The next afternoon brought him no enlightenment either. By four o’clock
he had obtained the twenty thousand marks, and he made his way to the
Excelsior Hotel. At his request a telephone message was sent to Room
15. Herr Balling was there, he was told, and requested the gentleman to
send up his card. This Hull did, following close upon it.

In the middle of Room 15 he found a man whom he had never seen in his
life before. He was a short, stout, clean-shaven man, apparently an
American. He made a very stiff bow.

“I beg your pardon,” said Hull. “I must have been directed wrongly. I
wanted Room 15.”

“This is it,” said the other.

“Then Herr Balling must have given me the wrong number.”

“My name is Balling.”

“This time I am _not_ dreaming, I am in full possession of my senses,”
said Hull to himself, and then aloud, he continued: “But the mystery
can soon be explained. Did you write this?” and he extended the
notebook in which the stranger of the previous night had written his
name and address.

“Certainly not,” replied the stout man.

“Then I am not in your debt to the tune of twenty thousand marks?”

“My time is very limited, and I am expecting a friend on business,”
said the other, looking at his watch.

“I will make way for your friend, sir, at once, and will only put one
more question to you. It is not my fault that I am bothering you; I
have been misled in some way.”

The other nodded.

“Possibly you are acquainted,” Hull went on, “with a gentleman of about
sixty, with large grey eyes, a big nose and white whiskers. He wears
good and well-cut clothes and a tall grey hat, and his name is also
Balling.”

“I can only repeat that I know nothing about him,” said the Balling of
No. 15.

Hull thereupon took his leave. Downstairs he asked whether there were
a second Herr Balling in the hotel, but the answer was “No.” Had Room
15 been occupied by any Herr Balling who had just left? “No.” Was the
writing in the pocket-book known? Again there was a negative reply.
“For the first time in my life,” thought Hull, “I find myself unable to
pay a debt of honour.”

Gradually he became uneasy. What a mysterious affair this was! Nothing
of the kind had ever occurred before. He had won money and lost it
again … sometimes much, and at other times little. He had been in
financial straits. He had had some trouble about a girl he cared for.
Once, indeed, he had been seriously wounded in a duel. Yet all that was
comprehensible and straightforward, so to speak. But this tale of Herr
Balling and the twenty thousand marks had some mystery or other behind
it. He had forgotten that it was he who introduced the stranger to the
club. He had played as if he had lost his head. He had incurred a debt
of twenty thousand marks, and his creditor had furnished a name and
address which did actually exist but were not his, and, moreover, he
would not have the money….

If it had not happened that Hull had no mistress at the moment, he
could have talked this affair over. He pondered over it alone while he
walked along Lenbach Square and the Promenade, looking everybody in the
face in the hope that he might encounter the distinguished stranger
among them. He went to the Café Bastin and scanned all the faces there.
He sat down at a table and waited to see whether the _genius loci_
would be favourable to him and recall the vanished recollections;
but nothing came of it, and he stood up again, a prey to increasing
uneasiness. It seemed as if in the invisible depths behind him another
power, extraneous to himself, was pursuing him, pressing down upon him,
trying to jump on his back as a monkey might do, and lead him into
unlucky adventures of some kind or another.

Hull forced himself to return to his lonely bachelor chambers. There he
met Karstens, and greeted him with relief. But Karstens at once asked:

“Well, has your memory returned?”

“My dear fellow, there’s something wrong with me!”

“With the twenty thousand marks?”

“No, there they are!” and he tapped his breast-pocket. “Nobody
wants them, it appears. There is a Herr Balling in Room 15 at the
‘Excelsior,’ but he isn’t my man, and we’ve never met before. He has
never played vingt-et-un, and nobody owes _him_ twenty thousand marks.
I can’t get rid of the money, and it makes me feel creepy! Something
is going to happen to me. Who _is_ there near me whom I cannot see?
There’s certainly something wrong with me!”

“Come to the club! Perhaps your Herr Balling will go there to fetch the
money himself.”

“Yes, but what about the real Balling in No. 15?”

“Well, that’s certainly odd, I grant you. Come along.”

“All right. Perhaps he’ll be there.”

In the club that night there was no play. The curious circumstance
had so worked upon the members’ imagination that no one felt the need
of trying his luck. Hull was overwhelmed with well-meaning or obtuse
advice.

“Emil,” said one of them to the attendant, “what did his car look like?”

“An excellent one, Herr Baron, a twenty-horsepower at the least–a
closed car with a body like a royal cradle, if one may use such a
comparison nowadays … so smooth and well rounded and polished. It
started off with a great bound, and soon vanished. It was a first-class
car. I kept a close eye on the gentleman, and I saw that he had the
devil’s own luck when he played against Herr von Hull. He played quite
straight, however.”

They learnt nothing more about the stranger. Nobody came either to the
club or to Hull’s rooms to ask for the twenty thousand marks or to
offer him his revenge.

A few days afterwards Hull made acquaintance with a girl who was
performing jazz dances in the Bonbonnière. She was partly Mexican, she
told him. She soon effected a diversion in his thoughts, and in her
company he rapidly got rid of the twenty thousand marks which he could
not pay over to the stranger.