Hubert remained in the passage for a moment longer, until he heard husband and wife talking. Then he crept up the stairs with extreme caution, so that no board should creak. He knocked softly on a door, once only, and entered quickly.
In the room Violet was sitting at a little table; a crumpled damp handkerchief and red patches on her face revealed that she, too, had been crying.
“Well?” she said, curious nevertheless. “Did Mamma put you through it as well, Hubert?”
“The young Fräulein shouldn’t be so careless when she’s eavesdropping,” rebuked Hubert. “I saw your foot the whole time on the top stair. And madam could also have seen it.”
“Ah, Hubert, poor Mamma! She’s just been crying here. Sometimes I’m terribly sorry for her, and I feel that I ought to be ashamed.…”
“There’s no use being ashamed, Fräulein,” said Hubert severely. “Either you live as the old people want you to—then you won’t need to be ashamed—or else you live as we young people think right, and then you really don’t need to be.”
Vi looked at him searchingly. “Sometimes I think, though, you’re a very bad man, Hubert, and that you have very bad plans,” she said, but rather cautiously, almost anxiously.
“What I am must be no concern of yours, Fräulein,” he said at once, as if he had thought it all out long ago. “And my plans are mine, after all. What you want, that’s your concern.”
“And what did Mamma want?”
“Just the usual questions about the unknown man. Your grandparents are also worried about you, Fräulein.”
“Oh, God, if they could only get me out of here! I can’t stand it any longer indoors. I shall weep myself to death! Was there really nothing in the tree again, Hubert?”
“No letter, no note!”
“When did you look, Hubert?”
“Just before serving coffee.”
“Take another look now, Hubert. Go there immediately and let me know at once.”
“But it’s useless, Fräulein. He doesn’t come into the village in the daytime.”
“Do you keep a good look-out at night, Hubert? It’s impossible that he hasn’t come at all! He gave me his solemn promise! He was going to be here on the second night, no, the next night.”
“He has definitely not been here. I would have met him, and I would also have heard about it if he had been here.”
“Hubert, I simply can’t stand it any longer … I see him day and night, as if he were really here, but if I try to touch him, there’s nothing, and I seem to fall down a hundred stairs.… I feel quite different, it’s as if I’ve been poisoned, I can’t sleep any more.… And then I see his hands, Hubert. They hold you so tightly, they send a thrill through you.… Oh, what can be the matter with me?” She stared at servant Hubert Räder with wide-open eyes. But it was not certain that she saw him at all.
Räder stood by the door like a stick. His gray complexion took on no color, his eye remained gray and lusterless even though he did not turn his gaze away from the soft, confiding girl.
“You mustn’t think anything about it,” he said in his usual didactic tone. “It is so!”
Vi looked at her confidant, her only confidant, as if he were a prophet bringing salvation.
Räder nodded significantly. “Those are physical processes,” he explained. “That is physical desire. I can give you a book about it, written by a doctor, a specialist. In it everything is exactly described, how it comes, and where its seat is, and how it is cured. It is called deficiency-phenomena or abstinence-phenomena.”
“Is that really so, Hubert? Is that in the book? You must bring it me, Hubert.”
“That is it. Nothing to do with—the man.” Hubert narrowed his eyes and observed the effect of his words. “It is just the body—the body is hungry, Fräulein!”
Vi, although as foolish and pleasure-seeking as any girl in those days, still had her illusions about love, and not every pleasant fancy was swept away by the tearing of a single veil. Only gradually did she grasp the full significance of Hubert’s revelations; she shrank as if from a sudden pain; she moaned.
But then she drew herself up. “How disgusting!” she cried. “You are a swine, Räder, you dirty everything. Go away—don’t touch me! Out of my room, at once!”
“But please, Fräulein! Please calm yourself—madam’s coming! Tell some lie; if the Rittmeister finds out, the Lieutenant is lost.”
He glided out, vanishing into the adjoining bedroom of Frau von Prackwitz, and stood behind the door. He heard the hurried step; then the door of Violet’s room was shut. He could hear the mother’s voice, and Violet sobbing …
That’s the cleverest thing she can do, he thought with satisfaction. Cry! I was probably a bit too soon and too strong. Well, when she’s been a week without news of the Lieutenant …
He heard the Rittmeister’s footstep on the stairs and cowered well back between Frau von Prackwitz’s bathrobe and dressing gown. However contemptible the Rittmeister was in his stupidity and temper, he remained almost the only person of whom one had to be afraid. He was quite capable of throwing someone out of the window—through the glass.
“I tell you you’re exaggerating,” he heard the Rittmeister say angrily. “The child is simply nervous. She must get into the fresh air. Come, Vi, let’s go for a little walk.”
Räder nodded. He slipped through the bathroom and the Rittmeister’s bedroom to the stairs, down which he vanished into his own bare room. He unlocked the cupboard. With a second key he opened a suitcase from which he took out a well-thumbed book—What a Young Man Must Know Before and About Marriage. This he wrapped in a piece of newspaper. One evening he would place it under Violet’s pillow. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the day after. He was convinced Vi would read it, despite her outburst.
VI
Sophie Kowalewski, ex-maid to the Countess Mutzbauer, had said to her parents this Sunday morning: “I’m going over to Birnbaum to see Emmi. Don’t keep dinner waiting for me; perhaps I won’t be back until evening.” Her kind-hearted old father had nodded his head. “Ride along the main road, Sophie, not the forest path. There are such a lot of fellows knocking around the district now.” And her tremendously fat mother, interested only in food and digestion, had said: “Emmi has made a wonderful match. They already have a cow and two goats. They kill three pigs for their own use. They don’t have to go around with hungry bellies; there’s always something to eat. They’ve also got chickens and geese. If you would only have such luck!”
Sophie did not stay to hear it all. She duly let her friend, who was lending her the bicycle, admire her blue costume, swung on to the saddle and pedaled slowly through the village with bell ringing, so that all should see her. She turned into the quiet mossy forest path along which the cycle ran as silently as on velvet, a firm and very narrow path, close to the rutted cart track. Heather and broom kept brushing the pedals, casting drops of morning dew on to the toes of her shoes. The beautiful pillars of old pine trees wandered past her, tinged reddish by the morning sun—and sometimes the path went so narrowly between two trunks that she had to grip the handle bars firmly in order not to knock against them. The bilberries were thick and their berries already turning blue. The forest grass was still green, and the junipers stood dark and silent in the bright undergrowth; there was an incessant fluttering and twittering of little forest birds.
Here Sophie had passed her childhood; every sound was familiar to her. As a child she had heard the distant vague soughing of the forest, which came close, but could never come closer. The sun shone on her hair as it had shone on the child’s. As she glided by, there opened and closed almost immediately glades which seemed to lead into the heart of the forest.
No one is all bad, and Sophie isn’t either. Sophie was filled with a gaiety which had nothing in common with the boisterous merriment of a night spent drinking in a bar. It was as if her body had received new blood; joyful, serene thoughts streamed through her with every fresh breath she to
ok; instead of a dreary dance hit she hummed the song of “May has come.” … The clouds—they wander—in the canopy of heaven.… Oh, wonderful!
Suddenly Sophie laughed. She remembered how her mother once took her to pick berries in the forest. At that time she was eight or nine years old. The laborious picking soon bored her. Playing, humming to herself, she wandered away from her busy mother; ten times she heard herself being called, without paying any heed; the eleventh call no longer reached her. Singing softly, laughing with happiness, she wandered deeper and deeper into the forest, aimlessly on and on, from the sheer joy of movement, into the little valleys where the trees descended from flat hills like silent pilgrims. For a long time she listened to the gurgling of a hurrying brook. For a still longer time she watched a butterfly which flew from blossom to blossom in the heat of a forest clearing—and was not tempted to try and catch it.
At last she reached a beech wood. The trees towered high and silver-gray. The green above was so bright. They stood far from each other; everywhere sunbeams penetrated into the golden warm shadows; her bare feet sank deep into the soft brownish-green moss. Singing softly, almost without knowing what she was doing, Sophie stripped off her clothes. There lay her little dress; over a tree stump the bright patch of her little knickers; now her chemise fell upon the moss—and gaily whooping, the child danced naked through sun and shade, laughing.
It was the joy of living on this earth, of wandering in the light—the joy of life! The little heart in the thin body throbbed. Dancing into ever new greenness, into ever different worlds, into ever deeper mystery. With sounds such as the birds sing, interrupted to watch a beetle lost in a wheel track … and begun again, all without thinking, like breathing.…
It was the joy of life, the happiness of being—that for which grown-up people eternally yearn, whether they know it or not. Happiness—for which they are always seeking, and which they will never find again. Joy which vanishes with childhood—only to be glimpsed afterwards in the weak reflection of a lover’s embrace, in the joy over some work.
The bicycle sang softly along the path, the chain grated. Passing over a root, the rear mudguard clattered and the saddle springs sighed. Sophie, wishing to sing, could not succeed, and remembered only how to the child the sun had suddenly become cold, and the familiar forest strange. She had burst into tears—she was lost. Everything was hostile: prickly brambles, pointed stones on the path, a swarm of horseflies blowing over from a herd of cattle. At last a woodsman, old Hofert, had found her …
“Aren’t you ashamed, Sophie, to run around naked like that?” he had scolded her. “You’re a human being, you know, not a little pig.” And he had taken her back to her mother. Oh, her mother’s anger. The long search for her clothes, which could not be found, the scolding, the blows. The return to the village, with her mother’s kerchief round her hips. The mocking of the other children, the wise observations of the old people: “Look out, Kowalewski. That girl will bring you trouble some day.”
Sophie pedaled faster, ringing the bell loudly in the forest silence. She shook her head, although no swarm of horseflies now buzzed round her—she wanted to shake her thoughts away. No person can say how he has become what he is, but sometimes a piece of the way is revealed to us. Then we become angry with ourselves, find it disagreeable, shake the tormenting thoughts from our head. We’re all right as we are; it’s no fault of ours if we haven’t turned out differently. We needn’t think about that.
Faster and faster sped the bicycle; glade after glade, path after path, glided by. Sophie was not cycling to Birnbaum to see Emmi. She was cycling to the prison to visit Hans Liebschner, a lawfully condemned swindler with previous convictions. Life is no holiday; it’s an extremely deceitful business, and whoever doesn’t cheat others gets cheated himself. Sophie had no time to waste on dreams. She had to work out how she could get a visitor’s permit as Hans’s sister—without identification papers!
Her eyes had a dry, hard gleam. True, she had certified on a sheet of note-paper from the Christian Hostel that she was the cook, Sophie Liebschner, working there. But she was quite aware that this badly written and perhaps not even properly spelled document would be worthless to an official eye. From what her father had told her, Meier, the little bailiff who had run away, would have been just the right man to have given her some sort of certificate with the farm stamp on it. But there again she had been unlucky; she hadn’t been able to get hold of the fellow. And the other two, who had traveled in the train with her, they wouldn’t do a girl a favor like that, as you could see at a glance. They’d been much too polite, just like those gentlemen in a bar who are so politely cold merely to save themselves buying a lady a whisky!
Sophie’s thoughts, however, did not make her despondent. Up till now she had always had luck, and she knew very well what effect a proper glance at the proper time could have. Pretty girls always had luck.
Sophie as well, therefore. It was grand visiting day at the prison; over a hundred relatives were standing outside its iron gate. Forcing herself among them, Sophie was let in with the great rush. Warders ran to and fro, papers were examined, questions asked, and gently, gently, step by step, Sophie edged herself from the group which had not been questioned into that which had.
Then she was in the visitors’ room. On one side of the bars stood the relatives, on the other the prisoners. The talk and chatter were deafening! The two poor warders who had to supervise every word couldn’t but fulfill their duties badly. How wonderfully might Sophie now have chatted with her Hans, have said everything that she had in her heart! But of course there was no Hans Liebschner in the visitors’ room, nor could she insist on seeing him, for he was not in the list of prisoners due for visits, naturally!
But here again it proved to be good that Liebschner was a swindler—that is to say, not a violent or dogmatic person, but a cunning fox, versed in all the crafty arts—that is to say, a submissive, well-behaved prisoner, the pattern of obedience. Which was why he had become an orderly and, as orderly, had work to do in the corridors, and from the corridors could see the visitors coming. A raven’s eye is sharp: Sophie was the same Sophie. Yes, supposing Hans had not been in favor with the warder of his landing? But the steel saw had actually been found, and three bars already sawn through! To discover a thing like that in time is a feather in the cap of any warder. And this one had been commended and was therefore well disposed to his orderly—all the more because he hadn’t been able to fulfill his promise about the outside gang, since none had yet been sent out.
So Sophie was suddenly beckoned onwards by a bearded old warder. “Just come along here, Fräulein.” She was pushed into a narrow cell crammed full of dirty cordage, even bolted in; and just as she was beginning to think all sorts of things, wondering if her unauthorized entry had been discovered and if this was her punishment, the bolt rattled again and in slouched her Hans in a disgusting get-up. There were shadows under his eyes, his nose was thin—but the same mischievous smile, the same old Hans!
The warder raised his finger threateningly. “Don’t get up to any silly tricks now, children!” But he looked at Sophie with a benevolent smirk, as if he wouldn’t mind getting up to silly tricks with her himself.
Then the bolt rattled again, and she was in Hans’s arms. It was like a storm, a hurricane. She lost all sense of sight and sound. Oh, this dear good face, so close! The familiar smell! The taste of his lips! A sigh, a laugh which soon choked, a few words. “Oh, you! You! Oh, darling!” They scarcely found time to speak. “How I’ve been longing for you!”
“I’m coming out, with a harvest crew. Then I’ll make a break for it!”
“Oh—if you would come to us!”
“Where?”
“To Neulohe! I’m with my parents. Father says we need a harvest crew.”
“I’m certain to go with the next one. Can’t you put a little pressure on your people?”
“Perhaps. I’ll see. God, Hans …”
“That did
me good! Six months …”
Happy and contented, Sophie walked along the rough pavements of the little town of Meienburg, having first left her cycle in a small pub. She entered the Prince of Prussia, the best hotel in the town, for lunch. There the wealthy farmers ate; as a child she had often stood before it, admiring the sign. Now she walked through the place and sat down on the terrace. The hotel was almost empty. On Sunday the farmers ate at home; there was no farmers’ union, no cattle-dealing to be used as a pretext for escaping from their families.
Sophie ate with relish everything that was brought her, and drank half a bottle of Rhine wine with it. There was some point in feeding well now—perhaps Hans would be coming to Neulohe. He must succeed! With her coffee she ordered a large glass of cognac, and leisurely smoked cigarette after cigarette. From the stream, which flowed below the terrace, came the dry wooden sound of oars in their rowlocks. The rowers could not be seen, but in the midday heat their voices were heard distinctly. “Pull a little quicker, Erna! We want to have a bathe.”
Suddenly Sophie realized that she also wanted to bathe, to bathe and lie in the sun, and roast herself. But not here! Here it was certain to be crowded with fellows. That wasn’t bathing! The ass at the next table had been goggling at her for the last half hour: strange that some men can never understand that one hasn’t been waiting precisely for them.
But she had no bathing suit with her—nor, for that matter, one at home—but a bathing suit was not a problem in Meienburg, even on Sunday. She paid, and as she went out accidentally knocked the goggling gentleman’s straw hat off his head into the cheese dish. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said graciously to the blushing man and hurried out.
The little needlework shop, of course, was still where it had been five years ago, ten years ago, where it had probably been ever since Meienburg was built; there where the needlework shop of Fräulein Otti Kujahn would forever be—in little Bergstrasse, directly opposite the Konditorei Köller (the Lover’s Nook). Sophie did not try the shop door. In things like that the little villages are punctilious; on a Sunday afternoon the shop door is locked. But if you go round the back there is not the slightest difficulty. Little humpy Fräulein Kujahn with the same gray hair, the same languishing pigeon-glance of ten years ago, was very pleased. She stocked bathing suits. She was also ready to sell them on a Sunday afternoon.