He grinned.
The sun shone through his ears so that they looked like stained-glass windows.
"I've been photographed twice too," he went on. "With the tree for background."
"Good for you, you'll be a film star yet," said I, and walked across to the pit where Lenz was crawling out from under the Ford.
"Bob," said he, "something's just occurred to me.
We must be getting busy about that girl of Binding's."
I stared at him.
"What do you mean?"
"Just what I say.
What are you staring for anyway?"
"I'm not staring—"
"I say you are staring.
What was her name exactly?
Pat—but Pat what?"
He straightened up.
"You don't know? but you wrote down her address.
I saw you myself."
"I lost the bit of paper," I explained.
"Lost!" He seized his yellow hair with both hands. "After my spending a solid hour outside with Binding!
Lost!
Well, perhaps Otto knows." "Otto doesn't know either," said I.
He looked at me.
"You miserable dilettante!
You're worse than that.
Don't you know, then, that that was a wonderful girl?
Hergott!" He stared at the sky. "When for once in our lives a bit of all right runs across our track, a dismal bonehead like you must go and lose the address."
"She didn't strike me as anything so wonderful," said I.
"That's because you're an ass," replied Lenz; "a twerp, who can recognize nothing above the level of a whore from the Cafe International.
A pianist, that's what you are.
Let me tell you once more, that was a windfall, a real windfall, that girl.
You have no idea about such things, of course!
Did you look at her eyes?
Of course you didn't—you looked at your schnapps glass."
"Oh, you shut up," I interrupted, for with the mention of schnapps he touched me on the raw.
"And her hands," he went on, without paying any attention—"slender, long hands like a mulatto's—Gottfried understands these things, Gottfried knows.
Holy Moses! A girl at last, as girls ought to be—beautiful, of course, and, what is more important, with atmosphere-r-" He interrupted himself. "Do you know, for instance, what that is—atmosphere?"
"Air, that you pump into a tyre," said I.
"Of course," said he pityingly. "Air, of course!
Atmosphere, aura, radiance, warmth, mystery—it's what gives beauty a soul and makes it alive.
But what's the use—your atmosphere is the smell of rum—"
"Now stop, or I'll drop something on your head," I growled.
But Gottfried still talked and I did nothing to him.
He had of course no notion of what had happened and that every word found a mark—especially that about the drink.
I had just about gotten over it, and was consoling myself pretty well; and now he must dig it all up again.
He went on praising and praising the girl until soon I began to feel that I had really lost irretrievably something extraordinary.
At six o'clock I went disgruntled to the Cafe International.
That was my old refuge; Lenz had been right when he said so.
When I got there, to my surprise there was an immense activity.
On the counter were iced cakes and plum cakes, and flat-footed Alois was running with a tray laden with rattling coffee-cups to the back room.
I halted.