The Trespassers by Laura Z. Hobson Page A

soil, then on that, or that other.
    But France, England, Portugal, Belgium—all countries had their immigration laws, had their decreed quota of welcome to the ones in flight. Everywhere the tale was told in the same sad syllables—the quota is full, the quota is full.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE LAST WINDS OF March were blowing over Vienna. Against them Dr. Vederle raised the collar of his overcoat as he walked through the streets. They were chill winds, blowing from the North, blowing over a sick Germany to stricken Vienna heavy-laden with the terrible pollens of hatred and human pain.
    As he walked he considered the letter in his pocket. It had come at last, that very morning, mailed in New York on the twentieth, traveling by five-day boat, and then delayed, unaccountably, another five days coming across civilized western Europe from Southampton to Vienna. Was there a secret censorship of mails?
    He took the letter out and examined it again. There were no signs of its having been opened. Ah, well, if they knew, the Gestapo, that he was actively preparing to leave, they knew.
    He would not succumb to a thousand fears and apprehensions. The question he was considering now was a realistic question, brought into focus by the letter. Could they wait in Vienna for the affidavits? Or was it wiser, safer, to leave Austria at once, and do their waiting elsewhere?
    For the letter, cordial as it was, showed him clearly that there would be delay. It was disappointing that Ann Willis had been forced to turn the affidavits over to a stranger, who could not have the personal compulsion to help that Mrs. Willis herself had. Then, to the list of documents that would have to be prepared—there was plenty of room for delays there—by a bank, a lawyer, by this Vera M. Stamford herself, who was apparently a busy woman with a thousand other things to do.
    Christa had read the letter with him, and the same uneasy disappointment assailed her.
    “The affidavits won’t be here for a month, I’m sure. Is there nothing to do but just wait?”
    “I must think,” he had answered. Was there a month’s leeway in this swiftly changing, darkening Vienna?
    A half-formed plan teased his mind.
    Now, walking swiftly, he must decide, and either reject it as needless and thus overdramatic or make it workable and act upon it.
    He turned a corner and came upon some street disturbance; automatically he stood still at the edge of a crowd, to see what caused it. Over the shoulders of the jeering people ringed about in a large circle, he looked down upon the sidewalk.
    Six men and two women were on the ground, on hands and knees. They were probably Jews. They wielded brushes, rags, crumpled masses of newspaper. Kicking and prodding them on with their task were two dozen storm troopers. The task was to wipe or wash out the chalked name of SCHUSCHNIGG, printed during the night on the stone walk. Schuschnigg had been arrested a few days ago, was being tortured, according to rumor, by a blaring radio at his ear so that for days and nights he had had no sleep.
    The look in the eyes of the crouching, cleaning Jews made Vederle turn away, nauseated and murderous. The mourning, the unbelief in those eyes…
    Each day now, some new event brought that nausea, that helpless impulse to stop, to halt, to kill these precise-gestured storm troopers.
    Yesterday they had arrested Professor Carl Meiers, one of Europe’s greatest physicists. They had smashed the laboratories and imprisoned Dr. Anton Rachler, one of the world’s leading crystal-lographers. They had seized Professor Johann Biedenkass, the anthropologist, and shot him to death while he was “trying to escape custody.” Not one of these three was engaged in politics or in anything but the grave, fine life of science; by the demented Nazi standard each was an “enemy of the Reich.”
    How could a crystallographer, immersed in the precisely beautiful study of crystals, be an enemy of the Reich? “Today the German