She looked at them, and then abruptly said: “they are satisfactory, have fires built at once; my servant can sleep in the unheated room.”
I merely looked at her.
“Bring up the trunks, Gregor,” she commands, paying no attention to my looks. “In the meantime I’ll be dressing, and then will go down to the dining-room, and you can eat something for supper.”
As she goes into the adjoining room, I drag the trunks upstairs and help the waiter build a fire in her bed-room. He tries to question me in bad French about my employer. With a brief glance I see the blazing fire, the fragrant white poster-bed, and the rugs which cover the floor. Tired and hungry I then descend the stairs, and ask for something to eat. A good-natured waiter, who used to be in the Austrian army and takes all sorts of pains to entertain me in German, shows me the dining-room and waits on me. I have just had the first fresh drink in thirty-six hours and the first bite of warm food on my fork, when she enters.
I rise.
“What do you mean by taking me into a dining-room in which my servant is eating,” she snaps at the waiter, flaring with anger. She turns around and leaves.
Meanwhile I thank heaven that I am permitted to go on eating. Later I climb the four flights upstairs to my room. My small trunk is already there, and a miserable little oil-lamp is burning. It is a narrow room without fire-place, without a window, but with a small air-hole. If it weren’t so beastly cold, it would remind me of one of the Venetian piombi.4 Involuntarily I have to laugh out aloud, so that it re-echoes, and I am startled by my own laughter.
[Footnote 4: These were notorious prisons under the leaden roof of the Palace of the Doges.]
Suddenly the door is pulled open and the waiter with a theatrical Italian gesture calls “You are to come down to madame, at once.” I pick up my cap, stumble down the first few steps, but finally arrive in front of her door on the first floor and knock.
“Come in!”