The Chemistry of Tears

of an envelope and a stamp (“Brief-marke”) which I understood to be of sufficient value to get a letter to my boy. In an empty beer garden, I found a single chair beneath a chestnut tree. I tore a page from my notebook and described for Percy the tiny merry-go-round. As my memory is rather good, I managed to fill both sides and then a third with a full account of all the little figures and their motions. I encouraged him to see this as a promising start. I was hopeful, I wrote, of more good news in the next letter. I was a liar, but what choice did I have? It was essential, even in my absence, that his magnetic agitation be maintained as much as possible.

I returned to the inn with no appetite and Frau Beck led me immediately to a parlour adjacent the main dining room. This was panelled in dark wood and hung about with a number of fusty tapestries depicting what were said to be “Rumanian Hunters.” The windows being rather small, the light distinctly funereal, it required candles even in the middle of this sunny spring day. It was some time before I made out the considerable figure of a man seated in the corner.

He addressed me in a deep voice, “Guten Tag.”

He looked like a soldier, a major uncomfortable in his mufti.

A waiter arrived, his head lowered in such a way that, had he been a dog, his ears would have been flattened on his head. I was by now in a panic about the duck which I attempted to cancel by ordering an omelette.

“Of course,” he said. “Immediatement.”

“How do you enjoy Karlsruhe, Brandling?”

Brandling? The hair rose on my neck. He was a large man, with a neck as wide as the gleaming head which he kept completely bald. His brows were black and heavy and clearly kept in shape with the same mad barbering he brought to his moustache.

I thought, was it you who wrote the note? At the same time I thought, this is ridiculous.

Two waiters arrived (Immediatement, indeed) to present me with—no omelette, no beer—but a duck which had been prepared with fruit and cinnamon and other ghastly ingredients that would more properly be found in pudding.

The stranger kept on at me, stretching his arm along the back of his banquette. He had nothing before him but a book in which he appeared to sketch. It occurred to me that, although his broad shoulders suggested a plebeian, he was a pretender to the role of artist. That is, he exhibited a sort of insolence not unlike various individuals who had dined at our table when Mr. Masini was finishing his first “portrait” of my wife.

“Your meal is agreeable,” he demanded.

I did not reply.

“You are the bloke who went to Hartmann with your plans?”

Bloke was I? Indeed. “I’m afraid I know no Hartmann.”

“Hartmann the clockmaker,” he insisted, using English as if he had been wet-nursed by a cockney. “You spoke to him about your plans. You are Mr. Brandling, I believe?”

“Am I?” I said. “Indeed.”

“You scared the pants off Hartmann.” A cigar was ignited and in the flare I saw how his jacket strained against his arms.

“Herr Hartmann is not from here,” he said, “but if he was from Karlsruhe, what would it matter? The idiots have no idea of who they are. They spend their time trying to be Prussians. They are living in a dream,” he said.

I was doing my best with the meal, that is, not very well at all.

“Do you know what I am talking about?” the ruffian demanded.

At home, I would have confidently become deaf and blind. In Karlsruhe I did not know the form.

“They are living in a dream,” he insisted.

So then, finally, I spoke to him. “I do not understand you, Sir.”

“Then,” said he, rising as he spoke, “I think it is time for me to join you.”

I was appalled to see the giant come towards me. My brother, doubtless, would have left the room. But I, Henry Brandling, sat like a great big English bunny, and permitted the “bloke” to deposit his leather book beside my meal. This ill-treated volume held, between its pages, countless numbers of other sheets, all of different sizes and colours. The whole was tied together with a leather thong.

He shouted in German at the waiter, demanding what turned out to be an ashtray. When that wish was satisfied he turned his attention to my meal. No question of consulting me. I should have pulled his nose for him but I sat like a dressmaker’s dummy and permitted him to use the handle of the butter knife to deftly, one might say surgically, separate out the elements in the sauce, and with each of these excisions he asked a question, not of me, but of the servant. Finally he ordered it removed, or at least that seemed a consequence of what he said.

“Next we will have cognac,” he announced.

I thought, perhaps he is a mayor, an ill-mannered farmer risen through the ranks. I thought, Good luck with your cognac old chap.

“Why do you smile, comrade?”

“They serve only beer.”

He smiled, but not offensively. “Comrade, they are living in a dream.”

I shrugged. “When it comes to cognac, might I say the same to you.”

Now he was opposite me, there was no doubt that his tailor had done a poor job accommodating him. However that tight jacket had a pocket for everything, one specifically, it seemed, to fit a deck of cards.

He dealt one card, face down. “Do you know what this is?” he demanded. Was he smiling in the shadow of that large moustache?

Clearly I had fallen into company with a card sharp, but I would not be the easy victim my friends all feared. “If you expect me to turn it over, you are quite mistaken.”

“No.” He tapped the verso. “It is this I show you. This is the dream you are living in the middle of.”

For the first time I looked into his eyes. They were a very dark brown and one could almost call them black. I was not afraid of him, but he was certainly a beast both fierce and strange. “This is a picture of Karlsruhe,” I said.

“In English that would mean Karl’s Rest. You see that of course. But what you cannot see is the Karl who dreamed Karlsruhe. That is, Karl III Wilhelm, Markgraf von Baden-Durlach. He fell asleep and had a dream, and what he dreamed is what you see on the back of this card. So what do you observe?”

“Clearly it is in the form of a circle.”

“Clearly, Mr. Brandling. A wheel in fact.”

I thought again, how in the devil does he know my name? From the awful jumble of his leather book he plucked an ill-used sheet, a kind of catalogue, of clockwork wheels and gears.

“You are not a clockmaker,” I said—the hands upon the table were too large to decently tie boot laces.

“Why on earth did you speak to that idiot Hartmann? You come to the home of the wheel, and you talk to that dull bourgeois little shopkeeper. Do you not know where on earth you are?”

I thought, perhaps they all address each other in this tone.

“You want a cuckoo clock.” He almost sneered.

“No,” I said but he was insisting I consider an engraving of clock wheels, all the time staring with that senseless excitement you see in the eyes of people who have lost their wits. He had a theory, I understood. If you were from Karlsruhe you had spokes and metal rims.

“Have you ever seen a running machine?”

“A machine that runs?” (My goodness, I thought, that would be really something.)

“For God’s sake, drink, no of course not. If such a machine were to be invented, where would the most propitious place be?”

“You will say that it is Karlsruhe.”

“Here,” he cried, plucking one more item from his collection, and offering it with his enormous hand—a card like the ones manufacturers sometimes slip inside their tins of pipe tobacco. “Study it,” he commanded. “You spend too much money on your tailor and not enough on books.”

It was a coloured engraving of a fellow with a two-wheeled contraption.

“This is Herr Drais of Karlsruhe.” He tapped the fellow’s head with fingernails as square and dirty as a