“The children....” The builder made an effort to turn round. His halting look went slowly round the room.
Christopher clung trembling to the edge of the table. He had a feeling that if this great searching glance were to find him, it would strike upon his pupils and press his eyeballs inwards. Everything shrank in him. His body wanted to vanish into space.
So death was like this! He had never seen it yet, though he had guessed that it hovered everywhere and whispered fear into men’s ears. It had whispered to him too when he was a child and he had to hide under his blankets or run out of the room when the candle went out. But then he did not yet understand the sibilant voice and his fear went astray among phantoms, deep silence and darkness. For all that, it had always been death.
He saw the others near him in a haze. His father, Füger, Gemming and Feuerlein. The pointed long face of Tini was there too. It moved correctly, with an appearance of unreality, between the washstand and the armchair. It came and went. A wet towel in her hand. In the corridor the workmen. Subdued, heavy steps. Changing, frightened faces in the door. One pressed against the other, as if looking into a pit.
Suddenly he perceived Anne. How pale she was. Yet she moved calmly. Now she knelt down near the armchair and her face was clasped by two waxy hands. A grey head bent over her and gave her a long look, a look insufferably prolonged. If he were never to release her? If he were to take her with him?
Christopher sobbed. Someone pushed him forward. Now he too was kneeling near the armchair. Now, now.... The fading eyes had found him. Two hands of wax reached searchingly into the air, the fingers stretched, tried to grasp something.
The boy fell to the floor without a sound. He was not aware that he was carried out of the room.
Slowly the room became dark. The steps of the priest interrupted the solemn silence of the corridor. Steps came and went. The smell of incense pervaded the porch. The choir-boy’s bell rang along the street. He rang as if he were playing ball with the sounds while one house was telling another the news:
“Ulwing, the master builder, is dying....”
There was a throng on the staircase. The heavy, syncopated breathing of the builder was audible in the corridor. Upstairs in the room, anxious, tearful faces leant over the armchair.