In his room the man went to the window, hitched back the lace curtains
and threw up the sash. Life in the open had made these shut-in places
stifling, and he drew in the air with a deep relish. Evening was falling,
a belated fog drifting in, wreathing in soft whorls over the hills,
feeling its way across their summits and through their hollows. It made
the prospect depressing, everything enveloped in a universal, dense
whiteness. He surveyed it, frowning--the looming shapes of the high land
beyond, the line of one-story hovels sprawled on the gore. To the right
the street slanted upward toward Telegraph Hill whence smaller streets
would decline to the waterfront and the Barbary Coast. He knew that
section well and smiled a little as he thought of it and of himself, a
ragged vagrant, exploring its byways.

His thoughts stopped at that memory--the lowest point of his fall--hung
there contemplative and then turned backward. They passed beyond his
arrival in California, his days of decay before that, the first gradual
disintegration, back over it all to the beginning.

Thirty-six years ago he had been born in New York, a few months after
the arrival of his parents. They were Austrians, his father an officer
in the Royal Hungarian Guards, his mother a dancer at the Grand Opera
House in Vienna. When Captain Ruppert Heyderich, of a prosperous
Viennese family, had, in a burst of passionate chivalry, married Kathi
Mayer, end coryphee on the second row, he had deserted the army, his
country and his world and fled to America. Captain Heyderich had not
committed so radical a breach of honor and convention without something
to do it on, and the early part of the romance had moved smoothly in a
fitting environment. Their only child, Lothar, could distinctly recall
days of affluence in an apartment on the Park. He had had a governess,
he had worn velvet and furs.