The Strong City

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Franz, so alive, so robust, so vigorous, forced to live in these horrible dark rooms, which had begun to smell of drains and dust and mustiness. It was dreadful, but so touching, she would say to Baldur, her dark-rimmed tired eyes shining with love and infatuation. And Baldur would listen silently and coldly, thinking those secret thoughts which now so infuriated his sister. He knew that Franz did not dare insist upon abandoning this house. To do so would awaken Hans to a last frantic realization of what had happened to him. Safe in the walls he had built, he retained a last security, a last belief that he still held authority. It was a necessity for Franz to allow him to believe this, the while he daily and deftly stripped the old man of his final kingship. Wrapped in this false security, this false and pathetic faith, he was the more easily undone, the more easily betrayed. Franz was satisfied. In the mills, they knew who was master. Even Dietrich knew, and had accepted. Day by day, sinking deeper into his somber house, still desperately believing in himself, Hans was an impotent, whimpering old dog gnawing his bones, shutting his eyes whenever he could, for the sake of his own reason and his own survival.

  Thinking these many things tonight, Baldur watched his father closely. He saw that Hans barely ate anything, that Gillespie carried away his plate almost untouched. He saw that his father was literally dying, drawn into that last abstraction of the old and the beaten. He saw the blind dead glance, the fumbling hands. He heard the deep hoarse sighs. He knew that his father saw nothing, heard nothing.

  The meal over, Ernestine fluttered off to the nursery to hear the children’s prayers, and to be sure that Miss Whitmore had not neglected to beat an egg into Joseph’s milk, and had not forgotten to flavor it, artfully, with coffee. (The dear child had such an aversion to milk, just like herself at his age!)

  Baldur sat alone with his father, under the spectral light of the chandelier, which seemed like some palely illuminated stalactite in the dim hollow cave of the great room. He sipped a glass of wine, holding the fragile crystal thoughtfully in his slender fingers, and watching Hans. The old man sat sunken deeply in his immense carved chair. His bowed whitened head, round and smooth, almost hairless, was outlined sharply against the crimson velvet. He appeared to be asleep, so still was he, so motionless, so hardly breathing. His eye-glasses shone with a ghostly reflected light. For a time Baldur thought he was drowsing, and then, through the glasses, he saw the opaque fixity of his eyes, staring at the table-cloth, and the slack fallen thickness of his lips. The diamond on his hand twinkled a little, like a drowned star. But that was the only life about him.

  It was this attitude, abandoned, done, lost, pathetically tragic and impotent, which stirred Baldur as no gesture, no wild crying word, no broken murmur, could have done. Had his father always been retiring, reserved, coldly quiet, his present attitude would have been acceptable as natural senility. But Hans, violent, exuberant, bellicose, degenerated into this pulpy mass of dumbly agonized flesh, was not to be borne with indifference. Baldur had not forgotten the hatred and the murderous enmity which had blighted his whole life. Yet even this memory, paradoxically, increased his compassion and his bitter understanding. Nothing had defeated Hans but Franz Stoessel. And the old man still did not know the nature of the thing which had destroyed him.

  Or did he know, at last? In this Walpurgis Night of a house, in this den of monstrous things, had he come to realization? Baldur looked more closely at those fixed unblinking eyes behind the glasses. He looked more closely at the slack hand on the table-cloth.

  He wanted to speak, gently, softly. But he had no words to say. Between these two was only a horrible memory, too terrible for speech, too impassable, like a chasm which could not be bridged.

  Then, very slowly, as if the very lifting of his lids was at the expense of a mortal effort, Hans looked at Baldur in the shadowy dusk of the silent room, and Baldur, sitting at the other end of the table, looked back. The shining white cloth glimmered between them, with its litter of crystal and silver, only half seen in the dusk. Not even the voice of a servant could be heard, not the creak of a closing door, not a footstep. The snow fell silently outside, and even the wind was still. The fire at the far end of the room burned without sound.

  “My son,” said Hans, and his voice was a hoarse croak.

  Something lurched and fell in Baldur, and something dim made the dim room almost dark before him. His fingers tightened on his glass. But he made no other gesture. “My son,” Hans had said. He had never said it before like this, but always with derision, fury and repudiation.

  “Yes, Father,” replied Baldur, very quietly.

  Hans sighed, and Baldur bit his lip at the sound. Hans stirred on his chair, as though his exhausted body had been stricken with a pang, which, though sharp, was not sharp enough to move that dying flesh.

  And now Hans groaned, feebly. His hand on the tablecloth lifted and fell. It was not much, but it revealed to Baldur, more eloquently than a furious motion, how close to dissolution the old man was, how tormented. Baldur did not rise. He knew, subtly, that if his father saw again his misshapen body, what he had to say would never be said. Sitting on his padded chair as he was, Baldur gave an illusion of less deformity, even of some strength, for his head was so large and so heroic.

  Again, Hans groaned, and the sound seemed to rise from his opening and dying heart. But his eyes had quickened to a dull fever.

  “I am sick,” muttered the old man, simply. “I am dying. My life, it is over.”

  Baldur said no quick word of negative, no conventional denial, soothing and false. He said only, very softly, in German: “What is it you wish me to do, my father?”

  Now Hans had begun to breathe audibly and hoarsely, as though struggling for breath. He forced himself upright in his chair. A dark suffused flush flowed over his face, and his features became congested. Baldur could see his waistcoat throbbing and heaving. The cravat was like a twisted rope about his thick neck. He struggled for breath, for words to say the things he must say.

  “That man—it is my mills—my mills they are lost. No more the mills are mine. What can I say? The men like him—the mills, the factories, the lands, they are taking from the little men. Like me. Like your father. It eats in my heart,” and slowly, poignantly, he struck his chest a slow heavy blow with his clenched fists. “I cannot say what is in my heart—”

  “I know,” said Baldur, gently.

  Hans stared. His hand fell on the table, and the fingers unclenched. Baldur gazed at his father with infinite compassion, the while Hans’s suffused tiny blue eyes gaped at him intensely. Then, very slowly, to Baldur’s mournful distress, those eyes filled with acrid and most terrible tears, tears like blood seeping upward from his tortured soul.

  Then Hans said heavily, ponderously: “Ja.” And again, “Ja.”

  There was silence again. Hans averted his head, stared at the fire. Baldur saw his thick porcine profile. It was somber, sad, no longer blank, but only full of comprehension and weighted despair. It had lost its chronic brutish expression. Now it had a kind of solemn dignity in it, a tragic nobility.

  He began to speak once more, almost inaudibly: “Never have I had a friend. Never have I talked to a man. There were no words. Now, in my son, I find my words.” He seemed to be thinking aloud, with a sort of humble wonder and grief.

  “Yes,” said Baldur, very gently. “But you need not speak. I know.”

  Hans nodded his head, as he still stared at the fire. “It is true,” he muttered.

  Baldur sighed. “But you and I know, my father, that there is nothing we can do. It is not—Franz, alone. It is all America. Is it good? Is it bad? Who can tell? We cannot stop the flow of change, however we may grieve. That is not to be done.”

  His voice fell into the silence, as into a dark pit. Baldur thought his father had not heard, for his fixed expression did not change. And then, like a soldier proudly surrendering his sword to invincible defeat, the old man nodded slowly.

  “It is true. I must understand it
. But, there is my daughter. And my grandchildren. They must not suffer. You understand that, my son?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. But what can I do?”

  Now the old man turned his head, and a cunning, monkey-like look wrinkled his features.

  “It is for me to do,” he said.

  He tried to get to his feet, but fell back in his chair, panting. Baldur went to him, and held out his hand. The old man stared at him, first at his face, compassionate, gentle, smiling, comprehending everything, and then at the outstretched hand. Then, very slowly, he gave Baldur his hand. Baldur was alarmed at its coldness and dampness. But he continued to smile. Hans’s features worked like those of a child who is about to burst into loud weeping. Then, without speaking, he leaned on that hand, and that arm, and forced himself to his feet.

  They went up the great winding staircase together. Hans’s eyes moved over the stairs, over the walls, over the stained window, as though he were seeing them for the first time, or the last. They said nothing. Hans’s feet seemed numb and stumbling. It was he, not Baldur, who was now the cripple.

  Baldur took him to his room. At the doorway, they halted.

  “Goodnight, my father,” said Baldur gravely.

  Hans was silent. He regarded his son with a long strange look. And then he spoke, almost whisperingly:

  “Goodnight, my son. Goodnight, my son.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Night after night, listening to somber January winds, Baldur had waited for Franz Stoessel to come to him.

  He knew he would come. At the dinner table, no one could have been more suave, quiet and considerate than Franz, no one more conventional and impersonal. He was gentle and courteous to his wife, amiable to the sententious and dolorous “Auntie Elizabeth,” smilingly indulgent to her “impossible” children, Richard and Marcia. (Baldur knew how much iron self-control that involved, for he had long known that Franz detested the young.) With Baldur, he maintained a quiet and aloof dignity. Baldur sat, now, in his father’s empty seat, though he knew that Ernestine had privately protested to Franz, with considerable indignation. In these days, Baldur had come to admire Franz, not reluctantly, but whole-heartedly, as he always admired the valorous. He knew now that Franz had a species of real valor, all the more amazing when one was aware of his real emptiness and long chronic fear. Baldur also knew that this valor, though compounded in no small part of hypocrisy, self-seeking and opportunism and falseness, nevertheless had a measure of genuine verity. It came from his blood, which, though denied for years, had in it the elements which made Emmi Stoessel inflexible, honest, and grimly shining with integrity.

  Baldur, these days, was frequently overcome with fresh wonder at the complexity of the human spirit, in which all vices and viciousness could live in comparatively peaceful juxtaposition with nobilities. He was no bright-eyed enthusiast, who believed men were either good or evil. He was contemptuous of those who declared that “evil” was the result of childhood obstacles and handicaps, or perverse misunderstanding. (As well declare, he would say, that storms and earthquakes and cyclones, came not from a nature designed to be “beneficent,” but from some malignant causes outside of, and in spite of, nature. The storms and earthquakes and cyclones in the human spirit were as inherent in it as were its social “goodnesses.” They must be reckoned with dispassionately. It was folly to treat them as “illnesses.” Men were born with them, as they were born with blue eyes or brown, with crooked noses or straight.) And so, he was not overly amazed that Franz Stoessel, the expedient, the ruthless, the cruel and the treacherous, and the fear-ridden and merciless, could display this dignified and bitter valor. He was not amazed that Franz frequently was genuinely kind and gentle. He had long ago discovered that he was truly fond of a certain boarding-house keeper, a Mrs. Dolly Harrow, and her three young daughters, and he had come upon other occasions, believed by Franz to be secret, when he had displayed evidences of selflessness, courage and understanding. Consistency in character, thought Baldur, is found only in the novels of Charles Dickens and others of his school. The one real fact in human nature is inconsistency.

  He did not feel a new respect or softness for Franz in the recognition of his valor. It did not surprise him. He did not think, foolishly: “I have underrated him. I have done him some injustice.” He did not discard all his knowledge of Franz’s wickednesses with the large and emotional cry of: “He is really an excellent person, whom I have wronged!” He merely accepted the valor as another one of Franz’s attributes which he had not heretofore recognized. It did not increase either his respect or contempt for Franz. It only increased his comprehension, and heightened his interest.

  Knowing that he would come to him, Baldur, that he must come, Baldur was, nevertheless, surprised at the long delay. He had expected the coming within two weeks of Hans’s death, just after Christmas. But now it was nearly the end of January, and Franz had not come. Baldur’s interest and curiosity were enhanced. He had come to find life very exciting recently. What was delaying Franz? Baldur did not for an instant believe that it was resignation, or compromise. He knew Franz too well. In fact, only he of all who knew and had known Franz, really understood him. But still Franz did not come. He treated his brother-in-law with reserve and politeness. He never spoke of the mills. He sat at Baldur’s left hand at the table, paler, thinner, less vital, perhaps, in a physical way, than usual. But what he lost in physical vitality he had regained in a vitality of spirit, which had made him grim, silent, more inexorable, more dangerous. Baldur would frequently and covertly study him, observing the new sharpness in eyes never soft at best, the new hardness of a mouth once given to easy smiles, the new deep line in the high light forehead, the new chiselling of the planes of cheek and chin and temple. Baldur knew that he was suffering. And men like Franz, when suffering, were deadly. If he could kill me, thought Baldur with amusement, he would do so. A little more courage, a little more cunning, a little less caution, and perhaps, a little less valor, and he would contrive that I should have an “accident” of some sort. But, he lacks daring.

  Baldur knew that Franz had frequently been daring in his life. But it was not the daring of the true adventurer, the true reckless of spirit. There was too much of the German in him. He dared only when he had nothing to lose, and when he had a fair chance of gain. Then, he was completely ruthless. But never would he sacrifice, for one gesture of daring, what he had already secured.

  Was it patience that was delaying Franz’s coming? The patience of the German who never moved except when he had a fair chance of succeeding? Sometimes Baldur, with pleasant excitement, suspected that Franz was playing a cat-and-mouse game with him, that he was trying to lull him into indifference or boredom. He had come to accept this latter theory in a measure, for though Franz’s voice was always grave, measured, courteous and calm with him, his eyes were like bits of polished steel. Franz was watching him. Baldur pretended that he was unaware of this. And now, he began to try to hasten Franz’s coming by assuming an air of languid unawareness and forgetfulness. Was he deceiving Franz? At times he had been impressed with Franz’s acuteness with regard to human nature. And then he had discovered that Franz was acute only when confronting those attributes in another with which he was familiar, having found them in himself. Attributes which he did not possess puzzled and infuriated him, rendered him helpless and confused. Had he been a Frenchman, a Latin, a Jew, an Oriental, Franz would, by delicate intuition, have been able to understand alien attributes. But Germans never understood the nature of others unlike them. That accounted for an obtuseness which puzzled, amused or alarmed other races. At the end, some day, Baldur would think, we shall have to reckon with this ominous and dangerous obtuseness. Since 1860, the world had had to reckon with it three times, to its dismay, its wounds, and its shock. What did the future hold? (Baldur, though half-German himself, never thought of himself as anything but an American, as alien to Franz as a Chinaman.)

  Then, one night, Franz came.

  At
the dinnertable, Franz had been even paler than usual, even more silent. There was an abstraction about him, gloomy and somber. When Ernestine, in her adoration, had fluttered about him anxiously, he replied to her tremulous inquiries by saying that he was tired. He had answered her patiently and gently. His eyes, Baldur had observed, became less hard when he looked at her. Was it fondness, or exhaustion? Was he, at last, grateful for her unquestioning adoration in a world which had become somewhat too much for him? Baldur doubted that a little, though he did not discard the idea. Or was he giving, for Baldur’s benefit, and subsequent softening, an exhibition of husbandly appreciation? Baldur subscribed to this theory not a little. He had noticed that Franz was less malicious with his wife since Hans’s death, especially in Baldur’s presence, less obscurely ridiculing, less jocose. He must be carrying this attitude over even into the privacy between husband and wife, for Ernestine no longer had that faintly lost and bewildered expression when emerging from the chambers she shared with him.

  Baldur watched closely that night. Suddenly he knew that this was the night when Franz would come to him. He listened to Ernestine’s urging that Franz “retire” immediately after dinner. He heard Franz agree that “that might be best.” Husband and wife left the dining-room together, Ernestine, small and frail and aging, fluttering at his elbow. Baldur, smiling a little to himself, went up to his rooms.

  He drew the heavy draperies across the face of the dark wet night outside. He stirred up his fire. He placed two glasses and a decanter of cognac on a little table. He opened a box of cigars, put fresh cigarettes in a silver box beside it. Then he sat down near his fire, opened a book, read and waited. The firelight fell in long fluttering shadows over the quiet austerity of the great studio. The high beamed ceiling was lost in dusk. The few chairs stood waiting, emptily. The wind mourned at the shrouded windows. Baldur did not glance at the mahogany clock which ticked on the mantel. He reckoned that it would be an hour or two before Franz came. He read quietly. Above his head hung Irmgard’s portrait, and it seemed to watch and wait, also.