I walked on through well-ordered rooms where beautiful pictures were hanging on the walls and flowers were arranged in window-boxes and the floor was overlaid by soft carpets. But every room I entered I found cold and uninhabitable.
Door after door I opened and closed gently till I found myself standing in front of the last one leading to the last remaining room in that part of the house, a corner bedroom already well-known to me. I stood outside the door to listen for a moment as somebody inside the bedroom moved about.
I knew what I was going to find in that bedroom, but I felt, nevertheless, a cold, clammy sweat breaking out on my forehead and all the nerve-endings on my skin ever so slightly beginning to tingle. Even the most case-hardened doctor is never quite hardened enough and today I was to learn the truth of that all over again.
It was a warm and cheerful, comfortable room into which I now entered. Here too sunlight inundated everything, reflected by the room's big mirrors. And here too, on the window-sill, pretty flowers were in evidence, and somewhere, in amongst them, a finely wrought birdcage with two songbirds in it. Over here was a piano with the lid up and, in front of it, a piano-stool the seat of which had been embroidered. A songbook lay open on the music holder. Everything in that room pointed to the fact that a woman and, moreover, a young woman, lived there or rather had lived there. Everything bore the hallmark of a single young lady's delicacy; a married woman or an old maid would not have had the same taste in interior design. The pale-looking woman, dressed in black, whom I greeted wordlessly and who, kneeling on the carpet in front of an open drawer, looked up at me with eyes terribly sad, drained absolutely dry of tears, came here every day to drink in every minute of this fading brilliance and fragrance: the fragrance and the brilliance, alas, of what had been and never would be more.
After exchanging greetings, we spoke but little. The bereaved mother addressed me as usual with the words: "Thank you for coming, dear friend!" and then I sat down on the embroidered stool in front of the piano, resting my head in my hand, watching this woman as she stooped to do things.
She was busy ordering the little treasures that her daughter had left behind her after her brief stay on earth. Each day she would imbibe another bitter draught from that chalice of memory which all those who have lost a loved one clutch at so tightly.
Now it was up to her to sort out letters from school friends, old birthday presents, items of personal jewellery and a hundred and one other curiosities of a manifold and colourful multiplicity which art and craft, full of hidden meanings, bestow on their favourites in this world. Everything that came to hand was treated by this poor woman as a sentient, living thing. She lingered over it, talked to it and called it to mind, remembering just when it had first come into the house to give pleasure to or perhaps, in some cases, to slightly unsettle the woman's now dead daughter. Here, for instance, was a smashed shepherdess in porcelain and thereby hung a tale and this proud mother told it to herself, to me and to the multi-coloured gilded ornament with all its twists and turns, exactly as it had happened. Then, as my hands wandered absent-mindedly over the piano keys behind me, a look of jealousy flashed across the face of that much-to-be-pitied narrator: would the hand of a stranger dare to play again those notes that had once belonged to the deceased?
As the woman once more cast her livid face downwards, my glance chanced to fall on the songbook lying open on the music-holder. The song contained therein was a sad one. Was it just a coincidence that the songbook lay open at that particular place or had the dead girl, somewhat ominously, turned to it herself? It read as follows:
Should fate bestow on you a precious gift,
Needs must you lose some other dear advantage;
Pain, like success, is gathered bit by bit,
And what you long for most will do most damage.
A human hand is like a childish hand
That grabs at life, then wantonly destroys it.
It ruins what it cannot understand
And clings to something though it ne'er enjoys it.