The
incessant smoking of a stout German pipe had spread upon the ceiling
and over a wretched wall-paper, scratched and defaced by the cat, a
yellowish tinge. The cat, a magnificently long-furred, fluffy animal,
the envy of all portresses, presided there like the mistress of the
house, grave and sedate, and without anxieties. On the top of an
excellent Viennese piano he sat majestically, and cast upon the
countess, as she entered, that coldly gracious look which a woman,
surprised by the beauty of another woman, might have given. He did not
move, and merely waved the two silver threads of his right whisker as
he turned his golden eyes on Schmucke.
The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted
black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys,
worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous
colors of the pipe. On the desk, a little heap of ashes showed that
the night before Schmucke had bestrode the old instrument to some
musical Walhalla. The floor, covered with dried mud, torn papers,
tobacco-dust, fragments indescribable, was like that of a boy's
school-room, unswept for a week, on which a mound of things
accumulate, half rags, half filth.
A more practised eye than that of the countess would have seen certain
other revelations of Schmucke's mode of life,--chestnut-peels,
apple-parings, egg-shells dyed red in broken dishes smeared with
sauer-kraut.
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