Anna now rarely saw her husband at home in the evening, for the unmarried cousin took him to a tavern where he liked to wind up the day’s work. Here, over hot drinks, the transactions were discussed with which they would soon amaze the little town; later, when the head could no longer serve for this, cards were laid on the table, with which stakes and results showed up faster.
Yet for all that Heinrich had not lost interest in his wife. If fortune flung a momentary profit in his direction, which according to his way of thinking always made a rich man of him, he might spend half of it for gold chains or rings or costly stuffs to adorn her lovely body. But what was Anna, the wife of a small shopkeeper, to do with these things, especially since the entire running of the business gradually came to rest on her shoulders?
One Sunday – the first cargo of oysters had just been quickly and profitably sold – while Anna was walking the floor with her boy on her arm, Heinrich quickly and cheerfully entered the room. After he had rested his eyes on her face for awhile, he led her to the mirror and suddenly placed a necklace of individually set sapphires about her neck; happy as a child he gazed at her. “Well, Anna? Let these do until I can bring you diamonds!”
The boy reached for the glittering jewels and emitted sounds of delight, but Anna looked at her husband with alarm. “Oh, Heinrich, you love me, but you waste money! Think of yourself, of our child!”
At that the happiness in his face was extinguished; he took the jewellery from her neck and put it back into the case from which he had removed it. “Anna,” he said after a while and almost humbly grasped his wife’s hand, “I never knew my mother, but I have heard about her – not at home, for my father never spoke to me of her; an old captain in Hamburg, who was once her dancing partner in his youth, told me about her. She was beautiful, but she didn’t care to be anything but beautiful and gay; perhaps her death was fortunate for my father. I often yearned for my mother, but her son, Anna – I think you would have done better not to take him as husband.”
In passionate emotion the young wife flung her free arm about her husband’s neck. “I know I am different from you, Heinrich, and from your mother, but for that very reason I am yours and am near you; please will to be near me too; don’t always go away evenings, stop doing it for your old father’s sake as well. He is worried when he knows you are in that company.”
But the last words had already changed Heinrich’s mood. He freed Anna’s arm from his neck, and with a jest that passed over his lips somewhat unsteadily he said, “How can I help it if the wine I drink gives my father a headache?”
With a vehement movement Anna clasped the boy to her breast. “Be assured, Heinrich, I will faithfully see to it that this child will not some day say that of his father!”
“Oh come, Anna! I didn’t mean anything bad when I said that.”
No matter how it had been meant, it changed nothing, either. When during that time the night watchman approached Heinrich’s house on his rounds, he often saw the young wife’s head at the open window as she listened to the street in the quiet night; he knew her well, for he was the father of that neighbour’s child which Anna had once so fondly dragged around. Respectfully, without being seen by her, he lifted his hat in passing, and not until he was far from her house did he call out the late hour. But Anna had counted each stroke of the clock, and when finally the familiar step could be heard coming up the street, it was usually not as steady as when she used to hear it during the day. Then she fled back into the room and threw her arms anxiously over her child’s cradle.
The wise as well as the stupid townspeople had been shaking their heads for a long time, and evenings in the Ratskeller the fox-red wig on Mr Jaspers’s head could be seen bobbing up and down as he laughed in glee; indeed he could not refrain from repeatedly telling his friend, the city inspector of weights and measures, that the house in South Street would soon pass once more through his dirty broker’s hand.
In the meantime Carsten was waging a quiet, oft recurring battle with his own child. At the time of the marriage he had made the couple agree that a part of Anna’s fortune should remain under his jurisdiction as her private estate; now this too was to be drawn into the partnership, but since Anna had become a mother, she considered this sum to be the property of her child and had placed everything in the faithful hands of her uncle and father. When his son had left him in anger after such discussions, the old man would look groaning towards the stove in which years before the remains of those letters were burnt, or he would stand before the family picture and carry on a silent, painful dialogue with the shadow of his own youth.
A seemingly insignificant circumstance added its weight. Old Brigitta suddenly fell sick one night – it might have been close to two o’clock in the morning – and since their domestic help was only there by day, Carsten himself set out to get the doctor.
On the way home he passed the before-mentioned tavern, whose windows were the only ones in the dark row of houses that sent lamplight into the street. There seemed to be no guests inside any more, for it was completely quiet. Carsten already had the house behind him when from it a hoarse sound came to his ears which caused him to stop suddenly; in this ugly human voice, in which another familiar one seemed to be hidden, there was something that frightened him almost to death. He could not walk on, he had to go back; prowling, eager to hear it again and this time more clearly, he stood under the window of the ill-reputed tavern. And again it came, wearily, as if emitted by a babbling tongue. Then the old man clasped his hands over his head and his cane fell with a clatter on the stone pavement.
Brigitta recovered slowly, as much as one can recover at seventy-five, but after that night Carsten had permanently lost his sleep. He always seemed to hear the hoarse voice of his son coming from that tavern, though it was several blocks away; he would sit up among his pillows and listen to the stillness of the night, but again and again at brief intervals that awful sound would be set free; his bony hand would reach into the darkness as if to grasp that of his son, but soon it would fall down limply over the edge of the bed.
His thoughts sped back to Heinrich’s childhood; he tried to recall the happy face of the boy when he was told: “A walk along the dike”; he tried to hear his joyful cry when a lark’s nest had been found or a large sea spider was drifted to the shore by the tide. Yet here too something came to share his poor sleep with him. Not only when the wind blew against his window from the sand flats, but even in nights as still as death, the monotonous roar of the sea was in his ears, now as always; it seemed to come as at ebb-tide from far out beyond the narrow channel; instead of the happy face of his child he saw the bare stretches of foaming mud flats shining in the moonlight, and out of them, flat and black, rose a desolate marsh islet. It was the one to which he had once rowed with Heinrich to look for gull or pewit eggs. But they had found none; only the stranded corpse of a drowned man. He lay among the primeval plants of the marsh grass, with large birds flying about him, his arms outstretched, his terrible dead countenance turned towards the sky. Screaming, with horrified eyes, the boy had clung to his father at this sight.
The old man tried again and again, even in his dreams, into which these imagined pictures followed him, to direct his thoughts towards more peaceful places, but each light breeze led him back to that terrible islet.
The days had changed, too; old Curator Carsten was still known under that name, to be sure, but he bore it almost as a retired official does his title, yet without any pension. Most of his former business transactions had passed into younger hands; only the small city job, which he really had procured that time, was still his, and the woollen goods business was also moving along under Brigitta’s ageing hand, but more and more slowly.
It was an afternoon in the beginning of November. The wind blew steadily from the west; the arm with which the North Sea reaches into the city, in the shape of a narrow harbour, was filled with muddy-grey water which, b
oiling and foaming, had already flooded the landing steps in the harbour and was flinging the small island boats anchored there to and fro. Here and there people were already beginning to place before doors and basement windows the wooden bulwarks between whose double walls they would then pound down the manure which had been lying for weeks on all the adjacent streets.
Out of the house on the alley, escorted to the door by Brigitta, stepped a young sailor, who had equipped himself for the winter with a woollen jacket, but the storm ripped the paper from his package and the hat from his head.
“Oho, Miss Brigitta,” he said as he raced after his hat, “the wind has changed; we’ll have water today!”
“Oh Lord Jesus,” screamed the old woman, “they’re already putting up shutters everywhere! Christine, Christine!” and she turned towards a neighbour’s child she was caring for while its parents were away. “The shutters must be brought up from the basement. Run to Kramer Street – Long Christian must come over at once!”
The child ran, but the storm seized it and would have thrown it against the houses like a poor bird, if Long Christian had not fortunately been coming already and brought the child back with him.
The bulwarks were fetched and set in front of the door up to half the height of a man. When twilight fell almost the whole square by the harbour was flooded; inhabitants of the houses near the ramparts were taken to higher parts of the city in boats. The sailboats below tore at their anchor chains, the masts pounded against each other; large white birds were hurled among them or clung shrieking to the fluttering tackle.
Brigitta and the child had watched Long Christian at work for a while; now they were sitting in the dark in the good room, behind securely screwed-on window shutters. Outside, the slapping of the water, the whistling in the ships’ tackle, the shouting and the screaming of people, and how fiercely the gale tugged at the shutters as if it would tear them loose.
“Ohhh,” said the child, “it’s coming in, it’s going to take me!”
“Child, child,” said the old woman, “what are you talking about? What’s coming in?”
“I don’t know, auntie; what’s outside there!”
Brigitta took the child on her lap.
“That is our dear God, Chrissy; what he does is well done. But come, let’s go up to my room!”
During this time Carsten was occupied in the back hall; he was unpacking the old papers and ledgers stored in a cupboard and carrying them up to the bedroom in the annex; for in about an hour the tide would be high; today the lower floor was not safe from flooding.
He was just stepping back into the hall, a lit tallow candle in his hand; for lack of a table he placed the candle on the window seat, where the draft caused it to smoke, making the room with its massive cupboards seem all the gloomier; the storm, striking obliquely from the west, caused the leaden-framed window panes to rattle, as if at any moment they would be hurled down on the tile floor.
Regardless of this and in spite of the cries and shouts that reached him from the street, the old man seemed to be in no great hurry with his work. His house, made of stone, would surely remain standing; a different fall of his house stood before his soul, which he did not know how to prevent. That forenoon Anna had called on him, and, as the final salvation for her husband, had herself demanded of him the release of her bonds, but even to her, who had a right to make this demand, he had refused it. “Sue me; then they can be taken from me by the courts!”
Now he repeated to himself these words, with which he had dismissed her, and Anna’s grief-distorted countenance arose before him, a silent accusation which he could not escape.
When he finally bent down at the cupboard again, he heard the outside door which led from the alley into the yard torn open by force, and soon the door from the yard to the hall was unlatched, and, as if hurled in by the storm, there stood in the middle of the dusky room a form which Carsten gradually recognized as that of his son.
But Heinrich did not speak, nor make any effort to close the door through which the storm was blowing in. Only after his father had asked him to, did he close it; yet as he did so the latch slipped out of his hand several times.
“You haven’t wished me a good evening yet, Heinrich,” said the old man.
“Good evening, father.”
Carsten started when he heard this tone of voice; only once, only on one night had he heard it before. “What do you want?” he asked. “Why aren’t you with your wife and child? The water must have reached your garden a long time ago.”
What Heinrich answered was hardly to be heard above the roaring that surrounded the house.
“I don’t understand you. What are you saying?” said the old man. “The money? Your wife’s bonds? No, I will not give them up!”
“But – I’ll be bankrupt – tomorrow!” The words had been convulsively uttered, and Carsten had understood them.
“Bankrupt!” As if stunned he repeated that one word. But now he stepped close to his son, and pressing his scrawny hand as in self-support against his chest, he said almost calmly, “I’ve gone far with you, Heinrich; may God and your poor wife forgive me for that. I will not go further; whatever comes tomorrow, we’ll both atone then for our own guilt!”
“Father, my father!” stammered Heinrich. He seemed not to grasp the words that had been spoken to him.
In a sudden rush of emotion the old man stretched out both arms towards his son, and if the duskiness dominating the large room had permitted, and if Heinrich’s eyes had been clear enough, he would surely have been frightened at the expression on his father’s face, but the weakness which had overcome the latter for a moment passed.
“Your father?” he said, and his words sounded hard. “Yes, Heinrich! But I was also something else – people named me after it – only a piece of it have I still retained; see if you can tear it out of my old hands! For your wife shall not go begging, because her curator betrayed her for the sake of his wicked son!”
From outside a cry penetrated to them, and from distant streets came the muffled, traditional cry of distress: “Water, water!”
“Don’t you hear?” cried the old man. “The sluice has given way. Why are you standing here? I have no more help for you.”
But Heinrich did not answer, nor did he leave; with arms hanging limply he remained standing there.
Then, as on a sudden impulse, Carsten reached for the flickering candle and held it close before his son’s face. Two dull, glassy eyes stared at him.
The old man staggered backwards. “Drunk!” he cried. “You are drunk!”
He turned away; holding the smoking candle before him with one hand, thrusting out the other hand defensively behind him, he swayed towards the door of the annex. As he stepped through it, he felt a tug at his coat, but he freed himself, and it grew dark in the hall, and from the other side the key was turned in the door lock.
The drunken man had suddenly regained his senses. As if awakening from the fog of a dream, he found himself alone in the familiar dark room; he suddenly knew every word that had been spoken to him. He groped along the locked door, he shook it. “Father, listen to me!” he called. “Help me, my father, only this one last time!” And again he shook the door, and once more he called with a loud voice. But whether the storm blew his voice away, or whether his father’s ears were closed to him, the door was not opened; he heard nothing but the roaring in the air and in between the ravines of the yards and houses.
He stood there a while, his ear pressed against the door; then at last he left. But not through the yard towards the alley, where the door was perhaps still free of water; he went through the front hall to the bulwarks at the open door, halfway up which the water was already splashing. The moon had risen, but clouds were flying across the sky; light and darkness raced alternately over the foaming waters. Before him a mighty stream now seemed to be shooting down over the sluice, w
here through the gap between houses the way goes eastward towards the gardens and meadows; he thought he heard the death cry of the animals which the pitiless powers of nature were dragging past him there as in a frenzy. He shuddered. What was he doing here? But then at once he threw back his pallid, still youthfully handsome head.
“Oh, Jens!” he suddenly called; at one side among the houses he had caught sight of a boat, manned by two men, belonging to one of the former oyster ships. A defiant arrogance flashed from the eyes that a moment before had still been so dull. “Give me the boat, Jens! Or do you still have use for it?”
“Not this time,” the answer rang back. “But where do you want to go, sir?”
“Where? Yes, where? There, just diagonally across to Kramer Street.”
The little boat drew up to the bulwarks. “Get in, sir. But let us get out next door here at the butcher’s.”
Heinrich got in, and the two others were let out as they had requested. Yet as they stood there behind the bulwarks in the doorway, they soon saw that the boat was not steering into the safe path of the street, as Heinrich had declared. “Confound it,” cried one of the men, “where are you going?”
Heinrich was still protected by the row of houses. “Home,” he called back. “Home by the back way!”
“Sir, are you mad? That’s not possible. The boat will overturn before you have rounded the sluice-way.”
“It must be possible!” the voice came once more, partly blown away by the storm; then the boat shot out into the wild flood. For one moment more they saw it, like a shadow, thrown up and down by the waves; as it reached the gap between the houses above the sluice, it was seized by the current. The men uttered a cry: the boat had suddenly disappeared from view.
“It seemed to me,” said Brigitta up in her room to the child, “as if I just now heard Uncle Heinrich’s voice. But how should he get here?” Then she went out and called down into the dark hall from the stairway, “Heinrich, are you there, Heinrich?” Getting no answer, she shook her head and listened again, but only the water was splashing against the bulwarks.
Immensee and Other Stories Page 13
