her love’s sake.
Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and violets on the bedcover. When she turns to the little room in the wing of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters a little scream.
There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two. Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty, black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner.
“You’ve been up there!” says the sweeper’s wife.
As a child I always believed that she smiled when she said this, and that her teeth shone as white in the darkness as those of her husband’s prentices.
“Yes, I have been with him,” Magda may perhaps have answered, defiant and erect even in her chalk-pale terror.
What happened then? No one really knows, but probably there was a desperate pursuit round the courtyard. At the foot of the old linden the girl tripped and fell. She dared not call for help, for fear the invalid might hear; and besides, who would have helped her? Her mother was away at work. The infuriated woman was above her—she had meanwhile got hold of a weapon, a broomstick or something of the sort—and blow followed blow. A couple of half-strangled screams from a throat constricted by the dread of death, and then nothing more.
A couple of prentices who had just come home stood down in the dark doorway and looked on; they did not move a finger to help the girl. Perhaps they did not dare; perhaps, too, they were led by a faint hope of seeing their mistress carried off in a police wagon some day.
When Mrs. Wetzmann went into the house after exercising her right of mastery—for she felt by instinct that she naturally had proprietary right to all over whom she could and would exercise it—she stumbled against something soft in the stairway. It was Frederick. He had heard the faint screams, had sprung from bed and gone out, and had fallen on the stairs.
Magda lived three days; she then died and was buried.
Sweeper Wetzmann paid a sum of money to the charwoman, her mother, and there were no legal proceedings on the matter. Nevertheless the old man took it hard. He went no more to the tavern to drink toddy, but generally sat at home in a leather-covered chair and spelled in an old Bible. He fell into a decline, grew silent and peculiar, and it was not a year before he too was dead and laid in earth.
The son Frederick grew slowly better; but he never passed his examination as minister, for both his grasp of intellect and his memory had become weakened. He was often seen going with flowers to Magda’s grave; he walked leaning forward and very rapidly, indeed he almost ran, as if he had many important errands to attend to, and he mostly had a couple of books under his arm. To the end he remained wholly weak-minded.
And the sweeper’s wife? She seems to have had a strong nature. There are people who are not exactly conscienceless, but who never of their own accord hit upon the idea that they have done anything wrong. It may happen that a fellow with bright buttons on his coat may clap them on the shoulder and request them to come along with him; then their conscience awakens. But no one came to Mrs. Wetzmann. She sent her stepson to an asylum when he became too troublesome at home, she mourned her husband, as was proper and customary, and then she married again. When she drove to church on the bridal day, she wore a jacket of lilac-colored silk with gold braid and was “fixed up fit to kill”—so said my grandmother, who was sitting at her window in the house opposite and saw the whole display while she was turning a leaf in her book of sermons.
Bloom
On a brilliant August morning at eight o’clock precisely the gates of the establishment of Långholm were opened for three boarders of the establishment, who had come there for various causes and sojourned for various periods. These periods were exactly suited to the grade and kind of their differences with the law-abiding community as proved by their conduct. They did not know each other, and having no feeling of brotherhood through their common misfortune, they said to one another neither good morning nor goodbye.
The man who came out first was a thickset fellow with a beast-like forehead and heavy wrists. One dark evening he had fallen upon an old workman whom he did not like, knocked out some of his teeth, and kicked him in the chest so that he coughed blood for several days. He had been given a month for assault and battery, which did him little harm, and he betook himself hastily to the nearest tavern.
Next came a man who had swindled an impersonal entity known as a bank of a fairly large sum of money. The three months he had spent indoors had not overly bleached his fresh brandy complexion. He had a well-fitting summer suit of dark blue with narrow white edgings; on his feet he wore new yellow shoes, and in his hand he held an elegant little satchel of the same color as the shoes, so that he most nearly resembled a traveling salesman who comes whistling softly out of a hotel. He did not, however, whistle, but mounted into a cab with a lowered hood, under which a black-clad woman with pale and anxious features awaited him. He then tossed an address to the coachman, and vanished in a cloud of dust.
Last came the former tailor’s apprentice Bloom, Oscar Valdemar Napoleon. His complexion inclined more to gray, for he had had
