I climbed over the sofa to where Koster was standing.
An idea had suddenly occurred to me.
"Otto, I want you to do me a favour.
I want the Cadillac for to-morrow evening."
Braumuller interrupted his intensive study of a scantily clad Creole dancer.
"Can you take corners now, then?" he enquired. "I thought you could only drive straight ahead as yet, when someone else steered for you."
"Don't you worry, Oscar," I replied, "we're going to make mincemeat of you in the race on the sixth."
Braumuller almost choked with laughing.
"Well, what about it, Otto?" I asked eagerly.
"The car isn't insured, Bob," said Koster.
"I'll crawl like a snake and hoot like a bus.
Only a few kilometres into the country."
Otto closed his eyes until they were narrow slits and smiled.
"It's all right by me, Bob."
"You want the car, I suppose, to go with your new tie?" asked Lenz, who had come over. '"You shut up," said I, pushing him aside.
But he was not to be eluded.
"Show us, baby!" He felt the silk between his fingers. "Fine.
Our boy as a gigolo.
Strikes me he's going to a bride show."
"You haven't anything on me to-day, you quick-change artist," I replied.
"Bride show?" Ferdinand Grau lifted his head. "And why shouldn't he go to a bride show?" He became livelier and turned to me. "You do, Bob.
You have the requirements for it.
A certain simplicity is necessary for love.
You have it.
Keep it.
It is a gift of God.
Never to be gotten again once it is lost."
"Don't take it to heart too much, though, baby," said Lenz with a grin. "It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid."
"Now you be quiet, Gottfried." With one movement of his powerful paw Grau wiped him aside. "You don't come into it, you back-area romanticist.
It's no pity about you."
"You just say your say, Ferdinand," said Lenz. "Expression always eases the soul."
"You, you are a malingerer," declared Grau. "A miserable escapist, that's what you are."
"So are we all," grinned Lenz. "We live only on, illusions and credits."
"Yes, indeed," said Grau surveying us from under his bushy eyebrows. "On illusions out of the past, and credits on the future." Then he turned to me again. " 'Simplicity,' I said, Bob.
Only envious people call it stupidity.
Don't you worry on that score.
It's not a weakness; it's a gift."
Lenz wanted to interrupt. But Ferdinand went on.
"You know what I mean. A simple courage, not yet eaten away by skepticism and over-intelligence.
Parsifal was stupid.
If he had been bright, he would never have conquered the Holy Grail.
Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.
In difficult times simplicity is the most priceless gift—a magic cloak that conceals dangers into which the super-intelligent run headlong as if hypnotized." He drank a great gulp and looked at me with his immense, blue eyes, that sat in his lined face like a piece of the sky. "Never want to know too much, Bob.
The less a man knows the simpler it is to live.
Knowledge maketh free —but unhappy.
Come, drink with me to simplicity, to stupidity and to the things that belong to it—to love, to faith in the future, to the dream of happiness; to magnificent stupidity, to the paradise lost. . . ."
He sat there, heavy and massive, suddenly sunk back into himself and his drunkenness, like a lonely hill of unassailable melancholy.
His life had gone to pieces, and he knew that he would never assemble it again. He lived in his big studio and had a relationship with his housekeeper.
The woman was tough and coarse; Grau, on the other hand, despite his great body, was sensitive and unstable.
He could not get away from her and he probably did not care.