This Month's Installment
When he set out on the way back, the moon had disappeared from the sky, a faint, pale streak announced already the incipient daybreak. Without stopping, he proceeded homewards. The "Sea Star" lay before him, shrouded in dark gray. But out of the room on the first floor, light still shone through the closed shutters. What could the two up there still have? More and more the mysteries that surrounded them grew.
But he didn't think about them for long, he had become dead tired, quickly got undressed in his room, and slept until the next morning, a bright Sunday.
For a few more days he enjoyed his stay with unspoilt pleasure. Until suddenly and quite abruptly the hour came when he became weary of this life of lavish
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idleness, of these incessantly streaming torrents of polished people, when because of the high-strung culture, he longed to be back in the quietly modest nature, and even the wonderful sea no longer gave him the reviving and refreshment it had so far given. On a beach hike, the yearning for the East Prussian fields and woods overcame him with such irresistible force, that he would have liked to leave on the very same day in order to spend the short remainder of his vacation in Bärwalde.
It had become lunchtime, and he returned to the "Seastar."
But even at the entrance he hesitated.
The people weren't resting as usual, waiting for the bell call for dinner in their deckchairs in the hall or walking in carpet-covered corridors, festively dressed for the great meal. Everywhere a noticeable restlessness: in the expressions, in the movements, in all the air around him. Here one hurried past an-other carelessly, there stood one, speaking lively, shaking his head, and guiding the most intense movements with his arms and hands. Even the English siblings, who had up till now kept their calm and dignity impertubably in every situation, today appeared to be overcome with the general fever. He saw them standing in the middle of a group of a few Poles, outlining the whole circle in the air with gestures, taking part in the loud, almost passionately led conversation.
Now the young Frenchman also joined with his wife. They had exchanged a few polite words quite often. Today they greeted coolly and solemnly. And she didn't even have a silk dress on, and he appeared without a dinner jacket. That
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had not yet occurred up till now. What had happened?
There came the German guests, they too in excited conversation. Immediately, one word from it rang out to him. And it was "war."
"Austria had placed an ultimatum against Serbia," a Danzig business explained to him.
The day passed in feverish tension. One thought of nothing, spoke of nothing but the war.
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
Instead of translating "das englische Geschwisterpaar, das seine Ruhe und Gemessenheit... bewahrt hatte" as "the English sibling pair, who had kept its calm and dignity," which - while accurate and literal - is a bit awkward because it describes a pair of people with "its," I translated it as "the English siblings, who had kept their calm and dignity." I want especially to point out that I avoided the pernicious use of the singular "their." The pronoun and antecedent in the German are both singular ("das Geschwisterpaar" "seine"); I simply made them both plural while retaining the same sense ("the siblings" "their").This is the end of chapter sixteen and the beginning of chapter seventeen.
Since Austria's ultimatum to Serbia is a historical fact, I can now determine the book's chronological setting more precisely. The day described here is 23 July 1914.
