s more interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank. He had
no friends, and though he treated all the restaurant frequenters as
acquaintances he never seemed to wish to carry the acquaintanceship
beyond the door that led into Owl Street and the outer world. He dealt
with them all rather as a market woman might deal with chance passers-by,
exhibiting her wares and chattering about the weather and the slackness
of business, occasionally about rheumatism, but never showing a desire to
penetrate into their daily lives or to dissect their ambitions.

He was understood to belong to a family of peasant farmers, somewhere in
Pomerania; some two years ago, according to all that was known of him, he
had abandoned the labours and responsibilities of swine tending and goose
rearing to try his fortune as an artist in London.

"Why London and not Paris or Munich?" he had been asked by the curious.

Well, there was a ship that left Stolpmunde for London twice a month,
that carried few passengers, but carried them cheaply; the railway fares
to Munich or Paris were not cheap. Thus it was that he came to select
London as the scene of his great adventure.

The question that had long and seriously agitated the frequenters of the
Nuremberg was whether this goose-boy migrant was really a soul-driven
genius, spreading his wings to the light, or merely an enterprising young
man who fancied he could paint and was pardonably anxious to escape from
the monotony of rye bread diet and the sandy, swine-bestrewn plains of
Pomerania. There was reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the
artistic groups that foregathered at the little restaurant contained so
many young women with short hair and so many young men with long hair,
who supposed themselves to be abnormally gifted in the domain of music,
poetry, painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to support the
supposition, that a self-announced genius of any sort in their midst was
inevitably suspect. On the other hand, there was the ever-imminent
danger of entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares. There had been
the lamentable case of Sledonti, the dramatic poet, who had been
belittled and cold-shouldered in the Owl Street hall of judgment, and had
been afterwards hailed as a master singer by the Grand Duke Constantine
Constantinovitch--"the most educated of the Romanoffs," according to
Sylvia Strubble, who spoke rather as one who knew every individual member
of the Rus