Three Comrades

  "If it weren't for the illness, a paradise. Snow and sun."

  He looked up. "Snow and sun? Sounds improbable, eh?"

  "Yes. Damned improbable. Everything there is improbable."

  "What are you doing to-night?" said he.

  I shrugged my shoulders. "Taking my traps home first."

  "I have to go out for an hour or so now. What about coming along to 'The Bar' afterwards?"

  "Sure," said I. "What else is there?"

  I collected my trunk at the railway station and took it home. I opened the door as quietly as I could, for I had no wish to talk to anyone. I managed to get in without falling into the hands of Frau Zalewski. I remained awhile sitting in my room. On the table were letters and newspapers. The letters were obviously circulars. Nobody wrote to me. But now I shall have someone, thought I.

  After a time I stood up, washed and changed. I did not unpack my bag; I wanted to have something to do still when I came home alone. Nor did I go into Pat's room, though I knew nobody was in there yet. I slipped quietly down the passage and when I was outside, breathed again.

  I went into the Café International to get something to eat. The waiter, Alois, greeted me at the door. "You here again?"

  "Yes," said I, "one always comes back in the end."

  Rosa was sitting with the other girls at a large table.They were nearly all there—it was the interval between the first and second patrols.

  "Good Lord, Robert!" said Rosa. "You're a stranger."

  "Don't ask questions, Rosa," said I. "The main thing is I am here again."

  "How's that? Will you be coming often?"

  "Probably."

  "Don't take it hardly," said she, looking at me. "Everything passes."

  "True," said I. "The one sure thing in the world."

  "Certainly," replied Rosa. "Lill y has a song like that, too."

  "Lilly?" I now saw her for the first time, sitting beside Rosa. "What are you doing here, Lilly? I thought you were married? You ought to be at home, looking after the plumbing business."

  Lilly did not reply.

  "Plumbing business!" said Rosa scornfully. "While she still had any money all went smooth as butter, it was Lilly here and Lilly there; the past didn't matter at all. Just six months that lasted. And when he'd got the last penny out of her, fine gentleman that he'd made of himself with her money, suddenly had no use for a common prostitute as a wife." She snorted. "Suddenly never knew anything about her past; was no end surprised to hear it. So much so that he made it a ground for divorce. But the money was gone of course."

  "How much was it, then?" I asked.

  "Four thousand marks, no small trifle! Think how many pig-dogs she must have had to sleep with for that!"

  "Four thousand marks," said I, meditatively. "Seems to be in the air."

  Rosa looked at me mystified. "What about playing us something," said she, "just to change the tune?"

  "All right—as we are all here again."

  I sat down to the piano and played a few songs. As I played I thought of Pat, how her money for the sanatorium would last only till the end of January, and that I would have to make more now than ever before. I strummed mechanically over the keys and on the sofa beside me saw Rosa listening enraptured, and next to her Lilly's pale face set with a terrible disillusionment, colder and more lifeless than if it had been dead.

  A cry waked me from my brooding. Rosa had started from her dreams. She was on her feet behind the table, her hat had slipped to one side, her eyes were staring, and slowly, without her noticing, the coffee was pouring from

  her overturned cup into her open handbag. "Arthur!" she stammered. "Arthur, is it really you?"

  I stopped playing. A thin man with a shuffling gait, a bowler set well back on his head, came in. His face was a yellow unhealthy colour; he had a big nose and a little egg-shaped head.

  "Arthur!" stammered Rosa again. "You?"

  "Who else should it be?" growled Arthur.

  "My God, where have you sprung from?"

  "Where should I spring from? Out of the street through the door."

  Considering that he was returning home after such a long absence, Arthur was not particularly amiable. I looked at him interestedly. So this was Rosa's idol. He looked as if he had come straight from gaol. I searched in vain for something that might have explained Rosa's infatuation. But perhaps that was the explanation. It is extraordinary what these diamond-hard judges of men do fall for.

  Without so much as by your leave Arthur reached for the glass of beer that was standing on the table next to Rosa, and drank it off. The adam's apple of his thin, sinewy throat went up and down like a lift. Rosa watched him beaming.

  "Will you have another?" she asked.

  "Of course," growled Arthur. "But bigger."

  "Alois!" Rosa waved happily to the waiter. "He wants another beer."

  "So I see," replied Alois imperturbably, drawing off another glass.

  "Arid our little one, Arthur, my dear, you haven't even seen little Elvira!"

  "Dear!" For the first time Arthur began to show signs of interest. He raised a hand in a gesture of refusal. "Don't you blame me. That's none of my business. I told you to get rid of the brat. And you would have too, if I hadn't . . ." He sank again into gloom. "Costs a nice penny, I'll be bound, and goes on costing . . ."

  "It's not so bad really, Arthur. Besides it's a girl."

  "Don't they cost money?" said Arthur, putting the second glass of beer behind his collar. "You might get some cracked, rich dame to adopt it perhaps. For a consideration, of course. That's the only chance."

  He roused again out of his gloom. "Got any cash?"

  Rosa, eager to be of service, produced her coffee-soaked handbag. "It's only five marks, Arthur—you see, I wasn't to know you were coming—but I've got more at home."

  Arthur slipped the money into his vest pocket like a pasha.

  "And you won't earn anything sitting there on your behind on the sofa," he muttered ill-humouredly.

  "I'm going now, Arthur. But there's nothing much about yet. Suppertime."

  "Small cattle also make manure," declared Arthur.

  "I'm going this minute."

  "All right. . . ." Arthur tipped his bowler forward on his head. "Then I'll look in again around twelve."

  He ambled off with his shuffling gait. Rosa's eyes followed him blissfully. He did not look round and left the door open behind him.

  "Swine," muttered Alois shutting the door.

  Rosa looked at us proudly. "Isn't he wonderful? Nothing can touch him, nothing soften him. I wonder where he's been hiding all this time?"

  "You can see that from his skin," replied Wally. "In quod, of course. A prize bastard."

  "You don't know him—"

  "All I want."

  "You don't understand." Rosa stood up. "A real man he is. None of your weeping Willy about him. . . . Well, I must be off. Cheerio, boys."

  Rejuvenated, treading on air, she rocked out of the room. Once more she had someone to hand over her money to, so that he could drink it and then beat her afterwards. She was happy.

  Half an hour later the others went also. Only Lilly, with her stony face, remained. I strummed on the piano a while longer, then had a sandwich and vanished likewise. You couldn't stick it for long alone there with Lilly.

  I roamed through the wet, dark streets. Outside the graveyard the Salvation Army had taken up position. To the sound of drums and trumpets they were singing "Jerusalem the Golden." I stopped. Suddenly I felt I could not go on alone, without Pat. I looked at the bleak stones in the graveyard; I told myself I had been more alone a year ago—that then I did not even know Pat; that now if not actually with me, she was at least there; but it did not help —I was suddenly completely undone and at my wits' end. At last I went to my room to see if, perhaps, there was any mail from her. It was quite absurd—there could not possibly be anything yet—but I went all the same.

  As I left again I met Orlow at the door.
He had a dress suit on under his open coat and was going to a dance at his hotel. I asked him if he had heard anything of Frau Hasse in the meantime.

  "No," said he. "She hasn't been here since. Nor to the police. It's just as well she shouldn't come back."

  We walked together along the street. At the corner a lorry was standing with bags of coal. The driver lifted the bonnet up and did something to the engine. Then he got back into his seat. Just as we passed he started her up and stepped on the gas. Orlow jumped. I looked at him. He was pale as death.

  "Are you ill?" I asked.

  He smiled with white lips and shook his head. "No—but it does give me a fright sometimes when I hear that noise unexpectedly. They ran the engine of a lorry outside the house so we shouldn't hear the shots, when my father was killed in Russia. We did hear them, though." He smiled again as if he had to apologise. "They made less bones about my'mother; they shot her in a cellar in the early morning. My brother and I escaped at night. We had a few diamonds. But my brother got frozen on the way."

  "What were your father and mother shot for?"

  "Before the war my father commanded a Cossack regiment that had put down a rising. He knew it was coming to him; found it quite in order, as you might say. Not so my mother."

  "And you?"

  He made a tired gesture as if to wipe out the past. "So much has happened since then."

  "Yes," said I, "that's just it. More than one human brain can cope with."

  We had reached the hotel where he worked. A large woman stepped out of a Buick and made for him with a happy cry.

  She was rather fat and smartly dressed, with the slightly washed-out look of a blonde in the forties who had never had a care or an idea in all her life.

  "Excuse me," said Orlow with a hardly perceptible glance. "Business—"

  He bowed to the blonde woman and kissed her hand.

  In "The Bar" were Valentin, Köster and Ferdinand Grau. Lenz came a bit later. I joined them and ordered a half-bottle of rum. I was still feeling bloody bad.

  Ferdinand, broad and massive, with bloated face and perfectly clear, blue eyes, was squatting in a corner. He had had all kinds-of drink already.

  "Well, Bob, my lad," said he clapping me on the shoulder, "what's happening wkh you?"

  "Nothing, Ferdinand," I replied, "that's the trouble."

  He looked at me awhile.

  "Nothing?" said he then. "Nothing? That's a great deal. Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world."

  "Bravo!" cried Lenz grinning. "Most original, Ferdinand."

  "You keep quiet, Gottfried." Ferdinand turned his great head on Lenz. "A romantic like you is only a grasshopper on the verge of life. He understands it all wrong and manufactures his sensations out of that. You lightweight, what do you know about Nothing?"

  "Enough to be content to remain a lightweight," declared Lenz. "Decent people show a proper respect for Nothing. They don't go rooting about in it like moles."

  Grau stared at him.

  "Pros't," said Gottfried.

  "Pros't," said Ferdinand. "Pros't, you cork."

  They emptied their glasses.

  "I wouldn't mind being a cork," said I, emptying my glass likewise, "the sort that does everything right and for whom everything goes right. For a bit, at any rate."

  "Apostate!" Ferdinand threw himself back in his chair so that it creaked. "Do you want to be a deserter—to betray the brotherhood?"

  "No," said I, "I don't want to betray anything. But I do want that not everything we touch should always go to pieces." '

  Ferdinand leaned forward. His big, wild face twitched. "To compensate, you do belong to an order, brother—the order of the unsuccessful, the unsound fellows with their desires without purpose, their ambition that brings in nothing, their love without prospect, their despair without reason." He smiled. "The secret brotherhood that prefers to go under rather than make a career, that will sooner gamble, lose, trifle their life away than forget or industriously falsify the unattainable picture—the picture they carry in their hearts, brother, indelibly engraved there in the hours, the days, the nights when there was nothing but this one thing—stark living and stark dying."

  He held up his glass and made a sign to Fred at the bar. "Give me something to drink."

  Fred brought the bottle. "Should I put on the gramophone a bit?" he asked.

  "No," said Lenz, "chuck your gramophone out the window and bring some bigger glasses. Then turn out half the lights, put a few bottles on the table and shove off into your office next door."

  Fred nodded and turned out the top lights. Only the little side lamps with the parchment shades from old maps were left burning.

  Lenz filled the glasses. "Pros't, boys! Because we're alive. Because we breathe. Because we're so conscious of life that we don't know which end to begin."

  "That's just it," said Ferdinand. "Only the unhappy man appreciates happiness. The happy man is a mannequin for the life-feeling. He displays it merely; he doesn't possess it. Light doesn't shine in the light; it shines in the dark. A health to the dark. The man who has once been in the storm can't handle delicate electric apparatus any more. To hell with the storm. Blessed be our bit of life. And because we do love it we're not prepared to invest it in five per cents; we prefer to burn it. Drink, my boys. There are stars still shining that blew up ten thousand light-years ago. Drink while there is yet time. Long live unhappiness. Long live the dark."

  He poured himself a tumbler of cognac and drank it up.

  The rum was knocking in my head. I got up softly and went over to Fred in the office. He was asleep. I waked him and put through a long-distance call to the sanatorium.

  "You may as well wait," said he. "It's pretty quick this time of night."

  Five minutes later the telephone rang and the sanatorium answered.

  "I want to speak to Fräulein Hollmann."

  The nurse came to the phone. "Fräulein Hollmann is asleep already."

  "Hasn't she a telephone in her room?"

  "No."

  "Can't you wake her?"

  The voice hesitated. "No. Besides she is not to get up to-day."

  "Has something happened?"

  "No. She only has to stay in bed for the next few days."

  "You're sure nothing's happened?"

  "No, no, it's the usual thing at the start. She has to stay in bed and get used to the place."

  I hung up the receiver. "Too late, eh?" asked Fred.

  "How do you mean?" said I.

  He showed me his watch. "It's getting on towards twelve."

  "Yes," said I. "I shouldn't have rung up at all."

  I went back and continued drinking.

  At two we broke up. Lenz took Valentin and Ferdinand home in the taxi. "Come," said Köster to me, switching on Karl's engine.

  "I can go those few steps, Otto," said I.

  He looked at me. "We're going out a bit."

  "Good." I got in.

  "You drive," said Köster.

  "Nonsense, Otto. I can't drive, I'm drunk."

  "You drive. I'll take the responsibility."

  "All right, you'll see," said I, sitting to the wheel.

  The engine roared. The steering wheel shivered in my hands. The streets seesawed toward me, the houses swayed and the street lamps stood obliquely in the rain.

  "It's no good, Otto. I'll hit something."

  "Hit it," he replied.

  I looked at him. His expression was clear, tense and alert. He was looking down the road ahead. I pressed my back against the back of the seat and gripped the wheel more firmly. I clenched my teeth and contracted my brows. Slowly the road grew more distinct.

  "Where to, Otto?" asked I.

  "Straight on. Out."

  We reached the by-pass that led out of the city and came on to the highroad.

  "Big headlight," said Köster.

  The concrete road lit up light grey in front of us. It was raining only a little, but the drops struck my face like
hailstones. The wind came in heavy gusts, the clouds were hanging low; just above the wood there was a cleft, and silver trickled through. The mist vanished from behind my eyes. The roar of the engine pulsed through my arms into my body. I felt the engine and its power. The explosions of the cylinders shattered the dull paralysis of my brain. The pistons hammered like pumps through my blood; I settled down. The car shot along the country road.