Marc and Meidner immediately took to renovating everyone’s costumes, pushing three tables together as their workspace; Marc in particular was so full of energy that Lasker-Schüler seemed chary and withdrawn by comparison. Paul went from being the Red Knight to the Red Cubist. Zech became the Scarlet Gryphon. Wilhelm became the Deadly South Seas Carnivorous Underwater Plant.

Marc decided he was fascinated with Hans, whom he called An Animal of the Higher Hillsides. Marc was a Bavarian just back from Paris, and presented himself as an unstable mixture of bumpkin and expatriate. While Paul sat on Hans’s shoulders, Paul’s new cubist costume slowly falling apart, the three of them played a nonsensical rhyming game of Marc’s invention. Wilhelm found himself in a seminar with Meidner, who’d been very excited by the recent production of The Miracle. Meidner vaporized about rhythm, dynamics, agitation, ecstasy, and motoricity. Wilhelm caught Hans’s eye while the painter mopped his face, and mouthed, “Motoricity?”

When Meidner finally staggered off to relieve himself, Wilhelm sought out Walden, who was sitting by himself. He was pale, owlish, and not what they’d imagined as Lasker-Schüler’s husband. He watched his wife across the room and alternated between parodying her hyperbole and offering more of his own. His wife dragged her family everywhere around the city, he said bitterly, and the best he could do was to take advantage of the situation by promoting his gallery and artists before the evening ended with his cuckolding in some other room of the house.

Wilhelm had no response.

“Go on, get out of here,” Walden said, and Wilhelm left him alone.

Meidner as he said his goodbyes announced that he intended to paint Wilhelm’s portrait and to portray him in a straw hat. Marc executed in blue chalk on the hallway wall a mural-sized blue ox and scribbled under it, In the Spirit of Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele.

Sharing their enthusiasm for these new wild-men painters and their work became a new way for the two friends to be together. Through Marc and Meidner they met more lunatics: Pechstein, the “nature-boy,” with his uncomplicated manners and obsession with nude bathing; Kirchner, the neurasthenic, who so consistently flew into a rage if asked about his family in the provinces that his friends always did, for sport; and Kubin, who interpreted the world as poison and breakdown, and who finally stopped answering his bell and responded to calls from the street with only a wave from his window. They were struck by the ecstatic nervousness of these young men’s paintings, like strike-storms signaling the release of psychic pressure. Being in their studios was like gazing upon handwriting in extremis.

They became part of the group, and christened themselves The Pathetic Ones. Hans and Zech even began a newsletter called The New Pathos.