The manager came to my room presently, bringing my money and papers, and the miniature, which he had taken charge of; lucky it was for me that I had fallen into honest hands when I reached Berlin!
He addressed me as “Herr Gould” of course, and was full of curiosity to know how I got through, and if things were as bad in Warsaw as the newspapers reported. Berlin was full of Russian refugees; but he had not met one from Warsaw.
“They say the Governor will issue no passports permitting Poles to leave the city,” he said. “But you are an American, which makes all the difference.”
“I guess so,” I responded, wondering how Loris had managed to obtain that passport, and if it would have served to get me through if I had started from the city instead of making that long détour to Kutno.
I assured my host that the state of affairs in the city of terror I had left was indescribable, and I’d rather not discuss it. He seemed quite disappointed, and with a queer flash of memory I recalled how the little chattering woman—I forget her name—had been just as disappointed when I didn’t give details about Cassavetti’s murder on that Sunday evening in Mary’s garden. There are a lot of people in this world who have an insatiable appetite for horrors,—when they can get them at second-hand.
“They say it’s like the days of the terror in the ‘sixties’ over again,—tortures and shootings and knoutings; and that the Cossacks stripped a woman and knouted her to death one day last week; did you hear of that?”
“I tell you I don’t mean to speak of anything that I’ve seen or heard!” I said, feeling that I wanted to kick him. He apologized profusely, and then made me wince again by referring to the miniature, with more apologies for looking at it, when he thought it necessary to take possession of it.
“But we know the so-amiable Fraulein and Herr Pendennis so well; they have often stayed here,” he explained. “And it is such a marvellous likeness; painted quite recently too, since the illness from which the Fraulein has so happily recovered!”
I muttered something vague, and managed to get rid of him on the plea that I felt too bad to talk any more, which drew fresh apologies; but when he had gone I examined the miniature more closely than I’d had an opportunity of doing since Loris gave it me.