The more close and personal touch is found in his short stories, many of which, as in “Good Blood,” deal with a superior character in rebellion against its surroundings. This little story, though new, is fast becoming a classic.
GOOD BLOOD
BY ERNST VON WILDENBRUCH
Translated by R. W. Howes,
3d. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.
Is it possible that there are people quite free from curiosity? People who can pass on behind any one they see gazing earnestly and intently toward some unknown object without feeling an impulse to stop, to follow the direction of the other’s eyes, to discover what odd thing he may be looking at?
For my part, if I were asked whether I counted myself among that class of cold natures, I do not know that I could honestly answer “Yes.” At any rate, there was once a moment in my life when I was not only goaded by such an impulse, but when I actually yielded to the temptation and fell into the way of any mere curiosity seeker.
The place in which it happened was in a wine-room in the old town where as Referendar[6] I was practising at court; the time was an afternoon in summer.
The wine-room, situated on the ground floor of a house in the great square which from the window one could look out upon in every direction, was at this hour nearly empty. To me this was all the more agreeable, for I have ever been a lover of solitude.
There were three of us: the fat waiter, who from a gray, dust-covered bottle was pouring out the golden-yellow Muscatel into my glass; then myself, who sat in a nook of the cozy, odd-cornered room and smacked the fragrant wine; and still another guest, who had taken his place at one of the two open windows, a tumbler of red wine lying before him on the window-sill, in his mouth a long brown, smoke-seasoned meerschaum cigar-holder, out of which he wrapped himself in a cloud of smoke.