baroness in Germany, in Texas she was the wife of a prosperous merchant, a furniture dealer. The Kentuckians, who were gradually starving on the land, thought the land the only honorable means to a living, unless one entered a profession; and Charles, whose family made their living, such as it was, from a blackland farm, wondered at the pride with which Kuno would lead him past his father’s shop windows to show him the latest display of fashionable, highly polished and stuffed furniture. Looking through the broad clear window into the depths of the shop, Mr. Hillentafel, Kuno’s father, could be seen dimly, pencil behind his ear, in his black alpaca coat, his head inclined attentively before a customer. Charles, used to seeing his father on horseback, or standing about the barns with the Negroes, looking at the animals, or walking the fields in his big boots, or riding on the cast iron seat of a plow or harrow, felt he would have been ashamed to see his father in a store, following someone about trying to sell him something. The only time he had ever felt like fighting with Kuno was after Kuno had returned from the second visit to Germany, when they were both about eight years old. Kuno one day spoke contemptuously of farmers, calling them a name in German which Charles did not understand. “They’re as good as storekeepers,” Charles said in a fury. “Your papa’s just a storekeeper.” Kuno had shouted back, “My mother is a Baroness, and we were all born in Germany, so we would be Germans. In Germany only low-down people work on farms.”

“Well, if you are German, why don’t you go and live there?” Charles had shouted back, and Kuno had said very proudly, “There is a big war there, and they wanted to keep my mama and my papa and all of us there, but we had to come back.” Kuno then began to explain in a mystified way how they almost hadn’t got back; they had almost got locked up in a prison somewhere, but some big important people came and got them out, and in the exciting but confused tale which followed, Charles forgot his quarrel with Kuno. “It was because my mother is a Baroness,” Kuno said. “That is why we got away.”

But after the war, Mr. Hillentafel took his family back to Germany for a few months every two years, and Kuno’s postcards, with their foreign stamps, coming from far-off places like Bremen and Wiesbaden and Mannheim and Heidelberg and Berlin, had brought the great world across the sea, the blue silent deep world of Europe, straight to Charles’ door. When he returned, Kuno always had new, odd but serious-looking clothes. He brought fascinating mechanical toys; and later, neckties of strange rich material, coats with stitched pockets, and blunt-toed thick shoes of light brown leather, all made by hand, he said. Kuno would say in the little accent he always brought back and which took several weeks to wear off, “No, but if you don’t go to Berlin, you miss everything. We waste time always in those horrid little places, Mannheim and so on, we have to visit with our dull relatives, of course, they are stuck to the necks there, but in Berlin. . .” and he would talk for hours about Berlin until Charles in his imagination saw it as a great shimmering city of castles towering in misty light. How had he got such an image? Kuno had said only, “The streets are polished like a table top and they are as wide as—” he would measure with his eye the street they were walking in, a very narrow crooked dirty little street in an old colonial Spanish city—“oh, five times as wide as this. And the buildings—” he would glance up, disgust in his face for the flat roofs lowering over them—“they are all of stone and marble and are carved, carved all over, with pillars and statues everywhere and staircases wider than a house, winding. . .”

“My father says,” Charles said once, trying to keep abreast of all this knowledge of grandeur, “in Mexico the horses have silver bridles.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Kuno, “and if they do, it’s nonsense. Who would be so silly as to bridle a horse with silver? But in Berlin, there are marble houses carved all over with roses, loops of roses. . .”

“That sounds silly too,” said Charles, but feebly, because it did not sound silly at all, any more than did the silver bridles on the horses of Mexico. Those things were what he would like, what he most longed to see, and he said, easily, “I’ll go there too, some day.”

Kuno played the violin, and went twice a week to a stern old German teacher who cracked him over the head with a bow when he made mistakes; and his parents forced him to practice three hours every day. Charles wanted to paint and draw, but his parents thought he wasted time at it when he could have been doing something useful, like studying, so he merely scratched around with charcoal on odd sheets of paper, or dabbled for hours in some retired spot with brushes that shed hairs in his poorly equipped paint boxes. On the fourth or fifth voyage to Germany, when Kuno was about fifteen, he died there and was buried in Wiesbaden. His parents, bringing back, beside the elder brother and sister, a new baby, the second within Charles’ memory, were very silent on the subject. They were all fair, tall, lightboned, rather lifeless people, and Charles, who had no friendship with any of them but Kuno, hardly saw them or thought of them any more.

Charles, sitting in the café, trying to put his mind on the necessity for beginning a search for a cheaper room, thought, If it hadn’t been for Kuno I should never have come here. I would have gone to Paris, or to Madrid. Maybe I should have gone to Mexico. That’s a good place for painters. . . . This is not right. There is something wrong with the shapes, or the light, or something. . . .

His father had been to Mexico when he was young and had told Charles long stories, but Charles had never listened to him as he had to Kuno. So here he was, trying to be a painter, even believing by now that he was really going to be a good one, and he had come, as he believed, on a reasoned decision strictly his own. In his new, vague, almost shapeless misgivings, his half-acknowledged disappointment in the place—what was it?—he began to understand that he had come to Berlin because Kuno had made it seem the one desirable place to be. He hardly ever thought of Kuno any more, or had not for a long time, except simply as dead, though that went on being hard to believe; still it was just those colored postcards of Kuno’s and those stories, and the way Kuno had felt then, and had made him feel, that had brought him here. Soberly facing facts, he decided that wasn’t enough reason, not half enough. But still he decided also to stay, if he possibly could.

It would be four days until New Year’s, and Charles began to think seriously about money. The next boat would bring him a check from his father, who had decided, in a kind of mixed despair and pride in his son’s talent, to help him. Charles, keeping accounts in a book, had resolved it should all be repaid. The editor of a small art magazine was publishing a series of his drawings, and was going to pay for them. If these failed, he saw clearly that even beer for his New Year’s celebration would be out of the question. Still, at one time or another, the sooner the better, there would be a boat coming from America, and it would bring him money, not much, but enough to keep him going. Meantime, he thought of his expensive camera, which a Kentucky aunt had given him, and decided instantly to pawn it. He also had his grandfather’s big gold watch. Why, he was rich. This settled, the question went out of his mind, except for a faint uneasiness as to where his money had gone. In the days before Christmas he had dropped, rather carelessly, without counting, small change into the hats and outspread handkerchiefs of the men along the streets, who were making the most of their holiday licenses to beg. Some of them begged in orderly groups, singing carols familiar to him from the days when his parents took him to the German Singing Society at home: “Heilige Nacht,” “O Tannenbaum,” Martin Luther’s “Cradle Song,” in the familiar singing society voices, even, full, melodious. They had stood there with their ragged shoes sunk in the slushy snow, starving and blue-nosed, singing in their mourning voices, accepting coins with grave nods, keeping their eyes fixed on each other as they beat time softly with their hands.

Others stood alone, and these the most miserable, each man isolated in his incurable misfortune. Those blinded or otherwise mutilated in the war wore a certain band on their sleeves to prove that they had more than any others earned the right to beg, and merited special charity. Charles, with his almost empty pockets, nothing in them except the future, which he felt he owned, saw a tall young man so emaciated his teeth stood out in ridges under the mottled tight skin of his cheeks, standing at the curb with a placard around his neck which read: “I will take any work you can offer.” Almost furtively, Charles slipped a mark into the limp hollowed palm, then stepped into the doorway near by, and sheltered by fir trees piled before a shop, their sweet odor in his nostrils, with cold fingers he sketched hastily the stiff figure in its abject garments, surmounted by that skull of famine.

He walked on thinking it would be a relief when the necessity for appearing to celebrate something was over, remembering with the present smell of freshly cut fir the smell of apples along the curbs of New York streets, while he was roaming about the picture galleries waiting for his boat. Men stood shivering by the fruit, or patrolled the sidewalks, saying, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” The saying had become famous, a catchword, at once. Then almost overnight the whole thing had become simply a picturesque aspect of the times, a piece of local color, a current fad. Even if the plight of the men was real, it was not going to last; the breadlines were only temporary, the newspapers insisted, and gave strange wonderful far-fetched reasons for the situation, as if it had been a phenomenon of nature, like an earthquake, or a cloudburst.

Here, Charles could see, the misery was acknowledged as real and the sufferers seemed to know they had no reason for hope. There was none of the raffish manner of the apple-sellers, but just complete hopelessness and utter endurance. . . . Yet back of them the windows along Kurfürstendamm and Unter den Linden were filled with fine wools and furs and overcoats and great shining motor cars. Charles, walking and gazing, compared them with the New York windows back of the apple sellers and the beggars. They were by no means so fine, but where were the buyers? In New York the buyers streamed gaily in and out of shops, dropping dimes into extended hands. Here, a few dully dressed persons stood and stared, but when he glanced in, the shops were almost empty. The streets were full of young people, lean and tough, boys and girls alike dressed in leather jackets or a kind of uniform blue ski suit, who whizzed about the streets on bicycles without a glance at the windows. Charles saw them carrying skis on their shoulders, shouting and laughing in groups, getting away to the mountains over the weekend. He watched them enviously; maybe if he stayed on long enough he would know some of them, he would be riding a bicycle and going away for the skiing, too. It seemed unlikely, though.

He would wander on, and the thicker the crowd in which he found himself, the more alien he felt himself to be. He had watched a group of middle-aged men and women who were gathered in silence before two adjoining windows, gazing silently at displays of toy pigs and sugar pigs. These persons were all strangely of a kind, and strangely the most prevalent type. The streets were full of them—enormous waddling women with short legs and ill-humored faces and roundheaded men with great rolls of fat across the backs of their necks, who seemed to support their swollen bellies with an effort that drew their shoulders forward. Nearly all of them were leading their slender, overbred, short-legged dogs in pairs on fancy leashes. The dogs wore their winter clothes: wool sweaters, fur ruffs, and fleece-lined rubber boots. The creatures whined and complained and shivered, and their owners lifted them up tenderly to show them the pigs.

In one window there were sausages, hams, bacon, small pink chops; all pig, real pig, fresh, smoked, salted, baked, roasted, pickled, spiced, and jellied. In the other were dainty artificial pigs, almond paste pigs, pink sugar chops, chocolate sausages, tiny hams and bacons of melting cream streaked and colored to the very life. Among the tinsel and lace paper, at the back were still other kinds of pigs: plush pigs, black velvet pigs, spotted cotton pigs, metal and wooden mechanical pigs, all with frolicsome curled tails and appealing infant faces.

With their nervous dogs wailing in their arms, the people, shameless mounds of fat, stood in a trance of pig worship, gazing with eyes damp with admiration and appetite. They resembled the most unkind caricatures of themselves, but they were the very kind of people that Holbein and Dürer and Urs Graf had drawn, too: not vaguely, but positively like, their latemedieval faces full of hallucinated malice and a kind of sluggish but intense cruelty that worked its way up from their depths slowly through the layers of helpless gluttonous fat.

The thin snow continued to fall and whiten rounded shoulders and lumpy hat brims. Charles, feeling the flakes inside his collar, had walked on with intention to get away from the spectacle which struck him as revolting. He had walked on into Friedrichstrasse, where, in the early evening, the thin streetwalkers came out and moved rather swiftly in the middle of the pavement, and though they all appeared to be going somewhere, they never left each one her own certain fixed station. They seemed quite unapproachable to Charles in their black lace skirts and high gilded heels, their feathered hats and grease paint. On his first evening in Berlin a young unsmiling one had spoken to him, inviting him without enthusiasm to come with her. He had stammered a phrase which he hoped meant, “I haven’t time now,” fearing that she would insist. She had given him a serious, appraising glance, saw, to his shame, that the market was no good, and had turned away with an indifferent, “Well, good evening.” At home, his adventures had all been with girls he knew, and the element of chance had always been present. Any given occasion might go off very well, and it might not; he felt he had learned a lot from what he described to himself as the block and tackle, balance and check, trial and error method. These reserved-looking professional women, almost as regimented as soldiers in uniform, roused in him uneasy curiosity and distrust. He hoped quite constantly he was going to meet some gay young girls, students perhaps; there seemed to be plenty of them about, but not one had given him the eye yet. He had stopped in a doorway and hastily jotted a few broad-bottomed figures, sagging faces, and dressed pigs, in his notebook. He sketched a specially haggard and frustrated looking streetwalker with a preposterous tilt to her feathered hat. He tried at first not to be seen at his occupation, but discovered soon that he need not worry, for, in fact, nobody noticed him.

These rather scattered impressions were in his mind and he was very dissatisfied with all of them as he folded up his map and pamphlet and set out walking to find a room in Berlin. In the first dozen squares he counted five more of those rather sick-looking young men with fresh wounds in their cheeks, long heavy slashes badly mended with tape and cotton, and thought again that nobody had told him to expect that.

Two days later he was still tramping the snowy streets, ringing doorbells and crawling back to the little hotel in the evenings pretty well dead on his feet. On the morning of the third day, when his search brought him finally to the third floor of a solid looking apartment house in Bambergerstrasse, he took pains to observe very attentively the face of the woman who opened the door. In such a short time he had learned a wholesome terror of landladies in that city. They were smiling foxes, famished wolves, slovenly house cats, mere tigers, hyenas, furies, harpies: and sometimes worst of all they were sodden melancholy human beings who carried the history of their disasters in their faces, who all but wept when they saw him escape, as if he carried their last hope with him. Except for four winters in a minor southern university, Charles had lived at home. He had never looked for a lodging before, and he felt guilty, as if he had been peeping through cracks and keyholes, spying upon human inadequacy, its kitchen smells and airless bedrooms, the staleness of its poverty and the stuffiness of its prosperity. He had been shown spare cubbyholes back of kitchens where the baby’s wash was drying on a string while the desolate room waited for a tenant. He had been ushered into regions of gilded carving and worn plush, full of the smell of yesterday’s cabbage. He had ventured into bare expanses of glass brick and chrome-steel sparsely set out with white leather couches and mirror-topped tables, where, it always turned out, he would be expected to stay for a year at least, at frightening expense. He peered into a sodden little den fit, he felt, only for the scene of a murder; and into another where a sullen young woman was packing up, and the whole room reeked of some nasty perfume from her underwear piled upon the bed. She had given him a deliberately dirty smile, and the landlady had said something in a very brutal tone to her. But mostly, there was a stuffy tidiness, a depressing air of constant and unremitting housewifery, a kind of repellent gentility in room after room after room, varying only in the depth of feather bed and lavishness of draperies, and out of them all in turn he fled back to the street and the comparative freedom of the air.

The woman who opened the door presently, he saw, was a fairly agreeable looking person of perhaps fifty years or more—above a certain age they all looked alike to Charles—with a pinkish face, white hair and very lively light blue eyes. She gave the impression of being dressed up, she had a little high-faluting manner which seemed harmless and she was evidently very pleased to see him. He noticed that the hall was almost empty but highly polished, perhaps here was the perfect compromise between overstuffed plush and a rat trap.

The landlady showed him her best room, the only one unoccupied, she explained. He might be glad to know she had only young gentlemen in the house, three in fact, she hoped he might make a fourth. “I have here,” she said with pride, “a young student from the University of Berlin, a young pianist, and a young student from Heidelberg on leave, so you see the company will not be so bad. May I ask your profession?”

“I am a kind of painter,” said Charles, hopefully.

“Charming,” said the landlady. “We lacked only an artist.”

“I hope you will excuse my poor German,” said Charles, a little overwhelmed by all the high manner.

“You will learn,” said the landlady, smiling graciously as a mother, and added, “I am Viennese, which accounts perhaps for any little difference you may notice between my speech and that which you hear ordinarily in Berlin. I may say, the Viennese way of talking is not the worst in the world, if you really wish to learn German while you are here.”

The room. Well, the room. He had seen it several times before in his search. It was not what he would choose if he had a choice, but it was the least tiresome example of what he recognized now as a fixed style, with its sober rich oriental carpet, the lace curtains under looped-back velvet hangings, the large round table covered with another silky oriental rug in sweet, refined colors. One corner was occupied by deep couches heaped with silk and velvet cushions, the wall above it adorned with a glass-doored cabinet filled with minute curiosities mostly in silver filigree and fine porcelain, and upon the table stood a huge lamp with an ornate pink silk shade, fluted and fringed and draped with silken tassels. The bed was massive with feather quilt and shot-silk cover, the giant wardrobe of dark polished wood was carved all out of shape.

A hell of a place, really, but he would take it. The landlady looked human, and the price was no higher than he would be asked anywhere else for such a monstrosity. She agreed at once that he would need a plain work table and a student lamp, and added, “I hope you expect to stay for six months.”

“I’m sorry,” said Charles, who had been waiting for this. “Only three months.”

The landlady concealed her disappointment unsuccessfully in a sweet little smile. “It is usual to agree for six months,” she told him.

“But I am going to another country in three months,” said Charles.

“Oh, really? Where are you going?” she asked, and her whole face lighted as if the prospect of travel were her own.

“To Italy, perhaps,” said Charles. “First to Rome and then to Florence. And then all over Europe,” he added recklessly, feeling certain for the first time that this was really true, it was bound to happen.

“Oh, Italy,” cried the landlady. “I spent the three happiest months of my life there, I have dreamed of going back.”

Charles was standing near the table. On the silk rug, near the lamp, there stood a small plaster replica, about five inches high, of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they talked, his hand wandered towards it, he picked it up lightly by the middle with his finger tips, and the delicate plaster ribs caved in. They simply crumbled at his touch, and the fragments dropped around the weighted base as he snatched back his hand. He saw in horror that the landlady had gone very pale, her blue eyes instantly suffused.

Charles’ self-possession crumbled with the tower. He stammered, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” seeing that to the landlady the accident was serious and feeling himself shamefully exposed before her in his proved and demonstrated clumsiness, the aimless wandering curiosity of his mind, his bad habit of pawing things. Why couldn’t he have kept his hands to himself? “Please allow me to replace it.”

“It cannot be replaced,” said the landlady, with a severe, stricken dignity. “It was a souvenir of the Italian journey. My husband and I brought it back as a pleasantry from our honeymoon. My husband has been dead for many years. No, the little tower is not a thing that can be replaced.”

Charles, wishing to escape with his humiliation into the open air, said, “Perhaps I had better go for my luggage. I will be back in an hour.”

“Yes,” she said, absently, gathering up the ruins bit by bit on a sheet of paper. “My only hope is, it may be repaired.”

“Do please let me pay for that, at least,” said Charles. “I am so very sorry.”

“It is not your fault, but mine,” said the landlady, “I should never have left it here for—” She stopped short, and walked away carrying the paper in her two cupped hands. For barbarians, for outlandish crude persons who have no respect for precious things, her face and voice said all too clearly.

Charles, red and frowning, moved warily around the furniture towards the windows. A bad start, a very bad start indeed. The double panes were closed tightly, the radiator cast an even warmth through the whole room. He drew the lace curtains and saw, in the refracted pallor of the midmorning, winter light, a dozen infant-sized pottery cupids, gross, squat limbed, wanton in posture and vulgarly pink, with scarlet feet and cheeks and backsides, engaged in what appeared to be a perpetual scramble to avoid falling off the steep roof of a house across the street. Charles observed grimly their realistic toe holds among the slate, their clutching fat hands, their imbecile grins. In pouring rain, he thought, they must keep up their senseless play. In snow, their noses would be completely buried. Their behinds were natural victims to the winter winds. And to think that whoever had put them there had meant them to be oh, so whimsical and so amusing, year in, year out. He clutched his hat and overcoat with a wild impulse to slip out quietly and disappear. Maybe he wouldn’t come back at all. He hadn’t signed or paid anything yet. Oh, yes, but he would, though. For the landlady appeared at once, again smiling and composed, carrying a card, a slip of paper with printing on it, pen, ink, and her receipt blanks, all on a silver tray. He did not escape without leaving on that tray a full report of himself for the benefit of the police, a signed agreement to keep the room for three months, and a month’s rent in marks, instead of dollars. “What a pity you have no dollars,” she said brightly, and tilted her head at him in a brave gesture of acceptance. On her left hand she wore a rather inordinate diamond, square and blue, obviously a very fine one, set elaborately at great height. He had not noticed it before.

The sallow wornout looking hotel proprietess greeted him with an almost pleasant expression when he approached her desk. He was surprised at the violent change in her face when he explained that he had found another room and would be leaving at once. Instantly she seemed ready to weep with anger and disappointment.

“But I do not understand,” she told him stiffly, her lids reddening. “You agree to stay for a month, I give you very special rates, and now in eight days you are saying you must go. Do you find us disagreeable, perhaps? Isn’t your room cared for properly? What has happened?”

“It is simply true that I must find something less expensive still,” he told her, carefully. “That is all.”

“But our charges here are most reasonable,” she said, her dry mouth working over her long teeth. “Why will you not stay?”

“They are reasonable,” he admitted, feeling cornered, and as if he were making a humiliating confession, “but I cannot afford them.”

The woman opened her account book and began copying from it rapidly, her face stiff with indignation as if she had caught him snatching her purse. “That is your own business,” she told him, in a low voice, “but naturally you must expect to pay by the day, in this case.”

“Naturally,” he agreed.

“You will find you cannot change your mind for nothing,” said the woman, in a severe, lecturing tone. “Indecision is a very expensive luxury.”

“I suppose so,” said Charles, uneasily watching the notations on the sheet of paper lengthening rapidly.

She glanced up and over his shoulder, and Charles saw her face change again to a hard boldness, she raised her voice sharply and said with insolence, “You will pay your bill as I present it or I shall call the police.”

Charles, who had his money in hand ready to pay what she asked, believed for an instant he had not understood properly. Turning in the direction of her glance, he saw standing a few feet away the middle-aged podgy partner. His head was like a soft block, covered with scanty gray bristles. Hands in pockets he was eyeing Charles with a peculiarly malignant smile on his wide lipless mouth. Charles, amazed at the sum written at the foot of the page, counted out the money to the last pfennig, suddenly afraid that if he gave her a round sum she would not give him back the change. She swept it away from him, together with the bill, without speaking.

“Will you please give me the receipt?” asked Charles.

She did not answer, but moved away a little, and the man approached silently and said in a voice of edged, false courtesy, “I must require you, before you go, to let me see your papers.”

Charles said, “I showed them when I came here,” and picked up his suitcases.

“But not to me,” said the man, and his pale little eyes behind their puffy lids were piggish with malice. “Not to me, I am sorry to say, and that will be necessary before you are allowed to go, let me assure you.”

He seemed struggling with some hidden excitement. His neck swelled and flushed, he closed his mouth until it was a mere slit across his face, and rocked slightly on his toes. Charles had been well prepared for the nuisance of being under constant observation, experienced travelers had told him he would feel like a criminal on parole in Europe, especially in Germany, at first, but that he would soon grow accustomed to it, and he was to be certain to hand his papers over at once to anyone who asked for them. He set his suitcases down and felt in his pockets, then remembered he had tucked the flat leather case containing his papers in one of his suitcases. Which one?

He opened the larger of the two, exposing a huddle of untidy clothing. The man and the woman leaned forward to gaze at his belongings, and the woman said, “So,” in a contemptuous voice. Charles, in outraged silence, closed the suitcase and opened the other. He handed the leather case to the man, who drew out the passports and other papers one by one with maddening slowness, regarded them with a skeptical eye, puffing his cheeks and clicking his tongue by turns. With deliberation he handed them back and said, “Very good. You may go now,” with the insulting condescension of a petty official dismissing a subordinate.

They continued to look at him in a hateful silence, with their faces almost comically distorted in an effort to convey the full depths of their malice. It was as if they doubted, from his manner, that he had understood the extent to which they were insulting and cheating him, or as if, being safe in their advantage, they wished to goad him to protest so they might do him further damage. Awkwardly under their fixed stare, Charles returned his papers to the suitcase, closed it with difficulty after some trouble with the fastenings. As the door closed behind him he heard them laughing together like a pair of hyenas, with deliberate loudness, to make certain he should hear them.

He felt all at once rather too poor to afford a taxicab, so he walked, lugging his rather battered possessions, and as their weight increased and the distance stretched before him, he meditated rather shapelessly on the treatment he had just received. He was a tall, personable young man, there was nothing wrong with his looks or his intentions, though at that moment, a trifle beetle-browed, hat over eyes, he seemed sullen and rather ugly. His first furious impulse to hit the fat man in the teeth with his fist had been overcome instantly by the clear cold spot in his mind which knew that this situation was hopeless, there was no chance for any sort of reparation, he could either keep quiet and escape from the two thugs or quite simply he would be in worse trouble. His anger remained and settled, took root and became a new part of him.

His landlady opened the door for him again. He observed there seemed to be no servant about the place. After a few more formalities of greeting, restlessly he took to the street again, telling himself he needed a haircut. Consulting his map, he bore towards Kurfürstendamm. The sun had disappeared, it was colder suddenly, the snow began to fall again on the smooth dark streets gleaming in the light like polished metal. The weighty laborious city was torpid in the early darkness.

The barber shop was small and clean, wrapped in white towels, shining with mirrors and full of warm soapy steam. A weakly shaped, bloodless little man took him in hand and began to tuck cloths around his neck. He had scanty discouraged hair the color of tow, and a sickly, unpleasant breath. He wanted to cut Charles’ hair long on top, clip it to the skin around the back of his head in a wide swath over the ears. His own was cut that way, the streets were full of such heads, and a photograph, clipped from a newspaper and stuck in the corner of the mirror, showed a little shouting politician, top lock on end, wide-stretched mouth adorned by a square mustache, who had, apparently, made the style popular. It required a great deal of head shaking, rather desperately assembled German, some pointing to other photographs in a barber’s journal of fashion, to persuade the man to a more reasonable point of view.

The barber, sad enough at his gayest, drooped rather more as he tapered Charles’ hair almost imperceptibly towards the neck; and to change the whole topic he spoke of the weather. The last day or two had been mild, even milder than anyone thought, for it had deceived the storks. The papers that morning had mentioned that storks had been seen flying over the city, certain signs of good weather and an early spring. Had the young gentleman noticed a dispatch from New York that said the trees in Central Park were putting out green buds—imagine, at this time of year.

“There is nothing in the Tiergarten at this time,” said the little barber, sighing. “This is a dark place in winter. I lived in Malaga once, I worked there in a barber shop for a whole year—nearly thirteen months, in fact. The barber shops there are not like ours, they are very dirty, but there, flowers were in bloom outside, in December. There, they use real almond oil for their hair lotions—real. And they have such an extract of rosemary as you cannot find anywhere else. Olive oil the poorer people use for their hair, as well as for cookery. Olive oil, imagine, here so expensive, there they pour it out on their heads. Olive oil, they told me, inside and out, that is what makes hair grow. Well, maybe. Here, everyone wants his hair dry, and mostly,” he returned to the hateful subject, “they like it close above the ears and full on top. Say it is only our poor German taste,” he said sourly, and then, “In Malaga, I never wore my topcoat all winter. Ah, I hardly knew it was winter.” His fingers were clammy and his front teeth looked weak, as if they had never got a proper start. “It was strange there in many ways, naturally, considering the kind of people they are, but then they did not have to worry so much about living. Sometimes, there, I put my hand in my pocket and felt my last peseta, but I was not alarmed as I would have been here. I thought that when that was gone I could get more. I should have saved something there,” he said, with a guilty look, “but I did not, and here I save and save, but there is nothing.” He coughed, turning his head away. “In Malaga,” he said, and he was like a man talking about a homeland he had lost, “I never had a cough, though here I cough all the time.”

“Flu?” asked Charles, through the towels.

“No, gas,” said the little barber, modestly. “The war.”

After a dismal pause, Charles said, “I noticed the other day that Malaga froze stiff too, this winter.”

“Well, yes, once perhaps, but only for a few days,” admitted the barber, shaking his head slowly. “Once, perhaps—”

When Charles felt carefully in his pocket for the smallest coin he could give, uneasy because he knew it was not enough, but all at once unnerved by caution, not daring to reduce his cash store by a single pfennig more than necessary, the barber held out his bluish narrow hand, glanced discreetly into the palm, smiled and said with genuine feeling, “Thank you, thank you very much.” Charles nodded his head, in shame, and hurried away.

The knob turned from within and the door flew open as Charles was bending, key in hand, and the landlady fluted at him sweetly. She had been expecting him, she had wondered what was keeping him, she had happened to be in the hall and had heard his step on the stair. She believed she had him nicely settled now, and at what hour would he have his afternoon coffee? Charles said he supposed five o’clock would be all right. “So,” she said, smiling and tilting her head at him with what struck Charles as a slightly too intimate, possessive gleam. Still smiling, she hurried away to the farther end of the hall and rapped sharply at a closed door.

It was opened at once, and Charles got a full glimpse of a drooping heavy-set dark young man with a big cropped head and blunt features. The landlady went straight past him, talking in a rapid authoritative tone as if she were giving orders. Charles closed his own door with some relief and looked around for his luggage. It had disappeared. He glanced into the big wardrobe and saw with a peculiar sense of invasion that his things were unpacked—he had long since lost the keys and had never got into the habit of locking things, anyway—and arranged with an orderliness that exposed all their weaknesses of quality and condition. His shoes, needing minor repairs and a coat of polish, were set in wooden supports. His other two suits, the tweed with its buttons hanging, were on silk padded frames. His meager toilet articles, his frayed hair brushes and his flabby leather cases were in array on the middle shelf. Conspicuous among them, looking somehow disreputable, was his quart bottle of brandy, a third empty, and he realized that he had in effect taken to secret drinking during his search for a room. He peered into the lumpy laundry bag hanging on a hook, and shuddered with masculine shame. Its snowy sweet-smelling whiteness concealed his socks that needed darning, his soiled shirts worn too long for economy’s sake, and his stringy underwear. On the pillow of his bed, half concealing the long effeminate lace pillow ruffles, lay a pair of neatly folded clean pajamas.

Last effrontery of all, the woman had unpacked his papers and his drawing material and his cardboard folders of unfinished work. Had she looked into them? He hoped she had a good time. A great many of his sketches were not meant for publication. Everything was laid out carefully stacked with a prime regard for neatness and a symmetrical appearance. He had noticed before the strange antagonism of domesticated females for papers. They seemed to look upon papers as an enemy of order, mere dust-catching nuisances. At home he had waged perpetual silent warfare with his mother and the ser vants about his papers. They wanted to straighten them out, or better, hide them away in the deepest shelves of a closet. Why in God’s name couldn’t they let his work alone? But they could not, under their curious compulsion; and neither could this woman, that was clear. Consulting his little phrase book, he began constructing and memorizing a polite sentence beginning, “Please don’t trouble yourself about my table. . .”

The table was large, though not plain, the lamp was good enough, but the straight-backed chair was a delicate affair with curved spindle legs and old mended tapestry in seat and back: a museum piece beyond doubt, Charles decided, and sat upon it experimentally. It held up. He proposed to overlook and forget the whole damned situation, put his stuff in order and get to work. First he emptied his pockets of accumulated bits of notes, sketches, receipts, scribbled addresses of restaurants, postcard reproductions of paintings he had bought at museums, and the agreement he had signed to stay in this house for three months. He noticed that the landlady’s name was Rosa Reichl, written in a tall, looping, affectedly elegant hand. He could not see the end of those three months. He felt a blind resentment all the more deep because it could have no particular object, and helpless as if he had let himself be misled by bad advice. Vaguely but in the most ghastly sort of way, he felt that someone he trusted had left him in the lurch, and of course, that was nonsense, as Kuno used to say. “Nonsense” was one of Kuno’s favorite words, especially just after his returns from abroad.

The voices in the next room were going on, rising and tightening somewhat with an excitement that might be anger. Charles listened carefully with no sense of eavesdropping, as always surprised that he understood German so well and spoke it so poorly.

“Herr Bussen, Herr Bussen,” Frau Reichl was crying, in a flighty, impassioned voice, her light Viennese accent slightly blurred, “you treat my good chairs like this, my beautiful old chairs I have had for so long—in spite of my other troubles you must add this? How can you, when you know I shall never have chairs like these again?”

Charles, who had begun testing crayons and sharpening pencils, stopped to light a cigarette, leaning back in his own chair. He balanced on the back legs for a split second and came down with a thump, his heart seeming to turn over as the thin joints complained in a human voice.

Herr Bussen, who began by defending himself half-heartedly, gave in and took his scolding dutifully as if Frau Reichl were his mother or his conscience. Yes, he knew better, Charles heard him saying in heavy Low-German, he had been brought up properly even if she did not think so. His mother had such chairs too, he would not let it happen again. Herr Bussen’s speech sounded to Charles like some ungainly English dialect, but in no language would he have been a match for Frau Reichl. Charles found himself feeling very sorry for that poor devil as he blundered on apologizing; she was to excuse him this time if she could.

“Yes, this time,” rejoined Frau Reichl, exasperated to a point beyond all grace, “this time,” she said sarcastically in her sweetest tones, “and how many others, past and to come?”

Herr Bussen found no answer for this. After a silent moment of triumph, Frau Reichl emerged and swished past Charles’ door while he waited uneasily for her to stop before it, and knocked on the door just next his at the right.

“Jawohl!” shouted the young man inside in the drowning voice of one dredged too suddenly out of sleep. “Yes, yes, come in.” Then a gay and youthful voice cleared and added, “Oh, it’s you, Rosa dear. Well, I thought there must be a fire.”

Rosa, is it? thought Charles, hearing their voices running on together, quick and friendly, in lowered tones, with now and again a small duet of good-humored laughter. Rosa seemed very cheerful indeed, moving about the room as she talked, crossing the hall to her own apartment and back several times. At last she said, “Now then, please tell me when you need anything. Only, no more ice. There is no more.”

“Who cares?” called the young man, and Rosa laughed again. Charles began to think of her as Rosa, and a nuisance, if affairs went on at this rate all day in the house.

Daylight had failed. Charles settled himself firmly to his drawing under the lamp which was better than he expected. He began with many small anxieties. Suppose that editor changed his mind? Suppose his drawings were not published and paid for, after all? How long could his father continue to send him money? How long, and this was the real question, this was what worried him most, how long should he go on taking money from his father? Should he have come to Europe at all? A lot of good painters had never been in Europe. He tried to think of one. Well, he was here, horribly disturbed and miserable really, he might as well face it, he had got a much harder blow than he expected from the place. At least he must try to find what he came for, if it wasn’t to be just a wild goose chase. He refused to listen any further to the sounds in the house, but focused his eyes upon a certain spot on the paper, remembered what he meant to do, and went to work. All his energy seemed to flow and balance in his right hand, he felt steadied and at ease, he belonged to himself and knew what he was doing. Then he forgot himself altogether. Some time later he sat back and looked at what he had done. It wouldn’t do, it was absolutely all wrong.

A light rap on the door saved him. He had an excuse to stop, to turn the page over and let it cool off before he looked at it again. Hardly waiting for his word, Rosa came in. She glanced sharply first at the light and then at the table, already in disorder.

“Ah, you need light early, I see,” she commented, with an uncertain smile, a deprecating tilt of the head. “As for Herr Bussen, he does not work in the evenings until after supper. And Herr Mey, the Polish gentleman, quite often plays in the dark because he wishes. Our young student from Heidelberg doesn’t have anything to think about but his face at this moment, and the less light on that, the better. Ah me, it is a sight. But,” she said, fondly and mysteriously, “he is young, it is his first, he will know what to expect the next time. But the wound is infected, you know, he is here for treatment. Ah, the young one,” she said, tenderly, clasping her hands over her breast, “he is very brave all day, but when the dark comes, it is very hard for him. He is so young and tender,” she told Charles, almost tearful in her pride and pity, “but he did well, you can see. The wound—well, it is a beauty!”

She moved about the room while she talked, straightening the chairs ever so little, giving a flick at the cushions here, a whisk at the curtains there. Standing beside Charles at the table, she even reached round him to take a light turn among his papers, setting up a small commotion by moving his ash tray and the India ink a few inches out of their places. “After all, there is no more daylight,” she admitted, finally, “and if you draw, you need light, isn’t it true? Now I shall bring your coffee at once,” she promised, brightly, and went away with that extraordinarily busy air of hers.

No more daylight. Charles, feeling helpless, as if he were taking part in a play, and had forgotten his lines if he ever knew them, watched the street as he waited, silent under the falling snow, empty in the frosty shimmer of the corner lamps. Lights were coming on one by one in the many windows of the houses opposite.

In the past few days he had watched each morning by lamplight the feeble sun crawl later and later barely to the level of the housetops, slide slowly around in a shallow arc and drop away in midafternoon. The long nights oppressed him with unreasonable premonitions of danger. The darkness closed over the strange city like the great fist of an enemy who had survived in full strength, a voiceless monster from a prehuman, older and colder and grimmer time of the world. “It is just because I was born in a sunny place and took the summer for granted,” he told himself, but that did not explain why he could not endure with patience, even enjoy, even look upon as something new and memorable to see, unfamiliar weather in a foreign climate. Of course it was not the weather. No one paid attention to weather if he had the proper clothes for it; he remembered a teacher of his saying once that all great cities are built in uninhabitable places. He knew that people love even the worst of the climate in the place they know, and can wonder at the feelings of strangers about it. At home in Texas he had seen northern travelers turn upon the southern weather with the ferocity of exhaustion; it gave them the excuse they needed to hate everything else they hated in the place, too. It would be so easy and simple, it would put such an end to the argument to be able to say, “I can’t settle down in this place because the sun doesn’t rise until ten o’clock in December,” but that was not his trouble here.

There were the faces. Faces with no eyes. And these no-eyes, pale, lightless, were set in faces shriveled as if they were gnawed hollow; or worse, faces sodden in fat with swollen eyelids in which the little no-eyes peered blindly as if all the food, the plates of boiled potatoes and pig’s knuckles and cabbage fed to the wallowing body, had weighed it down and had done it no good. The no-eyes in the faces of the women were too ready to shed tears. Charles had not understood in the least the first thing that had happened to him in Berlin. He had bought some cheap socks in a little shop. At the hotel he saw they were too small, and had gone back at once to exchange them for a larger size. The woman who had sold them to him saw him coming in with the package in his hand, had remembered him and instantly stood transfixed, the tears welling up in her eyes. While he was trying to explain in awful embarrassment that he merely wished larger socks in place of those she had given him, the tears rolled over her cheeks and she said, “I have no larger size.”

“Could you get them for me?” he asked, and she said, “Oh, yes,” in such pain that Charles said awkwardly, “Don’t bother, I’ll keep these,” and ran out, annoyed and mystified. A day or two later it was all clear to him and seemed quite natural. She needed badly to sell the stock she had. She could not afford to order just a few pairs of larger socks. She was frightened at seeing the goods she had on hand, unsold, and she had deliberately given him the socks she had already, hoping he could not, a stranger, a traveler, find his way back to complain.

Men who sold wine and fruit in tiny corners did not seem to prosper in their rich and warming commodities, they got no nourishment of their company and obviously they could not afford to enjoy them. These men were silent, usually middle-aged, deeply sullen, and if Charles asked them a question, hearing the foreign voice they would shout out their answer as if in a burst of fury, though the words were harmless. Among themselves they talked in a dead tone of disheartenment that seemed an old habit. With his limited money, he was frightened to go to any place where things were for sale. Because he was poor, he went to poor places, and felt trapped, for they could not let him go until he had bought something. They tried desperately to sell him things he did not want or need, could not use, or could not afford. It was no good trying to explain this to them. They could not hear him.

No more daylight. No more ice. No more chairs with tapestry on them and legs that broke if you leaned back in them. No more of those table rugs with their nasty sweet colors. If the corner whatnot should be knocked over, just once, there would be no more of that silly bric-a-brac and a good thing too, thought Charles, hardening his heart.

“Coffee at last,” said Rosa, coming in without knocking this time, carrying a very dressed up tray. No more coffee at five o’clock, unless you were a foreigner, and—it followed naturally—rich. Charles felt he was living under false pretenses of the kind his early training had taught him to despise. “I am poorer than she is,” he thought, watching Rosa arrange the fine porcelain cup with butterfly handle, and spread out thin napery. “But of course not. A boat is coming from America for me, but there is no boat for her. For nobody in this house but me is a boat coming from America, with money. I can get along here, I can leave when I like, I can always go home—”

He felt young, ignorant, awkward, he had so much to learn he hardly knew where to begin. He could always go home, but that was not the point. It was a long way home from where he stood, he could see that. No more Leaning Tower of Pisa, he remembered with guilt, when Rosa, with a last little fussy pat as if she could not quite give up her coffee table, stood back and said, “Now, if you will sit, I will pour your coffee. Pity it is we are not in Vienna,” she told him, with a gay little air, “then I could give you real coffee. But this is not the worst in the world, either.” Then she ran away, and the flurry of her wake did not settle until some seconds after she was gone.

The coffee was indeed as good as Charles had ever tasted, more than good enough, and he had just taken the first swallow when he heard Herr Bussen’s voice in the hall. “Ha,” he pronounced in his loud Low-German, “how that coffee stinks.”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like it just the same,” said Rosa cruelly. “Just because you drink milk like a big baby and leave the dirty bottles under the bed. Shame on you, Herr Bussen.”

They were silenced in the sound of a piano, struck firmly and softly at first, and then without pause there followed a long rippling continuous music. Charles loved music without knowing how or why, and he listened carefully. That would be the Polish student, and it seemed to Charles he was doing pretty well. He sat back in a pleasant daze, hypnotized by the steady rhythm and delighted with the running melody that he could follow easily. Rosa tapped and came in on tiptoe, finger on lip, eyebrows raised, eyes shining. She approached the table and with careful lightness gathered up the napery and silver. “Herr Mey,” she whispered, and then, reverently, “Chopin—” and before Charles could think of any response, she had the tray up and had tiptoed out again.

Charles, lightly asleep, dreamed the house was burning down, silently alive and pulsing with flame in every part. With no fear or hesitation at all, he walked safely through the fiery walls and out into the wide bright street, carrying a suitcase which knocked against his knees and weighed him down, but he could not leave it because it contained all the drawings he meant to do in his whole life. He walked a safe distance and watched the dark skeleton of the house tall as a tower standing in a fountain of fire. Seeing that he was alone, he said in wonder, “They all escaped, too,” when a loud and ghostly groan was uttered in his ear. He spun about and saw no one. The groan sounded again over his shoulder and woke him sharply. He found he was wallowing in the airless deeps of the feather quilt, hot and half smothered. He fought his way out and sat up to listen, turning this way and that to locate the sound.

“Ah,—ahoooooooo,” sighed a voice hopelessly from the room to the right, falling and dying away in a heavily expelled breath of weariness. Without deciding to do anything, Charles found himself at the right hand door tapping with the extreme tips of his fingers.

“Well, what is it?” came a drowsed but soberly indignant voice.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” asked Charles.

“No, no,” said the voice in despair. “No, thank you, no no. . .”

“I’m sorry,” said Charles, thinking he had been saying this to somebody or other, or thinking it, or feeling it, all day and every day since he had been in that city. The soles of his feet were tingling on the bare floor.

“But come in, please,” said the voice, changing to a shade of affability.

The young man sitting on the side of the tumbled bed was of the extreme pale blondness such as Charles had often noticed among the young people in the streets. His hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were pale taffy color, the skin taffy blond, the eyes a flat grayish blue almost expressionless except for a certain modeling of the outer lids that gave him the look of a young, intelligent fox. He had a long, narrow head, with smooth, sharply cut features of the kind Charles vaguely regarded as aristocratic. So far, a good-looking fellow, perhaps twenty-one years old; he stood up slowly and was eye level with Charles’ six feet of height. There was only one thing wrong with him: the left side of his face was swollen badly, the eye was almost closed from beneath, and glued along his cheek from ear to mouth was an inch-wide strip of court plaster, the flesh at its edges stained in dirty blues and greens and purples. He was the Heidelberg student, all right. He stood cupping his hand lightly over his cheek without touching.

“Well,” he said, keeping his mouth stiff and looking from under his downy light brows at Charles. “You can see for yourself. Nothing to speak of, but it gives me the devil. Like a toothache, you know. I heard myself roaring in my sleep,” he said, and his eyes quietly dared Charles to doubt his word. “I woke myself up at it. When you knocked, to tell you the truth, I thought it was Rosa with an ice cap. I don’t want any more ice caps. Sit down, please.”

Charles said, “I’ve got some brandy, maybe that would do something.”

The boy said, “God, yes,” and sighed again in spite of himself. He moved around the room aimlessly, holding his spread hand just beside his face as if he expected his head to drop and hoped to catch it as it fell. His pale gray cotton pajamas gave him the look of being about to fade away in the yellowish light of the bed lamp.

Charles, in his old blanket robe and felt slippers, brought two glasses and the brandy bottle. As he poured, the young man watched the liquid filling the glass as if he would spring upon it, but he held his hands until the glass was offered, smelled the brim, they touched glasses and drank.

“Ah,” said the young man, swallowing carefully, head back and tipped to the right. He curled up the right side of his mouth at Charles and his right eye glimmered at him gratefully. “What a relief.” He added suddenly, “Hans von Gehring, at your service.”

Charles spoke his own name, the other nodded, there was a pause while the glasses were filled again.

“And how do you like it, here in Berlin?” Hans asked politely, warming the brandy between his palms.

“So far, very well,” said Charles; “of course, I’m not settled yet.” He observed Hans’ face in the hope that language was not going to get in the way of their talk. Hans seemed to understand perfectly. He nodded, and drank.

“I’ve walked nearly all over, and have been to a lot of museums, cafés, all the first things, of course. It is a great city. The Berliners are not proud of it, though, or pretend not to be.”

“They know it’s no good compared with any other city at all,” said Hans, forthrightly. “I was wondering why you came here. Why this city, of all places? You may go where you please, isn’t that so?”

“I suppose so,” said Charles. “Yes, that’s true.”

Hans said, “My father sent me here to see a doctor who is an old friend of his, but in ten days I shall be back in Heidelberg. The Polish fellow is a pianist so he came here because pianists seem to think old Schwartzkopf is the only Master. Herr Bussen, down the hall, he is Platt Deutsch to begin with and he lives in Dalmatia, so anything would perhaps be a change for the better to him. He thinks he is getting an education here and maybe he is. But look at you. A free man and you come to Berlin.” He smiled on one side of his face, then shuddered bitterly. “Are you staying on, then?”

“Three months,” said Charles, rather gloomily. “I don’t know why I came, except that I had a good friend who was German. He used to come here with his family—that was years ago—and he would say, Go to Berlin. I always thought it was the place to be, and if you haven’t seen anything else much, this looks pretty good. Of course, there is New York. I stayed there only about a week, but I liked it, I think I could live there.”

“Of course, New York,” said Hans, indifferently. “But here, there are Vienna, and Prague, and Munich and Budapest, and Nice and Rome and Florence, and, ah, Paris, Paris, Paris,” said Hans, suddenly almost gay. Imitating a German actor imitating a Frenchman, he kissed his fingers and wiggled them lightly towards the west.

“I am going to Paris later,” said Charles. “Were you ever there?”

“No, but I am going,” said Hans. “My plans are all made.” He got up as if his words excited him, wrapped his robe around his knees, felt his cheek tenderly and sat down again.

“I hope to stay there a year, I’m going to some atelier and get some painting done. Maybe you will be there before I leave.”

“Oh, I have another year in Heidelberg,” said Hans, “and my grandfather, who is old, is giving me the money, so I must stop with him for at least a few months first. But then I may go, I shall be free then for a while, perhaps for two years.”

“It is strange to have everything mapped out so,” said Charles. “I haven’t a notion where I’ll be two years from now. Something might even happen to keep me from Paris.”

“Oh, it is necessary to plan everything,” said Hans, soberly, “or how should we know where we were? Besides, the family has it arranged. I even know the girl I am to marry,” he said, “and I know how much money she has. She is an extremely fine girl,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Paris will be my own, though, my holiday. I shall do as I please.”

“Well,” said Charles, seriously, “I am glad to be here. All Americans want to come to Europe one time or another, you know. They think there is something here.” He sat back and crossed his legs, feeling comfortable with Hans.

“There is something in Europe,” said Hans, “but not in Berlin. You are wasting your time here. Go to Paris if you can.” He kicked off his slippers and slid into bed, piling up his pillows and letting his head down very carefully.

“I hope you are feeling better,” said Charles. “Perhaps you could sleep now.”

Hans frowned slightly, retreated. “There is nothing wrong with me,” he declared, “and I was asleep before. This is perfectly normal, it happens quite often.”

“Well, good night,” said Charles, getting up.

“Oh, no, don’t go yet,” said Hans, starting to sit up and thinking better of it. “I tell you—knock on Tadeusz’ door and get him up, too. He sleeps too much. It’s just there, next door. If you please, dear fellow. He’ll like it.”

A moment of complete silence followed Charles’ knock, and in silence the door opened on darkness. A thin, tallish young man, his small sharp head thrust forward like a bird’s, appeared in the hall. He wore a thin plum-colored silk dressing gown and his long yellowed hands were flattened one above the other over his chest, the fingers lying together. He seemed entirely awake, and his keen little dark eyes were smiling and good tempered. “What’s up now?” he asked in an English accent lying over a Polish accent. “Is the damnation dueler raising hell again?”

“Not exactly,” said Charles, pleased at hearing English and astonished at the speech, “but he isn’t resting easy, either. We were having some brandy. I’m Charles Upton.”

“Tadeusz Mey,” said the Pole, sliding out and closing the door noiselessly. He spoke just above a whisper in an easy voice. “Polish in spite of the misleading name. Indiscreet grandmother married an Austrian. The rest of my family have names like Zamoisky, lucky devils.”

They entered Hans’ room and Tadeusz said instantly in German, “Yes, yes, you are going to have a real beauty,” and leaned over to examine the wound with a knowing eye. “It’s doing very well.”

“It will last,” said Hans. Over his face spread an expression very puzzling to Charles. It was there like a change of light, slow and deep, with no perceptible movement of eyelids or face muscles. It rose from within in the mysterious place where Hans really lived, and it was amazing arrogance, pleasure, inexpressible vanity and self-satisfaction. He lay entirely motionless and this look came, grew, faded and disappeared on the tidal movement of his true character. Charles thought, Why, if I drew him without that look I should never have him at all. Tadeusz was talking along in his low voice, amiably in a mixture of French and German. The easy use of languages was a mystery to Charles. He listened acutely, but Tadeusz, gesturing neatly with his brandy glass, did not seem to be saying anything in particular, though Hans was also listening attentively.

Charles, feeling free not to talk, was trying to see Hans in Paris, with that scar. Trying to see him in America, in a small American town like San Antonio, for example, with that scar. In Paris perhaps they would understand, but how would it look in San Antonio, Texas? The people there would think he had got into a disgraceful cutting scrape, probably with a Mexican, or that he had been in an automobile accident. They would think it a pity that such a nice fellow should be so disfigured, they would be tactful and not mention it and try to keep their eyes off it. Even in Paris, Charles imagined, those who understood would also disapprove. Hans would simply be another of those Germans with a dueling scar carefully made livid and jagged to last him a lifetime. It occurred to him that nowhere but in this one small country could Hans boast of his scar and his way of getting it. In any other place at all, it would seem strange, a misfortune, or discreditable. Listening to Tadeusz chattering along, Charles watched Hans and thought hard in a series of unsatisfactory circles, trying to get out of them. It was just a custom of the country, that was all. That was the way to look at it, of course. But Charles didn’t know, had never known, very likely never would know, a friend in the world who, if he saw Hans, wouldn’t ask privately afterwards, “Where did he get that scar?” Except Kuno, perhaps. But Kuno had never said a word about this. Kuno had said, that if you didn’t get off the sidewalk when army officers came along, you would be pushed off, and when his mother and he were walking together, she would always step into the street and let them by. Kuno had not minded this, he had rather admired the tall officers with their greatcoats and helmets, but his mother had not liked it at all. Charles remembered this for years; it was nothing related to anything he knew in his own life, yet remained in his memory as unquestioned truth, that part of Kuno’s life lived in absence and strangeness which seemed to him more real than any life they had shared.

Prize fighters got cauliflower ears, but not purposely. It was a hazard of the game. Waiters got something called kidney feet. Glass blowers blow their cheeks all out of shape, so they hang like bags. Violinists sometimes get abscesses on their jaws where they hold the violin. Soldiers now and then have their faces blown off and have to get them put back by surgery. All kinds of things happen to men in the course of their jobs, accidents or just deformities that come on so gradually they are hardly noticed until it is too late to do much about it. Dueling had been a respectable old custom almost everywhere, but there had to be a quarrel first. He had seen his great-grandfather’s dueling pistols, the family pride in a velvet-lined case. But what kind of man would stand up in cold blood and let another man split his face to the teeth just for the hell of it? And then ever after to wear the wound with that look of self-satisfaction, with everybody knowing how he had got it? And you were supposed to admire him for that. Charles had liked Hans on sight, but there was something he wouldn’t know about him if they both lived for a thousand years; it was something you were, or were not, and Charles rejected that wound, the reason why it existed, and everything that made it possible, then and there, simply because there were no conditions for acceptance in his mind.

Still he liked Hans, and wished the wound were not there. But it was there, an improbable and blood-chilling sight, as if at broad noon he should meet in Kurfürstendamm a knight in armor, or the very skeleton from the Dance of Death.

“You don’t speak French?” Tadeusz asked at last, turning to Charles.

“A little,” said Charles, but fearing to begin.

“You are lucky,” said Tadeusz. “You have a language everyone tries to learn. So have the French. But for me, I have to learn every pest of language there is, because no one but a Pole speaks Polish.”

He was a narrow, green-faced young man and in the light his eyes were liver colored. He looked bilious, somehow, and he continually twisted a scorched looking lock of hair on the crown of his head as he talked, a tight clever little smile in the corners of his mouth. “I can even speak Platt Deutsch, but Herr Bussen pretends not to understand me.”

“That is the fellow our landlady was scolding today,” said Charles, and felt instantly that he had been tactless.

“Today?” asked Tadeusz. “She scolds him every day for one thing or another. He’s very stupid. All the Platt Deutsch are stupid beyond hope. Let Rosa take it all out on him. She won’t annoy the rest of us so much. She is a terror, that woman.”

“Well,” said Hans fretfully, pouting under his lip, “what do you expect? This is a pension.”

“On the recommended list, too,” said Tadeusz, amiably, smoking, holding his cigarette at the base of his third and fourth finger, lighted end towards the palm. “I don’t expect anything.”

“It would be all right if only she would let my papers alone,” said Charles.

“You’re the rich American who pays the rent for all of us,” said Tadeusz, smiling. “You’ve got the real lace curtains and the best feather bed. But if you do anything tactless, remember, Herr Bussen will catch it.”

Charles shook his head at this, thinking it was too near the truth to be funny for him, at least. He poured more brandy, and they lighted fresh cigarettes all around. The visitors sat back comfortably and Hans turned on his side. They all felt well disposed and at peace and as if they were beginning to get acquainted with each other. Three sharp little raps upon the door were followed by Rosa’s voice. With sweet severity she reminded them in a set speech that it was three o’clock and others in the house might like some sleep. They glanced at each other with conspiratorial smiles.

“Rosa, dear,” said Hans, putting a good deal of patient persuasion in his tone, “I was feeling frightfully and they came to sit up with me.”

“You do not need anyone to sit up with you,” said Rosa, briskly. “You need sleep.”

Tadeusz, rising in silence, opened the door suddenly and Rosa fled with small squeaks, an apparition in dressing gown and hair net. He called after her soothingly, “We are going at once,” and turned back with a monkeyish gleam in his near-sighted little eyes. “I thought that would rout her,” he said, “that woman is vain as if she were twenty. You’d think we were living in a damnation jail,” he went on, taking his glass again, “but all Berlin is just that. Let me tell you,” he said to Charles, “I can hardly wait to get back to London. You should go there by all means. Believe me, I have seen nearly all the cities—except your fabulous New York, and those photographs made from the air terrorize me—and London is the only place for a civilized man.”

Hans shook his head cautiously and repeated, “No, Paris, Paris.”

“All right,” said Tadeusz in English. “Okay. I learned that from one of your Americans: typical 100 per cent specimen, he told me. He was a cowboy from Arizona with a five gallon hat. He was a Holy Roller and a vegetarian and he drank a tumblerful of whiskey every morning before breakfast. He was in love with a snake charmer who also did a fan dance. When I knew him he was running a little boîte on the Left Bank; the walls were covered with steers’ horns and lariats. When he quarreled with the snake charmer, he dragged her all around the floor by one of the lariats. She left him at once, but not before putting a venomous serpent in his bed. However, no harm was done. As he said, it was all okay by him.”

Hans said, “What are you saying, please? Remember I don’t know English.”

Tadeusz said in German, “I was explaining where I learned to say Okay.”

Hans nodded. “Ah, yes, I understand that very well, okay. That is the only English I know.”

By way of proving they were still men, masters of themselves, they lingered somewhat and took their sweet time about saying good night and separating.

Charles, emerging from the bathroom in the morning, met Herr Bussen in the hall. Herr Bussen was wearing a short cotton bathrobe and carrying a rather draggled towel. His fat round face wore a grieved and bewildered look, like a child who had been so sternly treated at home it did not expect better from the rest of the world. Charles had been wakened by the sound of Rosa scolding Herr Bussen about something or other. Presently she came in with coffee and rolls and butter, looking very well combed and dressed so early in the morning, but with a light sparkle of roused temper in her eyes. She opened the curtains and turned out the light, leaving the winter day like dirty water in the room. She spun away and knocked at the bathroom door, saying in a prissy voice of authority, “It is fifteen minutes, your time is up, Herr Bussen.” Returning, she stripped the bed with one gesture, creating a small breeze over Charles’ head as he sat at the table. Standing close beside him she sighed suddenly: “Oh, how hard it is to have an orderly and peaceful life, a correct life of the kind I was accustomed to. And the bathroom. Always shaving soap, toothpaste and water, water on the linoleum, the mirrors themselves splashed, everything so unclean, oh, Herr Upton, I do not know why gentlemen will never wash the bathtub. And oh, the Herr Bussen. Every day his bed is full of cheese and bread crumbs, there are often tins of sardines open in the chest among his clothes, he eats walnuts and hides the shells in the closet. It is no excuse to say he is going to be a professor. And every month late, late with the rent. How does he think I shall exist if I cannot have the rent promptly?”

Charles, positively blushing all over, got up and said, “If you will wait a few minutes, I am going out and won’t trouble you.”

“Ah, you don’t trouble me. I am going about my work, you about yours. No, it is not that.” She smiled brightly upon him, her despair seemed to pass. “Let me tell you, before the war I had five servants besides a gardener and a chauffeur, my frocks came from Paris and my furniture from England; I had three diamond necklaces, Herr Upton, three—so now, is it strange that sometimes I wonder what is to become of me? I make up beds like a servant,” she said, “and I wash dirty floors. . . .”

Charles, feeling cornered, got his hat and coat, stammered a sentence in German unintelligible to himself even, and rushed away, appalled at Rosa’s lack of decency in her confidences, and her shameful knowledge of his own untidy bathroom habits.

He pawned his camera, expecting to get almost nothing for it, but the quiet little man in the shop took his thin nose out of a book, examined the handsome contrivance with professional approval, and gave him a hundred marks without question. Feeling unreasonably rich and cheered up, Charles rushed back to the apartment hoping to work for a while. A few steps from his own door, he saw Herr Bussen going in, clutching a small brown paper parcel—bread and liver sausage, perhaps—and without an overcoat in the wolfish cold. Charles overtook him on the stairway, for Herr Bussen was moving slowly, his shoulders bent. From the back he appeared to be a middle-aged man, but the face he turned to Charles seemed even younger than it should have been, with an underlying half-spent childhood still lingering in it. His nose was red and wet, his eyes were full of tears, his bare hand holding the parcel was cracked at the knuckles.

“Good morning,” said Herr Bussen, and his lumpy face lightened, just for a moment, as if he expected something pleasant to happen. Charles slowed down, they exchanged names, and went on together in silence. Rosa opened the door for them.

“Ah,” she remarked, glancing from one to the other suspiciously, “so you are acquainted already?”

“Yes,” they said in one voice, and strong in solidarity, they moved past her without another word. Rosa disappeared into her own part of the house, talking to herself.

“Does she insult you every time she speaks to you?” asked Herr Bussen, with resigned patience.

“Not yet,” said Charles, who was beginning to find his immunity a disadvantage. He felt he was on the wrong side, he would not if he could help it be a pet of Rosa’s. Herr Bussen said, “Every day she insults me for at least half an hour, then she goes and insults Herr Mey, but in a different way, for he is very sharp and answers her in little ways she does not understand, but he really insults her in turn. She makes a house cat of Herr von Gehring because he fought a mensur, but it won’t last, and she is polite to you because you are a foreigner and pay more rent than we do. But you wait. Your turn will come.”

“Well, when it does,” said Charles, easily, “I’ll just get out.”

“And pay your whole three months’ rent or have her report you to the police?” asked Herr Bussen in wonder. “My God, you must be rich.”

Charles shook his head, feeling that it was all pretty much no use. A look of envy so deep it was almost hatred spread over Herr Bussen’s face, he paused and his eye wandered over Charles from head to foot as if he were some improbable faintly repellent creature of another species. “Ah, well,” he said, “seriously, I advise you to observe our curious customs, and do nothing, not the smallest thing, to attract the attention of the police. I tell you this because you are unfamiliar with the country—they are not fond of outlanders here.”

“Thank you,” said Charles stuffily, feeling deeply offended.

This melancholy conversation first depressed him, then it put him in a temper. He sat down in a dull but pleasant fury and began to draw hastily, without plan. Now and then he raised his elbows, drew his lungs full of air. The walls seemed to be closing in upon him, he imagined he could hear the breathing of those people in the other rooms, he smelt the iodoform on Hans’ bandage, the spoiled sardines on Herr Bussen’s breath, Rosa’s sweetish female hysteria made him ill. He drew the people at the hotel, the woman a sick fox, the man half pig, half tiger. He drew Herr Bussen’s unenlightened face, several times, growing more tender with each version. There was something about the fellow. With concentrated malice he drew Rosa, first as kitchen sloven, then as a withered old whore, finally without any clothes on. Studying these, he decided he had paid off a large installment of his irritation with her, and tore them all into minute bits. Instantly he regretted it, but there was no place to hide them from her. Then quite calmly he began to draw Hans’ face from the memory of that strange expression of pride in his wound, and this absorbed him so that he grew calm, was ashamed of his anger, wondered what had got into him. They were all good people, they were in terrible trouble, jammed up together in this little flat with not enough air or space or money, not enough of anything, no place to go, nothing to do but gnaw each other. I can always go home, he told himself, but why did I come here in the first place?

The sound of Tadeusz’ piano stopped him. He listened with pleasure, sitting back at ease. That fellow really could play. Charles had heard a great many famous pianists, by radio, who didn’t, it seemed to him, sound so much better than that. Tadeusz knew what he was doing. He drew Tadeusz sitting over the piano, bird head, little stiff wrinkles at the corners of his mouth, fingers like bird claws. “Hell, maybe I’m a caricaturist,” he thought, but he did not really worry about it. He settled down again and forgot to listen.

A scurrying about in the hall and Rosa’s voice raised in a shrill whimpering got through to him slowly, he did not wake up altogether until she was beating at his door, crying aloud in real terror, “Oh, God, oh, God, Herr Upton, come and help me. Come help. Herr Bussen—” Charles opened the door. Tadeusz and Hans were already at Herr Bussen’s door. Rosa’s face was streaming with tears, her hair was draggled. “Herr Bussen has poisoned himself.”

Charles shuddered with a mortal chill of fear. He came straight out and joined the others and they went in to Herr Bussen’s room together.

Herr Bussen was kneeling beside his bed, clutching a large bedroom jar in his arms, vomiting and retching, speechless except for a gasp between convulsions. Yet he could still raise his hand in a violent waving motion, gurgling, “Go away, go away. . . .”

“Get him to the bathroom,” cried Rosa, “fetch a doctor, bring water, for God’s sake look out for the rug,” and while Charles seized Herr Bussen under the arms to lift him up, Tadeusz came with wet towels and Hans, holding his face, ran to the telephone.

“No, no, God damn it,” shouted Herr Bussen, fiercely. “No doctor, no.” Freeing himself partially from Charles, he doubled up over the footboard of his bed, holding his stomach, apparently in agony, his face a terrifying purple green, a shower of sweat pouring over his eyebrows and nose.

“Oh, why did you do it?” cried Rosa, weeping. “To poison yourself, here among your friends, how could you?”

Herr Bussen collected himself for protest. “I tell you, I did not poison myself,” he shouted in a good strong baritone, “I told you, I ate something and it poisoned me.” He collapsed again over the jar, and the upheavals recommenced.

“Get him to the bathroom,” cried Rosa, wringing her hands. “I know,” she said, turning on Herr Bussen, indignant again. “That sausage. All those sardines. That liver paste. I warned you, but no, you would not listen. No, you knew best. How many times did I tell you. . .”

“Let me alone,” cried Herr Bussen, desperately. “Leave me.”

Charles and Tadeusz joined forces. “Come on,” said Tadeusz, in Platt Deutsch, with a conversational tone, “come on, we’ll help you.”

They took hold of him around the middle so that he hung down rather like a sack, and began hauling him as well as they could. “Oh, Almighty God,” groaned Herr Bussen in sincere despair, “let me alone.” But they got him in the bathroom, with no more regard for his feelings than if he were already dead, closed the door and locked it. At once Charles came out again, and left the apartment at a run, without his hat. He was back in a very few minutes with a large package, purchases from a pharmacy, and again closing the bathroom door, ignoring Rosa’s questions, he and Tadeusz got to work on Herr Bussen seriously.

Rosa turned on Hans, her face quite sodden by then, and still weeping, ordered him back to bed. Hans said, “No, don’t trouble yourself. I am better, I am going out to the clinic now.”

“You will make yourself worse,” wept Rosa.

“No, you may be surprised, I shall be quite all right,” said Hans, coolly, leaving.

Herr Bussen, eased, soothed, cleansed, safe in bed with an ice cap on his brow, the object of all attention from his three new friends, lay in bitter, ungrateful silence. He does not seem to be very pleased with us, thought Charles, and we did a roaring good job, too. Herr Bussen—why did they call him that? He wasn’t more than twenty-four years old—seemed sunken and shame-faced, he kept his eyes closed or turned to the wall, and when Tadeusz came in with hot soup from a restaurant, he shook his head and seemed about to shed tears. Rosa was injured by the sight of the soup, also.

“You must let me prepare his food,” she said to Tadeusz, “I do not want him poisoned again.” She took away the soup and brought it again freshly hot on an elegant tray. She seemed very subdued and Herr Bussen was melancholy and without appetite.

Charles, noticing the piles of papers on Herr Bussen’s desk, saw written upon them only endless mathematical calculations which he could recognize but not read. Rosa fidgeted among them, trying to straighten them out. In the hall she said to Charles, “You may not know it, but Herr Bussen is considered, at the University, to be a very brilliant mathematician. He promises to become a very learned man.” She spoke with pride and possessiveness. “If I am annoyed with him at times, it is because he needs someone to teach him good habits. He eats—ah, it is no better than offal. And now he is ashamed because you know—you have found him out in his misery. It is a terrible thing to be poor,” she said, and the tears seemed to come not only from her eyes but from her skin, the tears and the sweat mingled in a stream and covered her face. “What shall we do? What is to become of us?”

Tadeusz came out and took her by the arm. “Enough of that, Rosa,” he said, shaking her gently. “Now what happened, really? Herr Bussen eats a sardine and makes a nuisance of himself. Go and lie down, we will look after him and not disturb anything.”

“I am very nervous,” said Rosa, smiling at him gratefully.

They looked in upon Herr Bussen. He was lying with his arm thrown over his face, quietly, as if the sleeping powders were taking effect. “Come along with me,” said Tadeusz to Charles, “I have an odd spot of brandy, too.”

Hans came in with his face done up in fresh lint and court plaster, much improved. He refused brandy and said, “Do you suppose we ought to watch him? Do you suppose?”

“No, I don’t believe it for a minute,” said Tadeusz, after a small pause. “Do you?” he asked Charles.

“I think he told the truth,” said Charles.

“Good,” said Hans. “Have one for me,” he said, and closed his door.

Tadeusz’ narrow room was crowded with an upright piano, and a small silent keyboard which Charles examined, touching stiffly. “I work on that seven hours a day,” said Tadeusz, spreading his hands and turning them about, “and you’d better be grateful. Now the damnation suicide is asleep, I shan’t be able to play any more today. We may as well get drunk,” he said, showing four inches of brandy in a bottle. “Seriously, I don’t drink. But if I stayed too long in this place I would.”

Charles said, “It’s getting me down, too, and I wish I knew why. Compared to really poor people, people I have seen, here and at home, even Herr Bussen is almost rich. Compared to even well-off people, I suppose I’m almost a pauper. But I never felt poor, I never was afraid of it. I always thought that if I really wanted money more than anything else, I could get it. But here—I don’t know. . . everybody seems so crowded, somehow, so worried, and they can’t get their minds off of money for a second.”

“They lost that war, please don’t forget,” said Tadeusz, running his fingers over the silent keyboard that gave forth an even wooden clatter. “That damages a nation’s personality no end, you know. But I have no sympathy for them, none. And as for feeling crowded, ha, you would have to be a Pole to know what that means. These big fat ugly people,” he said, and he crossed his knees and began torturing his scalp lock. “By God they should be Poles for a while to know what it is to be hungry.”

“They aren’t all ugly,” said Charles. “Not by a long shot.”

“Okay,” said Tadeusz, indifferently and his little eyes closed. Charles thought, Well, what should I say? Am I supposed to go into an impassioned defense of the Poles? Or a denunciation of the Germans? He was thinking really of his fleece-lined coat, wondering if it would be good enough to offer to Herr Bussen and how to go about it. Could he just knock at his door and say, “Here is a coat I don’t happen to need?” Or (no, this wouldn’t do), “If you don’t have a coat with you, why not use this one for a while?” There should be some way of doing it decently. He explained to Tadeusz and asked for advice.

“Oh, never,” said Tadeusz. “You can’t do that. He is very proud and he would be furious as hell. And besides,” Tadeusz swung a foot, “we have to realize that a man’s sufferings are his own, quite often he chooses them to some ends of his own—how do we know? We pity people too often for the wrong reasons. They may not need it or want it at all, you know. Poor Old Bussen, we are able to say, and it makes us feel better, more secure, in our own fortune. Sometimes there are worse things than cold and hunger. Had you thought of that? Do you know him at all, his feelings, or his plan for himself? I think until you do, don’t interfere.”

“If we hadn’t interfered today, he might be dead by now,” said Charles.

“We may have made a mistake even so,” said Tadeusz, calmly. “Now we must wait and see. Of course if we could give him money or food without letting him know why we did it, that would be another thing. But we can’t. If you go now after all that has happened and offer him a coat, just like that, why, what can you expect? He would feel like throwing it back at you. A man might accept charity if he did not fear the contempt of the giver. But only good friends can accept or exchange favors. Otherwise it doesn’t do.” Tadeusz stood up and walked about quickly, bent at the waist and peering at Charles. “Dear fellow, don’t mind if I say, you Americns have some very odd notions. Why all this benevolence? What do you expect to gain by it?”

Charles said, “I wouldn’t gain anything by it, and I would expect to lose a coat. But I don’t need the coat,” he said, “and so far as I am concerned that would be the end of it.”

“You sound morally indignant,” said Tadeusz. He paused before Charles and smiled. “Don’t get mad, you hear how well I speak American? You would gain from it the pride in being able to give a coat. And Herr Bussen would be warm, but he would owe his coat to the charity of a stranger, and it might spoil his whole career. Try to understand. I know more about this than you do. If ever I come to your country I will take your advice about Americans.”

“I don’t believe Americans are so different from other people as all that,” said Charles.

“Believe me,” said Tadeusz, “you are like beings from another planet to us. Don’t offer a coat to Herr Bussen. He will hate you for it.”

Charles said, “I can’t believe it really.”

“If you set yourself up as a benefactor,” said Tadeusz, “you must expect to be hated. Let me tell you something. A very rich man I know wished to give good sums of money to help young musicians. But he went to his lawyer and insisted that the gift must be anonymous; under no circumstances must the giver be known. Well, the lawyer said of course it would be arranged, but it would make work, mystery, why did his client want that? And this very wise man said, ‘I am superstitious and I do not want them to be able to curse me by name.’”

“Good God,” said Charles, sincerely horrified.

“Ah, yes, good God,” said Tadeusz, amiably.

Charles left the coat in his closet, and brought milk and oranges instead to Herr Bussen. Hans was there already, sitting beside the bed offering Herr Bussen more soup.

The invalid accepted, and swallowed the nourishment as if it were bitter medicine. Charles thought, Yes, it’s true, he isn’t getting any good out of it; and he saw plainly that Herr Bussen felt himself being engulfed slowly in a debt he had no hope of paying. Charles, at the foot of the bed, had a curious scene flash through his mind: Herr Bussen, the object of charity, fleeing like a stag across the snowy waste, with Hans and Tadeusz and Rosa and he, Charles, after him in full cry, bringing him down, by the throat if necessary, to give him aid and comfort. Charles heard the deep mournful voices of his father’s liver-spotted hounds.

When Rosa brought the coffee tray, one end of it was occupied by an ordinary looking black japanned metal box. She stood, without pouring the coffee, her hands on the table, and said in a low voice, “This hasn’t been a very good day for anybody, I suppose. But I have on my conscience my sharpness to Herr Bussen. I have told him so, and he answered—he answered kindly,” she said. “But I know that you, a stranger, and from a rich country—”

“The country may be rich,” said Charles, “but most of the people in it are not—”

“Couldn’t be expected to understand,” Rosa went on, waving his speech away without listening. “Look, I want to show you something, then maybe you will see a little of what has happened to us. Outlanders, all the world, come here with their money—”

“I tell you I am not rich, for one,” said Charles, hopelessly. She gave him a stare very much like contempt for his lying speech; she knew better. He was the worst kind of rich American, the kind who pretended to be poor. “With their money,” she said, angrily, raising her voice, “and then they think we are cheap because we worry about how we shall live. You despise us because we are ruined and why are we ruined, tell me that? It is because your country deserted and betrayed us in the war, you should have helped us and you did not.” Her voice dropped and became bitter and quiet.

Charles said in a matter-of-fact, reasoning tone: “All the way over on the boat, the Germans kept telling me that. The truth is, I’ve heard talk about that war all my life, but I hardly remember it. I have to confess I hadn’t thought much about it. If I had, maybe I would never have come here.”

“You didn’t have to think about it,” said Rosa, “but here, we have nothing else to think about.” She opened the black box. It was full of paper money, thick bales of it in rubber bands, such an amount of printed money as Charles had seen only in glimpses at the elbow of a clerk behind the barred windows of a great bank. Rosa lifted one of the bundles.

“These are nothing,” she said with affected airiness, “these are only a hundred thousand marks each. . . . Wait.” She lifted another and flirted the edges through her fingers. “These are five hundred thousand marks each—look,” she said, her voice wavering. “One million marks each, these.” She dropped each bundle as she spoke upon the table beside them without glancing up. Terror and awe were in her face, as if again for just a moment, she believed in the value of this paper as she had once believed. “Did you ever see a note for five million marks? Here are a hundred of them, you will never see this again—and oh,” she cried suddenly, in a frenzy of grief, clutching the treacherous stuff with both hands, “try now to buy a loaf of bread with all this, try it, try it!”

Her voice rose and she wept shamelessly without hiding her face, her arms hanging loosely, the worthless money dropping to the floor.

Charles looked about as if he expected help, rescue, to come by miracle. He backed away from her thinking only of escape, saying as well as he could, “I know it is all a horrible business—but, what can I do?”

This dull question had a remarkable effect. Rosa’s tears dried almost instantly, her voice deepened a note, she spoke with intense anger. “You can do nothing,” she said vehemently, “nothing, you know nothing at all, you cannot even imagine—”

Charles picked up the money from the carpet, and Rosa began placing the stiff pale colored bundles again in the box, carefully, arranging them first one way and another, stopping now and then to squeeze the end of her nose with her thin little handkerchief. “Nothing to say, nothing to be done,” she repeated, giving him a resentful look as if he had failed her, a look as personal and angry as if she were a member of his family, or at least a familiar friend, or—what on earth was Rosa to him? A middle-aged stranger who had rented him a room, someone he had expected to see and speak to perhaps once a week, and here she was, swarming all over him, weeping on his neck, telling her troubles, putting the blame for the troubles of the world on him, driving him nuts, and no way that he could see of getting out of it. She closed the box and leaned her hands on the table. “When you are so poor,” she said, “you are frightened of the poor and unfortunate. I was frightened of Herr Bussen—no, I almost hated him. I thought every day, ‘My God, such a man will bring bad luck on us all, he will drag us all down with him.’” She spoke in a very low tone. “But today, it came to me that Herr Bussen will live through everything, he is strong, he is not really afraid. And that is a comfort to me, because I am afraid of everything.”

She poured the coffee, took up the japanned box and went out.

The household settled down that night for a good sleep. What a relief, thought Charles, to put a long quiet stretch of darkness between you and the thing that happened. Suppose Old Bussen had popped off? He felt warmly towards Old Bussen, who was still breathing—snoring, in fact, in long rich groans, as if he couldn’t breathe hard enough.

When Charles put his head in to look at Herr Bussen the next morning, two rawboned solemn youths with identical leather-colored forelocks were sitting with him, one on the bed, one on the spindling chair. They turned and gazed at the stranger with profound blue eyes exactly alike, and Herr Bussen, looking very well and merry, introduced them. Twin brothers, he said, school friends of his, who were at that moment on the point of fulfilling a life’s ambition. On New Year’s Eve they were going to open a small cabaret of their own, a snug little half-cellar with the best beer, a supper table and pretty girls who could sing and dance. Nothing big, but a good place, and Herr Bussen hoped Charles would go with him to celebrate the first evening. Charles said it sounded a fine idea to him, and thought perhaps Hans and Tadeusz would like to go, too. The brothers eyed him without a flicker of expression.

Herr Bussen sat up as if he had new life in him. “Oh, yes, we will all go together.” The brothers stood up to giant heights, and one of them said, “It will not be expensive, either.” As if being able to give this piece of good news was pleasant to him, he grinned broadly and reassuringly at Charles, who grinned in turn. He said to Herr Bussen, “I’m going out. Could I bring you anything?”

“Oh, no,” said Herr Bussen, firmly, shaking his head with a small glitter of resentment in his eye. “Thank you, nothing at all. I’m getting up now.”

At the foot of the shallow flight of steps leading to the new cabaret, a dish of food scraps had been set out for the hungry small animals. A black cat was there, eating very fast, glancing nervously over his shoulder as he swallowed. One of the twins put his head out, invited his four visitors in festively, noticed the cat and said ritually, “May it do him good.” He threw open the door to disclose a small, freshly painted, well-lighted little place, full of tables covered with red checkerboard cloths, a modest bar, and at the farther end, a long table set out with cold supper. It could all be seen at a glance. There was a homemade air about the colored paper decorations, the feathery tinsel draped above the bar mirror, the rack full of steins and the small cuckoo clock.

It was hardly Charles’ notion of a Berlin cabaret; he had heard about Berlin night life and expected something more sophisticated. He remarked as much to Tadeusz.

“Oh, no,” said Tadeusz, “this is another kind of thing altogether. This is going to be nice-stuffy-middle-class-German full of rosy emotions and beer. You could bring your most innocent child here if you had an innocent child.” He seemed pleased, and so did Hans and Herr Bussen: they walked about and praised everything the brothers had done. All of them were pleasantly excited because none of them had ever known anyone who ran a cabaret, and they enjoyed a cozy feeling of being on the inside of things for once. Almost immediately they began calling Herr Bussen by his first name. Tadeusz began it.

“Otto, dear fellow, could you give me a light?” he asked, and Otto, who did not smoke, blushed with pleasure and felt in his pockets as if he expected to find matches.

They were the first comers. As the brothers went on about their last-minute business, rushing back and forth through the swinging door leading to the kitchen, Otto led the way to the supper table, where they helped themselves comfortably but carefully, for at close range there was an air of thrift about the food, as if the cheese and sausages had been counted and the bread weighed, perhaps. A boy in a white jacket brought them tall steins of beer; they lifted them to each other, waved them at the brothers, and drank long and deeply.

“In Munich,” said Tadeusz, “I used to drink with a crowd of music students, all Germans. We drank and drank, and the man who had to leave the table first paid for all. I always paid. It was a bore, really.”

“A dull custom at best,” commented Hans, “and of course the kind of thing foreigners would notice and tell about, as if it were typical.” His face was quietly annoyed, he looked past Tadeusz, who refused to be snubbed.

“I have already agreed with you it was a bore,” he said, “and after all, only an incident of life in Munich.” His tone was soothing, indulgent, a little insolent. Charles, observing, thought with some slight surprise that these fellows did not like each other, after all. And almost instantly he felt indifference tinged with dislike for them both, and an uneasy feeling that he was in the wrong company; he wished pretty thoroughly he had not come to that place with them.

One of the brothers leaned over them with his open, singleminded expression, calling their attention to newcomers. A stupidly handsome young man with a careful thatch of curls above a self-consciously god-like brow was helping an oliveskinned, yellow-haired young woman with her wraps. “A star in the moving pictures,” whispered the brother, excitedly, “and that girl is his mistress and his leading lady.” He dived towards his celebrities awkwardly, saw them settled and was back in a moment. “There comes Lutte, a model, one of the most beautiful girls in Berlin,” he said, his voice throbbing. “She is going to dance a rumba when the time comes.”

They all turned in natural curiosity and saw indeed a very beautiful slender girl, her head shining like a silver yellow peony above her rather skimpy black dress. She smiled and waved her hand at them, they stood up and bowed, but she did not approach them as they had hoped. Leaning on the bar, she talked to the boy in the white jacket. The room filled then rather rapidly, there was a rush for the long table and the brothers, flushed with success, beamed and scurried with trays and steins. A small orchestra moved into the space beside the bar.

Almost every guest, Charles noticed, had brought a musical instrument, a violin or flute or white piano accordion, a clarinet; and one man lumbered in under the burden of a violoncello in a green baize-covered case. A young woman with huge haunches and thick legs, a knot of sleek brown hair slipping upon her unpowdered neck, came in by herself, looked around with a vague smile which no one returned, and went behind the bar, where she began competently to set up trays of beer.

“There you see her,” said Hans, looking at Lutte possessively, “the truest type of German beauty—tell me, have you seen anything better anywhere?”

“Oh, come now,” said Tadeusz, mildly, “there aren’t a half dozen like her in this town. The legs and feet, surely they aren’t typical? She might have French blood, or even a little Polish,” he said. “Only she is perhaps a little flat-bosomed for that.”

“What you seem never to understand,” said Hans, in a slightly edged voice, “is that when I say German I don’t mean peasants or these fat Berliners.”

“Perhaps we should always mean peasants when we speak of a race,” said Tadeusz. “The nobility and the royalty are always mixed bloods, the complete mongrel, really, they have no nationality at all. Even the middle classes marry everywhere, but the peasant stays in his own region and marries his own kind, generation after generation, and creates the race, quite simply, as I see it.”

“The trouble with that notion,” said Hans, “is that the peasantry of almost any country looks quite like the peasantry of any other.”

“Oh, superficially,” said Otto. “Their heads are very different, if you will study them.” He leaned forward earnestly. “No matter how it came about,” he told them, “the true great old Germanic type is lean and tall and fair as gods.” His forehead formed a deep wrinkle which sank to a meaty cleft between his brows. His small puffy eyes swam tenderly, the roll of fat across his collar flushed with emotion. “We are not by any means all the pig type,” he said humbly, spreading his thick hands, “though I know the foreign caricaturists make us all appear so. Those were perhaps the old Wendish people, and after all, they were a single tribe, they are not of the old true great Germanic—”

“Type,” finished Tadeusz, mildly rude. “Let’s agree then, the Germans are all of the highest type of beauty and they have preposterously fine manners. Look at all the heel-clicking and bowing from the waist and elegant high-toned voices. And how polite and smiling a seven-foot policeman can be when he is getting ready to crack your skull open. I have seen it. No, Hans, you have a great culture here, no doubt, but I think no civilization. You will be the last race on earth to be civilized, but does it matter?”

“On the other hand,” said Hans with extreme politeness, smiling, a cold gleam in his eye, “the Poles, if you like that high-cheeked, low-browed Tartar style, have also great physical beauty, and though they have contributed exactly nothing to world-culture, they are civilized in a medieval sort of way, I suppose.”

“Thanks,” said Tadeusz, turning towards Hans as if to show his flat cheeks and narrow high forehead. “One of my grandmothers was a Tartar, and you can see how typical I am.”

“One of your grandfathers was an Austrian, too,” said Otto; “I’d never think of you as a Pole. You seem to me an Austrian.”

“Oh, by God, I can’t have that,” said Tadeusz, decidedly, and he laughed with his lips tightly closed. “No, no, I’ll be a Tartar first. But I am a Pole just the same.”

Charles had never seen any Poles except a few short-legged broad-faced men laying railroad ties somewhere in the South, and he would not have known they were Poles unless someone had told him, and the man called them Polacks, besides. He could make nothing of Tadeusz, but Hans and Otto both seemed persons he had known before; Texas was full of boys like Otto, and Hans reminded him of Kuno. It seemed to him that the discussion was getting nowhere, and it reminded him of quarrels during his schooldays between the German boys and Mexican boys and the Kentucky boys; the Irish boys fought everybody, and Charles, who was partly Irish, remembered that he had done a good deal of fighting in which all sight of the original dispute had been lost in the simple love of violence. He said, “All the way over on the boat the Germans kept telling me I was not a typical American. How could they know? Of course I am perfectly typical.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Tadeusz, and this time his good humor was real. “We know all about you. Americans are all cowboys or very rich, and when they are rich they get drunk in poor countries and paste thousand-franc notes on their suitcases, or light cigarettes with them—”

“Oh, God,” said Charles simply. “Who started that story?” Even American tourists went about repeating it with complacent horror, as if to prove they were not that sort of tourist.

“You know what is the trouble?” asked Tadeusz, amiably. “The Americans we know are all so filthy rich. There is nothing Europeans love and crave and covet more than wealth. If we didn’t believe your country has all the money, there would be nothing wrong with you, particularly.”

“We’re punch drunk, anyhow,” said Charles. “We don’t give a damn any more.”

“Europeans hate each other for everything and for nothing; they’ve been trying to destroy each other for two thousand years, why do you Americans expect us to like you?” asked Tadeusz.

“We don’t expect it,” said Charles. “Who said we did? We, naturally, like just everybody. We are sentimental. Just like the Germans. You want to be loved for yourselves alone and you are always right and you can never see why other people can’t see you in the same rosy light you see yourselves. Look what a glorious people you are and yet nobody loves you. Well, that’s a great pity.”

Otto gazed earnestly at Charles from under his deep brows, wagged his head and said, “I do not think you really like anybody, you Americans. You are indifferent to everybody and so it is easy for you to be gay, to be careless, to seem friendly. You are really a coldhearted indifferent people. You have no troubles. You have no troubles because you do not know how to have them. Even if you get troubles, you think it is just a package meant for the people next door, delivered to you by mistake. That is what I really believe.”

Charles, embittered, said, “I can’t talk about whole countries because I never knew one, not even my own. I only know a few persons here and there and some I like and some I don’t like and I never thought it anything but a personal matter. . . .”

Tadeusz said, “Oh, dear fellow, that is being much too modest. The whole art of self-importance is to raise your personal likes and dislikes to the plane of moral or esthetic principle, and to apply on an international scale your smallest personal experience. . . . If someone steps on your foot, you should not rest until you have raised an army to avenge you. . . . And as for us, what are we doing with our evening? At this rate I shall have indigestion. . . .”

“What about our friends the French?” asked Hans, suddenly. “Can anyone find fault with them? Their food, their wine, their dress, their manners—” he lifted his stein and drank without enjoyment, and added—“a race of monkeys.”

“They have very bad manners,” said Tadeusz, “and they would cut you into ribbons with a dull pair of scissors for five francs in hand. A shortsighted and selfish people, and how I love them. But not as I do the English. Take the English—”

“Take the Italians,” said Charles, “all of them.”

“Nothing worth mentioning since Dante,” said Tadeusz. “I detest their lumpy Renaissance.”

“Now that’s settled,” said Charles, “let’s take the pigmies, or the Icelanders, or the head hunters of Borneo—”

“I love them all,” cried Tadeusz, “especially the Irish. I like the Irish because they are nearly as damnation patriotic as the Poles.”

“I was brought up on Irish patriotism,” said Charles. “My mother’s name was O’Hara, and I was supposed to be proud of it, but you have a tough time being proud if you are called Harp and Potato Mouth at school where the others are all Scotch Presbyterians or of English descent.”

Tadeusz said, “What nonsense,” and he began to talk pleasantly and quietly about the great ancient Celtic race, slyly too, aiming at Hans; praising their ancient culture of which traces were found in all parts of Europe. “Yes, even the Germans have been improved by it,” he said. Hans and Otto shook their heads, but their anger seemed to have disappeared, their faces smoothed and their eyes met openly once more. Charles was soothed and flattered to find Irish greatness acknowledged at last by somebody other than his immediate family. He said to Tadeusz, “My father used to tell me, ‘Ah, the Irish, my boy. God knows they went down early in time, but don’t forget this, they had a great national culture when the British were still painting themselves blue, and the old French used to exchange scholars with them!’”

Tadeusz translated this to Hans and Otto, and Hans laughed so suddenly he put his hand to his cheek with a grimace. “Be careful,” said Tadeusz, looking at the wound as he always did, with an air of clinical interest, which he knew Hans liked. Charles went on to say he had never seen such a statement in any history books, which seemed very vague about the Irish until they began fighting with the British. By that time, the books said in effect, they were just a lot of wild bog-jumpers. He had felt sorry for his father, trying to wring a drop of comfort out of the myth of his splendid past, but the usual run of histories on the subject hadn’t borne him out. He was pleased to think he had simply got hold of the wrong books.

“They are very like the Poles,” said Tadeusz, “those Irish, living on the glory of their past, on their poetry and the jeweled Book of Kells and the great cups and crowns of ancient Ireland, the memories of victories and defeats godlike in intensity, the hope of rising again to glory: and in the meantime,” he added, “always fighting quite a lot and very unsuccessfully.”

Hans leaned forward and spoke with importance, as if he were a professor addressing his class: “The fate of Ireland (and of Poland, too, Tadeusz, don’t forget) is an example, a most terrible example, of what can happen to a country when it divides against itself and lets the enemy in. . . the Irish, so nationalistic at this late day, are yet divided. What do they expect? They could have saved themselves in early time by uniting and attacking the enemy, instead of waiting to be attacked.”

Tadeusz reminded him, “Hans, that does not always work either,” but Hans ignored the little gibe.

Charles, ill-informed as he was, floundering in the quicksands of popular history, could not answer, yet the whole notion was offensive to him. “But why jump on a man unless he jumps first?”

Hans, the youthful oracle, was ready. “Why, because he always attacks when you are not looking, or when you have put down your arms for an instant. So you are punished for carelessness really, for not troubling to learn the intentions of your enemy. You are beaten, and that is the end of you, unless you can gather strength and fight again.”

“The Celts aren’t ended,” said Tadeusz; “they exist in great numbers and are scattered all over and still have influence everywhere they touch.”

“Influence?” asked Hans. “A purely oblique, feminine, worthless thing, influence. Power, pure power is what counts to a nation or a race. You must be able to tell other peoples what to do, and above all what they may not do, you must be able to enforce every order you give against no matter what opposition, and when you demand anything at all, it must be given you without question. That is the only power, and power is the only thing of any value or importance in this world.”

“It doesn’t last, though, any better than some other things,” said Tadeusz. “It doesn’t always work as well as long ruse and intelligent strategy. It goes down in the long run.”

“Maybe it goes down because powerful people get tired of power,” said Otto, leaning his head on his hand and looking discouraged; “maybe they wear themselves out beating other people and spying on them and ordering them about and robbing them. Maybe they exhaust themselves.”

“And maybe one day they overstep themselves, or a new young power rises to put an end to them,” said Tadeusz; “that happens.”

“Maybe they find out it doesn’t pay,” said Charles.

“It always pays,” said Hans; “that is the point. It pays, and nothing else does. Everything else is childish beside it. Otto, you surprise me. That is a strange point of view for you.”

Otto sagged, guilty and uncomfortable. “I am not a soldier,” he said. “I love study and quiet.”

Hans sat very stiffly, an alienated hostile glitter in his eyes. He turned halfway to Charles and said, “We Germans were beaten in the last war, thanks partly to your great country, but we shall win in the next.”

A chill ran down Charles’ spine, he shrugged his shoulders. They were all a little drunk, there might be a row if they didn’t pull themselves together. He did not want to quarrel with anybody, nor to fight the war over again. “We were all in short pants when that war was ended,” he said. Hans answered instantly, “Ah, yes, but we will all be in uniforms for the next.”

Tadeusz said, “Oh, come now, dear Hans, I never felt less bloodthirsty in my life. I only want to play the piano.”

“I want to paint,” said Charles.

“I want to teach mathematics,” said Otto.

“Neither am I bloodthirsty,” said Hans, “but I know what will happen.” His cheek, under its band of court plaster, was slightly more swollen than earlier in the evening. The fingers of his left hand explored tenderly along the line of angry blue flesh. He said, in a bright impersonal tone, “Look, it is most interesting to remember one thing. We should have won that war, and we lost it in the first three days, though we did not know it, or could not believe it, for four years. What was the cause? One single delayed order, one sole failure of a body of troops to move at a given moment, on that first advance through Belgium. A delay of three days lost us that war. Well, it won’t happen the next time.”

“No,” said Tadeusz, gently, “the next time, there will be another kind of mistake, something else quite different will go wrong, who knows how or why? It is always like that. Wars are not won by intelligence, Hans. Can’t you see that? All the fine planning in the world can’t insure an army against that one fellow who will, when the moment comes, delay, or give the wrong order, or be in the wrong place. Why, the other side did nothing but blunder all the way through, and yet they won, that time.”

“Sea power,” said Charles, “good old sea power. I bet on that. It wins in the long run.”

“Carthage was a sea power, but she didn’t beat Rome,” said Otto.

“The next time,” said Hans, with cool stubbornness, “they won’t win. You’ll see. The next time, there will be no mistakes on our side.”

“I can wait,” said Tadeusz, “I am in no hurry.”

“I can wait, all right,” said Charles, “and meantime, let me get the beer.”

The orchestra, increased by the efforts of guests with their fiddles, flutes and the violoncello, had been making a fine din, so that the four voices had been rising gradually. “Let’s give it up for the present,” said Tadeusz; “it can’t be settled this evening.”

The actor and his mistress were gone, and Lutte remained the only beauty in the room. She was sitting with several young men and another girl at a table near by, all drinking beer heartily, laughing constantly and falling into each other’s arms at intervals for embraces and smacks on the cheek, the boys kissing boys or girls alike with indiscriminate warmth. Lutte caught Charles’ glance and waved her beer glass at him. He waved back and smiled excitedly. She was a knockout and he hoped quite violently to know her better. And even at that moment, like the first symptoms of some fatal sickness, there stirred in him a most awful premonition of disaster, and his thoughts, blurred with drink and strangeness and the sound of half-understood tongues and the climate of remembered wrongs and hatreds, revolved dimly around vague remembered tales of Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun and all the Caesars and Alexander the Great and Darius and the dim Pharaohs and lost Babylon. He felt helpless, undefended, looked at the three strange faces near him and decided not to drink any more, for he must not be drunker than they; he trusted none of them.

Otto, leaving his beer, wandered away, and one of the brothers handed him a white piano accordion as he passed. The change in Otto was miraculous. From soggy gloom his face turned to a great mask of simple enjoyment, he took up the tune the orchestra was playing and roamed among the tables, the instrument folding and unfolding in his arms, his blunt fingers flying over the keys. In a fine roaring voice he began to sing:

“Ich armes welsches Teufelein

Ich kann nicht mehr marschieren—”

“MARSCHIEREN!” roared every voice in the place, joyously. “Ich kann nicht mehr marschier’n.”

Otto sang:

“Ich hab’ verlor’n mein Pfeiflein

Aus meinen Mantelsack—”

“’SACK!” yelled the chorus, “Aus meinen Mantelsack.”

Hans stood up and sang in a clear light voice: “Ich hab’, ich hab’ gefunden, was du verloren hast—”

“HAST!” bawled the chorus, and everybody was standing now, their laughing faces innocent and pure as lambs at play, “was du verloren hast.”

There was a great wave of laughter after this, and the orchestra suddenly changed to “The Peanut Vendor.” Lutte, with a serious face as if she were fulfilling her duty, stood up and began to dance alone, something supposed no doubt to be a rumba, but to Charles, it seemed rather a combination of the black bottom and the hoochy-coochy such as he had seen, sneaking off furtively with other boys, in carnival sideshows during his innocent boyhood in Texas. He had danced the rumba to the tune of “The Peanut Vendor” all the way from his home town, across the Atlantic and straight into Bremen harbor, and it occurred to him that here was something he could really do. He took the gourds from the quiet little fellow who was clacking them rather feebly, and began to do his version of the rumba, shaking the gourds and cracking them together with great authority.

He could hear hands clapping in rhythm all over the room, and Lutte, abandoning her solo, began to dance with him. He handed back the gourds at once and took Lutte firmly around her warm, agitated waist, very thinly covered. She held her face back from him stiffly, smiled with a fair imitation of a cinematic femme fatale, and rather clumsily but with great meaning bumped her hip against him. He gathered her in, folded her up to him as close as he could, but she stiffened again and bumped him, this time full in the stomach. “What say we give up the technique and let nature take its course,” said Charles, with a straight face.

“What is that?” she asked, unexpectedly in English. “I do not understand.”

“Well,” said Charles, kissing her on the cheek, “it speaks English too.” She did not kiss back, but went limp and began to dance naturally.

“Am I as beautiful as that moving picture actress who was here this evening?” asked Lutte, wistfully.

“At least,” said Charles.

“Would I do for the moving pictures in America, in your Hollywood?” she asked, leaning upon him.

“Don’t bump,” said Charles. “Yes, you would do fine in Hollywood.”

“Do I dance well enough?” asked Lutte.

“Yes, darling, you do. You are a whizz.”

“What is that?”

“Something wonderful,” said Charles. “Come to me, angel.”

“Do you know anybody in Hollywood?” asked Lutte, sticking firmly to her one interest.

“No, but you might,” said Charles; “all Germany and Central Europe are there already; you’d be bound to run into friends. Anyway you won’t be lonesome long.”

Lutte put her mouth like a ripe peach to his ear and blowing warmly upon it whispered, “Take me to America with you.”

“Let’s go,” said Charles, and seizing her more firmly he ran a few steps towards the door. She held back. “No, I am serious, I want to go to America.”

“So do I,” said Charles, recklessly, “so does everybody.”

“That is not true,” said Lutte, severely, almost stopping in her tracks. At this moment Hans cut in. Charles sat down feeling cheated. Lutte’s manner changed completely. She melted towards Hans, they danced slowly and as they danced, she kissed him softly and continually and gently on his right cheek, her mouth meek and sweet, her eyes nearly closed. Over Hans’ disfigured face came that same look of full-fed pride, of composed self-approval—of arrogance, that was the word. Charles felt a flicker of sharp hatred for Hans. Then it passed. “Hell,” he said, aloud, yet to no one, “what of it?”

“I think so too,” said Tadeusz, “I think, hell, what of it?”

“Let’s have some brandy,” said Charles. Otto was sitting quietly, he roused and smiled.

“What a fine evening!” he said. “We are all friends, are we not?”

“Completely,” said Tadeusz, “we are all friends to you, Otto.” He had grown quieter and softer in his gestures, his eyes peered vaguely between his wrinkled lids, his little tight smile was constant. “I am getting damnation drunk, and my conscience will begin hurting soon,” he said, contentedly. Then the others, listening dimly, heard him telling some story about his childhood in Cracow. “. . . in the old house where my family have lived since the twelfth century. . .” he said. “At Easter we ate only pork in contempt of the Jews, and after the long fasting of Lent naturally we gorged ourselves shamelessly. . . . On Easter morning after High Mass I would eat until I was perfectly round, and in pain. Then I would lie down and cry, and when they asked me what troubled me, I would say, out of shame, that my conscience was hurting me. They would be very respectful and comfort me, but sometimes I thought I saw a gleam in an eye, or just a flash of a look on a face—not my mother’s, but my sister’s, perhaps—she was a horrid, knowing little thing—and my nurse’s. One day my nurse gave me some soothing syrup and rubbed my stomach with that insulting false sympathy and said, ‘There now, your conscience feels better, doesn’t it?’ I went howling and told my mother that my nurse had kicked me in the stomach. Then I upchucked all my Easter pork, so the Jews had their revenge for once. My nurse said, ‘What a little monster it is’; then she and my mother talked in the next room, and when they came back smiling I knew the game was up. I never mentioned my conscience again to them. But once after I was grown up, or nearly, I was very drunk and came home at four in the morning, and I crawled upstairs because it seemed unreasonable, this business of people walking about on their hind legs all the time. The red stair carpet gave me a sense of great security and ease, and I remember feeling that I was a kind of prophet of good for mankind, restoring an old way of locomotion which would probably revolutionize all society once I had proved its pleasures and possibilities. The first obstacle I encountered was my mother. She stood at the head of the stairs holding a lighted candle, waiting without a word. I waved one paw at her but she did not respond. And when I put my head above the last step she kicked me under the chin and almost knocked me out. She never mentioned this incident and I could hardly believe it myself except for my sore tongue the next day. Well, such was my upbringing in that old city, but I remember it dearly now, something between a cemetery and a Lost Paradise, with an immense sound of bells. . . .”

Otto said, “Maybe we should have some beer,” and with a sad mouth he talked a little about his own childhood. His mother had beaten him quite hard one day, without warning, when he was cracking walnuts and eating them. With tears he had asked her why, and she said, “Don’t ask me any questions. What is good enough for Martin Luther is good enough for you.” And later in a child’s book he had read how Luther’s mother had beaten him until the blood came because he annoyed her with the sound of cracking nuts. “Until then I had thought of Luther as a great, forbidding cruel man who loved bloodshed, but after that I felt sorry for him. He was once a poor helpless child like me, beaten for nothing,” Otto said, “and yet he became great.” His face was full of humble apology. “That was child’s nonsense, but it helped me to live,” he said.

The drifting smoke and the lights and the voices and the music were all mingled and swimming together around their heads. The big young woman who had been helping at the bar came then, her knot of hair slipping still further down her neck, and seemed to be pulling chairs and tables towards the wall. Her fine haunches jiggled under her tight skirt, her great breasts were stretching and falling as she raised and lowered her arms, her heavy legs were braced far apart as she pushed at a table. The men sitting about watched her without moving or offering help. Charles observed another change in Otto. He was watching the girl intently, his mouth moistening. He seemed lost in a pleasant daze, his nose twitched, his eyes grew round and took on the calculating ferocity of a tomcat’s. The girl leaned over and the hollows of her knees showed; she straightened up and the muscles of her back and shoulders writhed. Slowly, feeling Otto’s gaze upon her, she began to blush. Her neck turned red, her cheeks, her forehead, the whole face stiffened and darkened as if she were resisting pain, or a surge of anger. But the corners of her soft formless mouth were smiling, and she did not raise her eyes again after her first quick glance. Quite suddenly she gave a last plunge at a chair, set it in place with a thump, and ran away, her body full of awkward, contradictory motions. Otto turned to Charles, and showered upon him the remains of his impassioned gaze at the girl.

“There is a fine armful for you,” he said; “I like big strong girls.” Charles nodded as if he agreed, and looked again at Lutte, still dancing with Hans and kissing him.

A wooden cuckoo about the size of a humming bird leaped from his little door above the clockface and began his warning note. Instantly everybody rose and each one embraced the person nearest him, shouting, “Happy New Year, health, good luck, happy New Year, God bless you.” Glasses and stems danced aloft in half circles, spilling foam on uplifted faces. A disordered circle formed, arms interlocked, and a ragged singing began which smoothed out almost at once into a deep chorus, the fine voices swinging along together in frolicsome tunes Charles did not know. He swayed with the circle, woven into it, he opened his mouth and sang tunelessly without words. Real joy, warm and careless, swept him away; this was a place to be, these were wonderful people, he liked absolutely everybody there. The circle broke up, ran together, whirled, loosened, fell apart.

Hans came over smiling on one side of his face, Lutte beside him. They put their arms around Charles together and wished him a happy New Year. He stood there swaying with an arm around each, all jealousy gone. Lutte kissed him sweetly on the mouth, and he kissed back but like a child. Then they all saw Tadeusz leaning over Otto, who was sprawled at the little table, head pillowed on his arms.

“He’s gone completely, he has deserted us,” said Tadeusz. “Now we must drag him about with us wherever we go for the rest of the evening.”

“We aren’t going anywhere else, are we,” asked Charles, “for God’s sake?”

Otto was indeed gone, altogether. They got him up by the arms, and in a busy sort of scramble they found themselves on the sidewalk, with a tall policeman watching mildly, getting into a taxicab, where their feet were tangled hopelessly and they all seemed to hang at once dangerously far out of the windows. Lutte was saying, to all of them alike, “Good night, happy New Year,” her face shining but sober looking.

On the staircase, Otto collapsed once for all. The three pulled him along slowly, pausing at every step. At moments the whole structure tottered, they would stagger and lose hold of each other and step on Otto, who groaned and howled, but without resentment. They would heave themselves together more firmly and start again, making wild sounds of laughter, nodding at each other as if agreed on some inexplicable but gloriously comic truth. “Let’s crawl,” shouted Charles to Tadeusz; “maybe it will work this time.” Hans disapproved of this instantly.

“No crawling,” he said, taking command at once. “Every man goes up on his own feet, except perhaps Otto.” They assembled themselves once more for a last effort, and arrived at the door known to be theirs.

Rosa’s door was ajar slightly, a streak of light shining into the hall. They regarded it with sobering gloom, expecting the door to fly open and Rosa to rush forth scolding. Nothing happened. They changed their tactics, and dragging Otto, they rushed her door, beating on it in tattoo and shouting recklessly, “Happy New Year, Roslein, Roslein, happy New Year.”

There was a small flurry inside, the door opened a few inches more, and Rosa put out a sleek, orderly head. Her eyes were a little pink and sleepy looking, but she was smiling a gay, foxy smile. Her pensioners were most lordly drunk, she saw at a glance, none the worse for it, thank God. Hans’ cheek was discolored somewhat more, but he was laughing, Charles and Tadeusz were quieter, trying to appear sober and responsible, but their eyelids drooped, they leered drolly. The three were supporting Herr Bussen between them, and Herr Bussen, hanging at random, his knees bent, had a blissful innocent confidence in his sleeping face.

“Happy New Year, you owls,” said Rosa, proud of her household who knew how to celebrate an occasion. “I had champagne too, with friends, and New Year’s punch. I am a little merry too,” she told them, boasting. “Go to sleep now, look, this is the New Year. You must start it well tomorrow. Good night.”

Charles sat on the feather bed and wriggled out of his clothes, pushing them off any old way and leaving them where they fell. As he fumbled with his pajamas, his eyes swam about in his head, seeing first one thing and then another, but none of it familiar, nothing that was his. He did notice at last that the Leaning Tower seemed to be back, sitting now safely behind the glass of the corner cabinet. By a roundabout way he brought himself across the room to the Tower. It was there, all right, and it was mended pretty obviously, it would never be the same. But for Rosa, poor old woman, he supposed it was better than nothing. It stood for something she had, or thought she had, once. Even all patched up as it was, and worthless to begin with, it meant something to her, and he was still ashamed of having broken it; it made him feel like a heel. It stood there in its bold little frailness, as if daring him to come on; how well he knew that a thumb and forefinger would smash the thin ribs, the mended spots would fall at a breath. Leaning, suspended, perpetually ready to fall but never falling quite, the venturesome little object—a mistake in the first place, a whimsical pain in the neck, really, towers shouldn’t lean in the first place; a curiosity, like those cupids falling off the roof—yet had some kind of meaning in Charles’ mind. Well, what? He tousled his hair and rubbed his eyes and then his whole head and yawned himself almost inside out. What had the silly little thing reminded him of before? There was an answer if he could think what it was, but this was not the time. But just the same, there was something terribly urgent at work, in him or around him, he could not tell which. There was something perishable but threatening, uneasy, hanging over his head or stirring angrily, dangerously, at his back. If he couldn’t find out now what it was that troubled him so in this place, maybe he would never know. He stood there feeling his drunkenness as a pain and a weight on him, unable to think clearly but feeling what he had never known before, an infernal desolation of the spirit, the chill and the knowledge of death in him. He wrapped his arms across his chest and expelled his breath, and a cold sweat broke out all over him. He went towards the bed and fell upon it and rolled himself into a knot, being rather unpleasant with himself. “All you need is a crying jag to make it complete,” he said. But he didn’t feel sorry for himself, and no crying jag or any other kind of jag would ever, in this world, do anything at all for him.

Berlin 1931