154
PARTISAN REVIEW
peared at the window, and all that time Alfred had been somewhat
inattentive to his lectures and had spent more time at Burkhardt's.
But strangely enough, he had not really been fond of Greta-children,
in general, made
him
shy-and he had even found himself wishing
that the ritual had never been established since once it had been, it
had to be repeated every day without fail for his complete peace of
mind. He was even annoyed if the cat did not appear at the window
or if it appeared without its ribbon.
But what he would not give for Greta now! With a perversity
which he acknowledged frankly, he imagined that he had been de–
voted to her, that he had called her pet names and had dandled her
on
his
knee. And that
his
relationship with her mother had been in–
timate. He could even long for the irascible porter at the medical
Gollege, for the torpid
Badmeistert
at the public baths who invariably
tried to give him a towel which someone else had just finished using.
All these people whom he had known slightly or not at all seemed,
in his misshapen reflection, to be
his
friends . .
Dr. Pakheiser was not given to self-pity. A scientific man, he
looked on facts. He knew that the
Badmeister
had no more been
his
friend than was Mrs. Horvath and that, in the end, Greta was the
only one who had that stature. And just so now, twenty years later,
he had again one friend, one companion, a solitary daily relation with
a breathing creature. His companion was a grey tom-cat who called
on him each evening with the same ·unswerving regularity that had
brought the little girl to the window every morning. The cat came at
seven o'clock, announcing himself with a trilling mew outside the
door. He drank the heavy cream his host had poured into a bowl for
him and then he spent the evening, until about midnight, curled up
in the doctor's lap, asleep. Two or three times in the course of the
evening, he roused himself to make an excursion round the room,
cleverly picking his way through the decanters, patting the trailing
leaves of the philodendron to watch them sway. He washed a little
and returned and slept again. Half-roused by the turning of a page
or the sound of a match being struck, he would briefly purr as if to
say that
his
affection had not lessened, that he was merely preoc–
cupied. At midnight, Dr. Pakheiser took him downstairs, dropped
him on the veranda and watched him, revived by the night air, streak
across the lawn and disappear over the wall.
The doctor called him Milenka which in Russian, of which he
knew a few words, means "darling." He knew too
littl~
Russian,
even, to affix the masculine diminutive. "Milenka," he would say,
"I-yi-yi-yi, bad puss! Bad boy. Ah, Milenka!" Milenka was an or-
