“My friend! I never set eyes on him before! How did he get here?”
“Hull, you certainly are needing the services of a good physician. Emil, bring the telephone directory.” Karstens turned over the leaves. “Here we are: Dr. Schramm, Psychopathological treatment, 35, Ludwigstrasse. …”
“I don’t understand your joke, my dear Karstens.”
“Well, who brought this fine vingt-et-un player here but you?”
“That is not true, Karstens.”
“Go to No. 35, Ludwigstrasse, my dear fellow, and quickly too.”
“Of course it was you who brought him, Hull,” said another.
“I? I brought him? At any rate, I don’t remember a thing about it, but it may be so.”
Hull then withdrew, exhausted and stupefied, brooding over the problem which had so strangely and suddenly opened up before him that evening.
When he awoke, towards morning, he had a dim and fleeting remembrance, and he seemed to recall the stranger sitting at the same table with him in the Café Bastin. He had an idea that they had been talking together, and that it was about the theatre, but what they had said, and which theatre it was about, he had not the slightest idea. In the dim recesses of his mind he recalled merely the sensation of a dazzling reflector that seemed to throw its beams upon him during the conversation. Sleep was no longer possible, but, try as he would to pierce these elusive fragments of memory and penetrate to the reality behind them, he was quite unable to make anything out of them.
The next afternoon brought him no enlightenment either. By four o’clock he had obtained the twenty thousand marks, and he made his way to the Excelsior Hotel. At his request a telephone message was sent to Room 15. Herr Balling was there, he was told, and requested the gentleman to send up his card. This Hull did, following close upon it.
In the middle of Room 15 he found a man whom he had never seen in his life before. He was a short, stout, clean-shaven man, apparently an American. He made a very stiff bow.
“I beg your pardon,” said Hull. “I must have been directed wrongly. I wanted Room 15.”
“This is it,” said the other.
“Then Herr Balling must have given me the wrong number.”
“My name is Balling.”
“This time I am not dreaming, I am in full possession of my senses,” said Hull to himself, and then aloud, he continued: “But the mystery can soon be explained. Did you write this?” and he extended the notebook in which the stranger of the previous night had written his name and address.
“Certainly not,” replied the stout man.
“Then I am not in your debt to the tune of twenty thousand marks?”
“My time is very limited, and I am expecting a friend on business,” said the other, looking at his watch.
“I will make way for your friend, sir, at once, and will only put one more question to you. It is not my fault that I am bothering you; I have been misled in some way.”
The other nodded.
“Possibly you are acquainted,” Hull went on, “with a gentleman of about sixty, with large grey eyes, a big nose and white whiskers. He wears good and well-cut clothes and a tall grey hat, and his name is also Balling.”
“I can only repeat that I know nothing about him,” said the Balling of No. 15.
Hull thereupon took his leave. Downstairs he asked whether there were a second Herr Balling in the hotel, but the answer was “No.” Had Room 15 been occupied by any Herr Balling who had just left? “No.” Was the writing in the pocketbook known? Again there was a negative reply. “For the first time in my life,” thought Hull, “I find myself unable to pay a debt of honour.”
Gradually he became uneasy. What a mysterious affair this was! Nothing of the kind had ever occurred before. He had won money and lost it again … sometimes much, and at other times little. He had been in financial straits. He had had some trouble about a girl he cared for. Once, indeed, he had been seriously wounded in a duel. Yet all that was comprehensible and straightforward, so to speak. But this tale of Herr Balling and the twenty thousand marks had some mystery or other behind it. He had forgotten that it was he who introduced the stranger to the club. He had played as if he had lost his head. He had incurred a debt of twenty thousand marks, and his creditor had furnished a name and address which did actually exist but were not his, and, moreover, he would not have the money. …
If it had not happened that Hull had no mistress at the moment, he could have talked this affair over. He pondered over it alone while he walked along Lenbach Square and the Promenade, looking everybody in the face in the hope that he might encounter the distinguished stranger among them. He went to the Café Bastin and scanned all the faces there. He sat down at a table and waited to see whether the genius loci would be favourable to him and recall the vanished recollections; but nothing came of it, and he stood up again, a prey to increasing uneasiness. It seemed as if in the invisible depths behind him another power, extraneous to himself, was pursuing him, pressing down upon him, trying to jump on his back as a monkey might do, and lead him into unlucky adventures of some kind or another.
Hull forced himself to return to his lonely bachelor chambers. There he met Karstens, and greeted him with relief. But Karstens at once asked:
“Well, has your memory returned?”
“My dear fellow, there’s something wrong with me!”
“With the twenty thousand marks?”
“No, there they are!” and he tapped his breast-pocket. “Nobody wants them, it appears. There is a Herr Balling in Room 15 at the Excelsior, but he isn’t my man, and we’ve never met before. He has never played vingt-et-un, and nobody owes him twenty thousand marks. I can’t
