Just then a small, twisted man, with a large head crowned with wild black hair, limped into the inn parlor. It was Lame Hans, but no one knew that then. He asked Scheer the innkeeper for a room.
Scheer smiled. “Sitting rooms on the first floor are a hundred marks,” he said. He could see by Lame Hans’s worn clothes that he could not afford a sitting room.
“Something cheaper.”
“My regular rooms are thirty marks. Or I can let you have a garret for ten.”
Hans rented a garret room, and ordered a meal of beer, tripe, and kraut. That was the last time anyone except Gretchen noticed Lame Hans that night.
* * *
A
nd now I must leave off recounting what I myself saw and tell many things that rest solely on the testimony of Lame Hans, given to me while he ate his potato soup in his cell. But I believe Lame Hans to be an honest fellow, and as he no longer, as he says, cares much to live, he has no reason to lie.
One thing is certain. Lame Hans and Gretchen the serving girl fell in love that night. Just how it happened I cannot say—I doubt that Lame Hans himself knows. She was sent to prepare the cot in his garret. Doubtless she was tired after drawing beer in the parlor all day and was happy to sit for a few moments and talk with him. Perhaps she smiled—she was always a girl who smiled a great deal—and laughed at some bitter joke he made. And as for Lame Hans, how many blue-eyed girls could ever have smiled at him, with his big head and twisted leg?
In the morning the machine would not play chess.
Professor Baumeister sat before it for a long time, arranging the pieces and making first one opening and then another, and tinkering with the mechanism, but nothing happened.
And then, when the morning was half-gone, Lame Hans came into the professor’s room. “You paid a great deal of money for this machine,” he said, and sat down in the best chair.
“Were you in the inn parlor last night?” asked Professor Baumeister. “Yes, I paid a great deal: seven hundred and fifty kilomarks.”
“I was there,” said Lame Hans. “You must be a very rich man to be able to afford such a sum.”
“It was the university’s money,” explained Professor Baumeister.
“Ah,” said Lame Hans. “Then it will be embarrassing for you if the machine does not play.”
“It does play,” said the professor. “I played three games with it last night after it was brought here.”
“You must learn to make better use of your knights,” Lame Hans told him, “and to attack on both sides of the board at once. In the second game you played well until you lost the queen’s rook; then you went to pieces.”
The professor sat down, and for a moment said nothing. And then: “You are the operator of the machine. I was correct in the beginning; I should have known.”
Lame Hans looked out the window.
“How did you move the pieces—by radio? I suppose there must still be radio-control equipment in existence somewhere.”
“I was inside,” Lame Hans said. “I’ll show you sometime; it’s not important. What will you tell the university?”
“That I was swindled, I suppose. I have some money of my own, and I will try to pay back as much as I can out of that—and I own two houses in Furstenwalde that can be sold.”
“Do you smoke?” asked Lame Hans, and he took out his short pipe, and a bag of tobacco.
“Only after dinner,” said the professor, “and not often then.”
“I find it calms my nerves,” said Lame Hans. “That is why I suggested it to you. I do not have a second pipe, but I can offer you some of my tobacco, which is very good. You might buy a clay from the innkeeper here.”
“No, thank you. I fear I must abandon such little pleasures for a long time to come.”
“Not necessarily,” said Lame Hans. “Go ahead; buy that pipe. This is good Turkish tobacco—would you believe, to look at me, that I know a great deal about tobacco? It has been my only luxury.”
“If you are the one who played chess with me last night,” Professor Baumeister said, “I would be willing to believe that you know a great deal about anything. You play like the devil himself.”
“I know a great deal about more than tobacco. Would you like to get your money back?”
And so it was that that very afternoon (if it can be credited) the mail coach carried away bills printed in large black letters. These said:
IN THE VILLAGE OF ODER SPREE
BEFORE THE INN OF THE GOLDEN APPLES
ON SATURDAY
AT 9:00 O’CLOCK
THE MARVELOUS BRASS CHESSPLAYING AUTOMATON
WILL BE ON DISPLAY
FREE TO EVERYONE
AND WILL PLAY ANY CHALLENGER
AT EVEN ODDS
TO A LIMIT OF DM 2,000,000
Now, you will think from what I have told you that Lame Hans was a cocky fellow, but that is not the case, though like many of us who are small of stature he pretended to be self-reliant when he was among men taller than he. The truth is that though he did not show it, he was very frightened when he met Herr Heitzmann (as the two of them had arranged earlier that he should) in a certain malodorous tavern near the Schwarzthor in Furthenwald.
“So there you are, my friend,” said Herr Heitzmann. “How did it go?”
“Terribly,” Lame Hans replied as though he felt nothing. “I was locked up in that brass snuffbox for half the night, and had to play twenty games with that fool of a scholar. And when at last I got out, I couldn’t get a ride here and had to walk most of the way on this bad leg of mine. I trust it was comfortable on the cart seat? The horse didn’t give you too much trouble?”
