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The doctor often climbed the mountain at night, climbed up behind his own house hour after hour in the dark, and came back to bed long after his two children were asleep. At the end of June he sprained his knee coming down the mountain late. He wrenched it out of joint making his way down with the other men through the pines. They helped him into the house where his wife was waiting and writing letters by the stove, and the agony that he would not mention was marked upon his face.

His wife bound his leg with fresh, wet cloths all through the night, but in the morning the knee was hot with fever. It might be weeks before he could go about again, and there was nothing to do but write to the hospital in Vienna for a student doctor to come out and take over his patients for a time.

“I’ll lie still for a fortnight or so,” said the doctor, and he asked his wife to bring him the bits of green wood that he liked to whittle and his glazed papers and his fancy tag ends of stuff. He was going to busy himself making new personages for his theater, for he could not stay idle for half an hour. The June sun was strong at that height, and the doctor sat on the liegestuhl with his knee bared to the warm light, working like a well man and looking up now and again to the end of the valley where the mountains stood with the snow shining hard and diamond bright on their brows.

“You’ll never sit still long enough for it to do you any good,” said the doctor’s wife sharply. She was quite a young, beautiful woman, in spite of her two growing sons and in spite of her husband’s ageless, weathered flesh. She was burned from the wind and the snow in winter and burned from the sun at other times of year; she had straight, long, sunburned limbs, and her dark hair was cut short and pushed behind her ears. She had her nurse’s degree from Vienna, and she helped her husband in whatever there was to do: the broken bones, the deaths, the births. He even did a bit of dentistry, too, when there was need, and she stood by in her nurse’s blouse and mixed the cement and porcelain fillings and kept the instruments clean. Or at night, if they needed her, she climbed the mountain with him and the other men, carrying as well a knapsack of candles over her shoulders, climbing through the twig-broken and mossy silence in the dark.

The doctor had built their house himself with the trees cut down from their forest. The town lay in the high valley, and the doctor had built their house above it on the sloping mountainside. There was no real road leading to it; one had to get to him on foot or else on a horse. It was as if the doctor had chosen this place to build so that the village might leave him to himself unless the need were very great. He had come back to his own country after the years as a prisoner of war in Siberia and after the years of studying in other countries and the years of giving away as a gift his tenderness and knowledge as he went from one wild place to another. He had studied in cities, but he could not live for long in them. He had come back and bought a piece of land in the Tyrol with a pine forest sloping down it, and he built his house there, working throughout the summer months late into the evening with only his two sons and his wife to help him lift the squared, varnished beams into place.

Inside the log walls the doctor made a pure-white plaster wall and put his dark-stained bookshelves against it and hung his own paintings of Dalmatia and his drawings of the Siberian country. Everything was as neat and clean as wax, for the doctor was a savagely clean man. He had a coarse, reddish, well-scrubbed skin through which the gold hairs sprang; they sprang out of his scalp, wavy and coarse, and out of his forearms and his muscular, heavy thighs. They would have sprung, too, round his mouth and along his jaw had he not shaved himself clean every morning. His face was as strong as rock, but such rains of tenderness washed over it that it seemed split apart with love: one side given to anguish, and the other to shelter for everyone else alive.

None of the places where he had been before, Paris or Moscow or Munich or Constantinople, had left an evil mark. None of the grand places or people had ever done to him what they can do. But because of his own strong, humble pride in himself, his shirt was always a white one and of fresh, clean linen no matter what sort of work he was doing. In the summer he wore the short leather trousers of the country, for he had peasants behind him and he liked to remember that it was so. But the woven stockings that ended just above his calves were perfectly white, and the nails of his broad, coarse hands were white. They were spotless, like the nails of a woman’s hand.

The day the student doctor arrived from Vienna and walked up from the village the doctor and his wife were both out in the sun before the house. She had been hanging the children’s shirts up on the line to dry, and she came round to the timber piazza, drying her hands in her dress. The doctor was hopping around on one leg like a great, golden, wounded bird; he was hopping from one place to another, holding his wrenched leg off the ground and seeking the bits of paper and stuff and wood and wire that he needed to make his dolls.

“Let me get the things for you,” his wife cried out. ‘Why must you do everything for yourself? Why can’t you let anyone help you?”

The doctor hopped across to the timber table in the sun and picked up the clown’s cap he was making and fitted it on the head of the doll he held in his hand. When he turned round he saw the student doctor coming up the path. He stood still for a moment, with his leg still lifted up behind him, and then his face cleared of whatever was in it and he nodded.

“God greet you,” he said quietly, and the young man stopped, too, where he was on the path and looked up at them. He was smiling in his long, dark, alien face, but his city shoes were foul with the soft mud of the mountainside after rain, and the sweat was standing out on his brow because he was not accustomed to the climb.

“Good-day,” he said, as city people said it. The doctor and his wife stood looking down at him, and a little wave of pallor ran under the woman’s skin.

The doctor had caught a very young fox in the spring, and it had now grown to live in the house with them without shyness or fear. The sound of their voices and the new human scent on the air brought it forth from the indoor dark of the house. It came out without haste, like a small, gentle dog, with its soft, gray, gently lifted brush and its eyes blinking slowly at the sun. It went daintily down the path toward the stranger, holding its brush just out of the mud of the path and with the black bead of its nose smelling the new smell of this other man who had come.

The young doctor from Vienna leaned over to stroke it, and while his head was down the doctor’s wife turned to her husband. She had seen the black, smooth hair on the young man’s head and the arch of his nose and the quality of his skin. She could scarcely believe what she had seen, and she must look into her husband’s face for confirmation of the truth. But her husband was still looking down the little space toward the stranger. The fox had raised the sharp point of his muzzle and licked the young doctor’s hand.

“Is this a dog or a cat?” the young man called up, smiling.

“It’s a fox,” said the doctor, and his face was filled with compassion. The young man came up with his hat in his hand and said that his name was Heine and shook their hands, and the doctor gave no sign.

“You live quite a way from the village,” said the student doctor, looking back the way he had come.

“You can see the snow mountains from here,” said the doctor, and he showed the young man the sight of them at the far end of the valley. “You have to climb this high before you can see them,” he said. “They’re closed off from the valley.”

This was the explanation of why they lived there, and the young man from the city stood looking a moment in silence at the far, gleaming crusts of the everlasting snows. He was thinking still of what he might say in answer when the doctor asked his wife to show Dr. Heine the room that would be his. Then the doctor sat down in the sun again and went on with the work he had been doing.

“What are we going to do?” said his wife’s voice in a whisper behind him in a moment.

“What do you mean? About what?” said the doctor, speaking aloud. His crisp-haired head did not lift from his work, and the lines of patience and love were scarred deep in his cheeks as he whittled.

“About him,” said the doctor’s wife in hushed impatience.

“Send one of the boys down for his bag at the station,” said the doctor. “Give him a drink of apfelsaft if he’s thirsty.”

“But don’t you see, don’t you see what he is?” asked his wife’s wild whisper.

“He’s Viennese,” said the doctor, working.

“Yes, and he’s Jewish,” said his wife. “They must be mad to have sent him. They know how everyone feels.”

“Perhaps they did it intentionally,” said the doctor, working carefully with what he had in his hands. “But it wasn’t a good thing for the young man’s sake. It’s harder on him than us. If he works well I have no reason to send him back. We’ve waited three days for him. There are people sick in the village.”

“Ah,” breathed his wife in anger behind, “we shall have to sit at the table with him.”

“They recommend him highly,” said the doctor gently, “and he seems a very amiable young man.”

“Ah,” said his wife’s disgusted whisper, “they all look amiable. Every one of them does.”

*  *  *  *  *

Almost at once there was a tooth to be pulled, and the young wife was there in her white frock with the instruments ready for the new young man. She stood very close, casting sharp looks at Dr. Heine, watching his slender, delicate hands at work, seeing the dark, silky hairs that grew on the backs of them and the black hair brushed smooth on his head. Even the joints of his tall, elegant frame seemed to be oiled with some special, suave lubricant that was evil as the Orient to their clean, Nordic hearts. He had a pale skin, unused to the weather of mountain places, and his skull was lighted with bright, quick, ambitious eyes. But at lunch he had talked simply with them, although they were country people and ignorant as peasants for all he knew. He listened to everything the doctor had told him about the way he liked things done; in spite of his modern medical school and his Viennese hospitals, taking it all in with interest and respect.

“The doctor,” said the young wife now, “always stands behind the patient to get at teeth like that.”

She spoke in an undertone to Dr. Heine so that the peasant sitting there in the dentist chair with the cocaine slowly paralyzing his jaws might not overhear.

“Oh, yes. Thank you so much,” said Dr. Heine with a smile, and he stepped behind the patient. “It’s quite true. One can get a better grip that way.”

But as he passed the doctor’s wife the tail of his white coat brushed through the flame of the little sterilizing lamp on the table. Nobody noticed that Dr. Heine had caught fire until the tooth was out and the smell of burning cloth filled the clean, white room. They looked about for what might be smoldering in the place, and in another moment the doctor’s wife saw that Dr. Heine was burning very brightly: the back of the white jacket was eaten nearly out, and the coat within it was flaming. He had even begun to feel the heat on his shirt when the doctor’s wife picked up the strip of rug from the floor and flung it about him. She held it tight round him with her bare, strong arms, and the young man looked back over his shoulder at her and laughed.

“Now I shall lose my job,” he said. “The doctor will never stand for me setting fire to myself the first day like this.”

“It’s my fault,” said the doctor’s wife, holding him fast still in her arms. “I should have had the lamp out of the way.”

She began to beat his back softly with the palm of her hand, and when she carried the rug to the window, Dr. Heine went to the mirror and looked over his shoulder at the sight of his clothes all burned away.

“My new coat!” he said, laughing. But it must have been very hard to see the nice, gray flannel coat that he had bought to look presentable for his first place scalloped black to his shoulders where the fire had eaten its covert way.

“I should think I could put a piece in,” said the doctor’s wife, touching the good cloth that was left. And then she bit her lip suddenly and stood back, as if she had remembered the evil thing that stood between.

When they sat down to supper, the little fox settled himself on the doctor’s good foot, for the wool of his stocking was a soft bed where the fox could dream a little while. They had soup and the thick, rosy-meated leg of a pig and salt potatoes, and the children listened to their father and Dr. Heine speaking of music and painting and books. The doctor’s wife was cutting the meat and putting it on their plates. It was at the end of the meal that the young doctor began talking of the royal white horses in Vienna, still royal, he said, without any royalty left to bow their heads to, still shouldering into the arena with spirits a man would give his soul for, bending their knees in homage to the empty, canopied loge where royalty no longer sat. They came in, said Dr. Heine in his rich, eager voice, and danced their statuesque dances, their “Pas de Deux,” their “Croupade,” their “Capriole.” They were very impatient of the walls round them and the bits in their soft mouths, and very vain of the things they had been taught to do. Whenever the applause broke out round them, said Dr. Heine, their nostrils opened wide as if a wind were blowing. They were actresses, with the deep, snowy breasts of prima donnas, these perfect stallions who knew to a breath the beauty of even their mockery of fright.

“There was a maharajah,” said the young doctor, and the children and their father listened, and the young wife sat giving quick, unwilling glances at this man who had no blood nor knowledge of the land behind him, at this wanderer whose people had wandered from country to country and whose sons must wander, having no land to return to in the end. “There was a maharajah just last year,” said Dr. Heine, “who went to the performance and fell in love with one of the horses. He saw it dancing and he wanted to buy it and take it back to India with him. No one else had ever taken a Lippizaner back to his country, and he wanted this special one, the best of them all, whose dance was like an angel flying. So the state agreed that he could buy the horse, but for a tremendous amount of money. They needed the money badly enough, and the maharajah was a very rich man.”

Oh, yes, thought the young mother bitterly, you would speak about money, you would come here and climb our mountain and poison my sons with the poison of money and greed! “But no matter how high the price was” said Dr. Heine, smiling because all their eyes were on him, “the maharajah agreed to pay it, provided that the man who rode the horse so beautifully came along as well. Oh, yes, the state would allow that too, but the maharajah would have to pay an enormous salary to the rider. He would take him into his employ as the stallion’s keeper, and he would have to pay him a salary as big as our own President is paid,” said Dr. Heine with a burst of laughter.

“And what then, what then?” said one of the boys as the student doctor paused to laugh. The whole family was listening, but the mother was filled with sorrow. These things are strange to us, she was thinking. They belong to more sophisticated people; we do not need them here. The Spanish Riding School, the gentlemen of Vienna, they were as alien as foreign places.

“So it was arranged that the man who rode the horse so well should go along, too,” said Dr. Heine. “It was finally arranged for a great deal of money,” he said, and the mother gave him a look of fury. “But they had not counted on one thing. They had forgotten all about the little groom who had always cared for this special horse and who loved him better than anything else in the world. Ever since the horse had come from the stud farm in Styria the little groom had cared for him, and he believed that they would always be together; he believed that he would go wherever the horse went, just as he had always gone to Salzburg with the horse in the summer, and always come back to Vienna with it in the wintertime again.”

“And so what, what happened?” asked the other boy.

‘Well,” said the student doctor, “the morning before the horse was to leave with the maharajah and the rider they found that the horse had a deep cut on his leg, just above the hoof in front. Nobody could explain how it had happened; but the horse was so wounded that he could not travel then, and the maharajah said that he could go on without him and that the trainer should bring the horse over in a few weeks when the cut had healed. They did not tell the maharajah that it might be that the horse could never dance so beautifully again. They had the money and they weren’t going to give it back so easily,” said Dr. Heine, and he laughed as if their shrewdness pleased his soul. “But when the cut had healed,” he went on, “and the horse seemed well enough to be sent by the next boat, the trainer found the horse had a cut on the other hoof, exactly where the other wound had been. So the journey was postponed again, and again the state said nothing to the maharajah about the horse being so impaired that it was likely he could never fly like an angel again. But in a few days the horse’s blood was so poisoned from the wound that they had to destroy him.”

They all waited breathless with pain a moment, and then the doctor’s wife said bitterly:

“Even the money couldn’t save him, could it?”

“No,” said Dr. Heine, a little perplexed. “Of course it couldn’t. And they never knew how the cuts had come there until the little groom committed suicide the same day the horse was destroyed. And then they knew that he had done it himself because he couldn’t bear the horse to go away.”

They were all sitting quietly there at the table, with the dishes and remnants of food still before them, when someone knocked at the outside door. One of the boys went out to open it, and he came back with the Heimwehr men following after him, the smooth little blackand-white cockades lying forward in their caps.

“God greet you,” said the doctor quietly when he saw them.

“God greet you,” said the Heimwehr men.

“There’s a swastika fire burning on the mountain behind you,” said the leader of the soldiers. They were not men of the village, but men brought from other parts of the country and billeted there as strangers to subdue the native people. “Show us the fastest way up there so we can see that it’s put out.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said the doctor, smiling. “You see, I have a bad leg.”

“You can point out to us which way the path goes!” said the leader sharply.

“He can’t move,” said the doctor’s wife, standing straight by her chair. “You have reports on everything. You must know very well that he is injured and has had a doctor come from Vienna to look after the sick until he can get round again.”

“Yes,” said the leader, “and we know very well that he wouldn’t have been injured if he stayed home instead of climbing mountains at night.”

“Look here,” said the student doctor, speaking nervously and his face gone thin and white, “he can’t move a step, you know.”

“He’ll have to move more than a step if they want him at the Rathaus again,” said the Heimwehr leader. “There’s never any peace as long as he’s not locked up.”

The young doctor said nothing after they had gone, but he sat quiet by the window, watching the fires burning on the mountains in the dark. They were blooming now on all the black, invisible crests, marvelously living flowers of fire springing out of the arid darkness, seemingly higher than any other things could grow. He felt himself sitting defenseless there by the window, surrounded by these strong, long-burning fires of faith. They were all about him, inexplicable signals given from one mountain to another in some secret gathering of power that cast him and his people out, forever out upon the waters of despair.

The doctor’s wife and the children had cleared the table, and the doctor was finishing his grasshopper underneath the light. He was busy wiring its wings to its body, and fastening the long, quivering antennas in. The grasshopper was colored a deep, living green, and under him lay strong, green-glazed haunches for springing with his wires across the puppet stage. He was a monstrous animal in the doctor’s hands, with his great, glassy, gold-veined wings lying smooth along his back.

“The whole country is ruined by the situation,” said the student doctor, suddenly angry. “Everything is politics now. One can’t meet people, have friends on any other basis. It’s impossible to have casual conversations or abstract discussions any more. Who the devil lights these fires?”

“Some people light them because of their belief,” said the doctor, working quietly, “and others travel round from place to place and make a living lighting them.”

“Politics, politics,” said the student doctor, “and one party as bad as another. You’re much wiser to make your puppets, Herr Doktor. It takes one’s mind off things, just as playing cards does. In Vienna we play cards, always play cards, no matter what is happening.”

“There was a time for cards,” said the doctor, working quietly with the grasshopper’s wings. “I used to play cards in Siberia, waiting to be free. We were always waiting then for things to finish with and be over,” he said. “There was nothing to do, so we did that. But now there is something else to do. One’s hands are not tied.”

He said no more, and in a little while the student doctor went upstairs to bed. He could hear the doctor’s wife and the children still washing the dishes and tidying up, their voices clearly heard through the fresh planks of his newmade floor.

Usually in the evening the doctor played the marionette theater for his wife and children and for whatever friends wanted to come up the mountainside and see. He had made the theater himself, and now he had the new personages he had fashioned while nursing his twisted knee, and a week or two after the student doctor had come he told them at supper that he would give them a show that night.

“The Burgermeister is coming up with his wife and their young sons,” he said, “and the Apotheker and his nephews sent word that they’d drop in as well.”

He moved the little fox from where it was sleeping on the wool sock on his foot, and he hopped on his one good leg across the room. Dr. Heine helped him carry the theater to the corner and set it up where the curtains hung, and the doctor hopped, heavy and clean and birdlike, from side to side and behind and before to get the look of the light and see how the curtains drew and fell.

By eight o’clock they were all of them there and seated in the darkened room, the doctor’s and the Burgermeister’s boys waiting breathless for the curtain to rise, and the Apotheker’s nephews smoking in the dark.

“I think it’s marvelous, your husband giving plays like this, keeping the artistic thing uppermost even with times as they are,” said Dr. Heine quietly to the doctor’s wife. “One gets so tired of the same question everywhere, anywhere one happens to be,” he said, and she gave him a long, strange, bitter glance from the corners of her eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I suppose you do think a great deal of art.”

“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Heine, guilelessly. “Art and science, of course.”

“Yes,” said the doctor’s wife, saying the words slowly and bitterly. “Yes. Art and science. What about people being hungry, what about this generation of young men who have never had work in their lives because the factories have never opened since the War? Where do they come in?”

“Well—” Dr. Heine began, and then the whispered dialogue ended. The curtain had been jerked aside, and a wonderful expectancy lay on the air.

The scene before them was quite a simple one: the monstrously handsome grasshopper was sitting in a field, presumably a field, for there were white linen-petaled, yellow-hearted daisies all round him. He was a great, gleaming beauty, and the people watching cried out with pleasure. The doctor’s sons could scarcely wait until the flurry of delight had died and the talking had begun.

There were only two characters in the play, and they were the grasshopper and the clown. The clown came out on the stage and joined him after the grasshopper had done his elegant dance. The dance in itself was a masterpiece of grace and wit, with the music of Mozart playing on the gramophone behind. The children cried with laughter, and Dr. Heine shouted aloud, and the Burgermeister shook with silent laughter. It lifted its legs so delicately and sprang with such precision this way and that through the ragged-petaled daisies of the field that it seemed to have a life of its own in its limbs, separate from and more sensitive than that given it by any human hand. Even the little fox sat watching in fascination, his bright, unwild eyes shining like points of fire in the dark.

“Wunderbar, wunderschon!” Dr. Heine called out. “It’s really marvelous! He’s as graceful as the white horses at Vienna, Herr Doktor. That step with the forelegs floating! It’s extraordinary how you got it without ever seeing it done.”

And then the little clown came out on the stage. He came through the daisies of the field, a small, dwarfed clown with a sword ten times too big for him girded round his waist and tripping him at every step as he came. He was carrying a bunch of paper flowers and smiling, and there was something very obsequious about the little clown. There was something very friseur about him. He had no smell of the really open country or of the roots of things, while the grasshopper was a fine, green-armored animal, strong and perfectly equipped for the life he had to lead.

The clown had a round, human face, and he spoke in a faltering human voice, and the grasshopper was the super-thing, speaking in the doctor’s tender, ringing voice. Just the sound of the doctor’s pure, loving voice released in all its power was enough to make the guilty and weak shake in their seats as if it were some accusation against them. It was a voice as ready for honest anger as it was for gentleness.

“Why do you carry artificial flowers?” the grasshopper asked, and the clown twisted and turned on his feet, so ridiculous in his stupidity that the children and all the others watching laughed aloud in the timber room. “Why do you carry artificial flowers’?” the grasshopper persisted. “Don’t you see that the world is full of real ones?”

“Oh, it’s better I carry artificial ones,” said the clown in the humorous accent of the country boor, and he tripped on his sword as he said it. “I’m on my way to my own funeral, nicht? I want the flowers to keep fresh until I get there.”

Everyone laughed very loud at this, but after a little, as the conversation continued between the grasshopper and the clown, Dr. Heine found he was not laughing as loudly as before. It was now evident that the grasshopper, for no conceivable reason, was always addressed as “The Leader,” and the humorous little clown was called “Chancellor” by the grasshopper for no reason at all. The Chancellor was quite the fool of the piece. The only thing he had to support him was a very ludicrous faith in the power of the Church. The Church was a wonderful thing, the clown kept saying, twisting his poor bouquet.

“The cities are full of churches,” said The Leader, “but the country is full of God.”

The Leader spoke with something entirely different in his voice: he had a wild and stirring power that sent the cold of wonder up and down one’s spine. And whatever the argument was, the Chancellor always got the worst of it. The children cried aloud with laughter, for the Chancellor was so absurd, so eternally on his half-witted way to lay his bunch of paper flowers on his own or somebody else’s grave, and The Leader was ready to waltz away at any moment with the power of stallion life that was leaping in his limbs.

“I believe in independence,” the poor, humbly smiling little clown said, and then he tripped over his sword and fell flat among the daisies. The Leader picked him up with his fragile, lovely forelegs and set him against the painting of the sky.

“Ow, mein Gott, the clouds are giving away!” cried the clown, and the grasshopper said gently:

“You are relying upon the heavens to support you. Are you afraid they are not strong enough?”

*  *  *  *  *

It was one evening in July, and the rain had just drawn off over the mountains. There was still the smell of it on the air, but the moon was shining strongly. The student doctor walked out before the house and watched the light bathing the dark valley, rising over the fertile slopes and the pine forests, running clear as milk above the timber line across the bare, bleached rock. The higher one went, the more terrible it became, he thought, and his heart shuddered within him. There were the rocks, seemingly as high as substance could go, but beyond that, even higher, hidden from the sight of the village people but clearly seen from the doctor’s house, was the bend of the glacier, and beside it were the peaks of everlasting snow. He was lost in this wilderness of cold, lost in a warm month, and the thought turned his blood to ice. He wanted to be indoors, with the warmth of his own people, and the intellect speaking. He had had enough of the bare, northern speech of these others who moved higher and higher as the land moved.

It was then that he saw the little lights moving up from the valley, coming like little beacons of hope carried to him. People were moving up out of the moon-bathed valley, like a little search party come to seek for him in an alien land. He stood watching the slow, flickering movement of their advance, the lights they carried seen far below, a small necklace of men coming to him; and then the utter white-darkness spread unbroken as they entered the wooded places and their lamps were extinguished by the trees.

“Come to me,” he was saying within himself, “come to me. I am a young man alone on a mountain.”

The doctor and his wife were sitting at work by the table when Dr. Heine came quickly into the room and said:

“There’re some men coming up. They’re almost here now. They look to me like the Heimwehr come again.”

The doctor’s wife stood up and touched the side of the timber wall as if something in it would give her fortitude. Then she went to the door and opened it, and in a moment the Heimwehr men came in.

“God greet you,” the doctor said as they gathered round the table.

“God greet you,” said the Heimwehr leader. “You’re wanted at the Rathaus,” he said.

“My leg isn’t good enough to walk on yet,” said the doctor. “How will you get me down?”

“We brought a stretcher along,” said the Heimwehr leader. “We have it outside the door.”

The doctor’s wife went off to fetch his white wool jacket and to wake the two boys in their beds. Dr. Heine heard her saying:

“They’re taking Father to prison again. Now you must come and kiss him. Neither of you is going to cry.”

The men brought the stretcher just within the doorway, and the doctor hopped over to it and lay down. He looked very comfortable there under the wool rug that his wife had laid over him.

“Look here,” said Dr. Heine, “why do you have to come after a person at night like this? Do you think the Herr Doktor would try to run away from you? What are you up to? What’s it all about?”

The Heimwehr leader looked him full in the eyes.

“They got Dollfuss this afternoon,” he said. “They shot him down in Vienna. Were rounding them all up tonight. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow.”

“Ah, politics, politics again!” cried Dr. Heine, and he was wringing his hands like a woman about to cry. Suddenly he ran out the door after the stretcher and the men who were bearing the doctor away. He felt for the doctor’s hand under the cover and he pressed it in his, and the doctor’s hand closed over his in comfort. “What can I do? What can I do to help?” he said, and he was thinking of the pure-white horses of Vienna and of their waltz, like the grasshopper’s dance across the stage. The doctor was smiling, his cheeks scarred with the marks of laughter in the light from the hurricane lamps that the men were carrying down.

“You can throw me peaches and chocolate from the street,” said the doctor. “My wife will show you where we are. She’s not a good shot. Her hand shakes too much when she tries. I missed all the oranges she threw me after the February slaughter.”

“What do you like best?” Dr. Heine called down the mountain after him, and his own voice sounded small and senseless in the enormous night.

“Peaches,” the doctor’s voice called back from the stretcher. “We get so thirsty. . . .”

“I’ll remember,” said Dr. Heine, his voice calling after the descending lights. He was thinking in anguish of the snow-white horses, the Lippizaners, the relics of pride, the still unbroken vestiges of beauty bending their knees to the empty loge of royalty where there was no royalty any more.