But Agathe had already bent down and slid a wide silk garter off her leg, lifted the magnificent shroud, and pushed the garter into her father’s pocket.

Ulrich? At first he could not believe his eyes to see this memory returned to life. Then he almost jumped forward to stop her, simply because it was so contrary to all order. But then he caught in his sister’s eyes a flash of the pure dewy freshness of early morning before the bleakness of a day’s work has set in, and it held him back. “What on earth are you doing?” he said in gentle remonstration. He did not know whether she wanted to conciliate the dead man because he had been wronged, or whether she wanted to give him something good to take with him because he himself had done so much wrong: he could have asked, but the barbaric idea of sending the frigid dead man on his way with a garter still warm from his daughter’s thigh constricted his throat and started all sorts of disorder in his brain.

6

THE OLD GENTLEMAN IS FINALLY LEFT IN PEACE

The short time that was available until the funeral had been filled with countless unaccustomed little tasks and passed quickly; finally, in the last half hour before the departure of the deceased, the steady arrival of callers that had run like a black thread through all the hours became a black gala. The undertaker’s men had intensified their hammering and scraping with the same earnestness as a surgeon who cannot be argued with once one has placed one’s life into his hands, and had laid, through the otherwise untouched quotidian normalcy of the rest of the house, a pathway of reverent solemnity leading from the entrance up the stairs into the room where the body lay in state. The flowers and potted plants, black cloth and crepe hangings, and silver candelabra with trembling little gold tongues of flame that received the visitors knew their assignments better than Ulrich and Agathe, who were obliged to represent the family and greet all who had come to pay their last respects to the deceased, and who scarcely knew who anyone was except when their father’s old servant inconspicuously drew their attention to particularly eminent guests. And all those who appeared glided up to them, glided away, and dropped anchor somewhere in the room, either singly or in small groups, to stand motionless and observe the brother and sister, whose faces in turn assumed masklike demeanors of grave introversion, until finally the owner of the funeral home, who may also have been in charge of the horses—the same man who had presented his printed forms to Ulrich and who during the last half hour had run up and down the stairs at least twenty times—hurried up to Ulrich in a kind of sidelong canter and, with a tactfully modulated display of his own importance, like an adjutant addressing his general on parade, informed him that everything was now ready.