CHAPTER IV
Every vacant seat in the Senate must, according to the Constitution, be filled within four weeks. Three of them have passed, and this is election-day—a day of thaw, at the end of February.
It is about one o’clock, and people are thronging into Broad Street. They are thronging before the Town Hall, with its ornamental glazed-brick façade, its pointed towers and turrets mounting toward a whitish grey sky, its covered steps supported on outstanding columns, its pointed arcades, through which there is a glimpse of the market place and the fountain. The crowd stands steadfastly in the dirty slush that melts beneath their feet; they look into each other’s faces and then straight ahead again, and crane their necks. For beyond that portal, in the Council Room, in fourteen armchairs arranged in a semicircle sit the electors, who have been chosen from the Senate and the Assembly and await the proposals of the voting chambers.
The affair has spun itself out. It appears that the debate in the chambers will not die down; the struggle is so bitter that up to now not one single unanimous choice has been put before the Council—otherwise the Burgomaster would at once announce an election. Extraordinary! Rumours—nobody knows whence, nobody knows how—come from within the building and circulate in the street. Perhaps Herr Kaspersen, the elder of the two beadles, who always refers to himself as a “servant of the State,” is standing inside there and telling what he hears, out of the corner of his mouth, through his shut teeth, with his eyes turned the other way! The story goes that proposals have been laid before the
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