The young doctor shook his head. "We obeyed orders," he said. "We had to. Those people think that life and death are subject to orders. I kept him going till we got here, but about an hour ago he had a hemorrhage."
He put his pipe back into his mouth, inhaled and exhaled a cloud of smoke, and spoke again.
"Died before we could do anything," he said. "You see, after all he had been through, he hadn't much blood to spare. What did they want him here for, do you know?"
"No," said Herr Haase. "But I know the Herr Baron was needing him particularly. Was fur eine Geschichte!"
"Want to see him?" asked the young doctor.
It had happened to Herr Haase never to see a dead man before. Therefore, among the incidents of his career, he will not fail to remember that the progress in his socks from the one car to the other, the atmosphere of the second car where the presence of death was heavy on the stagnant air, and the manner in which the thin white sheet outlined the shape beneath. A big young orderly in shabby civilian clothes was on guard; at the doctor's order he drew down the sheet and the dead man's face was bare. He who had slashed a helpless conscript across the face with a whip, for whom yet any service of his Fatherland was "good enough," showed to the shrinking Herr Haase only a thin, still countenance from whose features the eager passion and purpose had been wiped, leaving it resolute in peace alone.
"I I didn't know they looked like that," whispered Herr Haase.
The two homeward miles of cindery path were difficult; the sun was tyrannical; his boots were a torment; yet Herr Haase went as in a dream. He had seen reality; the veil of his daily preoccupations had been rent for him; and it needed the impertinence of the ticket-collector at the door of the station, who was unwilling to let him out without a ticket, to restore him. That battle won, he found himself a cab, and rattled over the stones of Thun to the hotel door. He prepared no phrases in which to clothe his news; facts are facts and are to be stated as facts. What he murmured to himself as he jolted over the cobbles was quite another matter.
"Ticket, indeed!" he breathed rancorously. "And I tipped him two marks only last Christmas!"
The Baron's car was waiting at the hotel door; the cab drew up behind it. The cabman, of course, wanted more than his due, and didn't get it; but the debate helped to take Herr Haase's mind still further off his feet. He entered the cool hall of the hotel triumphantly and made for the staircase.