486
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the tradition and practice of language which are still holy in
your eyes, then I have a proposal to make: Give up this irksome
and thankless work.-Wait a moment, let me finish. You're afraid
you'll lose your daily bread? Not at all, that would make us bar–
barians! No, there's no question of going hungry. You have old-age
insurance, and over and above that our company- I give you my
word-will grant you a lifetime pension so that you can be perma–
nently sure of the same income you have now." He was pleased with
himself. This solution, of granting a pension, had only occurred to
him while he was talking.
"Well, what do you say to that?" he asked smiling.
Johannes could not reply immediately. During the kind gentle–
man's last words his aged child's face had taken on an expression of
dreadful apprehensiveness, his faded lips had gone completely white,
his eyes stared, fixed and helpless. Only gradually did he regain con–
trol of himself. His chief regarded him with disappointment. And so
the old man began to speak, he spoke very quietly but with tremen–
dous and anxious urgency, passionately striving to give the right,
the persuasive, the irresistible expression of his cause. Little red spots
appeared and disappeared on his forehead and cheeks; there was a
desperate plea in his eyes, in the crooked angle of his head, for a
hearing, for mercy; his wrinkled neck twisted, long, beseeching and
ardent, out of the wide collar of
his
shirt. Johannes said:
"Please forgive me, sir, for having troubled you. I will not do
it again, never again. It was done in a good cause, but I realize
now that I have been a bother to you. I realize too that you cannot
help me, the wheel runs over us all. But for God's sake don't take
away my work! You reassure me on the subject of going hungry–
but that's something I have never feared! I will even be glad to work
for smaller wages; no doubt I am no longer very efficient. But leave
me my work, leave me my chance to serve, otherwise you kill me!"
And very softly, with glowing eyes, hoarse and intense, he went on:
"I have nothing at all but this service, it is the one thing that makes
me want to live! Oh, Herr Doktor, how could you make this dread–
ful proposal, you the only one left who knows me, who still knows
who I once was!"
The editor endeavored to quiet the man's alarming excitement
by patting him repeatedly on the shoulder to the accompaniment of
