the Emigrants Read Online Free

lived in grand style; you have seen for yourself what is left of it. A good deal of Ellis fortune was used up that way. True, I had a practice in town, and was a hospital surgeon, but my income alone would never have permitted us such a life style. In the summer months we would motor right across Europe. Next to tennis, said Dr. Selwyn, motoring was my great passion in those days. The cars are all still in the garage, and they may be worth something by now. But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul. People have told me repeatedly that I haven't the slightest sense of money. I didn't even have the foresight, he said, to provide for my old age by paying into a pension scheme. That is why I am now practically a pauper. Elli, on the other hand, has made good use of the not inconsiderable remainder of her fortune, and now she must no doubt be a wealthy woman. I still don't know for sure what made us drift apart, the money or revealing the secret of my origins, or simply the decline of love. The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to. In i960, when I had to give up my practice and my patients, I severed my last ties with what they call the real world. Since then, almost my only companions have been plants and animals. Somehow or other I seem to get on well with them, said Dr. Selwyn with an inscrutable smile, and, rising, he made a gesture that was most unusual for him. He offered me his hand in farewell.
    After that call, Dr. Selwyn's visits to us became fewer and further between. The last time we saw him was the day he brought Clara a bunch of white roses with twines of honeysuckle, shortly before we left for a holiday in France. A few weeks after, late that summer, he took his own life with a bullet from his heavy hunting rifle. He had sat on the edge of his bed (we learnt on our return from France) with the gun between his legs, placed the muzzle of the rifle at his jaw, and then, for the first time since he bought the gun before

    departing for India, had fired a shot with intent to kill. When we received the news, I had no great difficulty in overcoming the initial shock. But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence. In late July 1986 I was in Switzerland for a few days. On the morning of the 23rd I took the train from Zurich to Lausanne. As the train slowed to cross the Aare bridge, approaching Berne, I gazed way beyond the city to the mountains of the Oberland. At that point, as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine, the memory of Dr. Selwyn returned to me for the first time in a long while. Three quarters of an hour later, not wanting to miss the landscape around Lake Geneva, which never fails to astound me as it opens out, I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
     
     

     
    PAUL BEREYTER
    There is mist that no eye can dispel
     

     
    In January 1984, the news reached me from S that on the evening of the 30th of December, a week after his seventy-fourth birthday, Paul Bereyter, who had been my teacher at primary school, had put an end to his life. A short distance from S, where the railway track curves out of a willow copse into the open fields, he had lain himself down in front of a train. The obituary in the local paper was headed "Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher" and there was no mention of the fact that Paul Bereyter had died of his own free will, or through a