There were times when she tried to recall that Germany had suffered, and this suffering had taken this frightful form. But she also remembered that France, during the war, had suffered more, far more, that Britain had suffered, and Belgium. Their victory over Germany had brought them nothing but starvation, distress, torment, hunger, bankruptcy and hopelessness. They had forgotten the victory. They suffered as Germany had suffered. But they had not gone mad, and had sought no vengeance. Germany had gone mad. She screamed against the Versailles Treaty, which had never been enforced. She was outraged at her own torment. It was insupportable to her. It did not matter to her, and she would not see, that other nations suffered also. Her egotism revolted against her own anguish. She had told herself that she was surrounded by remorseless and gloating enemies, upon which she must be avenged. And so, from the abscess of her intolerable vanity, her sick egotism, her brutelike indifference to the grief of others, she had drawn a virus to make herself mad, knowing that only in a state of grotesque and vivid unreality could she take vengeance on a world she imagined chuckling over her misfortunes, and revelling in them. She lifted herself to a fourth dimension, invoked demons and fiends from the steaming pit of her dark insanity, and spewed out horrors on an appalled world. Worst of all, in becoming mad, she had breathed out her effluvia of madness through the aisles that led to other peoples, and had infected them also, or had at least awakened the latent infection in the souls of other men. Doctor Traub had been right: it was not Hitler. It was the German people. Had Germans been less egotistic, less rigid, less criminally innocent, less ferocious and intrinsically uncivilized, Hitler would have been a name lost only in a cloud of anonymous names forever.
And now Therese saw that hatred is the last weapon of weak peoples. Only the weak, the fundamentally unsound, the inadequate and the inferior, hated. In their hatred was a confession of inferiority. In their hatred was the seed of death, for only the strong can survive, and they were not strong.
She realized now, coldly and bitterly, that Karl was the personification of Germany. He was wounded and stricken. But his suffering had not made him strong, compassionate, resolute and faithful. It had not inspired in him a passionate and wholesome desire to reform outrages, without envy and without egotism. It had only inspired a self-induced madness in him, in which he could hate and take a loathsome vengeance.
Like a small but healthy minority of Germans, Therese detested weakness and extravagance and lack of fortitude. She detested them in her country, and now she detested them in Karl. Out of the deaths of Eric and Gerda (if he had been strong), he would have taken a stern resolution to help destroy the corruption which had destroyed those he loved. Just as Doctor Traub had taken that resolution. He should have grown in stature, shocked, all-seeing, passionate, yet filled with pity. But instead, he had allowed himself to be absorbed into the anonymous and seething madness of his country. Therese saw now that it was only an accident which had made him hate that which had killed Eric and Gerda. Only a small accident. He might just as easily have hated what Eric represented, if he had not known an Eric. The German intellectual was not superior to the German peasant.
She had come to have a deep suspicion of intellectuals. In spite of their acknowledged mental superiority, they were fundamentally no more than the lowest among their people. Their greater brain-power made them only more ingenious in wickedness and foulness, made their recovery less possible.
And so it was that Therese began to hate Karl. Her compassion was consumed in her bitterness and understanding. She was coldly disgusted. She forgot him more and more, deliberately. Sometimes, when she heard his pacing, his fumbling, she had to clench her fists to control her anger and detestation. She also experienced fear. She felt that she harbored a danger in her house, a danger which was part of the fury outside. Karl was the enemy of Felix Traub. He was one with the violence which had killed her friend.
Sometimes she had an impulse to leave him and his house forever. She would pack her belongings and quietly flee from him, hoping to forget him. And then she thought that she dared not. Her going would open a door to release him into the sea outside. There were the defenseless, outside, struggling in that sea. She dared not release another fury upon them.
She saw now that those who hated, unreasonably and ferociously, were all one, no matter what it was that they hated. They were no better, no worse, than all the other haters. Hatred was a condition with no distinctions.
One day she really thought she would leave. Karl was dead, she told herself. There was no point to remaining. But, at the last, she could not leave. Some mysterious compulsion kept her there, like a guard, like a watcher.
But out of her revulsion and bitterness she drew a new, waiting strength. Perhaps Karl would die, as his poor brother was dying. That was her only hope. She had no real belief that he would awaken to a new self.
If he was a victim, he was a victim of himself. For that, there was no forgiveness.
Daily she called Maria to inquire about Kurt, Kurt who was not a victim of himself, but the bewildered and shattered victim of the madness which had Germany and his brother. At these times, Maria hysterically demanded that Karl be brought to his brother, and would unreasonably shout down Therese’s explanations and excuses. Kurt was dying, but he could not die. He could only suffer and wait, coming alive only for brief moments when the door opened and he thought that Karl was coming. Maria wanted nothing more these days but that her husband should obtain relief from his torture, in death. She could not endure the daily anguish of watching his suffering, for which there was no hope. But Karl’s absence kept him alive, though every physician said he should have died long ago of his mysterious malady. Maria could not forgive Therese for what she extravagantly termed her squeamish concern for her precious husband. “You are afraid he might be ‘disturbed’!” she screamed violently. “You are afraid he might be ‘upset’! What does that matter? He has always ill-treated my poor Kurt, in his sly derisive way. Yet he will not come to him, even though he is dying inch by inch!” And then when Therese patiently repeated that Karl was ill, was not himself, and was, at times, literally insane, Maria shrieked with wild and contemptuous laughter. “You lie!” she said. “It is you, only you. You want your petty revenge on Kurt, because you blame him for the deaths of that cursed Eric and Gerda!”
After this, Therese gave orders to Lotte that she must not be called to the telephone when Maria called her.
She went to see the old General one day. She was horrified at the change in him. He was old and broken, shrunken to apparently hah his usual size, almost senile. He sat in a chair by a sunny window, wrapped in plaid blankets and robe, his massive head shaking unceasingly with an uncontrollable tremor. But he was very gentle and abstracted, even to the poor silly Martina, who found him less arduous these days. His memory was failing fast. Sometimes in the midst of a remark, he would fall abruptly into a doze, or a stupor, from which he would awake, dazed and blinking. He talked no longer of the National Socialists; he was completely unaware now of the changes in Germany. He spoke only of the campaigns of his youth and his middle age. He repeated, endlessly, and with chuckles, stories of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He spoke reverently of the Kaiser, who he had come to believe still lived and ruled in Potsdam. Once he said: “I must get better soon. Ludendorff is a good marshal, but stupid. He is no match for the French, who are tough fighters. What is the news from the Western Front today, Therese? And is there really a revolution in Russia? Some one said that the Czar is a prisoner.”
He had been very upset when he noticed that the portrait of Hindenburg no longer had its place over the drawing-room fire. Martina hastily explained that it had been taken down for repairs to the frame. He was not satisfied until it was re-hung. Then he would hold long, amiable or querulous and bellicose conversations with it. He no longer knew the name of Hitler. When Therese tentatively introduced the name into a conversation, he merely stared, puzzled. “Who is this ‘Hitler’? I have never heard o
f him,” he said belligerently. “A plebeian name. Or is it von Hitler?” He shook his head. “A plebeian name. I do not know it.”
He liked to recount the tales of his youth, and then he would blink at her archly, in the midst of them. “Ah, that is no story for a maiden, liebchen. You are so young. You would not understand. Ah, we were gay dogs!” And then she knew that he did not see her as she was, but as she had been as a young girl. It was too piteous for her to bear. She could not endure the sight of this broken, senile old man with his shrivelled throat and withered face, who believed himself a virile middle-aged man who was home, invalided by wounds.
While Therese was still with him, some of his old army friends came, old generals and colonels and field marshals. They sat near him, impotent and senile. They did not talk about the present; they talked only of the past. Therese listened to them, felt strangely soothed. She looked at their medals, saw the grim flashings of their ancient eyes. This was another Germany, rigid, honest, proud and fearless, unbending, perhaps, and inexorable. Once, one of them said in a hard low voice:
“The army! The hope of Germany is still in the army. No low fellows there, no upstarts, no aliens, no riffraff! The tradition goes on. Some day it will sweep away this filthy chaff—some day!”
Therese wanted to believe it. But when would that day come?
She had friends in England, France and America, and received significant magazine and newspaper articles from them, for censorship had not yet been fully established. She took heart at some of the denunciations, vigorous and indignant, of German National Socialism. But many of the articles enraged her. She read, for instance, the calm, cynical and hating article of a certain prominent American woman writer:
“The thoughtless, the race-polluted, the trouble-makers and the ignorant frequently denounce the new order in Germany, for private or stupid reasons. They do not realize that new orders are inherent in a vital world. It may be true that some of the excesses of Germany do not appeal to us. But we must remember that both Mussolini and Hitler are an expression of revived vitalism, and this should be heartening to those who have feared that human dynamics have become static. Mussolini and Hitler are symptoms of a resurgence of activity; they have mounted the galloping horses of a new era. They have taken advantage of a renaissance of world-quickening.… If we wish to preserve our own form of democracy, we must understand this world-quickening, and apply its dynamics in order to destroy our national inertia and sluggishness. No good will come of interference, and only harm will be the result of any denunciations on our part. After all, we shall have to deal with these new forces in the world of tomorrow, and it is better to do so on our terms by conciliation and understanding, rather than in a mood of antagonism and deliberate misapprehension.”
She read many similar. At first she thought these articles came from a lack of understanding. Finally, with disgust and bitterness and anger, she knew they came from only too much understanding. The writers of such were no fools. They were traitors, in spite of their smooth words and their air of reasonableness.
The men who urged “reasonableness,” or set themselves up as apologists for Hitler, were either the old and impotent, or the woman-driven and effeminate. They too experienced the resurgence of eroticism in the command for obedience and subservience. But the men who were strong and fearless and intelligent were the real enemies of Hitler. If the world were to survive, one of its first necessities was the masculine spirit, reborn and virile, uncompromising and inexorable.
She was so filled with disgust these days that she felt that she was wandering in some subterranean chambers of slimy corruption, where everything was darkness filled with quick hot breaths and foul smells. She knew now that there was no escaping this corruption. Its galleries were dug out under every nation. They were the Augean Stables which must be cleansed by light and sun, by vigorous hands and hearts. Perhaps even by war.
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One by one the first flakes fell, first dark specks against a pewter sky, and then white feathers drifting silently. But when they touched the ground they winked and disappeared, for it was too early for a lasting snow. However, the eaves were fringed with faint and fragile whiteness, and the bare trees in the garden were flowering with the melting blossoms of an artificial spring. There was no wind, only a ghostly silence and muteness.
Therese watched the snow fall. Her mind grew numb and still under it, as though her pain and sadness had begun to sleep. A largeness and peace took their place. Quiet shadows drifted through her thoughts, formless, cool and spectral. She felt that she sat in an aura of unreality, that the world that had existed for her had forever disappeared. Suffering was gone. She believed she had lost the capacity for emotion, for fever and terror. Surely the dying felt so. This was greater than indifference. It was no turning away. It was not even negation. It was the formlessness of eternity.
She had not seen Karl for a long time. He rarely emerged from his room and study. He was a ghost, haunting two rooms, to which she had become accustomed. She thought of herself unconsciously as a widow. The idea no longer disturbed her. At first, her loneliness and desolation had been anguish. But she had gone beyond death now. She was accustomed to its silence, and to its, inevitable peace. She rarely heard, consciously, the slow dragging footsteps of the distracted man upstairs. She slept at night, dreamlessly, as under a drug. When she thought of Doctor Traub it was like thinking of some one who had died many, many years ago.
She was resting in her small sitting-room, after breakfast. The unopened newspaper was on her knees. She doubted that she would read it. She rarely read any papers now. She never listened to her radio. Germany, like all the rest of the world had ceased to exist for her. Upon her features was a motionless tranquillity.
She heard a faint sound at the door. Karl stood there. She looked at him without a stir of the heart, as one might look at a ghost or a shadow.
“Therese,” he said.
She said nothing, merely gazing emptily at this unreal visitation.
He hesitated. But she could not move, nor gesture towards him. The snow-dimmed light was uncertain. She knew there was something there for her to see, but she could not arouse herself to see it. She struggled faintly against her inertia. And then, while she still struggled, still fought to see, he had gone away, without a sound.
I should have spoken to him, she thought. But her heavy thoughts would go no further. She closed her eyes, and for a time, she drowsed. The snow continued to fall. One thought floated dimly through the hollow of her mind: I must wake up.
It was the sudden wind which finally awoke her. The light was almost gone. She thought it was twilight. But it was just past noon. The snow was thicker, and swirled and danced in skeins and garlands in the wind. The wind was hollow and echoing, standing at the windows and the eaves, and calling in its dolorous voice. Now the trees outside were draped in white.
Lotte came in with Coffee and small cakes. She set the tray on the table at Therese’s elbow. She was much disturbed. “The Herr Doctor has left the house. We do not know where he is gone.”
“Gone?” echoed Therese, dully, rousing herself heavily. “How long ago?”
“I do not know, Frau Doctor. It may be an hour. It may be two hours. No one heard him go.”
Therese forced herself to her feet. She felt the renewed and painful throbbing of her pulses. She went upstairs. Karl’s study door was open. His desk was shiningly empty. Eric’s African box was nowhere in sight. The tiny mummified head still grinned from the cold mantelpiece. But that was all. Therese went into his bedroom. His dressing-gown and slippers lay neatly on his smooth white bed. She examined his closet. His coat and hat were gone.
Now she was trembling. Should she call the police, and tell them that her deranged husband was wandering the streets? He had not been outside his house for months. Where had he gone? What dark urging had made him go out? She wrung her hands in her distraction. She glanced through the windows, hoping to see his bent and emaciated
figure. But the street was silent and white and deserted. Had the sight of the first snow aroused in him some dormant and healthy desire to be out in it? Had the first faint stirrings of sanity come back to him? He had stood near her that morning. He had wanted to say something. She had driven him away. As she had driven Wilhelm away.
She uttered a thin sharp cry. She ran to the telephone and called the police. The young man who took her message was sluggishly indifferent. She could not arouse him to any interest He finally took Karl’s description. She gathered that he was contemptuously amused. These hysterical women!
She went downstairs again, conscious of faintness and weakness. She forced herself to drink the coffee, but could eat nothing. I must be calm, she told herself. Perhaps Karl had merely gone for a walk. She must believe that. After all, he was not bedridden. Perhaps the fresh keen air would revive him a little. All at once a curious quiet came to her, as though a gentle voice had spoken to her, soothingly. Hardly knowing what she said or did, she turned her head and spoke aloud, wonderingly: “Felix?”
The sound of the name in her ears and heart increased the quiet, steadied her nerves. Tears filled her eyes, but they were not painful tears. She was sure that Doctor Traub was in the room. She could feel his warm and wholesome presence, his strength and comfort. It was very strange. She tried to see him. She was certain he was beside her, and the dim room seemed full of his smile. Her heart swelled, but it was not with pain. How ridiculous to believe there is any death, she thought. All at once, there was a still joy in her heart.
Time No Longer Page 33
