The conversation continued into the late evening and ended with praise of the discovery of love and goodness, which, as Toót put it, may be regarded as the two most significant European inventions, and this, said Korin, was roughly when Hirschhardt did his round of the tables and totaled up the bills of the various drinkers so that he might send them home, and, while he was at it, to say goodnight to Kasser and his companions too; and so it went night after night, like clockwork, and no one imagined that it would all change soon or that the accustomed order of things would be overturned, not even Kasser’s friends on their way back along the Rhine who felt a little heavy on account of the beer and spent their time discussing whether the peculiarly frightening figure who had recently appeared in the vicinity of the cathedral and whom they had spotted through the window, a gangling, exceedingly thin man with pale blue eyes wearing a black silk cloak, had anything to do with the building, for all they knew about him was what the ever informative Hirschhardt told them when they enquired, which was that he was named Herr von Mastemann, and while that was all he or anyone else knew, there was no lack of gossip on the subject, a gossip that varied from day to day so that now he was supposed to represent the State, and now the Church; now he was said to be from a country on the far side of the Alps, now from some northeastern principality; and while one couldn’t exclude the possibility that one or other of these rumors was true it was impossible to be certain, for there was nothing but rumor, hearsay, said Korin, to go on, rumors such as that he had been seen with the master of the works, or with the foreman of the carpenters and eventually with Master Voigtel too, or that he had a servant, a very young man with curly hair whose only task seemed to be to carry a portable folding chair, to appear with it each morning in front of the cathedral, and to put it down dead in the center facing the west front so that his master might sit in it when he arrived and remain there for hours, immobile, in silence; rumors that women, the women, Korin explained in English, particularly the servant girls at the inn were head over heels in love with him, that he had made them wild; that here in the celebrated city of St. Ursula, the city of beer, he did not drink beer at all but — scandalously — confined himself to wine; in other words, said Korin, there were endless petty rumors but nothing firm, no convincing overall picture, nothing of the essence, as a result of which of course the evil reputation of this von Mastemann increased hour by hour while the whole of Cologne looked on and feared; so that in the end there was no chance at all of discovering the facts, the truth, said Korin, rumor having grown ever wilder and spread ever more quickly, people saying that the air grew significantly cooler as you drew closer to him and that those pale blue eyes were not in fact blue at all, nor were they real, but were actually made of a peculiarly sparkling steel, which must mean that this von Mastemann character was quite blind, and taking all rumors into account the truth itself would have seemed pretty dull so that no one actually sought it any longer and even Toót, who was the least likely to pay attention to idle chatter, remarked that cold shivers ran down his spine as he watched von Mastemann sitting immobile for hours, his two metal eyes sparkling and staring at the cathedral.
The bad thing was getting ever closer, its progress irresistible, Korin explained in the kitchen, and there were any number of signs of its approach, but it was one word that decided the issue in Cologne, after which there could be no doubt as to what was to follow, this word being Festungsgürtel, said Korin, or rather the event associated with it, an event whose importance outweighed everything else, at least for Kasser and his companions, for while the febrile mood they observed both in town and at the inn, and the ever more frequent sight of military detachments patrolling the streets were enough to set them thinking, they could still not be certain as to the true nature of events, and could only be so once they heard the military snap of the word one day when the inn was full of the tramp of soldiers’ boots and Hirschhardt sat down at their table to inform them that the army unit stationed in town, or rather the Festungsgouvernor, to give him his proper tide, that is to say Lieutenant-General von Frankenberg himself — despite the fury of the archbishop — had ordered the vacating of the Festungsgürtel to make space for a shooting gallery, the Festungsgürtel, Hirschhardt emphasized the word, which, as you gentlemen must know, serves as the spiritual center of the building works, where they keep the stones, in what we call the Domsteinlagerplatz, right next to the Banhof am Thürmchen, and the order had just been given so Herr Voigtel had immediately to stop all further railway deliveries, thereby severely endangering the whole project, and to begin hoarding the stone surreptitiously and in a great hurry, the very tone of the order making it clear that it would have to be obeyed immediately and that there would be no appeal against it, and indeed what could Herr Voigtel do but rescue that which was still possible to rescue and to remove whatever he could, burying the rest, for it was pointless referring to the overriding significance of the progress of the cathedral, the answer would have been that its overriding significance was merely an aspect of the glory of the German Empire, for the word was Festungsgürtel, and that’s what mattered, repeated Hirschhardt nodding significantly, then, seeing that his guests had fallen utterly silent, tried to cheer them with a discussion of the glorious prospects of the coming Krieg but without much success, for Kasser’s little band just sat there with vacant stares, in shock, before asking more questions in an attempt to understand more clearly what had happened, without much success for Hirschhardt could only repeat what he had already said before returning to his group of carousing soldiers, perfectly at peace with himself it seemed, relieved of his normal gloom, prepared even to take the liberty, as he had never done before, of downing a big tankard with them and joining in a roaring chorus celebrating the glorious forthcoming victory over the filthy French.