With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.
In the afternoon the wind turned, it became clearer and colder, and by night Pat was better.
Next morning she was able to get up, and some days later when Roth, the chap who was cured, went away, she was even able to go down to the station.
A whole swarm accompanied Roth.
That was the custom here whenever anyone left.
Roth himself wasn't especially cheerful.
He had had bad luck in his way.
Two years before, a specialist, answering his question, how long he still had had to live, had said two years at the outside, provided he looked after himself carefully.
To make quite sure he then asked a second doctor.
This one gave him even less.
Roth thereupon realised all his resources, divided them into two years, and lit out for all he was worth, without troubling any more, about his illness.
Finally with a bad haemorrhage he landed in the sanatorium.
And here, instead of dying, he began steadily to get better.
When he arrived he had weighed ninety pounds.
Now he weighed a hundred and fifty and was in such good shape he was able to go out again.
But his money was gone.
"What'll I do though?" he asked me, scratching his ginger head. "You've just come up, haven't you?
How is it down there, then?"
"It's changed a lot," I replied, contemplating his round, chubby face with its colourless eyelashes.
He had got well again, though he had been given up—for the rest he did not interest me.
"I'll have to find myself a job," said he. "What are the chances that way?"
I gave a shrug.
What use was it my telling him he probably wouldn't find one?
He'd discover that for himself soon enough.
"Have you connections, friends, or anything?" I asked.
"Friends—well, you know." He laughed scornfully. "When you suddenly have no more money, they hop away like fleas off a dead man."
"Then it'll be difficult."
He puckered his forehead.
"Just can't picture it, you know.
I've only got a few hundred marks left.
And I never learned anything but handing out money.
Looks as if my old quack was right when be said I'd kick inside two years, though in another way perhaps—by a bullet."
I suddenly was seized with an insane fury against this blathering idiot.
Didn't be realise then what life is?
I saw Antonio walking ahead of me with Pat, saw their shoulders and the back of their necks, grown thin in the grip of the disease; I knew how much they wanted to live, and I could have murdered Roth at that moment without turning a hair, if Pat might thereby have been made well again. The train pulled out.
Roth was waving his hat.
Those left behind called after him all kinds of things, laughing.
One girl ran tottering a short way after the train, calling in a cracked, thin voice:
"Au revoir! Au revoir!" Then she came back and burst into tears.
The others made wry faces.
"Hello!" called Antonio. "Anyone crying on the station must pay a forfeit.
An old sanatorium rule.
A forfeit to the funds for the next party."
With a large gesture he held out his hand.
The others were laughing again.
Even the girl, the tears still trickling down her poor pinched face, smiied and took a shabby purse from her coat pocket.
It made me miserable.
These faces around—it wasn't a laugh at all, it was a convulsive, tortured jollity—not smiles but grimaces;
"Come on," said I to Pat taking her firmly by the arm.
We walked in silence down the village street.