The Wish

In the old doctor's bedroom, a cheerful fire was flickering. He himself still lay a-bed, quite penetrated by the delightful sensation of a man who knows his life's work is completed. When one has been sitting half a century through, for twelve long hours every day, in the rumbling conveyance of a country doctor, thumped and bumped along over stones and lumps of clay, one may now and again lie in bed till daylight, especially when one knows one's work is safe in younger hands. He stretched and straightened his stiff old limbs, and once more buried in the pillows his weather-beaten, yellowish-grey face, covered with white stubble like granite with Iceland moss. But habit, that austere mistress, who had for so many years driven him forth from his bed before dawn, whether it was necessary or not, would not let him rest even now. He sighed, he yawned, he abused his laziness, and then reached for the bell standing on the little table at his bedside. His housekeeper, an equally grey, tumble-down specimen of humanity, appeared on the threshold. «What time is it, Frau Liebetreu?» he called out to her. Since the day on which the young assistant arrived in Gromowo, the old Black Forest clock hanging at the doctor's bedside, and whose rattling alarm had often unpleasantly jarred upon his morning slumbers, was no longer wound up. «So that I know that my life too henceforth stands still,» as he was wont to say.