i 16b0d473103b6aa5

i 16b0d473103b6aa5 by Adena Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: i 16b0d473103b6aa5 by Adena Read Free Book Online
Authors: Adena
while
    she put all these things in my bag. Then I said I must go, so she sent their servant to carry it, and
    the coal. Also, we are going to dinner there to-morrow.”
    “Can you cut hair,” asked Klaus anxiously, “if I sharpen our nail-scissors?”
    They went to Munich in the spring of 1923, a year almost to the day since the auction at
    Haspe, and found two tiny bedrooms and a sitting-room in the upper half of a workman’s house
    in Quellen Strasse, close to the Mariahilfe Church in the old part of the city. From here it was
    only a short walk for Klaus through the Kegelhof and by Schwartz Strasse and the outer Erhardt
    Bridge, to the Isar island which is nearly covered by the immense buildings of the Deutsches
    Museum. The pay was desperately little in those days, but permanent, and as Lehmann came to
    know the Museum personnel, some of the unmarried members of the staff were glad to have
    Ludmilla to darn socks and vests for them. Gradually they got a home together, with chairs
    replacing packing-cases, and blankets on the beds instead of coats and sacks and strips of carpet.
    They were always hungry and usually cold, but they had occupation.
    Klaus was fortunate in the man who worked in the same part of a section as he did. Herr
    Kurt Stiebel was an elderly man who had been a partner in a firm of solicitors of some repute in
    Munich; in common with the rest of the professional classes in Germany he had been brought to
    absolute penury in the slump, and thought himself fortunate to have obtained a post which would
    provide him with a fireless attic in a narrow turning off the Höhe Strasse, and almost enough
    food to keep him from starving. Klaus brought him home to Quellen Strasse one evening after
    the Museum closed, to drink watery but hot cups of “Blumen” coffee and eat a few leathery little
    cakes Ludmilla had saved up to buy for the party.
    “You are our first guest, Herr Stiebel,” said Fräulein Rademeyer, “you are very welcome
    indeed.”
    “I am honoured,” said the old gentleman, and kissed her hand. “It is long since I had the
    pleasure of being entertained.”
    “Take this chair,” said Klaus. “That one has a loose leg, I have learned the art of sitting
    on it.”
    “It is as well,” said Ludmilla. “It will cure you of your regrettable tendency to lounging.
    Have you had a good day, Herr Stiebel?”
    “I was not asked more than twenty questions of which I did not know the answers. There
    was a small boy who asked who invented the arch, and when I said the Romans did—I believe
    that is right—he asked who the Romans were. I directed him to the Ethnological Section.”
    “He didn’t go,” said Klaus. “He came and asked me why bricks are usually red and what
    makes the veins in marble. Even that wasn’t so bad as the young man who asked me to explain in
    simple language the Precession of the Equinoxes. I swivelled him off to what’s-his-name in
    Astronomy.”
    “We are learning,” said Stiebel dryly, “to cope with these emergencies. When I was a
    solicitor and found myself confronted with a poser I used to say I would consult the authorities.
    Now my clients do it instead.”
    “My father used to say,” said Ludmilla, “that you can’t teach an old hand new tricks, but
    I have learned many things this last year or so.”
    “We all have, my dear lady, even to seeing a saddler of Heidelberg Chancellor of a
    German Republic, and a house-painter from Vienna leading a march on Berlin.”
    “Where is he now, what is his name—the house-painter?”
    “Hitler. Serving a sentence of five years’ detention in a fortress.”
    “Did you ever see him?” asked Klaus. “I have heard much about him. General
    Ludendorff was behind that, I understand.”
    “Certainly he was, there is no secret about that; Ludendorff, in my opinion, wanted to
    turn out Ebert and did not care what tools he used for the work, but as you know, the scheme
    failed ignominiously. Yes, I have seen

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