The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free PDF

the streets of the suburb. It was not fitting for one of his rank to do this, and the officers always drove home in the regimental carriages. Nobody ever went walking here—even Bertrand would not have thought of it—and the fact that he himself was doing so now was as disturbing to Joachim as if he had made a false step. Was it not almost as if in doing so he were humiliating himself for Ruzena’s sake? Or was it an indirect humiliation of Ruzena? For in his fantasy she now occupied quite definitely a suburban flat, perhaps that very cellar-like little shop before whose dark entry greens and vegetables were spread for purchase; and perhaps it was Ruzena’s mother who squatted in front of it, knitting and talking in her darkforeign speech. He smelt the smoky odour of paraffin lamps. In the low vaulted cellar a light shone out. It came from a lamp fixed into the dingy wall at the back. He felt he could almost sit there himself with Ruzena before the cellar, her hand ruffling his hair. But he was startled when he became conscious of this thought, and to drive it away he tried to imagine that over Lestow the same light grey dusk was settling. And in the park, silent under the mist and already fragrant with dewy herbs, he saw Elisabeth; she was walking slowly towards the house, from whose windows the soft light of the paraffin lamps shone out into the falling dusk, and her little dog was there too, and it, too, seemed to be tired after the day. But as he thought more intently and intimately it was Ruzena and himself that he saw on the terrace in front of the house, and Ruzena’s caressing hand was resting on the back of his head.
    It went without saying that in those beautiful spring days one was in good spirits, and that business was flourishing. Bertrand, who had been in Berlin for a few days, felt this too. Yet in his heart he knew his good spirits came simply from the success which, for years now, had followed all his transactions, and conversely that his good spirits were needed to bring about further success. It was like a propitious gliding with the current, and instead of himself making towards the things he wanted he saw them come floating towards him. Perhaps this had been one of the reasons why he had left the regiment: there were so many things which invited him and from which at that time he was excluded. What did the brass plates of banks, solicitors and export firms mean to him then? They were only empty words at which one did not look, or which disturbed one. Now he knew a great number of things about banks, knew what took place behind the counter, yes, understood not only all that was connoted by the inscriptions discount, foreign exchange, deposits, and so on, but knew also what went on in the directors’ offices, could size up a bank by its deposits and its reserves, and draw lively conclusions from a fluctuation in shares. He understood such export terms as transit and bonded warehouse, and all this had come very natural to him, had become as matter of course as the brass plate in the Steinweg in Hamburg:
    Eduard von Bertrand, Cotton Importer.” And the fact that now a similar plate could be seen in the Rolandstrasse in Bremen and the Cotton Exchange in Liverpool actually gave him a feeling of pride.
    When in Unter den Linden he met Pasenow, angular in his longmilitary coat with the epaulets, his very shoulders angular, while he himself was comfortably clad in a suit of English cloth, he felt quite elated, greeted Pasenow airily and familiarly as he always greeted his old comrades, and asked him without further ado if he had lunched yet and if he would come with him to Dressel’s.
    Taken aback by the sudden encounter and the quick cordiality, Pasenow forgot how much he had been thinking of Bertrand these last few days; once more he felt ashamed to be talking in his spick-and-span uniform to a man who stood before him naked, as it were, in mufti, and he would have been glad to evade the invitation. But