What kept him composed was the fact that in the opposition camp, men likewise got up to blubber incoherencies. As a result of this, the conference sometimes became downright lively, and no one let the other finish speaking. Quantus Negatus observed what the female speakers did: In this chaotic din of masculine clamor, they smiled in silence and it seemed to him that they gave a plaintive sign. Then each time a corpulently hefty young man with a wide face and a thick head of hair got up and gave off a veritable booming phenomenon of voice, he in turn was interrupted by loud exclamations that made little sense, but in one burst swept twenty contentious voices over the crowd, so that in the silence that followed you could once again hear the interrupted female speakers. “That’s a man!” Negatus thought, flattered at first. But when he reflected more upon it, in the mood he was in at that moment, he realized that a powerful voice was after all just another sensual phenomenon, like a long pigtail or an opulent bosom had been in his youth. These thoughts, so foreign to his usual way of thinking, tired him out. He was more than a little bit tempted to leave his party in the lurch and sneak out of the gathering. Dark memories from his high school days stirred in him: the Amazons? “What a topsy-turvy world!” he thought. But then he also thought: “How curious it is, for once to imagine a topsy-turvy world. It provides a certain change of pace.” This train of thought made him feel confident again; there was a certain boldness in it, a candid manly curiosity. “How dark is the future of civilization!” he thought. “I am a man, but that will finally mean something very feminine, if we don’t soon return to an age of true men!” But when the issue was brought to a vote he sided after all with the reaction.
The opposition was defeated; the conference came to an end. Quantus stirred awake, and with a courtly bad conscience, his eyes searched for those of his tenacious female opponents. But they were just then in the process of powdering their faces and had pulled out their little silver mirrors. With the same unerring detachment with which before they uttered such deadly words, they now applied their powder. Quantus was astonished. And his last, albeit still highly disconcerted, thought upon leaving was this: “Why do comely male heads trouble themselves over such useless thoughts?!”
Children’s Story
Mr. Hiff, Mr. Haff, and Mr. Huff went out hunting together. And because it was autumn, nothing grew in the fields; nothing but earth that had been so loosened by the plough that their boots got brown all the way up to the leg. There was an awful lot of earth all around, nothing but still brown waves as far as the eye could see; sometimes one of those waves wore a cross on its crest, or a saint or a deserted pathway; it was very lonesome.
As they stepped back down into a hollow, the gentlemen spotted a hare, and because it was the first animal they had seen all day, all three raised their rifles quickly to their cheeks and fired. Mr. Hiff aimed over his right boot toe, Mr. Huff over his left, and Mr. Haff aimed right between his two boots, for the hare sat about the same distance from each of them and looked up in their direction. Now the three shots raised a terrible thunder, the three bits of buckshot rattled through the air like three clouds of hail, and the ground exploded in dust; but once nature had recovered from this shock, the hare lay there in the heap of pepper and moved no more. Only nobody knew now to whom he belonged, for all three had shot him at the same time. Mr. Hiff called out already from afar, “If the hare’s hit on the right, he’s mine” because he shot from the left; Mr. Huff maintained the same, but from the opposite side; but Mr. Haff argued that the hare could still have pivoted at the last moment, which could however only be established if he had been shot in the breast or the back: but then, and in any case, however, they realized that it was impossible to decide where the hare had been hit, and started arguing anew about whose hare he was.
Then the hare politely raised himself upright and said: “Gentlemen, if you can’t decide the matter among yourselves, then I’ll take the liberty of still being alive! For I fell, as I now realize, from the mere shock of it.”
Then Mr. Hiff and Mr. Haff were, as we say, all in a huff, which in the case of Mr. Huff naturally goes without saying. But the hare proceeded unperturbed. He regarded them with big, hysterical eyes — probably, after all, because death has grazed his hide — and began to tell the hunters their fortunes. “Gentlemen, I can prophecy your end,” he said, “if only you let me live! You, Mr. Hiff, will in as soon as seven years and three months be mowed down by death in the form of a bull’s horns; and Mr. Haff will grow very old, but I see an awfully grisly end for you — something — well, it isn’t so easy to talk about.” He paused and regarded Haff with a look of concern, then snapped out of it and rattled quickly: “But Mr. Huff will choke on a peach pit, that’s simple.”
Then the hunters turned pale, and the wind howled over this lonely place. But as the gun barrels still rattled in the wind against their legs, their fingers loaded up their guns again, and they said: “How can you know what hasn’t happened yet, you liar!”
“The bull that is supposed to spear me in seven years,” said Mr. Hiff, “isn’t even born yet; how can he spear me if he may never be born!?”
And Mr. Huff consoled himself in this way, saying: “All I have to do is not eat any more peaches, and already you’re a swindler!”
But Mr. Haff just said: “Well, well!”
The hare replied: “You gentlemen can make of this what you will; it won’t do you any good.”
Then the hunters made ready to trample the hare to death with their boots, and yelled: “No hare is going to make us superstitious!!” But in that instant an ugly old hag came walking by, carrying a load of kindling, and the hunters had to spit three times quickly so as to ward off the evil eye.
Then the hag, who had noticed what they’d done, grew angry and cried back: “Yas tink I couldn’ toin der heads in de old days!” No one could say for sure where her accent was from; but it sounded an awful lot like the dialect of Hell.
The hare took advantage of this opportunity to escape.
The hunters thundered after him with their rifles, but the hare was no more to be seen, and the old hag had also disappeared, though they thought they heard a wild cackle above the sound of the three shots.
Then Mr. Haff wiped the sweat off his brow and shivered.
Mr. Hiff said: “Let’s go home.”
And Mr. Huff was already bounding up the hill.
When they got to the stone cross up on the top of the hill though, they felt safe in its proximity and took a rest.
“We made fools of ourselves,” said Mr. Huff, “— it was an absolutely ordinary hare.”
“But he spoke to us —” said Mr. Haff.