by Vicki Baum
At two o’clock in the morning seven utterly exhausted, limp and dejected men, carrying black cases, left the Grand Hotel by Entrance No. II. They were the members of the Eastman Jazz Band going home in their moist shirts, discontented with their pay as all musicians are in every corner of the globe. In front of Entrance No. V cars drove off, and a little later the powerful lights of the hotel front were turned off. The Lobby was getting cooler, for the central heating had been turned down a little. Doctor Otternschlag, who sat there almost alone, gave a shudder and yawned. Immediately afterwards Rohna, too, yawned at his desk, closed a few drawers and retired for his five hours of sleep on the fifth floor. The night porter sorted the next day’s morning papers, which had just been brought in by a messenger, who had got soaked in the rain and now went out again with tired and muddy feet through the revolving door. Two loud-voiced American women went up to bed, and after that there was a profound silence in the Lobby. Half the lights were turned off. The telephone attendant drank black coffee to keep himself alert.
“Shall we go up now?” Doctor Otternschlag asked himself, as he finished his cognac. “Yes, I think we might go now,” he replied to himself. He required about ten minutes to carry the decision into execution. Once on his patent-leather feet he was in better form, and he embarked upon his customary circular tour of the Lobby till he reached the night porter. “Nothing for the Herr Doktor,” the porter said unfeelingly and waved him off while he was still two or three yards distant. “If anyone happens to inquire for me, I have gone to bed,” Otternschlag announced. He then picked up one of the moist morning papers and skimmed the headlines. “Gone to bed,” the porter repeated mechanically and made a chalk mark on the room-key board. Through the revolving door there came a chill rush of air smelling of dust and rain. Otternschlag turned round.
“Aha,” was all he said, after his one serviceable eye had taken in the sight that confronted it. He even opened his mouth in a wry smile. He saw Gaigern come in through the revolving door, large and strong and flourishing as ever, though at the moment, he looked seriously preoccupied as he pushed the almost senseless Kringelein ahead of him. Kringelein was groaning and moaning. Doctor Otternschlag was well able to distinguish cases of drunkenness from cases of serious illness, in spite of the rather similar state of prostration that accompanies both. The night porter, less expert in these matters, threw a severe and watchful glance at the two arrivals.
“The keys for 69 and 70,” Gaigern said in a low voice. “My friend is in a bad way. A doctor, the sooner the better.” He supported Kringelein with one hand and took the keys in the other and then propelled Kringelein towards the elevator.
“I am a doctor. Hot milk at once to No. 70,” Doctor Otternschlag said suddenly in a surprisingly alert tone of voice to the night porter, and then he followed the others without more ado.
“I’ll look after Kringelein,” he said to Gaigern as they were being taken up. “Don’t worry, Herr Kringelein, it will soon be over.”
Kringelein, who misunderstood these words, stopped groaning and sank in a heap on the small elevator bench, clutching himself in agony. “Over already?” he whispered with resignation. “Over so soon? But it’s only just begun.”
“You were too greedy. Everything at once is too much,” said Otternschlag. He bore Kringelein a grudge on many grounds, but he held his hand all the same and felt his pulse.
“Nonsense, Kringelein. It’s not over yet! You’ve drunk too much iced champagne, that’s all,” Gaigern said to cheer him up. The elevator stopped with a jerk and put an end to this conversation with all its misunderstandings. Kringelein’s knees gave way in the corridor, to the great alarm of the dejected chambermaid. Gaigern picked him up and carried him to his bed. While he got him out of his clothes and buttoned him into his new pajamas, Otternschlag disappeared with a busy air.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said and went out with his stiff walk, but galvanized by a new energy.
When he came back he found Kringelein lying rigid in his bed with his hands pressed to his thighs like a soldier at attention. The fact that he was not moaning was due to a supreme effort of will. When he had set out in search of life, he had promised himself to die like a man and without making a fuss about it when the moment came. It was a debt he felt he owed to some unknown power for the extravagant license of his last days. To this vow he now clung in his brass bed, while pain and the fear of death wrung a cold sweat from his forehead and neck. Gaigern fetched his own silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped Kringelein’s jaundiced little face with it. He carefully removed the pince-nez from his thin nose, and this for the space of a relieved second made Kringelein believe that he was already dead and that all was over. He waited for Gaigern’s large warm hand to close his eyes. Instead of that, Gaigern left his bedside to make room for Otternschlag.
Otternschlag took a syringe out of a little black case. From somewhere, like a magician, he produced a glittering ampoule, broke off the end of it with a conjurer’s dexterity and putting his thumb through the ring of the syringe, filled it with one hand and without so much as looking at it, while at the same moment with the other he took hold of Kringelein’s bared arm and washed it off with sublimate.
“What’s that?” asked Kringelein, though his experiences in the hospital had already acquainted him with the beneficent drug.
“Something good. You’ll like it,” Otternschlag replied in a singsong voice like a quaint old nanny. Meanwhile he pinched Kringelein’s thin flesh between his thumb and forefinger and drove the needle in under the skin.
Gaigern looked on. “Lucky you had that at hand,” he said.
Otternschlag held up the syringe against the light in front of his blind eye.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s my travelling trunk. Always packed, you see. Readiness is all—that’s the thing, as Shakespeare so elegantly puts it. Ready to move on, ready at any moment, do you see? That’s the best of this little bit of luggage,” he added, as he washed the syringe, put it back in the case, and snapped it shut. Gaigern took the small black object from the table and weighed it in his hand. There was a puzzled expression on his face. Why, he wondered.
“Are you feeling better?” asked Doctor Otternschlag, turning toward the bed.
“Yes,” Kringelein replied. He was sitting on a cloud with closed eyes, and it was bearing him swiftly away. The pain receded, and he himself dissolved into something like a circling cloud. “There, you see—” he could still hear the Doctor say, even as everything became a matter of indifference and the fear of death retreated like a black beast.
“There we are,” said Otternschlag after a while and put Kringelein’s hand back on the silken quilt. “He’s at peace for the time being.”
Gaigern, who meanwhile had put Kringelein’s new clothes away, now came over to the brass bedstead and saw the quick, shallow breathing beneath the bright blue pajamas.
“For the time being?” he asked in a whisper. “Will nothing— happen? Isn’t it dangerous?”
“No, our friend will have to flounder along for a while longer. He has many a caper like this to go through before he is left in peace. His heart you see, his heart’s all there. It’s still alive and beating, and it won’t close down yet. It’s a machine that’s not been much used— Herr Kringelein’s heart. A lot around it has gone to pieces, but the heart itself insists on its rights. So the marionette must dance on as long as the last string holds. Cigarette?”
“Thanks,” said Gaigern, and absentmindedly took one. Then he sat down beneath the still life of pheasants and thought hard for a minute or two about what Otternschlag had said.
“And so he’s really in a bad way? And can’t die in spite of that? Seems a ghastly business,” he concluded.
Otternschlag, who had nodded in reply to each question, replied: “Just so. That’s true. That’s why I value my little case so highly. You cannot really put up with all the pain that being on this earth entails unless you know that at any m
oment you can make an end of it. Life is a miserable sort of existence, believe me.”
Gaigern smiled at this. “But—I enjoy life,” he said innocently.
Otternschlag turned his good eye on him quickly. “Yes, you enjoy life. Your sort enjoys life. I know your sort and I know you—”
“Me?”
“Yes, you personally, you in particular.”
Otternschlag extended his arm and pointed with his heavy, tobacco-stained forefinger at Gaigern’s face. Gaigern drew back.
“I once took a nice little shell splinter out of your face just there. That charming scar that looks so interesting on you, I stitched that up—you don’t remember—at Fromelles? Your sort forgets everything. It is a different story for me. I remember everything, can’t forget anything, not anything.”
“Fromelles! In that awful shack of a field hospital? No, I can’t remember much. I wasn’t conscious of much on that occasion. I was played out. I thought in those days you had to faint when you were wounded, and so I fainted.”
“But I remembered you. You were the youngest soldier to pass through my hands. ‘Meeting death with a song on his lips’ sort of thing. It’s quite possible in any case that it wasn’t you at all—only one of that type, you know. And so now you’re enjoying life? Only to be expected. Glad to hear it. But, you’ll grant me this, the revolving door must remain open.”
“What?” asked Gaigern at a loss.
“The revolving door, I mean. Just sit in the Lobby for an hour and watch the revolving door. It’s crazy. In and out. In and out. In and out. Funny thing, a door like that. You can get quite seasick if you look at it too long. But now listen to me: suppose you come in through the revolving door—well, you want to be sure you can get out again. You don’t want to find it shut in your face, leaving you a prisoner in the Grand Hotel?”
Gaigern felt his blood run cold. The word “prisoner” sounded like a concealed threat.
“Of course not,” he hastened to say.
“Then we’re agreed,” Otternschlag went on. He had meanwhile taken the syringe out of its case again and was playing lovingly with its smooth glass and nickel. “The revolving door has to remain open. The exit must always be available. You must be able to die when it suits you, when you yourself want to.”
“But who wants to die? Nobody,” said Gaigern quickly and with conviction.
“Well,” said Otternschlag and swallowed something. Kringelein meanwhile was muttering some incomprehensible words into his drooping mustache. “Well, look at me for example,” said Otternschlag. “Look at me closely. I am a suicide, you understand. As a rule you only see suicides after the event—after they’ve already turned on the gas or pulled the trigger. I, as I sit here now, am a suicide before the event. To put it succinctly, I am a living suicide—a rarity, you will agree. One of these days I’ll take ten of these ampoules out of this box and inject them into my vein—and then I’ll be a living suicide no longer. I will march out through the revolving door, figuratively speaking; and you can keep on sitting in the Lobby, waiting.”
Gaigern realized with surprise that this mad Doctor Otternschlag seemed to feel a kind of hatred for him.
“That may be a matter of taste,” he said lightly. “I am not in such a hurry. I have no complaint to make of life. I find it splendid.”
“Indeed? You find it splendid? And yet you were in the war. And then you came home, and then you find life splendid? Good Lord, man, how do you all go on living? Have you all forgotten? All right, all right, we won’t talk about what it was like out there. We all know it well enough. But how can you come back after that, and still say you’re pleased with life? Where do you find it—this life of yours? I have looked for life, but I can’t find it. I often think to myself: I’m dead already. A shell has torn my head from my shoulders, and all this time I’m sitting as a corpse buried in that dugout at Rouge Croix. There you have the real and actual impression I have of life since I got back.”
Something in Otternschlag’s impassioned words touched Gaigern. He got up and went over to the bed. Kringelein was asleep, though his eyes were not quite closed. Gaigern came back to Otternschlag on tiptoe.
“Yes, there’s some truth in that,” he said in a low voice. “It wasn’t easy coming back. When a man says ‘out there,’ he means something almost like ‘back home.’ Nowadays being in Germany is like being in outgrown clothes. We’ve become unruly and there’s no place for us. What are we to do with ourselves? The army? Drill? Intervening in election scuffles? Thanks! Flying, pilot? I’ve tried it. Toddling off twice daily according to a timetable, Berlin—Cologne—Berlin. And as for voyages of discovery, adventure, that’s all so stale and without danger. That’s how it is, you see. Life ought to be a little more dangerous, and then it would be all right. But you have to take it as it comes.”
“No. That’s not what I mean,” Otternschlag said irritably. “But perhaps we’re just seeing things from a slightly different angle. Perhaps I would take as amiable a view of things as you do, if my face had been stitched up as well as I stitched up yours. But when you look at the world through a glass eye, it looks quite remarkable, I can assure you.—Ah, Mr. Kringelein, what’s the matter?”
Kringelein was suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed. With a great effort he had got his drugged eyes open and was looking for something. He was feeling all over the quilt with fingertips that the morphine had made insensitive.
“Where’s my money?” he whispered. He had come straight from Fredersdorf after a quarrel with Anna, and it had been very difficult for him to find his way back to the mahogany-furnished room of the Grand Hotel. “Where’s my money?” he asked with a dry mouth. At first he saw the two men in the plush armchairs only as enormous moving shadows.
“He asks where his money is,” Otternschlag repeated, as if Gaigern were hard of hearing.
“He deposited it in the hotel safe,” said Gaigern.
“You deposited it in the hotel safe,” Otternschlag repeated after him like an interpreter. Kringelein’s dazed head tried to cope with this reply. “Are you still in pain?” Otternschlag asked.
“Pain? Why?” asked Kringelein from his cloud.
Otternschlag laughed with a wry mouth. “All forgotten,” he said. “You’ve forgotten your pain already, and all I’ve done for you too. Tomorrow you’ll be ready to start again, you—bon viveur,” he said with undisguised scorn.
Kringelein did not understand a syllable. “Where’s my money?” he persisted obstinately. “All that money? The money I won?”
Gaigern lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke into his lungs.
“Where is his money?” asked Otternschlag.
“In his wallet,” said Gaigern.
“In your wallet,” Otternschlag passed on. “Now go to sleep again. You mustn’t get too lively, or it’ll do you harm.”
“I want my wallet,” Kringelein demanded with outspread fingers. He could not express himself clearly in his drugged condition. He knew only in his foggy consciousness that he had to pay for every minute of his life in cash and pay dearly. In his dream he had seen both life and money escaping from him, flowing away in a rapid and strong stream full of stones, like the stream in Fredersdorf that went dry every summer.
Otternschlag sighed and got up. He felt in the pockets of Kringelein’s jacket, which Gaigern had hung over the back of a chair, and found nothing. Gaigern stood at the window smoking with his back to the room and his face turned to the street, which now lay silent in the white light of the street lamps.
“There’s no wallet there,” said Otternschlag, and let his hands drop to his sides after this immense exertion.
In an instant Kringelein was out of bed, standing in the middle of the room on his thin and tottering legs. Breathless and horrified.
“Where is my wallet?” he cried piteously. “Where is it? Where is all that money? Where, where is it? Where is my wallet? Where is my wallet?”
Gaigern, who had long ago taken possessi
on of the wallet, tried to shut his ears to the plaintive clamor which was shrill in spite of a sleepy huskiness. Outside he heard the elevator. He heard steps come along the corridor and fade away behind closed doors. He heard—or so he imagined—someone breathing in Room No. 71, next door. He heard his wristwatch ticking. But he heard Kringelein’s terror as well, and he hated Kringelein savagely at this moment; he would have liked nothing better than to kill him. He turned impetuously into the room, but the pitiful sight that Kringelein presented disarmed him. Kringelein was standing in the middle of the room and weeping. The tears fell from his dazed eyes and down onto to his new bright-blue silk pajamas. Kringelein was crying over his wallet like a child. “There were six thousand two hundred marks in it,” he sobbed. “You can live for two years on that.” For Kringelein, without knowing it, had fallen back into the Fredersdorf scale of existence.
Otternschlag turned to Gaigern with a despairing gesture. “Where can his wallet be, then, since the man’s determined at any cost to live another two years?” he asked with an attempt at a joke.
