For a brief period Albert was blind to all else save the romantic beauty
of his environment. He did not even brood over the humiliation of being
segregated. All Frankfort was then composed of segregated
groups—hostile camps—towns within towns, fortresses within fortresses,
every period of the distant past, clear back to the feudal days,
indelibly stamped upon the inhabitants. His imagination was aglow with
romance. Indeed the theme for a poem, a heroic poem—a poem to vie with
the Odyssey—was born in his fantastic brain. In this epic he would tell
the glorious story of Israel in the same manner as Virgil had told of
Augustus and of the Romans. His hero was to be a descendant of Don
Abarbanel, from the branch of David, and a fugitive from the Spanish
Inquisition. Yes, he visualised his hero—he was a young man with
greenish blue eyes and light brown hair, with poetic aspirations, and
the heroine—
But with the beginning of his apprenticeship the subject lost all glamor
for him. He found the banking business disappointing and the Judengasse
disheartening. He had imagined a bank was—well, he did not clearly know
what a bank was like except that money flowed from it like milk and
honey in the promised land, and with money one could buy so many
beautiful things. For aside from thought and feeling Albert was still
childishly unpractical.
Rindskopf’s bank was a sombre room with a dingy little chamber in the
rear, in which stood a large iron box and was fastened with three locks.
He had soon become dreadfully lonesome and homesick for Gunsdorf—the
Gunsdorf he had been so glad to leave only a few weeks before. He longed
for Schmallgasse, for the Marktplatz, for the Hofgarten, for Father
Rhine, for Hedwiga. He had never known how much he loved his native
town. How had he ever wished to depart from it, he asked himself again
and again in his loneliness. He had already seen the house where Goethe
was born, had again visited the Roemer and the Zeil and Sachsenhausen,
and found nothing new any longer.
All his thoughts again turned to Hedwiga. He had despatched two letters
of glowing passion and tenderness but had received no answer. So he
stayed up late at night, writing heart-rending verses about a maiden
with golden hair, who chanted as she sewed a shroud for her lover . . .
The banker had put Albert to copying letters and filling in draft blanks
and the youth found the task irksome. At the end of the second week his
work was done so mechanically and with such eloquent distaste that his
employer, seated at his writing desk a short distance away shook his
head and murmured, “_Der Junge hat kein Talent zum Geschaeft_.”
No, the young man had no talent for business. Adolf Rindskopf would have
sent him away but David Zorn was his friend and he must endure his
friend’s son a little longer. Besides, Albert wrote a very neat hand,
with a flourish which Adolf secretly envied. When he wrote to
Berlin—_die Kaiserstadt_—he was anxious to make an impression on his
correspondent. Yes, Albert’s penmanship was beautiful.
But one day while Albert was seated at the long table copying a letter
and thinking of other things, the postman came in. Albert looked up
eagerly. Although he had already given up hope of hearing from Hedwiga,
the postman revived his anxiety. But no letter for him. So he watched
Rindskopf from the corner of his eye. He loved to watch Rindskopf open
his mail. Rindskopf approached this task as a gourmand attacks a
palatable dish. His eyes dilated, his bulky stolid body stirred
restlessly in his chair, his lips twitched, avidity in every gesture.
Then he took the large ivory paper-cutter in one hand, and with the
other tapped the edge of the envelope against his desk and, raising it
on a level with his eyes, screwed one eye almost tight as he fixed the
other at the upper end, which he held against the light, and ripped it
open with the utmost care for fear of touching the contents.
“_Tausend Donner Sakrament!_” Adolf suddenly exclaimed and jumped up
from the chair, with the enclosure of the envelope in his hand.
Albert poised his pen, an amused smile on his boyish countenance.
Rindskopf’s face was flushed, his mustache twitched, his paw-like hands
trembled.
“_Ach, du lieber Gott!_” he called upon the Almighty to witness his
distress, and rushed up to Albert.
“You’ll bring ruination on me—what? Where is your head—what do you—”
He was so enraged that coherent speech would not come.
Albert’s face changed color. He paled a trifle and was terrified.
“This is a fine piece of business,” Rindskopf soon regained his
voice—“What did you do with that bill of exchange?”
This strange demand puzzled poor Albert. He stared fretfully at his
employer.
“What did you do with that bill of exchange I gave you the other day to
forward to Berlin?” Rindskopf repeated, panting.
“—I—I enclosed it in the letter—as you told me—” Albert stammered.
Adolf’s eyes were dancing over the letter in his hand. Presently he was
reading its contents aloud. “‘My dear Herr Rindskopf:
“‘In Frankfort, the birthplace of Goethe, love-songs may be called bills
of exchange, but in our prosaic city of Berlin we mean precisely what we
say. We have tried to cash the enclosed but without success; perhaps you
can do better with it in your home town—’”
Rindskopf had caught the facetious tone of the letter and burst out in
enraged laughter.
“Fine business I call this!” he cried as he continued reading the ironic
reply, accentuating every syllable, contempt in his voice: “‘We are
therefore returning your amorous ditty, much as we appreciate your
romantic sentiments, and beg to send us instead a plain, matter-of-fact
bill of exchange.’”
Adolf was beside himself. He called Albert a good-for-nothing, cursed
the day he had let the boy enter the bank, swore that his wife had
warned him against taking Zorn’s son into his house.