The innkeeper had returned at late dusk from tilling his fields several miles away. Like his fellows throughout Bavaria, he was a peasant except by night and on holidays. During the working-day the burden, if it could be called one, of his urban establishment fell upon his wife and children. It was natural, therefore, that the topic with which he wedged his way into the conversation should have been that of husbandry. Seeds, he asserted, were still fairly good, fortunately, though in a few species the war had left them sadly inferior. But the harvest would be poor this year. The coldest spring in as far back as he could remember had lasted much later than ever before. Then, instead of the rain they should have had, scarcely a drop had fallen and things were already beginning to shrivel. As if they had not troubles enough as it was! With beer gone up to sixteen pfennigs a pint instead of the ten of the good old days before the war! And such beer! Hardly 3 per cent. alcohol in it now instead of 11! The old peasants had stopped drinking it entirely—the very men who had been his best customers. They distilled a home-made _Schnapps_ now, and stayed at home to drink it. Naturally such weak stuff as this—he held up his half-empty mug with an expression of disgust on his face—could not satisfy the old-fashioned Bavarian taste. Before the war he had served an average of a thousand beers a day. Now he drew barely two hundred. And as fast as business fell off taxes increased. He would give a good deal to know where they were going to end. Especially now, with these ridiculous terms the Allies were asking Germany to sign. How could they sign? It would scarcely leave them their shirt and trousers. And they, the peasants and country people, would have to pay for it, they and the factory hands; not the bigwigs in Berlin and Essen who were so ready to accept England’s challenge. No, it would not pay Bavaria to assert her independence. They did not love the northern German, but when all was said and done it would be better to stick with him.
Suddenly the brain-racking dialect in which the _Wirt_ and his cronies had been sharing their views on this and other subjects halted and died down to utter silence, with that same curious similarity to a shut-off motor that my entrance had caused. I looked about me, wondering what I had done to bring on this new stillness. Every man in the room had removed his hat and all but two their porcelain pipes. Except for the latter, who puffed faintly and noiselessly now and then, the whole assembly sat perfectly motionless. For a moment or more I was puzzled; then a light suddenly broke upon me. The bell of the village church was tolling the end of evening vespers.