The police-station had cost him some trouble to enter. But they had been attracted to each other from the start. Something in the form of an illicit attachment now existed between them. Buildings are female. There is no such thing as a male building. This practical and pretentious small modern edifice was having its romance. Otto Kreisler was its romance.
It was now warning him. It echoed sharply and insistently the feet of its policemen.
After his evening meal he took up his bed in his arms and placed it on the opposite side of the cell, under the window. He sat there for some time as though resting after this effort. The muttering of two children on a doorstep in the street below came to him on the evening light with melodramatic stops and emptiness. It bore with it an image, like an old picture, bituminous and with a graceful, queer formality. It fixed itself before him like a mirage. He watched it muttering.
He began slowly drawing off his boots. He took out the laces, and tied them together for greater strength. Then he tore several strips off his shirt, and made a short cord of them. He went through these actions deliberately and deftly, as though it were a routine and daily happening. He measured the drop from the bar of the ventilator, calculating the necessary length of cord, like a boy preparing the accessories of some game. It was only a game, too. He realized what these proceedings meant, but shunned the idea that it was serious. Just as an unmoral man with a disinclination to write a necessary letter takes up the pen, resolving to begin it merely and writes more and more until it is, in fact, completed, so Kreisler proceeded with his task.
Standing on his bed, he attached the cord to the ventilator. He tested its strength by holding it some inches from the top, and then, his shoulders hunched, swaying his whole weight languidly on it for a moment.
Adjusting the noose, he smoothed his hair back after he had slipped it over his head. He made as though to kick the bed away, playfully, then stood still, staring in front of him. The last moment must be one of realization. He was not a coward. His caution was due to his mistrust of some streaks of him, the sex streak the powerfullest.
A sort of heavy confusion burst up as he withdrew the restraint. It reminded him of Soltyk’s hands on this throat. The same throttling feeling returned. The blood bulged in his head. He felt dizzy; it was the Soltyk struggle over again. But, as with Soltyk, he did not resist. He gently worked the bed outwards from under him, giving it a last steady shove. He hung, gradually choking, the last thing he was conscious of, his tongue.
The discovery of his body caused a deep-felt indignation among the staff at the police-station. They remembered the persistence with which this unprincipled and equivocal vagrant (as which they still regarded him) had attempted to get into the building. And it was clear to their minds that his sole purpose had been to hang himself on their premises. He had mystified them from the first. Now their vague suspicions were bitterly confirmed, and had taken an unpardonable form. Each man felt that this corpse had personally insulted and made a fool of him. They thrust it savagely into the earth, with vexed and disgusted faces.
Herr Kreisler paid without comment what was claimed by the landlord in Paris for his son’s room; and writing to the authorities at the frontier town about the burial, paid exactly the sum demanded by this town for disposing of the body.