Thus we walk to the door, in friendly colloquy.  Somehow if he failed to speak of shirtings and hosiery, I should feel as if a familiar cord had broken;

At the door we part.

“Good afternoon,” he says.  “A week from Tuesday—­yes —­good afternoon.”

Such is—­or was—­our calm unsullied intercourse, unvaried or at least broken only by consignments from Europe.

I say it was, that is until just the other day.

And then, coming to the familiar door, for my customary summer suit, I found that he was there no more.  There were people in the store, unloading shelves and piling cloth and taking stock.  And they told me that he was dead.  It came to me with a strange shock.  I had not thought it possible.  He seemed—­he should have been —­immortal.

They said the worry of his business had helped to kill him.  I could not have believed it.  It always seemed so still and tranquil—­weaving his tape about his neck and marking measures and holding cloth against his leg beside the sunlight of the window in the back part of the shop.  Can a man die of that?  Yet he had been “going behind,” they said (however that is done), for years.  His wife, they told me, would be left badly off.  I had never conceived him as having a wife.  But it seemed that he had, and a daughter, too, at a conservatory of music —­yet he never spoke of her—­and that he himself was musical and played the flute, and was the sidesman of a church—­yet he never referred to it to me.  In fact, in thirty years we never spoke of religion.  It was hard to connect him with the idea of it.

As I went out I seemed to hear his voice still saying, “And nothing to-day in shirtings?”

I was sorry I had never bought any.

There is, I am certain, a deep moral in this.  But I will not try to draw it.  It might appear too obvious.

Peace, War, and Politics

XI.  Germany from Within Out

The adventure which I here narrate resulted out of a strange psychological experience of a kind that (outside of Germany) would pass the bounds of comprehension.

To begin with, I had fallen asleep.

Of the reason for my falling asleep I have no doubt.  I had remained awake nearly the whole of the preceding night, absorbed in the perusal of a number of recent magazine articles and books dealing with Germany as seen from within.  I had read from cover to cover that charming book, just written by Lady de Washaway, under the title Ten Years as a Toady, or The Per-Hapsburgs as I Didn’t Know Them.  Her account of the life of the Imperial Family of Austria, simple, unaffected, home-like; her picture of the good old Emperor, dining quietly off a cold potato and sitting after dinner playing softly to himself on the flute, while his attendants gently withdrew one by one from his presence; her description of merry, boisterous, large-hearted Prince Stefan Karl, who kept the whole court in a perpetual roar all the time by asking such riddles as “When is a sailor not a sailor?” (the answer being, of course, when he is a German Prince)—­in fact, the whole book had thrilled me to the verge of spiritual exhaustion.