The chambermaid entered and announced that the porter’s wife from the Schreyvogelgasse had come to fetch the doctor on behalf of the Court Counsellor, who was again feeling very ill. Fridolin went into the hall, learned from the messenger that the Court Counsellor had had another heart-attack and was in a bad way, and promised to come at once.

‘Are you going out?’ Albertine asked him as he was hastily preparing to leave, and from her irritable tone it seemed as though he were deliberately treating her unjustly.

A little incredulously, Fridolin answered, ‘But I have to.’

She sighed lightly.

‘It shouldn’t be too bad, I hope,’ said Fridolin, ‘in the past, three grams of morphine have usually helped him over the attack.’

The chambermaid brought his fur coat. Fridolin kissed Albertine on the mouth and forehead a little absentmindedly, as if the last hour’s conversation had already been erased from his memory, and hurried off.

II

Out on the street he had to unbutton his fur coat. There had been a sudden thaw, the snow on the pavements had almost completely melted, and there was a breath of the coming spring in the air. From Fridolin’s apartment near the General Hospital in the Josefstadt it was barely a quarter of an hour’s walk to the Schreyvogelgasse; and so Fridolin soon found himself climbing the ill-lit, winding stairs of the old house to the second floor and tugging at the bell; but, even before the old-fashioned tinkling resounded, he noticed that the door was ajar; he stepped through the unlit hall into the living-room and realized immediately that he had arrived too late. The green-shaded kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling cast a dim light over the bed-cover, under which an emaciated body was stretched out motionless. The dead man’s face was in shadow, but Fridolin knew it so well that he imagined he could see it quite distinctly – gaunt, wrinkled, the high forehead, the full short white beard, the strikingly ugly ears with their white hairs. The Court Counsellor’s daughter, Marianne, sat at the foot of the bed, her arms hanging limply by her sides as if in utter exhaustion. There was a smell of old furniture, medicaments, kerosene, the kitchen; also a whiff of eau de Cologne and rose-water, and somehow Fridolin could even sense the stale sweetish smell of this pale girl, who though still young had for months, for years, been losing her bloom in the course of heavy household chores, tiring care and nocturnal vigils.

When Fridolin entered, she turned to look at him, but in the meagre light he had difficulty making out whether her cheeks turned red as they usually did when he appeared. She was on the point of getting up, but a gesture from Fridolin prevented her, and, nodding, she greeted him with her large, sorrowful eyes. He approached the head of the bed, mechanically felt the dead man’s temples, then the wrists that protruded from the wide, open sleeves resting on the bed-cover, then shrugged his shoulders in a mild gesture of regret and put his hands in the pockets of his fur coat, his gaze wandering round the room and eventually coming to rest on Marianne. Her hair was thick and fair but dry, her neck well formed and slender but of a yellowish complexion and no longer completely free of wrinkles, and her lips pinched as if from many unspoken words.

‘Well now, my dear young lady,’ he said softly and almost in embarrassment, ‘you were scarcely unprepared for it.’

She stretched out her hand towards him. He took it sympathetically, asking dutifully about the last fatal attack, whereupon she related everything factually and briefly, and then described the last relatively tranquil days during which Fridolin had not seen the sick man. Fridolin drew up a chair, seating himself opposite Marianne, and to console her intimated that in his last hour her father would hardly have suffered at all; then he asked if the relatives had been informed. Yes, the porter’s wife was already on the way to her uncle, and in any case Dr Roediger would soon be there. ‘My fiancé,’ she added, glancing at Fridolin’s forehead rather than looking him in the eye.

Fridolin merely nodded. In the course of a year he had met Dr Roediger two or three times here in the house. This pale, excessively slim young man with glasses and a short blond beard, a lecturer in history at Vienna University, had made a favourable impression on him, without, however, rousing any further curiosity. Marianne would certainly look better than she did, he thought, if she were his mistress. Her hair would be less dry, her lips redder and fuller. How old would she be? he wondered. When I was first called out to the Court Counsellor’s three or four years ago, she was twenty-three. Her mother was still alive then. She was more cheerful when her mother was alive. Didn’t she take singing lessons for a while? So she’s going to marry this lecturer. Why is she doing it? Certainly she isn’t in love with him and he can’t have much money either. What sort of marriage will it turn out to be? Well, a marriage like a thousand others. What concern is it of mine? It’s quite possible that I shall never see her again, since I will no longer have any function in this house. Ah, how many people I’ve never seen again, who were closer to me than she is.

While these thoughts were running through his head, Marianne had begun to talk about the dead man, moreover with a certain urgency, as though by virtue of the mere fact of his death he had suddenly become a person of distinction. Was he really only fifty-four years old? Of course, the many worries and disappointments, his wife forever ailing, and his son too had given him a great deal of trouble! What, she had a brother? Yes, certainly! Surely she had told the doctor about him once before.