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but the neighboring bits were still unsold. On the shores of that lake business was slack, the place being damp, mosquito infested, and far from the village; then also there was no road connecting it with the highway, and nobody knew when that road would be made.
    It was, I remember, on a Sunday morning in mid-June that, yielding to Ardalion’s rapturous persuasions, we went there for the first time. On our way we stopped to pick up the fellow. Long did I keep toot-tooting, with my eyes fixed on his window. That window slept soundly. Lydia put her hands to her mouth and cried out in a trumpet voice: “Ar-dally-o-o!” In one of the lower windows, just above thesignboard of a pub (which, by its look, somehow suggested that Ardalion owed money there) a curtain was dashed aside furiously and a Bismarck-like worthy in frogged dressing gown glanced out with a real trumpet in his hand.
    Leaving Lydia in the car, which by now had stopped throbbing, I went up to arouse Ardalion. I found him asleep. He slept in his one-piece bathing suit. Rolling out of bed, he proceeded with silent rapidity to slip on sandals, a blue shirt, and flannel trousers; then he snatched up a briefcase (with a suspicious lump in its cheek) and we went down. A solemn and sleepy expression did not exactly add charm to his fat-nosed face. He was put in the rumble seat.
    I did not know the way. He said he knew it as well as he knew his Pater Noster. No sooner had we left Berlin than we went astray. The rest of our drive consisted of making inquiries.
    “A glad sight for a landowner!” exclaimed Ardalion, when about noon we passed Koenigsdorf and then sped along the stretch of road he knew. “I shall tell you when to turn. Hail, hail, my ancient trees!”
    “Don’t play the fool, Ardy dear,” said Lydia placidly.
    On either side there stretched rough wasteland, the sand-and-heather variety, with a sprinkling of young pines. Then, farther on, the country changed a little; we had now an ordinary field on our right, darkly bordered at some distance by a forest. Ardalion began to fuss anew. On the right-hand side of the highway a bright yellow post grew up and at that spot there branched out at right angles a scarcely discernible road, the ghost of some obsolete road, which presently expired among burdocks and oatgrass.
    “This is the turning,” said Ardalion grandly and then, witha sudden grunt, pitched forward into me, for I had put on the brakes.
    You smile, gentle reader? And indeed, why should you not smile? A pleasant summer day and a peaceful countryside; a good-natured fool of an artist and a roadside post.… That yellow post.… Erected by the man selling the allotments, sticking up in brilliant solitude, an errant brother of those other painted posts, which, seventeen kilometers farther toward the village of Waldau, stood sentinel over more tempting and expensive acres, that particular landmark subsequently became a fixed idea with me. Cut out clearly in yellow, amid a diffuse landscape, it stood up in my dreams. By its position my fancies found their bearings. All my thoughts reverted to it. It shone, a faithful beacon, in the darkness of my speculations. I have the feeling today that I
recognized
it, when seeing it for the first time: familiar to me as a thing of the future. Perhaps I am mistaken; perhaps the glance I gave it was quite an indifferent one, my sole concern being not to scrape the mudguard against it while turning; but all the same, today as I recall it, I cannot separate that first acquaintanceship from its mature development.
    The road, as already mentioned, lost itself, faded away; the car creaked crossly, as it bounced on the bumpy ground; I stopped it and shrugged my shoulders.
    Lydia said: “I suggest, Ardy dear, we push on to Waldau instead; you said there was a large lake there and a café or something.”
    “That’s out of the question,” retorted Ardalion excitedly. “Firstly, because the café is only just being