The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  He liked cold baths with plenty of soap and rough towels. His weight shook the thick polished floor of his gigantic bedroom as he traversed it on the way to his bathroom, icy-cold this early winter morning. The floor of the bathroom was paved with blocks of white marble, and the mahogany doors were set with mirrors. He ran cold water from the silver faucets, climbed weightily into the marble tub, and slowly sat down, grunting. The water eddied and foamed round his reddening flesh. He splashed it vigorously over his body. His skin was white as milk until the water flushed it with renewed circulation. He began to feel better, the ache subsiding behind his eyes. Covered with lather, he began to sing, hoarsely. It was a German song, a peasant song, of plows and fields and blue morning skies. Like most German lieder, it was melancholy, yet strong with gloomy grandeur. He forgot where he was. He saw his native Bavaria, dark and gloomy like the song, courageous and stormy and barbarous. It was his favorite saying that the Germans had escaped Roman civilization, had been unbefouled by the Renaissance, had retained their barbarian soul. Odin and Thor still lived in them, swinging sword and thunderous hammer. They had never emerged into reality. The black forests of legend were still filled with the Nordic gods, and lived close to the very breath of all true Germans. He would often say that Luther had not merely liberated the German spirit from the fetid clutch of Romanism: he had really liberated it from the clammy, sickly effluvium of Christianity, so alien to that spirit.

  He, Hans Joachim Schmidt, had married his aristocratic Frances. He had become an American industrialist. He had conformed to many American customs. But his resistance was powerful against all these circumstances. When he was alone, he was a German once more, washing more than his body free from alien corruptions. His overwhelming romanticism returned like a flood of healing water, rising up in him, an irresistible fountain. His blue eyes became jets of light. Even his grossness became strength and dignity.

  He dried himself vigorously, and returned to his cold bedroom, a veritable vault in the morning’s half-light. He would have no rugs. His huge four-poster mahogany bed stood in the center of the gleaming floor. It was a German bed, white and broad, heaped with thick pillows and puffy silken quilts. Curtains of old tapestry hung at the vast windows. He pulled them aside and stared gloomily at the gray day. He began to dress, taking a fresh suit from the towering mahoganv wardrobe, and fresh underclothes and shirt and collar and cravat from the giant dresser. He would have no valet. He had fought out this battle with Frances years ago. He wanted no lackeys about him, he said. But the real reason was his unconquerable shyness and fastidious modesty, which would allow no other creature to see his nakedness. It was not that he was ashamed of his body. But he had an innate dignity, as well as shyness and modesty. He thought that unashamed nudity was a mark of Latin corruption, of abandonment of all self-respect and pride. Even his wife had never seen his nakedness.

  In spite of his fat, he gave an impression of geometrical squareness He wore black broadcloth almost exclusively, which he believed minimized his bulk. His linen shirt was glossy and stiff, as was his collar. He tied and folded his black silk cravat neatly His little hands were dexterous and swift as a woman’s. He had a small stiff blond mustache, which he waxed. He carefully brushed his bristling hair with a silver brush He flicked open his great square of a linen handkerchief and sprinkled a few drops of Eau de Cologne upon it. The odor of lemon verbena filled the cold darkness of the bedroom. Then, creaking and starched, he allowed himself an approving glance in the mirror. Across his enormous black waistcoat hung the thick golden chain of his watch. On his cuffs glittered golden links. As a final touch he thrust a diamond pin into the depths of his cravat. He was ready for his breakfast. It was barely seven o’clock.

  Carefully affixing his pince-nez on his porcine nose, he opened the door of his bedroom. The great hall outside was quiet and dark, the night-light still burning at the end of the corridor. The sleeping quarters of the family were on the third floor. On the fourth floor slept the servants. He walked down the carpeted hall to the stairway. From the enormous first floor a tremendous circular stairway of marble and mahogany coiled upwards to the fourth floor. Leaning over the banister, he could look down the well to the first floor, and up, to the fourth. He never tired of the pleasantly giddy sensation this survey gave him. A man could plunge straight down, he thought, with never a hindrance, to the bottom of that circular well. The German soul, always so furtively enamored of suicidal death, was titillated. It was not thought, but emotion, which made him go through this morning ritual of contemplating swift extinction. Nor did the emotion depress him. Strangely, it lightened him, put him into a more agreeable humor.

  He went downstairs, a small fat bulky figure on those vast marble steps, moving with ponderous dignity and sureness. On the second floor landing there was a huge window of stained glass. He liked to pause and gaze at its gloomy somberness, its squares of dull green, purple, crimson and blue. When he was certain that no one observed him, he would stand on tiptoe and look through a few of the lower squares. He could see a bare tree, the sky, the neighboring lawns and a section of the quiet street below. But when he looked through a blue square, the view became nightmarish, spectral, a scene on the moon, where dreadful phantoms lurked just out of sight, but waiting. He would change to a crimson square, and the very same scene became a vision of the uttermost depths of smoldering hell, a stormy frozenness, a wild and savage cavern. Pleased, he would look through a purple section, and the scene became that of a land under graves, eternally dead and filled with amethystine mist. He would hum again, mystically soothed, the sullen capricious spirit under his flesh refreshed by its momentary escape into fantasy.

  He was no egotist. He did not hug the thought to himself that no one ever suspected what lived within the folds of his gross body. Nor did he ever wonder what really lived within the bodies of others. That was because he was brutally selfish, and in spite of his romanticism, not possessed of considerable impersonal imagination. His sentimentality was for himself, but it was a clean, childlike sentimentality, without noxiousness.

  The dining-room was fully forty feet long, and high in proportion, with a curved and frescoed ceiling. The walls were panelled in black walnut. Within the black marble fireplace smoldered a dim crimson fire which hardly relieved the chill of the room. The furniture, too, was of black walnut, high, ponderous, intricately carved, and upholstered in red plush. The gigantic sideboard was a-glimmer with ancient silver, polished and twisted. Above it, the mirror reflected ghostly shadows. From the ceiling hung a cluster of crystal gaslights, faintly burning. The mammoth china closet threw back darker shadows from its glass doors. The big long table was covered with a thin lace cloth, and here, in ceremony, was laid out his breakfast, a gross breakfast. For it was composed of thick hot pork sausages, eggs and pancakes, jams and popovers, cream and coffee.

  The room, chill, splendid and gloomy, was weighted with silence. For the mistress and the son and daughter were still asleep in their beds. The butler came on slippered feet through the swinging door from the pantry, and drew out the master’s chair. Hans sat down, growled a good-morning, and opened his napkin. His feet did not quite touch the floor, so a red velvet hassock had been discreetly placed there for them. He scowled at the sausages, suspicious that they were not at the right degree of heat. He cut off a large morsel and put it into his mouth. Still scowling, he chewed on it belligerently, while the tall gaunt butler waited with apprehension. It was nothing new for Hans to thrust the plate violently from him, bellowing, when the food did not please him, spilling the contents all over the table. But this morning the sausages were exactly to his taste. The scowl lightened. He grunted something grudgingly, and the butler relaxed with a faint sigh. In silence, and with deftness, he presided over the table. The only sound in the room, now, was the gross, loud, smacking sounds of mastication. The gaslights flickered. There were faint hollow echoes from all over the house. A subdued clinking came from the kitchen. All at once the wind rose
and lashed half-frozen rain against the dull windows, which reached almost halfway to the ceiling.

  “A bad morning, sir,” ventured the butler, timidly.

  Hans growled something, sullenly. His guttural voice was usually half incomprehensible to the English servant at the best of times. But the man had trained himself to listen for intonations rather than actual words. He was even more relieved. From the porcine growling he had discerned agreement with his remark.

  Hans finished his breakfast with three mighty cups of good coffee. Then, and then only, did he open the newspaper near his plate. The butler lit his cigar which he had merely thrust into his mouth, waiting for the service. The man cleared the table, leaving only the final cup of coffee. He was halfway to the door when Hans exploded with a violent curse, almost causing the man to drop the silver tray in terror. He glanced with affright over his shoulder. But Hans was not looking at him. He was glaring at the paper. The butler fled in complete disorder, sweating.

  What had aroused Hans’s rage was the statement of a certain Senator that Hans’s local competitor, the Brixton Steel Company, should be given the right to manufacture steel rails for the opening territories in the west. Hans knew Senator William Endicott, and hated that thin English face with the fine distinguished features and cold expression. When the Senator had let it be known that he was to visit Nazareth, Hans, without much delicacy, had extended an invitation to him to be his house guest. But the Senator had not even deigned to reply to the invitation. He had gone to George Brixton’s home, instead. Mr. Brixton had invited nearly all of Nazareth’s leading industrialists and best society to a dinner in honor of his guest, but he had not invited Hans and his wife. The double slight had infuriated Hans to the point of apoplexy. He had cursed with such violence that Frances had become really ill on top of her usual invalidism.

  So, this, then, was what Endicott had been conspiring. Hans filled the morgue-like dining-room with volleys and thunders of foul German profanity. His hoarse gutturals bounded back from wall and ceiling. He flung the paper from him. He reached down from his chair and ground it under his polished boot. He spat at it, again and again. His face was bright purple. His voice rose to a scream. In the kitchen, the servants huddled together, whispering, their eyes glaring in terror at the pantry door.

  After some time the uproar subsided. The butler tiptoed to the door and opened it an inch. The room was empty. He crept to the table and glanced through the velvet draperies that outlined the arch. He could see beyond the hall into the library. There Hans was stamping back and forth before the fire, his hands under his coat-tails, the cigar smoking like a volcano in his mouth. The butler could see the huge purplish face, the fat, boar-like figure. He shook his head, sighing.

  He started, and again fled. Hans was crossing into the hall again. Whenever he was enraged, he took out his fury upon his family. Normally, he was totally indifferent to their absence from the breakfast table. He was not particularly fond of any of them except his daughter; in fact, he despised his wife and hated his son, and was glad of their customary absence. But he had to have victims. Now, shouting his curses upon them for a lazy, worthless congregation of imbeciles, he stamped violently upon the stairs to their sleeping quarters. The bristles on his head stood upright, like a pig’s in a rage; his blue eyes shot out red light. His face was inflamed and congested. His shouts trailed after him in diminishing violence. The servants in the kitchen could hear his furious pounding on his wife’s door.

  CHAPTER 3

  Frances Bradhurst Schmidt aroused herself out of her warm silken cave of a bed like a sick dark thin cat. Her room, all quilted satin French luxury, gilt, mirrors, eighteenth-century portraits of gay powdered gentlemen and ladies, perfume, ruffled satin draperies, plushy rugs and pale ornate furniture, was a strange setting for this meagre and feverish woman with her ailing flesh and sunken invalid’s eyes. She was an alien in this lushness. Her body was shrunken and gaunt, and hardly made a rise under the puffy embroidered quilts. A fire burned night and day in its yellow-marble fireplace, for she was always cold and shivering and sniffling.

  Rudely startled from uneasy slumber by her husband’s bellowings, she sat upright on her gleaming pillows, pushing back her black, gray-streaked hair. She blinked her slightly bleared eyes. Her dry mouth opened on a muffled sound of terror. She fumbled on her bed-table, and lit one of the candles in the elaborate silver-gilt candelabrum. Then she drew the quilts up to her chin and called faintly: “Yes? Hans?”

  He flung open the door. His snout of a nose wrinkled as usual as the odors of the room assailed it: stale perfume, closeness, and the sickly sweet effluvium of a chamber in which an invalid had slept all night with closed windows. He looked across the littered waste of thick purplish rugs to the bed, and grunted his disgust. In the aura of yellow candelight he glared at his wife with inimical rage and hatred. He could see her thin huddled shoulders behind the quilts, her long sallow face with its jutting cheekbones, her great dark eyes ringed and swollen. But her terror satisfied him even through his rage.

  Shouting incoherently, he rushed at the windows. He tore aside the golden and mauve draperies. The stream of gray light flowed in. He flung open a window, and the cold damp air swirled into the room. The fire crackled and smoked. Then he turned back to his wife, breathing violently, glaring at her with red eyes of fury.

  “Seven o’clock, and you lie there and stink!” he shouted. When in a fit of madness like this his guttural accents thickened to the point of unintelligibility. “Seven o’clock, already, and there you lie! I eat my breakfast alone. I live alone. And the day goes on. A wife haf I! A wife!”

  She gazed at him, petrified, frantically speechless. Once, early in their married life, he had struck her heavily. He had never done that again. But she still experienced that horror, that terror of death, whenever he was like this, after more than thirty years. She was convinced that she would die if he ever hit her again, die, not of the blow, but of that horror, that loathesome blackness. It was not death that she feared so much as the spiritual disintegration which would precede it.

  He stamped to the bed, and she watched him come, her eyes growing larger and larger, and now brilliant with her awful attempts to keep down the drowning clutch on her throat. He stood at her feet, letting her see his disgust and detestation, his repudiation of her as a woman and a wife. She hardly breathed. But under the silken shroud of her nightgown her heart quivered and beat. She could not take her gaze from him. That gaze was like two frail arms extended to ward off a blow, to prevent it. If she looked away for an instant, she was certain that he would attack her.

  “A wife!” he repeated, and then deliberately spat sideways on the rug. The nostrils in her long thin nose, bony and aristocratic, trembled. “Haf I a wife? Haf I ever had a wife? No! By Gott, no! I haf had a meowing cat. A sick scrawny cat! What a wife for a man like Hans Schmidt!”

  Again her mouth opened, and emitted a piteous sound like a sigh. She shivered. The open window made the room cold. The draperies blew inward. She could see the tops of the empty trees, the wind-lashed rain. The candle flickered. Her face was ghastly, and slightly damp, and she had a look of death.

  The door of her dressing room opened and her stout German maid entered. Matilda was a huge woman of thirty-five, buxom, phlegmatic, rosy and strong, with a mass of lightbrown hair under her cap. Frances felt rather than saw her enter, and still without removing her eyes from her husband she cried out thinly: “Matilda!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Matilda. The maid stared for an instant like an ox at Hans. “Good morning, sir,” she said amiably, as though his visit were customary, and his rage nonexistent. She stirred up the fire. Her buttocks, large and glossy, were outlined under her voluminous black silk skirts, as she poked at the fire. She passed Hans with a respectfully bent head, and drew the velvet curtains a little closer about the windows, which she closed. She moved surely and quietly, for all her bulk. Her round pink face was expressionless, yet pleasantly pr
eoccupied. The huddled woman on the bed, the raucously breathing fat man at the foot of that bed, watched her with a kind of hypnotism. Frances’s dry withered lips moved in a soundless prayer that Matilda would not leave the room. Hans was fascinated by this healthiness and placidity and sweetsmelling freshness. His rage began to abate. He loved health and robustness, and Matilda had these in earthy measure. To him, she resembled the cows he had once driven to pasture, sleek, handsome because they were strong and without sickness, serving a simple good purpose, and filling an ordained place in an orderly universe. It was true that she was overly stout, her black seams straining, her bosom like a pillow, her face that of a peasant, without great intelligence or much understanding. But all these things only added to her completeness and rightness.

  Hans spoke to her in his native tongue: “I have not seen you before. When did you come?”

  She turned to him quietly, but, being well-trained, and a German woman, she did not look at him directly. “I have been here two weeks, mein herr. I came from Saxony six months ago.”