Herr Carovius was a regular customer at the Crocodile Inn; a table was
always reserved for him. Around it there assembled every noon the
following companions: Solicitor of the Treasury Korn, assistant
magistrate Hesselberger, assistant postmaster Kitzler, apothecary
Pflaum, jeweller Gruendlich, and baker Degen. Judge Kleinlein also joined
them occasionally as a guest of honour.
They gossiped about their neighbours, their acquaintances, their
friends, and their colleagues. What they said ran the whole gamut of
human emotions from an innocent anecdote up to venomous calumny. Not a
single event was immune from malicious backstairs comment. Reputations
were sullied without discrimination; objections were taken to the
conduct of every living soul; every family was shown to have its
skeleton in the closet.
When the luncheon was finished, the men all withdrew and went about
their business, with the exception of Herr Carovius. He remained to read
the papers. For him it was one of the most important hours of the day.
Having feasted his ears with friends in private, he now turned to a
study of the follies, transgressions, and tragedies that make up
everyday life.
He read three papers every day: one was a local sheet, one a great
Berlin daily, and the third a paper published in Hamburg. He never
deviated; it was these three, week in and week out. And he read them
from beginning to end; politics, special articles, and advertisements
were of equal concern to him. In this way he familiarised himself with
the advance of civilisation, the changes civic life was undergoing, and
the general status of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat.
Nothing escaped him. He was as much interested in the murder of a
peasant in a Pommeranian village as he was in the loss of a pearl
necklace on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. He read with equal
concentration of the sinking of a steamer in the South Sea and the
wedding of a member of the Royal Family in Westminster Abbey. He could
work up just as much enthusiasm over the latest fashions as he could
over the massacring of enslaved Armenians by the Turks. If he read with
care and reflection of the death of a leading citizen, he pursued the
same course with regard to the reprehending of a relatively harmless
vagabond.
It is only fair to remark, however, that his real sympathy was with
those events that have to be entered on the calamitous side of life's
ledger. This was due to a bizarre kink in his philosophy: he studied the
world primarily from the point of view of its wars, earthquakes, floods,
hailstorms, cyclones, and public and private tragedies in the lives of
men. Happy and reassuring events, such as the birth of a healthy child,
the conferring of an order of distinction, heroic deeds, the winning of
a prize in the lottery, the publication of a good book, or the
announcement of a legitimate and successful speculation made no
impression on him. At times they even annoyed him. He kept his mind, in
other words, riveted on the evils, sorrows, woes, and tribulations that
come to pass either on this earth or in the starry firmament above, and
that were somehow brought to his attention.
His brain was a storehouse of fearful and ferocious happenings; it was a
catalogue, an inventory of disease, seduction, theft, robbery, larceny,
assassination, murder, catastrophe, pest, incest, suicide, duel,
bankruptcy, and the never failing family quarrel.
If he chanced to enrich his collection by the addition of some
especially curious or unheard-of incident, he took out his pocket diary,
noted the date, and then wrote: "In Amberg a preacher had a hemorrhage
while delivering his morning sermon." Or: "In Cochin China a tiger
killed and ate fourteen children, and then, forcing its way into the
bungalow of a settler, bit off the head of a woman as she was sleeping
peacefully by the side of her husband." Or: "In Copenhagen a former
actress, now ninety years old, mounted a huge vegetable basket on the
market place, and recited Lady Macbeth's monologue. Her unconventional
behaviour attracted such a large crowd of passersby that several people
were crushed to death in the excitement."
This done, he would go home, happy as a man can be. To idlers standing
in the doorways or servants looking out the windows he would extend the
greetings of the day, and that with really conspicuous cordiality.
If a fire broke out in the city, he was present. As his eyes peered into
the flames, they seemed intoxicated, obsessed, seized with uncanniness.
He would hum a tune of some sort, look into the anxious faces of those
immediately concerned, busy himself with whatever had been salvaged, and
attempt to force his gratuitous advice on the fire chief.
If a prominent citizen died, he never failed to attend the funeral, and,
where possible, to join the procession on the way to the cemetery. He
would stand by the grave with bowed head, and take in every word of the
funeral discourse. But his lips twitched in a peculiar fashion, as if he
felt that he were understood, and flattered.
And in truth all this did flatter him. The defeat, distress, and death
of other people, the betrayals that take place in any community, the
highhanded injustice of those in power, the oppression of the poor, the
violence that was done to right and righteousness, and the sufferings
which had to be borne by thousands day after day, all this flattered
him; it interested him; it lulled him into a comfortable feeling of
personal security.
But then he sat down at his piano at home, and played an adagio of
Beethoven or an impromptu by Schubert, his eyes with fine frenzy rolling
in the meantime. And when the mighty chorus in a Bach oratorio
resounded, he became pale with ecstasy. At the hearing of a good song
well sung he could shed copious tears.
He idolised music.
He was a provincial with unfettered instincts. He was an agitator with a
tendency to conservatism. He was a Nero without servants, without power,
and without land. He was a musician from despair and out of vanity. He
was a Nero in our own day.
He was the Nero of our day living in three rooms. He was a lonely
bachelor and a bookworm. He exchanged his views with the corner grocer;
he discussed city ordinances with the night watchman; he was a tyrant
through and through and a hangman at heart; he indulged in
eavesdropping at the shrine of fate, and in this way concocted the most
improbable of combinations and wanton deeds of violence; he was
constantly on the lookout for misfortune, litigation, and shame; he
rejoiced at every failure, and was delighted with oppression, whether
at home or abroad. He hung with unqualified joy on the imagined ruins of
imaginary disaster, and took equal pleasure in the actual debacles of
life as it was lived about him. And alongside of this innate and at
times unexpressed gruesomeness and bloodthirstiness, he was filled with
a torturing passion for music. This was Herr Carovius. Such was his
life.