“Beds?” cried the Kellner, too busy with his glasses to look up at me, “To be sure. We have always plenty of beds. One mark.”
But mein Herr the proprietor was staring at me from the back of the hall. Slowly he shuffled forward, cocked his head on one side, and scrutinized me intently from out his bleary eyes.
“What does he want?” he demanded, turning to the tapster.
I answered the query myself and the customary inquisition began.
“Woher kommen Sie?”
A baker’s cart of Holland on the morning round
A public laundry on the Rhine at Mainz, Germany
Knowing from experience the order of the questions, I launched forth into the story of my life, past, present, and future, or as much of it as was in keeping with the assertion that I was an American sailor on a sight-seeing expedition in the Fatherland. Plainly my hearers regarded it as a clumsy tale. Long before I had ended, the proprietor, the Kellner, and those clients of the house that had clustered around us, fell to nudging each other with grimaces of incredulity. The Wirt, harassed by the conflicting emotions of greed and fear, blinked his pudgy eyes and glanced for inspiration into the faces about him. The temptation to add another mark to his coffers was strong within him. Yet what would the police inspector say in the morning to the name of a foreigner on his register? He scratched his grizzly poll with a force that suggested that he was going clear down through it to extract an idea with his stubby fingers, glanced once more at the tipplers, and surrendered to fear.