The Strong City

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Tears suddenly ran over her cheeks. He held her hand tightly, but the grip was less angry now, and less painful. He could not bear her tears. He lifted her hand to his lips, laid his cheek against it. He felt its cold trembling.

  “You are right,” he said, almost inaudibly. “It is I who am selfish, and brutal. I understand. I understand what you have suffered, little one.”

  She dragged her hand away. “No!” she cried, passionately. “How could you understand? If you had understood, you would not have said these things! You remembered, deep in your mind, that I was your sister’s servant, and that I allowed my lover, who was not worthy of your sister because he was my lover, to marry her!”

  “Do you think I am so base?” he exclaimed, angered again. “Did I not ask you to marry me?” But under his anger he was ashamed, knowing that there was some truth in her accusations. “The wrong to Tina was marrying her without affection, and only for the advantages she could bring him!”

  The little boy, who had been closely watching his mother, pointed a stern finger at Baldur. “Go away!” he shouted. “Bad man!”

  Baldur looked impatiently at the child, agitated as he was. Then he could not help smiling. He reached out his hand and pulled the little one to him. “Yes,” he said, “I am a bad man. But don’t send me away.” He spoke, now, in English. “Let me stay with you and your Mama. Will you let me stay?”

  The child regarded him with grave hesitation. “You made my mama cry,” he accused.

  Irmgard, in her distraction, pulled the child away from Baldur. “Run away,” she exclaimed. “This is no place for you. There is work in the garden. Go at once, Siegfried!”

  The child obeyed at once, simply, without muttering. He walked away with dignity. Baldur smiled involuntarily, as he watched the child go. But Irmgard was still distraught. She said: “There is no reason for us to talk longer, Herr Schmidt. And I am very busy. If you have any regard for me, you will leave now.”

  Baldur did not speak for some moments. He gazed thoughtfully at the sun-soaked garden, and at the first roses on the white fences. He contemplated the dream-filled valley, floating in its mist of light, in which the trees were vague green islands. He looked at the smoke of the purple hills, drifting against the lighted heavens. A warm, earth-scented breeze touched his face, and the drowsy cackling of the fowl in the barnyard filled the quiet air. He seemed to forget the stormily breathing woman beside him. His hands lay open on the bench, and between his hunched shoulders his face took on quietness and meditation. In spite of her agitation, Irmgard slowly became impressed by his preoccupation, and as she looked at him, she was suddenly and sadly touched.

  “We speak to each other angrily because we do not understand,” she said, in a low voice.

  “Yes,” he replied, still gazing at the valley. “That is true.”

  He sighed, turned to her. “I forgot you were human,” he said, trying to smile. “You have been a dream to me. I thought you were more than just a woman. Always, in my life, there have been no shades of color. People were either very good or completely foul. I thought—” and he stopped.

  She smiled a little, drearily. “That there was no foulness in me? You were wrong. But,” and now her expression became deeply moved, “I am certain there is no foulness in you.”

  He regarded her gravely, then suddenly laughed. “We are both innocents,” he said, obscurely.

  Then, as he looked at her, at her thin beautiful face, at the heroic lines of her figure, at her green and mournful eyes, his own face changed, darkened. His nostrils distended hungrily, and with pain.

  “I have always loved you, Irmgard. I have always been your friend. I have always wanted you. There is nothing I would not do—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, very gently.

  He sighed, restlessly, and there was no softness in his look. His mood changed. He moved away from her a little.

  “Before I go, there are some questions you would like to ask me.” His voice became harder, even contemptuous. “Ask them. You would like to ask me if Franz is happy.”

  She was silent.

  He laughed shortly. “I will tell you this: he hates my sister. That makes you happier, yes?”

  “No!” she cried, stung. “That does not make me happy! But who could hate Miss Ernestine?”

  “He does,” he said, calmly, watching her. “He has always hated her. If it were not for my father, and me, protecting her, he would do wicked things to her. But one of these days, she will guess how much he hates her. Even such a gentle fool as Tina must know it some day.”

  She did not speak. She appeared to be on the verge of weeping openly.

  “He hates everything, and every one,” Baldur continued, still watching her narrowly. “He was born full of hatred. But it is an easy, smiling hatred, without bitterness, and only with amusement. There is the hatred which comes from wounds, pain and oppression. No one has ever wounded him, pained him, or oppressed him. His is a natural, and I might even say, healthy hatred, part of his very spirit. There is the hatred which poisons the hater. But he is not poisoned. He enjoys living. He is full of plots and intrigues. For all humanity, he has a vast contempt and detestation. That is why he is so dangerous. What his real stature is, only time will tell. I have discerned that he has no real greatness. But others will think him great. My father thinks so, and my father is no fool.”

  He paused. She still did not speak. He sighed, and went on:

  “It is not necessary to be great to succeed. One needs only to deceive others. He is a genius at deception. He knows this. Only I am not deceived. I know he is a liar and a traitor, and ruthless as death. I know that he is unfaithful to my sister, and that he hates her. I thought he could love no one. I find, now, that he loves you. But even his love is mixed with his natural, easy hatred.”

  Irmgard looked at him quickly. He could not read her strange expression.

  He said: “He hates his little son, Sigmund, who is my favorite. For his other son, Joseph, he has an indulgent affection. There is no natural emotion in him. Often I think: What has his childhood been? Who have been his parents? And then I know that the fault is in him, only. He was born that way. Many are born that way, and humanity invariably suffers. He is beyond good or evil. He operates in some distorted and violent world of his own. He will end in pettiness, or in power, depending on his ability to maintain deception.” He added, slowly: “He is waiting for my father to die. My father no longer trusts him, but he is dazzled by him. My father is very unhappy lately. I do not know why. He leans heavily on Franz. But the leaning is killing him. He is no longer himself.”

  “Why are you telling me these things!” cried Irmgard.

  “You want to know, do you not?” asked Baldur, implacably.

  She did not answer. He said: “He does not know of this child?”

  She came to life, in feverish alarm. “No. He does not even know where I am. He must never know.”

  “Why?”

  She moved as if tormented. “You would not understand. I never wish to see him again.”

  “Even though you love him still?”

  “Because of that,” she whispered.

  He sighed bitterly, and stood up. “I will go now.” He held out his hand to her, and she took it simply. Tears began to run over her white cheeks. He pressed her hand in both of his.

  “You will let me come again? Often?” He could not refrain from saying with sad tormenting: “I can bring you news of him, of course.”

  “Come again!” she cried, with a pang. “You need never mention him, if you will only come!”

  He looked at her in a long silence, searching her eyes. “I believe you,” he said at last, very gently.

  He left her then. She watched him go. She had the feeling that she was watching the departure of the only friend she had in the world.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the night that Mrs. Schmidt died, only Hans and Baldur were in her room. Not even Matilda, who had been nursing her, w
as there. Ernestine, of course, had not been informed that death was imminent, and was peacefully sleeping at the side of her husband. The whole house slept in its tall dark walls and gloomy corridors. The doctor had been in at sunset, and had said that the poor woman might live a day or two longer, and that he would call in the morning. There was no immediate danger of death, he had said.

  Matilda, in these last days, had exhibited much theatrical and emotional solicitude for her mistress. She had been very “devoted.” She sighed loudly and audibly whenever she had an audience, and spoke sadly of her pallor, her weariness, and her anxiety. Her brisk buxom step slowed, when any one approached, to a heavy and patient movement. Hans kept urging her to rest, and then she would look at him with heroic and suffering eyes, exclaiming: “How can I rest? It is unnatural!” She would dab her eyes briefly, and with dignity, and then, with bowed head would reenter Mrs. Schmidt’s chamber. She deceived no one but Ernestine and Hans. Mrs. Flaherty, the cook, made audible and ribald comments about such devotion, and the chambermaids snickered behind their hands. But Ernestine was deeply and tearfully touched at such loyalty and self-sacrifice. She forgave Matilda her onerous position in this household, and was full of remorse. Surely she had been wrong! Surely her horrible suspicions were unjustified! She would look at Franz imploringly, and he would pat her shoulder or kiss her cheek, assuring her that she had been very narrow-minded and unjust. Once, while doing this, he caught Matilda’s obscenely winking eye, and winked back in return. There was no deception between these two.

  Because Mrs. Schmidt appeared to be resting so easily, Matilda allowed herself to be ordered out of the room by Hans “to rest.” She went to her apartments and immediately fell into a lusty and snoring sleep. She was very satisfied. When the “old hag” was safely dead, then she could take her rightful place in this household. She slept, smiling, imagining herself addressed as “Mrs. Schmidt.” She had no doubt of the ultimate event.

  There had been a stormy and bloody sunset this evening, which was three days before Christmas. When the sky had finally darkened, a blizzard swept down upon the city, accompanied by bellowing and furious gales. Under the street-lamps, the streets were all deserted. Heaps of snow, like dunes, piled up against curbs, about trees and walls. Their ridged whiteness glittered under the lights. In large areas, the wind swept the streets bare. The wind was almost visible, so violently did the icy air palpitate under its shocks, and the gas flickered in the lamps, like feeble candles. The great Schmidt mansion stood ponderously in the path of the gale, which was filled with ice and snow particles as harsh and choking as sand. Nothing could shake that mansion, but every tall window and every door shuddered and creaked and rattled, and smoke blew in from fireplaces.

  For a time Baldur, sunk in a chair at the foot of his mother’s bed, was alone. One tall white candle burned on a table near the bed, and it was sufficient only to fill the darkness with a dim and trembling lighter shadow. The walls were lost in dimness, and on the ceiling was a round pool of wavering light in which the plaster-white carvings were like a tiny bas-relief of the face of the moon. Baldur could just discern the heavy trembling of the thick draperies drawn across the windows. They moved constantly in blasts of bitter air which found their way through minute crevices. But they moved without sound. There was no sound but the wind, and in the intervals, so intense was the silence, that Baldur imagined he could hear the ghostly whisper of the flickering candle. There was nothing else visible in the room but his mother’s bed, carved, high, drifting with dull crimson silk covers. From the chair where he was sitting, he could see the slight ridge her body made under the silk, and the dark blur which was her head. From time to time, he rose and looked down at the dying face on its satin pillows. He would stand there for a long time, gazing, his hand on a carved post. Sometimes he would bend down to listen to her halting breath, which came only irregularly through cracked and widely parted lips. Her eyes were bruised spots, sunk in her claylike face, and he saw the cords in her sallow neck, and the fluttering of her flat tired breast.

  In her dying, for the first time in her life, there was something heroic about the poor creature, something of dignity and aloofness. It is only in tragedy, he thought, that men approach the gods. Now that his mother stood in the gateway of death, she acquired a pride she had never possessed in life. Her dim and meaningless life, so petty, so without substance, took on some mysterious significance, like a link in a long chain whose beginning and end were not visible. Her usual timid and vacillating expression had gone, to be replaced by a thin austerity and sternness. He could not grieve for her, in her new dignity, her last majestic estate. He looked at the emaciated hands on the coverlet, already folded in the lofty resignation of final peace. He hoped she would die like this, without awakening again to the degradation of life. A great blasted tree, he thought, has more awe in it, more somber wonder and grandeur, than any lush growth wild with leaves, and noisy with birds.

  He knew that she would die tonight. He went slowly back to his chair, and sat unmoving, watching the blur on the pillows. Long motionless thoughts stood in his mind, dark static, yet without torment. He seemed to be standing on a vast plain under an endless night, where there were no sound, no life, no horizons. There was only eternity, solemn and immense, in which all personal being was lost. Here man could measure no time, nor could twist it into grotesque and painful patterns. He was not aware that he slept, but he awoke with a start, awakened by a faint rustling whisper.

  He got to his feet, feeling numb and dazed, and approached his mother. Her eyes, like dark bottomless holes, stared at him. “Hans?” she murmured.

  He bent over her and touched his lips to her cold damp forehead. “It is Baldur, Mama,” he said.

  Now she recognized him, and a glimmer of a smile passed over her pale lips. Her hand fluttered. He took it. It was already icy. He sighed deeply. As if his sigh stirred some suffering life in her, her hand trembled, and her expression changed.

  “Baldur,” she whispered. The holes which were her eyes brimmed with terrible tears. But she could say nothing else. He saw her tears, and he could not bear the seeing. He went for his father.

  Hans came to his bedroom door, his white nightshirt reaching to his ankles, a white flannel night-cap with a tassel tilted rakishly on his large pink skull. He blinked and scowled stupidly at his son, for he had been sleeping heavily. Behind him, his room, glaring with sudden gaslight, was stark and bitterly cold.

  “My mother is dying,” said Baldur, in a low voice.

  Hans continued to blink and scowl in silence, trying to understand.

  “She has asked for you. Please come at once,” urged Baldur. He dropped his voice even lower. “I don’t think it wise to call Ernestine.”

  Hans said nothing. In the past few years he had grown rapidly older. There was a flaccidity and hopelessness and sullen gloom about him, which had replaced his former bellicosity and loud belligerence. He was less fat; his broad shoulders stooped wearily. Moreover, there was a bewilderment, a confusion, in his tiny blue eyes, and his mustache did not bristle any longer. He was a very old man, lost in a perplexing and frightening world, which had grown too noisy, too exigent, too big for him. His disposition, never renowned for its sweetness and gentleness, had become thinly ferocious, so that he resembled an old stricken boar attacked in a thicket where he had gone to die. At moments, his old violence flared up, but it was gone like a sudden flame is gone, swallowed in impotent smoke. Sometimes his face worked grotesquely, as though he would burst into tears. He had long periods of brooding silence, from which he would rouse himself with a dazed look, and a trembling of his eyelids.

  He was no longer hateful to Baldur, who knew everything, but only pathetic. He was even more pathetic, standing there in his doorway, blinking. Baldur went into his room and brought his father his black silk dressing gown, helped him to put it on. Hans obeyed automatically, hardly aware of what he was doing. Once, in the operation, he looked at Baldur, tried to scowl,
succeeded only in grimacing.

  They went into Mrs. Schmidt’s room together, tiptoeing in the black coldness of the hall. Hans, with slow reluctant feet, waddled to his wife’s beside. But she had fallen into a light doze again. Baldur placed a chair for his father beside his own. “We must wait,” he whispered. “She will soon be conscious.”

  Hans sat down. His short fat body collapsed in the chair. His white night-cap was tremulous in the gloom. Baldur could not guess what he was thinking. He had folded his little white fat hands on his belly. He stared unblinkingly before him, his under lip thrust out. Baldur could see the wrinkling of his pink forehead. He knew that Hans was not thinking of his wife. Still bemused by sleep, he had fallen again into one of those stolid, heavily bewildered meditations so usual these days with him. He had come into this death chamber only to resume them consciously. Once he looked at Baldur unseeingly, and Baldur was touched by that blank groping stare. He knew that his father was not aware of the coldness of the room, which the faint pink fire could not alleviate. When Baldur stirred up the fire and put fresh coal on it, Hans watched him as a very young infant watches the movements of an adult, without comprehension, without thought. He was merely a moving object to Hans, upon which his eyes fixed without consciousness. Once an expression of some subterranean pain wrinkled his thick pink features, but again, the pain did not reach his awareness.

  Baldur guessed some part of the ponderous turmoil and imageless misery that had his father. But there was nothing he could say or do. His pity increased. He sat down, tried to find something he could say. But Hans’s chin had fallen on his broad fat chest, and his eyes were sightless. Then Baldur saw his lids droop, and a faint snore came from between his fallen lips.

  The winter gale increased in intensity. The candlelight moved vaguely about the room, touching the arm of a chair, a fold of the trembling draperies at the window. The fire rose a little. Hans had begun to mutter in his sleep.

  “Gleichschaltung!” he murmured. He repeated the word, and now it was like a faint cry of despair, impotent, contemptuous, and suffering. “Nein! Nein! That is folly! I shall not have it! You are ruining me!”