The Strong City

by Taylor Caldwell

  The dreadful majesty, terror and ghastliness of his vision stupefied him. He could only look at Franz, and whimper:

  “You do not love the mills, the industry.” He swallowed convulsively. “You do not love the growth by one’s hands and brain and muscle. What is it you love?”

  Franz had been watching him with careful curiosity. He had caught glimpses, in those old distracted eyes, of what Hans had seen. He said: “Money. Power. Profits. That is all.” He smiled a little, contemptuously, understanding the grief and despair of the old man. “If we were selling bananas, it would be the same to me. The smoke of these chimneys that you love, father? It is nothing to me. It is a stench in my nostrils. It dirties my linen.”

  He watched Hans narrowly. He had used ruthlessness lavishly. Now, he would either fail forever, or win. It was necessary to show his cards, for time was growing short.

  Hans fluttered his fingers in the air, and struggled, as though he was drowning. He cried out: “You cannot do these things! You are a dreamer, a builder of fantasies! A madman. I shall not let you take even the first step—”

  And then he knew he was defeated, not by Franz, but by a legion of others like him. His hands dropped heavily to his desk. He swallowed convulsively.

  “If you do not let me do this, we shall be ruined,” said Franz, quietly. He leaned across the desk, and fixed the old man with his inexorable and merciless eyes. “Do you hear? Ruined. You, and I, and your grandchildren.”

  Hans tried for a last victory, and again he whimpered:

  “But, we have so little money—”

  Franz rose. He was shaking internally. He had won. He had triumphed! For a moment he was dizzy. His lips opened, tightened over his teeth.

  “We have enough. We still have time. Money will buy the imagination I lack to accomplish these things. The manipulator does not need brains. He can buy them. I have already bought them for fifteen or twenty dollars a week.”

  He stood up. He glanced at his watch, every movement easy and controlled, though he was still internally trembling.

  “It is time for our noonday meal. The carriage will here any moment. Shall we go?”

  Hans rose heavily to his feet. He had to grasp the edge of his desk suddenly to support himself. He leaned across the desk and regarded Franz with a long, fierce, defeated look. “How long have you been plotting these things?”

  “For years,” smiled Franz. “For always.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Mrs. Schmidt was dying. The only one in the household who did not realize this was Ernestine, and her father and husband and brother wished to spare the little dark creature this painful knowledge. “When the summer comes,” she would say, anxiously, “and Mama can resume her drives, she will be so much better.” They reassured her that this was so. There was more impatience and disgust in Franz’s reassurance than affection. All his life he had been accustomed to women who were strong, who looked at all things with calm level eyes, who had deep courage. Hans’s and Baldur’s tenderness for Ernestine, and their desire to spare her pain, annoyed him. She was no child. She was a woman in her thirties, with two children. Yet her father and brother regarded her as something too frail and delicate for the harshness of life. Absurd! Sometimes he longed, brutally, to look into those wide gray eyes and say, without preliminary gentleness: “Your mother is dying. Shortly, she will be dead.”

  Buried in his desire was his brutality and sadism. When he contemplated saying this thing to her, he felt an obscure pleasure. She would turn deathly pale. She would tremble. She would cry out, suffering unbearably. She might even collapse. He smiled at this to himself. Even he did not know how much he hated her. He thought she merely made him impatient, and annoyed him with her vapors, light fluting voice, childishness, innocence and ingenuousness. He knew she loved him with a kind of unreasoning adoration, and fear. This, too, vaguely infuriated him, though he realized the advantages to himself. Therefore, in Hans’s presence, and even in his absence, he was everything that was kind and amiable to Ernestine. Let him once abuse, or overly frighten her, and Hans would turn on him like a savage boar, and destroy him. Sometimes he contemplated the thought of Hans’s death with more than just the pleasure of an heir. He would then be free to neglect Ernestine, or even to abuse her, if he desired. It was the restraint of Hans’s presence which goaded him.

  He had never, even at the first, liked Ernestine. She was cloying to him, unhealthy, frail of flesh, too delicate, too timid. He said to himself that she was not a woman. Somewhere in her life, her body had stopped growing. Perhaps in early adolescence. But, too, her mind and soul had stopped growing.

  He had often told himself that he liked small dark women. But these women must be quick and vivacious, with naughty slanting eyes full of mischief and promise, and bodies alive and avid. There was nothing avid in Ernestine. She submitted to him in mingled fear, dread and adoration and shame. That was all. There was no passion in her, no blood, though he had soon discovered that she could, at times, be hard and a little imperious. But never to him. To him, she was all softness, tremor, anxiety, and love. If he could once arouse her to anger against him, to complaint or annoyance, he might dislike her less. But he could never so arouse her. Let him be distrait, cold or indifferent, and she literally contorted herself in a fever of anxiety to please and placate. There was no fault in him, to her. If he were annoyed, it was all her fault! She had failed him somewhere.

  Hans believed that nothing but the firmest affection was between these two. This was the result of Franz’s unfailing gentleness, courtesy and kindness to his wife, a habit which he had cultivated for Hans’s benefit, and so strong was the force of habit, that he, most of the time, exercised it when alone with Ernestine. But he had never deceived Baldur, whom he hated virulently, and with secret fear.

  He knew he did not deceive this silent, smiling and derisive cripple. Part of his hatred was because there lived another heir to what he coveted. And the rest was because Baldur revolted him, and understood him completely. He also knew that Baldur had set himself like a sentinel to guard his sister’s life while she visited in the camp of the enemy. Franz knew that Baldur was aware that an enemy had come into this house, and that he must practice eternal vigilance. So long as Baldur lived, even if Hans died, there would be this indomitable sentinel, watching, guarding.

  I am a prisoner, Franz would think gloomily. A prisoner to a fool of an old man, and a poisonous cripple. A prisoner in this abominable house. He almost always forgot the presence of the sick and dying old woman upstairs in her luxurious fetid rooms. When he did remember that presence, it was with loathing, almost with nausea. Sometimes he thought himself penned in a house of pestilence and dark shadows and sickening smells. And great danger. Between himself and Matilda there was a healthy and chuckling understanding. He had soon become aware that Matilda, like himself, hated and despised the occupants of this somber and hideous mansion.

  He rarely thought of his sons, Sigmund and Joseph, except as stronger holds he had on Hans Schmidt, who worshipped them fatuously, and with senility. Ah, let the evil cripple gloat and watch now! he had thought, when the children had been born. Hans’s terrible anxiety and fear during the months of Ernestine’s pregnancy, and the sudden sinking whiteness of his old face when they were born, seemed exaggerated to Franz, who did not know the hidden terror that had haunted the old man that these children might be maimed. Everyone in the house had carefully kept from him the defect in the blood of the Bradhursts. He thought that Hans was fearing that the little ones might be girls. He still did not understand when Hans exclaimed, with breaking hysteria: “Ah, they are perfect, these darlings, these angels! You have given them good bodies and good limbs, my son! It is the German blood.”

  Franz supposed, indifferently, that his children resembled all others, noisy, screaming brats and nuisances. Towards the sons of his flesh he felt nothing of the ancient Teutonic fondness for children. They hardly seemed his own. They were Ernestine’s. They were small
, thin and dark, and whining. One, Joseph, whined the most, and was peevish, also, and selfishly demanding, though he was not yet two years old. The other, Sigmund, named after Hans’s father, was quieter, and sicklier, and appeared docile except for the rare and puzzling intervals when he was suddenly violent and uncontrollable. It was soon evident that Sigmund would be the taller, and the quieter, and the more reasonable, for all the infrequent rages. Franz felt a vague dislike for this child, who had Baldur’s large blue eyes in his little dark, triangular face, and strange long quietnesses. Too, Sigmund was not the favorite of either Ernestine or Hans. They preferred the noisy and petulant Joseph, who demanded everything, and was alternately impudent and mischievous, grinning or quarrelsome. Hans fondly called him “the little princeling,” for he had imperious ways and contriving slynesses. He, too, had blue eyes, but they were narrow and cunning, and glittering with precocious intelligence. Sigmund was his Uncle Baldur’s favorite, and during the day he would find ways to elude his nursemaid and slip into Baldur’s rooms. There he would sit quietly for hours, watching Baldur paint, and listen uncomprehendingly to Baldur’s long, gentle monologues.

  But in some way he discerned something beneath the ironic subleties in his uncle’s voice, and he would smile, strangely and mysteriously, and with a little wildness. Seeing this smile, Baldur would be taken aback for a moment, then, after a catch at his heart, he would seize the child in his arms and hug him convulsively. “We understand each other, little one!” he would exclaim, and would laugh.

  When Ernestine or the nursemaid would find him, and would seek to take him away for his nap or his walk, he would burst out into screaming cries and tears, and would fight impotently but wildly. To the last, as they carried him away, he would look over his shoulder at Baldur, despairingly.

  But Joseph, even in his babyhood, frankly detested Baldur. He had the gift of mimicry, and to Franz’s delight, he would strut before his father and mother, limping, his tiny shoulders bent and hunched. Ernestine was not delighted. But when she heard Franz’s laughter, she would smile a foolish, forgiving smile, reprimand the child halfheartedly, and send him away. “Really, Franz, you are encouraging him to be cruel,” she would say, in a fond, admonishing tone, with its undertone of fear that perhaps she was offending him.

  “Nonsense,” Franz would say, vigorously. “He is just a clever rascal. You cannot expect children to be hypocrites.”

  Slowly, day by day, he was deftly loosening the threads of Ernestine’s affection for her brother. Some day, he hoped, she would regard him with increasing impatience and indifference. Another danger, then, would be removed.

  The children very seldom saw their grandmother. Joseph would protest noisily, when dragged to her door. But Sigmund would enter silently, and stand by her bed, gazing at her, submitting to her feverish touch and hot dry kisses. Joseph would fight her off.

  From the very first, the children had no liking for each other. Sigmund would not fight his more vigorous and cunning brother. He would only cry, which Franz found contemptible. He submitted to Joseph’s sly and secret bullying, in silence. He avoided his twin, and always tried to escape him. He would hide in corners, and even retreat for hours under beds and divans. He knew, small as he was, that his mother loved him dearly but was impatient with his silences and escapes. He knew that his father was indifferent to him. He knew that only in Baldur, with his music and his beautiful pictures, was his refuge and his peace. He, only, perhaps, knew the evil inherent in his twin, and it horrified and stupefied him, little and inexperienced though he was. Joseph frightened him excessively, but this was less because he was kept in a state of apprehension for fear of his twin’s malice and cruelty; rather it was because of what Joseph was. The children resembled each other closely, for they were identical twins, but no one familiar with them, even slightly, ever mistook them. There was a large, serious, dreamlike and shrinking quality about Sigmund, whereas Joseph had a sly, knowing expression and an impish wrinkling of his face when he smiled.

  Franz might have remained indulgently indifferent of Sigmund, continuing, all the child’s life, his usual bantering and impatient way with him, had it not been for an incident, small in itself, which made Franz actively dislike his son. Only one person had been able to understand Franz, and that had been Irmgard, and only this one could so understand him and increase his original affection. But those who even vaguely approached a complete understanding aroused his self-protectiveness, his hatred, his anger. And his deep subterranean fear, and enmity. Baldur was such a one. And now, one day, little Sigmund became another.

  Never, from the very beginning, had Baldur invited his brother-in-law to enter his own rooms. The door was always carefully shut, and sometimes even locked. Franz, amused, began to feel a tantalizing desire to see those rooms, and inspect them impertinently. “He must have a captive princess there,” he would say to Ernestine, and burst into a laugh at the incongruous idea. Ernestine, annoyed with her brother for his discourtesy to her adored husband, wound murmur deprecatingly: “He is so shy, and reserved. Even Mama has been in there only a few times. It is his retreat.”

  “A toad’s retreat,” Franz would say, brutishly. Ernestine’s sensitive heart was wounded at both this remark, and Baldur’s aloofness, but characteristically, her final impatience was for Baldur, whom she hardly seemed to understand these days. From the first, Baldur’s quiet, elaborate and almost ironic courtesy towards Franz offended her. She saw something mocking in his smile, and his long level look. It was soon evident, to her, that Franz felt both dislike and irritability for Baldur, and she tried to find justification, in her infatuation, for this attitude. She soon, to her own satisfaction at least, found it. Baldur seemed genial enough, it is true, and politely attentive to Franz and even largely amiable, but, as she said to herself, “his spirit is not really in it, and it is so annoying and perplexing of Baldur.” So, finally, a cool estrangement grew up between brother and sister, which was exactly what Franz desired, and had adroitly arranged. He found frequent occasion to complain with a smile to his doting little wife: “God knows, I would like to be friends with your brother. I never had a brother, and a companion would be very agreeable. What have I done to him, my love? Why does he not invite me for conversation in his room? Am I a pariah?”

  Ernestine’s absorbed love rushed feverishly to defend her husband against an attitude of her brother’s which appeared to her to grow increasingly reserved, and even politely contemptuous. Once she said to Baldur: “What have you against Franz? He would so like to be friendly with you. Why don’t you ask him into your rooms some evening? He is so hurt.”

  Then it was that she saw that rare pointed spark in Baldur’s blue eyes, and even though he smiled humorously the spark had in it a strange menace.

  “Nothing, Tina, will ever hurt him. He needs no protection. It is others who need protection from him. I shall never ask him to visit me. I must have some retreat, some shelter.”

  From that day on, the coolness between brother and sister became actual coldness.

  Franz, however, had determined to enter those rooms some day, less from curiosity, than from a desire to annoy Baldur, and make him impotent. He plotted to force his way in, if necessary, and thus triumph over the crippled man.

  One day Mrs. Schmidt had one of her prolonged sinking attacks, and Ernestine and her brother were hastily called by her nurse. Franz went with his wife to the door of her mother’s room, supporting her small shaking body, and he saw Baldur hastily leaving his own apartment. Baldur took Ernestine’s hand and led her into their mother’s room. His own door stood partially open. Franz saw this. His eyes brightened maliciously. He waited until the door had closed behind Baldur and his sister, and after only an instant’s hestitation, he went quickly and silently down the hall, and entered the mysterious apartment, chuckling a little to himself. It was his intention to allow Baldur to discover him there. It would be very amusing.

  The wide quietness and austerity of the silent a
partment at first disconcerted him. Then his taste was pleased. The rooms were in cold semi-dusk, and he impudently flung aside the long velvet drapes. The spring sunshine gushed in. On an easel near the immense north window was a half-finished portrait of little Sigmund The child’s great blue eyes, intent and mournful, looked back at him. Only the eyes were complete; the rest of the small face was still only sketched in. But the eyes were vivid and alive, and seemed to condemn him.

  “Bah,” he said, aloud, and turned away, vaguely ashamed. Nevertheless, he felt some pride that Baldur was so excellent an artist. It seemed to confer distinction on himself. Then, too, the German affection for the true craftsman, the true genius, was both touched into respect and pleasure. Like most Germans, he found real aristocracy only in those who were endowed by nature with natural refinement or great talent. He began to wander about the room, studying each hung canvas or small portrait, and his pleasure grew. “I must have one or two of these for myself,” he thought, and his animosity for Baldur grew into a reluctant regard. He forgot the crippled body, the polite enmity, the turning-aside, the cold derisive smile. He even forgot the understanding, or, he thought it admirable and consistent that so fine an artist as Baldur understood him.

  Before he completed his circuit, however, he came upon the immense grand piano, shining in itself, and standing in its polished reflection on the bare floor. Now his face darkened somewhat. He put his hands on the white keys, and there grew up a slow distressing pain in him. It had been so long since he had played. Echoes of mighty music rushed into his mind, the music he had played, himself, and he felt a mysterious nostalgia. Only a few times had he heard Baldur play, and that was softly, behind those hateful closed doors. He said to himself: “That is really why I had wanted to enter here!” And it was partly true.