When he spoke of it to Pluizer he made no reply but a sly laugh; but Johannes understood that this was from no desire to spare him.
Those hours which Johannes did not spend in study or work Pluizer took advantage of to show him the life of men. He managed to take him everywhere—into the hospitals where sick people lay in great numbers—long ranks of pale, haggard faces with a dull, suffering expression—and where unearthly silence reigned, broken only by coughing and groaning. And Pluizer showed him how many of them could never leave the place. And when at a fixed hour streams of men and women came pouring into the place to visit their sick relations, Pluizer said: 'You see, they all know that they too must some day find their way into this house and these gloomy rooms, only to be carried out in a black chest.'
'Then how can they ever be so light-hearted?' thought Johannes.
And Pluizer took him up to a little attic-room where a dismal twilight reigned, and where the distant tinkle of a piano in a neighbouring house made an incessant dreamy noise. Here they found, among others, one man who lay staring helplessly before him at a narrow sunbeam which slowly crept up the wall.
'He has lain there for seven years,' said Pluizer. 'He was a sailor, and has seen the palms of India, the blue seas of Japan, the forests of Brazil; and now, for seven long years, he has amused himself all day and every day with the sunbeams and the sound of the piano. He will never leave this room again; but it cannot last much longer now.'
After this day Johannes had his worst dream; he fancied himself in that little room, listening to the feeble music, in the melancholy half-light, with nothing to look at but the rising and waning sunbeams —never more till the end.
Pluizer took him, too, to the great churches to listen to what was said there. He took him to festivals and grand ceremonies, and made him intimate in many houses. Johannes learnt to study men, and it sometimes happened that he could not help thinking of his past life, of the tales Windekind had told him and of his own disappointments. There were men who reminded him of the glow-worm, who fancied that the stars were his departed friends; or of the cockchafer who was one day older than his comrade, and who had said so much about a vocation; and he heard tales which made him think of Kribbelgauw, the Spider-Hero, and of the eel who did nothing, but was fed because it was a grand thing to have a fat king. Himself, he could only compare to the younger cockchafer, who did not know what a vocation was, and flew to the light. He felt that he in the same way was creeping, helpless and crippled, over the carpet with a string round his body, a cruel string which Pluizer tugged and twitched.
Ah! he should never see the garden again! When would the heavy foot come and crush him to death?
Pluizer laughed at him if he ever spoke of Windekind; and by degrees he began to think that Windekind had never existed.
'But, Pluizer, then the little key does not exist—nothing is real!'