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old woodcuts depicting frenzied dances in times of plague, and then,
again, of flocks of birds which, sensing a coming earthquake,
fly round and round in silent, instinctive fear.
    Car after car screeched to a halt outside the circus, and the
occupants scurried into the tent as if it were a matter of life and death: bejewelled ladies with delicate features; French baronesses who had become flues de joie; slim, refined Englishwomen, the creme de la creme and now arm-in-arm with some
hyena from the stock-market who had m ade a fortune overnight;
and Russian princesses, every fibre of their bodies twitching
with nervous exhaustion: all trace of aristocratic sangfroid had
disappeared, washed away by the waves of a cultural deluge.

    Like the portent of the approach of an age of doom, there
came at intervals from the interior of the tent, sometimes fearfully close and loud, sometimes stifled by heavy curtains, the
harsh, long-drawn-out bellowing of wild beasts, whilst an acrid
stench of big cats, perfume, raw flesh and horse sweat wafted
out onto the street.
    A contrasting image was released from Hauberrisser’s memory and appeared before his inner eye: a bear behind the bars of
a travelling menagerie, chained by the left paw, the embodiment
of utter desperation as it danced from one leg to the other, constantly, day after day, month after month - even year after year
as Hauberrisser saw when he came across the menagerie in a
fairground years later.
    `Why didn’t you buy its freedom!’ The thought reverberated
through his brain, a thought he had ignored a hundred times
already, but which still ambushed him, still burnt in his mind
with a fire of self-reproach as intense and unquenchable as when
it first appeared; it was a dwarf of a thought, tiny and insignificant compared with the gigantic sins of omission that form an
unbroken chain through a man’s life, and yet it was the only one
that time could not subdue.
    `The shades of all tortured and murdered creatures have
cursed us, their blood cries out for revenge.’ For a heartbeat
Hauberrisser’s mind was filled with a confused vision, `Woe to
mankind if, on Judgment Day, there is the soul of one single
horse among the council of the accusers: why did I not set it
free?’ How often had he not bitterly reproached himself for it,
and how often had he not stifled the reproach with the argument
that the liberation of the bear would have been as inconsequential as the fall of one grain of sand in the desert. But - he
quickly surveyed his past life - had he ever done anything that was of more consequence? He had spent his youth not in the
sunshine, but in colleges and libraries, learning how to build
machines, and he had spent his manhood building machines that
had long since rusted away, instead of helping others to enjoy
the sunshine; he had made his own contribution to the pointlessness of existence.

    He fought his way through the jostling throng until he came
to a less crowded square where he called a cab and asked to be
driven out into the country.
    He suddenly felt a thirst for all the summer days he had
wasted.
    How slowly the wheels rumbled over the cobbles! And the
sun was already beginning to go down! His impatience to reach
the open countryside merely made him more irritated.
    There, at last, was the rich green of the fields, cut up as far as
the eye could see into a chequerboard by the grid of brown
drainage ditches, and on the green squares thousands of speckled cows with a rug on their backs to protect them against the
cool of the evening, and among them the Dutch dairymaids with
their white caps fastened to their hair by brass spirals and their
gleaming pails; when the scene was finally before his eyes it was
like the image on a huge, pale-blue soap-bubble, and all the
windmills with their sails were like the first black crosses signifying the coming of eternal night.
    He wandered along narrow pathways beside the