“But I do have good news for you. I shall soon leave for Cuxhaven, where the doctors assure me the sea baths will restore my health, which has not been of the best. And the thought of leaving this hateful city already makes me feel refreshed. I detest this place and the people—everybody, everybody. I am sick at heart. You can readily understand my state of feelings that aside from my own grief—the grief of my many dismal failures—my blood is boiling within me at the memory of an ugly spectacle I witnessed the other night. It is too painful to speak of it; the iron has entered my soul; everything within me has turned to gall. The ‘Baptised traders’ here have launched a fierce attack against the Un-Baptised. The irony of it! The pot calls the kettle black. Those hideous cowards! You know me well enough that I am no more blind to the shortcomings of the Jews than any Christian, but when I see those selfish, cruel monsters revive the barbarism of the Middle Ages my heart cries in anguish. Those barbarians! In one breath they boast that they surpass the English in commerce, the French in art, the Greeks in philosophy, the Romans in warfare, and in the very next breath clamor that unless the progress of the Jews is checked the Teuton will be exterminated! Those miserable cowards! Twenty millions of these superior beings afraid of a handful of Jews! It would be laughable were it not so tragic! But I can’t speak of it, I can’t think of it—
“But wait, the day of reckoning will come. Before they have shaved my locks and put my eyes out I will tie firebrands to the tails of these foxes—you remember the story of Samson and the Philistines?—Yes, I will smite them hip and thigh, but not with the jawbone of an ass; a goose quill is my weapon.
“Did I say I was unhappy? I am to leave this cursed city, which holds for me nothing but the bitterest memories. So I will go to Bonn.
“O, what a comedy life is!—But enough!
From the depths I call to Thee, Oh, Lord!
Albert”
VIII.
A mid-April day, rather warm for the season. The sunbeams were playing around the slender spire of the Petrithurm at Hamburg, with sparkling flashes at the bluish surfaces of the calm waters of the Alster.
At the curb before one of the houses on Grosse Bleichenstrasse stood a blinking horse, harnessed to a cart, a driver fidgeting with whip and reins. Soon the portal of the courtyard opened and from it emerged a strapped black leather valise, then a little squatty man, then a slender young man of medium height with small greenish eyes and light brown hair, carrying a cane and an umbrella in one hand and in the other a small bundle.
The older man placed the valise in the cart, the younger one threw in the bundle, umbrella and cane; the two clasped hands.