He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had often noticed with pleasure.
“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is here—the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s little habits and tasks.”
“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a house with araucarias. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still I’m the son of a mother and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so here I sat me down then and there; and I look into this quiet little garden of order and rejoice that such things still are.”