People of the Book

by David Stacton

  He had had many adventures, none of them interesting. All men’s hands had been turned against him (particularly when he had been forced to cheat them a little), and no one had recognized his quality. He had become an outcast. That that was his own doing did not occur to him.

  In the year 1619 he had come to Küstrin, a town set in the endlessly shifting ambiguities of the Polish borderlands, not far from Frankfort an der Oder. He was then of the age of twenty-six, when dreams begin to float on the ebb. Somewhere he had picked up a small talent as a limner. In each village there is always some poor fool willing to be painted for five schillings less than he would have to pay in town, did he ever go to town. This gives one entry to the quality.

  It was, he supposed bitterly (he never supposed any other way), a comedy. The only form of comedy then available to the Teutons was low-bred peasant farce. In a family such as Stöss’s, a sickly religiosity is the best defense of an odd child. It explains night sweats, absent-mindedness, a distaste for getting soil under the fingernails, shyness, and hysteria. So he had been expected to go for a Jesuit, and allowed to learn his Latin. This is what a good sturdy peasant family does with its culls.

  The project found favor neither with the Jesuits nor him. St. Ignatius Loyola was a soldier of good family and a mystic (any good commander has his mystique), but he had not been an ecstatic, and he had not been given to night sweats. He had made use of the Church for its own good, and so did the Order. It therefore had a sharp eye to detect those who were religious only to their own advantage, and did not like them. First came the Order, then the Church, and its directors had no use for anyone who ran third. It was an order if not quite of gentlemen, at least of younger sons and spiritual magnates. These latter it could detect in embryo. It did not care for individuals, merely for a certain kind of exceptional intelligence to be found in economical bodies most usually, the sinewy bodies of those who do not require much fuel. These were the days of the great Aquaviva and Athanasius Kirchner.

  Baker Stöss was relatively well to do. Frau Stöss’s folk were peasants with four farms and handsome deep-chested dray animals, standing fetlocked eighteen hands high. Their black earth steamed with a moderate wealth. Their generosity took the form of enormous feeding at provincial family meals. Stöss found them too coarse for a refined spirit; he did not like them. Something had had to be done with him. So he was packed off to a seminary before he could sneeze.

  He had not liked that, either, and had a nagging, squirting scorn for anything he did not like, and many fine phrases to explain why. What he enjoyed was to sit alone in a room, rocking while the world trembled at his distaste. “I will say nothing to them. My silence will punish them. And later, when they realize how good I am, they will knock on the door, attempt to apologize, and bring me my tea. No apology they could make could possibly be acceptable, but we must be gracious, and I would like my tea. So why isn’t it brought to me?”

  His real reasons for distaste were that he did not care for the discipline, he did not like to take orders, he had not been recognized at once as a born commander, the bathing arrangements were inadequate, his breviary bored him, there were two members of the minor aristocracy who had not hailed him on the first day, and he was not allowed to wear stockings. Not only was that a discomfort, but there is something sordid about naked feet in naked shoes.

  It is possible to detect a natural-born Protestant from a Catholic, without bothering to inquire as to his faith. It is necessary only to remember the meaning of the word. Turning his pockmarked face (the result of acne) with its sharp self-seeking nose up to the ceiling, he sought God’s guidance, by which he meant approval, and to the relief of his superiors, got himself out of there. Mariolatry stifled him.

  He went to his mother’s brother at Löbau. Though the Stösses were Catholic, his uncle was Lutheran, not having cared for mariolatry either, if from different causes: he had a voice like a trombone and Maria does not thunder well. For oratorical cant and sostenuto work, a monosyllable does better. The word Gott not only conforms to the gutturals of German speech, for shouting purposes it is the next best thing to Hell-fire. The Latin Deus, on the other hand, suggests an armchair, too soft to sit in and too massy to hurl at a defenseless congregation once a week. Luther made converts to the vernacular among all those princelings who had as yet no aspirations to the French.

  And Mein liebe Gott, one must know one’s Latin for letters, but it is a chipped and chiseled language, it does not lend itself to the stentorian Sunday joys of plain-spoken and cast-iron rant. Who wants to damn the heathen and the cook with chamber music mellifluously, when the thing to do is roar them to a cinder, and fling the soup back scalding in her face?

  His uncle, as it happened, was a big, burly, hearty man with a chest like an ox, shrewd, not in the least voluble on weekdays, good, stubborn, and so completely devoted to what he was doing (feeding the poor and getting the turnips in), that sincerity and the other unctions impressed him not at all. He did not like Stöss, either, having enough Greek to know that the word hypocrite, or hypokritos, meant originally actor, and before that, interpreter of dreams, either his own or those of others. The boy, even while asking a favor, had a sneering manner which somehow managed to convey (surely not by accident) that vigor was coarse, turnips beneath him, and that his uncle lacked refinement.

  Vigor is coarse and his uncle did lack refinement. How else would we get the turnips in? What he did not lack, fortunately for Stöss, was a sense of responsibility to the rest of the family, Catholic or not, and besides, he gave himself credit only for those good acts he did not want to do, and not much for those; anything else was offhand, by the way, and practically a self-indulgence. In his quizzical snappish way, he had an immense affection for the human race; appearances were against it, but his sister said the boy had been born in the normal way, so off he was packed (Stöss of Löbau could move with rapidity, when he wanted to) to the Lutherans, a pewling, mewling convert. “I doubt if they will have a use for him, but they may be able to trim off the corners a bit,” he said, and blinked at being accused of furthering an apostasy which, as far as he could see, signified but very little more, and perhaps even less, than the original devotion had done. There was a family row.

  He was used to family rows. They did not surprise him. He sometimes even started them himself. When he heard Stöss had left the Lutheran establishment he was not surprised either. But if he knew his Gadarene swine, the boy would be back, for he was a moral coward, which meant he would always be in need of shelter.

  For the next five years Stöss went about the Germanies, being misunderstood, and very badly paid for it, too. Physical cowardice we can excuse, for it seldom inconveniences anyone, but the moral, alas, not; for the moral can do much harm. It was at this time that Stöss became aware that life was molding him into an increasingly Christlike figure. It was the lack of disciples that did it.

  1619 was the year that Frederick, Prince Palatine, having allowed his Chancellor, Christian of Anhalt, an inept man, to cause him to be elected King of Bohemia, was forced to scamper off his new throne and drag the war after him into the Germanies. But so far, what war there was had been in the devastated Polish borderlands. Küstrin, an ancient market town and county capital, predominantly German, stands either in or out of these, depending on the outcome of the last campaign.

  Here Stöss got a commission to take the likenesses of City Councillor Russeisheim, Frau City Councillor Ludovica Russelsheim (née von Graf, a fallen family, but she clutched her particle with the best of them, it made a sound domestic weapon), Ulric Russelsheim, the son (a shy boy of eleven), Uta, who was to be a beauty, despite the teeth, and a small, howling, red, dappled, as yet unnamed second son.

  Frau Larsen, under her then maiden name, was governess to the children, and, he gathered, a poor relation of Frau City Councillor Russelsheim, who, though herself never rich, tended to be bossy. Her first name was Aemalia. He never heard her referred to by her last name, but sh
e was not a von Graf. She was a vivid dark-haired woman with a habit of biting her lower lip. She had not been there long.

  Uta was difficult to paint. She fidgeted. Ulric was easier. All he did was squirm. Both the parents were commendably immobile, but the baby, who was silent for so long as Herr City Councillor Russelsheim was in the house, took a deep breath as soon as the great door slammed, and howled like a heathen until he came back.

  A governess is not the worst person of whom to inquire further commissions, and he sensed in her someone who did not belong where she was, either. As for her, she welcomed him aboard that invisible plank which was all that kept her from drowning. Though hostile to all men not her late father, she had been patronized often enough this last year to be desperate for any possible escape. Besides, though dark and odd, Stöss, despite his damp hands, was not without a certain panache.

  Sittings went well. The family did not interfere. Indeed any little occurrence like that would not have been unwelcome (Herr City Councillor Russelsheim did not like the Fräulein, whose gentility in another way made him even more uncomfortable than did that of his wife, the authentic von Graf herself). Stöss heard Aemalia’s story, which was a sad one, of which he thoroughly approved.

  *

  People who have lost houses, gardens, large estates, the ancient position of their family, or it may be only an oleander bush beside a bucket and a well, or something they could not help but believe in, most ordinarily shut up about it, and are to be identified, if at all (like the Magician), by a quality of silence about them, a tarnhelm cast over what they care about. They bury things in the back corners of drawers. Or, again like the Magician, they shoulder their bundle of mischief and go, and make their confession only once, in extremis, as a final elegy. These things do not really count now, they say deprecatingly, that world is dead. And they mean exactly what they say, for they are dying, they are going home, it no longer matters. They will see once more the old familiar hill. Exile is over. For the matter of that, they have had it before them every moment of their lives. They have sent their message from a watcher to a star, and now at last the star has signaled back, there is the flash of a mirror, the beds have been fresh made up and triangularly turned down. Your third cousin is coming at last, Dietrich’s boy. We must freshen the flowers. Welcome home. Why did you not warm to our dark light sooner?

  But it is the habit of genteel refugees always to up the situation of the world they left, and of their own position in it, not so much to impress the not yet fallen as to convince themselves that there really was something they cared enough about to explain why they feel as rootless in these new surroundings as they have always felt, anywhere. So they speak of the past as people speak of the dead at funerals, to prove that life was worth living, when plainly it is not, they never found it so. They put any little souvenirs they may have saved (or subsequently bought) out on the bureau, and speak too often of the servants we used to have, of the family friend, Baron von un zu Ch—, and of the happy life I used to lead with my father.

  Frau Larsen, that taciturn woman who had never told her husband anything about Stöss, and had mentioned him only twice to her children as their uncle, in those days when she knew him, spoke of her past compulsively whenever something she did not like caught her eye.

  Stöss was impressed. He took a better room at the inn, and presented Aemalia with her own likeness. Since she was a member of the gentry, he had drawn her against a plain blue background (an expensive blue with ground lapis in it), with gold lettering for the date (real gold, inferior in carat, but with a glitter to it, to give it the right shine for now).

  The truth of Frau Larsen’s past was much more nearly solid than her daydreams about it were, and of better stock. She was the only child of a widower yeoman whose family had always lived in that same house, for all the generations of their name. He did not consider himself a cut above the neighbors, or a cut below them either. His daughter did. It was one of those families too old to take a title when titles were to be taken, and oblivious to any merit merely written out on a sheet of paper since, and waved till it was dry. In short, they had always been the people of that place, and like Oxenstierna with Södermanland and Föno, that not only sufficed, it was a daily blessing and an elegant sufficiency. They respected no one who did not love his own inheritable piece of land to the extent of remaining on it. Trips to the comty seat were not encouraged.

  By some freak, Frau Larsen had been born with the soul of a townswoman, and respected not land, but only things. The house was cluttered with the past, and it was her pleasure to keep these old things shiny, and to add to them preserves put up and dated in 1614, laid down in 1616, and to keep the keys about her of that cellar which, though small, was excellently chosen and better aged, put there by the last generation, for the next generation but one.

  She saw herself as everything in the world of value, and as an exemplar to everyone in the district who was not. Who had better brandies? It was not snobbery; it was possession. An hundred years of linen, some of the first forks seen in the Germanies (from Byzantium, by Venice, out of Augsberg), and 150 books to dust made her pre-eminent, so far as she was concerned. She had never designed to be pretty. Her appearance was too striking for that, and she was already halfway to an old maid. The other young women of the district had to ask her to formal gatherings, but did their best to keep her from intimate afternoon chats. Since the formal were the only ones that mattered to her, she never noticed the omission. No one guessed she was a dreamer. She stood too firmly on her rights, with a jerk of her chin, for that. She did not guess it herself.

  This house stood at the end of a small valley, in mountainous country on a permanently disturbed border, in an area so anciently settled everyone had forgotten it. The wars had nothing to do with her undoing. Driving back from the local market, at scented dusk, with their one competent serving girl, she had seen flames against the sky, galloped the wagon to pieces, and arrived in time to see the source of what pride she had burning unenterable. So she was disinherited by nothing more than a country accident. Her father was found suffocated and partially charred, when the ruins had cooled, beside what had once been the tile stove in the hall.

  Some acquaintances took her in. An old servant had taken her in. Finally, grudgingly, her distant cousin had offered to take her as a companion governess. Her former friends in the county had been delighted to give her cast-off dresses. The father of another friend had been equally pleased to sell her land for less than half its worth. The money was transferred to Küstrin, but was not enough to dower her for a husband of her own class. She kept herself dressed decently out of it, and wished never to see her native place again. In conversation she shifted its location to the south. She was gentle, patient, competent, understanding, and disliked children. She was a large woman forced to be mousy. She bore condescensions with a small still smile. She raged. She was a governess.

  Stöss presented himself as an heroic rebel forced from home by a stodgy family. She inquired about the family not by question, but by analogy. If in mentioning his uncle of Löbau, he said, “in the corner by the tile stove,” she found out what kind of tile stove, and compared it to the one at home. If he cited a conserve, she said, “What did it taste like?” added three spices, and there were the storerooms back again, without the flames. In this way she formed a favorable impression and made up her mind. She knew about the seminaries. His explanation was that he had had to come into the world again, to wrestle with Doubt. Her assumption was that he would return, her feeling that a manageable preacher of secure family was more apt than most men to be fatherly, the position would be a respectable one, it would not be too bad. She described the linen press at home, and then, in her methodical but thorough way, seduced him. She had her father’s skill at sizing up strangers, like him was seldom wrong, and like him avoided them as much as possible, but this was an unavoidable case.

  Stöss had notions of the Whore of Babylon, and one or two bad memorie
s. Purity in him arose not from a sense of sin, but a fear of failure. He did nothing for the first time, because he could not face the ridicule of being shown not to be adept. It was a matter of putting the tenant farmers at their ease, no problem to the daughter of a county squire. She had him vaunting like Siegfried in no time.

  It is not easy to remember one’s spring. One can remember only that it was spring. Stöss sometimes gloated over this adventure in the soiled upstairs bedroom of an inn with creaking joists and no fire. It had been his one success in a world that made him shudder. Until Blicksberg, he had not had another.

  He had been so proud of himself he had almost proposed marriage. But not quite. Stöss never did anything quite. He was incapable of decision, unless driven by a terror of what was behind him even greater than his fear of what lay to the front and the sides, and even then, one could never be sure. It was not that he wished to do both, only that take him away from the glum joys of neither, and he panicked and found the air too thin.

  Of outcomes to this dronelike seduction there had been two. Upon discovering he was the son of a baker and not of rich peasants, as she had supposed, Frau Larsen, though in control of herself at all times, had been unable not to blink; and she found herself pregnant, which did not distress her. She had been sure he would marry her.

  Perhaps he would have done so, had he not seen that blink. But that had given him his fright. He sat alone all day in his room, with his lips narrow and his forehead taut. When he was frightened he would kick and twitch and make tight downward movements with his arms, his fists clenched.

  “But it is insupportable,” he would snap at the plaster on the walls. “In-sup-port-able.”

  That evening he was supposed to take chocolate at City Councillor Russelsheim’s, with thin anise wafers, among the ladies. On the way there (he had a good conscience; he had tried), he turned and fled out the town’s east gate.