The evening when the Jewess had confronted him in the dark street and driven him away appeared before him like a vision. He no longer remembered her words, but he saw her body, distorted by motherhood, and trembled. He rose and approached the intoxicated man.

Good evening Lazarus! — he said — How is Susanna?

His voice sounded brittle from fear and in the same instant he wondered how he had had the courage to ask.

The old man stared vacantly into his wine and did not turn his head.

She came back from the foundling hospital today — —

And after a long pause, in which the three women looked at each other and held their breath:

But the child is dead, Severin, — — stone dead — —

And Lazarus laughed until the tears ran down his bony cheeks.

III


The closer the summer came to its end, the more tender and beautiful it became. Every day the sky spread out its flawless covering and the sun shone mildly. Severin spent his vacation in the city. He savored the idleness of the mornings like a pleasure he had long been denied. Now and then, with wonderful clarity, the mood of his school vacations welled up behind the silent years that had been nullified by dull office work. The events of the previous winter and the thoughts of his meager life, wasted on the treadmill, scattered like insubstantial webs. Early in the morning, when sleep fell away from him, he stretched out his limbs and lay for another hour in bed. Leisurely he watched the circles the light painted on the door after it fell through the curtain mesh. He felt he had been relieved of a burden. Then he washed and went out onto the street. He climbed the hill of the Weinberge fortifications and looked down at the Nusl Valley. New, chalk-white buildings glared in the sunlight and the smoke from distant railroad trains filled the air. In his youth there had been a small overgrown garden somewhere nearby, where he had looked for pebbles and snail-shells. Ox-eye daisies grew there in the untended grass during the springtime. Next to the children’s hospital the dome of the Karlshof Kirche peered at him like an enormous brown onion, and on the other side of the valley, in the fields of Pankraz, stood the new water-tower, which always looked to him as if it had been cut it out of the picture book he had once owned. The morning was clear and shone above the rooftops. In a factory a siren began to whine, and its melancholy voice remained in his ears for a long time, like a novel and monotonous song.

It was during these morning hours that he first discovered the city’s polymorphous life. Its thousand streets stretched out all around him. When he climbed the edge of the valley he saw the Moldau flowing past the fortifications of Wyschehrad. Bright reflections floated on the water like glowing firebrands. Grass was growing in the crumbling arrow-slits of the fortress wall. Severin thought back to the evenings when he had stood in the labyrinth of houses, dully and nervously oppressed, awash in dread and foreboding. The city that lay before him and plunged its towers into the morning seemed more beautiful now, and had retained its wonder.

On his way home he usually entered a church. Ever since that afternoon on the Kleinseite there was something that compelled him to linger in the darkness of the side-altars, where, with grave countenances, the statues leaned in the niches and the eternal light burned in a red glass. He sat on a pew and rested for a quarter of an hour. At this time of day there were rarely any visitors, except for an old woman who sometimes shuffled over the flagstones with small steps. Severin drew the silence into him anxiously, like someone long accustomed to noise. In the murky light of the remote corner that concealed him, his thoughts wove together inextricably and entangled his heart in a world of childish confusion.