And when Fame was with him, all this magic was increased. He could see the wonder, interest, respect, and friendly envy in the eyes of men, and the frank adoration in the eyes of women. The women seemed to worship at the shrine of Fame. George began to get letters and telephone calls from them, with invitations to functions of every sort. The girls were after him. But he had been through all of that before and he was wary now, for he knew that the lion hunters were the same the whole world over. Knowing them now for what they were, he found no disillusion in his encounters with them. Indeed, it added greatly to his pleasure and sense of power to turn the tactics of designing females on themselves: he would indulge in little gallantries to lead them on, and then, just at the point where they thought they had him, he would wriggle innocently off the hook and leave them wondering.
And then he met Else. Else von Kohler was not a lion hunter. George met her at one of the parties which his German publisher, Karl Lewald, gave for him. Lewald liked to give parties; he just couldn’t do enough for George, and was always trumping up an excuse for another party. Else did not know Lewald, and took an instinctive dislike to the man as soon as she saw him, but just the same she had come to his party, brought there uninvited by another man whom George had met. At first sight, George fell instantly in love with her, and she with him.
Else was a young widow of thirty who looked and was a perfect type of the Norse Valkyrie. She had a mass of lustrous yellow hair braided about her head, and her cheeks were two ruddy apples. She was extremely tall for a woman, with the long, rangy legs of a runner, and her shoulders were as broad and wide as a man’s. Yet she had a stunning figure, and there was no suggestion of an ugly masculinity about her. She was as completely and as passionately feminine as a woman could be. Her somewhat stern and lonely face was relieved by its spiritual depth and feeling, and when it was lighted by a smile it had a sudden, poignant radiance, a quality of illumination which in its intensity and purity was different from any other smile George had ever seen.
At the moment of their first meeting, George and Else had been drawn to each other. From then on, without the need of any period of transition, their lives flowed in a single channel. They spent many wonderful days together. Many too, were the nights which they filled with the mysterious enchantments of a strong and mutually shared passion. The girl became for George the ultimate reality underlying everything he thought and felt and was during that glorious and intoxicating period of his life.
And now all the blind and furious Brooklyn years, all the years of work, all the memories of men who prowled in garbage cans, all the years of wandering and exile, seemed very far away. In some strange fashion, the image of his own success and this joyous release after so much toil and desperation became connected in George’s mind with Else, with the kieferntrees, with the great crowds thronging the Kurfürstendamm, with all the golden singing in the air—and somehow with a feeling that for everyone grim weather was behind and that happy days were here again.
It was the season of the great Olympic games, and almost every day George and Else went to the stadium in Berlin. George observed that the organising genius of the German people, which has been used so often to such noble purpose, was now more thrillingly displayed than he had ever seen it before. The sheer pageantry of the occasion was overwhelming, so much so that he began to feel oppressed by it. There seemed to be something ominous in it. One sensed a stupendous concentration of effort, a tremendous drawing together and ordering in the vast collective power of the whole land. And the thing that made it seem ominous was that it so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded. The games were overshadowed, and were no longer merely sporting competitions to which other nations had sent their chosen teams. They became, day after day, an orderly and overwhelming demonstration in which the whole of Germany had been schooled and disciplined. It was as if the games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might, a means of showing to the world in concrete terms what this new power had come to be.