But the music played on, it was a light, clear, splendid day, and Ulrich’s feelings swayed to and fro like the canopy that is carried in processions above the Holy of Holies. Occasionally Ulrich glanced at the windows of the hearse that was driving in front of him and saw his head with hat and shoulders reflected in them, and from time to time he would notice again on the floor of the hearse, next to the coffin with its armorial decor, the little droppings of candle wax from earlier burials that had not been properly cleaned away, and then, without any thought, he simply felt sorry for his father as he would for a dog that had been run over in the street. His eyes grew moist, and when his gaze moved beyond the black throng to the spectators by the sides of the street, they looked like freshly sprinkled flowers, and the notion that he, Ulrich, was now seeing all this and not the one who had spent all his days here, and who moreover loved ceremony much more than he did, was so strange that it seemed downright impossible to him that his father could not be among those who saw him departing from a world that he had, all in all, regarded as good. It was a deeply moving thought, but it didn’t escape Ulrich that the agent or undertaker who was leading this Catholic procession to the cemetery and keeping it in good order was a tall, muscular Jew in his thirties. He was graced with a long blond moustache, carried papers in his pocket like a tour guide, and rushed back and forth, fiddling with a horse’s harness or whispering something to the musicians. This reminded Ulrich that his father’s corpse had not been in the house on the last day and had only been returned shortly before the funeral, after being placed at the disposal of science, in accordance with a testamentary disposition inspired by the free spirit of humanistic inquiry, and it seemed rather likely that after this anatomical intervention the old gentleman had been only hastily sewed together again; whereupon, behind the windows reflecting Ulrich’s image, a haphazardly stitched-up thing rolled along as the focal point of this great, beautiful, solemn act of imagination and illusion. “With or without his medals?!” Ulrich asked himself in dismay; he had forgotten about it and did not know whether his father had even been dressed again before the closed coffin returned to the house. The fate of Agathe’s garter, too, was uncertain; it could have been found and he could imagine the jokes the students would have made. All of this was extremely embarrassing, and so the objections of the present again dissolved his feeling into many particulars, after it had, for a moment, nearly attained the smooth round wholeness of a living dream. All he felt now was the absurdity and confused vacillation of all human order and of himself. “Now I’m completely alone in the world,” he thought. “A mooring rope has snapped. I’m rising!” It was in this thought, which recalled the sensation he had felt on receiving the news of his father’s death, that his feeling now clothed itself as he walked on between the walls of the watching crowd.