Itsye resumed his former position.
“Move on!”
The official was now in an ugly mood and had raised his sabre.
Itsye felt that he must refuse to stir. But something moved his feet. It was the instinct that a policeman must be obeyed.
He went off. Back to his street. Slowly, scarcely moving his legs, without looking back at the official.
He was frozen through and through. It was as if he had no feet. As he approached the gate to his house he felt that it would be pleasant to lie down a while. This he felt against his will. He must remain in the street because he was filled with rage and must vent it in some vindictive deed. But his heavy, frozen limbs drew him to his attic, where it was frightfully cold, where the icy wind moaned and whistled. The wind was not so noisy here below. It seemed that his feet knew he would hunt up all sorts of old rags and wrap them around his frozen members.
So he allowed his feet to carry him along. On the way to the garret they overturned a slop-pail and stumbled across a cat. It was they, too, who opened the door of his room. The door flew back and struck against something soft. The soft object fell, and the feet had to step over a heap of tatters out of which looked the parchment-yellow, wrinkled, peaked face of an old shrivelled-up woman.
“Wow—wow—wow!” she began to wail, hopelessly enmeshed in her rags. It was the deaf-and-dumb landlady of his lodgings.
He made no reply. The feet were already in bed.