They returned to class the next day, their absence loudly noted for the group by one of their classmates, a boy named Walter Spiess.

Spiess they’d registered from the beginning as having a face that looked to have been modeled in a confectioner’s shop. They knew him as a saboteur capable of demoralizing an entire class. His poem on the battle of Actium had won the monthly prize, even though it had flaunted the fact that after its first two lines—Spindle-topped waves / hurl themselves at the sea-chariots—it had had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject. In the dramatic club he had played Hecate, called upon to witness Wilhelm’s oath, as Jason, to Hans’s Medea.

He watched them from a distance for the few weeks following their day-long absence and then, one afternoon, asked them to look at one of his paintings. It was a catastrophe, he shrugged, but they’d get an idea of what he did. There was a blankness to his manner which was not simplicity. He seemed to be committed to nothing in particular, to stand in an attitude of general hospitality to opportunities.

He and Hans led the way. Wilhelm followed, feeling excluded and faintly sulky.

Spiess’s room was at the end of a hallway, half hidden beneath a staircase. They were impressed by what he’d done with it. He’d found an antique bronze screen for his fireplace, and had brought in a Turkish divan. In an alcove he’d constructed a sultan’s tent of pink silk and muslin. Inside, over the bed, a small silver casket hung suspended by chains.

His easels were in the bathtub. His landscapes turned out to involve monstrous trees that confronted one another over prostrate figures. Over the sink he’d framed a medieval woodcut of a witches’ sabbath. The artist had conceived it as a cross between a carnival and a trade convention. Arty newspapers—Free Spirit, The Herald of Hellas, New Friendship—were spread around the floor.

After a short visit they left, and made no subsequent overtures. Even so, they got to know him. He surfaced wherever they went, always scratching around about money; he’d changed his mind about a tutoring job when his future charge had asked in a peculiar way if he was interested in poisonous spiders. He had terrible luck with clothes, and his favorite hat had to be thrown away after he got sick into it one night at the theater.