The Wardrobe
It was cloudy, dusky, and cool when the Berlin-Rome express entered a railway station of medium size. In a first-class compartment, with lace covers over the backs of the broad plush seats, a lone traveller straightened himself up: Albrecht van der Qualen. He awoke. He experienced a sickly taste in his mouth, and his body was full of that not very agreeable feeling which is evoked by a standstill after a long journey, the silencing of the rhythmic rolling thud, the stillness which affords such a marked contrast to the noises without, the calls and signals.—This condition is like coming to out of a state of intoxication, of insensibility. Our nerves are suddenly deprived of the support, the rhythm, to which they had surrendered; now they feel themselves utterly disturbed and abandoned. And this is all the more pronounced when simultaneously we awake out of the dull sleep of a railway journey.
Albrecht van der Qualen stretched himself a bit, stepped to the window, and let down the sash. He glanced along the length of the train. At the forward end a number of men were busy loading and unloading parcels. The locomotive gave vent to more noises, sneezed and growled a little, and then became still and silent, but only as a horse stands still, lifting its hoof, twitching its ears, and waiting eagerly for the signal to start. A large, stout lady in a long raincoat perseveringly dragged a travelling-bag which must have weighed a hundredweight to and fro alongside the train, shoving it ahead of her by jerks of one knee. Her face was infinitely careworn; she was dumb, hounded, with anxious eyes. Especially her upper lip, which she protruded considerably and which was beaded with tiny drops of sweat, had something unutterably pathetic about it. “You poor, dear creature!” thought Van der Qualen. “If I could help you, give you shelter, comfort you, only for the sake of that upper lip of yours! But everyone for himself, that’s the way life is arranged, and I, who am at this moment quite free from anxiety, am standing here and looking at you as though you were a beetle that had fallen on its back.”
Twilight reigned in the modest railway station. Was it evening or morning? He did not know. He had slept, and it was absolutely impossible to say whether he had slept for two, five, or twelve hours. Had he not even upon occasion slept for twenty-four hours and longer, without the slightest interruption—a deep, an extraordinarily deep sleep?—He was a gentleman in a dark-brown winter overcoat of half length, with a velvet collar. It was very difficult to tell his age from his features; one might have hesitated between twenty-five and the close of the thirties. His complexion was yellow, but his eyes were of a glowing black, like coals, and surrounded by deep shadows. These eyes boded no good. Various physicians, in frank and serious conversations with him, had given him only a few months more to live.—His hair, by the way, was dark and parted smoothly on the side.
In Berlin—though Berlin was not the starting-point of his journey—by chance he had boarded the departing express with his red handbag; he had slept, and now, having awakened, he felt himself so completely freed from all sense of time that a feeling of comfort permeated him. He owned no watch. He was happy in the thought that the thin chain of gold that he wore round his neck bore only a small medallion, which he carried in his waistcoat-pocket. He did not care to know what hour it was, nor even what day of the week, for he also refrained from using a calendar. For some time past he had rid himself of the habit of knowing the day of the month or even the month itself—yes, even the particular year. All things must float in the air, he was used to think, and he considered this to mean a great deal, though it was a pretty murky turn of phrase. Seldom or never was he disturbed in this ignorance, since he did his utmost to keep all such disturbances at a distance. Surely it was enough to know approximately what season it happened to be? “It is approximately autumn,” he thought as he looked out into the dusky and damp station. “I know no more than that! Have I the least idea where I am?”
And suddenly this thought reduced the satisfaction that he felt to a kind of joyous horror. No, he did not know where he was! Was he still in Germany? No doubt. In North Germany? That remained to be seen! His eyes, still stupid from sleep, had seen a lighted sign glide past the window of his compartment, and this sign had possibly displayed the name of the station—no image of a single letter had penetrated to his brain. Still in his state of stupor he had heard the conductor call out the name two or three times—not a single syllable had he caught. But there, there, in a twilight of which he did not know whether it meant morning or evening, lay
