I went to Berlin because it was cheap. The trip really began in Paris, the evening my father's lawyer summoned me.
No, that's not fair. He didn't summon me. He sent me a cheerful pneumatique inviting me to dinner at the Grand Vefour.
Grand Vefour, a lovely place: mirrors, paintings on glass, red velvet banquettes, and windows looking right into the gardens of the Palais Royal. The dinner was magnificent. I could not help wondering if the bill would somehow be charged to my old man - knowing I could live for a month on what this was costing - but it didn't matter, because George Graham had ordered a couple of very dry martinis the moment we sat down.
I was touched. A year ago, in Philadelphia, nobody would have allowed me anywhere near a martini, and that had nothing to do with Prohibition.
George Graham is the nicest partner in Conyers & Dean, the firm that has always handled my family's legal matters. He must have been in his early forties, a success, a leader in his firm, a leader in his profession ... and what was I? A recovering invalid? A student? An aspiring painter? Or a bum who preferred the sidewalks of Montparnasse to the bond department of Drexel & Co?
"Cheers," said George Graham, lifting his martini.
"Cheers," said I, lifting mine.
George Graham had kind blue eyes. He was the one they always sent when they wanted to be nice. I knew perfectly well what he had come to tell me.
"Peter, the War's been over four years," he began.
"Been over five for me, Mr. Graham. They shipped me home in April, 'seventeen."
"I know that, Peter. And you were in ... well, an unhappy condition."
"Unhappy condition? I was strapped into my bunk! They kept me so full of morphine that I slept from Brest to Hoboken. Didn't know what day it was. Didn't know what month it was!"
"You've made a splendid recovery, boy! "
"Painted the azaleas at Friends Hospital."
`The doctors did a wonderful job. And so did you. You've recovered your equilibrium."
"Well, I can get a glass to my mouth without spilling it. I got so I could get through dinner at home without crying."
"Peter, you're sitting here and having a martini and discussing this painful subject without the slightest loss of control. You've made a complete recovery. All the doctors say so. And your pictures ... the sketch you made of Walter Smith is so good we're thinking of commissioning a real portrait, for the office -."
"- so they want me to come home and sell bonds."
"Not at all! " He put his drink down and leaned forward. "Peter, your parents want you to complete your education. You left college in your sophomore year, didn't you? You've got no credentials to earn a living. Selling bonds was just an opportunity offered by one of your father's patients, but that's not ... You know what your father really wants."
I know what he really wants. He's the most famous surgeon in Philadelphia, and so was his father, and so was his grandfather. You can see their portraits along the halls of the University Hospital. Maybe not the best surgeons, but certainly the best known. People felt better just mentioning their names.
When I dropped out of Harvard to join the American Field Service my parents were delighted. Ambulances, wounded soldiers, obviously a step in the right direction. Of course I didn't do it in a spirit of helping wounded people. It was mob psychology.
It is hard to reconstruct the spirit of those times, but it overwhelmed us: the Hun was raping Belgium and driving toward Paris. Babies were having their hands chopped off with bayonets; some Americans living at Neuilly bought ambulances and called for American drivers. The thing caught on, especially in the colleges. At Harvard they drove an ambulance right into Memorial Hall, some fellows who had already been on the Marne made speeches, the band played "La Marseillaise," the College gave us permission to drop out, we had to buy our own uniforms and equipment, my father wrote an enthusiastic letter (enclosing a check for a thousand dollars and the required certificate of non-German parentage!) and next thing we were all on the Aquitania, headed for Le Havre. The atmosphere was college outing, a patriotic camping trip complete with sleeping bags and all-night singing ("There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, into the Land of My Dreams") in the blackedout first-class dining hall, and the only hint of the future was in the tired eyes of the Aquitania's officers as they silently observed our antics.
"Well, of course your father wants you in medical school," said George Graham. "But you' ve got to finish college first."
"A twenty-four-year-old sophomore?"
"Why, sure. You'II get much more out of it, and the others will defer to you -"
I doubted that. I doubted it all through dinner, while we talked about other things. George Graham was leaving on the morning train for Cherbourg, going home. He had been in Paris for several weeks, investigating the facts behind a will contest Conyers & Dean was handling. He told me about it: a rich old lady from Philadelphia had adopted a young Frenchman as her son and left him a couple of million dollars when she died. Had he used undue influence? Had she been told that he had served a jail term for embezzlement? Did that make any difference? Should it make any difference?
Not to me. What mattered to me, as George Graham tried to interest me in the facts of his depressing case, was that he found his message to me so difficult to deliver that he put it off until his last evening.
When the coffee came, he couldn't put it off any longer. My father wanted me home. Now.
"The agreement was a year in Paris, to paint, to complete your recuperation, to find out what you really want to do with yourself. The year's up, isn't it?"
"So he's going to stop my money?"
George Graham nodded. "One more check-a very generous one so that you can finish your semester at the Beaux Arts, get out of your lease, buy passage home - but then that's all, Peter. You can't expect them to support you here indefinitely."
"But I've really been working, I could show you what I've done -"
"I like very much to see what you've done, but have you sold anything?"
"I sold Mr. Smith that sketch of Walter, and I sold Miss Boatwright a little portrait of Joanne.... She was in the hospital with me."
"Have you sold anything over here?"
"That's awfully difficult, Mr. Graham. I don't know anybody."
"Of course it's difficult, we all know that, and that's why you've got to settle down and learn something that will provide a living. You're twenty-four years old, Peter, and you've got to learn a trade."
"Isn't painting a trade?"
"Not if there's no market for your pictures."
"Mr. Graham, can I ask you a question: Do you agree with them? "
He looked out the window for a moment before he turned back to answer.
"The Friendly Persuasion, Peter. Your people believe in honest labor. Maybe even more than Presbyterians. Certainly more than us Episcopalians. You know that."
"A Quake can't be an artist?"
"I didn't say that. But I'm not sure that a Friend will support an artist indefinitely. He would expect the artist - if he's good enough -to pay his way. If we think of patrons of the arts, who do we think of? Byzantine emperors? Medici popes? Henry Tudor and Charles Stuart? We don't think so much of George Fox and William Penn, do we?"
I had to smile. "You're a good lawyer, Mr. Graham. But it still hurts."
After dinner we strolled through the cool April evening, straight down the Rue St.-Honore to the Place Vendome. George Graham was staying at the Ritz, where he was to meet with a French lawyer who was helping with the will contest.
"This lawyer had to take a couple of German bankers out to dinner, so they may still be with him, but he promised to get rid of them as soon as possible. I don't suppose you'd like to show the town to a couple of German bankers, would you?" George Graham's eyes twinkled.
Remember this was 1922. The war was less than four years behind us. Most Frenchmen and many Americans hated the Germans - all Germans - with a passionate, personal kind of hatred.
I never did. I hated the Kaiser, I hated what little I had read about Bismarck and Prussian militarism, and of course the invasion of Belgium inspired me to join the Field Service, but when I got to France I soon saw that the ordinary German soldier was just as much a victim of the system as any other soldier. That wasn't all, though. Underneath my consciousness was the influence of Else Westerich.
In my grandfather's time, and in my father's time, American medical students who could afford it went to German universities, especially for advanced training, and doctors who had done this tour looked down their noses at doctors who hadn't. My father went beyond that: I wouldn't get as much out of the experience unless I spoke fluent German, and the only way to learn fluent German was to learn it as a child, so Fräulein Else Westerich came to live with us in 1906, when I was eight. She taught me German, slowly and gently. She played the piano and taught me German songs. She taught me "Hamburg ist ein schönes Städtchen" and she taught me "Nun ade, du mein lieb' Heimatland" and later she taught me other things too, and she left us when I was fourteen in circumstances I have taught myself not to remember, although one doctor at Friends Hospital got me to talk about her while I was full of morphine. Maybe it helped. Maybe it didn't.
The Ritz Bar was dimly lighted and smelled pleasantly of Scotch and cigarette smoke and perfume. At first I thought it was filled entirely with Americans.
"No, there they are," said George Graham, his hand on my arm, guiding me toward a corner table, where three men turned around, saw us, and stood up. I don't remember the French lawyer at all, but I remember that he made the introductions in English. Baron von Something was as short as I but handsome in a slicked-down, doe-eyed, almost Latin way. Herr Keith needed a cane to get out of his chair. Then he towered above me, gaunt and skinny; teeth gleamed below his rather British cavalry moustache as he shook my hand, grinning.
"I think Mr. Ellis and I have met before," he said. Quite overwhelmed, I was pumping his hand and grinning too.
first pages of book
PROLOGUE:- THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
I. HOW I GOT THERE
>1. PARIS 1922
2. VERDUN 1916
3. IT'S STEALING MONEY, ISN'T IT
4. WHERE WERE YOU IN 1919?
5. RELIABLE TROOPS
6. AN ISLAND
7. BISMARCK FOUND THEM USEFUL
8. INTRODUCTIONS
9. THE LITTLE HOUSE
10. INDIAN CROSSES
11. ANOTHER PART OF TOWN
12. A VIEW OF THE GENDARMENMARKT
13. TWO FOR TEA
14. ON THE TOWN
15. A VIEW OF THE HAVEL
16. REIGEN
II. WHAT HAPPENED
17. THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
18. MONDAY, JUNE 19, 1922
19. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1922
20. FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 1922
21. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1922
22. WHAT HAPPENED?
III. THE WITCHES' SABBATH
23. SILENCE WITH VOICES
24. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS
25. SAME SONGS, DIFFERENT SINGERS
26. THEY'RE ONLY GOING TO HIRE HIS VOICE
27. INFLATION WORKS IN DIFFERENT WAYS
28. SMALL CHANGE
29. WHY NOT PAINT LILI?
30. COLD WIND IN MAY
31. ROLLING THUNDER
32. WALDSTEIN'S VOICE
33. THE MATTER OF A DOWRY
34. A RUSSIAN WORD AND A GERMAN WORD
35. THE MARCH ON BERLIN
36. A PIG LOSES MONEY ALL THE TIME
37. THE ARTISTS' BALL
IV. STRIKE TWELVE ZEROs
38. AMYTAL DREAMS
39. LETTERS
40. PROFESSOR JAFFA'S PROGNOSIS
41. THE OTHER SUBJECT
42. ROLLING HOME