Now that Joachim von Pasenow had put on his civilian frock-coat and between the two corners of his peaked stiff collar his chin was enjoying unaccustomed freedom, now that he had fixed on his curly-brimmed top-hat and picked up a walking-stick with a pointed ivory crook handle, now that he was on the way to the hotel to take out his father for the obligatory evening’s entertainment, suddenly Eduard von Bertrand’s image rose up before him, and he felt glad his civilian clothes did not sit on him with by any means the same inevitability as on that gentleman, whom in secret he sometimes thought of as a traitor. Unfortunately it was only to be expected and feared that he would meet Bertrand in the fashionable resorts he would have to visit with his father that evening, and already during the performance in the Winter Garden he was keeping an eye open for him and seriously considering the question whether he could introduce such a man to his father.
The problem still occupied him as they were being driven in a droshky through Friedrichstrasse to the Jäger Casino. They sat stiffly and silently, with their sticks between their knees, on the tattered black-leather seats, and when a chance girl on her beat shouted something to them Joachim stared straight in front, while his father, his monocle rigidly fixed, muttered: “Idiotic.” Yes, since Herr von Pasenow had first come to Berlin many things had changed, and even if one accepted it, yet one could not close one’s eyes to the fact that the innovating policy of the founder of the Reich had produced some very curious fruits. Herr von Pasenow said, as he was accustomed to say every year: “Paris itself isn’t any worse than this,” and when they stopped in front of the Jäger Casino the row of flaring gas-lamps before it, drawing the attention of passers-by to the entrance, excited his disapproval.
A narrow wooden stair led up to the first floor where the dancing-halls were, and Herr von Pasenow climbed it with the bustling, undeviating air which was characteristic of him. A black-haired girl was descending. She squeezed herself into a corner of the landing to let the visitors pass; and as she could not help smiling, it seemed, at the old gentleman’s fussiness, Joachim made a somewhat embarrassed and deprecatory gesture. And once more he felt a compulsion to picture Bertrand either as this girl’s lover, or as her bully, or as something else equally fantastic; and no sooner was he in the dancing-hall than he looked searchingly around for him. But of course Bertrand was not there: on the contrary Joachim found two officers from his own regiment, and now he remembered for the first time that it had been himself who had incited them to come to the casino, so that he might not be left alone with his father, or with his father and Bertrand.
In acknowledgment of his age and position Herr von Pasenow was greeted with a slight, stiff bow and a click of the heels, as if he were a military superior, and it was indeed with the air of a commanding general that he inquired if the gentlemen were enjoying themselves: he would feel honoured if they would drink a glass of champagne with him; whereupon the gentlemen made known their agreement by clicking their heels again. A new bottle of champagne was brought. They all sat stiffly and dumbly in their chairs, drank to each other in silence, and regarded the hall, the white-and-gilt decorations, the gas flames that hissed, surrounded by tobacco smoke, on the branches of the great circular chandelier, and stared at the dancers who were revolving in the middle of the floor. At last Herr von Pasenow said: “Well, gentlemen, I hope that you aren’t refraining from the company of the fair sex on my account.” Bows and smiles. “Some pretty girls here too. As I was coming upstairs I met a very promising piece, black hair, and with eyes that you young fellows couldn’t remain indifferent to.” Joachim was so ashamed that he could have throttled the old man to suppress such unseemly words, but already one of his comrades was replying that it must have been Ruzena, really an unusually pretty girl, and one couldn’t deny her a certain elegance either; anyhow, most of the ladies here were better than might be expected, for the management were very strict in selecting their girls and laid a great deal of importance on the maintenance of a refined tone. Meanwhile Ruzena had returned to the dancing-hall; she had taken the arm of a fair girl, and as they sauntered past the tables and boxes with their high coiffures and tight-laced figures they actually produced an elegant impression. As they were passing Herr von Pasenow’s table they were asked jestingly whether Ruzena’s ears had not been tingling, and Herr von Pasenow added that, to judge from her name, he must be addressing a fair Pole, consequently almost a countrywoman of his. No, she was not Polish, said Ruzena, but Bohemian, or as people said in this country, Czech; but Bohemian was more correct, for the proper name of her country was Bohemia. “All the better,” said Herr von Pasenow, “the Poles are no good … unreliable.… Well, it doesn’t matter.”
Meanwhile the two girls had sat down, and Ruzena began to talk in a deep voice, laughing at herself, for she had not yet learned to speak German correctly. Joachim was annoyed at his father for conjuring up the memory of the Polish maids, but was forced himself to think of one of the harvest workers who, when he was a little boy, had lifted him up on to the wagon with the sheaves. Yet though in her hard, staccato pronunciation she made hay of the German language, still she was a young lady, stiffly corseted, who lifted her champagne-glass to her lips with a proper air, and so was not in the least like a Polish harvest worker; whether the talk about his father and the maids were true or not. Joachim had nothing to do with that, but this gentle girl wasn’t to be treated by the old man in the way he was probably accustomed to. All the same Joachim was unable to envisage the life of a Bohemian girl as any different from that of a Polish one—indeed even among German civilians it was difficult to divine the individual behind the puppet—and when he tried to imagine Ruzena as coming out of a good home, with a good matronly mother and a decent suitor with gloves on, it did not fit her; and he could not get rid of the feeling that in Bohemia life must be wild and low, as among the Tartars. He was sorry for Ruzena, although she reminded him somewhat of a humble little beast of prey in whose throat a dark cry is strangled, dark as the Bohemian forests, and he longed to know whether one could talk to her as one talked to a lady; for all this was so terrifying and yet seductive, and in a way justified his father and his father’s lewd intentions. He was afraid that Ruzena, too, would see through these, and he sought for an answer in her face; she noticed it and smiled to him; yet she let the old man fondle her hand which was hanging languidly over the edge of the table, and the old man did it quite openly, and tried at the same time to summon up his scraps of Polish to erect a lingual hedge round the girl and himself. Of course it was wrong of her to allow him such liberties, and when at Stolpin they maintained that Polish maids were quite unreliable perhaps they were right. Yet perhaps she was only weak, and one’s honour demanded that she should be protected from the old man’s advances. But that would be the duty of her lover; if Bertrand possessed the slightest vestige of chivalry he was in duty bound to appear now to put everything in order with a word. And suddenly Joachim began to talk about Bertrand to his fellow-officers: hadn’t they heard any word of Bertrand lately and of what he was doing; yes, a curiously reserved fellow, Eduard von Bertrand. But his comrades, who had already drunk a good deal of champagne, gave him confused answers and were beyond being surprised at anything, even at the pertinacity with which Joachim harped on the theme of Bertrand; and cunningly and persistently as he brought out the name in a loud and distinct voice, not even the girls twitched an eyelash, and the suspicion mounted within him that Bertrand might have sunk so low as to come here under an assumed name; and so he turned directly to Ruzena and asked whether she didn’t know von Bertrand—until the old man, keen of hearing, and officious as ever in spite of the champagne, asked why Joachim was so hot on the track of this von Bertrand: “You’re as eager about him as if he were hidden somewhere in the place.” Joachim reddened and denied it, but the old man had been set going: yes, he had known the father well, old Colonel von Bertrand. He had departed this life, very likely it was this Eduard who had brought him to his grave. When his waster o
f a son had chucked the army he had taken it, people said, very much to heart; nobody knew why, or whether there mightn’t have been something shady behind it. Joachim became indignant. “Pardon me, but that’s only empty gossip—and the last thing that Bertrand can be called is a waster!” “Gently, gently,” replied the old man, turning again to Ruzena’s hand, on which he now pressed a long kiss; Ruzena calmly permitted it and regarded Joachim, whose soft fair hair reminded her of the children at the village school in Bohemia. “I not will flatter you,” she said in her staccato voice to the old man, “but nice hair has your son.” Then she seized the head of her friend, held it pressed to Joachim’s, and was delighted to see that the colour of the hair was the same. “Would be beautiful pair,” she declared to the two heads, and ran her hands through their hair. The other girl shrieked, because her coiffure was being disarranged; Joachim felt a soft hand touching the back of his head, he had a slight sensation of dizziness and threw his head back as if he wished to catch the hand between his neck and his collar and force it to remain there; but then the hand slipped of its own accord down to the back of his neck, and stroked it quickly and timorously, and was gone. “Gently, gently!” he heard his father’s dry voice again, and then he noticed that the old man had taken out his pocket-book, had drawn out two large notes, and was on the point of pressing them on the two girls. Yes, that was just how he used to throw marks to the harvest girls when he was in a good mood, and though Joachim wanted to intervene now he could not prevent the fifty-mark note from being pressed into Ruzena’s hand, nor her from sticking it gaily into her pocket. “Thanks, papa,” she said, then she bettered her words, “papa-in-law,” and winked at Joachim. Joachim was pale with rage: the old man would buy a girl for him for fifty marks, would he? Quick of hearing, the old man caught Ruzena’s quip and seized on it: “So! It seems to me that my young rascal has caught your fancy.… Well, you have my blessing.…” Swine, thought Joachim. But now the old man was in full sail: “Ruzena, my sweet child, to-morrow I’ll call on you and fix up the match in proper style, all tip-top. What shall I bring you as a wedding gift? … But you must tell me the address of your castle.…” Joachim looked away like one who at an execution does not wish to see the axe falling, but Ruzena suddenly stiffened, her eyes went blind, her lips quivered, she pushed away a hand that was stretched out in help or concern, and ran away to cry herself out beside the woman who attended to the lavatory.
“Well, well,” said Herr von Pasenow, “but it must be quite late! I’m afraid we must be going, gentlemen.” In the droshky father and son sat side by side, stiff and hostile, their sticks between their knees. At last the old man said: “Well, she accepted the fifty marks, all the same. And then she took to her heels.” What a wretch, thought Joachim.
On the theme of the military uniform Bertrand could have supplied some such theory as this:
Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that he was a sinner. Nowadays it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” And as once it was only the garments of the priest that marked a man off from his fellows as something higher, some hint of the layman peeping through even the uniform and the robe of office, so, when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into a property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life.
This is what Bertrand might have said; but though it is certain that not every wearer of uniform is conscious of such things, yet it may be maintained that everyone who has worn a uniform for many years finds in it a better organization of life than the man who merely exchanges one civilian suit in the evening for another civilian suit during the day. True, the soldier has no real need to think deeply of these things, for a generic uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world; it is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and distinctly and are differentiated from each other; for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide, and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to a distance. Then, after he has finished by pulling down his tunic so that it stretches smooth and without a crease over chest and back,—then even the child whom he sincerely loves, and the woman in whose embrace he begot that child, recede into such a civilian remoteness that the mouths which they present to him in farewell are almost strange to him, and his home becomes something foreign, which in his uniform he dare not enter. Should he next proceed in his uniform to the barracks or to his office, it must not be thought pride that makes him ignore men otherwise clothed; it is simply that he can no longer comprehend that such alien and barbarous raiment can clothe anything even faintly resembling actual humanity as he feels it in himself. Yet this does not mean that the man in uniform has become blind, nor that he is filled with blind prejudices, as is commonly assumed; he remains all the time a man like you and me, dreams of food and love, even reads his newspaper at breakfast; but he is no longer tied to things, and as they scarcely concern him any longer he is able to divide them into the good and the bad, for on intolerance and lack of understanding the security of life is based.
Whenever Joachim von Pasenow was compelled to put on civilian clothes Eduard von Bertrand came into his mind, and he was always glad that mufti did not sit on him with the same assurance as on that man; yet he was very eager to know what Bertrand’s views were on the question of uniform. For Eduard von Bertrand had of course every reason to reflect on the problem, seeing that he had laid aside the uniform once for all and decided for the clothing of a civilian. That had been astonishing enough. He had been passed out of the cadet school in Culm two years before Pasenow, and while there had acted exactly like the others; had like the others worn white trousers in summer, had eaten at the same table, had passed his examinations like the others; and yet when he became a second lieutenant the incomprehensible thing happened: without ostensible cause he quitted the service and vanished into a kind of life quite foreign to him—vanished into the labyrinth of the city, as people called it, into a labyrinth from which he emerged only now and then. If one met him in the street one was always a little uncertain whether to greet him or not, feeling that he was a traitor who had carried over to another world and there offered up something which had been a common possession, and that in confronting him one was exposed and naked, while he himself gave away nothing about his motives and his life, and maintained always the same equable friendly reserve. But perhaps the disturbing factor lay simply in Bertrand’s civilian clothes, in the fact that his white stiff shirt-front was so exposed that one really had to feel ashamed for him. Beside
s, Bertrand himself had once declared in Culm that no genuine soldier would ever allow his shirt-cuffs to appear below his sleeves, because everything connected with being born, sleeping, loving and dying—in short, everything civilian—was a matter of underclothing; and even if such paradoxes had always been characteristic of Bertrand, no less than the airy gesture with which he was accustomed, lazily and disdainfully, to disavow them afterwards, yet obviously he must have been troubled at that time by the problem of the uniform. And about the underclothing and the shirt-cuffs he may have been partly right: for instance when one reflected—and Bertrand always awakened such unpleasant reflections—that all men, civilians and Joachim’s father not excepted, wore their shirts stuck into their trousers. For that reason Joachim actually did not like to encounter anyone in the men’s barracks with his tunic open; there was something indecent about it, which gave one a vague inkling of the justification for the regulation that when visiting certain resorts and for other erotic purposes mufti must be worn; and more, which made it appear almost like an offence against the regulations that such beings as married officers and married non-commissioned officers should exist. When the married sergeant-major reported for morning service and opened two buttons of his tunic so as to draw out of the opening, which laid bare his checked shirt, his huge red-leather book, Joachim generally ran his fingers over his own tunic buttons, and felt secure only when he had certified that they were all in order. He could almost have wished that the uniform was a direct emanation of his skin, and often he thought to himself that that was the real function of a uniform, and wished at least that his underclothes could by a distinctive pattern be made a component part of the uniform. For it was uncanny to think that every soldier carried about with him under his tunic the anarchical passions common to all men. Perhaps the world would have gone off the rails altogether had not someone at the last moment invented stiff shirt-fronts for the civilians, thus transforming the shirt into a white board and making it quite unrecognizable as underclothing. Joachim recalled his astonishment as a child, when, looking at the portrait of his grandfather, he had recognized that that gentleman did not wear a stiff shirt, but a lace jabot. But then in his time men had had a deeper and more intimate faith, and did not need to seek any further bulwark against anarchy. Of course all these notions were rather silly and obviously only an overflow from the kind of things Bertrand said, which had neither rhyme nor reason; Pasenow was almost ashamed of thinking of them in front of the sergeant-major, and when they surged up he thrust them aside and with a jerk resumed his stiff, official bearing.
The Sleepwalkers Page 2
