A friend of mine did the French version, but it was I, quite unaccompliced, who betrayed my English to the German. At twelve marks it continues to have a brisk sale. I redid my study with a recent check.

I had intended to introduce

This is to introduce a work on death by one who’s spent his life in a chair.

I could not hold my father in much love, my mother either. Indeed, I learned to love far later, as it proved, than they had time for. So perished they without’ It. None of us grieves. I’ve played a few sly tricks upon insanity since then, and now life holds me as it once held them—in a dry fist. Hearts held that way wad up eventually . . . trees did. Once—once only—my heart burst bloodily in that grip. But what has this to do with me now, or with Germany?

* * *

Life in a chair

Yes, I’ve sat too long, no wonder it’s painful, though this is the great Tabor’s own chair, which I had shipped from Germany. It swivels smoothly, tips without a sound. In the mornings he lectured at the university. Scholars, statesmen, writers, filled his afternoons. My day commences, he said to me once, his fingers grazing on a slope of papers, when I come to rest in here at the end of an evening and begin making Greek and Roman history up out of German words, French wit, and English observation. He scrawled his famous smile across his face, hastily, like an autograph; but he was old, already ill, and his hand trembled. German words, he said, not German feeling. Tabor spoke ironically, of course, yet what he said was true: he woke because his neighbors slumbered; he spied upon their dreams; he even entered their dreams eventually, and brandished a knife in the nightmares of Europe. Magus Tabor. Mad Meg, they called him. One day they’d say he wore the decade like a diadem. His baldness glistened like a forest pool. There’ve been times when this chair’s been my only haven, he said, and his lids closed over his protruding eyes. Night had fallen behind them—in Mad Meg’s head. You see how obedient it is; how swiftly it turns, like fortune in history? He spun the chair hard, his eyes still in lids. So I find it easy to reverse my position. He laughed with the stutter of an angry bird and I managed a low social chuckle. It really was a dream for him, all this: our conversation, the lecture of the morning, the interrupting applause and tumult of shouts at the end, the famous and powerful who waited for him while he spoke with an unimportant, young, and dazzled American. Those deeply curtained eyes reminded me that we were drifting through the middle of his sleep, and that I was just a wraith who would evaporate the instant he sank into his circuiting chair sank into the past into death into history.