The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Ah,” he grunted. He plucked at the wax ends of his mustache. His belly swelled. But he was more pleased than ever. He forgot the sick woman on the bed, who had borne him two children. And Frances watched him. Slowly, the pain and terror abated in her heart. She gave a slow sad sigh. But she could not yet relax, though all the frail muscles in her body cried out against their own tenseness. She was afraid to lie down again, lest his rage rise against her once more. So she sat there, the quilts up to her chin, fright still brilliant in her sick eyes. She prayed that he would go now, and leave her to the peace of her medicines and her fire, and the strong ministering hands of Matilda. Coldness still lay like a sheath of ice over her thin legs and arms.

  Hans, musing pleasantly on Matilda, continued to watch the maid with her competent hands and swift sure movements. Ah, what a woman! He had forgotten, in America, that there were such women. His mother had been such a one, and his sisters. They had smelled so of clean earth, wind, bread and milk. They had had hands like these, big and red and scoured of nail. They had worked hard, and long, in the fields and the house, among many clean children, yet they had had this freshness, this utter cleanliness. A frown suddenly appeared on his face as he remembered Frances’s friends. They were not women! Perfumed, curled, whining, clad in silks and furs and velvet bonnets, with thin white faces and sick avid eyes, stepping from carriage to threshold and from threshold to carriage, shivering! He could hear their voices, high and faint and affected, and always with that undertone of delicate complaint. They were not women, with their muffs and gloves and lace handkerchiefs. They had no bodies, only bones covered by sick decaying flesh; for all the perfumed soaps, they were unclean. They were insults to warm luxurious nature. Yet, he had slept with such a one as these, and an outraged rigor stiffened his fat body, as though he had touched pollution. He felt corrupted in his flesh, befouled.

  He mused upon Matilda. She would be good in a man’s bed, sweet and strong and docile. A man would be reminded of hay and sunshine and distant cow-bells, and peace and tranquillity. He could wash himself in this fountain of fresh water, and the pollution would be gone from him. He was filled with a deep angry melancholy, a nostalgia, not of the spirit, but of the flesh. All his emotions came from his flesh, and never from his mind. All his frequent psychic disturbances, all his rages and hungers and ruthlessnesses, arose from no deep subconscious core of the mind, but from his body. Now he lusted for Matilda, not with a sensual lust, but with a mournfulness of deprived flesh, a really physical hunger.

  Still musing upon her, and hungering, he did not hear his wife’s bedroom door open, and was not aware of his son, Baldur, until he heard his low sweet voice anxiously asking Frances if she were well. He had, he said, heard a commotion, and thought perhaps she had been taken ill again. Frances, with renewed fright, was unable to speak. She merely thrust her thin hot trembling hand out to him, as though she were drowning. She knew how Hans hated his son.

  At the sound of that detested voice, all Hans’s fury returned, but renewed now by his impotent outrage against a fate which had deprived him of healthiness. He could never look upon his son without repudiation and loathing, as though Baldur’s very existence was an insult to him, an insult which nothing in the world could remove, except death. He had longed for Baldur’s death since the latter’s birth, longed for it until it had become an almost irresistible urging to personal action. When the child had sickened frequently, he had felt that this will for his son’s death had brought about the illnesses, and he had concentrated upon it fiercely, again not with his mind, but with all the force of his powerful flesh. He never saw Baldur without remembering that horrible hour of his birth, when the doctor had sadly told him of the club feet, the bent back. Dreadful operation after operation had taken place, thereafter, all through Baldur’s childhood. Hans had not had any hope that the operations would cure the piteous defects, but some atavistic savagery in him had been satisfied because of the boy’s suffering. And, too, he had hoped each time that Baldur would not survive the ordeals.

  Frances, in her hours of greatest anguish brought upon her by her husband, yet consoled herself with the memory of his frantic insistence upon Baldur’s operations. Surely, she would tell herself feverishly, Hans must really love the child, or he would not have spent so much money upon him and wasted so much of his time. She never suspected the real reason. But Baldur was not seven years old when he realized what lay behind that seeming absorption in his operations. He had been a silent preoccupied child, without physical fear for all his torments. He, of everyone in the household, was not afraid of Hans. He knew him completely. He was ironically amused by him, and out of each pit of pain succeeding the operations he would emerge with grim resolution to survive in order to thwart his father. That was his revenge upon him: his survival. He had not been horrified by what his sharp perceptions had revealed to him. Some preternatural intuition was in him, which enabled him to see behind words and actions and understand the source from which they had come. Because of this, rather than his disabilities, had come his love of solitude, his aversion for his kind, and yet, his enormous compassion for everything that existed.

  The ghastly, unspeakable struggle between father and son had gone on all these twenty-seven years, and each knew that the other was aware of his motives. Baldur did not hate his father. He regarded him as a natural phenomenon, to be studied and observed in a spirit of detachment, and even amusement, and with much irony. At the time of his last operation, which was some twelve years before, and at which time Baldur had almost died, the boy had opened his eyes to fix them upon his father’s savage and hopeful face. Then he had smiled, triumphantly, from out his torture, and Hans knew. The knowledge had momentarily shamed him and cowed him. For long months he had avoided seeing his son. He had been almost appalled at what he had seen in Baldur’s eyes. But it had not lessened his hatred. It had not decreased his will that Baldur must die. He had been only embarrassed that Baldur had seen him fully, as though he had come upon him when he was naked. In fact, his hatred gained in virulence from that day on, and the silent hidden struggle became more intense. Hans felt that his son was ridiculing him, defying him.

  Baldur, at twenty-seven, was no taller than a twelve-year-old boy, and very slight of frame. This was because his spine was curved and humped. His body was frail, almost tenuous, in its delicate and wraith-like quality. His hands were small, girlish and very fine. In this, he resembled his father. Moreover, he had inherited Hans’s fairness of skin, hair and eyes, and largeness of head. This head was incongruous on the small body and twisted shoulders, for it had a heroic quality and pride and dignity. But it was his face that attracted fascinated attention. It was a face of beauty, quietness and intelligence, an almost angelic face, belied, at times, by the ironic gleam in the blue eyes and a faintly bitter smile. He was like a splendid statue that some mad sculptor, upon its completion had struck violently with a heavy hammer, destroying its height and beauty and strength, and leaving a ruin with only the face untouched. The statue was misshapen and crumpled crushed together out of all semblance to humanity, but the face had remained, conquering and triumphant, its splendor intact, its spirit enhanced. This Hans could not forgive. If his son had been an idiot, as he often openly declared he was, he could have forgiven him easily. But one could not ignore a man’s soul in that ruined body, particularly when that soul understood, defied and laughed.

  It was not until Baldur’s birth that Hans learned that his wife’s dead brother and one of her uncles had been born so. Thus, she too shared in his hatred for her son. He implied that in some way this degradation was her fault, that she had wronged him beyond forgiveness.

  Years had not dulled the activity of his detestation. So, when he heard Baldur’s voice, a thick jet of crimson blood seemed to spout up into his brain. He turned savagely upon his son, who was standing beside his mother, holding her hand tightly and warmly. Hans’s blood-shot eyes became more suffused; his face purpled. But Baldur regarded hi
m serenely, faintly smiling, as beautiful as a ruined angel.

  “So!” shouted Hans. “You are up! Is it not too early in the morning for my fine gentleman?”

  “No,” replied Baldur, softly. “I usually get up at six.”

  Hans’s fury increased to a murderous pitch. “So, you get up at six, already! That is good, very good. And what do you do with all the long day after six o’clock, you important gentleman?”

  Baldur laughed gently. “Oh, many things, father. I read. I walk. I go with mother on her visits. I read again. I paint a little. And I think. Did you ever think, father? It is very entertaining, sometimes.”

  His voice was as beautiful as his face, soft and melodious, with an undertone of quiet mirth. A girl’s voice, Hans had once called it in black contempt. Now the mirth, unafraid, and with a timbre in it of bored disdain, was very evident in that voice. Hans’s fists clenched; his heart rolled over in his barrel-chest, thickly, sickeningly. Had he been able to kill, as he desired, he would have obtained enormous relief. And Baldur watched him almost musingly, still holding his mother’s hand. Within his large blue eyes there was a strange spark. Hans had seen it only once or twice, and that in the last few months. He could not understand it. But for some reason it startled him, made his peasant’s soul vaguely uneasy, chilled his fury.

  “Think!” he bellowed, hoarsely, retreating a little. “What can you think, you idiot? Whole men don’t think. They act, and work.”

  Baldur said nothing. He still smiled and regarded his father intently.

  There was a little silence. Matilda was laying out her mistress’s morning garments. She went to the door and accepted the breakfast tray which a maid had brought. She closed the door and brought the tray to the bedside table, smiling comfortably. “A little early, ma’am, but they must have known you were awake.” She plumped up Frances’s pillows, and then brought her a thick woolen shawl to put over her shoulders. Hans watched her. Again, that sad nostalgia of the flesh assailed him, and he forgot both his wife and his son.

  He turned abruptly and stamped from the room. When he had gone, Frances began to weep, silently, the tears streaming down her cheeks. Baldur wiped her eyes with his own handkerchief, tenderly. “There, there, mother, you mustn’t let him frighten you like that, the red-faced Dutchman! He loves to frighten you. He gets a perverse satisfacton from seeing your fright. Why do you humor him like that?”

  She leaned her head against her son’s chest and wept without restraint. “Oh, Baldur, my darling,” she murmured. Matilda watched them for a furtive moment or two with a stolid expression, without compassion, but with something of curiosity and contempt.

  Alone in the wide silent hall outside, Hans stood without moving for some time. He felt violently ill. He wiped his wet forehead. He was trembling. He was used to these fits of illness, after rage and hatred. He fumbled in his vest pocket and drew out a vial his physician had given him. He put a small pellet in his mouth and sucked it. It had a stinging, acrid taste, but it made his heart slow down just when it seemed that its pressure must burst every artery in his shaking body. He leaned against the low mahogany balustrade and stared somberly down the wide circular well of the staircase. As ever, its mysterious suggestion soothed and quieted him. Now he could breathe without pain and constriction. He glanced with last loathing at his wife’s door and went down the hall. At another door he hesitated, then knocked gently.

  There was no reply. He turned the handle, and entered his daughter’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was a relief to Hans, as always, to smell the odor of Ernestine’s room. Like himself, she loved freshness and the odor of lemon verbena cologne. Though the air was warm, it was clean, and pervaded with that cologne, like a breath from a citrus grove. She, too, liked somber dark furniture and austerity and dark polished floors. But all this was enlivened by touches of pure blue and gold and scarlet, for Ernestine Schmidt had a gentle yet profound taste. She loved the breadth of sky, uncluttered, and her golden silk curtains were swept back from the enormous windows so that she could see the heavens in a broad sweep above her.

  She did not hear him come in. She was sitting, dressed in a broad sill, her chin in her hand. The gray light of the morncrimson peignoir, by one of the windows, her elbow on the ing streamed over and past her. She was a small slight figure sitting there, somehow pathetic and very quiet, gazing down into the street. The vastness of the room and the windows made her seem even smaller than usual, even more defenseless. Her feet barely touched the floor as she sat in her large chair. Dark curls clustered at the nape of her thin childish neck. She was bent forward a little, as though something in the street had attracted her intense attention, and Hans could see the outline of her delicate thin shoulders. For some reason the line of her shoulders and throat always caught his breath with a sensation of sadness and tender protectiveness. She was so fragile, so little, so defenseless, for all her twentyeight years, and so immature and unformed.

  He contemplated her for a moment, then it occurred to him that she was not moving, hardly breathing. Her tenseness seemed to increase. He tiptoed towards her, craning his neck curiously. Even when he stood behind her, she did not hear him nor was aware of him. He looked through the window, which dripped with long ribbons of pale water. He looked down to the street, past the lawns and the black empty trees, glistening in the leaden light. Then he saw what had riveted Ernestine’s attention. A tall young man in workman’s clothing and cap was standing on the sidewalk, staring fixedly at the house. It was evident that he had not seen Ernestine; his eye kept wandering slowly but thoughtfully over the house, as though it interested him in itself. The rain and the wind did not appear to disturb him. His cap was thrust back on his head, and Hans could see his thick yellow hair and rectangular face.

  Hans squinted, the better to see. He liked what he saw, sourly. The young man was broad and strong and held himself well in his shabby shapeless clothing. Moreover, he did not have the workman’s sullen posture and bent shoulders. The light was not good, but Hans had an impression of strong hard features and cold blue eyes. As the young man studied the house, he kept swinging his dinner pail idly as though in time to some inner marching song.

  The seven o’clock whistle wailed through the rainy silence of the street. The young man started, then turned and broke into a dog-trot. He disappeared down the street, and was out of sight.

  “Who is that man?” asked Hans, truculently.

  Ernestine started violently. “Papa!” she cried faintly, her hand flying to her throat. She turned to him, frightened, and quite pale. She looked guilty and flustered.

  “There, I frightened you,” he said, with rough contrition. He bent and kissed her cheek. “Do not be frightened, liebchen. It is natural for a maiden to look at a man. Do you know him?” He was pleased that his secluded daughter had finally shown interest in a man, even if that man was only a workman. He had been much worried about her, for the prospect of heirs of her body had been fading steadily for ten years. Moreover, he had the German’s aversion for a sterile woman.

  “No, papa, I don’t know him,” she murmured. She gazed up at him with her great gray eyes, so luminous and untouched. She kissed his hand, which lay on her shoulder. She smiled, and then rubbed her thin colorless cheek against the hand she had kissed. A thrill of grieved tenderness ran over Hans’s gross body, and he blinked his eyes sternly. “But every morning, almost, he stops in front of the house and looks at it, like that, for minutes together. He never sees me. But I often watch for him.” A febrile flush crept up to her forehead, then receded.

  “But he’s only a workman, probably one of the men in my mill,” protested Hans, without much severity.

  “But—but he looks so nice,” stammered Ernestine, flushing again. “So—so clean. So strong. And so confident,” she added, wistfully.

  “A German boy, probably,” said Hans, but his voice was abstracted. He regarded his daughter with a deep thoughtfulness, and renewed hope. He alwa
ys thought of her as a child, for she was so small, so unformed. Many thought Ernestine colorless and drab, a fleshless wraith of a woman, with quite a resemblance to her mother. But Hans thought that she had a strange beauty, delicate and shy, and in this he was quite right. The fragile porcelain-like bones of her small thin face had an aristocratic fineness under her smooth pale flesh and skin. Her nose was little and very straight, with flared nervous nostrils. Her mouth was a child’s mouth, faintly colored and innocent and melancholy, but with something of Baldur’s sweetness and steadfastness in its expression. But it was her eyes that touched him the most deeply, for they were overlarge for that little face and sensitive features. Gray, black-lashed, shining with an inner radiance, they were filled with shy pure light and gentleness. It was these eyes which had embarrassed suitors attracted by the wealth of the Schmidts, and had driven them away. Only a man who loved her could bear that shining translucence and innocent purity, and no man had as yet loved Ernestine. This was because she had no social graces, in spite of the best schools and earnest teachers. Among strangers she was unbearably frightened and shy and wretched, and always found a corner to hide in at balls and other social events. When approached, she literally fled, confused and completely terrified.

  She knew that her father urgently wished her to marry, for he had been outright in his demands, and even coarse when alarmed enough at the prospect of her never marrying. But though she frequently forced herself to speak to young men, her terrified smile, her blushes, her extreme nervousness and open terror, alarmed any prospects and sent them scurrying away. All this increased her fear. Therefore, more and more, as the years passed, she secluded herself and could only be compelled to go out and “look for a husband” when her father had become more than ordinarily exigent. On these occasions, it was more anxiety to please him and keep his love, than fear, which drove her to accept invitations. For she loved him with an aching passion and devotion, and lived only for his tenderness and affection. He had never had to strike her in all her life. Her desire to please him had always actuated her every word and deed. In her heart, she believed her failure with men was due to extreme ugliness and lack of charm and desirability.