He threw up his hands, gesticulating violently, as if the offer was an insult, appeared to work himself into a furious rage, and fumed and fussed and stormed, until I got up. Again he tested me; let me leave the room and reach the door of the shop, following with a mixture of lamentations and appeals to Heaven to bear witness to my lunacy.
I did not so much as turn round, remembering Feldmann's caution, and I was all but in the street, before he changed his tone, apparently satisfied that I was sincere.
"It's no use to part like this. Come back and talk it over again." Once more a similar pantomime was played; but this time I was much slower to give way. "It can't be done at the price. Impossible. Think of the risk I should——"
"Then don't do it. I tell you if you mean there's any risk in the thing, I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I thought a few marks was all that would be necessary; but if you offered to give it me for nothing and there's any risk I wouldn't take it. Get that into your head."
"Do you think I give things away?"
"Not I, seeing how you cling to the dirt on you."
This was also accepted as a joke and he wagged his head and winked. "It takes too much time to clean things; and time's money," he replied, with one of his repulsive leers. "But I like you. You say what you mean. I'll take a hundred marks from you."
"Will you? You'll be cleverer than I take you for, if you do."
"But there's the——" He was going to repeat about the risk, but checked the word as bad business; and a long chaffering began in which he tried to squeeze me first to seventy-five marks, then to fifty, coming down by tens and fives to twenty-five.
He stuck at that point a long time; and lest he should think even that sum suspicious, I held out at the five marks to which I had increased my offer during the bargaining.