In Spring and Summer, the window ledges were gay with flower boxes of bright geraniums.

In an old four-story house half way down this little street, Frederick lived with his mother, a sister, his uncle and his aunt. His father had died several years before, and had left his family a comfortable, although not a great, inheritance. And now his uncle carried on the family business.

They were a firm of private bankers and they had always borne a respected name. Beginning with Frederick’s grandfather, over sixty years before, the firm had carried on its business in the town of Koblenz. And it had always been assumed, without discussion, that Frederick also would go into the firm when he had finished school.

Frederick went along the pleasant ancient street until he came to the old house where he lived. In this house, members of his family had lived for eighty years. His bedroom was on the top floor of the house. It was a little gabled room below the eaves and at night before he went to sleep he could hear the voices of people passing in the street, sometimes a woman’s laughter suddenly, and sometimes nothing but footsteps which approached, passed, and faded with a lonely echoing sound.

The street ended in a broad tree-shaded promenade that crossed it at right angles and which was one of the leading thoroughfares of the town.

Beyond that was the river Rhine.

Images

MORNING

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JACK ASLEEP

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Jack thought he had gone back home to visit his family. Although his uncle had been dead for twenty years, and his aunt for twelve, and his sister was now an elderly married woman, with grown-up children of her own, who lived in Frankfort, and his mother was an old woman in the seventies, it seemed to Jack that they were all living in the old house in the Weinfass Gasse, and that none of them had grown any older. He was himself a spruce, smartly groomed, grey-haired man, but no one seemed to notice this. Everyone treated him as if he was a child, and as if he had been away from home for forty days, instead of forty years.

But now that he was back among them, he was haunted day and night by intolerable images of fear and pity. Nothing around him seemed to have changed one jot. The old house in the Wine-Cask Street looked just the same as it had always looked, and when he entered a room it leaped instantly into all its former life for him and he remembered the place of every minute object in it, even the place in an old wooden clock where the winding-key was kept, although these were things he had not thought of for many years. And the heavy deliberate tock of the old clock in the silent room suddenly awoke, with its own single character of time, the memory of a thousand winter evenings when he had bent above his book under the warm light of the table lamp, and had felt time slowly wear away around him, the grey ash of its slow intolerable fire.

These images of the past returned to him instantly, and they filled him with weariness and horror. Everything was as familiar as it was the day he left it, and yet it was stranger than a dream. He had returned to all that he had known and was part of, and yet it no longer seemed a part of him. It seemed incredible that it had ever been a part of him, and its very familiarity filled his soul with terror and unbelief. And this same doubt and terror chilled his heart when he thought of all the years since childhood that he had spent in America, and of the life he had lived there. The old life of his youth had instantly possessed him with all its terror of strangeness and familiarity and now it seemed impossible to believe that he had ever been away.

Then, Jack thought he went to bed in the little room of his childhood and that he dreamed he had gone to America, and that all his life there had been nothing but a dream. He thought he awoke suddenly at dawn to hear a cart rumbling on the narrow cobbled street below and to think for a moment that he was in New York. Then he would sweat with horror for it seemed that he belonged to nothing he had known, and could never tell whether his life had been a dream or a reality, or whether he had ever known a home or made a voyage. And it seemed to him that he was doomed forever to be a traveller upon the illimitable and protean ocean of time, borne constantly across its stormy seas upon a dark phantasmal ship that never reached a port, haunted forever by dreams of homes and cities he had never known. Grey horror gripped him. The snake of desolation ate his heart.

Yet, it seemed to Jack that his family saw nothing strange in his appearance or demeanour. He had returned to them, but he was still a boy of seventeen to them. He looked into the mirror in his little room, and he saw the grey hair and the worldly features of a man past fifty. This was the self he knew and saw, but his mother, his aunt, his uncle, his sister, his cousin, Karl, and the servant Anna, saw no change in him at all. And just as nothing in the street or house had changed a jot, so all of them looked just the same age as they had looked when he was seventeen.

Moreover when he tried to speak to them, he found he had forgotten his native German tongue. He understood every word they spoke to him, yet when he tried to answer a strange wordless jargon broke harshly from his lips, filling his heart with shame and terror. And yet they seemed to know just what he wished to say, and answered him without surprise.

Alone, with fear slow-feeding with its poisonous lip against his heart, he would try to speak to himself in English, but the words came rustily with a guttural outlandish accent, strange and difficult to his own ears and, he felt, incomprehensible to others.