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Time No Longer
A Novel
Taylor Caldwell
1
The city was getting ready for Easter. Karl Erlich saw rows of white candles tipped with yellow flames in many windows. The snow was falling like flocks of great silent white moths, and the red roofs of the houses were packed with cotton. The winter had been long and hard, and still lingered, in this last snow, through which the scents and humid breath of spring could not yet come. Karl liked walking; be had left his car at home. He liked the feel of the snow against his face, the cold bright wind of night filled with glittering and minute stars. He heard children’s voices from somewhere, clear and thrilling. His feet left imprints in the snow; it seemed wrong to break that gentle whiteness. Windows, filled with amber light, shone out at him; he saw the white curtains, stiff with starch in preparation for the holidays. He could see people moving about inside the houses, children with yellow plaited hair, jumping up into their parents’ arms for a good-night kiss. People laughed in doorways, lamplight behind them, for it was not so very cold. German laughter, he thought, in spite of old agony and new fear. Bells tinkled down quiet dimly lighted streets. An old man trundled a two-wheeled cart ahead of him; his shoulders and cap were white. He kept shaking the snow from his face, and grinning. His cheeks were red as small wrinkled apples. He wheeled carefully, for the cart was full of dead feathered poultry. Above, the sky was dark and starless, and the snow kept falling and filling the air with its pure breath. A young girl hurried past, glancing at Karl with shy smiling eyes. She had a vivid scarlet shawl over her head and shoulders, spangled with snow-dust. When she ran, her skirts fluttered, showing sturdy legs in white cotton stockings. A servant girl, running blithely in the last snow.
He passed the tall young policeman at the corner, and acknowledged the latter’s salute with a kind smile and inclination of his head. The young policeman looked clean and scrubbed and sharp-angled; his uniform was old and patched at the elbows, decently and without shame. Karl sighed, jingled the money in his pockets. Money was scarce these days; he felt guilty because he and his family still had money. So few honest people had money in Germany now. And yet, there were no beggars. Germans did not beg.
The thought made him think of his twin brother, Kurt, to whose home he was going tonight. He frowned uneasily. Kurt had said that only yesterday: “Germans do not beg.” But he had added with stiff grimness: “They take!” Karl shook his head, pursing his lips. He even smiled a little ruefully. Kurt was remembering the schloss, which they had had to give up. He never forgot the schloss. If they had lost all their fortune, instead of over half, and had been able to retain that mouldering old schloss, Kurt would have been satisfied. To him, it represented something that was himself yet greater than himself. Without it, he was only a man, only Kurt Erlich, a man like other men. To Kurt Erlich, with his innate hatred of other men, that was intolerable. He could no longer look at his acquaintances arrogantly, and speak of “the schloss.” He was not the kind to remind others of his own past illustriousness, or rather, his family’s illustriousness. He had to keep silent, or merely boast of things he had which he shared with others. Boasting, too, was no part of him. He never envied other men their money, for money was nothing to him, only pride. He had always despised and pitied men who had nothing but money; they were poor indeed, he often said. So, without the schloss, he was a man without a country, a man without a soul. He never spoke of it, though it was always in his mind, and a gloomy shadow of it was always in his deep-set small blue eyes.
“Damn the schloss!” thought Karl. He had never liked the schloss. He loved the Rhine valley below it, so golden, so green, so vast and broad and silent. When he stood far below in the valley, he had been able to look up at the schloss, a black chaotic shadow against the pale sky. He had been able to smell the warm grass with the sun on it, the exquisite hot perfume of grapes. To him the schloss, glowering and melancholy on its rocks, was an insult to this golden life and golden river and beautiful valley. It was dead, and all that it represented, thank God! was dead. There were some that yearned for the Germany that had produced things like this schloss, but they were sentimentalists who must have hated life. Karl, who loved life and his country, thought the sentimentalists dangerous when they were not funny. He was inclined to believe they were more funny than dangerous.
And that again brought him back to Kurt, and he pursed his lips ruefully again. Kurt lived in a sort of fierce pent joy and excitement these days; he was a somber man, not much given to conversation nor articulateness. But this joy and this excitement flashed out of his eyes constantly, and were the more noticeable because of his taciturnity. Karl had seen his big ruddy hands trembling yesterday when he had spoken of Adolf Hitler, the Austrian sign-painter who had seduced and hypnotized Germans into putting him in command of their country. There had been a fanaticism about Kurt. He belonged to the Party; was one of its first members. He had tried to persuade Karl to join, and had struck his brother across the mouth savagely when he had laughed. But Karl had forgotten. He forgot all of Kurt’s monstrous acts through a lifetime, because of his great pity for him. Karl could not remember a time when he had not pitied his twin brother, though sometimes he had laughed gently at him. He sometimes laughed still, but in secret, and ruefully, and even with boredom.
Germany had suffered much, and would probably suffer even more. But she did not need fanatics and madmen and frenzied orators to save her. She did not need hatred nor “vengeance.” She needed only a long quiet peace in which to adjust herself and understand herself, and rescue herself from hopelessness and fear.
Karl had now arrived in the broad street on which his brother lived. A fine sturdy middle-class street. The snow here was traced by the wheels of fine sturdy middle-class cars. It was a street of huge solid houses, old-fashioned and ugly, but strangely comforting in this present world of fear and insecurity and change. Kurt’s home, which had been his father’s and grandfather’s birthplaces, and his own, was a ponderous residence whose general hideousness and strength made it one with its neighbors. It was three times the size of Karl’s home, which had only to shelter Karl, his wife Therese and his young sister Gerda. But Kurt, who had been born two hours before his twin brother Karl, and who had inherited the greater share of his father’s fortune, had to shelter himself, his wife Maria, his two half-grown sons, his wife’s mother Frau Matilda Reiner, four servants, and, on the third floor, his adopted brother Doctor Eric Reinhardt. Incidentally, Doctor Eric Reinhardt was the betrothed of Gerda Erlich, Karl’s and Kurt’s younger and only sister, and the third floor was already under preparation to receive the couple upon their marriage, which was to take place in July.
As Karl lifted the knocker, he thought suddenly, and unwillingly of what his wife, Therese, had said last night. He had remarked uneasily upon Kurt’s growing rudeness and almost savage attitude toward Eric Reinhardt, who was a Jew, and expressed himself of some surprise that Kurt was still insisting that the third floor be the home of the betrothed couple. He remembered that Therese had looked at him with her clear gray eyes, so grave yet so smiling, and had answered quietly that the reason for this was not fraternal love for Gerda, though the love was there, but that should the two find a home elsewhere, Karl’s visits to his brother’s home would be considerably fewer. “Kurt knows quite well,” she had said, “that you go to his house as much to see Eric as to see him.” That had been her first and only indication that Kurt’s passionate love for his twin brother was not a secret from her
. Karl remembered that he had flushed with pain, and had changed the subject.
The housemaid opened the door and admitted him into the warm dimly lit hall. She believed that both the Herr Professor and Doctor Reinhardt were in. Karl went into the great old-fashioned living room, with its black-walnut and pale-ash furniture, and found his sister-in-law, Maria, sitting before the fire, sewing. She was always sewing, and never read anything; only her sharp malice and shrewdness kept her from being an ignorant fool. She gave her borther-in-law her knowing and malicious smile, and offered him a chair. “Kurt is with the boys,” she said. “He is in a bad temper with them, because of their lack of interest in the gymnasium. Listen, and you can hear him shout! He becomes more choleric every day, because he has so much on his mind. The Party, you know. Really, he is too harsh with the children. He struck Wilhelm last night, very brutally, telling the child he was no true German when he whimpered. That is probably true.”
She smiled again, more maliciously than ever, and her small blue eyes became even more knowing in their sidelong glance at Karl. She was a stout large woman with a mass of untidy light hair, coarse ruddy complexion, big pillowlike busts, execrable taste, and enormous hands and feet. There was a heavy necklace of yellow gold and diamonds about the crease which was her neck; the black silk dress was expensive, but dowdy. Karl detested her, and knew that she disliked him intensely in return. He was never comfortable in her presence. It was not that he was constantly thinking of her vulgar origin (her father had been a wealthy hop-merchant). It was because she seemed unclean to him, that he detested her. He always had the sensation that her mind was unwholesome, even obscene, and that she was constantly reading indecent meanings behind the most innocent remarks. She was not too bad-looking, and had been quite pretty in her youth, for her features were small and pudgy and her teeth were excellent. But it was her sly sidelong smiles that most revolted him.
“How is Therese?” she asked amiably, and both her smile and glance were those used when one archly asks about a visitor’s mistress.
Karl hated himself for it, but he could feel his ready color rising. “Very well, thank you,” he replied shortly, and looked fumingly at the doorway for his brother.
“And Gerda? When I spoke the last time about her wedding linens she said carelessly that she had not yet thought about them. What my mother would have said if I had told her that! The young girls, these days!”
“Gerda is well,” answered Karl, holding his temper and looking directly at his sister-in-law. “But she has more important things to think of than linens. She can buy them, but the school cannot buy her influence over her pupils so easily.” He bit his lip and determinedly studied the rich hideous old furniture of the room, every piece of which he knew by heart from his childhood.
Maria sighed hypocritically and examined her sewing with minute care while she said: “I have no doubt that poor little Gerda is thinking of other things besides linens these days. It will not be all sunshine for her when she marries a Jew, even if it is our own dear Eric Reinhardt.”
Karl regarded her with a fierce frown, though his heart began to beat. “What do you mean by that, Maria?” he demanded. His voice shook a little. “Eric is our adopted brother, as well as a Jew. Besides, he may be a Jew by religion, or parentage, but is a German, too. His father was one of our President Hindenburg’s aides, before he was killed at Verdun. Professor Reinhardt was one of the truest Germans who ever lived, and our father’s most devoted friend. He left, as you know, his little son Eric, in our father’s care, and all his fortune. But you know all this! How can you say, then, that Eric’s parentage might cause suffering for him and for Gerda?”
She looked at him pityingly, and with affected wonder. “Do you never read or understand anything, Karl? I know you are interested only in your writing, but you might sometimes lift your nose from your manuscripts and look about you, and read. This is a new Germany, now, under our heroic Chancellor Hitler. He will remake our distressed country; his life and heart are dedicated to her. In this new Germany, he says, there is no place for Jews.”
Karl laughed angrily and bitterly. “So that is what is behind all this! You are a foolish woman, Maria, and I offer you no apology for saying it. The Chancellor, in spite of much that is disgusting about him, is a clever man. His Jew-baiting is only incidental scenery on the stage of his, real and ambitious plans. It was a morsel he threw the stupid mob, so that it would elect him and bring his National Socialists into power. But now that he is elected, and there is no more opposition, he will forget his Jew-baiting in the press of greater things. Why, German Jews have been in Germany as long, and even longer, than most Germans! They built up Germany; they gave her the illustrious light of scientific genius and some of our most brilliant artists! To eliminate the German Jews from the life of Germany would be to eliminate the glory of the German soul, and reduce us all to savagery.”
His voice shook more and more as he added: “But it is ridiculous to discuss this at all. Nothing so monstrous will ever happen in this day.”
She smiled evilly. “I still recommend a little attention to what is happening in the world, Karl. I particularly recommend attention to Germany. Few of us like the Jews as you do. Most of us believe them to be enemies of the German people. So, I believe most sincerely that the coming of Chancellor Hitler is the day of death for this alien race in our country.”
Karl wet his lips. “Surely,” he cried, “you do not hear this terrible imbecility from Kurt?” He no sooner asked the question than he felt suddenly sick and filled with incredulous horror.
Maria gazed at him enigmatically, but did not answer. Her eyes bored into him without expression, as though he were a stranger and she were seeing him for the first time. To her, indeed, he was a ridiculous and disliked stranger, a thinner image of tall and stalwart Kurt, a paler and gentler and more futile image, with his large and luminous blue eyes, long lean face, cropped upstanding light hair and thin broad shoulders. He had a frank and candid expression, yet for all this he seemed older than his forty years, much older than somber and gloomy and angry-voiced Kurt, whose eyes were smaller and narrower and closer, and full of suspicion and coldness.
He was about to repeat his question to Maria, more frantically this time, when he heard his brother’s heavy rapid step on the stairway curving from the second floor. He turned to the doorway, and stood up, still pale and enormously shaken.
Kurt never entered a room; he projected himself into it, as though impelled by an explosive force. Yet his projecting had nothing of vivacity and eagerness; there was an iron and ruthless quality in it. Even when entering the old familiar rooms of his childhood, he entered as a soldier enters into alien territory, prepared for anything. He held his big hard body as a soldier holds it, erect and square. His glance was always hostile and challenging.
But this glance, when it encountered his beloved brother, suddenly lightened almost passionately. “Karl!” he exclaimed. “And you were here only Monday!” He flung his arm awkwardly about his brother, squeezed him, looked into his face with smiling and almost breathless affection.
Karl smiled also, feeling the old embarrassed and compassionate discomfort he had experienced from his earliest childhood.
“I’ll go away, if I come too often,” he said, laughing.
Kurt laughed at this absurd remark, squeezed his twin again.
“If you came every day, it would not be enough,” he answered.
“But you rarely come to my home,” said Karl, more to make conversation than anything else, for he was still sick inside, and dreadfully shaken.
At his remark, Kurt’s beaming expression darkened. He dropped his arm. “How can I come, when Therese dislikes me so visibly? Even Gerda, my own sister, finds me oppressive.” His voice was gloomy, almost accusing. “Therese, only the last time, told me insultingly that I was a savage father.”
“Therese speaks ignorantly,” said Maria. “But that is because, perhaps, her husband is not a father,
himself.”
Karl flushed. Kurt turned to his wife angrily. “That is none of your affair, Maria. Karl gives Germany poetry and beautiful prose. That is nobility, too. Perhaps as important as giving the Fatherland strong soldiers.” But his own voice did not sound convinced, but only loyally hypocritical.
Karl could not help smiling, for all his distress. On another night, he might even have laughed with pure amusement. “It is always the old question: is brain more valuable than brawn? In each nation’s answer to that question is the measure of her soul and the shadow of her destiny.” He hesitated. He had come tonight only to see his adopted brother, Eric, who had telephoned him that morning that his box from Africa had just arrived. But for some reason, he could not speak frankly about his coming to see Eric to his brother tonight. He waited for the subject to occur by itself, or for Eric to present himself voluntarily.
Kurt laughed indulgently at his brother’s last remark, and urged him into a chair. He began to speak of his secondary passion: biology. He was Professor of Biology at the University, where his adopted brother, Eric, was an instructor in psychology. Only with Karl was his voice so boyishly eager, as though he were a child anxiously trying to impress and cajole the only one who understood him, and the only one whom he loved.
“In biology,” he said, “we find the true road to the advancement of man. How can we have been so blind, all these years! But now we know that we can breed supermen, bold, heroic, devoted, patriotic, fearless and healthy. True Germans. The superman of Nietzsche is in the loins of the Fatherland; we have only to evoke him.” His face glowed.
Karl gazed at him with pity. Kurt was a scientist, perhaps one of the most eminent scientists of this day. His textbooks on biology had been translated into almost all the modern languages. He had made his university famous. But that had been before he had become a fanatic. In his new fanaticism the light of his genius was drowning, like a torch flung into a swamp. Now Karl’s pity spread from his brother to all Germany, to all the world, who had been robbed of this lighted torch. It was an awful thing to contemplate, the saddest of all things. It was so deep that he could not reply to Kurt, not even to ridicule his idea.