Free Five Women by Robert Musil Page A

young friend, laughing, bent low over too—over the kitten, over her lap. And this casual frolicking reminded Herr von Ketten of his illness, now nearly gone, as though the illness and its deathly gentleness had been transformed into that little animal's body and so were no longer merely within him, but there in the midst of them all. A serving-man said: "That cat is getting the mange."
    Herr von Ketten was astonished that he had not noticed this himself. The serving-man spoke again: "It will have to be done away with before long."
    Meanwhile, the kitten had been given a name taken from one of the fairy-tale books. It had become gentler and more sweet-natured than ever. Soon everyone began to see that it was ill and growing almost luminously weak. It spent more and more time resting in someone's lap, resting from the affairs of the world, its little claws clutching tight in mingled affection and anxiety. And now too it began to look at them, one after the other: at pale Ketten and at the young Portuguese sitting bent forward, his eyes intent on it or perhaps on the breathing movement of the lap where it lay. It looked at them all as though asking forgiveness for the ugliness of what it was about to suffer—in some myterious way for all of them. And then its martyrdom began.
    One night the vomiting began, and the little animal continued to vomit until the next morning. When daylight returned, it lay languid and dizzy as though it had been beaten over the head. Perhaps it was merely that in their excess of love for it they had given the starving kitten too much to eat. However this might be, after that it could not be kept in the bedroom, but was given to the serving-man to look after. After two days the serving-men complained that it was no better; and indeed it was probable that they had put it outside in the night. And now it not only vomited but could not hold its stool, and nothing was safe from it. And this now was an ordeal, a grim trial of strength between that almost imperceptible halo and the dreadful filth, and it was decided—since it had meanwhile been discovered whence the little creature came—to have it taken back there: to a peasant's cottage down by the river, near the foot of the hill. This was a kind of deportation, done in the hope of evading both responsibility for the animal and ridicule for all the attention they paid to it. But it weighed on their conscience, and so they also sent milk and a little meat and even money in order to make sure that the peasants, to whom dirt did not matter so much, would look after the cat properly.
    Nevertheless, the servants shook their heads over their master and mistress.
    The serving-man who had carried the kitten down recounted that it had run after him when he left and that he had had to carry it back again. Two days later it was once more up in the castle. The hounds avoided it, the servants did not dare to drive it away for fear of the master and mistress, and when the latter set eyes on it, it was tacitly agreed that nobody would now refuse to let it die up here.
    It was now very thin and lustreless, but the disgusting malady seemed to have passed off; now it was merely growing thinner all the time, losing flesh almost before their very eyes. For two days everything was, to a heightened degree, just as it had been before: there was the slow, affectionate prowling about in the refuge where it was cared for; an absent-minded smiling with the paws while striking at a scrap of paper dangled before it; sometimes a faint swaying out of weakness, in spite of having four legs to support it—and on the second day it sometimes collapsed on to its side. In a human being this process of disembodiment would not have seemed so strange, but in the animal it was like a metamorphosis into a human being. They watched it almost with awe. None of these three people, each in his or her peculiar situation, could escape the thought that it was his or her own destiny that was being