Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
They took turns too at the microscope, examined, with one eye placed to
the lens, a malignant secretion, a piece of blue-stained tissue stuck on
a slide, with tiny spots showing near the big patch. The spots were
bacilli. Klaus Heinrich wanted Miss Spoelmann to take the first turn at
the microscope, but she declined, knitting her brows and pouting, as
much as to say: "On no account whatever." So he took the precedence, for
it seemed to him that it really did not matter who got the first look at
such serious and fearful things as bacilli. And after this they were
conducted up to the second story, to the infants.
They both laughed at the chorus of squalls which reached their ears
while they were still on the stairs. And then they went with their party
through the ward between the beds, bent, side by side over the
bald-headed little creatures, sleeping with closed fists or screaming
with all their might and showing their naked gums--they stopped their
ears and laughed again. In a kind of oven, warmed to a moderate heat lay
a new-born baby.
And Doctor Sammet showed his distinguished guests a pauper baby with the
grey look of a corpse and hideous big hands, the sign of a
miscarriage.... He lifted a squealing baby out of its cot, and it at
once stopped screaming. With the touch of an expert he rested the limp
head in the hollow of his hand and showed the little red creature
blinking and twitching spasmodically to the two--Klaus Heinrich and Miss
Spoelmann, who stood side by side and looked down at the infant. Klaus
Heinrich stood watching with his heels together as Doctor Sammet laid
the baby back in its cot, and when he turned round he met Miss
Spoelmann's searching gaze, as he had expected.
Finally they walked to one of the three windows of the ward and looked
out over the squalid suburb, down into the street where, surrounded by
children, the brown Court carriage and Imma's smart dark-red motor car
stood one behind the other. The Spoelmanns' chauffeur, shapeless in his
fur coat, was leaning back in his seat with one hand on the
steering-wheel of the powerful car, and watched his companion, the
footman in white, trying to start a conversation, by the carriage in
front, with Klaus Heinrich's coachman.
"Our neighbours," said Doctor Sammet, holding back the white net curtain
with one hand, "are the parents of our patients. Late in the evening the
tipsy fathers roll shouting by. Yes."
They stood and listened, but Doctor Sammet said nothing further about
the fathers and so they broke off, as they had now seen everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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