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Updated: June 16, 2025
It was a splendid, calm morning; the long lines of our fortifications were lost in the mist; I gazed till I was weary, and then began to doze where I was sitting. A discreet cough waked me: I opened my eyes, and saw standing before me a Jew, a man of forty, wearing a long-skirted grey wrapper, slippers, and a black smoking-cap.
He wore a crimson velvet smoking-cap upon his head, and was buttoned up to the chin in a long tight coat of blue and yellow brocade. Above the collar and below the sleeves of the coat showed the neck and cuffs of an English linen shirt, which were crumpled and not particularly clean. The cuffs were so big that the Maharajah's thin little brown fingers were almost lost in them.
Often one could scarcely make one's way across the muddy yard; in the outer room, behind a canvas screen, with its covering peeling off it, would lie stretched the snoring orderly; on the floor rotten straw; on the stove, boots and a broken jam-pot full of blacking; in the room itself a warped card-table, marked with chalk; on the table, glasses, half-full of cold, dark-brown tea; against the wall, a wide, rickety, greasy sofa; on the window-sills, tobacco-ash.... In a podgy, clumsy arm-chair one would find the master of the place in a grass-green dressing-gown with crimson plush facings and an embroidered smoking-cap of Asiatic extraction, and a hideously fat, unpleasant dog in a stinking brass collar would be snoring at his side.... All the doors always ajar....
There may be eleven of them, each covered with writing materials. At one of them sits Mrs. Burton, in morning neglige, a gray choga the long loose Indian dressing-gown of camel's hair topped by a smoking-cap of the same material. She rises and greets her husband's old friend with the cheeriest voice in the world. 'I see you are looking at our tables; every one does.
I opened the wardrobe and found some more ordinary clothes, a pair of plaid trousers, and an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a venerable smoking-cap on my venerable head, and, coughing a little from my exertions, tottered out upon the landing. It was then, perhaps, a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely drawn and the house quite silent.
Then she went down to the gravelled path, selected one of the largest pebbles, took up her station before the door, and began to pound away. In a moment, a gentleman in dressing-gown and smoking-cap, with a cigar between his fingers, came round the corner.
He then removed his coat, his collar, his tie, and his gaiters, with equal solicitude, and put them in a place of safety. After which he donned a long purple dressing-gown and a smoking-cap, in which garb he performed the first steps of a mazurka as a sign of the additional ease which he experienced.
The mother insisted upon doing his mending all the next winter, and the sister embroidered him a pair of huge antimacassars and a smoking-cap. It sounds funny; but it was grim, earnest tragedy mixed with pathos. He did it all with such tact that the poor creatures never half realized how for a fact they never came into the middle of his life at all. Arlt realizes it, though.
It tells no tale, but there is a weird power about it that haunts one, and it was for that I bought it. Next to the picture comes the round blot that hangs below it, which I know to be a smoking-cap.
I was so eager to begin that I hesitated no more, but took the bird out into the tool-house, where I could make what aunt called "a mess" without being scolded, and uncle put on his smoking-cap, lit his pipe, and brought a high stool to sit upon and watch me make my first attempt at mastering a mystery.
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