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matter? It is only old furniture, and the people who loved it are all dead except me.”

“Who cares what people think?”

“I do, my dear, one must set a good example.”

Klaus bit his lip.

“How curiously shabby the things look, my dear, I had no idea that tapestry was so faded.

It is time they were turned out.”

Her voice was perfectly steady and her face calm, but the thin hands in her lap were

twitching, and Klaus turned away his head so as to avoid seeing them. He caught sight of the old

doctor making his way round the crowd, excused himself, and went to meet him.

“How’s she taking it?”

“Very well. Too well. I’ve been trying to persuade her to come away to your house, but

she won’t, she only sits there and gets older every moment.”

“I’d like to put her under chloroform,” grunted the doctor.

They were fairly comfortable at first in Dusseldorf, though every day saw prices higher

and food and clothing scarcer, but the real blow fell when Lehmann’s school closed because the

parents could no longer pay the fees, and Klaus found himself unemployed. This was the time

when the mark soared to an astronomical figure, and people took attaché cases to collect the

bulky bundles of worthless notes which constituted their wages. Klaus tramped the streets

looking for work, occasionally getting a week’s employment sawing timber or loading bricks,

while Ludmilla, when his back was turned, trotted out and sold her mother’s watch or the gold

cross and chain she had worn for her first communion. They moved into cheaper rooms, and then

into cheaper ones again, and Klaus almost reached breaking-point the day he went to look for her

and found her patiently scrubbing his shirt in the communal wash-house.

“But, my dear boy, it’s the only place where there is any hot water. One must be clean.”

“I will not have you there,” he stormed, “among all those rough women. I can wash my

shirt myself.”

He said “my shirt,” you notice, not “my shirts.” As for the rough women, he need not

have worried. Apart from a tendency to call a spade a spade not one of them would ever have

used a word deliberately to distress or embarrass Ludmilla. Still matters grew worse. There

followed the communal kitchen, the soup-kitchen, and the bread queues, the gnawing hunger

and, as the winter came on, the cold, and even Ludmilla’s courage sank.

“I think I have lived rather too long,” she said.

Fräulein Rademeyer came back one day to the two bleak rooms they tried to call home,

and Klaus lifted his head in surprise at her air of unmistakable triumph. She shut the door

carefully behind her, put her bag down and took out of it half a cabbage, perfectly fresh, a wedge

of cheese, a small piece of steak, a loaf, a twist of paper containing alleged coffee, and another

containing several spoonfuls of brown sugar. “Wait,” she said. “That is not all.”

She brought out of the pocket of her cloak a small parcel wrapped in greaseproof paper.

“Butter,” she said in awed tones, “real butter.”

“Have you been going in for highway robbery,” said Klaus, “or merely petty larceny?

Not that the result is petty—”

“There is a man outside the door,” she interrupted, “with a bundle. Would you bring it in,

my dear?”

Klaus returned with a small sack containing firewood on the top and coal underneath—

not much, but some.

“For heaven’s sake, explain,” said Klaus. “Have you met Santa Claus, or what is it?”

“I met a schoolfriend of mine, that is all, though it is true her name is Christine. Let me

come to the fire, dear, I want to make it up. She and her husband have just come to live here.

Give me three sticks—no, four. He was one of the architects or master contractors or something

who have just built the new Deutsches Museum at Munich. Now the coal. They came to live here

because her mother’s house—would you like to come and blow this while I prepare the stew?—

because her mother’s house was empty and her husband has retired, and they thought they might

as well live here as anywhere else. Oh, dear, how I do run on, I haven’t been so excited since—I

think I will sit down a moment, I don’t feel well.”

Klaus abandoned the crackling fire and sprang to help her to the battered old sofa on

which he slept at night.

“For pity’s sake lie down and keep quiet a minute,” he said. “I’ll put the kettle on, we’ll

have coffee and bread-and-butter while the stew cooks. I shall buy a collar and chain for you,

you run about too much.”

“No. The coffee is for later on. We shall overeat ourselves if we are not careful. I will lie

still while you peel the potatoes. Peel four.”

They feasted at last and were warm at the same time, an almost forgotten luxury, since as

a rule one could either buy food or fuel, but not both. Ludmilla went on with her story.

“I told Christine all about you and what a burden I am to you—”

“Then you told her a pack of lies, and the wolf will get you.”

“No, for if it were not for me you could go wandering off and find work somewhere.”

This was perfectly true, but Klaus had hoped it had not occurred to her.

“Rubbish,” he said stoutly. “If it were not for you I should have turned into a filthy tramp,

all holes, whiskers and spots.”

“Spots?”

“Where I had entertained visitors,” he explained kindly. “Go on about Christine.”

“She has a son-in-law. Do you know anything about”—she pulled a leaflet from another

of her numerous pockets and read from it—”transport by land, road and railway, construction of

tunnels and bridges, ships, aeronautics, or meteorology?”

“No, but I jolly soon will if it means work. Why?”

“Because her son-in-law is in charge of the section of the Deutsches Museum which deals

with all those things, and he wants steady, reliable men to look after them.”

“I think I could manage that. You only have to walk about and tell people not to touch.”

“You have to explain things to children when they ask you questions.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Klaus happily. “You just tell ’em they’ll understand all these

things better when they are a little older.”

“That wouldn’t have satisfied me when I was young,” said Ludmilla. “Perhaps the young

folk of the present day are less tiresome than I was.”

“Even now you haven’t told me where all the food came from.”

“Out of her larder. We went into her house to talk, and then we went into her larder while

she put all these things in my bag. Then I said I must go, so she sent their servant to carry it, and

the coal. Also, we are going to dinner there to-morrow.”

“Can you cut hair,” asked Klaus anxiously, “if I sharpen our nail-scissors?”

They went to Munich in the spring of 1923, a year almost to the day since the auction at

Haspe, and found two tiny bedrooms and a sitting-room in the upper half of a workman’s house

in Quellen Strasse, close to the Mariahilfe Church in the old part of the city. From here it was

only a short walk for Klaus through the Kegelhof and by Schwartz Strasse and the outer Erhardt

Bridge, to the Isar island which is nearly covered by the immense buildings of the Deutsches

Museum. The pay was desperately little in those days, but permanent, and as Lehmann came to

know the Museum personnel, some of the unmarried members of the staff were glad to have

Ludmilla to darn socks and vests for them. Gradually they got a home together, with chairs

replacing packing-cases, and blankets on the beds instead of coats and sacks and strips of carpet.

They were always hungry and usually cold, but they had occupation.

Klaus was fortunate in the man who worked in the same part of a section as he did. Herr

Kurt Stiebel was an elderly man who had been a partner in a firm of solicitors of some repute in

Munich; in common with the rest of the professional classes in Germany he had been brought to

absolute penury in the slump, and thought himself fortunate to have obtained a post which would

provide him with a fireless attic in a narrow turning off the Höhe Strasse, and almost enough

food to keep him from starving. Klaus brought him home to Quellen Strasse one evening after

the Museum closed, to drink watery but hot cups of “Blumen” coffee and eat a few leathery little

cakes Ludmilla had saved up to buy for the party.

“You are our first guest, Herr Stiebel,” said Fräulein Rademeyer, “you are very welcome

indeed.”

“I am honoured,” said the old gentleman, and kissed her hand. “It is long since I had the

pleasure of being entertained.”

“Take this chair,” said Klaus. “That one has a loose leg, I have learned the art of sitting

on it.”

“It is as well,” said Ludmilla. “It will cure you of your regrettable tendency to lounging.

Have you had a good day, Herr Stiebel?”

“I was not asked more than twenty questions of which I did not know the answers. There

was a small boy who asked who invented the arch, and when I said the Romans did—I believe

that is right—he asked who the Romans were. I directed him to the Ethnological Section.”

“He didn’t go,” said Klaus. “He came and asked me why bricks are usually red and what

makes the veins in marble. Even that wasn’t so bad as the young man who asked me to explain in

simple language the Precession of the Equinoxes. I swivelled him off to what’s-his-name in

Astronomy.”

“We are learning,” said Stiebel dryly, “to cope with these emergencies. When I was a

solicitor and found myself confronted with a poser I used to say I would consult the authorities.

Now my clients do it instead.”

“My father used to say,” said Ludmilla, “that you can’t teach an old hand new tricks, but

I have learned many things this last year or so.”

“We all have, my dear lady, even to seeing a saddler of Heidelberg Chancellor of a

German Republic, and a house-painter from Vienna leading a march on Berlin.”

“Where is he now, what is his name—the house-painter?”

“Hitler. Serving a sentence of five years’ detention in a fortress.”

“Did you ever see him?” asked Klaus. “I have heard much about him. General

Ludendorff was behind that, I understand.”

“Certainly he was, there is no secret about that; Ludendorff, in my opinion, wanted to

turn out Ebert and did not care what tools he used for the work, but as you know, the scheme

failed ignominiously. Yes, I have seen Hitler several times and have been to one or two of his

meetings. You know,” said Stiebel, as one apologizing for a lapse, “one goes anywhere when

one has no occupation, it serves to pass the time. To my mind, he is just a stump-orator, I doubt

if we hear any more of him.”

“He obtained a considerable following, did he not?”

“Among the more excitable and despairing elements, undoubtedly, Fräulein. Unhappy

young men, seeing no future, neurasthenic ex-servicemen, Army officers with no pay and no

prospects, older men with their life’s work ruined, such as these are tinder to his spark. But when

prosperity returns to our Germany, as return it must, there will be no place for such firebrands as

Hitler.”

“Apart from Ludendorff,” said Klaus, “did any of the more conspicuous war figures

support him?”

“Only Goering, so far as I can remember. He was very severely wounded in the shooting,

and smuggled out of the country, I hear. He may have died, I do not know.”

“Goering? The air ace? I met him at Darmstadt,” said Klaus. All through the year 1923

the mark, already so low in value that fifty would not buy a box of matches, dropped and

dropped until ordinary figures lost their meaning, and English soldiers in the Occupied Area

bought good cars for the equivalent of a few shillings, and a factory in full production for a few

pounds. Men and women, and especially young people, sold all they had or could give for the

price of a meal or a taste of ordinary civilized comfort, and every street, almost every house, had

its tragedy when vice, as always, walked hand in hand with despair, saying, “Let us eat, drink,

and be merry—or pretend to be—for to-morrow we die.” It was so horrible as to be incredible,

had it not been so oppressively real, this condition of a nation where nobody at all had any

money which was worth anything at all, it was like the awful catastrophic ravings of some

inspired prophet of evil.

“Surely,” said Klaus to Stiebel, “things must take a turn for the better soon, this cannot go

on. Something must happen or we shall all die.”

“Do you recall,” said Stiebel in his precise way, “what someone said during the war

about the gold-red-black of our Flag? Gold, they said, for the past; red for the present; and black

for the future. Well, this is the future, and I see no end to it.”

He put his glasses on his nose and they immediately fell off again, he caught them with a

bitter little laugh. “I could wish our agonies were not so frequently absurd also. My nose is so

thin my glasses will not stay in place.”

“Give them to me,” said Klaus, and spent ten minutes cutting thicker cork pads and

fitting them in the slides. “Perhaps that will be better.”

“It is admirable,” said the old gentleman, trying them on. “I wish I could fill all our voids

with a little cork and a sharp knife.”

“Then there would be a shortage of cork,” said Stiebel acidly. “It is evident to me that

Heaven is tired of Germany.”