But then fatigue began to dissolve the beautiful chain, other visions thrust themselves between, and all brought horror and dread.

It might have been a little past midnight. He sank into one confused and ugly dream after another. All the humiliations he had ever suffered in his life, everything that had ever caused him pain and fear, came over him again. He had to relive all the troubled and false situations of his life as a child and boy. And Romana fled before him, strangely dressed, half peasant, half lady, barefoot under her black pleated brocade skirt, and it was in Vienna, in the crowded Spiegelgasse, quite close to his parents’ home. He had to follow her, in dread, and yet, in dread, conceal his hurried pursuit. She forced her way through the crowd, turned her face to him, and it was expressionless and distorted. As she sped on, her clothes were torn in disorder from her body. Suddenly she vanished in an entry, and he after her, as far as he could with his left foot, which dragged intolerably and kept catching between the paving stones. Now at last he was in the entry, and here no horrible encounter was spared him. A look that he had feared more than any other as a boy, the look of his first catechist, shot through him, and the dreaded little podgy hand seized him. The loathsome face of a boy, who had told him on the backstairs in the twilight what he did not want to hear, was pressed close to his cheek, and as he struggled to push it away he saw lying in front of the door through which he had to follow Romana a creature which moved after him: it was the cat whose back he had once broken with a cart shaft, and which had taken so long to die. And so it was not dead, after all these years! Creeping like a snake with its broken back it came towards him, and panic seized him as it looked at him. There was no help for it. He had to step over it. With unspeakable torment he raised his left foot over the creature, whose back writhed up and down unceasingly—when the look of the cat’s upturned face struck him from below, the roundness of the cat’s face from a head at once cat and dog, filled with a horrible mixture of sensual gratification and death agony—he opened his mouth to scream—a scream issued from the house: he had to writhe his way through the wardrobe, which was full of his parents’ clothes. The screams from within grew more horrible, as though a living creature were being butchered by a murderer. It was Romana, and he could not help her. There were too many worn-out clothes, the clothes of many years, which had not been given away. Dripping with sweat, he writhed his way through …

He was lying in bed, his heart pounding. It was already dawn, but not yet day. The house was astir, doors were banging, from the courtyard came a noise of hurrying steps and loud voices. Then the screaming began again which had torn his dreaming soul from the depths of his dream to the livid light. It was the piercing weeping and wailing of a woman’s voice—a shrill complaint ceaselessly rising and falling. Andreas leapt out of bed and dressed, but he felt like a condemned man awakened by the voice of the executioner: he was still too much in his dream—it was as if he had committed some dreadful deed, and now everything would come to light.

He ran downstairs in the direction of the voice ringing so dreadfully through the house. Thinking it might be Romana, his blood froze. Then he knew that no such sounds could issue from her though she was being roasted alive in martyrdom.

Downstairs, on the ground floor, a little passage leading sideways was full of farm-hands and maids staring in at the open door of a room. Andreas joined them and they made way for him. On the threshold of the room he stopped. Smoke and a stench of burning rose towards him.