Towards Morning | Page 5

good-morning, gentlemen." They bowed stiffly and
expressionlessly. When the door closed they relaxed, stamping their
feet and moving their arms like schoolboys after a long restraint. The
Herr Amtschreiber stood apart. He tried to say something, to laugh and
look unconcerned, but he knew that they saw through him and knew
that he was sick with the premonition of disgrace. "Well," he thought,
"he can't kill me." They heard the clatter of hoofs on the cobbles and
presently 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