Yes, it was better to feign sleep if by any chance she were still awake when he returned. There was no sleep that night if, straight from the game, he started to talk.

“How can you stand it, my girl?” Frau Thumann would say, shaking her head. “Out every night and with all your dough in his pocket. And they say the place is alive with classy tarts. I wouldn’t let my man go.”

“But you let your husband go up a building, Frau Thumann. A ladder may slip or a plank give way. And tarts are everywhere.”

“Lord, don’t suggest such things with my Willem working on the fifth floor, and me being already so nervous. But there’s a difference, lass. Building’s necessary, but gambling’s not.”

“But suppose he needs it, Frau Thumann.”

“Needs it! Needs it! I’m always having my old man telling me what a lot he needs. Cards and tobacco and floods of beer, and, I dare say, little bits of fluff as well, but he don’t tell me that. I tell him: ‘What you do need is me to take you in hand and the pay envelope from the contractor’s office on Friday nights. That’s what you need!’ You’re too good to him, my girl, you’re too soft. When I look at you of a morning when I bring in the coffee, and see you making eyes at him and he don’t notice you at all, then I know how it’ll end. Gambling as work—I like that! Gambling’s not working and working’s not gambling. If you really mean him well, my girl, you take his money away and let him go building with Willem. He can carry bricks, can’t he?”

“Good God, Frau Thumann, you talk exactly like his mother. She also thought I was too kind to him and encouraging him in his vice, and she even slapped my face once for that very reason.”

“Slapping ain’t the right thing either! Aren’t you her daughter-in-law? No, you do it, see what I mean, for your own pleasure, and if it gets too much for you, then you hop it. No, slapping’s not nice, either; you c’n even go to the law about it.”

“But it didn’t hurt at all. His mother’s got such tiny hands. My mother was quite different. And anyway …”

IV

A wooden barrier divided the room of the Berlin Harvesters’ Agency into two very unequal parts. The front part, in which Rittmeister von Prackwitz stood, was quite small and the entrance door opened into it. Prackwitz had hardly room to move.

The other and larger part was occupied by a small, fat, darkish man. The Rittmeister was not sure whether he looked so dark because of his hair or because he had not washed. Gesticulating, the dark fat man in dark clothes was speaking vehemently with three men in corduroy suits, gray hats, and cigars in the corner of their mouths. The men replied just as vehemently, and although they were not shouting it seemed as if they were.

The Rittmeister did not understand a word; they were speaking Polish, of course. Though the tenant of Neulohe employed every year half a hundred Poles, he had not learned Polish, apart from a few words of command.

“I admit,” he would say to Eva, his wife, who spoke broken Polish, “I admit that I ought really to learn it for practical reasons. Nevertheless I refuse, now and forever, to learn this language. I absolutely refuse. We live too near the borders.