by Vicki Baum
Gaigern, his hands in his pockets, smiled. “Perhaps the girls at the Alhambra took it off him,” he answered. It was the answer he had long had ready.
Kringelein sank in a heap on the edge of the bed. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, no, no, no.”
Otternschlag looked from him to Gaigern and back again. “So that’s it,” he said to himself. He took up his black case and went over to Gaigern, stumping along by the wall in his usual manner as though a little life and strength could come to him from contact with walls and furniture, or as though he had not yet learned to move without cover. He came to a stop in front of Gaigern, and turning upon him the wounded half of his face, he fixed him with a stare from his glass eye.
“Kringelein must have his wallet restored to him,” he said quietly and politely.
Gaigern hesitated for one second, and in this one second his fate was decided. A rift opened in him and his assurance was gone.
Gaigern was not a man of honor. He had stolen and swindled before now. And yet he was not a criminal, for the better instincts of his nature and upbringing too often made havoc of his evil designs. He was a dilettante amongst rogues. There was strength in him, but not enough strength. He might have felled the two sick men and gone off. He might have pushed them aside and made his escape with his booty over the façade of the hotel. He might have left the room with a few jesting words, made a dash for the railway station and disappeared. Everything in him drew to a crisis as he thought of Grusinskaya and felt her light form in his arms as he carried her up the steps of her house at Tremezzo. He must go to her, he must, he must. But suddenly he was overcome by the unreasoning and irresistible pity that he had felt for Grusinskaya the day before; and he now felt it for Kringelein sitting there on the edge of the bed. He felt pity too for Otternschlag, for the war-wasted face fixed on his own, and pity, remote and unconscious, for himself, and this pity was his undoing.
He took two steps into the room and smiled. “Here is his wallet,” he said. “I took charge of it earlier so that it wouldn’t be stolen from Kringelein at the nightclub.”
“There we are then,” said Otternschlag, relaxing. He took the old worn and bulging wallet from Gaigern’s hands. It gave him an odd forlorn feeling of tenderness to do so. It was so seldom he had occasion to touch the hands of another human being. He turned his head and fixed the other eye on Gaigern with an expression that might have conveyed either gratitude or a secret understanding. But he was shocked by what he saw. Instead of Gaigern’s particularly handsome and lively face he saw a mask so blanched, drawn, vacant and dead, that he was frightened. Are there nothing but ghosts in this world then? he thought as he made his way along the sofa to the bed and put the wallet down in front of Kringelein.
The whole scene had taken only a few seconds, and during this time Kringelein had sat plunged in deep reflection.
Now that Otternschlag handed him the wallet about which he had set up such a piteous lamentation, he barely touched it. He let it fall onto the quilt without counting the money, all that money, the money he had won.
“Please, don’t leave me,” he said, and he said it, not to Otternschlag who had come to his help, but to Gaigern. He stretched out his arm to Gaigern who stood gloomily by the window smoking a fresh cigarette.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Kringelein,” Otternschlag said meanwhile to comfort him.
“I’m not afraid,” replied Kringelein peevishly and with a surprising alertness. “Do you think I’m afraid to die? I am not afraid. On the contrary. Indeed, I ought to be grateful for it. I would never have found the courage to live if I hadn’t known I had to die. When you know that you have to die afterwards, it’s then you become courageous—if you’re constantly thinking that you’re going to die, it makes you capable of anything—that’s the secret—”
“Aha,” said Otternschlag, “the revolving door. Kringelein is becoming a philosopher. Sickness brings wisdom. You’ve found that out, have you?”
Gaigern made no reply. What are you talking about, he thought. Life—death—how can one talk about them? They are not words after all. I live—well then, I live. I die—well then, good God, I die. As for thinking of death—no. And as for talking about it—ugh! Disgusting! There is nothing but to die decently whenever the moment comes. If you two were to climb along the hotel front like monkeys, you’d soon keep your mouths shut about life and death, he thought arrogantly. I am ready, too—and I need no help from a case full of morphine. He yawned and drew in a deep breath of the early morning air coming in through the open window, and at the same time a faint chill shook his athletic shoulders. “I am sleepy,” he said. Then all at once he broke into hearty laughter. “I never got to bed at all last night, and now today again it’s four o’clock. Come along, Herr Direktor, get under the covers.”
Kringelein obeyed at once. He lay down with his heavy head and the pain inside him, which, though dulled, had not left off, and folded his hands on the quilt.
“Stay with me. Please stay with me,” he said beseechingly. He said it much too loud, because his ears were buzzing and half deafened. Otternschlag stood there and listened. Nobody cared about him. Nobody asked him to stay.
“Now you have the morphine inside you, so you probably don’t need me any longer?” he asked Kringelein, but the scorn with which he said it escaped Kringelein.
“No, thank you,” he said amiably. He was holding Gaigern’s hand tightly like a little child. He clung to Gaigern. He loved Gaigern. Perhaps he even had a dim notion that Gaigern had meant to rob him; nevertheless, he clung to him tightly.
“Please stay with me,” he implored.
At this, Otternschlag in turn began to laugh. He raised his mangled face up to the cold light of the electric lamp and began to laugh with his crooked mouth, but it was not at all like Gaigern’s laughter. It was noiseless at first, then with a sort of dragging sound, then louder and louder, more and more scornful and more and more malevolent. Next door in Room No. 71, someone knocked three times on the wall. “I must really ask you to be quiet. The night is for sleeping not for having fun,” came the fretful, sleepy and aggrieved voice of an unknown person. It was General Manager Preysing, who little dreamt that in the next room three fates were intertwined for a fleeting and decisive hour . . .
IDEAS of conventionality were elastic in the Grand Hotel. It was not permissible for General Manager Preysing to receive his secretary in his room. But there was no objection to his engaging a room for her. He did so with a flushed forehead and stammered explanations after his decisive conversation with Flämmchen. Rohna, who knew his world, regretted that he had only a double-bedded room free, No. 72, separated from Preysing’s suite by a bathroom. Preysing murmured something that was meant, for the sake of appearances, to sound like an embarrassed objection, and then plunged feverishly into his adventure.
In the morning he had received letters from Fredersdorf, several business letters, and one from Mulle, to which Babs had appended two scrawled lines. Preysing, however, was now being carried along in midstream far from the shore, as occasionally happens to men of his age. This transformed Preysing read the letters coldly and without a pang of conscience during the breakfast that the charming and cheerful and entirely unconcerned Flämmchen shared with him in his room.
Kringelein, too, had received letters from Fredersdorf. He was sitting up in bed, free from pain, fortified by Hundt’s Elixir, and resolved at all costs to retain the hard-won and thrilling sense of life he had experienced the day before. Now that he had fought his way through the agonies of the night and left them behind, now that he had emerged from them alive, he felt he was made of a transparent substance as hard as steel. With his pince-nez on the thin nose that now was even thinner, he read the letter Frau Kringelein had written him on a sheet of blue-lined paper torn from her recipe book.
Dear Otto, (wrote this Frau Kringelein, who had never been close to him, and who now had vanished to an unthinkable distance and remoteness). Dear Otto, I received your letter
and am quite sure you wouldn’t be ill if you had taken care of yourself, and father thinks the same. He has applied to the factory, requesting support for me, but I have not heard yet how the matter stands. They only put you off. I am writing to you chiefly on account of the stove, for it can’t go on like this any longer. Binder was here to look at it. The vent pipe is blocked, he says, and in every house in the project there is something or other wrong. If they put in stoves like this they ought to supply the coal as well, for no one on earth can pay such coal bills as the stove runs up. Now I have talked it over with Binder. He says he cannot repair the pipe for less than fourteen or fifteen marks but that it would pay to do it because of the saving in coal. Of course, that is a big expense and I should like to hear without delay what you think we ought to do about the stove. It can’t go on the way it is, but it makes no sense, either, to spend fourteen marks on a bad stove. I have talked with Kietzau too, in secret. He knows something about these things. But he thinks it would cost rather more than less, and he won’t guarantee that we would need less coal than before, he says. So I went to the factory and made a row. I got hold of Schriebes after a lot of bother and told him they ought to fix the stove, and it is only right since it is on their property. But they won’t hear of it. Schriebes was uncivil, and he is only a common fellow who thinks of nothing but his own pocket. If I can get something now out of the sick fund—father thinks they might fork out thirty marks, but I don’t agree, for Preysing, the old skinflint, lets nothing past him, and so should I have the stove fixed then, or not? Do you get sick pay extra when you are in the convalescent home, or do they take it all? People here are turning nasty and saying that you are shirking work and putting your pay in your pocket. I can’t go outside the door, for they don’t spare my feelings. Please, see to this business with the sick fund at once. Frau Prahm says that as long as you are sick, they can’t deduct anything from your pay. You must look into it, or you’re the stupid one, she says. Bad weather here. How is it there?
Regards, your
Anna
Write to me at once about the stove, or shall I wait till you come back? It smokes so much that my eyes smart.
With this letter in his manicured hands, Kringelein sat lost in thought on the edge of his bed for about ten minutes, but he was not thinking of Fredersdorf, nor of his wife, nor of the stove, and not of the attack of pain or the fear of death during the night either. All the time he was thinking of the airplane and how he had not felt the least bit of airsickness. He was thinking of the thrill of pride and courage that came over him when on a sharp turn the world rose up at him through the window of the plane without causing him a tremor.
I shall get dressed now and go over to talk to Preysing, thought Kringelein, and with this resolve he got out of bed at once. He had to set things straight with Preysing, otherwise none of it made any sense.
Kringelein took a bath and put on the new Kringelein, the one with a silk shirt, a well-cut jacket and a sense of his own worth. His heart was as resolute as a clenched fist as he stood at the door of Room No. 71. He opened the outer door and knocked on the white-painted wood of the inner one.
“Come in,” Preysing called out. He said it from habit and without thinking, for he certainly didn’t want anyone to interrupt his cheerful breakfast with Flämmchen. But since he had called out “Come in,” the door opened and Kringelein appeared.
He appeared—and it seemed to Preysing as if an explosion had projected him into the Grand Hotel, onto the second floor, the floor of select visitors, and into Room No. 71. He had put his handsome new felt hat from Florence on his head with the deliberate intention of keeping it on his head, and there he kept it. “Good morning, Herr Preysing,” he said, and casually brushed the brim of it with two fingers. “I have to talk with you.”
Preysing stared.
“What do you want? How did you get in here?” he asked.
The sight of Kringelein with his hat on his head, this assistant bookkeeper from his accounting office coming in with this resolute air, amazed him as much as if he had come to announce the end of the world.
“I knocked and you said ‘Come in,’ ” Kringelein replied with astonishing coolness. “I want a word with you. May I sit down?”
“Please,” said Preysing helplessly as Kringelein did so.
“The young lady will please forgive the intrusion,” he said turning to Flämmchen.
Flämmchen, with lively amiability, replied, “We know each other, Herr Kringelein, don’t we? We danced a delightful fox-trot together.”
“Quite so. We did indeed,” said Kringelein, clearing his throat of a slight huskiness. His throat was throbbing. After this there was a silence.
“Well, what is it? I have no time to waste. I have urgent letters to dictate to Fräulein Flämmchen,” the general manager finally said in his general manager’s tone of voice.
Kringelein, however, showed no sign whatever of cringing under it, though he did not quite know where to begin.
“It’s a letter from my wife. The stove has gone bad again and the firm refuses to have it repaired. Now that won’t do. The housing project where I live, belongs to the firm and we pay the rent punctually. It’s deducted from our wages. And so the firm ought to see that everything is in good order in the houses on its property and none of us ought to suffocate because the stoves are bad.” This was how he began. Preysing went a dull red between his eyebrows and had the greatest difficulty in keeping his temper.
“You know very well that these matters are no concern of mine. If you have any complaints to make you must make them to the building-site office. It is absolutely unheard of to bother me with anything of this sort.”
Period. And this might well have concluded what he had to say. But Preysing had to add: “Instead of people being thankful to have homes put up for them, they become impudent. It’s intolerable.”
Though Preysing stood up, Kringelein remained seated.
“Very well, we will leave it at that,” he said carelessly. “You think that you can be as insulting as you like. I beg to differ. You think that you are something altogether superior, but you are quite a common man, Herr Preysing, though you may have married money and built yourself a house in the country. You are quite common, and they’ve never said such bad things of anyone in Fredersdorf as they do about you. So there, now you know the truth.”
“That does not concern me. That does not concern me in the least. I advise you to leave this room.”
But Kringelein found unsuspected reserves of strength within himself. He had twenty-seven years of drudgery of which to unburden his soul, and he was charged like a dynamo.
“Yes, it does concern you,” he said, “it concerns you very much. Otherwise why should you have your spies and informers in the factory, your informers, like Herr Schriebes, like Herr Kuhlenkamp, creatures who step on those below them and who cower before those above them? If anyone is three minutes late, it is reported. They even get in with the servants. The whole factory knows that. But we can work our fingers to the bone and not a word is said. We’re paid to do that. You don’t bother to ask, Herr Preysing, whether it is possible to live as a human being on the salaries we get. You sit in your car, and we can’t even afford to buy rubber heels for our shoes. And when we’re old and used up, we’re left sitting. Nobody cares. Old Hannemann was with the firm for thirty-three years, and now he sits there with cataracts and not a farthing of pension.”
If Preysing had been as black a tyrant as he appeared in the imagination of a subordinate employee like Kringelein, he would have chucked Kringelein out of the room without another word. But as he was a self-respecting, well-meaning and insecure man, he let himself be drawn into a discussion.
“You are paid according to the scale. And we have our Employees’ Fund,” he began in an embittered tone. “I know nothing of Hannemann. Who is Hannemann anyway?”
“A nice scale! A nice fund!” Kringelein cried. “I was in the paupers’ ward in the hospi
tal. I was supposed to eat cheese and salami four days after my operation. My wife has made one application after another, but not a penny of extra allowance did I get. And I had to pay for the ambulance to Mickenau out of my own pocket. And I was supposed to eat cheese, with my stomach in the state it was! After I had been sick four weeks, you wrote me a letter, saying that I would be given notice if I was sick for a longer time. Is that so or isn’t it—yes or no, Herr Preysing?”
“I can’t remember every letter I sign. But, in any case, a factory is not a charitable institution, nor a hospital, nor a life insurance agency. You have now reported sick again, yet here you are living like a lord or an embezzler—”
“You will take that back. You will take that back at once in this lady’s presence,” Kringelein shouted. “Who are you to presume to insult me? Who do you think you are talking to? Do you think I am dirt? And if I am dirt you are a great deal dirtier, Herr Generaldirektor. So now you know. You are dirt, dirt!”
The two men were standing face to face glaring at each other in a furious rage and hurling insults at each other. Preysing was flushed a dark red, almost bluish, and big drops of perspiration stood on his shaven upper lip. Kringelein had turned completely yellow. His lips were utterly drained of blood, and his elbows, his shoulders and indeed every one of his limbs quivered. Flämmchen looked first at one and then at the other. Her head moved back and forth like a foolish kitten’s following a swinging tangle of wool. All the same she understood pretty well what Kringelein had intended to say, in spite of his distracted state, and he had her sympathy.
“What do you know or care how people like us have to exist?” he shouted, white-lipped under his light, ruffled mustache. “But the way we live is enough to cause one to despair. It is like climbing up a bare wall. It is like being shut up in a cellar all your life. You wait from year to year, and first you have a hundred and eighty marks, and, when you have waited five years, then you have two hundred, and then you crawl on and wait again. And then you think: It’ll be better later on, and later on you’ll be able to afford to have a child— but it never gets to that—and then you even have to give up keeping a dog, because there’s not enough money, and then you wait on in hopes of a raise, working like a slave and putting in overtime without pay, and then another man gets the raise and the better job with three hundred and twenty marks pay and family allowances, and you’re stuck where you are. And why? Because the general manager doesn’t know his business. Because the general manager promotes the wrong men. Even Brösemann says that. My twentieth anniversary with the firm was the shabbiest thing ever known in the history of the world. Did you even congratulate me? Did it enter anyone’s head to give me a bonus? There I sat bent over my desk and waited— but nothing happened. Then I thought: It can’t be possible. It’s being kept as a great surprise, for it’s impossible they would forget me after I’ve worked twenty years in their office—twenty years. And then midday came and then six o’clock, and I put on my best jacket, and waited, but nothing whatsoever happened. And so I trudged off home, ashamed to be seen by my wife and ashamed to be seen by Kampmann. ‘Well,’ says Kampmann, ‘did they celebrate the occasion in proper style?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘my desk was covered with flowers, and they gave me five hundred marks, and the general manager himself spoke to me. Oh yes, and he knew quite well that I was always the last to leave the office.’ That is what I said to Kampmann, to hide the shame of it all. And seven weeks later Brösemann called me in and said, ‘I hear you have been with us for twenty years. It has been overlooked. Well, is there anything you would like?’ And I said, ‘I’d like to be dead and done with as soon as possible, that’s what I’d like, for there’s no pleasure in a dog’s life like this.’ And then Brösemann went to the old man, and he gave me a raise to four hundred and twenty from the end of May on—but that didn’t keep it from being a dog’s life all the same. And that’s when I swore that I’d tell that Preysing the truth one of these days.”
