"What do you wish here?"
"Your wife is dead, Herr Freidank. It was her heart: she must have been violently excited."
With a dull cry Ludwig sank to the ground.
When he came to himself it was autumn; he was a gray haired man. Since that time he has never painted. He spends his time in the gallery, and gazes for hours at Raphael's Madonna, while his lips move incessantly.
"He is praying," said the gallery attendant. "The Madonna is his shrine."
I do not know whether he prays or not. Cause to do so he surely has. Two graves might well have taught him to pray, did it not seem as if, in his memory, a kindly night had overshadowed the past. He allows no one to enter his studio, unwilling, it is said, that profane eye gaze on the shrine within it . . . his madonna.
No one has been able to buy it.
HE clock in the tower near by struck seven. The steam whistle blew shrill and loud, the sound reverberating through the whole of the upper New Town; a gong sounded, and before one could count twenty a long file of some fifty stalwart, broad shouldered men emerged from the low oaken gate of the factory, closely watched and scrutinized by the gateman. Most of them had on linen overalls and blouses that had once been blue; the faces and hands of all were grimy with dirt and dust.
The crowd, breaking up into groups, scattered in all directions, so that in a few moments the space before the factory was entirely empty. The gate keeper, however, still remained at his post, casting, from time to time, a questioning look toward the door of the engine room in the basement. He shook his head, and was on the point of starting in that direction, when out rushed a tall, powerful man of about thirty years of age, who shouted roughly:
"Wait, there! I want to get out. You'd keep us here in this dungeon till midnight! I wish a thunderbolt would fall on it!"
Pushing the gate keeper aside, an d lustily cursing, he continued: "Get out of my way! I'm no longer your slave. Thistime I have to myself."
- ↑ Englished by Frances Gregor.
