The street boys who stood nearest stared and consulted.  Through the shining, black window-panes their glances penetrated no further than to the white lace curtains.  One of the boys climbed up on the vines and pressed his face against the pane.  “What do you see?” whispered the others.  “What do you see?” The shoemaker’s shop and the shoemaker’s bench, grease-pots and bundles of leather, lasts and pegs, rings and straps.  “Don’t you see anybody?” He sees the apprentice, who is repairing a shoe.  Nobody else, nobody else?  Big, black flies crawl over the pane and make his sight uncertain.  “Do you see nobody except the apprentice?” Nobody.  The master’s chair is empty.  He looked once, twice, three times; the master’s chair was empty.

The crowd stood still, guessing and wondering.  So it was true; the old shoemaker had absconded.  Nobody would believe it.  They stood and waited for a sign.  The cat came out on the steep roof.  He stretched out his claws and slid down to the gutter.  Yes, the master was away, the cat could hunt as he pleased.  The sparrows fluttered and chirped, quite helpless.

A white chicken looked round the corner of the house.  He was almost full-grown.  His comb shone red as wine.  He peered and spied, crowed and called.  The hens came, a row of white hens at full speed, bodies rocking, wings fluttering, yellow legs like drumsticks.  The hens hopped among the stacked peas.  Battles began.  Envy broke out.  A hen fled with a full pea-pod.  Two cocks pecked her in the neck.  The cat left the sparrow nests to look on.  Plump, there he fell down in the midst of the flock.  The hens fled in a long, scurrying line.  The crowd thought:  “It must be true that the shoemaker has run away.  One can see by the cat and the hens that the master is away.”

The uneven street, muddy from the autumn rains, resounded with talk.  Doors stood open, windows swung.  Heads were put together in wondering whisperings.  “He has run off.”  The people whispered, the sparrows chirped, the wooden shoes clattered:  “He has run away.  The old shoemaker has run away.  The owner of the little house, the young wife’s husband, the father of the beautiful child, he has run away.  Who can understand it? who can explain it?”

There is an old song:  “Old husband in the cottage; young lover in the wood; wife, who runs away, child who cries; home without a mistress.”  The song is old.  It is often sung.  Everybody understands it.

This was a new song.  The old man was gone.  On the workshop table lay his explanation, that he never meant to come back.  Beside it a letter had also lain.  The wife had read it, but no one else.

The young wife was in the kitchen.  She was doing nothing.  The neighbors went backwards and forwards, arranging busily, set out the cups, made up the fire, boiled the coffee, wept a little and wiped away the tears with the dish-towel.

The good women of the quarter sat stiffly about the walls.  They knew what was suitable in a house of mourning.  They kept silent by force, mourned by force.  They celebrated their holiday by supporting the forsaken wife in her grief.  Coarse hands lay quiet in their laps, weather-beaten skin lay in deep wrinkles, thin lips were pressed together over toothless jaws.