Now he stroked his silken-soft hair back from his forehead and looked at her wearily. “I’m not going back to the Senator’s,” he said.
“Not back to the Senator’s?”
“No; for I have only two roads left: either here into the well or to the bailiff and prison.”
“What nonsense are you saying? Get up, Heinrich! Have you gone mad?”
He arose obediently and let her lead him to the little bench under the pear tree. But there was the child, who had been watching everything with astonished eyes. “Poor thing,” said Anna, “you haven’t got a pear yet. Here, buy yourself a little cake!” And as the child ran off with the coin, the girl again stood before the young man.
“Now speak up!” she said, while she pinned up her heavy blonde braid, which had fallen down her back. “Speak quickly, before father gets back.”
Her breathing quickened as she waited for an answer, but he was silent and stared down at the ground.
“You came back from Flensburg Saturday!” she said then. “You were to collect money for the Senator.”
He nodded without looking up.
“Just tell me! I can imagine: you were careless again; you left the money lying about, in the hotel or somewhere. And now it’s gone!”
“Yes, it’s gone,” he said.
“But maybe we can get it back. Why don’t you speak? Tell me about it!”
“No, Anna – it’s not lost the way you think. We were gay; we gambled—”
“Gambled away, Heinrich? Gambled away?” Tears gushed from her eyes, and she threw herself on his breast, both arms clasped about his neck.
Up in the treetop a light wind rustled in the leaves; otherwise there was no sound but an occasional deep sob from the girl, in whom all the activity she had displayed just before seemed broken now.
But the young man himself tried gently to push her from him; the lovely burden which compassion had thrown on his breast seemed to be crushing him.
“Don’t cry like that,” he said, “I can’t stand it.”
There was no need for this admonition; Anna had already jumped up and was trying quickly to wipe away her tears. “Heinrich,” she cried, “it is terrible that you did it, but I have money, I’ll help you!”
“You, Anna?”
“Yes, I! I just came of age. Tell me how much you have to deliver to the Senator.”
“It’s a lot,” he said hesitantly.
“How much? Tell me quickly!” He named a considerable amount. “Not more? Thank God! But…” And she faltered, as if a new obstacle had loomed up before her. “You should have been at the office today. What will you tell the Senator when he asks?”
Heinrich shook his soft curls from his brow, and already the old expression of carefree light-heartedness passed over his face. “The Senator, Anna? Oh, he won’t ask, and if he does – let me take care of that.”
She gazed at him earnestly. “See, now we’ll have to begin lying!”
“Only I, Anna, and I promise you, no more than necessary. And the money—”
“Yes, the money!”
“I’ll pay you interest, Anna, I’ll write you a promissory note – you shall not lose anything on my account.”
“Stop talking nonsense, Heinrich. Stay here in the garden; when your father gets home, I’ll ask him for the money.”
He wanted to reply, but she had already gone back into the house. She crept cautiously past the kitchen, where Aunt Brigitta was taking her place at the stove today, and then she ran up into her room, first of all to wash away all traces of weeping from her eyes.
The furniture and equipment of the narrow living room, whose bay windows faced the harbour, were of not much more recent date than the old pear tree. In the alcove bed there deep inside the bay, whose glass doors were closed in the daytime, the parents of the owner had lain down for their nightly and, in succession, also for their eternal sleep; at that time, as well as now, there stood in the west corner of the bay the leather-covered armchair in which the old captains after completing their purchases were wont to unravel their yarns before the master of the house as he sat facing them. The things had remained the same; only quite unnoticeably other people had been substituted, and while such reports of foreign countries had once supplied the late father Carstens merely with material for pleasant retelling, they often aroused in the son a chain of thoughts for the elaboration of which he was thrown on his own resources.
The table which stood at the bay windows between a straight chair and the leather armchair had also retained its own position; only the exotic shells, which now served on the table as paperweights for all kinds of writings, had formerly adorned the cash box standing near by. In their stead the present owner had had a little bookcase built, in which besides a few mathematical works and the chronicles of the city and its environs there were also books like Lessing’s Nathan* and Hippel’s Careers in an Ascending Line.*
No sofa had been brought into the room, nor would there have been room for one. On the other hand, a rather stately ancestral portrait was not lacking, by the contemplation of which the humble citizen Carsten, even if not in the French formulation of “noblesse oblige”, used to strengthen his wavering spirit in difficult hours.
This was to be sure no bright-coloured oil painting, but quite on the contrary only an enormous silhouette framed in glass moulding painted brown, which hung on the west wall nearest the bay, so that from his work table the owner could let his eyes rest on it. His father, about whom admittedly not much more can be said than that he was a simple and austere man, had had it done, soon after the death of his wife, by a transient artist. It represented an evening stroll of the now half-orphaned family. The father himself took the lead, a lean figure like the son now living, wearing a three-cornered hat and a roquelaure, and holding the arm of a bent old lady, the mother of the deceased; then came a tall tree of undetermined species, but clearly suggesting late autumn, for its branches were almost bare, and here and there under the glass of the picture clung little black shreds which with some imagination might be identified as fallen leaves. Then followed a boy of about four years, gaily riding a hobby-horse and brandishing a whip. The family group was completed by a girl like a beanpole and another boy about ten years old, with a cap as round as a dinner plate, both of whom, as it seemed, lost in admiration of the lively hobby-horseman, had no eyes for the charm of the evening landscape. And yet this was just the right hour for it, as was ingeniously worked out in the picture; for while in the foreground trees and people were cut out of coal-black paper, to the rear were the lines of a gently elevated plain, with a suggestion of evening distance, formed first of dark and then of light-grey blotting paper. The rest however had been completed by painting; beyond the reach of the eye a mildly gleaming afterglow suffused the whole horizon, making the shadows of all the strollers all the more sharply outlined; higher up, in brownish-purple twilight, night was descending.
Soon after the completion of the picture the jolly little rider had been snatched away by smallpox, and only his little hobbyhorse had for a long time stood in the case of the wall clock, which, facing the picture, now as then tried to measure the flight of time with its even tick-tock. Of the five evening strollers only the two older siblings were still living, under the same roof as at that time, and, even during the brief marriage of the brother, unseparated. Sometimes, in a quiet evening hour or when sorrow overcame them, they had found themselves – they themselves hardly knew how – hand in hand before the picture, reviving from memory the nature and the deeds of their parents. “There are the rest of us, still together,” the father had said when he hung the picture on the same nail which supported it now. “Your mother is no longer here, but instead we have the afterglow in the sky.” And then after a while, having turned his face away from the children and given the nail a couple of heavy blows with the hammer, “A light still remains on earth f
rom the dead, too, and those left behind should not forget that they stand in this light, so that they may keep their hands and faces clean.”
Aunt Brigitta, who as an old maid was somewhat given to sighing, and with complete unselfishness loved to build air castles in the past, after such reminiscing used to point to the silhouette of the little hobbyhorse rider and add, “Ah, Carsten, if only our brother Peter were still alive! Don’t you think too that he was the smartest of us three children?” And the conversation between brother and sister might then take the following course.
“What do you mean, Brigitta?” the brother would reply. “He was only in his fifth year when he died.”
“Yes, unfortunately he did die so young, Carsten, but you remember how our big yellow-speckled hen always laid her eggs behind the ash pile. He was only four years old, but he was already smarter than the hen; he would let her lay her eggs, and then one fine morning he would bring me a whole apron-full into the kitchen. Ah, Carsten, you know the Senator’s father was his godfather; he surely would have gone to the Latin school and not, like you, only learnt his letters and numbers.”
And the living brother was always glad to acknowledge such a preference for the brother who had died so very young.
The room with its old furnishings and its old memories was still empty, although only the row of lindens in front of the house obstructed the rays of the sun, which had now reached its zenith. The white sea sand with which Anna had strewn the floors before her trip to the city hall showed hardly any footprints, and the old wall clock ticked as loudly in the solitude as if it wanted to call its master to his customary work. Now finally the doorbell rang and Anna, sitting expectantly up in her room, heard the steps of her foster father, who immediately disappeared downstairs into the living room. After a while, she then braced herself to a quick decision, patted her eyes a few more times with a moist cloth, and went down to the first floor.
As she entered the living room she saw her foster father standing with his hat and his cane still in his hand, almost as if he must consider what to do now within his own four walls. Fear gripped the girl; it seemed to her as if he had suddenly become unspeakably old. She would have liked to slip away again unnoticed, but she had no time to lose.
“Uncle!” she said softly.
The sound of her voice almost startled him, but when he saw the girl standing before him, a friendly light came into his eyes. “What do you want of me, my child?” he asked gently.
“Uncle!” Only hesitantly did she utter it. “I am of age now; I would like to have some of my money now; I have urgent need of it.”
“So soon, Anna? That’s quick indeed.”
“Not much, Uncle; I mean, I have so much more; only about a hundred talers.”
She was silent, and the old man looked down at her a while without speaking. “And what would you want to do with all that money?” he then asked.
An imploring glance from her eyes found him; she murmured something which he did not understand.
He took her hand. “Just say it out loud, my child.”
“I didn’t want it for myself,” she replied falteringly.
“Not for yourself, for whom else then?”
Like a pleading child she raised her hands towards him. “Don’t make me say it, Uncle! Oh, but I must, I must have it!”
“And not for yourself, Anna?” As if suddenly understanding, he let his eyes rest on her. “If you wanted it for Heinrich – then both of us have already come too late.”
“Oh no, Uncle! No!” And she flung her arms about the old man’s neck.
“Yes, child, it’s true. What else do you think Mr Jaspers had to tell me? The Senator was informed of everything yesterday.”
“But if Heinrich takes the money to him now?”
“I wanted to take it to him myself, but he wanted neither my money nor my son. And as far as the latter is concerned – I could not say anything to the contrary.”
“Oh, Uncle, what will happen to him?”
“To him, Anna? He will leave that honourable house in disgrace.”
As she raised in fright her pure countenance towards her foster father, such an expression of suffering met her gaze as she had never before seen on any human face. “Uncle, Uncle!” she cried. “What crime did you commit?” And her maidenly eyes expressed such a maternal pity that the old man let his grey head sink on her shoulder.
Then however straightening up and laying his hand on her blonde hair he said quietly, “I, Anna, am his father. Now go and call my son to me.”
This day, too, passed. After the grievous forenoon came a noon meal and later an evening meal at which the dishes were removed almost as they were placed on the table; between the meals a seemingly endless afternoon, during which Heinrich, compelled by the superior will of his father, once more had to return to the Senator and was dismissed by him. This day, too, had finally passed and night had come. Only the master of the house was still pacing to and fro in the downstairs room; occasionally he stopped in front of the picture with the family shadows, but soon passed his hand across his brow and continued his unquiet wandering. Anna had also been at the Senator’s, in a swift, youthful resolve, but of that he had as little notion as of the fact that the Senator had barely managed to maintain his inexorable stand before her, but had finally done so.
The small shaded lamp which was burning on his work table shone on two letters, one addressed to Kiel, the other to Hamburg; for new ways had to be sought out for Heinrich, away from home.
Carsten had stepped to the window and looked out into the moonlit night; it was so quiet that he could hear the water from the gutters flow into the harbour far below, and now and then a faint flutter in the pennants of the ships off shore. Across the harbour the mole extended out like a shimmering fog bank; how often as a boy he had walked out there hand in hand with his father, to inspect the fen they had acquired at that time.
Carsten slowly turned around; there lay the two letters on his work table; he had a son himself now.
In the depth of the room the glass doors of the alcove had been opened by Anna, as on every other evening, and the turned-back covers of the bed in there seemed to invite Carsten, accustomed as he was to the hours of the solid citizen, to make an end of the overlong day. And so he took his big silver watch from its case and wound it. “Midnight,” he said, as he stepped into the alcove. But as he tried to hang the watch on the bed post, in accordance with his habit, the steel chain hooked itself in a gold ring he wore on his little finger, so that the ring was torn off and rolled away on the floor with a faint clink. With almost youthful quickness the old man bent down for it, and when the ring was back in his hand again he stepped back into the room and carefully held it under the lamp shade. His eyes seemed fixed on the woman’s name inscribed on the inside, but from his mouth burst a groan, as if he were begging for deliverance.
Just then he heard the steps of the staircase in the hallway creaking. He made a quick motion, as if to place the ring on his finger, when a hand was gently laid on his arm. “Brother Carsten,” said his old sister, who had entered the room in her nightgown, “I heard you walking down here; aren’t you ever going to try to rest?”
He gazed into her eyes as if reflecting. “There are thoughts, Brigitta, which won’t give us rest, which keep forever rising up in our brain, because they are never released.”
The old spinster looked at her brother in complete bewilderment. “Oh, Carsten,” she said, “I am a stupid old thing! Had only our brother Peter remained alive! Maybe he would be our minister now and would have baptized and confirmed our Heinrich; he would surely have known what to do today, too!”
“Perhaps, Brigitta,” gently replied the brother, “and yet perhaps we might not have understood one another completely, but you are alive and are my faithful old sister.”
“Yes, yes, Carsten, unfortunately! We two alone ar
e left.”
He had taken her hand. “Brigitta,” he said quickly, “did you see how pale the boy was when he went up to his room this evening? Never before had he resembled his mother so much; that’s how Juliana looked in her last days, when death had already taken all earthly thoughts from her.”
“Don’t speak of her, brother; that isn’t good for you now; she’s been at rest a long time.”
“A long time, Brigitta – but not here, not here!” And he pressed the hand which was still clasped about the ring against his breast. “It all keeps coming back to me; last Easter Sunday it was just twenty-three years ago.”
“Last Easter Sunday? Yes, yes, brother, now I remember it clearly; at that time the two of you were where you never should have been.”
“Don’t scold now, sister,” said Carsten, “you yourself could not turn your eyes from her, as you tied the blue sash around her that day. Now I know of course that it was not for me she pinned up her beautiful hair, and put the satin slippers on her tiny feet; I didn’t belong in that company of elegant and exuberant people, where nobody paid any attention to me, least of all my own wife. No, no,” he cried, as his sister tried to interrupt him, “Let me say it at last! You see, I did want to play my full part, and I danced with my wife a few times, but she was always snatched from me by the officers. And how differently she danced with those men! Her eyes glowed with pleasure; she passed from hand to hand; I was afraid they would dance my wife to death. But she could not get enough and only laughed when I begged her to spare herself. I couldn’t bear it any longer and yet I couldn’t change it; that’s why I sat down in the side room where the old gentlemen were playing their ombre, and gnawed at my nails and my own thoughts.
“You know, Brigitta, that captain of a French privateer whom the others called the ‘handsome devil’ – whenever I’d look into the dance hall from time to time, she’d always be dancing with him. When it was almost three o’clock and the dance hall already half-deserted, she stood next to him at the bar, each of them holding a full glass of champagne. I saw how fast she was breathing and how his words, which I could not understand, again and again caused a quick flush to cover her pale face; she herself said nothing, she only stood in silence before him, but as both of them now raised their glasses to their lips, I saw how their eyes melted into each other. I saw all that like a picture, as if it were a hundred miles away from me; then however it suddenly came over me that that beautiful woman belonged to me, that she was my wife, and then I walked up to them and forced her to go home with me.”
Immensee and Other Stories Page 9
