“Goot morning, sir,” as George opened the door
“If you bleeze, sir,” as he set the tray down upon the table, and then
“Dank you ferry much, sir,” as he marched out and turned to close the door behind him.
The formula had always been the same. All summer it had not varied by a jot, and now as he marched out for the last time George had a feeling of affection and regret. He called to the boy to wait a moment, got his trousers, took some money, and gave it to him. His pink face reddened suddenly with happiness. George shook hands with him, and the boy said gutturally:
“Dank you ferry much, sir.” And then, very quietly and earnestly: “Gute reise, mein Herr.” He clicked his heels together and bowed formally, and then closed the door.
George stood there for a moment with that nameless feeling of affection and regret, knowing that he would never see the boy again. Then he went back to the table and poured out a cup of the hot, rich chocolate, broke a crusty roll, buttered it, spread it with strawberry jam, and ate it. This was all the breakfast he wanted. The pot was still half full of chocolate, the dish was still piled with little scrolls of creamy butter, there was enough of the delicious jam, enough of the crusty rolls and flaky croissants, to make half a dozen breakfasts, but he was not hungry.
He went over to the wash-basin and switched on the light. The large and heavy porcelain bowl was indented in the wall. The wall and the floor beneath were substantial and as perfect as a small but costly bathroom. He brushed his teeth and shaved, packed all the toilet things together in a little leather case, pulled the zipper, and put it away in the old trunk. Then he dressed. By seven-twenty he was ready.
Franz Heilig came in as George was ringing for the porter. He was an astonishing fellow, an old friend of the Munich days, and George was devoted to him.
When they had first met, Heilig had been a librarian in Munich. Now he had a post in one of the large libraries of Berlin. In this capacity he was a public functionary, with the prospect of slow but steady advancement through the years. His income was small and his scale of living modest, but such things did not bother Heilig. He was a scholar, with the widest range of knowledge and interests that George had ever known in anyone. He read and spoke a dozen languages. He was German to the very core of his learned soul, but his English, which he spoke less well than any other language he had studied, was not the usual German rendering of Shakespeare’s tongue. There were plenty of Germanic elements in it, but in addition Heilig had also borrowed accents and inflections from some of his other linguistic conquests, and the result was a most peculiar and amusing kind of bastard speech.
As he entered the room and saw George he began to laugh, closing his eyes, contorting his small features, and snuffling through his sourly puckered lips as if he had just eaten a half-ripe persimmon. Then his face went sober and he said anxiously:
“You are ready, zen? You are truly going?”
George nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Everything’s all ready. How do you feel, Franz?”
He laughed suddenly, took off his spectacles, and began to polish them. Without his glasses, his small puckered face had a tired and worn look, and his weak eyes were bloodshot and weary from the night before.
“0 Gott!” he cried, with a kind of gleeful desperation. “I feel perfectly dretful! I haf not efen been to bett! After I left you I could not sleep. I valked and valked, almost up to Grunewald…May I tell you somesing?” he said earnestly, and peered at George with the serious intensity with which he always uttered these oracular words. “I feel like hell—I really do.”
“Then you haven’t been to bed at all? You’ve had no sleep?”
“Oh, yes,” he said wearily. “I haf slept an hour. I came back home. My girl vas asleep—I did not vant to get into ze bett wiz her—I did not vant to vake her up. So I laid down upon ze couch. I did not efen take off my clothes. I vas afraid zat I vould come too late to see you at ze station. And zat,” he said, peering at George most earnestly again, “vould be too dretful!”
“Why don’t you go back home and sleep to-day after the train goes?” George said. “I don’t think you’ll be able to do much work, feeling as you do. Wouldn’t it be better if you took the day off and caught up on your sleep?”
“Veil, zen,” said Heilig abruptly, yet rather indifferently, “I vill tell you somesing.” He peered at George earnestly and intently again, and said: “It does not matter. It really does not matter. I vill take somesing—some coffee or somesing,” he said indifferently. “It vill not be too bad. But Gott!”—again the desperately gleeful laugh—“how I shall sleep to-night! After zat I shall try to get to know my girl again.”