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expose him for a fool for all the world to see. He was able to cling to that thought for no more than a moment, for in his distraction he kept on forgetting everything.
    “Just try linking arms with your bride and getting in my way! I’ll sweep her from your side, you don’t know how!”
    Georg grimaced in disbelief. His father only nodded in the direction of Georg’s corner, affirming the truth of his words.
    “How you amused me today, coming in here to ask if you should tell your friend about your engagement. He knows all about it already, you stupid boy, he knows it all! I’ve been writing to him, for you forgot to take my writing things from me. That’s why he hasn’t been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, with his left hand he crumples up your lettersunopened while with his right he holds mine and reads them through!”
    In his exhilaration he waved his arm over his head. “He knows everything a thousand times better!” he cried.
    “Ten thousand times!” said Georg, to make fun of his father, but in his very mouth the words turned deadly earnest.
    “For years I’ve been waiting for you to come with this question! Do you think I’ve concerned myself with anything else? Do you think I’ve been reading my newspapers? Look!” and he threw Georg a page from a newspaper that had somehow found its way into the bed with him. An old newspaper, with a name entirely unknown to Georg.
    “How long it’s taken you to grow up! Your mother had to die—she couldn’t live to see the happy day—your friend is going to pieces in Russia, even three years ago he was yellow enough to be thrown away, and as for me, you can see what condition I’m in. You have eyes in your head for that!”
    “So you’ve been lying in wait for me!” cried Georg.
    His father said pityingly, in an offhand manner: “I suppose you wanted to say that earlier. But now it is no longer appropriate.”
    And in a louder voice: “So now you know there is more in the world than just you. Till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!—And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!”
    Georg felt himself driven from the room, the crash with which his father collapsed onto the bed behind him still rang in his ears as he fled. On the staircase, which he rushed down as if its steps were an inclined plane, he ran into the cleaning woman on her way up to do the morning tidying of theapartment. “Jesus!” she cried, and covered her face with her apron, but he was already gone. Out the front door he bolted, across the roadway, driven toward the water. Already he was clutching at the railing as a starving man clutches for food. He swung himself over, like the accomplished gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride. With weakening grip he was still holding on when he spied between the railings an approaching bus that would easily cover the sound of his fall, called out in a faint voice, “Dear parents, I have always loved you,” and let himself drop.
    At that moment an almost endless line of traffic streamed over the bridge.

The Stoker

THE STOKER
    AS KARL ROSSMANN, a boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. Her arm with its sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and around her figure blew the free winds of heaven.
    “So high!” he said to himself, and since he was not thinking at all of getting off the ship, was gradually pushed to the railing by the swelling throng of porters shoving past.
    A young man with whom he had struck up a slight acquaintance on the voyage