Dark Tunnel Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked.
    “Yes. She’s coming here to-night.”
    “You look excited.”
    “I am. She’s a wonderful woman. You’ll meet her.”
    “I hope so. She’s an actress, you say?”
    “She was when I knew her. Apparently she studied under Schneider before he left Germany. She never mentioned him to me so far as I can remember.”
    “You told me to remind you to tell me about her some time. How about now?”
    “All right.” I told him about Ruth Esch and the month I spent in Munich in 1937 and how it ended.
    I was twenty-three that year, and still a student. I was travelling on a fellowship and gathering material for my doctoral dissertation. After a couple of months in London, where I wore out the seat of a pair of pants in the reading room of the British Museum, I went to Munich at the beginning of November to do a month’s work there. I didn’t get as much work done as I expected to. I found better things than libraries in Munich, and worse things.
    My second day in Munich I was looking for the American Express Company to change some traveller’s marks into money, when I saw a huge crowd lined up on one of the main streets. I joined the crowd to see what was up, and heard people talking in tones of delighted awe about Der Führer. Great square banners of red silk marked with black swastikas hung high above the road on wires, and gasoline torches flared on square red pillars at every corner. Along the curbs like a human fence there were lines of black-helmeted elite guards standing at attention, each second guard facing the crowd.
    It looked to me as if Adolf Hitler was going to come down that street shortly, and I stayed where I was. I filled and lit a briar pipe which I had bought in London, and waited for the circus to begin.
    Sudden music blared from loudspeakers on the lampposts, and the crowd’s hum died into staring silence. The music sounded like an obsolete popular song to me, but the crowd liked it and the Germans are a music-loving people. I went on puffing at my pipe.
    Before six bars of music had been played, something happened to my pipe. It was whisked from my mouth and shattered on the pavement at my feet. A fat man beside me shook his jowls and growled at me in low, intense German. I gathered that he objected to the aroma of tobacco. It seemed that a lot of other people did, too, because a little circle of my German neighbors were glaring at me as balefully as hell. I felt uncomfortable and started to move out of the circle.
    The fat man gave me a petulant push and I pushed him and he sat down against a woman’s legs. The woman stepped around him and I saw that her legs were beautifully made.
    A man’s voice said, “Ruhe!” in a rasping whisper, and I looked up and saw the nearest elite guard stalking me with his eyes. I wanted to get away but the crowd had closed around me and the fat man was getting up panting with rage. The woman he had fallen against stepped between us and said something to him about an Auslander. Red hair flared under her black lamb hat like gasoline fire, and even in German I liked the sound of her voice.
    She turned to me and I liked her face: it was calm and beautiful, with no mob-hatred in it.
    “Come with me,” she said in English, and put a black-gloved hand in the crook of my arm. She said, “Bitte,” and the crowd made way for us. At the risk of breaking up the party, I went with her.
    When we reached the edge of the crowd, she turned to me. “Don’t you know the Horst Wessel song? You mustn’t smoke in the presence of sublime music.”
    She didn’t smile. I looked for irony in her eyes, which were green and cool as the sea, and saw it flickering deep down near the sea-floor.
    “I’m afraid I didn’t realize the seriousness of my offense,” I said, trying to match her irony. “Thank you for intervening.”
    “Not at all.” She smiled, so that she suddenly looked like a young girl. “I’d be jolly sorry to see anybody torn limb from limb.”
    “Are you