TWO STORIES
491
learned to get along with all sorts of people. But confronted by the
phenomenon of Johannes this knowledgeable man was wholly at a
loss; he had not in fact known, he had never dreamed, that this
sort of human being exists, or existed. Also as an editor he felt,
understandably enough, no obligation to accept advice and admoni–
tion from a typesetter, even though the latter might be a hundred
years old and even though he might in ,an earlier, sentimental age
have been a celebrity, yes, even if he had been Aristotle himself. And
so the inevitable happened; after a few minutes Johannes was hastily
escorted to the door by an angry, red-faced editor and forced to
leave the office. It happened further that a half hour later in the
composing room old Johannes after setting up a quarter column
full of unheard-of errors uttered a plaintive whimper and collapsed
over his manuscript. An hour later he was dead.
The people in the composing room, so suddenly robbed of their
senior member, agreed after a brief, whispered conference to take
up a collection for a wreath to be placed on his coffin. To Herr
Stettiner, however, fell the task of composing a small notice of the
death, for after all Johannes had been, thirty or forty years before,
a kind of celebrity.
He wrote "Tragic End of a Poet"-then he remembered that
Johannes had had an odd prejudice against the word "tragic." The
strange figure of the ancient and his sudden death shortly after their
conversation had, after all, made enough impression on him to
make him feel obliged to pay the dead man some honor. Accordingly
he struck out the headline and replaced it with the words "Regrettable
Demise," suddenly found this, too, empty and inadequate, became
annoyed, pulled himself together and wrote over his notice the final
headline "One of the Old Guard."
(Translated from the German
by
Denver Lindley)
