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Page 44
"Come and lend a hand," said the doctor.
The dead man was lifted up; they laid him on a sofa in a corner of
the room, and the nearest gas-jets were put out.
Madame Virginie was still standing up; her face was chalk-white,
and she held her little soft hand pressed against her breast. They
carried him right past the buffet. The doctor had seized him under
the back, so that his waistcoat slipped up and a piece of his fine
white shirt appeared.
She followed with her eyes the slender, supple limbs she knew so
well, and continued to stare towards the dark corner.
Most of the guests went away in silence. A couple of young men
entered noisily from the street; a waiter ran towards them and
said a few words. They glanced towards the corner, buttoned their
coats, and plunged out again into the fog.
The half-darkened cafe was soon empty; only some of Alphonse's
nearest friends stood in a group and whispered. The doctor was
talking with the proprietor, who had now appeared on the scene.
The waiters stole to and fro, making great circuits to avoid the
dark corner. One of them knelt and gathered up the fragments of
the glass on a tray. He did his work as quietly as he could; but
for all that it made too much noise.
"Let that alone until by and by," said the host, softly.
Leaning against the chimney-piece, Charles looked at the dead man.
He slowly tore the folded paper to pieces, while he thought of his
friend.
HOPES
BY
FREDERIKA BREMER
The Translation by Mary Howitt.
HOPES
BY
FREDERIKA BREMER
I had a peculiar method of wandering without very much pain along
the stormy path of life. Although, in a physical as well as in a
moral sense, I wandered almost barefoot,-I HOPED, hoped from day
to day; in the morning my hopes rested on evening, in the evening
on the morning; in the autumn; upon the spring, in spring upon the
autumn; from this year to the next, and this amid mere hopes, I
had passed through nearly thirty years of my life, without, of all
my privations, painfully perceiving the want of anything but whole
boots. Nevertheless, I consoled myself easily for this out of
doors in the open air but in a drawing-room it always gave me an
uneasy manner to have to turn the heels, as being the part least
torn, to the front. Much more oppressive was it to me, truly, that
I could in the abodes of misery only console with kind words.
I comforted myself, like a thousand others, by a hopeful glance
upon the rolling wheel of fortune, and with the philosophical
remark, "When the time comes, comes the counsel."
As a poor assistant to a country clergyman with a narrow income
and meagre table, morally becoming mouldy in the company of the
scolding housekeeper, of the willingly fuddled clergyman, of a
foolish young gentleman and the daughters of the house, who, with
high shoulders and turned-in toes, went from morning to night
paying visits, I felt a peculiarly strange emotion of tenderness
and joy as one of my acquaintance informed me by writing, that my
uncle, the Merchant P---in Stockholm, to me personally unknown,
now lay dying, and in a paroxysm of kindred affection had inquired
after his good-for-nothing nephew.
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