Gurdweill lay staring at the ceiling. Time trickled out slowly and soundlessly, monitored by distant watches scattered all over the world. There was no watch here, and no proof that time was not standing still, merging with the black night outside and the isolated snores rising here and there inside the room. Nor was there anything to show that Gurdweill himself had been here only since the previous day. Who could guarantee it? He might have been here for centuries, and there was no one to prove the opposite. In any case, he felt in his bones that he was closely connected to the people sleeping around him, that he belonged among them. And the fact that they were there with him even made him feel protected and gave him a certain sense of security. They were poor, miserably poor; they had been brought very low and were capable of anything; but at the same time they deserved to be loved and pitied, and their love and pity, too, was not to be rejected. In the life of every human being there was at least one moment when he felt an inner kinship with his fellows, whoever and wherever they were, without a single exception. Whether he felt it clearly and consciously, or dimly and elusively, like a sudden revelation that dissolved when he was on the point of grasping it — such a moment came to every man.

And Gurdweill’s thoughts passed unconsciously, without any obvious connection, to Lotte: Lotte, who had such beautiful, gentle hands, and who was burdened with some hidden pain that was eating away the marrow of her life. His heart grew very tender at the thought of her. He vaguely sensed that there was some connection between his own situation and her suffering, but the nature of this connection escaped him. Then he thought of Thea, without bitterness, without anger, but — on the contrary — with calm longing and complete reconciliation.

He glanced at the windows, which looked like black blots on the pale wall. Deep night still prevailed. ‘I should try to sleep a little longer,’ he said to himself, and closed his eyes. At that moment, however, the central-heating pipes began to boom with the same knocking noise as on the previous evening, a noise that sounded particularly irritating and intrusive now, in the sleepy silence of the room. The men began to wake up, to the accompaniment of yawns and coughs. They all got dressed with surprising haste, as if they had not a moment to waste. Gurdweill’s neighbour cast a covetous glance at his trousers, and asked him, with no signs of embarrassment whatsoever, if he had slept well.