HOTEL BARSTOW
251
Long ago, when he had bought the house, my father had put shelves
up against one wall which were called "the book shelves" although
they contained only a German translation of
Riders of the Purple
Sage,
a Bible, my schoolbooks and a very old copy of
Harper's M aga–
zine
in which I had one time read a bewildering advertisement:
"Everyone wants a gold tooth. Now you too can have one by sending
only ten cents ( lOc) for a complete Dento-Kit." The shelves were
crowded with pliers, hammers, Mason jars full of bacon grease as old
as myself, an empty caviar can which my mother fondled now and
again in memory of the day, ages ago, when she had eaten its con–
tents; broken pipes, broken knives, shattered sea-shells, a landing
net, a wooden snake, a gauze bag filled with venerable headache pills.
Jut as I lifted the stove-lid for the third time, the door to the bed–
room burst open and my parents tumbled out, shouting at me to put
the kettle on for tea and to run unlock the shop and to run to the
Hotel to .say Mamma was not well today and I would do for her.
These tousled, foolish creatures seemed not the same at all as those
hobgoblins who had rollicked and bawled and wailed in their temper
tantrum the night before. My father, while he rubbed his eyes with
one hand, patted my cheek with the other and said,
u
Good
morning,
Fraulein.
Look sharp, there. Today is the day we get rich all of a
sudden,
ni't wahr?"
My mother did not hear him, for she was run–
ning water at the tap for her perfunctory toilet.
My father gave me then a purposeless wink and nodded toward
the box of corn flakes on the table. "Esel von Hexensee hasn't eaten
his hay yet."
T~
was my favorite joke. Out in the shop, in the dark
little room that smelled of pipe smoke and leather, he made up sto–
ries, pretending that I was a boy named Fritz or a donkey named
Esel von Hexensee, and if I were the latter, he would fit a saddle to
my back and two Concord grape baskets for panniers and drive me
up the Zugspitz for some droll, pious purpose such as taking hot soup
to Fritz who had fainted from the altitude. The games delighted me
and when he was tired of playing, I would beg him to go on. "Na,"
he would say, suddenly sober. "I am stiff from beating that
dumm–
kopf
Esel," and picking me up like a cat, he would put me out of the
shop and bolt the door behind me.
I drank a cup of tea that had not brewed long enough, swallowed
a few spoonfuls of corn flakes and ran out of the house towards the
road leading to the Hotel. The fishermen were untying their boats
and calling greetings to one another. Their wives stood on the door–
steps complaining to their neighbors that it looked like "another
scorcher." Mrs. Henderson, who lived next door to us, cried some-
