Read The Tanners for Free Online Page B

employers always had the decency to wish me luck with my
     future endeavors. With you, sir, in your bookshop (and here the young man’s
     voice grew suddenly confiding), I will surely be able to last for years and
     years. And in any case, many things speak in favor of your giving me a try.”
     The
     bookseller said: “Your candor pleases me, I shall let you work in my shop for
     a
     one-week trial period. If you perform well and seem inclined to stay,
     then we can discuss it further.” With these words, which signaled the young
     man’s dismissal, the old man at the same time rang an electric bell, whereupon,
     as if arriving on the gusts of a strong wind, a small, elderly, bespectacled
     man
     appeared.
    “Give this young man something to do!”
    The spectacles nodded. With this, Simon became an assistant
     bookseller. Simon—for that was his name.
    At around this same time, Professor Klaus, a brother of Simon’s who
     lived in a historic capital where he’d made a name for himself, had begun to
     worry about his younger brother’s behavior. A good, quiet, dutiful person, he
     would dearly have loved to see his brothers find the firm
     respect-commanding ground beneath their feet in life that he, the
     eldest, had. But this was so utterly not the case, at least till now, in fact
     it
     was so very much the opposite, that Professor Klaus began to reproach himself
     in
     his heart. He told himself, for example: “I should have been a person who would
     long since have had every opportunity to lead my brothers to the right path.
     Until now I’ve failed to do so. How could I have neglected these duties, etc.”
     Dr. Klaus knew thousands of duties, small and large, and sometimes it seemed
     as
     if he were longing to have even more of them. He was one of those people who
     feel so compelled to fulfill duties that they go plunging into great collapsing
     edifices constructed entirely of disagreeable duties simply out of the fear that
     some secret, inconspicuous duty might somehow elude them. They cause themselves
     to experience many a troubled hour because of these unfulfilled duties—never
     stopping to consider how one duty always piles a second one upon the person
     undertaking the first—and they believe they’ve already fulfilled something like
     a duty just by being made anxious and uneasy by any dark inkling of its
     presence. They meddle in many an affair that—if they’d stop to think about it
     in
     a less anxious way—hasn’t a blessed thing to do with them, and they wish to see
     others as worry-laden as themselves. They tend to cast envious glances
     upon naïve unencumbered people, and then criticize them for being frivolous
     characters since they move through life so gracefully, their heads held so
     easily aloft. Dr. Klaus often forced himself to entertain a certain small modest
     sensation of insouciance, but always he would return again to his gray dreary
     duties, in the thrall of which he languished as in a dark prison. Perhaps, back
     when he was still young, he’d once felt a desire to stop, but he’d lacked the
     strength to leave undone something that resembled a nagging duty and couldn’t
     just walk past it with a dismissive smile. Dismissive? Oh, he never dismissed
     anything at all! Attempting this—or so it seemed to him—would have split him
     in
     twain from bottom to top; he’d have been incapable of avoiding painful
     recollections of what he’d cast aside and dismissed. He never dismissed or
     discarded anything at all, and he was wasting his young life analyzing and
     examining things utterly unworthy of examination, study, attention or love. Thus
     he’d grown older, but since he was by no means anything like a person devoid
     of
     sensibility and imagination, he often also reproached himself bitterly for
     neglecting the duty of being at least a little happy. This was yet another
     neglect of duty, a new one, which with perfect acuity demonstrated that the