Beware of Pity Read Online Free PDF Page A

drop of eau de cologne on my moustache, I drive out to pay a courtesy call. The manservant—old, discreet, good livery—takes my card and murmurs, apologetically, that the family will be very sorry to have missed seeing Lieutenant Hofmiller, but they are at church. All the better, I tell myself, courtesy calls are always a terrible bore. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. On Wednesday evening, I tell myself, you’ll go off there again, and it’s to be hoped the occasion will be pleasant. That’s the Kekesfalva affair dealt with until Wednesday. Twodays later, however, on Tuesday, I am genuinely pleased to find a visiting card from Herr von Kekesfalva handed in for me, with one corner of it turned down. Good, I think, these people have perfect manners. A general could hardly have been shown more civility and respect than Herr von Kekesfalva has paid me, an insignificant officer, by returning my original courtesy call two days later. And I begin looking forward to Wednesday evening with real pleasure.
    But there’s a hitch at the very start—I suppose one should be superstitious and pay more attention to small signs and omens. There I am at seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, ready in my best uniform, new gloves, patent leather shoes, creases in my trousers ironed straight as a knife blade, and my batman is adjusting the folds of my overcoat and checking the general effect (I always need him to do that, because I have only a small hand mirror in my poorly lit room), when an orderly knocks vigorously on the door. The duty officer, my friend Captain Count Steinhübel, wants me to go over to join him in the guardroom. Two lancers, probably as drunk as lords, have been quarrelling, and it ended with one hitting the other over the head with the stock of his rifle. Now the idiot who suffered the blow is lying there bleeding and unconscious, with his mouth open. No one knows whether or not his skull is intact. The regimental doctor has gone to Vienna on leave, the Colonel can’t be found, so Steinhübel summons me to help him in his hour of need, damn his eyes. While he sees to the injured man, I have to write a report on the incident and send orderlies all over the place to drum up a civilian doctor from the café or wherever there’s one to be found. By now it is a quarter to eight, and I can see that there’s no chance of my getting away for another fifteen minutes or half-an-hour. Why in Heaven’s name doesthis have to happen today of all days, when I’m invited out to dinner? Feeling more and more impatient, I look at the time. Even if I have to hang around here for only another five minutes, I can’t possibly arrive punctually. But the principle that military service takes precedence over any private engagement has been dinned into us. I can’t get out of it, so I do the only possible thing in this stupid situation, I send my batman off in a cab (which costs me four crowns) to the Kekesfalva house, to deliver my apologies in case I am late, explaining that an unexpected incident at the barracks … and so on and so forth. Fortunately the commotion at the barracks doesn’t last long, because the Colonel arrives in person with a doctor found in haste, and now I can slip inconspicuously away.
    Bad luck again, however—there’s no cab in the square outside the town hall, I have to wait while someone telephones for a two-horse carriage. So it’s inevitable, when I finally arrive in the hall of Herr von Kekesfalva’s house, that the big hand of the clock on the wall is pointing vertically down; it is eight-thirty instead of eight, and the coats in the cloakroom are piled on top of each other. The rather anxious look on the servant’s face also shows me that I am decidedly late—how unlucky, how really unlucky for such a thing to happen on a first visit.
    However, the servant—this time in white gloves, tailcoat and a starched shirt to go with his starchy expression—reassures me; my batman delivered my message