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32
THE FREEDOMSEEKER
family went away on holiday. That time, of course, he spent whole days with
his friends the gamekeeper and his wife.
The holidays too, alas, went all too quickly by. Ernst Foerster's fellow pupils at his new school came from the most varied backgrounds. Side by side with the sons of nouveau-riche farmers from the surrounding districts, trying to bolster their pride by having their thick-headed sons educated, sat those who had been sent there by desperate parents because they were unable to get on at their local schools. The community was as colourful as that of his last school had been uniform and so was of doubled interest to the newcomer. The teachers, too, came from all over, and at least two of them were quite new types to him. One of them, the modern language teacher, was an inexhaustible subject of gossip in the town. He was slim and elegant, with sharply defined but weary features — God alone knew what destiny had cast him up here. He kept to himself in a fabulous flat where, among other wonders, there was supposed to be a room of unheard of splendour, furnished with Oriental weapons and carpets — but no stranger had ever set foot there. Every Saturday after school he went to the nearby city where he stayed until Monday and where, it was whispered with horror, he had a mistress. There came a day when he did not return — he had shot himself at the home of his mistress. This unbelievable event, from which the town did not recover for years, had an even stronger effect on Ernst because, only a few days before, encountering him casually — and quite against his usual custom — this teacher had drawn him into a lengthy conversation at the end of which, with a warm clasp of the well-groomed hand and an enigmatic smile, he had said: "Good-bye, Foerster. Make a better job of things than I have done" — an encounter which he never forgot and which he mentioned to no-one. The other teacher was the absolute opposite. Young, jolly and carefree, he made no secret of the fact that his one ambition was to get away from "this dump" as quickly as he could, for which, he said, all he needed was money. This money he tried to earn by freelancing of any kind for all manner of newspapers. He was the only one who bothered about the pupils outside of school hours, sometimes taking them with him on his nature rambles, and he seemed to have a special regard for Ernst, treating him like a grown-up and discussing with him, freely and often, his own plans for the future. "You can write too — anyone can who has his head screwed on the right way. Mere- |