Towards Morning | Page 5

a man came back into the room. He was short and thick-set with light-blue protuberant eyes. He came up to the Herr Amtschreiber so close to him that it seemed as though he meant to tread him down under his feet.
"You choose a strange occasion to over-sleep yourself, Herr Felde," he said loudly and coldly. "What do you suppose the Grand Duke thinks of an administration in which the officials behave as you do? His Royal Highness honours us with his presence and you stroll in an hour late your coat on anyhow with a dirty collar and and crumpled clothes. My God one would think you had been drinking."
The Herr Amtschreiber' s lips trembled.
"Excuse me --my wife is ill --I was up all night."
"What is that to me? Do you think the work of the state has to stop still because your wife has a headache? Let me tell you, Herr Felde, we expect efficiency in this office efficiency and again efficiency. Those who can't live up to our standards well, they can take their talents elsewhere. That's all."
The Herr Amtschreiber did not answer. He made a little bow and crept away to his office at the back of the Rathaus. His knees shook under him. It was as though he had been whipped in public before all his fellows. But the shame did not matter. The veiled threat mattered. His Bureau-Chef hated him had always hated him. And an "entlassense Beamte" a middle-aged official dismissed for inefficiency what was he? An old circus-horse, trained to gallop round and round the ring, thrust out to find a living on the streets!
And there was Clarchen and the mysterious, halfrealised being who was coming and the Geheimrat who would shrug his flat, broad shoulders.
"He was bound to fail. Too soft much too soft. It doesn't do: these are stern times."
The Herr Amtschreiber bent over his papers. Though his head was hot and heavy, he worked with a feverish accuracy. The machine revolved round him and he who was just a little cog, infinitely significant, infinitely insignificant, revolved in measure. If he failed there would be a moment's hitch. The engineer would come burrowing down to the cause and wrench him off and throw him to the scrap-heap. There would be no recrimination no explanation. It was appallingly simple. The cog mattered only so long as it served its purpose. It was the machine the machine that mattered always.
The Herr Amtschreiber forgot himself. The atmosphere of the dingy office stifled all personality all feeling. It smelt of all the little souls that had sweated out their life there and of something moribund, as though an alien and evil spirit had crept into the old Rathaus and was eating out its heart.
No one spoke to him. His colleagues held aloof with an air of condemnation. He felt no surprise or pain. It was just. He had sinned. And then they too had the spectre of failure at their elbows. They too were afraid. Not only for themselves. They were thinking of the machine. It was as though at the back of their minds was the vision of its collapse of a monstrous cataclysm.
At last some one came up to him and spoke. It was old Heim who had grown grey and bent in the Service. He had never risen above the position of a clerk and now he was near the end. A cancer ate at his vitals and soon he would be going into the hospital to die. But he was holding on to his office as though it were his life.
"This has just come for you, Herr Felde."
The Herr Amtschreiber tore open the untidy envelope. The slip of paper inside was smeared with an illiterate scrawl:
"If the Herr Amtschreiber would please come at once. The Herr Doktor says so.
"ANNA."
He sat there blinking over his glasses. His vacant wandering blue eyes rested at last in a fascinated stare on the broad back of his chief. His hands began to tremble and the slip of paper fluttered down on to the floor.
"I can't " he thought over and over again. "I can't--"
"Herr Amtschreiber."
He turned stupidly. Old Heim was leaning against the desk, his face yellow and withered as old parchment, his dry lips opened in a smothered gasp.
"Well?"
"Herr Felde if I could be excused this afternoon I am not well you know how it is the pain it's very bad."
Something leapt up out of the dark places of the Herr Amtschreiber's heart. It was tigerish bestial. It had lain there all night, ringed in by enemies, goaded and starved, gnawing the roots of its hiding-place. As it leapt upon its victim the Herr Amtschreiber could have screamed out in an ecstasy of relief.
His hand lying on the desk clenched itself to a fist.
"Do