“It is not far to walk. Suppose you walk with me? I shall dismiss my car. I shall be glad of your company, and I like to walk. I do not think it will rain.” She added, forced by her habit: “But will it not wait?”
He stood before her, in his new uniform. He was too thin, and very tall. He was more like Karl than ever. But this did not soften Therese. She had always been annoyed at this resemblance, and had politely disclaimed it when any one pointed it out to her. How dare any one resemble the one whom she loved, and so make him common clay! Her egotism was outraged.
He took her arm, not masterfully, but gently and courteously. “Thank you, Aunt Therese,” he said.
Maria suddenly appeared. “What are you doing, Wilhelm?” she asked.
“I am taking Aunt Therese home,” he replied, in his polite young voice.
Maria was pleased. Wilhelm was her favorite son. Many had pointed out to her the close resemblance between this son and Karl Erlich, the famous writer who must eventually get the Nobel Prize. She snorted, scoffed, pretended to be contemptuous, but was secretly delighted. Let them laugh at her plebeian background if they wished. Some day her son would be greater than Karl Erlich. She said: “That is quite right.” She offered her flabby puffy cheek to Therese. “Dear Therese, come again very soon. And give our love to Karl. We are so worried about him.” She added: “But will you not wait for Kurt? He will be so disappointed to have missed you.”
Therese, who had been hoping that Wilhelm might be detained by his mother, was quickened to action.
“I am so very sorry. But I must go at once. Give our love to Kurt.”
She and Wilhelm went out into the gray twilight. A damp wind had arisen. Therese drew her furs closer over her shoulders. She always dressed simply but with exquisite taste. Maria tried to imitate her, but succeeded only in appearing dowdy. Her black cloth suit, its somberness relieved only by the red of a rose near her left shoulder, was beautifully cut. It set off her slim tall figure and good bosom to elegant advantage. She had bought it in Paris. Her small black hat was Parisian, too, and enhanced the poise of her head, and the glinting waves of her fair hair.
They walked together in silence, past the tall ugly rich houses, so old and so graceless. Here and there an ornate lamp stood lighted in a window behind lace curtains. Brass knockers on the doors gleamed. Limousines were discharging ladies at various points, and recognizing Therese they greeted her cordially and would have detained her for conversation had she not indicated by her formal manner that she did not wish to be detained. The western sky was torn with thin scarlet, through which the dying sun attempted to appear. “It always shines at sunset, no matter what the day,” she had heard somewhere. All at once her eyes were filled with tears. She began to hurry a little. She forgot Wilhelm for a moment, then when she became aware of him walking beside her, she felt her old distaste rising.
Wilhelm she liked least of her husband’s nephews. She had never known why. He had taste and breeding, and reserve and gravity. He was a gentleman. Perhaps it was because he was so young. Therese had never liked the young, even when she had been young herself. They bored her and irritated her. Vapid, immature, green and inexperienced, they either distressed her with their bombast and noise, or disgusted her with their gravity and knowingness. Mature and experienced herself, she hated immaturity and narrowness of experience. They were so boring, so tedious. She could never be indulgent or maternal with the young. She liked them best when she did not have to see them. And now she was so hampered, when she needed so desperately to be alone and think, by a schoolboy with his silly troubles!
“What did you wish to say to me, Wilhelm?” she asked, with an attempt at affection, yet in a voice that implied that nothing he could have to say would be important. Perhaps he would tell her now, and she could dismiss him, and be alone.
He did not answer for a long moment. Then he said, in an oddly muffled voice: “Really not so much, Aunt Therese. But I must have some one to talk to!” Suddenly his voice was sharp and strained and breathless. “I have no one to talk to!”
She sighed resignedly. “You have your mother, who loves you, and your father, who is a brilliant man. And your brother, and your schoolmates, and your professors!” (Oh, the absurd exigency of mankind, who never has any one to talk to except the whole world! The silly impertinence of it, the ridiculous egotism! And now she must be bored by the vaporings of a schoolboy, who had begun, in his adolescence, to believe that his soul and glandular disturbances were of worldly significance.)
He gave a peculiar slight sound, then said: “My mother only loves me. You cannot talk to one who only loves you, Aunt Therese! That is not a point of contact.”
She had hardly listened to his first words, then, when the impact of what he had said finally entered her consciousness she felt a plunge of her heart and an awakening of her senses. She actually stumbled, and stopped for a moment. She gazed at him, like one aroused suddenly from sleep. “Wilhelm! Yes, yes, child, I know what you mean.” She stood, looking at him with profound recognition.
They were unconscious of those passing them towards Unter den Linden, and who glanced at them curiously, wondering what intensity had this slim young fellow in uniform and this distinguished older woman.
“And my father,” went on Wilhelm, gazing at her with dumb misery. “He loves only Uncle Karl, and thinks only of the Party. Alfred? He is less my brother than the brother of any stranger. My professors!” Now his young face darkened and grew tighter as though with grief. “I have no professors. We have left school. I thought I heard Alfred tell you today.”
“I had forgotten,” she murmured. She moved on; he stepped to her side and took her arm.
They reached Unter den Linden. Here, Therese became conscious of the renewed activity of which she had been only vaguely aware recently. The shop windows glittered in the faint bright light of the sunset. There were many customers within, buying with a sort of gay fever. Busses and cabs moved with a quickened tempo. The crowds stepped livelier. There were many uniforms and military cars. From every building fluttered the vivid black, red and white of swastikas. Cries and greetings of “Heil Hitler!” resounded behind, before and at each side of Therese. It might have been a holiday. But to Therese it was dread delirium, in which the patient had been electrified to a last mortal motion before dissolution. There was no use trying to talk to Wilhelm in the febrile press. They finally turned down the Wilhelmstrasse, and, as though they had consulted each other, they crossed the broad strip of grass into the park.
It had suddenly become warmer. It was as though the fever and heat of Unter den Linden had pervaded the air, like the emanations of a blast furnace. Therese loosened her furs, and Wilhelm took them on his arm. The park was full of nursemaids and children; the girls were shrilly gathering up their charges and preparing to leave. It was still summer, but yellow faded leaves were drifting down on the grass. Here and there a young fellow in the same uniform as Wilhelm’s chattered gayly to a nursemaid, or saluted a passing officer. Now the air and the sky were dimming swiftly. In this duskiness the flower-beds glowed strongly, as though throwing out light of their own. They wandered among the trees and finally found a quiet and isolated spot near a small pond. The water was the dull polished hue of lead, and as still. Trees bent towards it, staring at their dark pale shadows. Lily-pods floated on it, immobile, and the red and white flowers were closing into buds. They sat down on a bench facing the water. The heavens were a gaseous gray, without substance. But in the west the scarlet had brightened to long tongues of fire. It made the trees on the opposite side of the water look as if a conflagration burned behind them. A wall of solitude closed about them. They might have been alone, though behind them was the Wilhelmstrasse and its important office buildings, and to their right, beyond the trees, were the walls of the United States Embassy.
Therese noted that for all the isolation and quiet of the place Wilhelm kept glancing about him uneasily. His eyes searching every tree and every dist
ance. Seeing her watching him, he said, with a sad laugh: “One has to watch for the Gestapo. They are everywhere. I believe they spring up from the ground.”
She listened, incredulously. “Oh, Wilhelm, do not look for shadows!”
“Shadows,” he repeated. His young face, in that dusky light, became sharp and suddenly clear. “That is what we must look for, always. They are more potent than realities. Germany is full of shadows. Soon the world will be full of them, too. Terrible shadows.”
She was startled again. She regarded him closely. Was this really a schoolboy, immature and obsessed with the workings of his adolescent glands? She had never known Wilhelm, she reflected, with a feeling of stupidity. She had graciously watched him grow from childhood into manhood. She had received his awkward kiss for Christmas, Easter and birthday presents. But he had never touched her thoughts or her consciousness. She had never really seen him. She did not answer him. She was too filled with her own dolorous and heavy thoughts.
He began to speak in a rush of words, not as though he were speaking to her, but to the pond and the trees. He must speak, and it did not matter if she listened. The words burst from him; he could not contain them. No matter who else listened, he could not hold them back.
“I wanted to study music, when I had finished with the gymnasium. Paris, Rome. Mother had half-promised. Father never listened to me. It was all my life! It was not just the music. I felt it was only a door that might open the world to me. I wanted to know all the world. I believed that if I did, I would find something in it that was an answer to all the sorrow and pain in it. I—I might even find God there.
“Somewhere, I knew, there was an answer. It seemed terribly important to me to find it. Important for everybody. Every one looks, at some time in his life. Perhaps it might be given to me to find, or to help find. Goethe, Schiller, Lessing—Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner. They had heard the answer, somewhere. They tried to give it to us. But so few of us have ears to hear. Even when we heard, the voices of these men came to us muffled; we heard only a few scattered words. But there would be others who would hear a few more words. Some day the whole sentence would be there! I wanted to find only one word, to add to all the others.”
It seemed to Therese that fingers were fumbling at her raw heart. And now her whole conventional training, her whole timorous selfish nature, her old shrinking from the sight of nakedness, struck at her full force. She did not want to see! Even though she, too, looked for the answer, she did not want to see. She thrust away the desperate fingers that fumbled at her wounds. Her face grew cold.
“And then, Wilhelm?” she said, in her usual cool voice.
If she thought to stop him, to stop his fumbling, she was disappointed. He did not hear her. His eyes, bright and fixed, were turned inward on his own despair and agony.
“And then,” he continued, his tones feverish and broken, “This happened. This thing came which shut out even the words we had already learned. This shut me, and others like me, in a prison. There is no window in the prison. Tomorrow, we shall not be released. Soon, the whole world will be in the prison. I know it, I feel it! What then, is there to live for?”
She glanced about her, uneasily. What if some passerby heard this raving, which had become loud and incoherent? Perhaps this passerby might think, with amusement, that this schoolboy was making some shameful and passionate declaration to a woman old enough to be his mother.
“Do be more moderate, Wilhelm,” she said, almost sharply. She took the furs from him and put them on her shoulders with a gesture that was like a slap in his face.
He seized her arm; he thrust his face close to hers. She could feel his breath. “Aunt Therese, do you not feel it, too? This death? This ruin? This raging destruction under our feet?”
“I think you are very immoderate,” she answered, trying to release her arm. He stared at her. The eagerness and fever slowly subsided on his face. He withdrew his hand. Now he was looking at her with dumb anguish and accusation. But he did not answer.
She said, keeping her voice judicious, and even a little severe:
“I think the thing that troubles you, Wilhelm, is that you will now have to dirty your hands. They make you work hard, do they not? It will not hurt you to use your hands at honest labor.”
He looked at his hands. Once they had been white and smooth. They were calloused and brown now, and the knuckles pushed through the thin skin.
“You young people have been so irresponsible and soft,” said Therese, all her old dislike of the young in her tones. “You have wanted a soft cushion. You have refused to grow up. You have whined and complained, and never worked. It is time for you to be men.” She became aware of her malice, and was momentarily ashamed, though she knew she had spoken only the truth. “Believe me, Wilhelm, I am not trying to be unkind. But you must be a little more realistic, and understand that you must work.”
She expected him to become immediately boyish and awkwardly confused, as all young people become in the presence of unheated adult ridicule. She expected him to stammer: “Oh yes, I know I must work.” Apologetically, and nonplussed. Placating, hoping for her favor, as a child hopes for a pat on the head.
But he said nothing at all. He had turned away from her. She saw his young profile, keen and clear, against the last fading light. That profile, so still, so absorbed, almost marble-like in its resignation and agelessness, frightened her. A swan, its white plumage vivid, gleaming, silently sailed out upon the dark and motionless pond. It stood poised over its own spectral image, bent its long curving neck, and appeared to meditate. Behind it, the trees were massed darkness, without form. The sky floated with vague ghostly violet, and the fire faded from the west. There was no sound, not even the purr of a distant bus, nor the most distant voice. Therese felt unutterably alone. Wilhelm had gone from her.
“I do not mean to be unkind,” she murmured, hoping to awaken life again in that desperate marble stillness. (Oh, why had her egotism, which always felt itself unique and superior, and resented a common touch, done this to this suffering boy?)
He said, as if speaking to himself: “Work. Yes, I have always wanted to work. That is why this is so hideous: I cannot work. There is no work for me to do. If it had all waited just a few years more, when I would have known how to work, how to fight it. But I do not know. There is our superior officer: he is strong and terrible. He is old. He knows what to do. But what he does is evil and dreadful.”
His voice changed, became a cry: “I do not know where to start, or what it is that I must do!”
Therese felt cold. These were her own words, her own cry. She could not endure it. She stirred abruptly. The swan lifted its long prehensile head and gazed at her steadfastly. It was like some ancient image, without pity but with the most awful understanding.
Therese had only one thought now: to escape this fumbling hand, this nakedness, this cry for help. Her old timorousness and distrust for emotion filled her with heat and anxiety. At all costs, he must be made to dress himself again in decent garments and leave her alone.
“I am sure you are too imaginative, Wilhelm. Things are never so horrible as they appear to the young. This—is all just a phase in history. It will pass tomorrow, or the day after. Germans are so stable, so controlled, you know. Do not take it so much to heart, child.”
“And I am sure it is not only Germany, but the whole world,” he said, so quietly that she could hardly hear him. He looked at her fixedly. There was no misunderstanding in his eyes. He knew all about her. He knew her timorousness, her coldness, her selfishness, her egotism; he knew that she comprehended, but denied the comprehension. He did not even accuse her, nor show contempt for her. He merely gazed at her as a marble image gazes, without wonder and without hope.
Now it was she who felt stripped naked, and ashamed. Her pulses throbbed. A pain shot across her eyes. She averted her head, and as she did so, she stood up. He had to rise with her. And then again he stood looking at her, with that unendurable
and all-seeing eye.
“Wilhelm,” she began, miserably and confusedly searching for the proper words.
He extended his hand to her. Her gloves lay in it.
“Your gloves, Aunt Therese,” he said, formally.
She took them.
“Shall I see you home now?” he asked, in the same formal voice.
“No!” she cried out, her sensations compounded of wretchedness and anger and compassion. “Please leave me, Wilhelm. I want to be alone for a few minutes.”
He bowed. He did not protest. He turned quickly and walked away. She watched him go. He disappeared among the trees. She turned back to the pool and the swan. All the light had completely gone, but the pool was livid in the darkness. The swan hovered over his image.
Therese shivered. She looked at the sky. The violet gas had drifted away into depthless darkness. The light was leaving the pond, and leaving Berlin. It was leaving Germany. It was leaving the whole world.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, aloud. “Why did that wretched boy have to upset me so!”
And then she knew. He had seen her face in his mother’s drawing room. He had recognized his own anguish in her face. He had been drawn to her as one tormented is drawn to another. He had come to her for help, and she had driven him away.
“I should have sent him to Doctor Traub,” she thought.
Ah, yes, there was the solution. She ran towards the trees through which Wilhelm had disappeared. She called him. There was no answer. Night insects began to shrill in the grass. A wind, lonely and mournful, filled the trees. A nightmare sensation fell over her. It seemed to her enormously necessary that, she find Wilhelm. She ran through the nightmare, through the trees, calling him. She was like one calling for the dead. Her voice took on a note of frenzy.
But when she emerged at the edge of the park, he was nowhere in sight.
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