the captain bought the still-life. this new version of himself along with the poached egg and the sunflowers was rather frightening. so he packed up for austria, for kaprun, with his picture, and had a fight to get the beastly thing out of germany, and another fight to get it into austria. fatigued and furious he arrived in salzburg, seeing no beauty in anything. next day he was in kaprun.

it was an elegant and fashionable watering-place before the war: a lovely little lake in the midst of the alps, an old tyrolese town on the water-side, green slopes sheering up opposite, and away beyond a glacier. it was still crowded and still elegant. but alas, with a broken, bankrupt, desperate elegance, and almost empty shops.

the captain felt rather dazed. he found himself in an hotel full of jews of the wrong, rich sort, and wondered what next. the place was beautiful, but the life wasn’t.