claims lest it should be stolen and used to prove the case of another claimant, and others who demanded travelling expenses in order that they might present their cases in person to the administrator. Above all, there were the lawyers.
Only thirty-four out of the first seven hundred claims which George examined had been handled by attorneys, but it took him over two days to get through those particular files. The claims in question were mostly of doubtful validity, and one or two were patently dishonest. In George’s view, no reputable lawyer would have touched any of them. But these had been disreputable lawyers; they had both touched and held on. They had quoted non-existent precedents and photographed useless documents. They had hired dishonest inquiry agents to conduct pointless investigations, and quack genealogists to draw up faked family trees. They had written portentous letters and uttered obscure threats. The only thing, apparently, that none of them had ever done was to advise his client to withdraw a claim. In one of these files there was a letter to the administrator from an old woman named Snyder, regretting that she had no more money left to pay her attorney to act for her, and asking that her claim should not on this account be overlooked.
In his second week on the records, George managed, in spite of a severe cold in the head, to push his score of examined claims up to nineteen hundred. In the third week he topped three thousand. By the end of the fourth week he was at the halfway mark. He was also feeling very depressed. The boring nature of the work and the cumulative effect of so much evidence of human stupidity were lowering in themselves. The amused commiseration of his new colleagues and the knowledge that he was beginning his career in Lavater, Powell and Sistrom at the wrong end of an office joke had done nothing to improve matters. Mr. Budd, when last encountered in the elevator on his way back from lunch, had talked cheerfully about baseball and had not even troubled to ask for a progress report. On the Monday morning of the fifth week George surveyed with loathing the stacks of records that still remained to be examined.
“Finish the O’s, Mr. Carey?” The speaker was the janitor who looked after the vaults, cleaned up the parcels, and carried them to and from George’s office.
“No, I’d better start on the P’s now.”
“I can ease the rest of the O’s out if you like, Mr. Carey.”
“All right, Charlie. If you can do it without bringing the lot down.” The inroads he had already made on the towering stacks of parcels had gradually reduced the stability of the remainder.
“Sure, Mr. Carey,” said Charlie. He took hold of a section near the floor and pulled. There was a slithering noise and a crash as an avalanche of parcels engulfed him. In the cloud of dust that followed the subsidence, he stumbled to his feet coughing and swearing, his hand held to his head. Blood began to pour from a long cut over his eye.
“For God’s sake, Charlie, how did that happen?”
The janitor kicked something solid under the heap of parcels about him. “This damned thing caught me on the head, Mr. Carey,” he explained. “Must have been stacked up in the middle somewhere.”
“Do you feel all right?”
“Oh, sure. It’s only a scratch. Sorry, Mr. Carey.”
“You’d better get it fixed anyway.”
When he had handed the janitor over to the care of one of the elevator men and the dust in the vault had settled again, George went in and examined the confusion. Both the O’s and the P’s had vanished under a rubble of S’s and W’s. He pushed several of the parcels aside and saw the reason for the janitor’s cut eye. It was a large, black, japanned deed box of the kind that used to line the walls of old family lawyers. Stencilled on it in white paint
were the words: “ SCHNEIDER-CONFIDENTIAL.”
George dragged the box clear of the parcels and tried to open it. It was locked and there was no key attached to either of the handles. He hesitated. His business in this case was with the claims files, and it was foolish to waste time satisfying his curiosity about the contents of an old deed box. On the other hand, it would take an hour to straighten out the mess at his feet. There was little point in his covering himself with dust and cobwebs in order to hasten the process, and Charlie would be back in a few minutes. He went into the janitor’s room, took a cold chisel and a hammer from the tool rack, and returned to the box. A few blows cut through the thin metal around the tongue of the lock, and he was able to wrench the lid open.
At first sight, the contents seemed to be simply some personal belongings from Mr. Moreton’s office. There was a calf-bound appointment book with his initials stamped on it in gold, an onyx desk set, a carved teak cigar box, a tooled leather blotting pad, and a pair of leather-covered letter trays to match it. In one of the trays there was a hand towel, some aspirin tablets, and a bottle of vitamin capsules. George lifted the tray. Beneath it was a thick loose-leaf binder labelled: “ GERMAN INQUIRY RE SCHNEIDER BY ROBERT L. MORETON, 1939.” He glanced through a page or two, saw that it was in diary form, and put it aside for later reading. Underneath was a Manila folder containing a mass of photographs, mostly, it appeared, of German legal documents of some sort. The only other things in the box were a sealed package and a sealed envelope. On the package was written: “Correspondence between Hans Schneider and his wife, with other documents found by Hilton G. Greener and Robert L. Moreton among effects of late Amelia Schneider Johnson, Sept. 1938.” On the envelope was written: “Photograph handed to R. L. M. by Father Weichs at Bad Schwennheim.”
George put Mr. Moreton’s personal things back in the deed box and took the rest of the contents up to his office. There the first thing he did was to open the sealed parcel.
The letters in it had been carefully numbered and initialled by Mr. Greener and Mr. Moreton. There were seventy-eight of them, all tied up in small packets with silk ribbon and with a pressed flower in each. George undid one of the packets. The letters in it belonged to the courtship period of Amelia’s parents, Hans Schneider and Mary Smith. They showed that Hans had been working in a warehouse at the time and learning English, and that Mary had been learning German. George thought them formal, graceless, and dull. However, their value to Mr. Moreton must have been considerable, for they had probably made possible the speedy tracing of the Smith family concerned, and led to its elimination from the list of claimants.
George tied the packet up again and turned to an album of old photographs. In it there were photographs of Amelia and Martin as children, of their brother Frederick, who had died at the age of twelve, and, of course, of Hans and Mary. More interesting, because it was even older, was a daguerreotype portrait of an old man with a vast beard.
He sat erect and very stern, his big hands grasping the arms of the photographer’s chair, his head pressed hard against the back of it. The lips were full and determined. There was a heavy, strong face beneath the beard. The silvered copper plate on which the portrait had been made was glued to a red velvet mount. Beneath it Hans had written: “Mein geliebt Vater, Franz Schneider. 1782–1850.”
The only other document was a thin, leather-bound notebook filled with Hans’s spidery writing. It was written in English. On the first page, elaborately decorated with ornamental pen-strokes, was a description of the book’s contents: “An Account of My Beloved Father’s Heroic Part in the Battle of Preussisch-Eylau, fought in the year 1807, of His Wounding, and of His Meeting with My Beloved Mother, who Saved His Life. Set down by Hans Schneider for His Children in June 1867, that They may be Proud of the Name They Bear.”
The Account began with the events leading up to Eylau and went on with descriptions of the various actions in which the Ansbach Dragoons had engaged the enemy, and of spectacular incidents in the battle: a Russian cavalry charge, the capture of a battery of guns, the decapitation of a French officer. Obviously, what Hans had written down was a legend learned at his father’s knee. Parts of it still had the artless quality of a fairy tale; but as the account progressed, the middle-aged Hans could be seen perplexedly trying to reconcile his boyhood memories with his adult sense of reality. The writing of the Account, George thought, must have been a strange experience for him.
After his description of the battle, however, Hans’s touch had become surer. The emotions of the wounded hero, his certainty that God was with him, his determination to do his duty until the end-these things were described with practised unction. And when the terrible moment of treachery came, when the cowardly Prussians had abandoned the wounded hero while he was helping a stricken comrade, Hans had let loose a torrent of Biblical denunciation. If God had not guided the hoofs of the hero’s horse to the farmhouse of the gentle Maria Dutka, all would certainly have been over. As it was, Maria had been understandably suspicious of the Prussian uniform, and (as she had later confessed to the hero) her humane instincts had been all but overcome by her fears for her virtue and for her ailing father. In the end, of course, all had been well. When his wound was healed, the hero had brought
