Part 30

There was but one barrier left between me and freedom. Judging from the disheveled appearance of the fat Hollanders who emerged, after long delay in every case, from the little wooden booths along the wall, the personal search that awaited me would be exacting and thorough. One could not expect them to take my word for it that I had no German money or other forbidden valuables concealed about my person. Yet that was exactly what they did. True, five weeks of knocking about in a “hand-me-down” that had been no fit costume for attending a court function in the first place had not left me the appearance of a walking treasury. But frontier officials commonly put less faith in the outward aspect of their victims than did the courteous German soldier who dropped his hands at his sides as I mentioned my nationality and opened the door again without laying a finger upon me.

“Happy journey,” he smiled, as I turned away, “and—and when you get back to America tell them to send us more food.”

My last hope of adventure had faded away, and Germany lay behind me. At Oldenzaal the Dutch were more exacting in their formalities than their neighbors had been, but they admitted me without any other opposition than the racial leisureliness that caused me to miss the evening train. A stroll through the frontier village was like walking through a teeming market-place after escape from a desert island. The shop-windows bulged with every conceivable species of foodstuffs—heaps of immense fat sausages, suspended carcasses of well-fed cattle, calves, sheep, and hogs, huge wooden pails of butter, overflowing baskets of eggs, hillocks of chocolate and sweets of every description, countless cans of cocoa.... I had almost forgotten that nature, abetted by industry, supplied mankind with such abundance and variety of appetizing things. I restrained with difficulty my impulse to buy of everything in sight.

At the hotel that evening the steak that was casually set before me would have instigated a riot in Berlin. Moreover, it was surrounded by a sea of succulent gravy. I could not recall ever having seen a drop of gravy in all Germany. When I paid my bill, bright silver coins were handed me as change. A workman across the room lighted a fat cigar as nonchalantly as if they grew on the trees outside the window. Luxurious private automobiles rolled past on noiseless rubber tires.

In the train next morning the eye was instantly attracted to the window-straps of real leather, to the perfect condition of the seat-cushions. A German returning to his pre-war residence in Buenos Aires with his Argentine wife and two attractive daughters, whom I had met at table the evening before, insisted that I share his compartment with them. He had spent three months and several thousand marks to obtain his passports, and the authorities at the border had forced him to leave behind all but the amount barely sufficient to pay his expenses to his destination. The transplanted wife was far more pro-German in her utterances than her husband, and flayed the “wicked Allies” ceaselessly in her fiery native tongue. During all the journey the youngest daughter, a girl of sixteen whose unqualified beauty highly sanctioned this particular mixture of races, sat huddled together in her corner like a statue of bodily suffering. Only once that morning did she open her faultless lips. At my expression of solicitude she turned her breath-taking countenance toward me and murmured in a tone that made even German sound musical:

“You see, we have not been used to rich food in Germany since I was a child, and—and last night I ate _so_ much!”

The stern days of the Kaiser’s régime, with their depressing submergence of personal liberty, would seem to have faded away. During all my weeks of wandering at large throughout the Fatherland not once did a guardian of the law so much as whisper in my ear. In contrast, during twenty-four hours in Holland I was twice taken in charge by detectives—it seems they were looking for a “bird” named Vogel—once in the streets of Oldenzaal and again as I descended from the train at Rotterdam.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Foreward and p. 112, changed "Hungry Empire" to "Hungary Empire" everywhere. 2. P. 10, changed “Organisationssinn” to “Organizationsinn”. 3. P. 12, changed “Addresse” to “Adresse”. 4. P. 26 changed “Americaner” to “Amerikaner”. 5. P. 41, changed “Königlicher” to “Königliches”. 6. P. 47, changed “kurfürsten” to “Kurfürsten”. 7. P. 48, changed “Türingerwald” to “Thüringerwald”. 8. P. 54 and 69, changed “Uns” to “uns”. 9. P. 66, changed “Blitzen” to “Blitz”. 10. P. 107, changed “keine Friede” to “keinen Frieden”. 11. P. 112, changed “Reichspresident” to “Reichspräsident”. 12. P. 121, changed “Französischerstrasse” to “Französischestrasse”. 13. P. 130, changed “Brühwürtchen” to “Brühwürstchen”. 14. P. 146, changed “Schlachtküh” to “Schlachtkuh”. 15. P. 265, changed “Selbstbesorger” to “Selbstversorger”. 16. P. 334, changed “Kühkäserei” to “Kuhkäserei”. 17. P. 341, changed “Real Schule” to “Realschule”. 18. Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling. 19. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 20. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.