What about turning off the illuminations?
The Ford anyway.
The damned thing with its cockeyed searchlight reminds me of the war.
It was no joke at night when those things reached out after your aeroplane."
Lenz nodded.
"And that there reminds me—well, no matter." He got up and turned off the headlights.
The moon had risen high over the factdry roof and was now hanging like a yellow Chinese lantern in the upper branches of the plum tree.
The branches swayed gently back and forth in the light breeze.
"It's extraordinary," said Lenz after a while, "the way men put up monuments to every conceivable sort of person —why not occasionally to the moon or to a tree in blossom?"
I went home early.
As I opened the hall door I heard music.
It was the secretary's, Erna Bonig's, gramophone.
A soft, clear woman's voice was singing.
Then came a quiver of muted violins and strumming guitars.
And again the voice, piercing sweet as if it were overflowing with a great joy.
I listened to catch the words.
It sounded strangely moving here in the dark corridor between Frau Bender's sewing machine and the Hasse's family trunks, the way the woman there sang so softly.
I looked up at the stuffed boar's head over the kitchen door. I heard the housemaid rattling dishes.
"How can I live without thee?" sang the voice a few steps away behind the door.
I shrugged my shoulders and went into my room. ' Next door I heard an excited argument.
A few minutes later there was a knock and Hasse came in.
"Am I disturbing you?" he asked wearily.
"Not at all," said I. "Will you have something to drink?"
"I'd rather not.
Just sit a bit."
He gazed dully in front of him.
"You're well off," said he. "You're alone—"
"Ach, nonsense," I replied. "Always to be sitting around like this alone, that's nothing either—you take it from me."
He sat sunken in his armchair.
His eyes were glazed in the half-light that entered from the street lamp outside.
The narrow, round shoulders . . .
"I pictured life so different," said he after a while.
"We all have," said I.
After half an hour he went back again to make peace with his wife.
I gave him some cigarettes and a half-bottle of curacao that had been standing in the cupboard from some previous occasion—unpleasant, sweet stuff, hut quite all right for him. He didn't understand such things.
Softly, almost soundlessly, he went out, a shadow into the shadow, as if he were already extinguished.
I closed the door after him again.
As I did so a scrap of music floated in from the passage—violins, banjos.
I sat by the window.
Outside lay the graveyard in the blue moonlight.
The coloured rockets of the electric signs climbed up over the treetops and the gravestones gleamed out of the darkness.
They were quiet and unterrifying.
Cars hooted close by them and the light of the headlamps wiped across their weather-worn inscriptions.
I sat a long while and thought of all sorts of things.
Among others, of how we came back from the war, like miners from a pit disaster, young and disillusioned of everything but ourselves.
We had meant to wage war against the lies, the selfishness, the greed, the inertia of the heart that was the cause of all that lay behind us; we had become hard, without trust in anything but in our comrades beside us and in things—the sky, trees, the earth, bread, tobacco, that never played false to any man—and what had come of it?
All collapsed, perverted and forgotten.
And to those who had not forgotten was left only power-lessness, despair, indifference and schnapps.
The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past.
The busy-bodies, the self-seekers triumphed.