Free The Tanners by Robert Walser

groups, where they remained standing, greedily
     luxuriating in the warm air’s kisses. Many coats of many people were cast aside.
     You could see the men moving more freely again, and the women had such strange
     expressions in their eyes, as though something blissful were emerging from their
     hearts. At night one heard the sound of vagabond guitars for the first time,
     and
     men and women stood amid a whirl of gaily frolicking children. The lights of
     the
     lanterns flickered like candles in quiet rooms, and when you went walking across
     the night-dark meadows, you could feel the blooming and stirring of
     the flowers. The grass would soon grow again, the trees soon begin again to pour
     their green over the low roofs of the houses and block the view from the
     windows. The forest would be luxuriant, voluptuous, heavy, oh the forest.— —
     Simon was working once more at a large commercial firm.
    This firm was a bank that enjoyed international significance, a large
     building with a palatial look to it in which hundreds of young and old, male
     and
     female people were employed. They all wrote with diligent fingers, made
     calculations using calculating machines and also sometimes their memories,
     thought using their thoughts and made themselves useful with their knowledge.
     There were any number of young, elegant letter-writing clerks who
     could speak four to seven languages. These clerks stood out from the rest of
     the
     calculating pack by virtue of their refined foreign airs. They had traveled on
     ocean liners, attended the theater in Paris and New York, visited tea houses
     in
     Yokohama and knew how to amuse themselves in Cairo. Now they were handling the
     bank’s correspondence and waited for their salaries to increase while casting
     aspersions on their homeland, which they found tiny and dingy. The calculating
     pack consisted for the most part of older individuals who clung to their posts
     large and small as if to beams and stakes. All of them had long noses from years
     of calculations and went about in threadbare, shabby, abraded, creased and
     crumpled garments. But among them were a number of intelligent individuals who
     perhaps secretly pursued strange exotic hobbies and thus led lives that, while
     quiet and isolated, were nonetheless dignified. Many of the younger clerks,
     however, were incapable of spending their free time in refined ways; mostly they
     were the offspring of rural landowners, innkeepers, farmers and craftsmen, who,
     the moment they arrived in the city, did all they could to cultivate a refined
     urban air, though they never quite succeeded, and so they failed to advance
     beyond a certain clodhopperish coarseness. Meanwhile there were also quiet
     characters with delicate manners who stood out oddly amid the louts. The bank’s
     director was an old quiet man whom no one ever saw. It seemed that the threads
     and roots of the entire monstrous enterprise lay in a tangle inside his head.
     As
     a painter thinks in colors, a musician in notes, a sculptor in stone, a baker
     in
     flour, a poet in words, and a farmer in patches of land, this man appeared to
     think in money. One good thought of his, thought at just the right moment, could
     bring in half a million in the space of half an hour. Possibly! Possibly more,
     possibly less, possibly nothing at all, and to be sure, this man must secretly
     have lost money now and then without his subordinates being any the wiser: They
     went off to lunch when the church-bell rang at noon, returned at two,
     worked another four hours, went away, slept, awoke, got up for breakfast, went
     back into the building just like before, resumed their labors, and no one knew
     a
     thing, for no one had time to learn anything at all about these mysterious
     goings-on. And the morose quiet old man went on thinking in his
     private office. For matters pertaining to his employees he had only a weak
     half-smile. This smile had something poetic,