Wilhelm’s father was not informed. The arrangement had been for him to send the money for the term-bills directly to his son, and Wilhelm simply had his mail forwarded. It took his father a year to discover what was happening. He had premonitions of trouble, though; every so often he sent along with the tuition money a postcard on which was written Domi manere felicibus corvenit: The happy do best to stay at home.

What a corps Reinhardt had collected! The evening of the introductory lecture, they attended a reception hosted by Reinhardt a his home. Their invitation read, “Herr Plumpe and his Agent.’ They met Müthel, Hoffman, Storm, Eckersberg, Conrad Veidt Granach, and Lubitsch. Reinhardt himself never joined the party. At various points he emerged backlit on the upper landing of the darkened staircase, a shadowy presence overseeing the proceedings.

Everyone turned out to be one of Reinhardt’s discoveries. Eckersberg he’d noticed in a church choir. Lubitsch had been a tailor’s apprentice. Within a half hour of their arrival, the new recruits had bonded sufficiently to create an imbroglio by defending Granach, a stumpy Jew from Galicia, from the anti-Semitic teasing of one of the instructors.

They felt exhilarated and full of themselves. Appreciably taller than the rest, Veidt and Wilhelm regarded each other over a sea of heads. They’d been the most strenuous in the skirmish over Granach. Hans christened them “the two bell-towers.”

Veidt was striking: gaunt and pallid, with a drawn face that gave people an uncomfortable sense of the skull beneath. He reminded Wilhelm of something that might hang at a crossroads in winter. His humor was quiet and mordant. His eyes worked to insure that no one outdid his tragic or sinister air. He wore nothing but black.

They exhausted one another’s backgrounds and stood about in nervous groups, gossiping in low voices, watching the stairs for Reinhardt’s reappearance. They noted what hung on the walls. They nibbled goose and liver sausage. They traded enthusiasms about a legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which each of them had seen three years earlier: the curtain going up on real trees, growing not out of painted ground-cloth but of palpable grass! Real flowers embowering the middle distance, the beeches and lake in the background mirrored between two hills. A moon shining over real mist. Streams trickling. And just when they’d believed they had absorbed the production’s visual wonder, the stage had begun to revolve. The gasp from the audience! The entire forest slowly revealed new aspects and perspectives inexhaustible as nature. Elves and fairies darted through the scene, disappearing behind trees, re-emerging from hillocks. Who could doubt Lysander’s bewilderment in such a setting? The opening moment had expressed the very heart of the play.