She rose hastily. “I must go,” she said. “Please have my car called, Maria.”
“But are you not going up to see Mother?” asked Maria. “She is so fond of you.”
“I am afraid that is a slight exaggeration,” said Therese with a faint smile. “However, it would be only courteous.”
Alfred conducted her up the stairway. “We see so little of you and Uncle Karl lately,” he said, warming her with his admiring eyes.
“Your uncle is still ill,” answered Therese, with that strange tightening of her heart which always came upon her when Karl’s name was mentioned. “He misses his sister.”
The hand under her elbow stiffened, and when she glanced at the youth she saw that his eyes had become hard.
“There are things worse than death, and Uncle Karl should realize that,” he said coldly and in an oddly mature voice.
Therese involuntarily paused on the landing. Behind her was a great tall window through which came the gray and spectral light of the dark day. It gave her face a leaden pallor.
“Alfred, how can you talk so? You know nothing of honor or dishonor!” The youth had never heard such a voice from his aunt, so tremulous and shaken, yet so thrilling with anger. He could hear her loud uneven breath. He was taken aback. “How old are you? Eighteen? You are hardly a man, but you mouth man’s words. Go back to school, Alfred!”
He colored with his father’s own bullish violence, and dropped her arm. His body seemed to swell and grow taller. He was no longer youth, loving and gay, but frightfulness and ferocity. She could see his face, suffused and savage. And yet, when he spoke, his words were quiet and controlled:
“I no longer go to school, Aunt Therese. Neither does Wilhelm. Haven’t you noticed our uniforms? We have men’s work to do, for we are men now. We have a new Germany today. We are preparing for anything and everything. For unity and strength, for power and war.”
Therese looked at the uniform. She had seen increasing numbers of these uniforms on the streets, but had not noticed them objectively. At her nephew’s final word she was filled with horror, and forgot everything else.
“War! Are you mad, Alfred?”
He smiled; his eyes disappeared in cunning and contemptuous wrinkles. He took her arm again with a new masterfulness and an open disdain.
“Grandmother is waiting for you, Aunt Therese.”
She was literally propelled up the stairs; she stumbled once or twice. She had the sensation that she had become old and impotent and shameful. The grip on her arm did not relax; her flesh was bruised when he deposited her upstairs. She turned to look at him, speechlessly. He smiled at her with irony and knowingness. He lifted his arm and said: “Heil Hitler!” Then with intensified irony he bowed, clicked his heels, turned and ran lightly down the stairs.
“He thinks himself a hero,” she thought. But then, was not all Germany posturing now in the attitudes of Wagnerian opera? Heroic and grandiloquent attitudes, absurd yet frightening. Lohengrins and Tannhäusers and Siegfrieds in a madhouse, wrapping tattered banners majestically about them. They did not know that Germany was old and tired, as was all the world. But Germany had become a Faust, insanely selling her soul for a spurious and dreadful youth which had no verity in it. Under the new litheness and activity, under the shouting and the leaping about, lurked an old dying man, drugged and feverish, revenging himself for his impotence by sadism and wild threatening screams.
She did not know she was laughing convulsively until she heard Frau Reiner’s shrill penetrating voice near by. “What is it? Is it you, Therese? Why are you laughing so loudly? Come in, come in!”
11
Frau Reiner, tiny and wicked and incredibly wrinkled, dressed in rich black silk, many chains, a scarlet shawl over her bowed shoulders, her little withered hands glittering with rings, sat near a huge window draped in red velvet. Her diminutive feet, elegantly shod, rested on a round blue footstool. Her dyed black hair was elaborately coifed, and dressed with jewelled combs, in the manner of her youth. Her cheeks were vividly painted, her lips crimson. Thick, almost fetid, perfume flowed from her, impregnated all the vast, high-ceilinged room, with its frescoed cupids, gilded plaster walls, crystal chandelier and heavy Victorian mahogany furniture. In one corner of the great room was an immense canopied bed, covered with heavy yellow lace and a puff of sky-blue satin. Amber candles burned in the dim grayness of the room before the crucifix which Karl had given the old beldame. A stout maid fidgeted about the dressing-table smoothing piles of lace-trimmed silken underwear such as a harlot might have worn.
As Therese entered, the old woman grinned. Her false white teeth shone in the sacred candlelight. Her little black eyes snapped and sparkled evilly. Vitality crackled about her, an obscene and quenchless vitality which was ageless and full of rascality. The grin became a leer. She leaned forward, the better to see Therese. The old witch of the garden, thought Therese, with an almost hysterical senselessness.
“Come in! Come in! Why do you stand there like a ghost, Therese?” cried Frau Reiner, peremptorily pointing at a chair near her. She turned to the stout maid. “Get out!” she shouted.
The maid started, dropped a gilt mirror, overturned a crystal bottle of perfume. Then, in complete terror, she ran out of the room.
“Clumsy trollop!” screamed the old woman, pursuing her with a voice like a yapping dog. “Ah, for the days when we were permitted to thrash our wenches! The world has gone soft.”
The hot stale air of the room was flooded with the renewed scent, and Therese felt nauseated. If the odor had been floral it would not have been so bad. But it was a thick and viscous odor, sweetish, overpowering and pervaded with corruption. Therese thought of a corpse stickily scented to close out the stench of decay. She put her cobwebby handkerchief to her nose and involuntarily closed her eyes against a sudden retching of her stomach. She had long suspected that under Frau Reiner’s silks and embroideries, shawls, rings, bracelets, chains and incenses, was an unwashed body.
She heard the old woman’s sharp vitriolic voice: “Well, Therese! You look ill. But tell me: how is my dear Karl?”
Therese forced herself to open her eyes. She was choking, as though from some noxious gas. The room swam before her.
“Karl? I believe he is a little better. He is beginning to show some interest in life.”
Frau Reiner grunted, eyed the younger woman. “Do you know what I think? He needs a mistress. When a man shuts himself up and has vapors, and gets a disturbance in his soul, he needs a new body in his bed.”
Therese found herself laughing helplessly. “I am sure that if that would help him I should have no objection.”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed cunningly. “Therese, you were always a cool selfish creature. Did you know that?”
Therese answered quietly, to the great surprise of the beldame: “A week ago I would have denied that with indignation. Now I know it is the truth. I have been too absorbed in Karl and myself, and the picture we presented to the world as a genius and his devoted wife, who lived only for him and cared for nothing else. I have been concerned with niceties. Now I know there are no niceties. I have tried to serve delicately brewed tea in thin cups in the midst of earthquakes and pestilences.”
There was a little silence as Frau Reiner’s eyes probed her ruthlessly. “Humph,” she said at last, surlily. “I used to wonder if you would ever realize anything. At your age the lesson must have come hard.”
“I am only thirty-eight!” said Therese quickly, with offense. And then she smiled at herself, drearily.
“But now you have grown much older,” remarked Frau Reiner in a grudging voice nevertheless tinged with approbation. “It is always good to grow old. One is allowed to live, at last.”
Therese wondered how soon she could escape. She glanced quickly at her watch. Within an hour Kurt would be home, and above all things she shrank from meeting him. I will give myself a polite five minutes, she thought.
The old woman settled back in
her chair to the tune of her jangling bracelets and chains. “Yes, it is true: only when one is old can one be free. If one is healthy, the appetites, in large measure, are still retained, or at least one can laugh at past appetites without regret.” She paused, Therese made no comment. Frau Reiner added in a loud tone: “What are you doing to help Karl?”
Even she was taken aback when the usually imperturbable and composed Therese cried out as if from the depths of some personal hell: “I have first to begin with myself! And I do not know what to do!”
Even in her distraction she thought that Frau Reiner would consider her mad or hysterical, and laugh at her contemptuously. She braced herself for this contempt with something like distraught hatred. But the contempt did not come. Instead, Frau Reiner’s wrinkled tiny face became shrewd and thoughtful. She played with a chain, and the candlelight flashed in the links. Then she nodded slowly:
“Yes, I can see that you must begin with yourself. I might say, you must begin with Germany. You see, I know Karl as you never knew him, you woman preoccupied with the delicacies! But to begin with Germany would be impossible. You have a hard enough task with yourself. I think, however, that you have gained some understanding.”
Therese pressed her lips together to stop their trembling and to quiet her nausea.
The old woman resumed in a hard slow voice: “Has it ever occurred to you that you and your kind, your nice, tolerant, reasonable, superiorly-smiling kind, all realism and selfishness, have done more to bring about the madness in Germany than any ridiculous sign-painter and his criminals, or the wretched people themselves? Just as the selfish, well-bred, cowardly, gentlemanly fools in all other nations will bring about the ruin of their own countries?”
“I am beginning to see,” answered Therese, almost inaudibly. She gazed at Frau Reiner with desperate humiliation and deep surprise.
Frau Reiner shrugged: “Your kind has no bowels.”
Therese thought to herself hysterically that her bowels just at this moment were only too factual.
“And Germany, just now, has no use for bowelless men. Say what you will about the National Socialists, they have begun to show evidences of intestinal activity. The wrong kind, of course. They have taken castor oil. Instead, your kind should have exercised and promoted natural and healthy activity. But you did not. You let the people take castor oil. And in the end you will take it, too, because you will admire the activity and think it vigorous. You will not see that the purging will destroy Germany. At the last she will expire from exhaustion. But not before she has destroyed other peoples, too. That will be your crime.”
Therese did not speak. The old woman continued: “Your kind, so cool and without hysteria, has hated emotion and passion. You have prided yourself on this, as evidence of your ‘civilization.’ You did not know that you were quiet because you were in a stage of rigor mortis. Pah, you disgust me! I hate corpses. All you have given the world is cynicism, hopelessness and confusion.”
And then it seemed to Therese that the smell of decay in the room came not from the old woman and her perfumes and fetidness, but from herself.
“Life,” said Frau Reiner, “is not nice and unemotional and tranquil, and full of books and commerce and the status quo. It is violent and terrible, hot and full of smells, and noises, and furious comings and goings. It is really very vulgar. It is not ashamed of its stenches. Why do you not wrinkle your arisocratic nose, Therese? A short time ago you would have done so.”
The old woman’s face was a grinning mask of contempt and satisfied hatred. “Selfish, correct, conversational idiots! Did you not know that anything the world has gained for itself, everything beautiful and splendid, its justice and its decencies and tolerances, were not won for it by you realists, you sensible ones, you reasonable gentry. They were won by the heroic, by those passionate souls who regarded martyrdom as an accolade, by the unrealistic who considered sacrifice and death as small things to pay for the liberation of men. Your kind laughed at them in their generation; you have always killed the prophets, you Pharisees!”
She gazed at the crucifix, in its halo of amber flames. She nodded grimly. “He knew all about you. He hated you. He knew that your gentlemanly selfishness and smiling derision were of more danger to the world than the Caesars, the Mussolinis, the Stalins and the Hitlers. Because you betray the people to them.”
She burst out into thin cackling laughter, and rocked in her chair. Therese gazed at her with the unwinking eyes of terror and revelation. The witch in the enchanted garden had broken in with storm and fury, and in the lightnings Therese saw herself.
“I am trying to do what I can!” she cried out wildly.
Frau Reiner chuckled with sadistic glee. All the hatred of the bourgeoisie for the aristocrat glittered in her tiny fierce old eyes.
“I am an old wicked woman with many sins. I have lived a long time. I know what life is, and I have loved it. You never knew what it was. Hitler knows what it is, in his distorted madman’s mind. He feels the weight of the triviality and exhaustion you attenuated fools have brought upon the world. He smells your decay. He knows what you have done in your selfishness and ‘realism.’ You have made life too complex; you have put too many chains on it. He will simplify things. But he will simplify them by a greater surge of madness, by cruelty and death, by fire and sword.”
She shrugged, shook a withered fist at Therese. “I would not mind if only you died. But others will die with you. My son-in-law, my grandsons, all of Germany. Perhaps all the world. Because you have never thought anything was worth fighting for, or dying for. If Germany is to live, you must learn to fight, to live, to die. However, I am sure you will not. You will prefer to run away to some remote place, where, for a little while at least, you can continue to be reasonable and cool and calm and comfortable.”
She paused, snorted. A disordered silence filled the room, as though violent deeds had transpired there, and violent voices sounded.
Complete nausea, of both mind and body, had Therese in its clutch. She lay back in her chair and struggled with it. Time and reality vanished for her; she floated in a gray mist. She was filled with a deadly sense of guilt. I have betrayed Karl, she thought.
Then into the dim and violent room there floated pure and poignant notes of music. Some one was playing the piano downstairs in the music room. One by one the notes mounted the long staircase, entered every room, like a host of majestic archangels with lighted faces. Everywhere was the sound of their voices, grave and mournful and full of sorrow. It was Wilhelm who was playing below, Therese knew, for she had often listened to him with delight. He was playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and it was the voice of the angels.
Even old Frau Reiner listened; her head drooped on her sunken breast. The light darkened at the windows. The crucified form seemed to move in the light of the candles, as though aroused to life.
Tears floated into Therese’s eyes. She clasped her hands passionately together, and simply. She looked at the crucifix, and it seemed to her that the answer was there for any eye to see. God and strength, passion and goodness, fortitude and self-forgetfulness, struggle and life.
And now the music below suddenly rose triumphantly for all its sorrow. Wings appeared to beat against every wall and every window, to flash against the sky and light the earth. Its tempo quickened; the voices cried out sternly and joyfully. Life had risen from its grave, wounded and stricken and beset, but it had risen and was on the march.
Therese, unable to bear the stress of her emotions, rose from her chair and left the room. She descended the staircase. When she had almost reached the bottom, the big old house was filled with silence, and there was no sound.
And then, so abruptly that she almost screamed out, Wilhelm appeared below her, and gazed at her strangely. “I must talk to you, Aunt Therese, at once,” he said.
12
Because of her own distraught condition, Therese saw distraction in Wilhelm’s thin young face and still fixed eyes. Bu
t nature, habit and convention were too much for her. She had always shrunk with well-bred fastidiousness from receiving confidences. And, she now admitted to herself, from having the smooth serenity of her thoughts disturbed by the heated emotions and despairs of others. She would always avert her eyes from the indecent spectacle of another human being standing naked before her. But not because of delicacy, and only because of selfishness. The cry for help would make her only faintly indignant, that any one should dare enter the cool and ordered rooms of her spirit where she dwelt in self-preoccupation, and should dare to demand anything of her which would remove her from her own tranquil affairs. Her lack of curiosity was not admirable; it was only that no one but herself and those she loved were important to her.
This nature, habit and convention now made her cry out to herself: I have too much to harass me to listen to this schoolboy! Her face became cold and distant, and full of polite reserve.
“My dear Wilhelm, I am in such a great hurry. Can you not wait for another time?”
He did not reply. He was barring her way, one hand on the balustrade near her own hand. He was very quiet. He only looked at her. His eyes bothered her, as well as irritated her, and she dropped her own. It was then that she noticed his hand on the balustrade. It was trembling violently. It was this contrast between his self-control and his hand which made her hesitate. Then she sighed.
Time No Longer Page 12
