Michael knew that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show an unsurpassable incompetence.  He showed it.  He flourished his incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial wrote a letter to his father that gave him his liberty.

The Henschels were sorry when he left.  The students, Otto and Carl and Ludwig, implored him not to forget them.  Hedwig and Loettchen cried.

* * * * *

Michael was not pleased when he found that he was to go home by Dresden to bring Veronica back.  He wanted to be alone on the journey.  He wanted to stop in Paris and see Jules Reveillaud.  He was afraid that Ronny had grown into a tiresome flapper and that he would have to talk to her.

And he found that Ronny had skipped the tiresome stage and had grown up.  Only her school clothes and her girlish door-knocker plait tied up with broad black ribbon reminded him that she was not yet seventeen.

Ronny was tired.  She did not want to talk.  When he had tucked her up with railway rugs in her corner of the carriage she sat still with her hands in her muff.

“I shall not disturb your thoughts, Michael,” she said.

She knew what he had been thinking.  Her clear eyes gazed at him out of her dead white face with an awful look of spiritual maturity.

“What can have happened to her?” he wondered.

But she did not disturb his thoughts.

Up till then Michael’s thoughts had not done him any good.  They had been bitter thoughts of the months he had been compelled to waste in Bavaria when every minute had an incomparable value; worrying, irritating thoughts of the scenes he would have to have with his father, who must be made to understand, once for all, that in future he meant to have every minute of his own life for his own work.  He wondered how on earth he was to make his people see that his work justified his giving every minute to it.  He had asked Reveillaud to give him a letter that he could show to his father.  He was angry with his father beforehand, he was so certain that he wouldn’t see.

He had other thoughts now.  Thoughts of an almond tree flowering in a white town; of pink blossoms, fragile, without leaves, casting a thin shadow on white stones; the smell of almond flowers and the sting of white dust in an east wind; a drift of white dust against the wall.

Thoughts of pine-trees falling in the forest, glad to fall.  He thought:  The pine forest makes itself a sea for the land wind, and the young pine tree is mad for the open sea.  She gives her slender trunk with passion to the ax; for she thinks that she will be stripped naked, and that she will be planted in the ship’s hold, and that she will carry the great main-sail.  She thinks that she will rock and strain in the grip of the sea-wind, and that she will be whitened with the salt and the foam of the sea.

She does not know that she will be sawn into planks and made into a coffin for the wife of the sexton and grave-digger of Aschaffenburg.