master, and was quite willing
to come to terms, in other words, who taught for what he could get.

Once a week, then, for the rest of the summer, Maurice climbed the
steep, winding stair of the house in the BRANDVORWERKSTRASSE where
Furst lived with his mother. It was so dark on this stair that, in dull
weather, ill-trimmed lamps burnt all day long on the different
landings. To its convolutions, in its unaired corners, clung what
seemed to be the stale, accumulated smells of years; and these were
continually reinforced; since every day at dinnertime, the various
kitchen-windows, all of which gave on the stair, were opened to let the
piercing odours of cooking escape. The house, like the majority of its
kind in this relatively new street, was divided into countless small
lodgings; three families, with three rooms apiece, lived on each
storey, and on the fifth floor, at the top of the house, the same
number of rooms was let out singly. Part of the third storey was
occupied by a bird-fancier; and between him and the Fursts above waged
perpetual war, one of those petty, unending wars that can only arise
and be kept up when, as here, such heterogeneous elements are forced to
live side by side, under one roof. The fancier, although his business
was nominally in the town, had enough of his wares beside him to make
his house a lively, humming kind of place, and the strife dated back to
a day when, the door standing temptingly ajar, Peter, the Fursts' lean
cat, had sneaked stealthily in upon this, to him, enchanted ground,
and, according to the fancier, had caused the death, from fright, of a
delicate canary, although the culprit had done nothing more than sit
before the cage, licking his lips. This had happened several years ago,
but each party was still fertile in planning annoyances for the other,
and the females did not bow when they met. On the fourth floor, next
the Fursts, lived a pale, harassed teacher, with a family which had
long since outgrown its accommodation; for the wife was perpetually in
childbed, and cots and cradles were the chief furniture of the house.
As the critical moments of her career drew nigh, the "Frau Lehrer"
complained, with an aggravated bitterness, of the unceasing music that
went on behind the thin partition; and this grievance, together with
the racy items of gossip left behind the midwife's annual visit, like a
trail of smoke, provided her and Furst's mother with infinite food for
talk. They w