A Distant Hope

by Ellin Carsta

  She laughed and shook her head. “Most assuredly not.”

  Johann poured and gave a glass to Robert, who got to his feet.

  “Here’s to success!”

  “To success!”

  Chapter Four

  Hamburg, 1888

  It had been nine weeks since Robert and Luise left for Cameroon, and Elisabeth awaited their return anxiously. Not a day passed without Elisabeth praying that her husband would return with disappointment written all over his face, having found the plantation unsuitable. Elisabeth didn’t want to imagine anything else. She did not want to go to Cameroon! She did not want to live anywhere but Hamburg. Unless her husband decided to run the office in Vienna and send her brother-in-law Karl to Africa in his place. She’d heard that society in Vienna was like Hamburg, so Elisabeth would be comfortable there. But Cameroon? With those Negroes, and surrounded by dirt, dangers, and wild animals? No, absolutely not!

  She sat at her dressing table and contemplated herself in the mirror. It had been a mistake to marry Robert—she knew it now more than ever. She’d only accepted him because Georg, whom her father had introduced her to at a reception and who seemed to be her perfect match, was already engaged to Vera. He was considerably more like her than her husband was. Robert had something impetuous about him, definitely not respectable. And furthermore, she recognized him too much in their daughter Luise, though she’d taken pains to raise both children to be well-bred girls from a good family. She’d succeeded with Martha. But Luise? No, something of her father’s love of adventure had won out there, which she loathed beyond measure. Admittedly, she’d been irked, but not surprised, that Luise had traveled with her father despite Elisabeth telling them in no uncertain terms what she thought about it.

  Still, he was her husband; though she had to resign herself to it, she certainly did not have to acquiesce in his decisions without protest. If the worst were to happen and Robert returned still wanting to run the plantation, she’d have to come up with something to keep herself in Hamburg with Martha. But what would life be like after that? She couldn’t imagine herself going to events in Hamburg society without Robert by her side. What would people think? Maybe she wouldn’t even be invited. And it would all be Robert’s fault!

  The thought brought a flush of anger to her face. Damn that Robert Hansen! She’d given him two children and almost lost her once-impeccable figure. How dare he behave like some impulsive adolescent determined to have whatever he wants, no matter the cost! She clenched her fists, raised her eyes, and studied her image in the mirror. She was still a beautiful woman and could attract men very different from Robert. But what would that do to her reputation?

  Her reverie was interrupted by loud voices outside the room. From the window, she could see a carriage, and Karl embracing Robert. Hidden behind the curtain, she tried to read her husband’s face. Was it joy or sorrow, triumph or disappointment? She couldn’t tell. She turned away with a sigh.

  “Mother!” she heard Martha shout from downstairs. “They’re back! Father and Luise are here!”

  Elisabeth went into the hallway and put on a smile. “I’m coming,” she called in as friendly a voice as she could muster, lifting her dress so she wouldn’t trip on her way down the stairs. Robert and Luise were already in the vestibule.

  “Robert! Luise!” she cried out in delight. “How fortunate! You’re back safe and sound!”

  Her husband embraced his wife on the bottom step. “It’s so nice to be home.”

  Luise was flanked by Martha and Frederike, who peppered her with questions: What is Cameroon like, what did she see, and what could she tell them?

  “Let her arrive home in peace, for heaven’s sake,” pleaded Vera, who approached her niece and hugged her briefly.

  “You must be exhausted,” Elisabeth said. “Do you want to freshen up first or tell us everything right away?”

  Robert and Luise exchanged glances.

  “We do have a lot to tell,” Robert said, and Luise nodded in agreement.

  She asked Anna to find something for them to eat and took her husband’s arm, and everyone went into the dining room. That he chose not to wash up after his trip was another mark against him, but she smiled as though she were truly happy to have him home. His relaxed demeanor, however, was a bad sign.

  “Well?” Karl asked the moment they sat. “Have you good news?”

  Robert was about to answer when he heard Georg’s steps in the hallway. He stood and went to meet his brother.

  “You’re back!” Georg embraced him enthusiastically, slapping him on the back. Elisabeth thought it absurd for two grown men to behave like that just because they hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks.

  “You’re just in time. I was about to begin my report.”

  They went into the dining room, where everyone looked happy, except Elisabeth, whose displeasure showed despite her effort to put on a brave face. Georg and Robert sat down.

  “Now don’t torture us any longer, Robert,” Karl urged.

  “How did you like Cameroon, Luise?” Georg asked, thanking Anna for his glass of beer.

  “Cameroon is indescribable.” Luise’s face was glowing. “It’s so incredibly beautiful that it’s beyond imagination!”

  Her eyes sparkled as she recounted events starting with their landing in Victoria Bay. Richard listened with some indifference, but Frederike and Martha hung on her every word.

  “And the plantation?” Karl asked, turning to Robert.

  “Huge, beautiful, and in impeccable condition.” Robert took a swallow. “You have to see it with your own eyes to believe it. Everything runs like clockwork. Meyerdierks has the most capable and industrious workers.”

  “You mean Negroes, don’t you?” Elisabeth asked disdainfully.

  “Yes, the natives, Elisabeth.” Robert sent her a cautioning look. “Blacker than you’ve ever seen in your life.” His words dripped with scorn. “Hardworking men and women who deserve a great deal of respect.”

  Elisabeth lifted her chin. She obviously had a response on the tip of her tongue but swallowed it.

  “Meyerdierks and you, you’ve come to an agreement?” Karl asked.

  “Yes,” Robert said with satisfaction. “He kept his word as expected. The only change was that we must keep his workers on and continue paying them. That will be in the bill of sale. There’re some Germans, and British and French in other colonies, who enslave Africans.”

  “I hope you made it clear that our family would never do such a thing,” Georg said.

  “Goes without saying.”

  Robert then detailed how much a worker earned monthly and how the cost of food was calculated.

  “That’s appreciably less than here,” Georg said.

  “Why should people there need any more money?” Elisabeth remarked pointedly. “Being so far from civilization, they hardly have the opportunity to spend money, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “Indeed you are,” Robert replied. “Trading is very lively in Cameroon. And young men save for the ‘bride price’ so they can marry, as Meyerdierks told us. That’s an important aspect of their culture.”

  “A bride price?” Elisabeth repeated mockingly, but refrained from saying more when she saw her husband’s angry look.

  “How did you leave it?” Georg asked, returning to the central topic of discussion.

  “Meyerdierks gave me all the necessary dates so I could have a bill of sale drawn up. You and Karl will still have time to consider whether you’ll come in on it or not. After that I’ll tidy up my affairs here and leave for Cameroon with my family. The main cocoa harvest goes from September to February. The secondary harvest has been coming in since May. It will be August before I’ve put everything in order, so we’ll be in Cameroon by the middle of September at the latest. Meyerdierks will stay for a month after we arrive. We’ll date the sale September 15. Until then the harvest belongs to Meyerdierks, everything after that is ours.”

  “That means we’ll s
tart with some revenue?”

  “Exactly.”

  Georg looked relieved. “On that point, I’d like to talk with you and Karl alone later.”

  Robert could tell that Georg’s news was not going to be good. But for the moment he didn’t want to spoil the mood.

  “Right.”

  “You might as well discuss it here and now,” Elisabeth objected. “After all, all our futures are at stake.”

  “Your husband, Karl, and I will handle it,” Georg said, sweeping his sister-in-law’s remark aside.

  “Are you ready for dinner?” Anna knocked sharply before opening the door and peeking in.

  “Yes, Anna. Luise and I are famished, aren’t we, Luise?”

  Luise’s nod corroborated his words.

  During dinner it was mainly Luise who regaled them with her impressions of Cameroon and its people. It was a high-spirited evening until Georg, Robert, and Karl excused themselves and went to the study to confer about the future. Elisabeth was annoyed that she wasn’t part of the discussion. Maybe she could have sown some doubt and destroyed that idée fixe of her husband’s. But she was consigned to an observer’s role, which infuriated her.

  Georg closed the study door and poured three glasses of cognac from a carafe.

  “As good as your news is, mine is just as bad,” Georg announced, looking at Robert. “Karl already knows: the bank will withdraw our credit if we don’t pay our loans in two weeks. We’ve liquidated all the stock in the warehouse. But it isn’t enough.”

  “Damn it! We just need a little time.” Robert looked from Georg to Karl. “Did you tell the bank about our plan?”

  “Yes,” Georg replied. “And I’m not sure it didn’t make things worse.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t think they trust us to pull it off. Perhaps they even got the idea that we were all going to abscond to Africa.” Georg shook his head. “But you can’t talk to them. We won’t have anything left for a down payment to Meyerdierks.”

  “I hope I didn’t go too far, but I shared our financial situation with him. That is, our coffee losses in German East Africa,” Robert explained.

  “How did he react?”

  “Kindly.” Robert looked at his brothers. “He told me he’d heard similar stories. Everything in the colonies is still confused, and swindlers have easy pickings. He showed sympathy for our situation. For that reason he repeated his offer to have us start with the installments after the first harvest.”

  “You couldn’t wish for a better business partner. But we won’t be able to hang on until then,” Georg lamented.

  “So what will we do?” Robert studied Georg most earnestly.

  “We must sell the villa.”

  “No!” Robert jumped to his feet. “Mother and Father loved this house, and we grew up here, and our children. Absolutely not!”

  “Do you think it’s easy for me?” Georg stood up, too, went to the window, and looked out.

  “Let’s try for another mortgage.”

  “Robert, mortgages go right up the flue. We won’t get any more money.”

  “Nevertheless, there must be a better way than selling the villa.” Robert thought feverishly.

  “If you think of one, I’d be glad to hear it.” Georg went back to his chair and sank down in it helplessly.

  “I’ll talk to the bank.” Robert sat down as well.

  “I was at the negotiations,” Karl piped up. “Georg and I tried everything—believe me.”

  “And the warehouse?”

  “Empty, as I said.”

  “I mean the building. What are the liabilities?”

  “Just as high as the villa’s.”

  “What would the building get us?”

  “Too little,” Georg estimated.

  “But it would buy us some time. And that’s the thing we need.”

  “No. It wouldn’t get us any time. Besides, I doubt we’d even find a buyer. For the villa, we could. And we could sell it ourselves, but if we don’t, if the bank takes it over, we’d get significantly less for it.”

  Robert squinted at Georg. “It sounds as if you already have a buyer.”

  “Yes,” Georg confessed. “I have.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Karl exclaimed. “Since when?”

  “The notary organized a meeting three days ago. He’s prepared to pay one hundred thousand marks for the villa. We’ll never have an offer like that again. It would pay off all our debts in a single stroke, and we’d have enough to start again.”

  “You should hear yourself talk—it’s as if you’d sell our parents’ memory.” Robert shook his head.

  “You’re being unfair,” Karl chided his brother. “Georg is looking for a way out just as you and I are.”

  Georg held back the words he wanted to hurl at his brother, keeping a calm tone of voice instead. “Robert, you’re taking your family to Cameroon, Karl’s going to Vienna. I don’t need a villa for Vera, the children, and me—there’s room here for four families. And we have no choice. Either we sell or the bank takes the villa from us and we realize a fraction of what Frederiksen is offering.”

  “August Frederiksen?” Robert jumped up again, fists clenched.

  Georg looked down. “Yes.”

  “That dirty swine will never have the villa!” Robert snapped. “Father hated him!”

  “There was a time when they were friends,” Georg corrected him. “Sit down.”

  “I won’t!”

  “Sit down and be reasonable!”

  Robert snorted several times, then sat on the couch again. “Father must be turning over in his grave.”

  “That’s enough, Robert,” Georg said, looking as if he meant it.

  “What do you think?” Robert turned to Karl.

  “What can I say? That I’m not pleased with the idea? Obviously not. But I don’t see any other way out.”

  “But Frederiksen of all people,” Robert said again. “You know very well what Father thought of him. Frederiksen cheated him, and that’s why we’re in this position.”

  “I know. But if Father hadn’t made those bad decisions, we wouldn’t be discussing it now.”

  “Don’t speak ill of him!”

  “I’m not. You know how much I respected him. But he took his own life because he couldn’t see any way out. And we’re stuck with his mess.”

  Robert began to say something, but stopped when Karl laid a hand on his arm.

  “Georg is right, and you know it.”

  “I still want to talk to the bank,” Robert said.

  “All right.” Georg gave in. “Shall I go with you?”

  “Yes. Let’s all of us go to show we’re united. The bank’s done good business with Peter Hansen & Sons. They owe us some consideration.”

  “I hope you can convince them.” Karl frowned, pressing his lips together.

  “I’ll make an appointment with Herr Reidel first thing in the morning,” Georg said.

  “Not with Reidel,” Robert responded. “He’s not the real decision maker. We have to speak with Palm in person.”

  “Fine,” Georg said. “I’m sorry we don’t have better news. But I’m sincerely happy that you’re back here safe and sound.”

  Robert gave a mirthless smile. “Are you two still on board with the Cameroon business, or do you want to look elsewhere?”

  “I am by all means,” Karl answered immediately.

  “I think we don’t have much of a choice,” Georg said after a momentary hesitation. “Our reputation will suffer if negotiations with the bank fail and the villa has to be sold. But we’ll cope. We wouldn’t be the first businessmen this has happened to.”

  “And not the last either,” Robert said. “But we’re not there yet.”

  He stood, took the glasses off the table, filled them again, and gave one to each of his brothers.

  “Let’s drink to the fact that Peter Hansen & Sons will not go under. We three will make it flourish again and will return to this vil
la when we’ve gotten through all this.”

  Georg and Karl leaped to their feet.

  “I’ll drink to that.” They clinked their glasses.

  “To Peter Hansen’s sons!” Karl said with a smile. But fear of not pulling it off, and of uncertain times ahead, stood in the room with them.

  Georg, Robert, and Karl waited silently in the ornate chairs outside the bank manager’s office. The tension was palpable.

  “The Hansen brothers.”

  The manager, Herr Palm—a gray-haired, rather stocky man about sixty whom they’d first met at their father’s funeral—came out to greet the brothers with a handshake.

  “Please come in. May I offer you something? A coffee?”

  “Delighted,” Georg replied. “I hope it’s from our company?”

  Palm smiled at him. “That’s a bank secret,” he joked, and asked his secretary to bring some coffee. “Do be seated, please.” Palm gestured toward the conference table.

  “Thank you,” Robert said, and they all sat down around the mahogany table that exactly matched the color of the paneled walls.

  “And how are you today?” the manager began informally. “I hope the family’s well?”

  “Yes, fine, thank you.”

  “I’ve heard that Richard wasn’t in school for a long time a while back. Hopefully he wasn’t sick?”

  “How did you hear that?” Georg was surprised. “No, Richard was with my brothers in Vienna, learning more about the trade.”

  The secretary brought in a tray of coffee, cream, and sugar and placed the little containers in the middle of the table.

  “Thank you very much, Fräulein Handtke.” The manager nodded to her. He waited until she’d left before resuming. “I heard it from my grandson. He’s the same age as Richard.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s my daughter’s son. His name isn’t Palm but Köhler. You wouldn’t have known.”

  “Köhler . . . Alexander Köhler? That name is familiar.”

  “Yes, indeed. That’s my grandson.”

  Georg had heard Richard speak of an Alexander Köhler often, but there was nothing kind about it. Köhler was an outsider and hardly had any friends, but on the other hand, he was one of the best students. He bored Richard to death.