Free Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig

to go a couple of streets away to buy more at his sweetheart Dolly’s shop, but he dared not leave the house for fear of his lord and master, a hot-tempered man. George Frideric Handel had come home from rehearsal in a towering rage, his face bright red from the blood that had risen to it, the veins standing out like thick cords at his temples. He had slammed the front door of the house and now, as the servant could hear, he was marching up and down on the first floor so vigorously that the ceiling shook; it was unwise to be negligent in his service on days when he was in such a fury.
    So the servant was seeking diversion from his boredom by puffing not elegant rings of blue smoke from his short clay pipe, but soap bubbles. He had mixed a little bowl of soapsuds and was amusing himself by blowing the brightly coloured bubbles out of the window and into the street. Passers-by stopped, bursting a bubble here and there with their canes in jest, they laughed and waved, but they showed no surprise. For anything might be expected of this house in Brook Street; the harpsichord might suddenly play loud music by night, you might hear prima donnas weeping andsobbing as the choleric German, falling into a berserk rage, uttered threats against them for singing an eighth of a tone too high or too low. The neighbours in Grosvenor Square had long considered Number 25 Brook Street a madhouse.
    The servant blew his bright bubbles silently and persistently. After a while his skills visibly improved; the marbled bubbles grew ever larger and more thin-skinned, they rose higher and higher, floating more lightly through the air, and one even sailed over the low roof ridge of the house opposite. Then he suddenly gave a start of alarm, for a dull thud made the whole house shake. Glasses clinked, curtains swayed; something massive and heavy must have fallen on the floor above.
    The manservant jumped up and raced upstairs to the study. The armchair in which his master sat to work was empty, the room itself was empty, and the servant was about to hurry into the bedroom when he saw Handel lying motionless on the floor, his eyes open and staring; and now, as the servant stood stock still in his initial panic, he heard heavy, stertorous breathing. The strong man was lying on his back groaning, or rather the groans were forcing their way out of him in short and increasingly weak grunts.
    He’s dying, thought the frightened servant, and he quickly knelt down to help the semi-conscious Handel. He tried to raise him and carry him to the sofa, but the huge man’s body was too heavy, too great a burden. So he simply loosened the neckcloth constricting Handel’s throat, and the stertorous breathing at once died away.
    And now up from the floor below came Christof Schmidt, the master’s secretary and assistant, who had just been copyingout some arias. He too had been alarmed by the heavy fall. The two of them raised the weight of the man—his arms dangled limp, like the arms of a dead corpse—and laid him on the sofa with his head raised. “Undress him,” Schmidt ordered the servant. “I’ll run for the doctor. And splash water on him until he comes round.”
    Christof Schmidt ran out without his coat, wasting no time, and hurried down Brook Street towards Bond Street, waving to all the coaches that trotted sedately by and took no notice at all of the stout, panting man in his shirtsleeves. At last one of them stopped. Lord Chandos’s coachman had recognized Schmidt, who flung open the carriage door, ignoring all the rules of etiquette. “Handel is dying!” he cried out to the duke, whom he knew to be a great lover of music and his beloved master’s best patron. “I must find a doctor.” The duke immediately told him to get into the coach, the horses were given a sharp taste of the whip, and they went to fetch Dr Jenkins from a room in Fleet Street where he was earnestly studying a urine sample. But he immediately drove with Schmidt to Brook