“Your supper is ready, M. Pastelot,” she said, addressing the priest, and they went.
Schmucke, left alone in the room, smiled to himself like a madman free at last to gratify a desire like the longing of pregnancy. He flung himself down beside Pons, and yet again he held his friend in a long, close embrace. At midnight the priest came back and scolded him, and Schmucke returned to his prayers. At daybreak the priest went, and at seven o’clock in the morning the doctor came to see Schmucke, and spoke kindly and tried hard to persuade him to eat, but the German refused.
“If you do not eat now you will feel very hungry when you come back,” the doctor told him, “for you must go to the mayor’s office and take a witness with you, so that the registrar may issue a certificate of death.”
“I must go!” cried Schmucke in frightened tones.
“Who else?... You must go, for you were the one person who saw him die.”
“Mein legs vill nicht carry me,” pleaded Schmucke, imploring the doctor to come to the rescue.
“Take a cab,” the hypocritical doctor blandly suggested. “I have given notice already. Ask some one in the house to go with you. The two women will look after the place while you are away.”
No one imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt sorrow. The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization and choose rather the customs of the savage. At nine o’clock that morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness. Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere and in everything. The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in the practical aspects of Death. In well-to-do families, a relative, a friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details; but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls heaviest upon the shoulders of the poor.
“Ah! you have good reason to regret him,” said Remonencq in answer to the poor martyr’s moan; “he was a very good, a very honest man, and he has left a fine collection behind him. But being a foreigner, sir, do you know that you are like to find yourself in a great predicament—for everybody says that M. Pons left everything to you?”
Schmucke was not listening. He was sounding the dark depths of sorrow that border upon madness. There is such a thing as tetanus of the soul.