The Case of the Lamp That Went Out. Auguste Groner

The clerk nodded and hurried away to tell his employer about the woman with the white face who came to ask for a man who, as she expressed it, “would never come there again.”

      “I don’t think she’s quite right in the head,” he volunteered. The head of the firm told him to bring the woman into the inner office.

      “Who are you, my good woman?” he asked kindly, softened by the evident agitation of this poorly though neatly dressed woman.

      “I am Mr. Winkler’s landlady,” she answered.

      “Ah! and he wants you to tell me that he’s sick? I’m afraid I can’t believe all that this gentleman says. I hope he’s not asking your help to lie to me. Are you sure that his illness is anything else but a case of being up late?”

      “I don’t think that he’ll ever be sick again—I didn’t come with any message from him, sir; please read this, sir.” And she handed him the newspaper, showing him the notice. While the gentleman was reading she added: “Mr. Winkler didn’t come home last night either.”

      Winkler’s employer read the few lines, then laid the paper aside with a very serious face. “When did you see him last?” he asked of the woman.

      “Day before yesterday in the morning. He went away about half-past eight as he usually does,” she replied. And then she added a question of her own: “Was he here day before yesterday?”

      The merchant nodded and pressed an electric bell. Then he rose from his seat and pulled up a chair for his visitor. “Sit down here. This thing has frightened you and you are no longer young.” When the servant entered, the merchant told him to ask the head bookkeeper to come to the inner office.

      When this official appeared, his employer inquired: “When did Winkler leave here day before yesterday?”

      “At six o’clock, sir, as usual.”

      “He was here all day without interruption?”

      “Yes, sir, with the exception of the usual luncheon hour.”

      “Did he have the handling of any money Monday?”

      “No, sir.”

      “Thank you, Mr. Pokorny,” said the merchant, handing his employee the evening paper and pointing to the notice which had so interested him.

      Pokorny read it, his face, like his employer’s, growing more serious. “It looks almost as if it must be Winkler, sir,” he said, in a few moments.

      “We will soon find that out. I should like to go to the police station myself with this woman; she is Winkler’s landlady—but I think it will be better for you to accompany her. They will ask questions about the man which you will be better able to answer than I.”

      Pokorny bowed and left the room. Mrs. Klingmayer rose and was about to follow, when the merchant asked her to wait a moment and inquired whether Winkler owed her anything. “I am sorry that you should have had this shock and the annoyances and trouble which will come of it, but I don’t want you to be out of pocket by it.”

      “No, he doesn’t owe me anything,” replied the honest old woman, shaking her head. A few big tears rolled down over her withered cheeks, possibly the only tears that were shed for the dead man under the elder-tree. But even this sympathetic soul could find nothing to say in his praise. She could feel pity for his dreadful death, but she could not assert that the world had lost anything by his going out of it. As if saddened by the impossibility of finding a single good word to say about the dead man, she left the office with drooping head and lagging step.

      Pokorny helped her into the cab that was already waiting before the door. The office force had got wind of the fact that something unusual had occurred and were all at the windows to see them drive off. The three clerks who worked in the department to which Winkler belonged gathered together to talk the matter over. They were none of them particularly hit by it, but naturally they were interested in the discovery in Hietzing, and equally naturally, they tried to find a few good words to say about the man whose life had ended so suddenly.

      The youngest of them, Fritz Bormann, said some kind words and was about to wax more enthusiastic, when Degenhart, the eldest clerk, cut in with the words: “Oh, don’t trouble yourself. Nobody ever liked Winkler here. He was not a good man—he was not even a good worker. This is the first time that he has a reasonable excuse for neglecting his duties.”

      “Oh, come, see here! how can you talk about the poor man that way when he’s scarcely cold in death yet,” said Fritz indignantly.

      Degenhart laughed harshly.

      “Did I ever say anything else about him while he was warm and alive? Death is no reason for changing one’s opinion about a man who was good-for-nothing in life. And his death was a stroke of good luck that he scarcely deserved. He died without a moment’s pain, with a merry thought in his head, perhaps, while many another better man has to linger in torture for weeks. No, Bormann, the best I can say about Winkler is that his death makes one nonentity the less on earth.”

      The older man turned to his desk again and the two younger clerks continued the conversation: “Degenhart appears to be a hard man,” said Fritz, “but he’s the best and kindest person I know, and he’s dead right in what he says. It was simply a case of conventional superstition. I never did like that Winkler.”

      “No, you’re right,” said the other. “Neither did I and I don’t know why, for the matter of that. He seemed just like a thousand others. I never heard of anything particularly wrong that he did.”

      “No, no more did I,” continued Bormann, “but I never heard of anything good about him either. And don’t you think that it’s worse for a man to seem to repel people by his very personality, rather than by any particular bad thing that he does?”

      “Yes. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s just how I feel about it. I had an instinctive feeling that there was something wrong about Winkler, the sort of a creepy, crawly feeling that a snake gives you.”