Unknown - Isherwood, Christopher (The Berlin Stories - The Last of Mr Norris - Goodbye to Berlin) (TXT)

burgerstrasse—I forget its name, but I can find it again, easily. … It was the most ghastly hole… . Anyhow, I don’t remember much more about what happened that evening. It was early this morning that I started to think about things properly, while he was still asleep; and I began to wonder if everything was really quite all right. … I hadn’t noticed his underclothes before: they gave me a bit of a shock. You’d expect an important film man to wear silk next his skin, wouldn’t you? Well, his were the most extraordinary kind of stuff like camel-hair or something; they looked as if they might have belonged to John the Baptist. And then he had a regular Woolworth’s tin clip for his tie. It wasn’t so much that his things were shabby; but you could see they’d never been any good, even when they were new. … I was just making up my mind to get out of bed and take a look inside his pockets, when he woke up and it was too late. So we ordered breakfast. … I don’t know if he thought I was madly in love with him by this time and wouldn’t notice, or whether he just couldn’t be bothered to go on pretending, but this morning he was like a completely different person—just a common little guttersnipe. He ate his jam off the blade of his knife, and of course most of it went on to the sheets. And he sucked the insides out of the eggs with a most terrific squelching noise. I couldn’t help laughing at him, and that made him quite cross… . Then he said: ‘I must have beer!’ Well, I said, all right; ring down to the office and ask for some. To tell you the truth, I was beginning to be a bit frightened of him. He’d started to scowl in the most cavemannish way: I felt sure he must be mad. So I thought I’d humour him as much as I could… . Anyhow, he seemed to think I’d made quite a good suggestion, and he picked up the telephone and had a long conversation and got awfully angry, because he said they refused to send beer up to the rooms. I realize now that he must have been holding the hook all the time and just acting; but he did it most awfully well, and anyhow I was much too scared to notice things much. I thought he’d probably start murdering me

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because he couldn’t get his beer… . However, he took it quite quietly. He said he must get dressed and go downstairs and fetch it himself. All right, I said… . Well, I waited and waited and he didn’t come back. So at last I rang the bell and asked the maid if she’d seen him go out. And she said: ‘Oh yes, the gentleman paid the bill and went away about an hour ago… . He said you weren’t to be disturbed.’ I was so surprised, I just said: ‘Oh, right, thanks… .’ The funny thing was, I’d so absolutely made up my mind by this time that he was a loony that I’d stopped suspecting him of being a swindler. Perhaps that was what he wanted… . Anyhow, he wasn’t such a loony, after all, because, when I looked in my bag, I found he’d helped himself to all the rest of my money, as well as the change from the three hundred marks I’d lent him the night before… . What really annoys me about the whole business is that I bet he thinks I’ll be ashamed to go to the police. Well, I’ll just show him he’s wrong–—”

“I say, Sally, what exactly did this young man look like?”

“He was about your height. Pale. Dark. You could tell he wasn’t a born American; he spoke with a foreign accent–—”

“Can you remember if he mentioned a man named Schraube, who lives in Chicago?”

“Let’s see … Yes, of course he did! He talked about him a lot… . But, Chris, how on earth did you know?”

“Well, it’s like this… . Look here, Sally, I’ve got a most awful confession to make to you. … I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me… .”

We went to the Alexanderplatz that same afternoon.

The interview was even more embarrassing than I had expected. For myself at any rate. Sally, if she felt uncomfortable, did not show it by so much as the movement of an eyelid. She detailed the facts of the case to the two bespectacled police officials with such brisk bright matter-of-factness that one might have supposed she had come to

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complain about a strayed lapdog or an umbrella lost in a bus. The two officials—both obviously fathers of families—were at first inclined to be shocked. They dipped their pens excessively in the violet ink, made nervous inhibited circular movements with their elbows, before beginning to write, and were very curt and gruff.

“Now about this hotel,” said the elder of them sternly: “I suppose you knew, before going there, that it was an hotel of a certain kind?”

“Well, you didn’t expect us to go to the Bristol, did you?” Sally’s tone was very mild and reasonable: “They wouldn’t have let us in there without luggage, anyway.”

“Ah, so you had no luggage?” The younger one pounced upon this fact triumphantly, as of supreme importance. His violet copperplate police-hand began to travel steadily across a ruled sheet of foolscap paper. Deeply inspired by his theme, he paid not the slightest attention to Sally’s retort:

“I don’t usually pack a suitcase when a man asks me out to dinner.”

The elder one caught the point, however, at once:

“So it wasn’t till you were at the restaurant that this young man invited you to—er—accompany him to the hotel?”

“It wasn’t till after dinner.”

“My dear young lady,” the elder one sat back in his chair, very much the sarcastic father, “may I enquire whether it is your usual custom to accept invitations of this kind from perfect strangers?”

Sally smiled sweetly. She was innocence and candour itself:

“But, you see, Herr Kommissar, he wasn’t a perfect stranger. He was my fiancé.”

That made both of them sit up with a jerk. The younger one even made a small blot in the middle of his virgin page —the only blot, perhaps, to be found in all the spotless dossiers of the Polizeipräsidium.

“You mean to tell me, Frl. Bowles”—but in spite of his gruffness, there was already a gleam in the elder one’s eye—

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“You mean to tell me that you became engaged to this man when you’d only known him a single afternoon?”

“Certainly.”

“Isn’t that, well—rather unusual?”

“I suppose it is,” Sally seriously agreed. “But nowadays, you know, a girl can’t afford to keep a man waiting. If he asks her once and she refuses him, he may try somebody else. It’s all these surplus women–—”

At this, the elder official frankly exploded. Pushing back his chair, he laughed himself quite purple in the face. It was nearly a minute before he could speak at all. The young one was much more decorous; he produced a large handkerchief and pretended to blow his nose. But the nose-blowing developed into a kind of sneeze which became a guffaw; and soon he too had abandoned all attempt to take Sally seriously. The rest of the interview was conducted with comic-opera informality, accompanied by ponderous essays in gallantry. The elder official, particularly, became quite daring; I think they were both sorry that I was present. They wanted her to themselves.

“Now don’t you worry, Frl. Bowles,” they told her, patting her hand at parting, “we’ll find him for you, if we have to turn Berlin inside out to do it!”

“Well!” I exclaimed admiringly, as soon as we were out of earshot, “you do know how to handle them, I must say!”

Sally smiled dreamily: she was feeling very pleased with herself: “How do you mean, exactly, darling?”

“You know as well as I do—getting them to laugh like that: telling them he was your fiancé! It was really inspired!”

But Sally didn’t laugh. Instead, she coloured a little, looking down at her feet. A comically guilty, childish expression came over her face: